Allen School News

A chance encounter helped Paul Beame, Paris Koutris (Ph.D., ‘15) and Dan Suciu create a model that aids scientists in understanding some of the deeper nuances surrounding big data management. Beame was passing by Suciu’s office one day as the latter and his advisee Koutris, a Ph.D. student in the Allen School at the time, were discussing research on parallel query processing, a shared idée fixe among the trio. 

They were thinking about how to model the complexity of new modes of computation used in practice, such as MapReduce, a creation of Allen School alum Jeff Dean (Ph.D., ‘96) and Sanjay Ghemawat that was developed to run major systems at Google. MapReduce, however, involved a specific set of parallel primitives that limited what types of operations could be captured. 

For Koutris and Suciu, a professor in the University of Washington’s Database Group, more was possible. They wanted a theoretical model, Suciu recalled, that could also capture other computations that could be performed more efficiently with other primitives. They also wanted to better understand “the fundamental limits” of these systems’ computing capabilities. They just needed an added spark, another stroke of inspiration. 

Along came Beame, a professor in the Allen School’s Theory of Computation group, and the rest was history. 

“It turned out that Paul had already been mulling over the general question of modeling MapReduce computations but there had been an aspect missing in his thinking that was a feature in my and Paris’ work on parallel database query processing,” Suciu said. “Even in the discussion that very first day, it became clear that the fundamental limitation that the model needed to capture was the communication of data that processors require in order to solve computational problems.” 

Beame added that the meeting was made possible by the collaboration and openness of the culture in CSE. Suciu’s door was open; his and Koutris’ minds, even more so. 

“We value collaboration and the mixing of ideas among different research areas enough that we put faculty from different areas near each other, rather than cloistering faculty in different zones by research area,” Beame said. “Dan’s office is on the way to mine just three doors away.”

Their work has helped crystallize what’s possible in the world of big data processing. Last month, the trio’s paper “Communication Steps for Parallel Query Processing” earned the 2023 ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award for providing a deeper understanding of the complexity behind database query evaluation. The award was announced at the 2023 ACM SIGMOD/PODS conference, jointly organized by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Management of Data and the Symposium on Principles of Database Systems in Seattle last month. 

Koutris joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a professor of computer science after graduating from the Allen School 2015.

The three continued to work together over a series of subsequent papers, investigating different questions related to their initial research. One involved data skew. By allowing additional communication rounds, the group theorized, they would be able to compute more complex queries. 

“That, indeed, turned out to be true,” Suciu said. “However, to our surprise, additional communication rounds also allowed the same query to process data that is skewed.” 

For example, Suciu added, there may be many more records referring to former president Barack Obama than records referring to a less famous individual. These “heavy hitters” pose a major problem for distributed computation, he continued, because they tend to overload a server and slow down the entire computation. 

In their Test of Time paper, the trio showed the heavy hitters’ impact could be blunted. By using additional rounds of communication, these records’ effects could be mitigated when distributed across multiple servers. 

“To our surprise,” Suciu said, “the additional communication rounds turned out to be very effective in decreasing the total cost of computation on skewed data.”

For the team, their model, dubbed Massively Parallel Communication (MPC), is yet another marker in the race toward measuring the complexity of query processing systems. During the early 2000s, the database and data processing environment underwent sweeping changes, with several systems, including MapReduce, popping up that could process vast swaths of data by using thousands of commodity systems. The process was unprecedented — and relatively cheap. 

“At around the same time Amazon provided the first cloud services, allowing users to access massively distributed systems,” Suciu said. “The traditional way to measure the complexity of a query was in terms of the number of accesses to the disk. However, these new, massively distributed systems were using a sufficiently large number of servers to store the entire data in main memory.” 

With progress came a new set of challenges. Now, the source of complexity, Suciu said, was the communication cost among the servers. It required a new theoretical approach to understand the contours of a changing landscape. 

“Once we had the model,” Beame said, “our focus was on understanding the complexity and best ways to solve natural and important classes of problems in database query evaluation.”

The team started with a simple model consisting of a large number of servers, with each featuring arbitrary computational power. The only limitation was the amount of data exchanged among the servers and the number of communication rounds.  

“Our breakthrough came when we were able to explain in this model why some queries were easier to compute than others,” Suciu said, “and to precisely characterize the communication cost of the queries.”

Their breakthrough has far-reaching implications. Thanks to the team’s research, systems developers and data analysts can better understand the limitation of processing complex queries on massively distributed systems. While it’s not the first model to attempt to capture synchronous distributed parallel computation, its elegance and simplicity have made it popular and able to withstand the test of time. 

