Allen School News

Each December, the Allen School invites prospective students and families to join us for a week-long celebration of Computer Science Education Week, a nationwide event that aims to inspire students, advance equity, and honor those who are contributing to the field and to society. After being compelled to go fully virtual due to the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, the school’s Diversity & Access Team was thrilled to offer a hybrid celebration this year. 

Throughout the week, prospective students and families joined Allen School researchers, staff and students for virtual sessions devoted to a range of topics, from “a day in the life” of an Allen School major, to exploratory discussions of computing’s impact on society, to research talks and demos spanning artificial intelligence, computer security, robotics, accessibility, and more.

“CS Education Week is our largest outreach event of the year,” said Assistant Director for Diversity & Access Chloe Dolese Mandeville. “We know that it’s extremely important for future students to picture themselves in computing and the Allen School before they even step foot on campus as an undergraduate. This week is an opportunity for us to provide that picture for high school students — especially those who don’t have access to computing opportunities in their schools or communities.”

To that end, in addition to offering an overview of what it’s like to be an Allen School student, the team also organized sessions devoted specifically to highlighting the experience of students from underrepresented communities and those who are the first generation in their families to pursue a bachelor’s degree. The celebration culminated in a virtual Hour of Code followed by an in-person open house in the Allen Center and Gates Center on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus, where an estimated 250 people spent the day touring the labs, participating in interactive demos, talking to current students and researchers, and experiencing firsthand what it means to be part of the Allen School and the field of computing.

“It was an incredible experience to host students and their families on campus again after three years,” said Dolese Mandeville. “We loved the energy that students and their families brought to campus — taking photos with each other, getting to know our undergraduate students, and engaging in hands-on activities. This celebration is really about welcoming more students into the computing community and the Allen School community, too.”

Thanks to all of our presenters, students and visitors for making CS Education Week a tremendous success! See you next year!

Photos: Emmy Ngo Read more →

The Allen School’s Kyle Johnson and Lisa Orii have been named to the first cohort of recipients of the Quad Fellowship, a scholarship program that recognizes outstanding STEM graduate students from Australia, India, Japan and the United States. 

The inaugural 100-member class includes students specializing in a number of disciplines across science, technology, mathematics and engineering. Operated and administered by Schmidt Futures, the Quad Fellowship is designed to spur research efforts and build ties among the next generation of STEM leaders. 

Each participating country is represented by 25 Fellows, who are selected for their commitment to advancing innovation for positive social impact. Each Fellow will receive benefits such as funding, cross-cultural exchange through cohort-wide trips, mentorship and participation in regular virtual and in-person workshops on various themes, including the intersection of STEM and society, ethics and innovation, and emerging technologies.

The Quad governments announced the first cohort of Fellows last week. 

“It is my great privilege to join the four Quad leaders in welcoming our inaugural cohort of Quad Fellows,” said Tony Woods, executive director of the Quad Fellowship. “The work that our Fellows do during and after their time as Quad Fellows will lead to bold, new inventions and generational breakthroughs in STEM that will enrich the globe for generations to come. At the same time, our scholars will help to build deeper ties between our four nations and renew the power and possibility of collaborative democracy.”

Johnson — one of three U.S. recipients in computer science — is a third-year Ph.D. student advised by Allen School professor Vikram Iyer and also works with Shyam Gollakota in the school’s Mobile Intelligence Lab and adjunct professor Sawyer Fuller, a faculty member in the UW Department of Mechanical Engineering, in the Autonomous Insect Robotics Lab. His research focuses on leveraging low-power actuators, structural properties in systems such as the bistability demonstrated in leaf-out origami, and off-the-shelf electronics to create insect-scale autonomous robots optimized for resource-constrained applications. Johnson also has worked to improve inclusion and access to STEM fields by co-founding A Vision for Electronic Literacy & Access (AVELA) and the University of Washington’s Black Graduate Student Association. He previously has been recognized as a 2021 Generation Google Scholar and inaugural UW + Amazon Science Hub Fellow for his work.

“I’m very grateful for the opportunity to build ties with other STEM professionals through the Quad Fellowship,” Johnson said. “I look forward to meeting a diverse group of students in and outside of my field, and learning how folks from various STEM backgrounds address current global issues. I also know that academia can get daunting, so I aspire to help grow a culture of support amongst the fellows through the highs and lows of our graduate school journeys.”

Orii is a second-year Ph.D. student who works with Allen School professor Richard Anderson in the Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab. She was named as one of the Quad Fellows representing Japan. Her research focuses on the development of human-centered technologies to address barriers associated with stigmatized health conditions, such as HIV and menopause, and improve health care quality and access for vulnerable communities in low-resource settings. Orii was previously recognized as one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Japan for her work.

“I am very thankful and honored to have been selected into the inaugural cohort of the Quad Fellowship,” Orii said. “I am excited to join a community of researchers who are committed to channeling their skills and knowledge in STEM for social impact. The Quad Fellowship will play a key role in driving my research forward and advancing my mission to empower vulnerable populations and promote health equity. With the fellowship’s financial support, I can actively visit, engage with and collaborate with communities in low-income and low-resource settings on a global scale.

“As a Quad Fellow from Japan,” Orii continued, “I wish to encourage students, especially in my home country, to participate in socially conscious work and recognize that this is not only possible but also valuable.”

UW alum Dellen Behrend, now a master’s student in civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, was also part of the Japan cohort. While an undergraduate student researcher in the UW Biogeotechnics Lab, she focused on the upscaling of bio-cementation soil improvement. She graduated from UW with her bachelor’s in civil engineering in June. 

Congratulations to Kyle, Lisa and Dellen! Read more →

When Allen School Ph.D. student Lisa Orii was in high school, she became involved with the work of Parasaiyo, a Japanese nonprofit that supports foster children in the Philippines in pursuing higher education. She began making annual visits to a foster home there over the summer, developing a bond with the children and staff. Between her trips, she helped organize related fundraising events back in her native Japan. 

Later, as an undergraduate at Wellesley College, Orii began to think about how she could connect her academic interests with her humanitarian ones. Curiosity crystallized into research. A computer science and philosophy major, she saw the potential for human-centered technologies, especially where they were needed most. 

“After discovering human-computer interaction, I thought about how I could apply the thinking and methods of this field to supporting vulnerable populations,” Orii said. “I was extremely excited to join the University of Washington’s Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab, where I found great researchers who have visions similar to mine.”

Orii continues to realize her visions of a better tomorrow. She was recently named one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Japan, a distinction that recognizes researchers, entrepreneurs and activists under age 35 who are helping to solve challenges in a number of academic and industrial fields. 

