Allen School News

When it comes to optimizing the deployment of finite resources in real-world domains, anything less than perfection comes at a price. From agriculture, to e-commerce, to transportation, industries are compelled to optimize everything from processes to personnel — finding the most efficient solution while satisfying a set of constraints that may be at odds with one another.

The optimum solution, then, often requires tradeoffs. But there are some tradeoffs that you just can’t make; it’s physically impossible to assign a quarter of a tractor to a field or half a truck to a route — never mind a third of a flight attendant to an aircraft. Problems such as these, where the only optimal solutions must make use of the whole, call for integer programming.

The integer programming problem, as presented by Karp in his classic 1972 paper, is NP-hard, and the algorithms for solving it run in exponential time. But there are many applications, such as the trio of examples above, that involve a fixed number of variables and thus call for a more limited solution. After all, a farm only has so many acres. For practical reasons, many domains will therefore rely on heuristics that perform well enough but don’t offer the formal guarantees of an exact algorithmic solution. 

But in the decades that followed the release of Karp’s seminal work, researchers have attempted to make progress toward such a solution — and several succeeded. In 1983, mathematician Hendrik Lenstra offered an algorithm with a runtime of 2^{O(n^3)}; four years later, Ravi Kannan and the duo András Frank and Éva Tardos arrived at an n^{O(n)}-time result. After that, progress stalled for more than 30 years.

During that time, as explained in a Simons Foundation article last summer, it remained an open question whether the previous work could be improved upon to exp(O(n)), which would be the fastest achievable under the exponential-time hypothesis. Recently, a duo from the University of Washington — Allen School Ph.D. student Victor Reis and professor Thomas Rothvoss — put such speculation to rest by producing the first (log n)^{O(n)}-time algorithm for solving integer programming problems within a fixed set of variables. 

The pair were motivated to tackle the question after studying the Subspace Flatness Conjecture proposed by Daniel Dadush in 2012, which itself drew upon work by Ravi Kannan and László Lovász in the late 1980’s. Far from falling flat, Reis and Rothvoss’ work earned a Best Paper Award at the 64th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2023) last November in Santa Cruz, California.

“Dadush observed that Kannan and Lovász’ result could be turned into a recursive algorithm for solving integer programs with a run-time of n^n, which yielded a modest improvement over the 1987 result,” explained Rothvoss, who holds a joint appointment in the University of Washington Department of Mathematics. “He further posited that the factor of n could be replaced by a smaller O(\log(n)) term, which would lead to an even more significant improvement. We proved that conjecture to be correct, up to a constant in the exponent.”

To do so, he and Reis employed a combination of well-established and relatively new techniques. One of the tools they were able to draw upon was what Rothvoss termed a “rather deep” result from asymptotic convex geometry known as the ℓ position for symmetric convex bodies, which emerged shortly before the search for a faster integer programming algorithm began in earnest. As described by the duo Tadeusz Figiel and Nicole Tomczak-Jaegermann and by Gilles Pisier, the result stipulates that any symmetric convex set can be linearly transformed to behave, in a certain sense, like a Euclidean ball. This property would prove important to the question at hand when, decades later, Oded Regev and Noah Stephens-Davidowitz produced their Reverse Minkowski Theorem. That theorem, which Rothvoss and Reis also put to good use, implied the correctness of Dadush’s Subspace Flatness Conjecture — assuming the convex set represented in the algorithm is a Euclidean ball.

But whereas the ℓ position allows that high-dimensional slices and projections will have a similar volume as for the ball, there is a huge discrepancy when it comes to low-dimensional slices and projections — precisely that which, according to the work of Kannan and Lovász, one would want to solve for using integer programming. This gave the UW duo a problem to overcome.

“The Euclidean property at the lower dimension was much too weak for Thomas and I to directly apply the work of Regev and Stephens-Davidowitz,” Reis noted. “But we realized we could apply their theorem to the n/2-dimensional sublattice and then recurse on the rest. That gave us a bound for the Subspace Flatness Problem that translated to a significantly improved algorithm for integer programming.”

At present, the result is — you guessed it — theoretical; while it created a buzz in the research community, the duo’s algorithm is unlikely to be put into practice. At least, not yet.

“Sorry, you’re not likely to get your packages any faster based on our paper, but our method could inform the development of future heuristics and open up new questions for us to pursue,” said Rothvoss. “Speaking for myself, I’m perfectly happy with this result — but I know Victor doesn’t like that the exponent isn’t tight.”

“I think it would be really interesting to reduce the original Subspace Flatness Conjecture, with a single logarithmic factor, to other well-studied problems in high-dimensional geometry such as the KLS Conjecture,” Reis said. “There is also the question of whether there could be other approaches for integer programming that don’t rely on subspace flatness. For example, we still don’t know whether the problem can be solved in simply exponential time.”

Read the research paper here and a related Quanta magazine story here. Read more →

In the spring of 2015, the City of Seattle organized a competition and invited teams to “Hack the Commute” by using technology to improve mobility for residents across the city. Among the participants at City Hall was a group of University of Washington students calling themselves Team Hackcessible who had developed a prototype of a web-based trip planning tool called AccessMap. The tool, as envisioned, would combine publicly-sourced and user-submitted data to enable individuals to customize their route around Seattle based on their mobility needs, accounting for factors such as the steepness of hills and the presence or absence of curb cuts.

Under the tutelage of Anat Caspi, director of the Allen School’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, Team Hackcessible took home first prize — and the Taskar Center embarked on a journey that would take it from the streets and sidewalks of Seattle, Washington to Santiago, Chile. 

Not long after its triumph at the civic hackathon, the Taskar Center launched OpenSidewalks under the auspices of the UW eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program. OpenSidewalks aims to make data about the public right of way consistent through a publicly available data schema and data collection tools that allow for manual editing in addition to machine learning and automated tools. It also provides educational resources to overcome some of the socio-technical hurdles and misconceptions that people have about access in the public right of way.

With OpenSidewalks up and running, Caspi worked with King County Metro to incorporate the data specification and tooling into the agency’s own paratransit service planning and tools — including data it collects for the provision of paratransit services to people with disabilities in Seattle and across the county. 

“Actual deployment into a large organization revealed a number of important points,” said Caspi. “It became clear to us that people’s understanding of what constitutes ‘accessible’ can vary wildly across transportation planners, administrators and well-meaning crowdsourcing mappers.”

Following the integration of OpenSidewalks into King County Metro’s processes, in 2019 the Taskar Center conducted a study of capacity building. Meanwhile, back on campus, Caspi was pouring her energy into building capacity of a different sort: the capacity to create and use artificial intelligence and data science in a way that addresses, rather than amplifies, ableist bias. For example, in 2017 she launched a vertically integrated project course, Responsible Data Science in Urban Spaces, that offers UW students hands-on experience with developing data-driven software tools to create more accessible, inclusive communities by applying innovation to a range of issues spanning social, economic, health and mobility justice. To date, 241 undergraduate and 23 graduate students have completed the course.

Caspi also leads AI4ALL at UW, a free workshop for high school and first-year college students co-sponsored by the Institute for Foundations of Data Science. Each year, 40 students spend part of the summer learning about how data science, geographic information science and machine learning can be applied to daily life. For current practitioners, Caspi developed a “Non-Ableist AI” workshop and toolkit; since she began offering the workshop four years ago, more than 420 people have participated.

For these and other contributions spanning nearly a decade of leadership at the Taskar Center, Caspi received the 2023 Human Rights Educator Award from the City of Seattle’s Human Rights Commission. 

It just goes to show that, when it comes to advancing accessibility, there’s no place like home. 

“I have always thought making an impact on local communities is where it starts,” said Caspi. “The Seattle commission’s focus on disability rights as civil rights serve as a reminder of the importance of collaborative efforts in creating a more inclusive and just society.”

Those efforts range from the expansive — mapping the accessibility of miles of urban infrastructure — to those of a more human scale. For example, the Taskar Center partnered with not-for-profit Provail Therapy Center to create a library of adapted technology for people with different abilities to borrow for free. The 800 artifacts in the Pacific Northwest Adaptive Technology Library were either donated or created through community education events, where volunteers don protective goggles and get a crash-course in safe use of a soldering iron before adapting battery-operated toys to be switch-accessible for players of different abilities. 

The power of play has been a recurring theme for the Taskar Center. The same year that AccessMap began attracting city leaders’ attention, the center introduced attendees at the Seattle Design Festival to the Universal Play Kiosk. Aligning with the event’s theme of “Design for Equity,” the Universal Play Kiosk demonstrated how to design an immersive environment to engage people of all abilities in collaborative play.