“The MPC model was very clean and natural to understand and think about,” Beame said. “The introduction of the model was quite timely and the MPC terminology has become widely adopted and used.”  Read more →

Take a generous helping of mathematical brilliance, cover it in copious amounts of curiosity about the most vexing problems underpinning computer science, add a generous dash of humility, and what do you get? 

Shayan Oveis Gharan, a professor in the Allen School’s Theory of Computation group, combines all the essential ingredients of a trailblazing researcher who, as his colleagues will attest, also happens to be a genuinely nice guy. The combination has also proved to be a genuine recipe for success, as he has racked up a series of accolades in theoretical computer science since he arrived at the University of Washington in 2015. His most recent honor, the Stephen Smale Prize from the Society for the Foundations of Computational Mathematics (FoCM), celebrated Oveis Gharan’s “breakthrough results on the applications of algebraic and spectral methods to the design of algorithms and to combinatorial optimization” that have made him “the architect of surprising and profound discoveries on foundational problems in computing.”

Oveis Gharan began acquiring the building blocks of those career triumphs as a middle school student in Iran, when he encountered the book “Mathematics of Choice: How to Count without Counting” by the Canadian-American mathematician Ivan Niven. Under Niven’s written tutelage, the young Oveis Gharan learned how to quickly count combinatorial objects — say, the number of ways one could assemble a basketball team consisting of 10 players and a captain from a class of 30 students — on paper. The lesson was a slam dunk, and counting problems still comprise a major portion of his research years later — only now, he’s designing computer algorithms to handle more sophisticated problems than the possible permutations with himself at point guard. 

Later, as he prepared to do battle in regional and world informatics competitions, a teenaged Oveis Gharan practiced with hundreds of combinatorial and graph theoretic problems drawn from past Russian Mathematics Olympiads. That practice paid off, as he took home a silver medal from the 2003 Central European Olympiad; a year later, he won gold at the International Olympiad.

“Those experiences are the backbone of most problem-solving techniques I still use today,” Oveis Gharan noted, pointing out that old approaches can come in handy when it comes to new problems. It’s one of the aspects he loves most about his chosen line of work.

“One of the amazing characteristics of research in discrete mathematics and combinatorics is that there is rarely a unified theme to approach hard problems,” he explained. “One often needs to cook up a new method from scratch. So in one sense, it feels like we are going to fight with a challenging problem empty-handed, but in reality, previous work on related problems can offer a menu of ideas with which to approach this other problem.”

One challenge that Oveis Gharan found he could really sink his teeth into is the infamous Traveling Salesperson Problem, which he first encountered over a decade ago as a Ph.D. student at Stanford University. There, he and his colleagues set out to design an improved approximation algorithm for metric TSP. 

At first, the team thought they had the solution — until they realized they didn’t.

“About halfway through we figured some of our intermediate conjectures were wrong,” Oveis Gharan recalled. “So, we made the problem simpler and instead only managed to prove that the algorithm breaks the long-standing barrier for a special family of metrics called ‘graph metrics.’ It wasn’t until two years ago that I and another group of co-authors finally achieved a result for all metrics.”

The aforementioned result was the first performance improvement in metric TSP in more than 40 years. Along the way, Oveis Gharan contributed to what co-author and Allen School professor Anna Karlin has described as a “deep mathematical machinery” mixing elements of graph theory and probability theory that researchers have since applied to other open problems. Among the tools in this expanded mathematical toolbox were the use of maximum entropy sampling, new theorems related to the geometry of polynomials, Strong Rayleigh probability distributions and negative dependence, and new insights into the combinatorial structure of the minimum and near-minimum cuts of a graph. Oveis Gharan and his co-authors, including Ph.D. student Nathan Klein, subsequently used the latter to build on their initial result by showing the integrality gap of the subtour linear programming relaxation for TSP is below 3/2 last year.

What is it about TSP that he finds so alluring? As Oveis Gharan explains it, TSP is different from most computational problems encountered by theoreticians, like the graph coloring problem, that require one to satisfy a range of local constraints. With TSP, one has to satisfy both a set of local constraints and a global constraint — connectivity — simultaneously.

“Oddly enough, each of these two sets of constraints is easy to satisfy optimally on their own, but the challenge is to satisfy both,” he said. “The quest in studying TSP is that you want to construct solutions which are locally correct while globally connected.”