“I am extremely grateful and honored to receive MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Japan Award. I am very excited to join this year’s and past years’ recipients whom I have admired and respected,” Orii said. “With this award, I wish to share with people in my home country the work that my peers and I do at the intersection of technology and society. I hope that this recognition informs more people in Japan that socially motivated work is not only valuable but also possible.”

Orii earned the award in the philanthropist category, which honors researchers who design technology to address injustice and empower vulnerable populations. On this front, Orii has conducted research in global health, data security and privacy, urban planning and more. 

In one recent study, Orii and her collaborators at the University of Tokyo investigated how certain vocal characteristics can invite bias and proposed a system for practicing one’s own speaking style that is specifically tailored to individuals’ identities and improves their self-perception. Using interactive voice conversion software, participants manipulated the pitch and duration of their speech and listened to the modified playback. They also listened to recordings of “role model” speakers, evaluating vocal traits besides their capability to be good public speakers. 

Orii’s team found that the combination of voice manipulation and model audio had the potential to improve self-perceptions of speech. Previous research has shown that gender biases can inform speech perceptions, with lower, more masculine voices being coded as more authoritative. Through their study, Orii and her collaborators sought to uplift the voices of women and gender minorities in the arena of public speaking. 

“Being unable to speak in a natural voice can negatively affect a speaker’s perceptions of their speaking abilities and discourage them from actively speaking,” Orii said. “With this thought, I became interested in thinking about how technology could play a role in speakers’ self-perceptions of their speech performances, hoping that there could be a way for speakers to not only gain insight into their speaking but also better appreciate the way they speak.”

Orii has also completed field research in Malawi identifying areas of improvement in HIV data security and electronic medical records. Along with her advisor, Allen School professor Richard Anderson, and UW Department of Global Health professor Caryl Feldacker, Orii gathered the perspectives of healthcare providers, patients, government officials and others in developing educational programs related to HIV patient data and security. 

“There is a lot of context that could only be fully captured through direct observations and interactions at the site,” Orii said. “From this experience, I learned the significance of working directly with stakeholders to address their concerns and needs. Through my conversations with them, I came to greatly appreciate the sophistication, consideration and care that these individuals had with respect to protecting HIV patients’ data. I am very thankful for the HIV clinic for welcoming me into their community and allowing me to do this research.” 

In a separate ongoing project, Orii is exploring designs for recording and sharing menopause experiences across generations, promoting open communication via tools to support women’s mental and physical health. Another project in the works asks how technology that delivers accurate information about contraception influences the decision to use contraceptive methods. 

Though her research has taken her far and wide, both in geographic and academic terms, the goal of her projects remains the same: helping those in need through technology. 

“My research focuses on developing human-centered technologies to address the barriers associated with stigmatized health in low-income and low-resource settings,” Orii said. “By working with local partners, I aspire to advance technologies that improve quality of care and drive equitable access to health care for vulnerable communities.” 

Congratulations, Lisa! Read more →

In the spring of 2020, schools and offices across the nation closed their doors en masse to in-person learning and working, restaurants and retail stores began extolling the virtues of curbside dining and delivery, and Zoom became a household name. In the midst of the global health emergency caused by the emergence of COVID-19, many of the services and activities people rely on as part of their daily lives — from doctors’ appointments to sessions at the gym — moved from the physical world to the digital one. 

But not everyone made the transition evenly. In a paper recently published in Nature Communications, a team of University of Washington and Microsoft researchers presented the first population-scale study of how digital engagement shifted during the pandemic and how the shift to online resources may have differed across subpopulations. Using anonymized activity logs of online search activity, the researchers examined the types of information and assistance that people sought in the days of remote work, telehealth, and virtual education tied to a range of environmental and socioeconomic factors. Their findings offer new insights into the disparities in how people access critical resources against the backdrop of a public health emergency and economic upheaval. 

“Prior research has shown that there are disparities in how people engage with digital resources, even when they have internet access. That ‘second-level digital divide’ has real-world implications for people’s health and well-being,” explained lead author Jina Suh, a Ph.D. student in the Allen School and principal researcher at Microsoft Research. “By steering so much of daily life online, the pandemic amplified or exacerbated those disparities and raised important questions about potential barriers to people obtaining essential information and support that they need.” 

Suh and her co-authors — Allen School professor Tim Althoff and affiliate professors Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft, and Ryen White, general manager at Microsoft Research — examined how that second-level digital divide changed during the pandemic by analyzing approximately 57 billion anonymized Bing search engine interactions across the U.S. between 2019 and 2020. Their analysis covered 25,150 ZIP codes representing 97% of the nation’s total population and leveraged the social determinants of health (SDoH), a framework from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services setting out the conditions known to affect outcomes related to health and quality of life.

To gain a holistic view of how online behavior relates to offline needs, the researchers classified search interactions according to elements of SDoH, spanning health, education, economic assistance, and food access. For each of the identified elements, they compared the change in online search activity between two corresponding ZIP code groups for a set of census variables — race, population density, educational attainment, employment, health insurance and internet access — to capture how the subpopulations leveraged online resources differently during the pandemic. Their analysis followed a longitudinal before-after observational method with a matching-based approach to isolate the influences of different census variables on the observed changes. The team first calculated the percentage change in digital engagement for each search category from before and during the pandemic within each ZIP code group; next, they measured the percentage-point difference in those results to gauge the disparities between the two matched groups. 

“Our methodology offers a level of detail and scale that can’t be achieved by conventional approaches to disparity research that rely on surveys or interviews,” Suh said. “It also allows us to account for normal seasonal variations and control for confounding factors in a way that traditional survey approaches cannot.” 

That control of confounding factors is important; since many of the socioeconomic and racial variables are correlated, it can be difficult to pinpoint which factors may be contributing to variances in digital engagement and design effective interventions. To sidestep potential confounding effects, Suh and her colleagues created matched pairings of ZIP codes for each census variable according to their similarity in other census variables. For example, to compare the magnitude of change on a particular SDoH element between ZIP codes above or below the $55,000 median household income, they matched a single high-income ZIP code to a single low-income ZIP code having a similar profile in the remaining variables. They repeated this step for all of the ZIP codes and each of the variables in turn, discarding any ZIP codes that could not be matched before performing their population-level analysis. 

