From left to right: co-author Jacob Wobbrock, lead author Shaun Kane, chair of the SIGACCESS Awards Committee Jeff Bigham, senior author Richard Ladner and co-author Chandrika Jayant.
Mobile devices — including cell phones, music players, GPS tools and game consoles — have helped people with disabilities live independently, however, these technologies still come with their own accessibility challenges. In a user study, a team of Allen School and University of Washington Information School researchers examined how participants with visual and motor disabilities select, adapt and use mobile devices in their everyday lives.
At the 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility in Denver, Colorado, in October, the authors received the SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award, recognizing an ASSETS conference paper from 10 or more years prior that has had “a significant impact on computing and information technology that addresses the needs of persons with disabilities.”
“At the time of our user study, touchscreen smartphones like the iPhone were not accessible and blind people were used to special feature phones with buttons that were accessible. Blind people might have separate mobile devices for activities like phone calls, navigation and playing music,” explained senior author and Allen School professor emeritus Richard Ladner. “The user study in ‘Freedom to Roam’ opened up the possibility that there could be one accessible mobile device that could be used for many purposes: phone, navigation tool, music player and more. This desire of blind participants became a reality.”
Through a series of interviews and diary studies, the researchers outlined the most important issues for people with visual and motor disabilities when using their mobile devices. Participants noted struggles such as too small or low contrast on-screen text and lack of exposed, tactile buttons, which previous studies had established. This study, however, also identified additional challenges. For example, environmental factors can impact how mobile devices function. Low vision participants mentioned that their screens were only readable under ideal lighting conditions. Other participants explained that it was difficult to use their mobile devices while walking, as it reduced their motor control or their situational awareness by making it hard to hear sounds in the environment.
Despite the many accessibility problems participants encountered, they also showcased strategies for successfully working with troublesome devices. For example, one participant with a motor impairment was able to effectively use his mobile phone by placing it in his lap to dial. When possible, participants modified their device, such as increasing the text size or installing access hardware such as screen readers; however, the device settings often did not have enough flexibility to meet their needs.
In the years after the paper’s publication, many of the participants’ desired features have materialized. Multiple participants anticipated that many of the functions they requested, such as screen readers, speech input and optical character recognition technology, could be combined into a single device in the modern smartphone instead of separate ones. Two users in the study also mentioned that user-installable apps could increase accessibility — predicting the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Additional authors include Jacob Wobbrock, UW Information School professor and Allen School adjunct faculty member; Allen School alum Chandrika Jayant (Ph.D., ‘11), head of design at Be My Eyes; and Shaun Kane, who received his Ph.D. from the UW Information School and is now a research scientist in responsible AI at Google.
From developing recyclable electronics to leveraging artificial intelligence in estimating carbon footprints, Allen School Ph.D. student Zhihan Zhang is tackling the challenge of sustainability on multiple fronts.
“The goal is to build a new generation of ubiquitous computing that is sustainable by design — from its physical materials to accelerated decision-making by autonomous AI — and in how it values human effort and ultimately augments everyone’s health,” Zhang said. “This is a massive, interdisciplinary problem. Our current computing ecosystem was not designed for this, so we can’t just solve it with better software or AI models.”
In his research, Zhang, who is co-advised by Allen School professors Vikram Iyer and Shwetak Patel, focuses on sustainable ubiquitous computing. He aims to reimagine computing ecosystems by integrating emerging sustainable materials and new sensing paradigms. For his contributions, Zhang was awarded a 2025 Google Ph.D. Fellowship in health research. The fellowship supports exceptional graduate students from around the world who represent “the next generation of scientists focused on critical foundational science.”
Printed circuit boards (PCBs) make up a large portion of the world’s environmentally hazardous electronic waste — almost all electronic devices contain a PCB, and their interconnected parts make them nearly impossible to recycle. As a more sustainable alternative, Zhang and his collaborators introduced a new PCB that can be repeatedly recycled with minimal material loss and performs on par with traditional PCBs made of hard plastic. The team found that these new PCBs could lead to an almost 50% reduction in the global warming potential compared to conventional PCBs.
Beyond reducing electronic waste, Zhang develops AI models to help users better understand the environmental impact of everyday decisions. Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) provide a framework for evaluating the environmental impact of a product, service or process throughout its entire life cycle, but they can be difficult for non-experts to navigate. To help bridge this gap, Zhang and his team introduced the first autonomous sustainability assessment tool that transforms unstructured natural language descriptions into interactive environmental impact visualizations. He also helped reimagine the labor-intensive process of LCAs in another way through a multi-agent AI system that can autonomously generate life cycle inventories and estimate the environmental impact of electronic devices using public data sources.
For Zhang, however, sustainability extends beyond addressing climate change to encompass issues such as personal health and public well-being. Alongside a team of Google researchers, Zhang helped develop a personal health agent that analyzes data from wearable devices and medical records to provide personalized, evidence-based guidance.
