Computer Science and Engineering

As AI-generated fake videos become more problematic, UC Riverside computer scientists developed a tool that moves beyond simply identifying whether a video is fake. It also determines which AI system created it.

Two UC Riverside students have received prestigious awards from the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, or ASMS, one of the world’s leading organizations dedicated to advancing mass spectrometry research.

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")