While they have a playful side, Caspi and her colleagues have shown they are serious about the Taskar Center’s motto, “designing for the fullness of human experience.” One of those colleagues — Olivia Quesada, the center’s manager of community engagement and partnerships — accepted the Seattle award on Caspi’s behalf during a ceremony to mark Human Rights Day last month. Quesada completed her UW honors thesis, “Disability Justice for Urban Planners and Designers,” working with Caspi; in her remarks, she shared what makes the center so effective.

“As an interdisciplinary team, we have built a space for recognizing and addressing systemic ableism in various technical and socio-technical systems,” she said. “Our practice of developing, deploying and translating artifacts, both in terms of technology and educational toolkits, is aimed at empowering individuals and communities to confront challenges related to disability justice with a growth mindset.”

The center’s own reach keeps on growing — not only in Seattle, but across the nation and around the globe. In 2021, Caspi launched the Transportation Data Equity Initiative with Co-PI’s Mark Hallenbeck, then director of  the Washington State Transportation Center (TRAC), and iSchool professor Bill Howe, adjunct faculty member in the Allen School and founding co-director of Responsibility in AI Systems & Experiences (RAISE). That initiative builds on the Taskar Center’s previous work to address inequities in transit data and information at scale with support from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Around the same time, the Taskar Center teamed up with the United Nations advocacy initiative G3ict — short for Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies — on AI for Inclusive Urban Sidewalks. The project combines artificial intelligence with on-the-ground community partnerships to improve pedestrian accessibility in cities around the globe, with support from Microsoft’s AI for Accessibility grant and the Open Data Campaign. In 2022, the Taskar Center and G3ict earned the SmartCity Expo World Congress Living & Inclusion Award, one of a set of honors recognizing pioneering initiatives and ideas to make cities around the world more livable, sustainable and economically viable. 

Which brings us back to where it all began. In the years following Hack the Commute, members of the original AccessMap team — including Allen School postdocs Nick Bolton, Ricky Zhang, and Sachin Mehta, all graduates of the UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering — and a succession of new student researchers drove the project forward. In 2017, Caspi and the team introduced their AccessMap web-based tool for the public that, upon first release, offered personalized trip planning for the Washington cities of Seattle, Mt. Vernon and Bellingham. Fast forward almost seven years later, and the center released a new, expanded version called AccessMap Multimodal. The latest iteration incorporates indoor transit information, where available, along with sidewalk data and extends to 11 cities worldwide — including several participants in the aforementioned AI for Inclusive Urban Sidewalks project. After racking up 65,000 user routing requests, AccessMap and its user base continues to grow. 

Whether in Santiago or Seattle, Caspi’s tireless efforts at advocacy and education have put the Taskar Center itself on the map. But she’s eager to share the plaudits with her collaborators.

“This recognition is not just a testament to my efforts but a celebration of the collective dedication to promoting disability human rights and inclusivity by the Taskar Center,” Caspi said.

For more inspiration, join the Taskar Center today (Thursday, January 25) for the Ben Taskar Annual Memorial Events (12:00–3:00 pm) — including an overview of AccessMap Multimodal — and the Ben Taskar Memorial Distinguished Lecture (3:30–5:00 pm) featuring Drago Anguelov, vice president and head of research at Waymo.

Read more →

Allen School professor and alum Leilani Battle (B.S., ‘11) originally wanted to be a game developer. As a kid growing up in Bremerton Washington, Battle saw a glimpse of her future every time she booted up her family’s Nintendo 64. Whether dodging shells and banana peels in Mario Kart or catching them all as a Pokemon trainer, she saw how imagination could manifest itself in new and inventive ways. 

“I loved immersing myself in the worlds created by others through video games,” she said. “I saw games as a nice mix of creativity and problem solving. Computer science seemed like a sensible step towards this childhood dream.”

At the University of Washington, Battle’s interests shifted. The creative problem-solving spark remained, but instead of immersing herself in games she immersed herself in data — specifically, new and improved ways to explore the vast quantities available to scientists and analysts. Battle went on to earn her Ph.D. from MIT before returning to the Allen School to complete a postdoc in the Interactive Data Lab and UW Database Group. After spending three years as a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, Battle returned once again to the Allen School in 2021 — this time as faculty — to co-lead the Interactive Data Lab with colleague Jeffrey Heer. 

Drawing upon techniques from databases, human-computer interaction and visualization, Battle is not playing around when it comes to her current research focused on modeling user behavior to not only understand but optimize users’ ability to glean actionable insights from their data. She has earned a string of professional accolades for this work; the most recent came in October, when she received the 2023 VGTC Visualization Significant New Researcher Award from the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community for her contributions to “interactive data-intensive systems for exploratory data analysis.”

As one example of her contributions, last year Battle and collaborators at the University of Maryland examined how users incorporate languages like D3 into their implementation workflows when designing visualizations. They performed a mixed methods analysis of nearly 38,000 posts on Stack Overflow — a popular resource for D3 users — and noted that a gap exists between how creators of data visualizations conceptualize their designs versus how they reason about D3’s code structure. The authors found that the resulting disruption to their workflows discouraged more widespread adoption of these tools. Battle and her colleagues proposed multiple approaches for ameliorating these issues, including smoother integration of languages like D3 with other visualization tools, automating the process for generating example design galleries, and improving D3’s support infrastructure to enable users to more easily find and incorporate meaningful code components into their workflows.

“When visualization languages are developed and tested in a vacuum, without considering how and where people use them, they can fall short of addressing those users’ needs,” said Battle, who alongside her co-authors earned the award for Best Short Paper at last year’s IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics Conference (VIS 2022). “By being mindful of how users interact with these tools in practice as they are developed, we can improve users’ information access and empower them to explore a broader range of effective visualization designs.”

Battle and another group of University of Maryland colleagues subsequently took a similar tack in an effort to understand how users approach sensemaking, an iterative process through which they refine their visualizations to deepen understanding of their data. This time, they applied their mixed methods analysis to more than 2,500 Jupyter notebooks — a popular tool for documenting the sensemaking making process in data science — on Github to understand how the sensemaking pipeline evolves over time in order to better support a variety of sensemaking activities, such as annotation, branching analysis and documentation. The team earned a Best Paper Honorable Mention at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2023) this past spring for their work.

More recently, Battle took a deep dive into historical whaling data as part of Computing for the Environment, a cross-campus initiative aimed at applying interdisciplinary research in computing, engineering and environmental sciences to address challenges ranging from climate change to wildlife conservation. She and Allen School Ph.D. student Ameya Patil teamed up with Trevor Branch, a professor in the UW School of Aquatic & Fishery Sciences, and Zoe Rand, a Ph.D. student in the UW’s Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management (QERM) program, to develop WhaleVis, an interactive dashboard that enables scientists to explore roughly a century’s worth of historical data maintained by the International Whaling Commission to inform current whale conservation efforts — without consuming an onerous amount of computing resources. 

“Scientific data is a really important aspect of big data, but scientists all over the world have access to completely different hardware and software. Maybe they can’t use big servers to process huge data sets quickly,” Battle explained to UW News. “So when creating WhaleVis we had to ask: How do we design a tool that can visualize millions of data points, but that doesn’t rely on super beefy servers?”

Battle and her colleagues presented WhaleVis at IEEE VIS 2023 held in Melbourne, Australia this fall — the very same conference at which she collected the VGTC recognition. The award follows her selection as a Sloan Research Fellow earlier this year, after having earned the TCDE Rising Star Award and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2022. Battle previously was named among MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 for her earlier work on projects such as ForeCache, a system for reducing latency in large-scale data exploration by prefetching data based on user behavior.

Read the full VGTC award citation here.

Roger Van Scyoc contributed to this story.

Read more →

Misinformation can spread like wildfire on social media, fueled in part by platforms’ tendency to prioritize engagement over accuracy. This puts the onus on individual users to determine the veracity of posts they see and share on their feed. Likewise, when it comes to violence, profanity and other potentially harmful content, users are often left to fend for themselves in the face of indifferent or inadequate moderation. The current state can make social media platforms a harrowing place — particularly for members of marginalized communities.

Researchers in the University of Washington’s Social Futures Lab led by Allen School professor Amy X. Zhang hope to change that by designing social media tools that empower users while minimizing the burden of managing their online experiences.

“A big problem to me is the centralization of power — that the platforms can decide what content should be shown and what should get posted to the top of one feed for millions of people. That brings up issues of accountability and of localization to specific communities or cultures,” Zhang explained in an interview with UW News. “I’ve been looking at what it would mean to decentralize these major platforms’ power by building tools for users or communities who don’t have lots of time and resources.”

At the 26th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing (CSCW 2023) last month, Zhang and her co-authors shared promising results from two such projects: an exploration of provenance standards to help gauge the credibility of media, and the creation of personal moderation tools to help stem the tide of harmful content.