“It’s been incredible to see the breadth and depth of Zhihan’s research on how his work in AI touches sustainability, health, materials, sensing and HCI,” said Patel, who holds the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical & Computer Engineering.
Next, Zhang plans to launch a startup to help translate his research into more practical, real-world solutions. He is also designing agentic workflows to automate diverse scientific challenges including large AI models for sustainable material discovery and seismological analysis.
In addition to receiving a Google Ph.D. Fellowship, Zhang has also been named a Heidelberg Laureate Forum Young Researcher and has received a Bob Bandes Award honorable mention, which recognizes exceptional teaching assistants in the Allen School.
“Zhihan stands out for his breadth, transcending disciplinary boundaries to tackle hard problems in sustainability across the computing stack,” Iyer said. “He can both fabricate recyclable circuits in a wet lab and build AI systems to automatically calculate a device’s carbon footprint. I’m excited for his next steps applying insights from this work on sustainability to a broader set of impactful problems in health care and accelerating scientific discovery.”
The Nickelsville Northlake tiny house village. Photo by Kurtis Heimerl.
Modern Internet of Things (IoT) technologies such as smart home devices, sensors and security cameras have transformed how we interact with our physical environments. As University of Washington researchers discovered, they also have the potential to help residents living in tiny house villages, a type of emergency shelter for those experiencing homelessness.
Through a series of visits and participatory design workshops with residents of two tiny house villages in Seattle, Washington, a team led by Allen School professor Kurtis Heimerl (B.S., ‘07) found ways for residents to leverage and augment their living spaces with smart technologies. The researchers also identified challenges such as land ownership and privacy concerns that residents need to balance with sensor design and deployment. Their paper “Participatory Design in Precarity: ‘Smart’ Technologies for Tiny House Villages” received an honorable mention at the 28th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW) in October.
To learn more about the team’s findings, we spoke with Heimerl and Allen School postdoc Esther Han Beol Jang (Ph.D., ‘24), first author on the CSCW paper.
What are tiny house villages?
KH: Tiny house villages are a Pacific Northwest transitional housing solution. The idea is basically a spot for unhoused people to get their own space. There’s two organizations that run them — the Low Income Housing Institute, which partners with the city, and the Nickelsvilles, which are independent and cooperatively run tiny home villages and the ones used in this study.
EJ: These are communal living arrangements, so they have shared kitchens and bathrooms, and the Nickelsvilles have a self-organized structure where the residents actually run the day-to-day operations.
What are some of the problems in tiny house villages that IoT technologies can help address?
Kurtis Heimerl
KH: One of the themes that came out was infrastructure management — this is stuff like water and power. These infrastructures are often ad hoc and precarious. For instance, the Central District tiny house village has its water coming from a hose on the neighbor’s house, and this is water for approximately 20 people, including showers and washing machines. One of the big results of the paper was that there was a need to engage with helping them monitor and evaluate failures across these ad hoc infrastructures in the village.
EJ: In the paper, we come up with design principles for technologies that are well-suited for outdoor encampments. All of these sensors that we want to put on — like the water supply, for example, to see whether there is a clean water supply, whether the water is flowing or if their water has been cut off — need to be easy to put on and easy to remove as well as portable.
What challenges did the team run into with implementing these technologies?
KH: Cost is a big factor. We identified some water quality sensors that could do the job asked of them that were thousands of dollars and clearly unsustainable for the space that’s run as tightly as Nickelsville.
EJ: One of the things about the way current IoT technologies are designed is there is an owner, and that owner has an online account for configuring the device or registering it, or doing some kind of integration with it, usually in the cloud. There is a churn of users in these transitional housing, but you need to have organizational continuity for the ownership of the sensors, and that can be really tricky with existing technologies.
The other thing that goes on with the cloud connectivity of all of these devices is that a lot of them report data back to the manufacturer, or have data that’s stored in the cloud — that is something that the villagers didn’t want. It would be best to have IoT technologies that report to an internal platform or a locally hosted platform, but a lot of technologies are not set up to do that.
What do you hope others take away from this research?
Esther Han Beol Jang
KH: Our experience is that these tiny house villages are a successful solution in the homelessness space, and something that should be encouraged. The barriers we saw are the barriers that they experience even outside of IoT and technology spaces, and that makes it really difficult, so it’s really amazing to see their success despite that difficulty.
Lastly, this is a really interesting research environment. It’s underresearched. These are populations that are assumed to have very little digital abilities, very little resources and despite those limitations there’s a lot of capacity and interest and value in doing technology work with them.
EJ: Homelessness is a problem that crosses a lot of boundaries, and a lot of people end up homeless who you would never expect. Those people may pass through after just a short time, or they may be there for years, and so you do get people who are technologically savvy in these villages. It’s a huge missed opportunity if we don’t engage with those people, and help them get out of their situation.
Additional authors include Jennifer Webster, research project manager at the Allen School, Ph.D. student Kunsang Choden and professor Jason Young at the UW Information School, Emma Jean Slager, a professor in the UW Tacoma School of Urban Studies, and Christopher Webb, a faculty member at Seattle Central College.