As anticipated, that analysis revealed some stark differences. Focusing on the aforementioned income variable, in the first four weeks after the pandemic was declared, the researchers found a significant gap — more than 200 percentage points — in the extent to which people ramped up their search for online health information between high-income ZIP codes versus low-income ZIP codes. Their analysis also revealed a difference of roughly 100 percentage points between ZIP codes with a higher than average proportion of Hispanic residents compared to those having a lower proportion of Hispanic residents. They saw smaller, but still measurable, disparities in ZIP codes with greater population density (a proxy for urban areas), higher rate of unemployment, and a higher proportion of Black residents compared to corresponding areas with lower density, lower unemployment, and a lower proportion of Black residents.  

Another outgrowth of the pandemic was a rapid pivot to online learning. Here again, the researchers found that not everyone leveraged relevant digital resources to the same extent. In particular, while clicks to online learning sites in low-income ZIP codes increased by around 200% compared to pre-pandemic times, that figure was closer to 400% in high-income ZIP codes. Similar, though not necessarily as dramatic, differences were noted between ZIP codes with higher proportions of Black or Hispanic residents or greater population density and their counterparts during the same period — and that’s with controlling for internet access. 

On the other hand, a greater uptick in online information-seeking was not necessarily a positive indicator of a community’s experience in weathering pandemic-induced impacts. In ZIP codes with higher proportions of Black residents, for instance, the spike in search queries for unemployment information in spring 2020 was nearly three times that found in ZIP codes having a below-average proportion of Black residents. That August, there was another surge, this time in clicks on unemployment websites, in ZIP codes with higher proportions of Black residents and Hispanic residents, respectively.  

“The summer increase in unemployment site visits coincided with the expiration of federal supplemental unemployment insurance benefits. We saw an overall surge in interest online that was not reflected in the submitted claims data,” Suh noted. “The disparities we see online can help shine a light on economic disparities offline.” 

As Suh and her co-authors point out in the paper, many of the disparities they see online can have downstream impacts on health and educational outcomes and economic opportunity — impacts that are likely to reverberate for individuals and communities long after stay-at-home orders and pandemic assistance programs have ended. 

“We know that certain subpopulations have experienced a higher risk of COVID infection and mortality and a heavier socioeconomic burden as a result of the pandemic,” said Althoff. “Thanks to our ability to analyze billions of queries by millions of people, we have evidence of how some of those same subpopulations experienced the shift to digital resources differently, as well. 

“There’s a saying, ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure,’” he continued. “Our study illustrates the importance of measuring digital engagement aligned with indicators of health and well-being at the subpopulation level, and provides a blueprint for continuously monitoring changes in that engagement in real time. Only then will we manage to begin addressing the disparities and improve outcomes for people and society as a whole.” 

Read the Nature Communications paper here and the related Microsoft Research Focus article here. Read more →

Back in May, a group of five student researchers advised by Allen School professors Rajesh Rao and René Just disembarked in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering. They had traveled to ICSE 2022 from Seattle to present a paper describing a methodology they had developed at the University of Washington for detecting and repairing faults in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which are designed to enhance or restore sensorimotor function in people with neurological disorders or spinal cord injury. 

The paper, “Repairing brain-computer interfaces with fault-based data acquisition,” was noteworthy for its contributions toward ensuring that BCIs, which decode or encode neural signals to mediate the connection between the brain and assistive devices, are safe and robust for everyday use. The team was noteworthy for their connection with each other: All five student co-authors — Cailin, twins Caleb and Chloe, Claris, and Cleah — are siblings. And all five were, or were about to become, Allen School majors.

The research that prompted the ICSE paper had its roots in a project initiated by four of the siblings during Rao’s neural engineering capstone course last year. While Rao appreciated the novelty of so many siblings working on the same project, he was most appreciative of their ambition and ingenuity in tackling an open problem in neural software engineering with the potential to significantly improve people’s quality of life.

“The field of BCIs is still in its early stages, with most researchers focusing on proof-of-concept demonstrations,” said Rao, co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology and the Cherng Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang Professor in the Allen School and the UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. “I was therefore surprised and impressed when the Winston team proposed a forward-looking class project seeking to apply state-of-the-art techniques in software engineering to the design and implementation of BCIs.”

Recent Allen School alum Cailin Winston (B.S., ‘20, M.S., ‘22) — the eldest of the Winston siblings — developed and evaluated components of the team’s approach, which applies widely accepted methods for automated software testing and debugging, such as partial test oracles for detecting faults, corrective heuristics for labeling faulty data and slice functions for localizing faults, to the nascent domain of BCIs. The acquired data is then used to retrain the model to correct its performance of fault-prone tasks or used to suggest additional classes of data to target data collection and labeling. A student in the Allen School’s fifth-year master’s program at the time of publication, Cailin was already keenly aware of the importance of software and computational methods to biomedical research. That awareness prompted her to seek out ways to explore the intersection of the two disciplines early in her academic career.

“I initially got involved by contacting research groups at the University of Washington with prior publications that piqued my interest,” explained Cailin, who joined NVIDIA as a Deep Learning Engineer after graduation. “Attending research talks and colloquiums also made me aware of the various research projects being carried out and allowed me to further my involvement.”

As it turns out, the people who would take her involvement furthest — all the way to Pittsburgh as first author of a major conference paper — were closest to home. Her brother, Caleb Winston (B.S., ‘22), was also eager to find a pathway into research; in his case, it was a weekly reading group focused on the latest program synthesis papers organized by graduate students in the Allen School’s Programming Languages & Software Engineering (PLSE) group that set him on his way. Fast forward a few years, and Caleb and Cailin are collaborating on a methodology for real-time debugging and repair of BCIs and writing a paper accepted to one of the top conferences in the field.

In addition to sharing responsibilities for aspects of the ICSE paper, Caleb also shared his sister’s interest in how computing intersects with biomedicine — along with many other fields.

“Computer science intersects with so many different fields of study, from law, to healthcare, to urban planning,” noted Caleb, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University after graduating from the Allen School in the spring. “This generalizability is what excites me to study programming languages, software engineering, AI and hardware/software systems. Simple ideas from these subfields have potentially impactful applications in many fields outside of computing.”

Claris Winston, who is now in her third year at the UW, became intrigued by the connection between computing and biomedicine in part by her experience working on a mobile app for scoliosis treatment as well as her experience participating in a summer computing camp organized by Girls Who Code. After earning direct admission to the Allen School as a freshman, she worked with members of the Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL) on a new combinatorial polymerase chain reaction method for efficient retrieval of DNA oligo pools. That work, for which Claris was first author, was presented in a journal, in which her graphic design was also featured on the front cover. As she subsequently discovered at ICSE, presenting her research at a conference offered an entirely different — and exhilarating — experience.