Seeing is believing?

The proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms has led to a “credibility crisis” when it comes to online content — including that posted by local and national news organizations. Visual content, in particular, can be used to manipulate users’ understanding of and reaction to events. While reverse-image search allows users to investigate potentially problematic content, this approach has its limitations; the results are often noisy or incomplete, or both.

Lab member Kevin Feng, a Ph.D. student in the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, believes the introduction of provenance standards could provide a pathway to restoring trust in what he calls the “information distribution infrastructure.”

“Misinformation can spread through social networks much faster than authentic information. This is a problem at a societal scale, not one that’s limited to a particular industry or discipline,” said Feng, lead author on the CSCW paper. “Being able to access a piece of media’s provenance, such as its prior edit history and sources, with just a click of a button could enable viewers to make more informed credibility judgments.”

Feng turned to the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which at the time  was in the midst of developing an open-source technical standard for media authoring tools such as Adobe Photoshop to embed a distinct signature into an image’s metadata every time someone edits it. The goal was to provide a verifiable chain of provenance information — essentially, a detailed edit history — to viewers of online content. 

But given the overall erosion of trust in online media, an important question remained.

“Even if we can reliably surface provenance information, we still didn’t know if or how that would impact users’ credibility judgements,” Feng noted. “This is an important question to answer before deploying such standards at scale.” 

Seeking answers, Feng and Zhang teamed up with Nick Ritchie, user experience design principal at the BBC, and Pia Blumenthal and Andy Parsons, lead product designer and senior director, respectively, of Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative. The team ran a study involving 595 participants in the United States and United Kingdom in which they measured how access to provenance information altered users’ perceptions of accuracy and trust in visual content shared on social media.

The team developed dual Twitter-esque social media feeds for the study: one regular feed, and one containing provenance information accessible through user interfaces built in accordance with the C2PA standard. The team relied on pre-existing images and videos sourced mainly from the Snopes “fauxtography” archives, representing a mix of truthful and deceptive content. Participants were asked to view the same series of images on the control feed followed by the experimental feed and rate the accuracy and trustworthiness of each piece of content on a 5-point scale. This enabled the researchers to gauge how each user’s perception of media credibility shifted once they had access to information about the content’s provenance.

And shift, it did.

“With access to provenance information, participants’ trust in deceptive media decreased and their trust in truthful media increased,” Feng reported. “Their ability to evaluate whether a claim associated with a particular piece of media was true or false also increased.”

Feng and his co-authors found that the use of provenance information comes with a couple of caveats. For example, if an image editor is incompatible with the C2PA standard, any changes to the image may render the chain of provenance information “incomplete,” which does not speak to the nature of the edit. In addition, if a malicious actor attempts to tamper with the metadata in which the provenance information is stored, the provenance is rendered as “invalid” to warn the user that suspicious activity may have occurred — whether or not the attempt was successful. 

The team discovered that such disclosures had the effect of lowering trust in truthful as well as deceptive media, and caused participants to regard both as less accurate. The researchers were also surprised to learn that many users interpreted provenance information as prescribing a piece of media’s credibility — or lack thereof.

“Our goal with provenance is not necessarily to prescribe such judgements, but to provide a rich set of information that empowers users to make more informed judgments for themselves,” Zhang notes. “This is an important distinction to keep in mind when developing and presenting these tools to users.”

The team’s findings informed the eventual design of the production version of the C2PA standard, Content Credentials. But that’s not the only distinction that is reflected in the standard. When the study launched, generative AI had not yet come into the mainstream; now, AI images seem to be everywhere. This poses important questions about disclosure and attribution in content creation that, in Feng’s view, make provenance standards even more timely and relevant.

“As AI-generated content inevitably starts flooding the web, I think that provable transparency — being able to concretely verify media origins and history — will be crucial for deciphering fact from fiction,” he said.

Everything in moderation

When problematic posts cross the line from mendacious to mean, there are a variety of approaches for reducing users’ exposure to harmful content. These vary from platform–wide moderation systems to user-configured tools based on personal preference in response to the content posted by others. The emergence of the latter has sparked debate over the benefits and drawbacks of putting moderation decisions on individual users — attracting fans and foes alike.

In their recent CSCW paper, lead author Shagun Jhaver and his colleagues investigated this emerging paradigm, which they dubbed “personal content moderation,” from the perspective of the user.

“With more and more people calling for greater control over what they do, and do not, want to see on social media, personal moderation tools seem to be having a moment,” explained Jhaver, a former Allen School postdoc who is now a professor at Rutgers University where he leads the Social Computing Lab. “Given the growing popularity and utility of these tools, we wanted to explore how the design, moderation choices, and labor involved affected people’s attitudes and experiences.”

Personal moderation tools fall into one of two categories: account-based or content-based. The former includes tools like blocklists, which prevent posts by selected accounts from being displayed in a user’s feed. Jhaver, Zhang and their co-authors — Allen School postdoc Quan Ze Chen, Ph.D. student Ruotong Wang, and research intern Alice Qian Zhang, a student at the University of Minnesota who worked with the lab as part of the Computing Research Association’s Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) program — were particularly interested in the latter. This category encompasses a range of tools enabling users to configure what appears in their feed based on the nature of the content itself.

The researchers built a web application that simulates a social media feed, complete with sample content and a set of interactive controls that can be used to reconfigure what appears in the feed. The tools included a word filter, a binary toxicity toggle, an intensity slider ranging from “mildly” to “very” toxic, and a proportion slider for adjusting the ratio of benign to toxic comments. They then enlisted a diverse group of two dozen volunteers to interact with the configuration tools and share their insights via structured interviews.

The team discovered that participants felt the need to build a mental model of the moderation controls before they could comfortably engage with the settings, particularly in the absence of robust text explanations of what various moderation terms meant. Some users switched back and forth between their settings and news feed pages, using examples to tweak the configuration until they could verify it achieved their desired goals. The test interface supported this approach by enabling participants to configure only one of the four moderation interfaces at a time, which meant they could observe how their choices changed the feed.

This seemed particularly helpful when it came to slider-based controls that categorize content according to high-level definitions such as “hateful speech” or “sensitive content” — categories that users found too ambiguous. Context is also key. For example, participants noted that whether profanity or name-calling is offensive depends on the intent behind it; the mere presence of specific words doesn’t necessarily indicate harm. In addition, some participants were concerned that filtering too aggressively could curtail the visibility of content by members of minority communities reclaiming slurs as part of in-group conversations.

“Whether at the platform level or personal level, users crave more transparency around the criteria for moderation. And if that criteria is too rigid or doesn’t allow for context, even user-driven tools can cause frustration,” Zhang said. “There is also a tradeoff between greater agency over what appears in one’s feed and the effort expended on configuring the moderation settings. Our work surfaced some potential design directions, like the option to quickly configure predetermined sets of keywords or enable peer groups to co-create shared preferences — that could help strike a balance.”

Another tension Zhang and her team observed was between content moderation policies and users’ desire to preserve freedom of speech. Although users still believe there is a role for platforms in removing the most egregious posts, in other instances, personal moderation could provide an attractive alternative to a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach. In what Jhaver terms “freedom of configuration,” users choose the nature of the content they want to consume without curtailing other users’ self-expression or choices.

“These tools are controlled by the user, and their adoption affects only the content seen by that user,” Jhaver noted. “Our study participants drew a distinction between hiding a post from their individual feed and a platform removing a post for everyone, which could be considered censorship.”

While it may not chill free speech, personal moderation could meet with an icy reception from some users due to another social media phenomenon: the dreaded FOMO, or “fear of missing out.”

“Many of our participants worried more about missing important content than encountering toxic posts,” explained Jhaver. “Some participants were also hesitant to suppress inappropriate posts due to their desire to remain informed and take appropriate action in response.”

Whether it has to do with moderation or misinformation, the researchers are acutely aware of the societal implications of their work.

“As social computing researchers, we are the architects of our digital spaces,” Feng said. “The design decisions we make shape the ways with which people interact online, who they interact with, how they feel when doing so, and much more.”

For more on this topic, see the UW News Q&A featuring Zhang here.

Roger Van Scyoc contributed to this story. Read more →

New approaches to finetuning large language models that decrease computational burden while enhancing performance. A robotic arm that safely delivers a forkful of food to someone’s mouth. A system that combines wireless earbuds and algorithms into a low-cost hearing screening tool.

These are just a sample of the nearly 60 projects that were on display during the Allen School’s Research Showcase and Open House at the University of Washington last week, capping off a day-long celebration of computing innovations that are advancing the field and addressing societal challenges. Nearly 300 Industry Affiliate partners, alumni and friends participated in the 2023 event, which included sessions devoted to computer science ethics, intelligent transportation, computing for sustainability, computing for health, natural language processing and more.