When analyzing a large dataset, it can be overwhelming trying to figure out where to look for interesting insights. Visualizing the data can help, but manual chart specifications can also be a daunting and time-consuming task for users without extensive domain expertise. To help make datasets easier to understand and examine, in 2015, a team of researchers led by Allen School professor Jeffrey Heer introduced Voyager, a system that automatically generates and recommends charts and visualizations based on statistical and perceptual measures — allowing users to efficiently explore different parts of the dataset they may not have discovered before.
Since its release, Voyager has been called a “landmark development” and has helped transform visualization technology from human-led interactive visualization to a mixed-initiative approach. At IEEE VIS 2025 earlier this month in Vienna, Austria, Heer and his co-authors were recognized with the InfoVis 10-Year Test of Time Award for the Voyager paper’s lasting impact on the field. With the advancement and increasing popularity of artificial intelligence tools, the award committee noted, the system’s mixed-initiative approach is even more relevant today.
“The Voyager paper is exciting to me for many reasons. The work introduced a new approach to visualization recommendation and how to richly incorporate recommendations within user interfaces — all of which has proved influential to ongoing research,” said Heer, who holds the Jerre D. Noe Endowed Professorship in the Allen School. “To provide a solid representation for reasoning about visualizations and recommending charts, we also invented Vega-Lite, a high-level language for statistical graphics that went on to become a popular open source tool in its own right.”
Underlying Voyager is the Compass recommendation system which takes in user selections, data schema and statistical properties and generates suggested visualizations in the form of Vega-lite specifications. For example, an analyst looking at a dataset about cars can use Voyager to examine the effect of different variables such as horsepower, number of cylinders and acceleration. If the analyst is interested in looking at horsepower, they can browse charts with varied transformations of horsepower in the Voyager gallery and find the car with the highest horsepower. Voyager can also recommend visualizations with additional variables to help the analyst see if there are potential correlations or pursue other questions.
In a user study comparing Voyager to a visualization tool modeled after Tableau, the researchers found that Voyager helped users explore more of the data, leading to a significantly greater coverage of unique variable combinations.
Additional authors include Kanit Wongsuphasawat (Ph.D., ‘18), visualization team lead at Databricks; Dominik Moritz (Ph.D., ‘19), faculty at Carnegie Mellon University; Anushka Anand, director of product management at Salesforce; Jock Mackinlay, former technical fellow at Tableau; and Allen School adjunct faculty member Bill Howe, a professor in the University of Washington Information School.
At the Allen School, 22% of Fall 2025 undergraduate students are first generation, or one of the first in their family to pursue a bachelor’s degree. For first-gen students, navigating the twists and turns of higher education without a roadmap can be a daunting challenge — what are office hours? How do I choose the right courses for me? What do I do after college? Still, these students have persevered to figure it out on their own or leverage resources such as the Allen School’s first-gen student group, GEN1, to help them find their way.
In honor of the National First-Generation College Celebration on November 8, we asked students and faculty to share their experience being first and what advice they have for others still embarking on their first-gen journey. Here are some of their stories.
‘You made it here for a reason’: Kurtis Heimerl, professor
What does it mean to you and your family to be among the first to pursue a bachelor’s degree?
Kurtis Heimerl
Kurtis Heimerl: Not much! My parents didn’t really (and still don’t really) understand higher education and the value of it. There was an expectation of increased wages (which was true!) but not really a push to attend.
How has being first-gen influenced your studies or career path?
KH: Dramatically, I think. I worked in industry at points but I think the lack of college being a “normal” path meant that I didn’t leave when it was economically sensible to do so; instead, I stayed in and got more degrees (as those credentials are things that are hard to lose once you have them). I’m not sure I’d advise my children to go all the way to a Ph.D. but the journey obviously worked for me.
What are some of the most challenging or most rewarding parts about being first-gen?
KH: There’s a lot of imposter syndrome. The reality is that you made it here for a reason. It has been rewarding being able to give back to the community that supported you; I do a lot of work for UW because it was instrumental in my own success and it’s great to see it continue doing that for new students as well.
What advice would you give to first-gen students?
KH: That the doors are open. I personally have struggled with feeling like opportunities (research, internships, etc.) weren’t for me; it seemed like others slid in so naturally to these paths, but I felt like I didn’t understand a lot of the details or nuances to succeed. The reality is that no one really understood and everyone was figuring it out.
‘Your success multiplies far beyond yourself’: Sanket Gautam, master’s student, Professional Master’s Program
What does it mean to you and your family to be among the first to pursue a bachelor’s degree?
Sanket Gautam
Sanket Gautam: It means breaking generational barriers and transforming not just my future, but my entire family’s trajectory. Coming from an underrepresented community in India, my degree created financial sustainability that enabled me to support others in my family to explore opportunities they never imagined possible. This achievement represents the fulfillment of countless sacrifices and dreams from those who came before me. It carries both deep pride and the profound responsibility of being a catalyst for change in my community.