“It was exciting to see researchers from all over the world and with such diverse backgrounds,” said Claris, who currently works with Allen School professor Jennifer Mankoff in the Make4All Group on research related to optimization for embroidered tactile graphics. “I was impressed by the range of topics covered, and the talks themselves had so many creative ideas and applications in the field.”

Youngest sibling and current freshman Cleah Winston contributed to the ICSE paper even before she arrived at the UW. She credits this and other early research experiences with opening her eyes to how an Allen School education would help her reach her goal of creating real-world impact.

“After being involved in several research projects in high school, I realized how much I enjoyed designing and developing solutions to problems in society,” she explained. “I felt that studying computer science would give me the tools and thought process for designing such solutions.”

The BCI project certainly gave her a head start in that regard, where she collaborated with sisters Claris and Chloe Winston (B.S., ‘22) in implementing a set of neural decoding BCI applications and using focused data acquisition and data labeling techniques to evaluate the team’s methodology for testing and repairing BCIs. Cleah is currently working with Allen School professor Byron Boots in the Robot Learning Lab exploring neural networks for computer vision and applications for hazard avoidance for off-road autonomous vehicles.

Chloe, who also took the lead on the statistical analysis of the results, credited an “internship-like class” in biotechnology research that she took in high school with setting her on a path to research at the UW. Her experience in the Garden Laboratory, in UW Medicine’s Department of Neurology, further fueled her love for research.

“I enjoyed the process of formulating research questions and designing and conducting experiments,” said Chloe, who double-majored in computer science and neuroscience at the UW. “That experience led me to seek other research opportunities throughout my undergraduate years.”

The two senior authors, Rao and Just, saw to it that all five student researchers would be able to attend the conference in person. While the siblings enjoyed the thrill of presenting their work to more senior researchers, their first conference experience was memorable for a variety of other reasons.

“I especially enjoyed the talks in the ‘Human Aspects of Software Engineering’ session, in which the social and cognitive aspects of the field were discussed,” said Claris. “Many of these topics were ones that I had not thought deeply about before, but this research is very important to study so we can build better engineering communities and software that benefits everyone.”

Chloe, meanwhile, found the conference eye-opening for the breadth of research happening in software engineering and the diverse problems it is trying to solve. The experience also impressed upon her the importance of researchers showing up to share their work. It’s a lesson she took with her to the University of Pennsylvania, where she is pursuing a M.D./Ph.D. with the goal of incorporating deep learning techniques into biomedical research and patient care as a physician-scientist.

“The conference environment was highly collaborative, and I was impressed by how new ideas were sparked through presentation and discussion,” she said. “Despite the inconvenience of travel and the anxiety that can come with presenting, I aim to continue attending and presenting at conferences. This is how new research directions are formed.”

For Caleb, ICSE offered a chance to bring what, at this point, could arguably be referred to as “the family business” full circle.

“The first time we all worked on a research project together was in high school. We were printing, cutting, and taping together a poster on precision medicine the night before a science fair,” he recalled. “It’s exciting to think that we have gone from working on high school science fair projects to cutting-edge research at the intersection of neural engineering and software engineering, which led to us presenting at ICSE.”

Read the team’s research paper here and the siblings’ retrospective on ICSE 2022 here. Read more →

By the end, colors filled the room. 

Blues, yellows, pinks and reds, all bobbing about, to and fro. When the clacking stopped, the popping began. And the trio of Allen School students, triumphant, smiled. 

“Team communication and coordination is the key to success,” said their bespectacled coach, who was watching from afar. “It’s a bonding experience.” 

The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) carries a colorful tradition besides an easy way for competitors to gauge where they stand in the rankings. As each team solves a problem, a balloon rises above their station, buoyancy abounding both above and below. A clutch of balloons spells success. A dearth of them adds pressure.

A few tables over, crews from Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University were tapping away with gusto. Around the ballroom on The University of Central Florida’s campus, balloons rose left and right. A chorus of keyboard clicks urged the contestants on as screens bathed their faces in a hazy blue light, and the timer continued to tick in giant white digits above the stage.

The University of Washington team, made up of then seniors Phawin Prongpaophan (B.S., ‘22), Milin Kodnongbua (B.S., ‘22) and Nathan Akkaraphab (B.S., ‘22), sat heads together, trying to decipher a riddle that had, so far, perplexed their competition. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the three dove in and submitted their response to the infamous problem “A,” their eyes fixed on the electronic scoreboard that announced the results as they arrived. 

The trio waited. Two submissions were pending — theirs and MIT’s. The scoreboard flashed green, signaling correct answers from both teams.

But who solved it first?

The answer came attached to a string. The UW team, dubbed “new-final-final-2,” received the star-shaped first balloon, edging MIT by 3 seconds. 

“Problem A was an interesting situation,” said Kodnongbua, now a Ph.D. student in the Allen School. “It wasn’t until we got the first-to-solve balloon that we knew we were ahead.”

The team would ride its momentum to a 10th-place finish in the ICPC North America Championship and a spot in the 46th Annual ICPC World Finals scheduled to be held in Egypt next November. Their achievement marks the first time in 22 years that a UW team has advanced to the world finals. 

But the team, which is advised by Allen School professor Stuart Reges, is focused on the process, not outcomes. 

“Our goal is to challenge ourselves by solving unprecedentedly hard and complex problems,” Kodnongbua said. “They are like a brain teaser that helps us stretch our thoughts and form a systematic way of solving problems.” 

Victor Reis, the team’s coach, has been through the process many times before. A veteran of the competitive programming circuit, the Ph.D. student in the Theory of Computation group, competed twice as an undergraduate at Cornell and went on to coach its team as a junior and a senior. 

At the UW, Reis has been at the helm since 2019. Past experiences in the competition have taken him to Marrakesh, Phuket and Beijing. 

But this year marked the first time he — and the team, for that matter — have been to Orlando, Florida. 

“So we had to go to Disney World,” Reis said, smiling.

The day they arrived for the national competition back in May, the members headed to the famed amusement park, braving roller coasters, water rides and encounters with Mickey Mouse. It’s the type of bonding that builds the teamwork needed during competition, Reis said, and stays with students far longer than wins or losses. 

For example, nothing toughens a group up like surviving The Tower of Terror. 

“Surprisingly scary,” Reis said. “I think that was our favorite.” 

To field the team, Reis took top squads from the programming contest he runs every winter, which garners interest from an estimated 100 students, to the regional ICPC competition held in March. There, Prongpaophan, Kodnongbua and Akkaraphab placed first, securing their place at nationals in sunny Orlando later that spring.

