Enjoy an ice cream social for students, faculty and staff.

The Office of Emergency Preparedness and Safety will conduct its annual Fire Life Safety Building Evacuation Exercise on Wednesday, Sept. 9, from 10:40 a.m. to 11:10 a.m. This exercise helps ensure that students, faculty, staff, and visitors know how to respond and where to go in the event of a fire or other life safety emergency requiring evacuation.

The exercise begins at 10:40 a.m. with the activation of fire alarms in the following buildings:
Jacobs, Keck, Sprague, Parsons, Galileo, Olin, Beckman, McGregor, Shanahan Center, Kingston, and the Platt Campus Center.

All individuals in academic and administrative buildings are expected to evacuate promptly and proceed to the nearest evacuation site. After evacuating, please check in by either scanning the QR located at the evacuation site, or by checking in directly with an Evacuation Coordinator. Community members will be able to resume their normal schedules once the exercise has concluded. Please note that residence halls are not included in this drill.

For more information, please contact Kelly Salazar, emergency preparedness and safety manager.

This is an informational meeting for all eligible students interested in applying for the Goldwater and Astronaut scholarships. Speakers will include Kerry K. Karukstis, professor of chemistry emerita, and a Barry Goldwater consultant and reviewer as well as previous Goldwater and Astronaut scholars from Harvey Mudd. A portion of the meeting will include a Q-and-A.

“One Developer, Two Decades and Thirty Million Users Later: How Python Tutor Became a Long-Lasting and Widely Used Academic Software Project”

Since 2009, Philip Guo has been developing Python Tutor, a tool that lets users write code in a web browser and see what happens step-by-step as the computer runs it. The tool visualizes variables, objects, pointers, data structures and stack frames. These visuals help students to debug their homework, teachers to explain concepts and programmers to prepare for job interviews. Despite its name, this tool visualizes code written in Python, Java, C, C++ and JavaScript, which are five of the most popular languages used in both teaching and industry.

Throughout the past two decades, over 30 million students and teachers from over 180 countries have used Python Tutor to visualize over 500 million pieces of code. Guo will reflect upon the design decisions (and non-decisions) he made to turn an off-the-cuff prototype into one of the most widely used pieces of academic software. He will cover three eras of Python Tutor development:

• Act I – Inception, the unique conditions that birthed this idea as a grad student side project.
• Act II – Acceleration, sustaining a decade’s worth of user growth as he began his career as a professor.
• Act III – Disruption, when Generative AI both threatens the health of this project and may also be what revitalizes it.

About the Speaker

Philip Guo is a professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego. His research spans human-computer interaction, computing education and human-centered AI for education. He studies how people learn computer programming and data science, and he builds tools to help people better understand code and data. For instance, his Python Tutor educational tool has been used by 30 million students and teachers from over 180 countries throughout the past two decades. Python Tutor received a UIST Best Paper award and the ACM SIGCSE Test of Time award for long-term impact. His other lines of research have received 10-year long-term impact awards from VL/HCC and ISSTA, along with Best Paper awards at CHI, UIST, SIGCSE, VL/HCC, ICSE and ISSTA.

Human Resources is excited to continue our Learning Series in partnership with Optum this Fall, featuring the theme: “Thriving Through Change: Building Resilience in Today’s Workplace.” These live, instructor-led virtual sessions (via WebEx) are designed to provide practical tools and insights to support your professional and personal well-being through engaging and relevant topics. Each session will be recorded so you can revisit the content at your convenience.

Advance registration is required to attend the live session.

The Office of Human Resources is excited to offer HR Connections, a gathering designed to provide a welcoming space where employees can connect with HR, share feedback and engage in open conversations about their workplace experiences. Whether over breakfast or afternoon tea, our goal is to foster meaningful dialogue, build relationships and better understand the needs and perspectives of our campus community.

Each session is intentionally kept small to encourage open discussion while bringing together a variety of ideas and experiences. Gatherings are hosted by Dana Nagengast, along with another member of the HR team. Participation is voluntary, and staff are asked to RSVP in advance.

The Office of Civic & Community Engagement (OCCE) will be hosting a guilt-free book club for fall 2026.

We will be reading Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race by Derald Wing Sue.

We will be meeting from Noon to 1pm. Please bring your lunch and join us.

About half of our gatherings will be in the Green Room and the other half in Shan 3421. Meeting dates are below:
Fri., September 18 (Shan 3421)
Fri., October 2 (Shan 3421)
Fri., October 16 (Green Room)
Fri., October 30 (Green Room)
Fri., November 13 (Shan 3421)
Fri., November 20 (Green Room)
Fri., December 4 (Green Room)

The IA lab for Emerging Health Technology and the Department of Engineering present a Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering Talk and Q-and-A with Lindsay Wray ’08, CEO and co-founder of Kapha Bio.

This talk is open to all interested Harvey Mudd students.

Large language models are now trusted with sensitive data, embedded in consequential decision pipelines, and are hosted on shared, expensive hardware. These factors make them an increasingly attractive target, and not just at the level of what you type into a chat box. In this talk, we’ll go on a tour of LLM security and privacy threats, organized around a simple question, looking at different classes of attacks based on attackers’ access points.

Abu-Ghazaleh starts where most people think LLM security lives: at the prompt itself, showing how attackers with malicious intent can bypass the model’s safety training. A second group of attacks targets training time, where an attacker who controls even a small slice of a model’s training data can plant hidden behaviors that surface only later, including those that enable leaking private information or undermining the safety alignment of the model. Finally, Abu-Ghazaleh goes below the model entirely, to the hardware it runs on: his recent work shows the GPU infrastructure powering today’s LLMs leaks information across users who are supposed to be strongly isolated from each other. Taken together, these attacks show that LLM security isn’t one problem but several, spread across different layers of the stack, including inference time, training time, and hardware and system vulnerabilities. Abu-Ghazaleh closes with where he thinks the most promising defenses lie, and the open questions.

 

Speaker

Nael Abu-Ghazaleh is a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, Riverside. His research is in architecture and system security, and security for emerging systems. He has published over 250 papers in these areas, several of which have been recognized with best paper awards or nominations. His offensive security research has resulted in the discovery of several new attacks on CPUs and GPUs that have been disclosed to companies including Intel, AMD, ARM, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Nvidia, and resulted in patches and modifications to products, and coverage from technical news outlets. He is a member of the Micro Hall of Fame, an ACM distinguished member, an IEEE distinguished speaker and an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Contributor.

The IA lab for Emerging Health Technology and Department of Biology present an Industry Career Talk by

Jonathan Striepen
Senior Scientist, Cell Engineering and Analytical Sciences, Johnson and Johnson

Striepen will discuss how studying esoteric cell biology can be translated to cell engineering for industrial drug production.

The Cabinet is hosting informal coffee breaks in fall 2025 for students, faculty and staff. These coffee breaks will be attended by most of the Cabinet team and will provide an opportunity for the community to share ideas, express concerns and highlight successes.

All are welcome to stop by as schedules allow.

Welcome back, student employees!

Kick off the new academic year with HR! Join us to meet the HR team, learn where to find us and connect with the people who are here to support you throughout your student employment experience. Stop by for food, swag and fun crafts as we welcome you back and show our appreciation for all that you do.