Everybody’s talking about LLMs

Attendees got the chance to sink their teeth into some of the latest advances in natural language processing during a luncheon keynote by Allen School professor Hannaneh Hajishirzi exploring the science behind large language models and the development of models to serve science.

“We have witnessed great progress in large language models over the past few years. These models create extremely fluent text — conversation-like text — and also code,” said Hajishirzi, who holds the Torode Family Professorship at the Allen School and is also senior director of AllenNLP at the Allen Institute for AI. ”Now they are being deployed in a diverse range of applications. And everybody these days is talking about their impact on society, their risks, their economic impacts, and so on.”

Those impacts and risks leave plenty of open questions for AI researchers to resolve, as LLMs continue to be computationally expensive, error-prone and difficult to maintain. They are also largely being developed by private companies.

“All of these models are proprietary,” Hajishirzi noted. “So it’s very hard for AI researchers to actually understand and analyze what is going on.”

Hajishirzi and her colleagues favor a more open approach to building models that are transparent, reproducible and accessible. But there are many definitions of “open.” Even if the company opens up the API or makes a model available for research purposes, restrictions remain — such as the inability to access the data on which the models are trained.

As an alternative, Hajishirzi and her collaborators created OLMo, short for Open Language Model. OLMo is a full language modeling pipeline in which “everything is open,” from pre-training to reinforcement learning through human feedback (and all stages in between). By being so transparent and engaging the broader AI research community, Hajishirzi hopes the project will help narrow the gap between the public and private sectors. Their good intentions are not limited to advancing AI research, either; the team is also developing the capability to advance scientific discovery in other disciplines by fine tuning and training on their data.

To that end, Hajishirzi and her colleagues developed a large-scale, high-quality pretraining dataset cleverly named Dolma, short for “data to feed OLMo’s appetite.” The dataset, which comprises 3.1 trillion tokens in total, is significantly larger than previous open datasets. A significant portion — 2.6 trillion tokens — is web data covering diverse domains, from Reddit to scientific data, filtered to eliminate toxicity and personally identifying information as well as duplication. Dolma has been downloaded 320,000 times in just the past month.

But how does this approach compare to that of state-of-the-art closed models? When it comes to the latter, “there are too many question marks,” Hajishirzi noted, pointing out that we don’t have sufficient information about the datasets — including not knowing how many tokens the models are trained on. 

That is not a problem when it comes to the work of Hajishirzi and her collaborators — including the development of novel approaches to instruction tuning to enable pretrained models to generalize to new applications. Hajishirzi described the result of those efforts, a project called Tülu, as “the largest, best and open instruction tuned model at this point.” And the team continues to make improvements; for example, they have added the ability to extract information from scientific papers and to perform parameter-efficient finetuning for use in low-resource contexts. The researchers have also developed an effective evaluation framework that includes in-loop evaluation of the training at every step of the process. 

Such progress does not come without a cost, however.

“This project required a lot of compute. It still requires a lot of GPUs and compute,” Hajishirzi observed, citing the need to improve computational efficiency so that more communities can make use of these models.

How low can you go?

As it happens, multiple Allen School researchers are attempting to answer this question — and answer Hajishirzi’s call — by exploring techniques for making LLMs more efficient. Teams shared their results from projects addressing this and a range of other challenges during the open house and poster session.

The event culminated with Scott Jacobson, managing director at Madrona Venture Group, announcing the recipients of the Madrona Prize, which highlights cutting-edge research at the Allen School with commercial potential. In his remarks, Jacobson highlighted the firm’s long standing partnership with the Allen School, which extends to supporting multiple startup companies based on student and faculty research that is helping to shape the future of the field.

”There’s so much great research here” said Jacobson. “Over the years, a number of themes that I think are now kind of commonplace in tech were really pioneered here. A lot of those themes you’ve seen in the poster session on Industry Affiliates day — cloud computing, edge computing, computer vision, a lot of applied machine learning and AI. And so it’s just really fun every year for us to get the opportunity to do this.”

Madrona Prize winner/ QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs

Allen School Ph.D. student Tim Dettmers accepted the grand prize for QLoRA, a novel approach to finetuning pretrained models that significantly reduces the amount of GPU memory required — from over 780GB to less than 48GB — to finetune a 65B parameter model. With QLoRA, the largest publicly available models can be finetuned on a single professional GPU, and 33B models on a single consumer GPU, with no degradation in performance compared to a full finetuning baseline. The approach will help close the gap between large companies and smaller research teams, and could potentially enable finetuning on smartphones and in other low-resource contexts. The team behind QLoRA includes Allen School Ph.D. student Artidoro Pagnoni; alum Ari Holtzman (Ph.D., ‘23), incoming professor at the University of Chicago; and professor Luke Zettlemoyer, who is also a research manager at Meta.

Madrona Prize First Runner Up / Punica: Multi-Tenant LoRA Fine-tuned LLM Serving

Another team earned accolades for their work on Punica, a framework that makes low-rank adaptation of pre-trained models for domain-specific tasks more efficient by serving multiple LoRA models in a shared GPU cluster. Punica’s new CUDA kernel design allows for batching of GPU operations for different models while requiring a GPU to hold only a single copy of the underlying pre-trained model — significantly reducing the level of memory and computation required. The research team includes Allen School Ph.D. students Lequn Chen and Zihao Ye; Duke University Ph.D. student Yongji Wu; Allen School alum Danyang Zhuo (Ph.D., ‘19), now a professor at Duke; and Allen School professors Luis Ceze and Arvind Krishnamurthy.

Madrona Prize Second Runner Up / Wireless Earbuds for Low-cost Hearing Screening

Allen School researchers were recognized for their work with clinicians on OAEbuds, which combines low-cost wireless acoustic hardware and sensing algorithms to reliably detect otoacoustic emissions generated by the ear’s cochlea. The system offers an alternative to conventional — and expensive — hardware to make hearing screening more accessible in low- and middle-income countries. Allen School Ph.D. student Antonio Glenn accepted on behalf of the team, which also includes Allen School alum Justin Chan (Ph.D., ‘22), incoming professor at Carnegie Mellon University; professors Shyam Gollakota and Shwetak Patel, who has a joint appointment in the UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering; ECE Ph.D. student Malek Itani; Drs. Randall Bly and Emily Gallagher of UW Medicine and Seattle Children’s; and audiologist Lisa Mancl, affiliate instructor in the UW Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences.

People’s Choice Award / ADA, the Assistive Dexterous Arm: A Deployment-Ready Robot-Assisted Feeding System

Also affectionately referred to as “the food thing” to attendees who overwhelmingly voted it their favorite demo of the night, ADA aims to address a variety of technical and human challenges associated with robot-assisted feeding to improve quality of life for people with mobility limitations. The researchers invited visitors to try the system for themselves by using a smartphone app to direct ADA in feeding them forkfuls of fruit. Ph.D. student Amal Nanavati accepted the award from professor Shwetak Patel, the Allen School’s associate director for development and entrepreneurship. The team also includes Ph.D. students Ethan Gordon and Bernie Hao Zhu; undergraduate researcher Atharva Kashyap; Haya Bolotski, a participant in the Personal Robotics Lab’s youth research program; Allen School alum Raida Karim (B.S., ‘22); postdoc Taylor Kessler Faulkner; and professor Siddhartha Srinivasa. Read more about the robot-assisted feeding project in a recent UW News Q&A with the ADA team here.

For more about the Allen School’s 2023 Research Showcase and Open House, read GeekWire’s coverage here and the Madrona Prize announcement here.

Read more →

It can feel lonely being the first in your family to pursue a four-year degree.

How do you apply? How will you pay for it? What major should you choose? How will you navigate your new surroundings, not to mention make new friends? If you run into difficulty, where do you turn for help?

And what are “office hours,” anyway?

Nearly one-third of the more than 43,000 undergraduates enrolled at the University of Washington are first-generation. So while it may seem lonely at times, they are not alone. To remind them of this fact — and to remind everyone at UW of the many ways in which first-gen students enrich our campus community — each year on November 8th the University participates in the National First-Generation College Celebration. To highlight the Allen School’s diverse first-gen community, we asked students to share what it means to them to “be the first” and any wisdom they have for those who have yet to embark on their first-gen journey.