In between, they set to work, practicing weekly before the national competition. They organized mock contests, solving past problems within the allotted five-hour time limit to mimic the actual event.

They’ll continue with this practice schedule until the world finals next year. Normally, they’d be on their way to the finals taking place the November following the national competition. But due to the pandemic, the schedule was shifted back another year. Qualifiers from 2022 will compete in a “mega” competition in fall 2023, Reis said, along with qualifiers from next year’s nationals. 

So, given the long wait, keeping their skills sharp remains a focus for the team members. 

“We want to do our best,” Kodnongbua said. “These problem-solving and coding skills deteriorate over time if not touched regularly.” 

“Be it luck or change in perspective, I consider us to be fortunate enough to get to advance to the world finals,” added Akkaraphab, who comes from a mathematics background and is currently pursuing his master’s at UW in applied and computational mathematics. “My competitive programming knowledge is not on par with [my teammates], but I hope that I can bring something from the other side — math — to the table, and I will learn something new from competitive programming.”

To pass the time, they’ll hone reflexes and brush up on areas of weakness in previous competitions. At nationals, for instance, the final problem they solved produced “a messy code” and three 20-minute penalties. A key observation regarding Fibonacci sequences sent them coding down a longer and more-winding path. 

“We started by asking ourselves, ‘how can we solve this problem in one-dimensional?’” said Prongpaophan, who is currently pursuing his master’s degree in computer science at Northwestern University. “After we had the answer to our question, we tried to reduce the original 2-D problem into a 1-D that we know how to solve.

“Shortly after the contest, we realized that we can simply use 2-D data structure to solve the problem, which has better time complexity and more importantly, is much easier to code than our square root decomposition,” Prongpaophan continued. “Thus, we took an unnecessarily challenging path to the final.”

But, in the end, they solved it — the tipping point that sent them to the world finals. 

“The final is going to be a magnitude harder than the nationals,” Kodnongbua said. “There are some concepts, like string and graph manipulation, that are currently not our strength, and so we want to strengthen our knowledge base and make sure we are up for the contest.”

Should they succeed, the only strings left to manipulate will be attached to balloons. 

“Just have fun,” Reis said, encouraging future students interested in competing. “Try to enjoy the experience, because that’s what you’re there for, right? If you learn something in the process, it’s an A plus.” Read more →

Nearly a decade ago, well before mixed reality and the metaverse went mainstream, a team of researchers from the University of Washington’s UbiComp Lab and Microsoft Research were making noise within the human-computer interaction community with a novel approach to on-body sensing. Their technique, which leveraged transdermal ultrasound signals, turned the human body into an input surface for pressure-aware continuous touch sensing and gesture recognition without requiring extensive, not to mention expensive, instrumentation.

Last week, that same team collected the 10-Year Impact Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Interactive Surfaces and Spaces Conference (ISS 2022) for ”significant impact on subsequent on-body and close-to-body sensing interaction techniques over the last decade within the SIGCHI and broader academic communities.” SIGCHI is the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction, which sponsors ISS.

The researchers originally presented the paper, “The Sound of Touch: On-body Touch and Gesture Sensing Based on Transdermal Ultrasound Propagation,” at the ITS 2013 conference — at that time, the “T” stood for “Tabletops,” as “Spaces” had not yet come into their own when it came to interaction research. The paper described a system for resonating low-frequency ultrasound signals across a person’s body using an inexpensive combination of off-the-shelf transmitters and receivers. As the person performs a touch-based gesture, the signal becomes attenuated in distinctive ways according to differences in bone structure, muscle mass and other factors, while distance from the transmitter and receiver and the amount of pressure exerted affect the signal amplitude. The system then measures these variations in the acquired signal and applies machine learning techniques to classify the location and type of interactions.

Although the set-up was simple — the proof of concept relied on a sole transmitter and receiver pairing — the technique was sufficiently robust to provide continuous detection and localization of pressure-sensitive touch along with classification of arm-grasping hand gestures for a variety of interaction scenarios. 

“Our approach was unique in that it was the first time someone had applied transdermal ultrasound propagation to the problem of on-body sensing. It also was the first system capable of detecting both the onset and offset of a touch interaction,” recalled Shwetak Patel, who holds the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professorship in the Allen School and UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. “We showed that our system could infer rich contextual information from a variety of interactions to support user input and information retrieval, from touch-and-click actions to slider-like controls.”

Patel and his collaborators evaluated two potential configurations of their system: a wearable transmitter and receiver pairing for pressure-sensitive, localized touch-based sensing and an armband that combined the two for gesture recognition. In a series of studies involving a total of 20 participants, they demonstrated the system could correctly classify a set of touch-based gestures along the forearm with roughly 98% accuracy, and more complex arm-grasping gestures with 86% accuracy just using baseline machine learning techniques without much in the way of fine tuning. Although the team’s experiments focused on the forearm, the transmitter and receiver could be positioned to enable touch-based sensing anywhere on the user’s body.

Patel’s collaborators on the project include Allen School affiliate professor Desney Tan, currently vice president and managing director of Microsoft Health Futures, and his Microsoft colleague Dan Morris, now a research scientist with Google’s AI for Nature and Society program; lead author Adiyan Mujibiya, former University of Tokyo student and Microsoft Ph.D. Fellow who now heads the Tech Strategy Office at Yahoo Japan and Z Holdings Corp.; Jun Rekimoto, professor at the University of Tokyo; and Xiang Cao, former Microsoft researcher and director at Lenovo Research who is now a scientist at bilibili.

“The impact of this research continues to be felt within the industry-leading companies developing AR/VR and wearable technologies today,” said Patel. “It’s great to see the results of the long collaboration between our group and Desney’s team at MSR being recognized in this way.”

In addition to the 2013 ITS paper, that collaboration includes a project that turned the human body into an antenna by harnessing electromagnetic signals for wireless gesture control; an ultra-low power system for passively sensing human motion using static electric field sensing; and a system capable of classifying human gestures in the home by leveraging electromagnetic noise in place of instrumentation. Each of those papers earned a Best Paper Award or Best Paper Honorable Mention at the time of publication.

Read the 10-Year Impact Award-winning paper here. 

Congratulations to Shwetak, Desney and the entire team! Read more →

When it comes to recruiting at the University of Washington, the latest promising commits to the Husky football team tend to grab most of the headlines. Here in the Allen School, we’re pursuing our own version of “Purple Reign” on a different playing field: the intense competition that is faculty recruiting in computer science and computer engineering. 

