UCB

UCB commonly refers to the University of California, Berkeley, a public research university located in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1868, it is one of the ten campuses of the University of California system and is known for programs across the sciences, engineering, humanities, and social sciences. The campus supports extensive research activities and collaboration with industry, government, and other academic institutions. It hosts a large and diverse student body and faculty, and it is widely regarded for its contributions to higher education, innovation, and public service.

UCB also stands for Upper Confidence Bound, a principle used in sequential decision-making and machine learning, particularly in multi-armed bandit problems. In UCB algorithms, each option is assigned an estimated reward along with a confidence bound that reflects statistical uncertainty. At each decision point, the option with the highest upper confidence bound is selected, balancing exploration of less-tested options with exploitation of well-performing ones. Variants such as UCB1 and UCB2 have been developed, and the approach is used in online learning, adaptive experimentation, and recommender systems.

Because the acronym is not unique, UCB can refer to other institutions or concepts in different contexts, including organizations and technical terms. When encountering the acronym, it is helpful to rely on contextual cues to determine the intended meaning.