Zander Brumbaugh: Turning a hobby into an opportunity for connection and empowerment

While Zander Brumbaugh knew from a young age that he wanted to be a scientist, he didn’t know he wanted to be a computer scientist. Growing up in Tumwater, Washington, Brumbaugh turned his fascination with the inner workings of various systems into a hobby making video games in high school and, eventually, the beginnings of a career in computing. Currently pursuing his master’s degree in the Allen School’s combined B.S./M.S. program, Brumbaugh has refined his career goals to focus on artificial intelligence research — an “immensely important field” in which he hopes to make a positive impact. To start, he is writing a book on how to adapt and use language models effectively for specific needs as a way of promoting public literacy around these rapidly emerging technologies.

What does it mean to you and/or your family to be the first to pursue a bachelor’s degree?

My family has always been very supportive of the work that I do and my decision to pursue higher education. Both of my parents were unable to attend college due to financial limitations. Because of the scholarships I received, I was able to overcome this and be the first in my family to earn a degree, for which I am eternally grateful. In short, my degree is a source of empowerment; it gives me the ability to create new opportunities for myself and to connect with like-minded individuals who share similar goals.

What has been the most challenging aspect of being a first-gen student?

College is quite different from high school or anything else most students are likely to have encountered in their early academic careers. Finding the groove in my first few quarters wasn’t easy, especially with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic less than halfway into my first year. I made a group of close friends who came from many different backgrounds, and I found my experience improved greatly. Being a first-gen student, I didn’t have anyone at first to help me navigate student life, but we ultimately found our way through it together. 

And the most rewarding?

By far the most rewarding part is simply being able to call home and tell my parents what I’ve been up to. Both of my parents are retired and enjoy hearing the details of my classes, activities with friends, and my research — though they say most of it goes over their heads! My father is my biggest promoter; oftentimes I’ll receive messages online from people who work as cashiers at stores or waitstaff at restaurants whom he’s cheerfully told about my books and games. My parents’ pride inspires me to be the best version of myself — and also thankful for the opportunities I’ve been given, knowing it’s something they didn’t have.

What motivated you to continue on and get your master’s?

As it was always my goal to become a researcher, I began looking for undergraduate research opportunities during my sophomore year. I first worked in AI for vision and language for creative applications and eventually found intersections with robotics that greatly interested me. I joined the ARK lab led by professor Noah Smith during my senior year and started my journey with natural language processing (NLP) research. Wanting to continue my research and eventually pursue a Ph.D. in the future, I applied to the B.S./M.S. program and was accepted. So far, the experience has been everything I imagined; the program provides an environment where I’m immersed in intriguing research, exchanging ideas with others both in and outside of my field and developing projects across various topics.

What advice would you give to other first-gen students?

Heading off for college is an exciting time, full of new experiences. Even if you have family or friends who went to college, it can be difficult to find advice on how exactly you should be approaching different problems — and if you don’t, it can be even more so. While everyone’s experience may be different, finding even a small, close group of friends can help to make a support system. You can help each other navigate your classes, work, or simply your social lives. I would encourage you to check out a club meeting, be outgoing whenever you can, and try to look for others with whom you might share something in common (or not!). There are also mentorship programs offered by multiple groups affiliated with the Allen School that may be helpful in getting you started.

Daniel Campos Zamora: Making a career out of making change and helping people at scale

Daniel Campos Zamora followed what he calls a “long and winding road” to computer science that extends back to his birthplace of Costa Rica. Growing up in New Jersey, Campos Zamora had always been interested in making interesting things; he just never considered making a career out of it. That changed after he began an interdisciplinary degree in psychology and art at Carnegie Mellon University. There, he discovered programming tools like Arduino and Processing that made him realize how powerful computing could be as a medium for change. After earning his bachelor’s, Campos Zamora worked for a professor of human-computer interaction, and later, for Disney Research; that combination of experiences caused him to realize that he wanted to do HCI research himself. The road eventually led him to pursue a Ph.D. in the Allen School’s Makeability Lab working professor Jon Froehlich — and to tap into his first-gen experience in his roles as a reviewer for the school’s Pre-Application Mentorship Service (PAMS) and faculty recruiting.

What does it mean to you and/or your family to be the first to pursue a bachelor’s degree?

I was raised by a single mom who immigrated to the U.S. because she had high hopes for us to get an education and get ahead. She always instilled in me and my siblings that she wanted us to go to college, but she didn’t really understand what that entailed. College didn’t really feel real to us; no one in our family had gone to college, and we didn’t know a lot of people in this country who had college degrees. My mom maybe took one class back in Costa Rica before she had to drop out to have my brother. So it meant the world to her that her three kids were able to get degrees. After graduating, I framed my diploma and gave it to her as a Christmas gift, because I knew how much it meant to her. And if you don’t know, the CMU diploma is gigantic!

What was the most challenging aspect of being a first-gen student?

I think the whole experience of college is really different when you’re first generation. I was the only one of us to move away for college and be away from family and live in the dorms. When you do that, you don’t have a support system, and you don’t know what kind of support is available at school. You don’t know about office hours; you may know they exist, but you don’t know what they actually mean, and you don’t know what any of the offices on campus mean or do. You don’t know what you don’t know yet — you’re dealing with “unknown unknowns.” I struggled because I didn’t identify with a lot of people at my institution, and it was really hard finding support.

How did you navigate those “unknown unknowns”?

I went back to what I knew: I can just work on the classes and do my best. I think I stumbled through some of the other parts, like eating, taking care of yourself, your mental health. You don’t realize, when you’re away from your family, it requires extra work to do that. The saving grace for me was that I met someone on my floor who has a similar background but who knew the school better after doing a summer program there. Through him I got involved in a minority organization and found a support system. And they led me to the campus resource center that assists minoritized students, including first-gen and low income. Through their counselors, I got a lot of support — but it took two years before I even knew that office was there.

What was the most rewarding aspect of being a first-gen student?

I feel like I’m in a much better place to help younger family members thinking about college to understand what it actually means to go down this path. I can take them to look at colleges and help them understand the processes and that there is so much more to the college experience than just getting good grades.

For me personally, what was most rewarding was being exposed to really talented people and really exciting ideas, and to be able to take advantage of resources once I knew they were available. I think it opened up a lot of doors for me, and I would not be at the Allen School if it was not for that experience at CMU. Also, the friends and connections that I made there — I know I have those relationships for a lifetime.

What advice would you give to aspiring first-gen students?

Advocate for yourself, but also be able to admit that you don’t know stuff. I feel that when you get to college, the imposter syndrome — that feeling like, “I don’t belong here” — is so aggravated because you are the first one. So I think it’s knowing that you do belong, but you might need help. Also, usually people who make it to these schools have done well academically, and they might not have struggled too much up until that point. And because so much importance is placed on going to college and getting good grades, when you do run into roadblocks, it’s so disorienting and discouraging.

It takes a lot of courage to acknowledge that you’re struggling and to ask for help. I think that’s very tough for first-gen students who may not even know that they are struggling. I wish someone had told me that it’s okay to ask for help. I’ve had to ask for help here doing my Ph.D. — I’m the first in my family to go to grad school, so that’s a totally new thing. The more you ask for help, and the earlier you do that, the better off you’ll be.

Ha Vi Duong: Choosing her own path while embracing the power of creative problem solving

As a high school student in Moses Lake, Washington, Ha Vi Duong envisioned a career in medicine. While she soon realized that she wanted to do something else with the rest of her life, she wasn’t sure what that something was. A conversation with an advisor — and an encounter with programming through Girls Who Code — helped her see how computer science would allow her to exercise her creativity while solving real-world problems. Duong entered the Allen School as part of the 2021-22 cohort of Allen Scholars. She later took on the role of chair of GEN1, a student group dedicated to empowering and guiding first-gen students, and joined the Vietnamese Student Association’s VSAUW Dance Team. Throughout her time at UW, she has been determined to work hard not just for her own future, but also for that of her parents — in appreciation for the sacrifices they’ve made.

What does it mean to you and your family to be among the first to pursue a bachelor’s degree?

My parents always emphasized the importance of education and believed it should be a top priority in life. I remember them sharing stories about their own experiences when they had to help provide for their families instead of continuing their education. For them, education didn’t always come first. They made the selfless decision to come to America in search of a better life, especially for their children. They’ve worked tirelessly to make this happen, running a restaurant that demands long hours and hard work. 

One summer, I got a firsthand look at what they go through when I helped out at their restaurant. It was an eye-opener, and I gained a deep appreciation for what my parents do every day. When I talked to them about how tough it is, they told me something that has stuck with me ever since: “You should work hard to not have a job like ours. We didn’t know what else to do.” It made me realize how lucky I am. I have the chance to pursue higher education, to explore many career options, and choose my own path. This awareness has made me incredibly grateful.

What has been the most challenging aspect of being a first-gen student at the Allen School?