The results of the 2022 season are in, and the Allen School scored nine outstanding educators and researchers who are rising stars in their respective disciplines. The newcomers will strengthen the school’s historic leadership in core areas such as systems and architecture, programming languages, and computer science education while expanding our impact in rapidly growing areas such as computational neuroscience, machine learning, quantum computing, and more. 

Throw your dubs up for the newest additions to the Allen School and UW campus community:

Gilbert Bernstein: High-performance domain-specific languages for simulation, optimization and design

Gilbert Bernstein bridges the fields of computer graphics and programming languages to develop domain specific languages (DSLs) that enable high-performance computing applications for physical simulation, optimization and design. His approach, which employs data abstraction for portability across architectures and decouples mechanism and policy in the scheduling of code and data structures, enhances system performance without the inherent tradeoffs of conventional techniques or the development and maintenance costs associated with customized software and hardware co-design. High-performance DSLs can be adapted to domains as varied as climate modeling, construction, drug development, fabrication, the visual arts and more — without requiring programmers to have deep domain expertise. Recent contributions include Aetherling, a DSL that enables hardware engineers to easily explore complicated space-time tradeoffs when developing hardware accelerators for system-on-a-chip designs, and an interactive sketch-based tool that assists quilters in creating designs compatible with foundation paper piecing to democratize fabric design and manufacturing. He previously contributed new approaches for working with 3D mesh data structures, editing vector graphics, and developing complex physical simulations.

Bernstein earned his master’s degree in 2012 from the Allen School before going on to complete his Ph.D. at Stanford University. He is currently pursuing postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley and MIT and will officially join the Allen School faculty in January 2023.

Andrea Coladangelo: Understanding quantum information through the computational lens

Andrea Coladangelo will join the Allen School faculty and the UW’s interdisciplinary QuantumX initiative in January. Coladangelo’s research focuses on the intersection of quantum computation, cryptography and complexity theory, with an emphasis on understanding the interplay between quantum information and ideas from computational hardness. In a recent example of this, he devised a new encryption scheme that protects against coercion in online elections in a way that is fundamentally impossible to do classically. In other work, Coladangelo showed how, in stark contrast with the classical setting, quantum communication allows one to realize the very general cryptographic functionality of secure multi-party computation from one-way functions — the latter being an object of essentially minimal cryptographic complexity. Going forward, Coladangelo is keen to explore the two-way interaction between quantum information and cryptography: On the one hand, how quantum information can be leveraged to achieve cryptographic functionalities that are beyond what is achievable classically, such as copy-protection of programs; on the other, how cryptographic hardness can be used to test and prove “quantumness,” as well as to understand the limits of quantum computation.

After earning his Ph.D. from Caltech, Coladangelo went on to pursue a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. He is an editor of the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Quantum and a co-founder of qBraid, a cloud-based platform for experimenting with quantum programs.

Elba Garza: Accessible and engaging computer science education for a variety of learning styles

Elba Garza joined the faculty this fall as a teaching professor in the Allen School’s revamped introductory course sequence. As co-instructor of the course focused on students with little or no prior programming experience, Garza is particularly keen to ensure that the school delivers introductory computer science in a way that supports first-generation students and those from historically marginalized backgrounds as part of building a more diverse academic community. She is also interested in advancing methods for presenting course content in a cohesive manner while incorporating a variety of techniques for engaging students with diverse learning processes, inspired by her own experience as a student diagnosed with a type of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Garza’s background in computer architecture also prepares her to teach a variety of upper-division systems and architecture courses.

Garza earned her Ph.D. from Texas A&M University, where her research focused on the development of microarchitectural predictive structures and policies. Prior to her arrival in Seattle, Garza was a member of AccessComputing, a UW-based program that provides mentorship and learning opportunities for students with disabilities to pursue computing education and careers. She also co-founded and served on the steering committee of the Computer Architecture Student Association (CASA), a student-run organization with the goal of fostering well-being and inclusion within the computer architecture community.

Matthew Golub: Computational techniques for understanding and augmenting neural processes

Matthew Golub’s research focuses on computational neuroscience, with an emphasis on advancing the theory and tools needed for understanding computation and communication within large networks of neurons in the brain. Golub’s work has demystified how these networks of neurons coordinate to enable, and sometimes constrain, the brain’s ability to learn, generate decisions, and control movements. A core approach to his research is to view a network of neurons as a nonlinear dynamical system whose activity evolves over time due to how those neurons are connected and the inputs they receive from other networks in the brain. Golub’s contributions include FixedPointFinder, a software toolbox for revealing the computations performed by such nonlinear dynamical systems. This approach, which is broadly applicable to different organisms, regions of the brain, and tasks, can help researchers identify the most promising avenues for more costly and labor-intensive experimental validation. Golub also co-led a series of studies exploring the neural mechanisms that influence the learning and performance of new tasks, in the contexts of both naturalistic movements and brain-computer interface operation.

Golub will join the Allen School faculty this December after completing a postdoc at his alma mater Stanford University, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In between, he earned his Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

Scott Sumio Ichikawa: Elevating design practices and education in service to society

Scott Sumio Ichikawa joined the faculty over the summer as a teaching professor and associate director of the UW’s Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction & Design (MHCI+D), which combines expertise from the Allen School, Information School, Department of Human-Centered Design & Engineering and the Division of Design in the School of Art + Art History + Design. Ichikawa’s devotion to advancing the ethical design of products and services for diverse users is matched by his commitment to mentoring the next generation of socially-aware design leaders — twin goals that are a natural fit for his leadership of MHCI+D. Ichikawa, who holds a Master of Design in Interaction Design from the UW, is already well-known within the MCHI+D community, having spent three years as an instructor for a range of undergraduate and graduate courses focused on foundational interface design, user research and evaluation, design methods, interaction design, and more.

In addition to leading his own independent design consultancy, Run, Jump & Fly, for the past 20 years, Ichikawa has held leadership roles at multiple design studios, where he worked with household names in technology, sports, consumer appliances and electronics, and the arts. He holds two patents related to the design of graphical user interfaces for planning and monitoring surgical procedures.