How has being first-gen influenced your studies or career path?
SG: Being first-gen taught me that creating opportunity means lifting others as I climb. Without a family roadmap, I learned to seek mentors, build networks, and advocate for myself in unfamiliar environments — experiences that shaped my commitment to serving as a GEN1 mentor and participating in GEN1 coffee chats. These skills developed through navigating my own journey now drive how I approach problem-solving and collaboration in my studies and career. My pursuit of AI specialization reflects a desire to build systems that expand access and empower underrepresented communities to thrive.
What are some of the most challenging or most rewarding parts about being first-gen?
SG: The challenge is navigating uncharted territory — creating your own path when there’s no family blueprint for financial aid, career planning, or institutional processes. You become your own guide, figuring out everything from networking strategies to academic decisions through trial, error, and determination. Yet this challenge builds incredible resilience and problem-solving skills that become your greatest assets. The reward is knowing your success multiplies far beyond yourself, opening doors and inspiring others in your family and community to pursue their own dreams.
What advice would you give to first-gen students?
SG: Your unique perspective is your strength — embrace it with confidence and pride. Seek out mentors, build community with fellow first-gen students, and never hesitate to ask questions, even when it feels intimidating. The path may feel uncertain at times, but every challenge you overcome builds the resilience that will carry you through future obstacles. Remember that by forging your own path, you’re not just succeeding for yourself — you’re creating a roadmap for everyone who comes after you.
‘You get to define your own path’: Czarin Dela Cruz, undergraduate student
What does it mean to you and your family to be among the first to pursue a bachelor’s degree?
Czarin Dela Cruz
Czarin Dela Cruz: Being among the first in my family to pursue a bachelor’s degree means making the most of the opportunities my family and I worked hard for after moving from the Philippines. Having access to more resources here motivates me to push forward and make my parents proud. It’s a way to honor their sacrifices and show that their efforts were worth it.
How has being first-gen influenced your studies or career path?
CD: Being first-gen has encouraged me to stand up for myself and always look toward the future. It’s motivated me to work hard in my studies and constantly find ways to improve. More importantly, it’s inspired me to pursue my passions not just for myself, but to honor the people who supported me and made it possible for me to be here.
What are some of the most challenging or most rewarding parts about being first-gen?
CD: One of the most challenging parts of being first-gen is navigating everything on your own — from understanding college systems to balancing academics and family expectations. But it’s also incredibly rewarding to see that your hard work pays off. Being first-gen means you get to define your own path, make your own choices, and work toward your goals for a brighter future.
What advice would you give to first-gen students?
CD: My advice to first-gen students is to never be afraid to ask for help. Communicate with those around you and reach out when you need support. There are so many people and resources ready to help you succeed. Being proactive opens doors to new opportunities, and you never know what meaningful connections or experiences you might discover.
Award winners and presenters, left to right: professor Shwetak Patel; Mark Nelson and Mike Fridgen, venture partners at Madrona Venture Group; Sabrina Albert, partner at Madrona Venture Group; Madrona Prize winner Yanming Wan; Madrona Prize runner-up Baback Elmieh; Madrona Prize runner-up Mateo Guaman Castro; Rasik Parikh and Rolanda Fu, investors at Madrona Venture Group.
From a robotic arm that learns how to pick up new objects in real time, to a model that converts 2D videos into 3D virtual reality, to a curious chatbot that adapts to its users, to machine learning techniques for decoding the brain (and so much more), the 2025 edition of the annual Research Showcase and Open House highlighted the breadth and depth of computing innovation coming out of the Allen School.
Last week, roughly 400 Industry Affiliate partners, alumni and friends gathered on the University of Washington campus to learn how the school is working toward solutions to a set of “grand challenges” to benefit society, in which the Allen School is uniquely positioned to lead; participate in technical sessions covering a range of topics, from artificial intelligence to sustainable technologies; and explore how researchers are leveraging machine learning to decode causality, learning and communication in the brain during a luncheon keynote; and learn about more than 80 research projects directly from the student researchers themselves at the evening poster session and open house — including those who walked away with the coveted Madrona Venture Prize or People’s Choice Award.
Unlocking the mysteries of brain learning with the help of machine learning
Allen School professor Matt Golub presenting his luncheon keynote on causality, learning and communication in the brain.
In his luncheon keynote, Allen School professor Matt Golub shared recent research from the Systems Neuroscience and AI Lab (SNAIL) that uses machine learning techniques to better understand how the brain performs computations such as decision-making and learning — insights that could, in turn, inform future developments in AI. Previous work has focused on reconstructing neuron connections ex vivo, or outside of the body, by looking at thin sections of the brain under a microscope. Instead, Golub and his team analyze active neural activity.
“If we can crack these problems, that will set us up in future work to understand how different brain networks perform distributed computation through their connections, through the dynamics of the activity that flows through those connections,” Golub said. “Then, we can ask how the connections change as the brain learns. We might be able to discover the learning rules that govern synaptic plasticity.”