For Oveis Gharan, satisfying that dual challenge is where the rubber meets the road.

”Think of a driver going from Seattle to San Francisco. They need to keep an eye on the road to make sure they are ‘locally’ driving safely — i.e., not ramming into the next car and not driving out of bounds,” he said. “But they also need to keep the bigger picture of the route in mind, choosing the right highway at every junction. Now in this example, perhaps, the bigger picture is easy to keep in mind when there’s only a single highway, I-5, running all the way south. But imagine how difficult it would be with millions of possible roads to choose from, and no GPS! That is similar to the dilemma in designing an algorithm for TSP.”

Despite his devotion to that problem, Oveis Gharan is also driven to tackle other challenges. For example, he is widely known for his work analyzing the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique for sampling from high dimensional distributions and as a method for studying large, complicated sets. As part of that work, Oveis Gharan and his collaborators — including former student Kuikui Liu (Ph.D., ‘23), who will join the faculty of MIT this fall — developed the theory of spectral independence, a revolutionary approach for approximate sampling of Markov chains that has implications for computational biology, machine learning, physics and more. 

Oveis Gharan and his colleagues leveraged that approach to produce the first efficient approximation algorithm for counting the bases of a matroid and simultaneously proved a 30-year-old conjecture concerning the minimum edge expansion of the bases exchange graph of any matroid. In another paper of the same series, he and his co-authors answered another open question that had gone unanswered for nearly three decades by proving that an algorithmic tool used in statistical physics called Glauber dynamics mixes in polynomial time to generate a random independent set for any graph up to the phase-transition threshold.

The aforementioned work relates to expander graphs — which, in Oveis Gharan’s view, are “one of the most extraordinary inventions in mathematics.” He is keen to further explore the theory of high-dimensional expanders, which have numerous practical applications in computing.

“On one hand, these graphs are as sparse as, say, a cycle; on the other hand, they preserve almost all properties of a complete network,” Oveis Gharan explained. “If one wants to build a sparse routing network that will be as reliable as possible against node or connection failures, the best design is to use an expander graph. High dimensional expanders are a generalization of expander graphs to hypergraphs, which have been a subject of intense study over the last decade leading to several breakthroughs, from improved analysis of MCMC algorithms, to the construction of new locally testable codes.”

To someone whose work is typically celebrated in optimization and algorithm design circles, the Smale Prize came as a pleasant surprise. 

“Although not the community in which I normally publish my research, I am truly honored and amazed that my work has been recognized by leaders in computational mathematics,” he said. “This certainly motivates me and my research group to pursue a deeper understanding of problems at the intersection of math, computer science and efficient computation.”

The Smale Prize — named for Stephen Smale, one of the founding members of FoCM — is awarded every three years. The organization formally honored Oveis Gharan, who joins rarefied company as only the fifth recipient since the prize’s inception, during its annual conference in Paris last month. Read more →

There is an old saying that perception is everything, and with regard to human senses and computer models that attempt to demonstrate how human sensory systems work, everything is highly complex. This includes our system of visual perception, which allows humans to interact with the dynamic world in real time. Because of biological constraints and neural processing delays, our brains must “fill in the blanks” to generate a complete picture. 

Allen School professor Rajesh Rao has dedicated much of his career to the discovery of computational principles that underlie the human brain’s abilities to learn, process and store information. Recently, Rao and Allen School third-year Ph.D. student Linxing Preston Jiang have focused on understanding how our brains fill in those blanks by developing a computational model to simulate how humans process visual information. Their paper presenting their findings, “Dynamic Predictive Coding Explains Both Prediction and Postdiction in Visual Motion Perception,” will receive a Best Paper Award in the Perception and Action category at the Cognitive Science Society conference (COGSCI 2023) later this month. 

“At a high level, our work supports the idea that what we consciously perceive is an edited timeline of events and not a single instant in time. This is because the brain represents events at multiple timescales,” explained Rao, the Cherng Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang Professor in the Allen School and UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology. “At the highest levels of the brain’s networks, the neural representations cover sensations in the past, present and predicted future. This explains some seemingly strange perceptual phenomena like postdiction and the flash lag illusion, where what happens in the future can affect how you perceive what is happening now.”

In their paper, Rao and Jiang hypothesized that human sensory systems encode entire sequences, or timelines, rather than just single points in time to aid perception. To test this notion, they trained a neural network model, dynamic predictive coding (DPC), to predict moving image sequences. Since DPC learns hierarchical representations of sequences, the duo found the system is able to predict the expected perceptual trajectory while compensating for transmission delays. When events deviate from the model’s expectation, the system retroactively updates its sequence representation to catch up with new observations.

