Allen School News

After a pandemic-enforced hiatus, last week the Allen School welcomed industry partners, alumni and friends to its 2022 Research Showcase this week to celebrate the groundbreaking work of its students and faculty. The typically annual event, which is hosted by the Industry Affiliates Program, welcomes industry partners and alumni to engage with the school’s research and learn more about… Read more →

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Allen School Ph.D. students Vivek Jayaram and John Thickstun have been named 2020 Qualcomm Innovation Fellows for their work in signal processing, computer vision and machine learning using the latest in generative modeling to improve source separation. In their paper, “Source Separation with Deep Generative Priors,” published at the 2020 International Conference on Machine Learning, the team addresses perceptible artifacts that are often found in source separation algorithms. Jayaram and Thickstun… Read more →

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Over a video conference presentation, Eugene Jahn showed viewers an augmented reality program he created to help aspiring Michael Jordans shoot the perfect basket, showing the best path and angle to become a better shooter. The Allen School sophomore is a student in the Virtual Reality Systems CSE 490V taught… Read more →

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The UW Reality Lab has launched a new incubator where students can develop innovative projects in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) with guidance and resources from lab faculty and staff. The Reality Lab, which launched two years ago, allows researchers to focus on the pursuit of leading-edge research and educating the next generation of innovators in this growing field. The incubator gives students a space to work on AR/VR projects while fostering a community… Read more →

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Christine Betts, a computer science major who earlier this week received the inaugural Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) Outstanding Software Engineer Scholarship for underrepresented groups, is profiled in GeekWire’s latest “Geek of the Week” feature. Betts, who hails from Kansas City, Missouri, is an active contributor to the Allen School community, serving as a teaching assistant for our popular introductory programming courses and engaging in undergraduate research in the Molecular Information Systems Lab. In talking about her… Read more →

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The Allen School has partnered with leading technology companies to create a new academic research center aimed at advancing the state of the art in augmented and virtual reality. The UW Reality Lab, which launched today with $6 million in funding provided by Facebook, Google, and Huawei, will focus on the pursuit of leading-edge research and educating the next generation of innovators in this burgeoning field. The center will build upon the Allen School’s established leadership in computer vision… Read more →

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Allen School professor Steve Seitz and Ph.D. alumni Gail Murphy and Geoffrey Voelker have been named Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). They are among just 54 computer science educators, researchers and practitioners to be recognized as 2017 Fellows based on their outstanding technical accomplishments and service to the computing community. “To be selected as a Fellow is to join our most renowned member grade and an elite group,” said ACM President Vicki L. Hanson in a… Read more →

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Ph.D. student Alex Mariakakis, who works with professor Shwetak Patel in the Allen School’s UbiComp Lab, has his eye on the prize in the latest edition of GeekWire’s “Geek of the Week.” Blue Devil-turned-Husky Mariakakis was a slam-dunk for the honor based on his work on mobile health apps that will one day allow anyone, anywhere to be screened for potentially life-threatening medical conditions using a smartphone. “There are so many reasons why I work at… Read more →

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Professor Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman of the Allen School’s Graphics & Imaging Laboratory (GRAIL) flies her geek flag high in this week’s edition of GeekWire’s “Geek of the Week.” Kemelmacher-Shlizerman is one of the brains behind a series of high-profile research projects that combine facial recognition, modeling and 3-D reconstruction — including a new technique to create photorealistic videos of people from audio files, as demonstrated by a lip-syncing Obama. The goal of her work, Kemelmacher-Schlizerman explains to GeekWire, is to… Read more →

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Researchers in the Allen School’s Graphics & Imaging Laboratory (GRAIL) have developed a new technique that enables them to generate photorealistic videos from audio clips. The team, which includes recent Ph.D. graduate Supasorn Suwajanakorn and professors Steven Seitz and Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, demonstrated their approach by producing a video of former president Barack Obama lip-syncing audio on a range of topics, complete with natural-looking facial expressions and mouth movements. To achieve such a lifelike result, the researchers had to overcome… Read more →

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