The most challenging aspect has been dealing with imposter syndrome. The rigorous coursework often makes it feel as though I’m behind compared to my peers. To this day, I still can’t believe that I am able to be where I am. However, amidst this struggle, I’ve discovered a valuable support system within the Allen School community and an understanding that we are all on our own paths and are here for a reason, which has been key in overcoming these challenges. 

What about the most rewarding?

The most rewarding part of my experience has been the sense of accomplishment that comes from successfully completing those demanding courses. It’s immensely satisfying to see the progress I’ve made and to be able to connect the material learned in one class to another and eventually apply this knowledge in the real world. This interconnectedness between academic learning and practical application makes the educational journey at the Allen School both challenging and deeply fulfilling.

Any advice for other first-gen students at UW?

For first-gen students, it’s essential to remember that UW offers fantastic programs and a wide range of groups and organizations. While it may initially feel overwhelming, it’s all about the effort you put into discovering resources and building connections to support you in your college journey. Don’t hesitate to step out of your comfort zone and make connections; you never know where it might lead! It’s normal to feel a bit lost, but remember that everyone has their unique path and pace.

What are you hoping to do after graduation?

I’m currently in the process of exploring my post-graduation options, and I believe that finding a career where I can witness the tangible impact of my work is crucial. While I don’t have a specific plan in place just yet, I’m actively seeking opportunities that align with my interests and values. My goal is to pursue a path that allows me to make a meaningful difference in the world and see the results of my efforts come to life.

Derrik Petrin: Rediscovering his love of computing by leaving the lab and entering the arena

Derrik Petrin went all the way to Yale University to earn a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry before he realized that he did not, in fact, enjoy working in a lab. As a middle-school student in Issaquah, Washington, he had taken a programming class and liked it; he also liked the original Magic the Gathering card game by Wizards of the Coast. After he returned to this coast, Petrin eventually parlayed both into a position with the company as a software development engineer after spending some time as a freelance software consultant. Lately, Petrin has been working on the team that produces the digitized version of the game, Magic the Gathering Arena. When he’s not getting paid to play during work hours, he’s advancing his own story arc by pursuing a graduate degree in computer science through the Allen School’s flexible Professional Master’s Program (PMP) — which offered Petrin not only the opportunity to obtain a computer science degree but also to explore what his next chapter might be. He also has connected with his roots through his involvement in the local Hungarian-American Association.

What did it mean to you and/or your family to be among the first to pursue a bachelor’s degree?

It’s funny — I didn’t really start thinking of myself as first-generation until near the end of undergrad. I went to school on the Eastside, on the plateau, and didn’t really appreciate the differences. Some of my aunts and uncles went to college, but my dad’s parents didn’t, my dad didn’t, my mom emigrated from Hungary. So it didn’t really start dawning on me until I was in undergrad, when I realized that all of my classmates’ parents were professionals — lawyers, doctors, engineers and mathematicians — and mine weren’t. I started noticing how my parents didn’t have any advice they could give me. I always thought I would get a degree; I think my parents always expected that, too. So it was hard to imagine me not doing that. 

What was the most challenging aspect of being a first-gen student?

My parents are not academically inclined. By late middle school and high school, I felt really comfortable in an academic setting and was used to planning and deciding everything myself. One of the reasons I ended up going to Yale was that it had the most generous financial aid package. I remember in my senior year seeing a statistic about the percentage of students who received no financial aid at all — and that’s a pretty high income cut-off — and it was a large number of students. And then I noticed that a lot of the classmates that I had formed close friendships with were also on some form of financial aid. So it dawned on me that this stuff tends to organically group us together without us realizing it.

I also had some pretty severe mental health struggles. Yale has had some publicity in recent years about their poor handling of student mental health. So it was not the easiest environment to not have parental support, but also I did not realize that that’s something that was making things more difficult. It was pretty overwhelming.

How has that experience shaped your career path since?

If I had not been first-generation, it’s more likely I would have continued straight into applying to Ph.D. programs. But also after college, I probably would have taken a less winding path than I have taken. And there are some benefits and disadvantages to that. One of the benefits is, when I ended up doing freelance consulting for a while, I dropped out of being in a cohort after spending most of my life in a cohort in an institutional setting. And I got used to being okay with doing things that are not necessarily the typical way to do them. For example, even though the PMP is typically an evening program, during one quarter the programming languages course was taught in parallel with the “normal” morning one. I had the flexibility to take that morning class instead and spend time with the Ph.D. students. One of the professors then invited me to spend time in the Programming Languages & Software Engineering (PLSE) lab, so I again got to interact with Ph.D. students there. It’s put me into a mentality where I think less in terms of a structured path. 

That flexibility is useful, but sometimes it would be nice to have more structure. Another challenge is that if you don’t have this very clear box to show to people, they’re not sure what to make of you. So, for instance, maybe you’re interested in doing research — but people aren’t sure even logistically how that would work. The PMP is not a research program; but at the same time, it’s this great, very broad survey program. So as I’m taking courses in these different areas, I’m thinking about which one sparks the most interest. But one area where the first-gen experience comes in is, I don’t know how to take that and follow through to make an ongoing connection. A lot of students do PMP for professional development, and that’s what it is primarily set up for, but there are also students, like me, who have that intellectual itch and this is the most accessible foot back in the door.

What advice would you give to other first-gen college students?

Something that I think is good advice for undergrads in general is to go to office hours, which as an undergrad, I did not do. Coming back to school and paying for the classes myself — and being really excited about them — face to face time with the professors is so important. Go to office hours even if you are behind on the assignment, or don’t have questions about the assignment, just to listen to what other students are asking. Even if you don’t have anything prepared, some conversation will happen. That has been really helpful for me coming back to the PMP. 

Some people who are first-gen students are very aware of it; it’s part of their identity right from the get-go. But for others, like me, we don’t realize right away how much being first-gen impacts our experience. So keep in mind that you are carrying a lot more weight than other students are. If it seems harder, if it seems things are not coming as easily to you, that’s not surprising. It’s also not your fault, so practice self-compassion.

Nicole Sullivan: Advancing science and sustainability while assisting others in their journey

Nicole Sullivan first began to consider a career in computing-related research as a high school student in Cerritos, California. After enrolling in a computer science course in the 11th grade, she became fascinated with the field’s potential to address environmental challenges such as nature conservation, climate change, agriculture and more. She found further inspiration as a Karsh STEM Scholar and undergraduate researcher at Howard University, an experience she credits with setting her on the path to earning a Ph.D. She followed that path across the country to the UW, where Sullivan is making meaningful contributions to data science and sustainability working alongside professor Magdalena Balazinska in the Allen School’s Ph.D. program. She is also helping to inspire a new generation of researchers by mentoring underrepresented minority students hoping to follow in her footsteps.

What did it mean to you and/or your family to be the first to pursue a bachelor’s degree?

I’m grateful for the opportunity to pursue higher education, which my parents fully support. They were proud of my independence during my undergraduate studies and are ecstatic about my pursuit of a Ph.D.  

What was the most challenging aspect of being a first-gen student, and what was the most rewarding?

While it was overwhelming and challenging to figure out scholarship and college applications on my own, I’ve gained a solid understanding of the process. That has equipped me with valuable insights that enable me to assist others in their journey. 

How have you applied your experience to assist others?

I am currently a graduate mentor for A Vision for Electronic Literacy and Access (AVELA). Before that, while I was at Howard University, I was a National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) Jr. Mentor and a Microsoft Code Academy (MCA) Lead Learner. As an AVELA mentor, I create and teach original STEM content for Black, Brown, and Indigenous middle and high school students throughout greater Seattle. In NSBE Jr., I supported two teams on their way to the NSBE national robotics competition. Additionally, through MCA, I spent every other weekend teaching programming fundamentals to Black students in kindergarten through 5th grade.

What advice would you give to aspiring first-gen college students?

I highly recommend participating in programs like AVELA and NSBE. Engaging with AVELA, which offers free courses in coding basics, machine learning, hardware, and more, can provide an excellent foundation in various areas of study. Not only will you acquire valuable knowledge, but you’ll also have compelling experiences to highlight in your college application essays and add to your resumes. Furthermore, NSBE extends scholarships to high school students and organizes an annual conference where you might discover field-related opportunities and gain hands-on experience during your high school years. While the NSBE conference isn’t free, consider contacting your high school counselor or local NSBE chapter to explore potential funding options.

What do you hope to do after earning your Ph.D. from the Allen School?

Although I’m not exactly sure what will happen after I graduate, I know I will choose a path either in academia or in industry research. And I intend to continue mentoring underrepresented minority students to foster their enthusiasm for STEM Ph.D. programs and higher education in general.

Learn more about the First Generation College Celebration at UW here.