Golub and his collaborators introduced a novel approach for analyzing neural population dynamics with optogenetics and computational modeling. Using lasers, the researchers targeted neurons to stimulate their activity; if they hit one neuron with the laser and another one fired reliably, they inferred a connection between the two. Because these experiments are resource intensive, the researchers designed an active learning algorithm that selected these stimulation patterns, or chose specific neurons to target with the laser, so that they could learn an accurate model of the neural network with as little data as possible.
Zooming out for a higher-level view, Golub and his team also developed a new machine learning method that can identify communication between entire regions of the brain. The technique, called Multi-Region Latent Factor Analysis via Dynamical Systems (MR-LFADS), uses multi-region neural activity data to untangle how different parts of the brain talk to each other. Unlike existing approaches, MR-LFADS observes what unobserved brain regions are likely saying as well — the team’s custom deep learning architecture can detect when a recorded region reflects an unobserved influence. When applied to real neural recordings, the researchers found that MR-LFADS could predict how disrupting one brain region would affect another, which were effects that the system had never seen before.
Moving forward, Golub said that he is thinking about “the nexus of these two fronts.” In particular, he is interested in advancing active learning in nonlinear models and other deep learning models that can help generate AI-guided causal manipulations — experiments where the model can tell researchers what data it needs to improve.
“All of this is aimed at trying to understand how our brains compute and learn to drive our flexible behavior, and advances there can and have inspired innovation in AI systems and for new approaches to improving the health and function of our brains,” Golub said.
‘Quite a lot of amazing research’
The event culminated with the evening poster session and announcement of the Madrona Prize, an annual tradition in which Madrona Venture Group recognizes innovative student research with commercial potential. Past award winners have gone on to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and build companies that have been acquired by tech giants such as Google and NVIDIA.
Sabrina Albert, a partner in the firm, presented the 2025 prize to the winner and two runners-up.
“There is quite a lot of amazing research that you guys are working on, so it was quite a challenge to pick which ones were most exciting,” Albert said.
Yanming Wan presents his poster, which received the Madrona Prize, to attendees.
Allen School Ph.D. student Yanming Wan accepted the grand prize for CURIO, or Curiosity-driven User-modeling Reward as Intrinsic Objective. This new framework enhances personalization in large language models (LLMs) on multi-turn conversations.
Conversational agents need to be able to adapt to varying user preferences and personalities as well as diverse domains such as education or health care. However, conventional methods for training LLMs often struggle with personalization because they require pre-collected user data, making them less effective for new or content-limited users.
To solve this problem, Wan and the team introduced an intrinsic motivation reward model that enables LLMs to actively learn about the user out of curiosity and then adapt to their individual preferences during the conversation.
“We propose leveraging a user model to incorporate a curiosity-based intrinsic reward into multi-turn Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF),” said Wan. “This novel reward mechanism encourages the LLM agent to actively infer user traits by optimizing conversations to improve its user model’s belief. Consequently, the agent delivers more personalized interactions by learning more about the user across turns.”
Additional members of the research team include Allen School professor Natasha Jaques, Jiaxing Wu of Google DeepMind, Lior Shani of Google Research and Marwa Abdulhai, a Ph.D. student at University of California, Berkeley.
Madrona Prize Runner-up / VAMOS: A Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Model for Capability-Modulated and Steerable Navigation
Mateo Guaman Castro showcases his poster.
Another research team received accolades for VAMOS, a hierarchical vision language-action (VLA) model that helps robots navigate across diverse environments. In both real-world indoor and outdoor navigation courses, VAMOS achieved a three times higher success compared to other state-of-the-art models.
“Contrary to the belief that simply scaling up data improves generalization, we found that mixing data from many robots and environments can actually hurt performance — since not all robots can perform the same actions or handle the same terrains,” said Allen School Ph.D. student Mateo Guaman Castro, who accepted the award on behalf of the team. “Our system, VAMOS, tackles this by decomposing navigation into a hierarchy: a high-level VLM planner proposes multiple possible paths, and a robot-specific ‘affordance modulator,’ trained safely in simulation, selects the path best suited to the robot’s physical abilities.”
Allen School researchers were also recognized for their research that transforms two-dimensional videos into a dynamic three-dimensional scene that users can experience in immersive virtual reality (VR) — revealing additional depth, motion and perspective.
“A key challenge is figuring out the 3D world from a single, flat video,” said Ph.D. student Baback Elmieh, who accepted the prize. “To address this, we first use an AI model to ‘imagine’ what the scene looks like from many different angles. We then use a new technique that models the scene’s overall motion while simultaneously fine-tuning the details in each frame. This combined approach allows us to handle fast-moving action, making progress towards reliving 2D videos or even historic moments as dynamic 3D experiences.”
Rounding out the evening was the announcement of the People’s Choice Award, where attendees voted for their favorite poster or demo.
People’s Choice Award presenter and winners, left to right: professor Shwetak Patel, Shirui Chen and Jiafei Duan.