In the two-level DPC model, lower-level neural states predict the next sensory input as well as the next state, while higher-level neurons predict the transition dynamics between those lower-level neural states. This enables higher-level neurons to predict entire sequences of lower-level states. This approach is grounded in predictive coding, a theory in neuroscience that suggests the brain has separate populations of neurons to encode the best prediction of what is being perceived and to identify errors in those predictions.

“Our model fits within the class of predictive coding models, which are receiving increasing attention in neuroscience as a framework for understanding how the brain works,” Rao noted.  “Generative AI models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 that are trained to predict the next word in a sequence are another example of predictive coding.”

The team observed that when DPC’s visual perception relies on temporally abstracted representations — what the model has learned through minimizing prediction errors — many known predictive and postdictive phenomena in visual processing emerged from the model’s simulations. These findings support the idea that visual perception relies on the encoding of timelines rather than single points in time, which could influence the future direction of neuroscience research. 

“While previous models of predictive coding mainly focused on how the visual system predicts spatially, our DPC model focuses on how temporal predictions across multiple time scales could be implemented in the visual system,” explained Jiang, who works with Rao in the Allen School’s Neural Systems Lab. “If more thoroughly validated experimentally, DPC could be used to develop solutions such as brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, that serve as visual prostheses for the blind.”

This is just the beginning for research on DPC. A future avenue of investigation might include assessing more than the two levels of temporal hierarchies Jiang and Rao examined in the current paper with videos that have more complicated dynamics. This could facilitate comparisons of responses in DPC models with neural recordings to further explore the neural basis of multi-scale future predictions. 

“Predicting the future often involves taking an animals’ own actions into account, which is a significant aspect of learning that DPC does not address,” explained Jiang. “Augmenting the DPC model with actions and using it to direct reward-based learning would be an exciting direction that has connections to reinforcement learning and motor control.” 

COGSCI brings together scholars from around the world to understand the nature of the human mind. This year’s COGSCI conference will take place in Sydney, Australia. Read more →

The possibility of a greener future inspired Meghna Shankar, a recent Allen School alum, to study alternative energy and help wean society off of fossil fuels. Her interdisciplinary academic career, she said, gave her the perspective to see the bigger picture, while also giving her the tools to make her goals a reality. 

“Since the world of scientific research is relying more and more on computing,” she said, “the skills I learn in my CS classes have come in handy in a variety of situations.”

For Shankar, who graduated in June with bachelor’s degrees in computer science and comprehensive physics, the discipline has been another path to a deeper understanding of the physical world. She was recently named a 2023 Dean’s Medalist in the Natural Sciences by the College of Arts & Sciences in recognition of her many scholastic achievements.

This fall, she will begin a doctoral program in experimental condensed matter physics at MIT, where she hopes to research topics that could have clean energy applications, such as batteries, fuel cells and solar panels. 

“UW was one of the best places for me to gain undergraduate research experience,” Shankar said. “I had the opportunity to work with amazing graduate students and postdocs, which helped me learn about the research process and the possibility of pursuing a Ph.D.”

Shankar’s Dean’s Medal selection comes on the heels of a prolific undergraduate career. As a first-year student, she began research at professor Cody Schlenker’s experimental chemistry laboratory, investigating how to increase the efficiency of solar cells. That experience led to an internship at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where her work resulted in her receiving the prestigious Mary Gates Research Scholarship. In her junior year she started working in the experimental condensed matter physics lab of professor Xiaodong Xu. She has also served as a teaching assistant in introductory physics courses in addition to the Allen School’s first year seminar.

Beyond the classroom, Shankar has demonstrated a commitment to both the arts and her community. The talented violist joined the UW Symphony Orchestra as a freshman and has performed with the ensemble since then. 

“Orchestra has been an invaluable part of my UW experience,” she said. “In my freshman year, some of my first friends at UW were in the viola section.”

Shankar also helped lead Women+ in Physics, a student organization that promotes inclusivity in the sciences. Senior students had previously begun the process to incorporate the group into the physics department, but due to the pandemic, they faced challenges in getting off the ground. Shankar and her friends revitalized the organization and have since hosted many community and professional development events.  

“I have really enjoyed this experience, as it has brought me closer to my friends and made me feel like I am making an impact in the physics community,” she said. “The physics department has been incredibly supportive of us as well.”

