BLISS Seminar

About

The BLISS seminar is the area seminar of the Berkeley Laboratory for Information and System Sciences. Talks at the seminar cover topics including but not limited to information and coding theory, signal processing, optimization, statistics, and control. The list of talks for the current semester can be found below, and past seminars from 2016 onwards are listed here.

Spring 2026
Regular seminar time: Fridays 2 PM - 3 PM PT
Regular seminar venue: Soda Hall 510, UC Berkeley subscribe to our mailing list for more details.

To give a talk at the seminar, contact Mert Cemri or Tom Courtade.

Dates marked in bold indicate that talks are at non-regular dates / times.

Recordings of the talks are available here.

Spring 2026 Schedule

Jan 30 Audrey Cheng (UC Berkeley) Rethinking Transaction Scheduling for Database Performance details
Feb 5, 3pm Ziteng Sun (Google Research) Advances in Accelerating LLM Inference and Test-Time Compute Through Speculative Drafts details
Feb 20 Amin Gohari (CUHK) The Auxiliary Receiver Approach in Network Information Theory details
Feb 27 Ahmad Beirami (Google DeepMind) TBD TBD
Mar 19, 10am Kangwook Lee (KRAFTON AI) TBD TBD
Apr 10 Geir Eirik Dullerud (University of Minnesota) TBD TBD
May 1 Haipeng Chen (William & Mary) Steering LLMs with Light-Weight Auxiliary Policy Models using Reinforcement Learning details

Fall 2025 Schedule

Sep 23 (Soda 510, 4pm-5pm) Rajesh Sundaresan (IISc) The four levels of fixed points in mean-field interacting particle systems, with applications to communication networks details
Oct 10 Beliz Gunel (Google DeepMind) PRISM: Efficient Long-Range Reasoning With Short-Context LLMs details
Nov 14 Bose Subhonmesh (UIUC) Autonomous Design in Piecewise-Stationary Environments details
Dec 9 Andreas Schlaginhaufen (EPFL) Geometric perspective on reward identifiability and transferability in inverse reinforcement learning details