Shwetak Patel, the Allen School’s director for development and entrepreneurship and the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE), presented the 2025 award to Allen School Ph.D. student Jiafei Duan and UW Department of Applied Mathematics Ph.D. student Shirui Chen for MolmoAct, an open-source action reasoning model developed by a team of UW and Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) researchers that enables robots to interpret and understand instructions, sense their environment, generate spatial plans and then execute them as goal-directed trajectories.
“MolmoAct is the first fully open action reasoning model for robotics. Our goal is to build generalist robotic agents capable of reasoning before they act — a paradigm that has already inspired a wave of subsequent research,” said Duan, who worked on the project as a graduate student researcher at Ai2.
The researchers invited attendees to test MolmoAct’s reasoning capabilities by putting an object in front of a robotic arm — such as a pen or a tube of lip gloss — and watching the robot learn to pick it up in real time.
Each year, the MIT Technology Review recognizes science and technology trailblazers whose work is helping solve global problems. Three members of the Allen School community were named part of this year’s MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Asia Pacific — professors Simon Shaolei Du and Ranjay Krishna, along with alum Sewon Min (Ph.D., ‘24), now a faculty member at University of California, Berkeley and research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2).
The three were recognized as pioneers for their innovative research that is advancing our understanding of artificial intelligence, large language models, computer vision and more.
Simon Shaolei Du: Tackling core AI challenges from a theoretical perspective
Simon Shaolei Du
Recent innovations in large-scale machine learning models have transformed data-driven decision making, from the rise of self-driving cars to ChatGPT. However, we still don’t understand exactly how these powerful models work, and Du is interested in unraveling some of the mysteries behind machine learning.
“My work focuses on building the theoretical foundations of modern artificial intelligence, establishing a systematic research path around deep learning’s trainability and generalization, as well as sample complexity in reinforcement learning and representation learning,” Du said.
Du’s research has already provided theoretical explanations for some of deep learning’s black boxes. He and his collaborators provided one of the first proofs for how over-parameterized machine learning models and neural networks can be optimized using a simple algorithm such as gradient descent. The researchers found that, with enough over-parameterization, gradient descent could find the global minima, or the point where the model has zero error on the training data, even if the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth. He also established the connection between deep learning and kernel methods, explaining how these models are able to generalize so well despite their large size. Beyond demystifying how these models work, Du is helping make over-parameterized models more mainstream. In 2022, he received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to support his research in designing a resource-efficient framework to help make modern machine learning technologies more accessible.
He has also tackled core challenges in reinforcement learning, such as its high data requirements. Because agents learn through trial-and-error interactions with the environment, it can take many interactions, and data points, to build up a comprehensive understanding of the environment’s dynamics. To make the process more efficient, Du and his collaborators introduced a new algorithm to address an open problem on sample complexity that had remained unsolved for almost three decades. In their paper, the researchers prove that their algorithm can achieve optimal data efficiency and show that its complexity is not dependent on whether the planning horizon is long or short. Du also provided the first theoretical results showing that a good representation as well as data diversity are both necessary for effective pre-training.
Ranjay Krishna: Developing ‘visual thinking’ for vision-language models
Ranjay Krishna
Krishna’s research sits at the intersection of computer vision and human computer interaction and integrates theories from cognitive science and social psychology. Through this multidisciplinary approach, his work enables machines to learn new knowledge and skills through social interactions with people and enhances models’ three-dimensional spatial perception capabilities.
“I design machines that understand the world — not just by recognizing pixels, but by reasoning about what they see, where they are and how to act to change the world around them,” said Krishna, who directs the UW RAIVN Lab and leads the PRIOR team at Ai2.
Krishna addresses large vision-language models’ deficiencies in compositional reasoning due to their inability to combine learned knowledge on the spot to handle new problems. Krishna proved that simply scaling up the models is not an effective solution. Instead, he and his collaborators introduced an iterated learning algorithm which is inspired by the cultural transmission theory in cognitive science. This method periodically resets and retrains the model, encouraging visual representations to evolve toward compositional structures. By combining this technique with the PixMo dataset, Krishna helped develop the Molmo series of models, Ai2’s family of open source and state-of-the-art multimodal models that can both understand and generate content using text and images.
He is also interested in tackling multimodal models’ challenges with spatial reasoning. While these models can often perform well in basic tasks like object detection, they struggle with tasks requiring a deeper understanding of geometric transformations and spatial context, such as sketching. Krishna and his collaborators developed Sketchpad, a framework that gives multimodal language models a visual sketchpad and tools to draw on it. Using this technique, a model can “think visually” like humans can by sketching with auxiliary lines and marking boxes, which helps it improve its reasoning accuracy and break down complex spatial and mathematical problems. He has taken this approach a step further with a training method that augments multimodal language models with perception tokens, improving their three-dimensional spatial perception.
Krishna has received the 2025 Samsung START Faculty Award to study “Reasoning with Perception Tokens” as well as the 2024 Sony Faculty Innovation Award to research “Agile Machine Learning,” in addition to his TR35 Asia Pacific recognition.
