Computer Science and Engineering

UC Riverside is drawing press attention for its findings on the safety and reliability of AI agents. The ICLR paper, "Just Do It!? Computer-Use Agents Exhibit Blind Goal-Directedness," was led by UCR Ph.D. student Erfan Shayegani, working with CSE faculty members Yue Dong and Nael Abu-Ghazaleh. The work introduces BLIND-ACT, a benchmark of 90 tasks, and evaluates nine frontier models acting as computer-use agents, systems that can click, type, and navigate a desktop to complete tasks on a user's behalf. The team found that these agents consistently exhibit what they term "blind goal

Two CSE instructors received honorable mentions from UC Riverside's Academy of Distinguished Teachers (ADT) on May 20th. Kelly Downey was awarded an honorable mention for the Lecturer Award, and Harini Venkatesan was awarded an honorable mention for the Graduate Student–Postdoc Instructor of Record Award. Link: https://academyteachers.ucr. edu/ (see "Awards")

Dr. Ben Stewart (BCOE) and Prof. Faloutsos (CSE) are part of a multi-institutional team that has secured a $4M grant from the Department of Education to develop the Civic Openness, Reasoning, and Engagement (CORE) Incubator. Led by Susan Hackwood (UCR/CCST) and involving researchers from George Mason University and the National Science Policy Network (NSPN), this four-year initiative aims to strengthen civic engagement and public policy discourse. The CORE Incubator will focus on providing training in communication, mediation, and leadership for young adults, as well as conducting advanced

A paper co-authored by Prof. Karamouzas received a Best Paper Award at the 2026 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D 2026), held at Lucasfilm in San Francisco. The paper, "Gen-C: Populating Virtual Worlds with Generative Crowds," is authored by Andreas Panayiotou, Panayiotis Charalambous, and Ioannis Karamouzas. i3dsymposium Link: https://i3dsymposium.org/2026/ awards.html