CRML Agentic AI Summit 2026

2026 UCSB Agentic AI Summit

UCSB organizers: Eric Wang, Miguel Eckstein, Yuheng Bu, Murphy Niu, Qianqi (Jackie) Yan, Zhen Zhang

The inaugural UCSB Agentic AI Summit will be held on Friday, January 23, 2026, at UC Santa Barbara. We’re bringing together researchers, industry leaders, and students from across Southern California to explore how next-generation, agentic AI systems can drive both scientific discovery and real-world impact.

Schedule

8:00 am — Registration and Breakfast

8:30 am — Opening Remarks

• Welcome Address by Umesh Mishra, Dean of the College of Engineering
• Introduction to the Summit’s Goals by Eric Wang and Miguel Eckstein

9:00—9:50 am — Keynote: Sujith Ravi, VP of GenAI at Oracle — Autonomous Intelligence at Scale: From Compute, Data and Models to Multimodal Agentic AI

9:50–10:40 am — Keynote: Jiantao Jiao, Director of AI at Nvidia — Post-Training Verifiable Agents

10:40–11:00 am — Morning Coffee break

11:00–11:50 am — Keynote: Michel H. Devoret, UCSB Physics, Nobel laureate — Introduction to quantum superconducting circuits for computation and sensing

11:50–1:00 pm —Lunch

1:00–1:50 pm — Keynote: Diyi Yang, Stanford CS — Automation or Augmentation? Optimizing Human-AI Collaboration

1:50–2:40 pm — Keynote: Daniel Martin, UCSB Economics — AI Agents as Economic Agents

2:40–3:00 pm — Afternoon Coffee break

3:00–3:45 pm — Industry Lightning Talks

• Ang Li, CEO of Simular
• Zackary Glazewski, Founding AI Engineer at ChipAgents
• Eser Kandogan, Principal Research Engineer at Megagon Labs

3:45–4:45 pm — AI Faculty Highlights

• Eric Wang: Building AI Agents that Act and Reason Like Humans
• Yuheng Bu: Beyond the Algorithm: Watermarking for AI
• Michael Beyeler: Neural Human-AI Interaction: Agentic Encoders for Sight Restoration
• James Preiss: Learning and Policy Optimization for Robotics
• Miguel Eckstein: AI to Uncover New Neuron Types Involved in Covert Attention
• Misha Sra: Spatial Human-AI Interaction

4:45–5:30 pm — Panel: Agentic AI for Science, Humanity, and Industry

5:30 pm — Closing Remarks

Sponsored by the Center for Responsible Machine Learning, Mind & Machine Intelligence, ScOp VC, ChipAgents, Simular, Megagon Labs, Oracle.