Sewon Min: Enabling models to find answers from the external world
Sewon Min
Min aims to build the next generation of AI systems that feature flexibility, superior performance and increased legal compliance. In her Allen School Ph.D. dissertation, she tackled fundamental challenges that current language models (LMs) face, such as factuality and privacy, by introducing nonparametric LMs. Her other work has only further driven the development of more open, controllable and trustworthy LMs.
“My research explores new ways of building models that use data creatively — for instance, by using retrieval (nonparametric LMs) and by designing modular LMs trained in a non-monolithic manner,” Min said.
Min has advanced retrieval-augmented and nonparametric language models on different fronts. She and her collaborators scaled a retrieval datastore, MassiveDS, to more than one trillion tokens — the largest and most diverse open-source datastore to date. The researchers also found that increasing the scale of data available at inference can improve model performance on various downstream tasks, providing a path for models to move from parametric memory toward data pluggability. At the systems interface level, Min helped develop REPLUG, a retrieval-augmented language modeling framework that augments black-box LMs with a tuneable retriever. This simple design can be applied to existing LMs and helps improve the verifiability of text generation.
She has also developed techniques to address reliability issues and legal risks that LMs run into. While the legality of training models on copyrighted or other high-risk data is under debate, model performance significantly declines when only trained on low-risk texts due to the limited size and domain coverage, Min and her collaborators found. So the researchers introduced the SILO framework, which manages the risk-performance tradeoff by putting high-risk data in a replaceable datastore. To help quantify the trustworthiness of LM generated text, Min developed FACTSCORE, a novel evaluation that breaks a generation down into atomic facts and then computes the percentage of these facts that are corroborated by a reliable knowledge source. Since its release, the tool has been widely adopted and used to evaluate and improve the reliability of long-form LM text generation.
Every year, as the amount of data we create grows and software becomes increasingly more complex, it is more crucial to improve the efficiency of computer systems. However, in this complex ecosystem, dependability, such as ensuring software contains fewer bugs and achieves greater security, is often considered an afterthought, said Allen School professor Baris Kasikci. Software and hardware have been plagued by bugs that can lead to data loss, security vulnerabilities and costly critical infrastructure failures.
In his research, Kasikci focuses on developing techniques for building systems that are both efficient and have a strong foundation of dependability, with an emphasis on real-world technical and societal impact. At the 55th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2025) in June, Kasikci was recognized with the Rising Star in Dependability Award for “his impressive track-record and contributions in the field of dependable systems, including multiple publications in highly regarded venues, and influence on current industry practice.”
“Building systems that are simultaneously efficient and dependable is challenging because there is a strong tension between techniques aimed to achieve these properties,” said Kasikci. “This tension is due to the different trade-offs involved in achieving efficiency and dependability (e.g., performance optimizations versus defenses against vulnerabilities that cause slowdown). To rise to this challenge, my work draws insights from a broad set of disciplines such as systems, computer architecture, programming languages, machine learning and security.”
Kasikci’s work helps improve society’s trust in computer systems with new secure hardware systems and bug detection techniques. He was part of the team that discovered Foreshadow, a speculative attack on Intel processors which enables an attacker to steal sensitive information that is stored inside personal computers and third-party clouds. Their work has influenced the redesign of Intel processors and motivated all major cloud vendors to deploy mitigations against the vulnerability. He and his collaborators also developed REPT, which is one of the most widely-deployed failure analysis systems in the world and is in use across all modern Microsoft Windows platforms. It has allowed Microsoft engineers to tackle bugs that have been open for many years, and the techniques behind the system have been adopted by both Intel and Facebook.
He is also interested in developing methods for optimizing the entire computing stack, from hardware to operating systems. At the hardware level, Kasikci helped introduce techniques to improve code, such as Ripple, a software-only technique that uses program context to inform the placement of cache eviction instructions. More recently, he developed new methods for making systems that support large language models more efficient including NanoFlow, a novel LLM-serving framework with close to optimal throughput.
In future work, Kasikci is interested in advancing reliability techniques such as debugging and testing by making production execution data such as logs and core dumps more useful. For example, he envisions using this information to quickly find bugs that production systems may suffer from, while also managing how much storage and resources these logs can consume.
Networks have become one of the foundational pillars for modern society. When they go down, we cannot fly airplanes, operate bank accounts or even scroll through social media. One of the long-standing challenges in networking, however, is the difficulty of accurately predicting how changes to device configurations will impact real-world traffic flows — especially when a single code line revision can easily break a network, explained Allen School professor and alum Ratul Mahajan (Ph.D., ‘05).
To help network engineers and operators ensure that their networks operate exactly as they intend, Mahajan and his collaborators introduced Batfish, an open source network configuration analysis tool that can find errors and ensure the accuracy of planned network configurations, helping to prevent costly outages. At the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) conference last month, Batfish was recognized with the SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award for its “significant impact on the world of computer networking.”