Read more →

Each year, Google recognizes approximately 75 exceptional graduate students from around the world through its Google Ph.D. Fellowship Program. The students, who come from a variety of backgrounds, are selected based on their potential to influence the future of technology through their research in computer science and related fields. As part of its 2023 class of Fellows, the company selected two future leaders from the Allen School: Miranda Wei in the Security and Privacy category and Mitchell Wortsman in Machine Learning.

Wei joined the Allen School in 2019 to work with professors Tadayoshi Kohno and Franziska Roesner, co-directors of the Security and Privacy Research Lab. Now in the fifth year of her Ph.D., Wei seeks to empower people and mitigate harms from emerging technologies through her dissertation research that explores how factors like gender affect people’s experiences with technological security and privacy. Her work has already contributed to an important new subfield that centers on sociotechnical factors in security and privacy research.

“Miranda’s focus on assessing conditions of disempowerment and empowerment, and then developing mechanisms to help users improve their computer security and privacy, is truly visionary,” said Kohno, who also serves as the Allen School’s Associate Director for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Access. “Miranda has not only identified important work to do, but she has identified a strategy and the key components for moving the whole field forward.”

Grounding her research in critical and feminist theories, Wei explores the (dis)empowerment of users through security and privacy measures in several contexts. Her work draws from the social sciences and multiple fields of computer science, including human-computer interaction and information and communication technologies for development in addition to security and privacy. In recent work, Wei has applied both quantitative and qualitative approaches, including case studies and participant interviews, to examine topics such as gender-based stereotypes and computer security and the connection between digital safety and online abuse. 

“This research sets the foundation for learning from experiences of marginalization to understand broader sociotechnical systems,” explained Wei. “This enables equitable improvements to security and privacy for all online users.”

Wei’s academic journey began as an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago, where she earned a degree in political science with a minor in computer science. In addition to having published over a dozen peer-reviewed papers, Wei volunteers her time to support new and prospective graduate students through the Allen School’s Pre-Application Mentorship Service (PAMS) and Care Committee. She is also active with DUB as a student coordinator and participates in the University of Washington’s graduate application review process as an area chair.

“Miranda has great insight for research problems at the intersection of computer security and privacy and society, and she pursues this vision passionately and independently,” said Roesner. “At the same time, she is a wonderful collaborator and community member who looks out and advocates for others.”

Wortsman, who is also in his fifth year at the Allen School, earned a Google Ph.D. Fellowship for his work with professors Ali Farhadi, co-director of the Reasoning, AI and VisioN (RAIVN) Lab and CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, and Ludwig Schmidt, who is also a research scientist in the AllenNLP group at AI2. Wortsman has broad interest in large-scale machine learning spanning deep learning, from robust and accurate fine-tuning to stable and low-precision pre-training. His dissertation work seeks to improve large pre-trained neural networks as reliable foundations in machine learning.

“One of my main research goals is to develop computer vision models that are robust, meaning that their performance is less degraded by changes in the data distribution,” explained Wortsman. “This will enable the creation of models which are useful and reliable outside of their training distribution.”

With the progress in pre-training large-scale neural networks, machine learning practitioners in the not-so-distant future could potentially spend most of their time fine tuning these networks. Wortsman studies the loss landscape of large pretrained models and explores creative solutions for fine tuning with the goal of improving accuracy and robustness. Wortsman wants his models to be useful to society at large and not exclusively for academic and commercial applications. One of his ongoing projects includes a collaboration with the UW School of Medicine.

Wortsman is first author on over nine peer-reviewed publications, several of which he co-authored as a predoctoral young investigator at AI2, and collaborated on the development of an open source reproduction of OpenAI’s CLIP model. He has also served as a teaching assistant in the Allen School and as a reviewer for PAMS.

“Michell’s work has laid the foundations for many open models that let computers understand and generate images,” said Schmidt. “Mitchell is one of the core developers of OpenCLIP, which is downloaded several thousand times per day and has become part of many AI projects. Every time someone uses Stable Diffusion, one of Mitchell’s models provides the text guidance for the image generation process.”

Learn more about the Google Ph.D. Fellowship program here.

Read more →

In the late 1990’s, members of the Allen School faculty experimented with a new — some would say unorthodox — way to mark the conclusion of Visit Days, the annual pilgrimage made by prospective graduate students to computer science programs around the country. To commemorate the visitors’  time in Seattle, professors in what was then the Department of Computer Science & Engineering would cheerfully send them on their way with a surprise parting gift: a palm-sized chunk of concrete.

The concrete in question had, without any human intervention, become dislodged from the crumbling facade of Sieg Hall — the building that, should the recipients choose the University of Washington, would become a home away from home for the duration of their Ph.D. 

“The souvenir definitely made us memorable, and it helped our cause when it came to recruitment,” Allen School professor Ed Lazowska, who chaired the department at the time, recalled wryly. “One student emailed that they just couldn’t say ‘no’ to us after we literally gave them a piece of our building. But giving out chunks of the building, like the building itself, was a joke. We were woefully behind other top computing programs when it came to facilities.”

While outside the building was crumbling, inside it was cramped — so much so that, as a prank, someone set up a “graduate student office” on a ledge in the stairwell, complete with a handy rope ladder for access. More than two decades after it first housed UW’s burgeoning Computer Science & Engineering program, Sieg was no longer fit for the purpose. In 1999, the department stepped up its campaign for a new, permanent home.

Lazowska and local technology industry leaders led the charge, forging a public-private partnership that was unprecedented in UW’s history. All told, they raised $42 million in private funds — substantially more than half the project’s cost — from more than 250 donors. Lazowska’s faculty colleague Hank Levy oversaw the design and construction of the building in tandem with LMN Architects and general contractor M.A. Mortenson. He saw to it that the funds were put to good use.

“Our goal was to create a warm and welcoming environment that would facilitate teaching, research and collaboration,” said Levy. “Every aspect of the building — the materials, the artwork, the abundant natural light, the open spaces that encourage people to gather and exchange ideas — were intentional choices made with this goal in mind.”

Those choices were supported in large part by leadership gifts from the building’s namesake, the late Paul G. Allen, along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft. Completion of the 85,000 square-foot facility, which was dedicated on October 9, 2003, tripled the program’s available space and set off a chain of events that made the Allen School into the powerhouse it is today. 

Allen himself understood at the time that he was investing in something more meaningful than bricks and mortar.

“I’m proud to have supported this beautiful and unique facility, but what really sets UW’s computer science program apart are the people,” Allen observed during the grand opening celebration. “The faculty here is unparalleled, and the undergrad and graduate students are dedicated and inspiring.”

Allen’s faith would inspire a period of expansion that no one — including Lazowska, who has been the program’s most vocal cheerleader over the years — could have foreseen in 2003. 

“I cannot stress enough the importance of the Allen Center to the trajectory of our program,” he said. “It provided us with competitive space for the first time in our history. It was the spark that set us on a path to triple our degree production, ramp up our ability to deliver computer science education to students across campus, and attract the brightest researchers in the field to Seattle.

“And in the midst of all that,” Lazowska added, “we became a full-fledged school!”

On move-in day in the summer of 2003, fewer than 40 faculty members unpacked boxes in their shiny new offices; two decades later, that number is approaching 100. And faculty recruiting has barely kept pace with the explosive growth in student interest, with the Allen School the most requested major among freshman applicants to the University for several years running. It now serves roughly 2,800 students across its degree programs — and thousands more who take one or more courses as non-majors each year.

As the program grew in size, it also grew in stature, thanks in no small part to its new and improved laboratory space.

“Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington is an engine of opportunity,” Allen had said at the time, “and I want to ensure it’s an even more cutting-edge resource for the coming generation.”

That engine has been going full throttle ever since. One high-profile example of how the move to the Allen Center greased the wheels of innovation is UW’s emergence as a center for mobile health. By tapping into the built-in sensing capabilities of smartphones coupled with advances in machine learning, Allen School researchers, in conjunction with UW Medicine clinicians, have developed a range of mobile tools for screening and monitoring of a variety of health conditions spanning fever, pre-diabetes, sleep apnea, infant jaundice, reduced lung function, ear infection, newborn hearing loss and more. All got their start in the Allen Center’s labs, and several led to the creation of Allen School spinout companies.

The collaborations don’t stop there, as the Allen Center provided a launch pad for multiple cross-campus initiatives, some supported by significant federal and/or private investment. These include efforts to advance accessible technologies and more accessible communities, data science for discovery and innovation, neurotechnologies for people with spinal cord injury, stroke or other neurological disorders, next-generation cloud computing infrastructure, computing for environmental sustainability and more. In the past five years alone, the Allen School has secured more than $200 million in grants and contracts to support its research. Along the way, the school has strengthened its leadership in core areas such as systems, architecture and theoretical computer science even as it has expanded its expertise to encompass new areas, including cryptography, molecular programming, quantum computing and natural language processing.

