🎲 Can LLMs stand in for real, unpredictable systems? We're increasingly dropping LLMs into simulations: humans in economic models 📈, agents in multi-agent settings 🤖, processes in epidemiology 🦠. But if a model always returns the single "most plausible" answer, it can't capture how messy and unpredictable the real world is. Please check out our recent work from @UBC_NLP and @UBC_CS, where we introduce the first benchmark for evaluating randomness in LLMs. 🧪 Introducing UnpredictaBench: 448 problems spanning shuffling 🔀, real-world randomness 🌍, and random number sampling across 40 distributions 📊, testing whether models can truly sample from a target distribution, not just vary their outputs. 🔬 We also put creativity under a numerical microscope for the first time, measuring it as distributional behavior instead of vibes. 🚨 The result: no model clears 40% at KS@100. Most collapse to one answer. Reasoning helps a little, but there's no quick fix. 📄 huggingface.co/papers/2606.0… Thanks for my awesome collaborators and supervisors: @DabiriAghdam, Liang Luo, Ellie Dingqiao Wen, Lele Wang, @careninigiusepp, and @PeterWestTM.

Congratulations to our outstanding undergraduate students who received the Rick Sample Memorial Award for their involvement in computer science research: Angela Chiang, Emilie Ma, Ali Salamatian, and Rain Yang!

This fall, UBC has a new introductory course about AI! AI 100 is open to all UBC students and covers the fundamentals of what AI is and explores its ethical and social implications. Learn more: science.ubc.ca/news/2026-05/…

Congratulations to Emilie Ma, who received the Martin Frauendorf Memorial Prize for demonstrating leadership and making significant contributions to student activities in the Department!

Congratulations to Jaehwan Seok, who received the Markus Meister Memorial Prize for graduating with the highest academic standing in the final year of the Computer Science BSc program!

UBC has a new introductory course about AI! AI 100 is open to all UBC students and covers the fundamentals of what AI is and explores its ethical and social implications. Read more about the new AI 100 course and UBC’s new AI-focused curriculum: science.ubc.ca/news/2026-05/…

#CVPR2026 Zero simulation data. Zero annotations. One physics foundation model that generalizes across arbitrary geometries. Introducing PhysSkin: a transformer-based, physics-informed self-supervised model that learns real-time simulation straight from static 3D shapes. The representation is discretization-agnostic — a single model generalizes across object categories, topologies, and resolutions, and works directly on 3D Gaussians. Under the hood: a transformer point-cloud encoder extracts latent shape features, while a cross-attention decoder aggregates both surface and volumetric information. Sun, Jun 7, 2026 · 10:45 AM–12:45 PM PDT · ExHall F 348 zju3dv.github.io/PhysSkin/

Canada’s AI strategy is at a pivotal crossroads. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting down with Keri Adams on @CTVNews @YourMorning today to unpack what this means for our future. Navigating the rapid evolution of generative AI requires clear, actionable frameworks, and having these public conversations is vital. Thank you to the CTV team for a fantastic and timely discussion! #ArtificialIntelligence #CanadaAIStrategy #GenerativeAI #MachineLearning #UBC ctvnews.ca/vancouver/video/2…

This week, Professor Laks Lakshmanan presented two papers and gave a workshop keynote and Professor Rachel Pottinger received a Distinguished Reviewer Award at ACM SIGMOD PODS 2026! Learn more about the papers in our new article: cs.ubc.ca/news/2026/sigmod26

The federal government released its national AI strategy today, outlining key areas of action. UBC experts are available to comment on related topics. news.ubc.ca/advisory/ubc-exp…

UBC Computer Science researchers Joanna McGrenere, Kevin Chow and Marvel Hariadi explain how focus apps are failing neurodivergent minds: theconversation.com/focus-ap…

Congratulations to our graduating students Irmak Bayir and Selin Uz, who received the Bill Aiello Memorial Award in Computer Science! The award goes to students who best combine academic excellence with leadership, community service or volunteerism.

June is Pride Month. Explore the many Pride activities at our Vancouver and Okanagan campuses and connect with the community: bit.ly/3Hkn1vX

Congratulations to the recipients of our UBC Computer Science Awards for Academic Excellence for graduating with the highest average in their program: Jason Yang, Jaehwan Seok, Emilie Ma, Michael Yang, Akira Kudo, Nathan Senyard, Horton Lai, Torrin Pataki!

Canada released its draft AI strategy today that will modernize online safety laws to protect Canadians in the digital age. However, it doesn't specify what those modernizations will look like. Here's what UBC AI pioneer Dr. @AlanMackworth recommends: bit.ly/4fkfpsi

From a model to observe Earth to a new approach for scene reconstruction, UBC Computer Science researchers present new papers at the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026. Read more: cs.ubc.ca/news/2026/06/CVPR2…

📌Our work on controllable video generation is being presented at the @CVPR 2026 AI for Creative Visual Content Workshop! 💡TLDR: ironically, minor deviations from control signals allow for better control adherence. 🧵(1/n) #CVPR2026 @cveu_workshop @RBCBorealis @UBC_CS

A new campus-wide 100-level course, and separate degree option in computer science, will help UBC students succeed in an AI-driven future. @UBC_CS science.ubc.ca/news/2026-05/…

Congratulations to UBC Computer Science Professor Kevin Leyton-Brown, who has been honoured with a major international computer science award for contributions to AI and machine learning! Read more: cs.ubc.ca/news/2026/05/dr-ke…

Flowers in full bloom cover UBC’s Vancouver campus, just in time to celebrate our graduating students as they prepare to cross the Chan Centre stage. We congratulate their achievements and welcome them to our alumni community! science.ubc.ca/news/2026-05/…