“Over the years, networks have become super complicated and it has gotten to the point where humans cannot assure that changes they make to the network are not going to bring it down,” said Mahajan, who is one of the co-directors for the UW Center for the Future of Cloud Infrastructure (FOCI). “With Batfish, we focus on what we call proactive validation. Instead of, after the fact, discovering that something bad has happened to the network, Batfish takes your planned change to the network and makes a model of how the network will behave if this change were to go through.”
The platform was first developed in 2015 by Mahajan and colleagues at Microsoft Research; University of California, Los Angeles; and University of Southern California. It was later commercialized by Intentionet, where Mahajan was the CEO and co-founder. Today, Batfish is managed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), and more than 75 companies rely on the tool to help design and test their networks.
Batfish uses an offline “snapshot” of the network to build a model and infer if there are any issues present within the configuration. The platform takes in device configurations from various vendors including Cisco, Juniper and Arista, and it then converts these configurations into a unified and vendor-independent model of the network. Once the model is built, engineers can query Batfish about topics such as the reachability between various network parts, potential routing loops, access control list (ACL) configurations such as incorrectly assigned permissions, or other policy and security constraints. Batfish then provides specific information needed to find and fix the misconfigurations.
While Batfish’s main architecture and original goal has stood the test of time, many of its underlying techniques have been revamped and enhanced to tackle scalability and usability challenges that complex, real-world networks face. For example, for each violated property, Batfish originally only provided one counterexample packet that was randomly picked by the SMT solver from violating headspace, however, these counterexamples lacked context and could be confusing. To help engineers understand what went wrong, Batfish now provides a positive example, or a packet that does not violate the property, alongside a counterexample that engineers can compare to pinpoint the issue.
As one of the earliest and most widely-adopted network verification platforms, it has helped shape key areas of research such as control-plane and data-plane modeling and network automation. From tech giants to small startups, multiple organizations rely on Batfish every day to both validate network configurations and drive innovations in network designs and operations.
“The main lasting impact of Batfish, beyond the code itself, would be changing the practice of networking to use these types of tools,” Mahajan said. “It was one of the first pieces of technology that made automated reasoning for networks a reality.”
Akari Asai (Ph.D., ‘25), research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and incoming faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, is interested in tackling one of the core challenges with today’s large language models (LLMs). Despite their increasing potential and popularity, LLMs can often get facts wrong or even combine tidbits of information into a nonsensical response, also known as hallucinations. This can be especially concerning when these LLMs are used for scientific literature or software development, where accuracy is vital.
For Asai, the solution is developing retrieval-augmented language models, a new class of LLMs that pull relevant information from an external datastore using a query that the LLM generates. Her research has helped establish the foundations for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and showcase its effectiveness at reducing hallucinations. Since then, she has gone on to add adaptive and self-improvement capabilities and apply these innovations to practical applications such as multilingual natural language processing (NLP).
Asai was recently named one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 2025 for her pioneering research improving artificial intelligence. The TR35 award recognizes scientists and entrepreneurs from around the world who “stood out for their early accomplishments and the ways they’re using their skills and expertise to tackle important problems.”
“With the rapid adoption of LLMs, the need to investigate their limitations, develop more powerful models and apply them in safety-critical domains has never been more urgent,” said Asai.
Traditional LLMs generate responses to user inputs based solely on their training data. In comparison, RAG enhances the LLM with an additional information retrieval component that utilizes the user input to first pull information from a new, external datastore. This allows the model to generate responses that incorporate up-to-date information without needing additional training data. By checking this datastore, an LLM can better detect when it is generating a falsehood, which it can then verify and correct using the retrieved information.
Asai took that research a step further and she and her collaborators introduced Self-reflective RAG, or Self-RAG, that improves LLMs’ quality and factual accuracy with retrieval and self-reflection. With Self-RAG, a model uses reflection tokens to decide when to retrieve relevant external information and critique the quality of its own generations. While RAG can only retrieve relevant information a fixed number of time steps, Self-RAG can retrieve multiple times — making it useful for diverse downstream queries including instruction following.
She is interested in utilizing these retrieval-augmented language models to solve real-world problems. In 2024, Asai introduced OpenScholar, a new model that can help scientists more effectively and efficiently navigate and synthesize scientific literature. She has also investigated how retrieval-augmented language models can be useful for code generation, and helped develop frameworks that can improve information access across multiple languages such as AfriQA, the first cross-lingual question answering dataset focused on African languages.
“Akari is among the pioneers in advancing retrieval-augmented language models, introducing several paradigm shifts in this area of research,” said Allen School professor Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Asai’s Ph.D. advisor and also senior director at Ai2. “Akari’s work not only provides a foundational framework but also highlights practical applications, particularly in synthesizing scientific literature.”
This award comes on the heels of another MIT Technology Review recognition. Last year, Asai was named one of the publication’s Innovators Under 35 Japan. She has also received an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship and was selected as one of this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in the Healthcare and Science category.