And that list is by no means exhaustive. 

“We took Paul’s words to heart, and the impact of the community’s investment continues to be felt today far beyond the Allen Center’s walls,” said Magdalena Balazinska, director of the Allen School and Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering. “It is felt through the graduates we’ve mentored, the technologies we’ve developed, the companies we’ve started, the opportunities we’ve created, and the leadership we’ve provided.”

The growth sparked by the Allen Center eventually led UW to break new ground in computing literally as well as figuratively; nearly 16 years later, with its first building now bursting at the seams, the Allen School dedicated its second building, the Bill & Melinda Gates Center, which doubled its physical space.

That additional space came just in time, too. Thanks to advocacy by the University and additional investments from the state legislature, the school is currently on track to award 820 degrees annually and has cemented its place in the top echelon of computer science programs in the nation.

“I said back then that the true measure of this building will be what we do inside to take our programs to the next level of excellence,” said Levy. “I’d like to think that we lived up to that promise, and then some.”

For more on the Allen Center’s history, see the Allen Center dedication brochure, a special pre-dedication insert in the Most Significant Bits newsletter, and the dedication issue of MSB from fall 2003.

Read more →

After a two-year hiatus, the University of Washington’s Bonderman Travel Fellows are back, independently traveling the world and benefitting from the monumental growth that comes with immersing oneself in unfamiliar spaces. Since its inception in 1995, the fellowship has supported over 300 UW students on their travels based on their curiosity, openness, resilience and creativity. 

Soon, it will be Allen School Ph.D. student Gus Smith’s turn to hit the road, along with seven other graduate students who were named 2023 Bonderman Fellows. Smith, who is in his fifth year at the Allen School co-advised by professors Luis Ceze and Zach Tatlock, focuses his research on using programming language tools to automatically generate compilers for custom hardware.

With support from the fellowship, he will have an opportunity to explore a different kind of language, far from the computing lab.

“I will use my Bonderman journey to bridge gaps between myself and my international friends and colleagues, not only by experiencing their home countries directly, but by challenging myself to experience the feeling of being an outsider in new and unfamiliar countries,” explained Smith. “In the process, I hope to gain more empathy for what it is like to live so far from your country of origin.”

Inspired by the international and first-generation American friends and colleagues he has encountered during his time at UW, Smith proposed to visit at least six countries over a period of five months following graduation. His itinerary — which is still taking shape — will span the continent of Asia from Taiwan in the east to Israel and Jordan in the west. Other highlights will include two months in India, a brief stay in Singapore and an exploration of Chiang Mai and Bangkok in Thailand. 

Along the way Smith hopes to connect with the cultures of the people he has known to develop a better understanding of their backgrounds. He also anticipates personal growth that will facilitate deeper connections with his friends, fellow computer scientists and other people he meets throughout his life.

“During my travels, I’ll seek to understand how people across the world engage with the search for happiness and how they cope with the knowledge that what they seek may be elusive or impermanent,” said Smith. “If I meet a thousand people, I’ll find a thousand different answers to that question.”

Learn more about the Bonderman Fellowship here. Read more →

On a cool afternoon at the heart of the University of Washington’s campus, autumn, for a few fleeting moments, appears to have arrived early. Tiny golden squares resembling leaves flutter then fall, switching from a frenzied tumble to a graceful descent with a snap. 

Aptly named “microfliers” and inspired by Miura-fold origami, these small robotic devices can fold closed during their descent after being dropped from a drone. This “snapping” action changes the way they disperse and may, in the future, help change the way scientists study agriculture, meteorology, climate change and more. 

“In nature, you see leaves and seeds disperse in just one manner,” said Kyle Johnson, an Allen School Ph.D. student and a first co-author of the paper on the subject published in Science Robotics this month. “What we were able to achieve was a structure that can actually act in two different ways.” 

When open flat, the devices tumble chaotically, mimicking the descent of an elm leaf. When folded closed, they drop in a more stable manner, mirroring how a maple leaf falls from a branch. Through a number of methods — onboard pressure sensor, timer or a Bluetooth signal — the researchers can control when the devices transition from open to closed, and in doing so, manipulate how far they disperse through the air. 

How could they achieve this? By reading between the lines. 

“The Miura-ori origami fold, inspired by geometric patterns found in leaves, enables the creation of structures that can ‘snap’ between a flat and more folded state,” said co-senior author Vikram Iyer, an Allen School professor and co-director of the Computing for the Environment (CS4Env) initiative. “Because it only takes energy to switch between the states, we began exploring this as an energy efficient way to change surface area in mid-air, with the intuition that opening or closing a parachute will change how fast an object falls.”

That energy efficiency is key to being able to operate without batteries and scale down the fliers’ size and weight. Fitted with a battery-free actuator and a solar power-harvesting circuit, microfliers boast energy-saving features not seen in larger and heavier battery-powered counterparts such as drones. Yet they are robust enough to carry sensors for a number of metrics, including temperature, pressure, humidity and altitude. Beyond measuring atmospheric conditions, the researchers say a network of these devices could help paint a picture of crop growth on farmland or detect gas leaks near population centers. 

“This approach opens up a new design space for microfliers by using origami,” said Shyam Gollakota, the Thomas J. Cable Endowed Professor in the Allen School and director of the school’s Mobile Intelligence Lab who was also a co-senior author. “We hope this work is the first step towards a future vision for creating a new class of fliers and flight modalities.”

Weighing less than half a gram, microfliers require less material and cost less than drones. They also offer the ability to go where it’s too dangerous for a human to set foot. 

For instance, Johnson said, microfliers could be deployed when tracking forest fires. Currently, firefighting teams sometimes rappel down to where a fire is spreading. Microfliers could assist in mapping where a fire may be heading and where best to drop a payload of water. Furthermore, the team is working on making more components of the device biodegradable in the case that they can’t be recovered after being released. 

“There’s a good amount of work toward making these circuits more sustainable,” said Vicente Arroyos, another Allen School Ph.D. student and first co-author on the paper. “We can leverage our work on biodegradable materials to make these more sustainable.”

Besides improving sustainability, the researchers also tackled challenges relating to the structure of the device itself. Early prototypes lacked the carbon fiber roots that provide the rigidity needed to prevent accidental transitions between states. 

Collecting maple and elm leaves from outside their lab, the researchers noticed that while their origami structures exhibited the bistability required to change between states, they flexed too easily and didn’t have the venation seen in the found foliage. To gain more fine-grained control, they took another cue from the environment. 

“We looked again to nature to make the faces of the origami flat and rigid, adding a vein-like pattern to the structure using carbon fiber,” Johnson said. “After that modification, we no longer saw a lot of the energy that we input dissipate over the origami’s faces.” 

In total, the researchers estimate that the development of their design took about two years. There’s still room to grow, they added, noting that the current microfliers can only transition from open to closed. They said newer designs, by offering the ability to switch back and forth between states, may offer more precision and flexibility in where and how they’re used. 

During testing, when dropped from an altitude of 40 meters, for instance, the microfliers could disperse up to distances of 98 meters in a light breeze. Further refinements could increase the area of coverage, allowing them to follow more precise trajectories by accounting for variables such as wind and inclement conditions. 

Related to their previous work with dandelion-inspired sensors, the origami microfliers build upon the researchers’ larger goal of creating the internet of bio-inspired things. Whereas the dandelion-inspired devices featured passive flight, reflecting the manner in which dandelion seeds disperse through the wind, the origami microfliers function as complete robotic systems that include actuation to change their shape, active and bi-directional wireless transmission via an onboard radio, and onboard computing and sensing to autonomously trigger shape changes upon reaching a target altitude.

“This design can also accommodate additional sensors and payload due to its size and power harvesting capabilities,” Arroyos said. “It’s exciting to think about the untapped potential for these devices.” 

The future, in other words, is quickly taking shape. 

“Origami is inspired by nature,” Johnson added, smiling. “These patterns are all around us. We just have to look in the right place.”

The project was an interdisciplinary work by an all-UW team. The paper’s co-authors also included Amélie Ferran, a Ph.D. student in the mechanical engineering department, as well as Raul Villanueva, Dennis Yin and Tilboon Elberier, who contributed as undergraduate students studying electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering professors Alberto Aliseda and Sawyer Fuller.

Johnson and Arroyos, who co-founded and currently lead the educational nonprofit AVELA – A Vision for Engineering Literacy & Access, and their teammates have done outreach efforts in Washington state K-12 schools related to the research, including showing students how to create their own bi-stable leaf-out origami structure using a piece of paper. Check out a related demonstration video here, and learn more about the microflier project here and in a related UW News release and GeekWire story.

Read more →