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‘A great citizen of the research community’: Allen School Ph.D. student Anandghan Waghmare receives Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award 

Anandghan Waghmare holds out his arm to display a smartwatch modified with additional, tiny sensors affixed to the armband in front of a poster on an easel In honor of the late Allen School professor Gaetano Borriello, whose work focused on applying mobile technologies to tackle issues of global equity and social and environmental justice, the ubiquitous computing community each year recognizes Ph.D. students who are following in his footsteps. This year, those footsteps led back to the Allen School when Ph.D. student Anandghan Waghmare won the 2024 Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award at the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing/International Symposium on Wearable Computing. Read more →
November 25, 2024

From firing up their intellectual curiosity to battling imposter syndrome, three Allen School veterans reflect on how military service is shaping their student experience

Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) members carry flags during the University of Washington's annual Veterans Day Ceremony. “Having traveled to and experienced different countries, I bring a more practical and global outlook to computer science. This definitely gives me a different understanding and appreciation for the subject compared to some of my peers.” That sentiment, offered by Fei Huang, veteran and current undergraduate, is one of the themes we found among Allen School students with military backgrounds. To mark Veterans Appreciation Week at the University of Washington, we spoke with three students on how being a veteran gives them a unique perspective on their studies and future career path. Read more →
November 15, 2024

One medical model to rule them all: AI takes center stage at Allen School’s 2024 Research Showcase

Sheng Wang onstage speaking to a crowd of people seated at round tables with a slide behind him titled Four Paradigms in AI for Medicine While the Allen School’s annual Research Showcase and Open House highlights both the breadth and depth of computing innovation at the state’s flagship university, the 2024 event at the University of Washington last week had a decidedly AI flavor. From a presentation on advances in AI for medicine, to technical sessions devoted to topics such as safety and sustainability, to the over 100 student research projects featured at the evening poster session, the school’s work to advance the foundations of AI and its ever-expanding range of applications took center stage. Read more →
November 8, 2024

Seeing the world through your pet’s eyes: Allen School professor Ben Shapiro receives JLS 2023 Outstanding Paper of the Year Award

A black dog lies in front of a row of toys and picks out a frog toy to play with. Pets can do more than just provide us with companionship and cuddles. Our love for our pets can improve science education and lead to innovative ways to use augmented reality (AR) to see the world through a canine or feline friend’s eyes. In a paper titled “Reconfiguring science education through caring human inquiry and design with pets”, a team of researchers led by Allen School professor Ben Shapiro introduced AR tools to help teenage study participants in a virtual summer camp design investigations to understand their pets’ sensory experiences of the world around them and find ways to improve their quality of life. The paper won the 2023 Outstanding Paper of the Year Award from the Journal of the Learning Sciences. Read more →
October 22, 2024

A way with words and trillions of tokens: Allen School researchers recognized at ACL 2024 for expanding the capabilities of language models

An artist’s illustration of artificial intelligence (AI). This illustration depicts language models which generate text. Would you call your favorite fizzy drink a soda or a pop? Just because you speak the same language, does not mean you speak the same dialect based on variations in vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar. And whatever the language, most models used in artificial intelligence research are far from an open book, making them difficult to study. At the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in August, Allen School researchers took home multiple awards for their work to address these challenges. Their research ranged from introducing more dialects into language technology benchmarks to evaluating the reliability and fairness of language models and increasing the transparency and replicability of large language model training as well as evaluations across languages. Read more →
October 8, 2024

Allen School researchers showcase speech and audio as the new frontier for human-AI interaction at Interspeech 2024

An overhead view of people sitting around laptops and phones working on a project. Trying to work or record interviews in busy and loud cafes may soon be easier thanks to new artificial intelligence models. A team of University of Washington, Microsoft and AssemblyAI researchers led by Allen School professor Shyam Gollakota, who heads the Mobile Intelligence Lab, built two AI-powered models that can help reduce the noise. By analyzing turn-taking dynamics while people are talking, the team developed the target conversation extraction approach that can single out the main speakers from background audio in a recording. Similar kinds of technology may be difficult to run in real time on smaller devices like headphones, but the researchers also introduced knowledge boosting, a technique whereby a larger model remotely helps with inference for a smaller on-device model. Read more →
September 19, 2024

Singular sensation: Allen School researchers develop new method for sequencing proteins using nanopores

Determining protein sequences, or the order that amino acids are arranged within a protein molecule, is key to understanding their role in different biological processes and diseases. In a recent paper published in the journal Nature, a team of University of Washington researchers introduced a new approach to long-range, single-molecule protein sequencing using commercially available devices from Oxford Nanopore Technologies. The team, led by senior author and Allen School research professor Jeff Nivala, demonstrated how to read each protein molecule by pulling it through a nanopore sensor multiple times to increase sequencing accuracy. Read more →
September 12, 2024

MONET helps paint a clearer picture of medical AI systems

A glowing brain emerges from a stack of books flinging pages with dermatology images around. In a recent paper published in the journal Nature Medicine, a team of researchers at the University of Washington and Stanford University co-led by Allen School professor Su-In Lee introduced a medical concept retriever, or MONET, that can connect images of skin diseases to semantically meaningful medical concept terms. Beyond annotating dermatology images, MONET has the potential to improve transparency and trustworthiness throughout the entire AI development pipeline, from data curation to model development. Read more →
September 11, 2024

Pushing beyond the silos: Allen School’s Jon Froehlich aims to build a unified approach to urban science as part of new NSF-funded project

Urban street scene depicting hot pink streetcar entering an intersection, with a car on the opposite side of the road and painted pedestrian crossing visible against a backdrop of street trees and low-rise buildings, with high-rise buildings in distant background Urban communities are vibrant centers of economic, cultural and civic activity. Such vibrancy yields a lot of data that could provide a window onto how our urban environments function, but it’s difficult to extract usable insights when the data is stored in different formats, spread across different systems and maintained by different agencies. Allen School professor Jon Froehlich is pursuing a more unified approach that will democratize data analysis and exploration at scale and empower urban communities as part of a new, five-year project dubbed OSCUR — short for Open-Source Cyberinfrastructure for Urban Computing — that recently earned a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Read more →
September 3, 2024

Looking into places others are not: Allen School’s Miranda Wei receives 2024 Karat Award for contributions to usable security and privacy

Headshot of Miranda Wei wearing a black sweater against a brick background When Miranda Wei attended her first Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) conference in 2017, she had little experience in the field; she had only recently graduated with a degree in political science from the University of Chicago. But the community of researchers at the conference welcomed her in. That experience paved the way for her to continue doing research on privacy and security and, eventually, to pursue a Ph.D. at the Allen School. Seven years after her first foray into the SOUPS community, Wei received the 2024 John Karat Usable Privacy and Security Student Research Award at the conference for her interdisciplinary contributions to the field, efforts to mentor others and community service. Read more →
August 26, 2024

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