Natasha Jaques: Advancing human-centered AI through social reinforcement learning

Natasha Jaques develops techniques for enabling artificial intelligence agents to engage in social learning, in which they acquire and practice increasingly complex behaviors from ongoing interaction with each other and with humans. Her goal is to build AI systems that can perform complex tasks, incorporate feedback from human social and emotional cues, and adapt seamlessly to new situations in order to assist humans with everyday tasks as effectively as another human can. For example, Jaques proposed a framework for enhancing coordination and communication in multi-agent reinforcement learning by rewarding agents for exercising causal influence over the actions of other agents. She also developed PAIRED, a novel reinforcement learning technique in which an environment generator builds increasingly complex environments for a pair of agents to solve and maximizes regret between the two to make the learner more robust. PAIRED demonstrated how multi-agent training can improve learning and generalization for a single AI agent. Jaques also proposed a method for training language models using reinforcement learning and human feedback that uses KL-control to minimize divergence from the original model trained on data. Going forward, Jaques intends to focus her research on developing agents’ ability to use social learning to acquire complex behavior, generalize to new environments, perceive and adapt to a person’s needs in real time, and to understand natural-language commands.

Jaques earned her Ph.D. from MIT and is currently a senior research scientist at Google Brain and a visiting postdoctoral scholar at University of California, Berkeley. She will join the Allen School faculty in January 2024.

Baris Kasikci: Building efficient and trustworthy systems across the computing stack

Baris Kasikci develops techniques for building efficient and trustworthy computer systems capable of delivering high performance at scale while minimizing bugs and security vulnerabilities. His work draws upon a range of disciplines, from systems and security, to computer architecture and programming languages, to produce solutions that span the entire computing stack. His contributions to software and applications include REPT, a practical tool for reverse debugging of failures in deployed software systems that is used in over a billion Windows systems worldwide, and OPTIMUS, the first hypervisor that supports scalable, flexible shared-memory virtualization of FPGAs for accelerating applications in the cloud. On the hardware side, Kasikci and his collaborators discovered microprocessor vulnerabilities such as Foreshadow that put billions of devices at risk. His group subsequently developed techniques to mitigate those risks while preserving performance, including NDA, which breaks the chain of dependent wrong-path instructions to head off speculative execution attacks at their source, and DOLMA, which introduced the principle of transient non-observability to comprehensively protect against transient execution attacks. Kasikci has also contributed to hardware/software co-design techniques for improving the performance and efficiency of data center systems that have been adopted by companies such as Intel and ARM.

Kasikci will join the Allen School next summer from the University of Michigan, where he has been a faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department since 2017. During that time, he earned a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, an Intel Rising Star Award and a VMware Early Career Grant. Kasikci holds a Ph.D. from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Pang Wei Koh: Making machine learning systems robust and reliable in the wild

Pang Wei Koh focuses on the theory and practice of building reliable machine learning systems for real-world deployment. His research encompasses tools for inspecting model behavior; approaches for dealing with noisy, incomplete or contaminated data; and techniques for benchmarking and mitigating distribution shifts that contribute to model failure. For example, Koh developed an efficient and scalable method for explaining black-box model predictions by applying influence functions to identify which training examples contributed most to a given prediction. To support data-driven COVID policy, Koh helped develop a framework that combined population-scale mobility data with epidemiological modeling to assist policymakers in analyzing the impact of reopening policies on infection rates and societal inequities. Koh also co-led the development of WILDS — a curated set of benchmarks that reflect real-world distribution shifts for machine learning models deployed in domains spanning agriculture, biomedicine, wildlife conservation and more — as well as distributionally robust optimization methods for mitigating the effects of such shifts. He aims to build on his past work by developing techniques that will aid models in reliably extrapolating information from new data, improve model performance based on interactions with end users, and optimize models trained on broad data.

Koh is currently a senior research scientist at Google Brain and will join the Allen School in fall 2023. He was recently named among MIT Technology Review’s 2022 Innovators Under 35 Asia Pacific for his research. Before earning his Ph.D. from Stanford University, Koh was the third employee at Coursera, where he built and led the team responsible for course content and university partnerships.

James Wilcox: Computer science education as refined storytelling

Allen School alum James Wilcox (Ph.D., ‘21) joined the faculty this fall as a teaching professor. His teaching interests include programming languages, systems programming, and reasoning about programs, and he enjoys teaching undergraduate and graduate as well as majors and non-majors courses. Wilcox’s favorite part of teaching is the creative process of learning, revising, and telling “the story” of each course in the spirit of oral tradition handed down from generation to generation.

Prior to joining the Allen School faculty, Wilcox taught multiple course offerings as a graduate student or lecturer, spanning undergraduate and graduate programming languages, software design and implementation, web browser engineering, introduction to systems, and more. His Ph.D. is in the theory of programming languages and focused on the application of formal reasoning techniques to distributed systems, including the first machine-checked proof for the popular Raft consensus protocol.

Including the 2022 recruiting season, the Allen School has added a total of 24 new faculty members over the past three years. Other recent arrivals are advancing transformational research focused on topics such as human-centric data visualization to support interactive exploration and discovery, bio-inspired wireless computing for environmental applications, molecular programming to bridge biology and information technology, and machine learning for understanding and treating disease.  Read more →

Allen School Ph.D. student Kelly Mack is a problem solver who aims to ensure that other researchers take accessibility and disability into account — both in their research methods and during their design process. She has carried this accessibility mindset into her work with industry, where she helped establish the first disability-focused employee resource group as an intern at Snap Inc., and into her leadership of a chapter of Girls Who Code, where for the past five years she has facilitated workshops and taught girls between the ages of 10-18 how to code. 

“I want to inspire and provide mentorship for the next generation of computer scientists,” said Mack, who works with professor Jennifer Mankoff in the Allen School’s Make4All group. “Even in the early stages of learning about coding, we can create awareness around accessibility and inclusive design.” 

In recognition of her leadership and dedication to advancing the greater good, Mack recently received the 2022 Dorothy L. Simpson Leadership Award from the Seattle chapter of Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation (ARCS). ARCS established the award in 2018 in honor of the late Dorothy L. Simpson, who, throughout her life, pursued intellectual curiosity and lifelong learning. As the President of the ARCS National Board and member of the Seattle ARCS chapter, Simpson was dedicated to supporting talented scholars through her philanthropic giving. Mack previously was named an ARCS Scholar (2019-2022), an award which is presented to top graduate students in the sciences who demonstrate exceptional qualities related to teamwork, innovation and creativity. 

“Kelly is a wonderful student, disability advocate and researcher,” said Mankoff, who is also founding co-director of the UW Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology (CREATE). “She is dedicated to raising up people with disabilities.”

Although only in the third year of her doctoral studies, Mack has authored many papers presented at venues such as the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computer Science and Accessibility (ASSETS) and ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). Five of her recent papers have been nominated for Best Paper Awards. Some of Mack’s notable work focuses on understanding accessibility and assistive technologies as a topic of research, qualitative research into the experiences and needs of people with disabilities using ethnographic and auto-ethnographic methods, and designing tools for high-quality alternative (alt) text authoring. 

In order to situate her own work as well as offer other researchers a starting point to explore questions related to accessibility, Mack led a meta-analysis of 836 papers produced over a 10-year period that focused on accessibility and assistive technology. The researchers wanted to learn who previous accessibility research had focused on, how other researchers articulated their goals (e.g., increase digital accessibility or increase independence for people), what methods were employed in the study design and how accessibility research has evolved since its conception.    

When COVID-19 turned her Microsoft Research internship virtual, Mack used it as an opportunity to examine how the pandemic style workspace created varied accessibility challenges for team members depending on their abilities, positions and seniority. This work broke new ground within Mack’s previous qualitative research endeavors wherein the researchers engaged in self-reflective methodology through the auto-ethnographic process. Ultimately, Mack and her team recommended guidelines such as community norm making, access labor and disability awareness, and a shift in attitudes toward accessibility within future mixed-ability virtual workspaces. 

Mack’s work on alt text authoring tackles the important topic of how to best assist authors to compose descriptions of digital images for the benefit of individuals who are blind or low-vision. In collaboration with Microsoft Research, this work was the first of its kind to tackle important questions related to alt text authorship as well as screen reader user preferences about human authored and human edited alt text. Significantly, this research uncovered the notion that screen reader users and alt text authors had widely different interpretations of what constitutes high-quality alt text. Likewise, Mack and her co-authors found that alt text authors produced superior alt text when they initiated the description based on the original digital image as opposed to when they edited AI generated alt text. 

For Mack’s dissertation work, she will focus on building technology that supports people with disabilities who have fluctuating access needs and disability identities.

“I want to demonstrate that ‘access’ isn’t static,” explained Mack. “What makes something accessible, or not, changes based on the person and context, and our technologies need to recognize that.”

Congratulations, Kelly! Read more →

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 how its members are advancing the field of computing. This year marked the first time the showcase has been held since 2019. 

The agenda included a variety of technical sessions featuring the latest and greatest Allen School research. Topics ranged from computing for the environment and artificial intelligence for health, to robotics and computational biology. The day concluded with an open house and poster session that culminated in the announcement of the Madrona Prize and People’s Choice Awards. 

Allen School professor Yejin Choi, who was recently named a MacArthur Fellow for her work in natural language processing and commonsense AI, gave the keynote address titled “David vs. Goliath: The Art of Leaderboarding in the Era of Extreme Scale Neural Models.” During the talk, she highlighted the power of smaller neural models developed in academia and how they can have an edge over larger industry-scale models.

One of the approaches that gives them this edge, Choi explained, is Symbolic Knowledge Distillation, a new framework she and her colleagues proposed that distills knowledge symbolically as text besides just the neural model alone. Her work produced a machine-authored commonsense model that, for the first time, surpassed a human-authored model in all criteria, including scale, accuracy and diversity. Instead of humans directing the commonsense knowledge graph, Choi and her collaborators found that through their framework machines could write their own knowledge graph, teaching themselves to distill language, knowledge and reasoning. 

Choi also explained how an unsupervised, inference-time reasoning algorithm, can match or surpass supervised approaches on hard-reasoning tasks or complex language generation tasks that require logical constraints. The algorithm, called NeuroLogic Decoding, illustrated the limits of larger-scale neural models while also demonstrating better performance on text-generation tasks. 

While bullish on the potential of smaller, high-quality models, Choi acknowledged that scaling is a necessary condition for making progress in AI — necessary, but not sufficient.

“Scaling laws are real, and denial is futile,” said Choi, the Bret Helsel Professor in the Allen School and senior research manager at the Allen Institute for AI. “Especially when we think about hard problems in AI, we cannot just solve the hardest problems by scaling things up — analogous to how you cannot reach to the moon by making the tallest building in the world one inch taller at a time.”

In the evening, nearly 300 people came together in the Paul G. Allen Center to catch up after two years of pandemic-enforced absence and view the latest research from Allen School labs. More than 50 teams of student researchers shared their work with attendees, who were invited to vote for their favorite poster or demo as part of the People’s Choice Award. 

Members of Madrona Venture Group, longtime friends and supporters of the Allen School, were on hand to present the Madrona Prize, which recognizes exciting projects with commercialization potential. Madrona partner Chris Picardo announced that members of the  UW Database Group behind VOCAL — short for Video Organization and Interactive Compositional AnaLytics — captured top honors for two projects related to that work. VOCAL allows users to extract semantic content from large datasets while minimizing inefficiencies in data cleaning, compositional queries, exploration and organization.

“We’re delighted to be back and able to award the prize again and have an amazing poster session,” Picardo said. “We’re thrilled that we get to do this and get to see such amazing research.” 

2022 Madrona Prize

Winner

Video Organization and Exploration and Interactive Video Analytics for Compositional Queries: Ph.D. students Maureen Daum, Enhao Zhang and Dong He; Allen School director and professor Magdalena Balazinska; professor Ranjay Krishna; alum Brandon Haynes (Ph.D., ‘20), now a senior scientist at Microsoft

Runners up

Clearbuds: Wireless Binaural Earbuds for Learning-Based Speech Enhancement: Ph.D. students Ishan Chatterjee, Maruchi Kim and Vivek Jayaram; professors Shyam Gollakota, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Shwetak Patel and Steven M. Seitz

Data Analysis Systems for Statistical Non-Experts: Ph.D. student Eunice Jun; professors Jeffrey Heer and René Just

Levity: Contactless Robotics and Automation for Synthetic Biology: Ph.D. student Jared Nakahara; professor Joshua R. Smith

2022 People’s Choice Awards

Distributing Trust and Establishing Transparency in Societal Scale Computing and Network Infrastructure: Ph.D. students Sudheesh Singanamalla, Matthew Johnson and Esther Han Beol Jang; master’s students Nick Durand and Abhishek Shah; postdoctoral researcher Spencer Sevilla; professors Richard Anderson and Kurtis Heimerl

Beyond WEIRDness of NLP: Ph.D. student Sebastin Santy; professors Katharina Reinecke and Yulia Tsvetkov; alum and former AI2 postdoc Maarten Sap (Ph.D., ‘21); psychology professor Andrew Meltzoff; research scientist Ronan Le Bras of the Allen Institute for AI; undergraduate alum Jenny Liang (B.S., ‘21), now a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University; research scientist Rodolfo Barragan of the UW Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences

Read GeekWire’s coverage of the awards here.

Thank you to our friends at Madrona and all of the members of the extended Allen School community who joined us in celebrating and supporting student innovation — it was wonderful to see you again! Read more →