Shankar credited her friends and family for encouraging her and fostering an environment for success. She will keep them and her UW experience in mind, she said, when she heads to MIT later this year. 

“Without the support of and collaboration with my friends and classmates, I would not have felt the same motivation to go to class and study every day,” she said. “I also want to recognize my mother and my father. They have been a huge inspiration to me to work through adversity and be committed to my goals.”

Read more about Shankar’s achievements here. Read more →

For faculty members who are at the start of their research journey, the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Awards are one of the most prestigious honors recognizing early-career scholarship and supporting future leaders in their respective fields. The latest Allen School recipients are no exception. From using machine learning to fight implicit bias to devising new architectures that bridge electronics and biology, here are eight rising stars who are advancing the field of computing at the University of Washington and reaching new heights.

Tim Althoff: Advancing behavioral data science to improve health and well-being

About a fifth of the world’s children and adolescents experience a mental health condition, according to the World Health Organization, with depression and anxiety costing the global economy $1 trillion each year. Between 2007 and 2017, Pew Research Center found that the total number of teenagers who reported experiencing depression increased by 59%. 

In “Realizing the potential of behavioral data science for population health,” Tim Althoff, director of the Behavioral Data Science Lab, aims to address rising mental health challenges by developing computational tools and utilizing behavioral health data. Though health-related data from phones, watches, fitness trackers and apps have become more widely available, integrating and modeling that data have remained difficult. Althoff’s project will attempt to develop a unified representation learning framework that effectively generalizes to new users, while also being highly predictive, robust and private without revealing private identifying information. 

His team will evaluate the framework’s performance across a number of health applications, including behavioral monitoring of influenza and COVID-19 symptoms, as well as personalizing sleep and mental health interventions. One project, for instance, uses AI to enable more empathic conversations among peer-to-peer support networks.

With this data in hand, Althoff’s group is seeking to expedite the development of new behavioral health research and related applications. They are also focused on helping scientists and health professionals learn more about the impact of behavioral health conditions. 

“Despite the significant potential of increasingly available data, broad and tangible impacts have yet to be realized, in part due to the unique challenges of integrating and modeling a broad range of behavioral and health data,” Althoff said. “This project seeks to address these challenges by developing and sharing computational tools that will enable researchers, clinicians and practitioners to improve mental health care and more rapidly respond to emerging diseases.”

Additionally, Althoff’s group will develop outreach and educational activities dedicated to increasing participation of historically underrepresented groups in computer science education, research and careers. The group also plans to share its results through public open-source software and workshops.

“I am honored to receive this prestigious award and am thankful to the NSF and U.S. taxpayers for supporting our research,” Althoff said. “We will use this award funding to positively impact U.S. health and well-being.”

Leilani Battle: Taming troves of data to gain actionable insights 

With troves of data at our fingertips, understanding and presenting that information requires more than just a good eye. As co-director of the UW Interactive Data Lab, Leilani Battle is helping to visualize the future of big data. She earned a CAREER Award for “Behavior-driven testing of big data exploration tools,” a proposal rich with insight into the future of data visualization. 

“Throughout my research I interweave core principles from HCI and visualization with optimization and benchmarking techniques from data management,” she said. “My CAREER award is the culmination of those ideas.”

Currently, evaluating the tools used to glean these analyses remains challenging, in no small part due to sheer volume. Used for everything from determining how climate change is addressed to which investments to prioritize, these computational tools boast an imposing number of use cases, making standardization and benchmarking a difficult task.

Battle’s project seeks to streamline the process. A key aim targets the development of an automated testing software that can determine the capability of a data exploration tool. Another focuses on discovering the types of problems these tools and evaluation methods may introduce along the way. 

Her team will also work with leaders in the visualization community, both in industry and academia, to optimize the software’s performance, and will develop programs that help students learn fundamental visualization and research skills.

Battle was also named a 2023 Sloan Fellow earlier this year. “It’s an honor to be recognized through these awards for the kind of work that I do,” she said. 

Simon Shaolei Du: Helping over-parameterized models go mainstream

Though Simon Shaolei Du focuses on the theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence, his findings have several applications in the real world. His proposal “Toward a foundation of over-parameterization” underlines the power of over-parameterized models and enumerates methods to help them go mainstream. These models have the ability to revolutionize several domains, including computer vision, natural language processing (NLP) and robotics. But they remain resource-intensive, costing millions to train and implement effectively. 

Support from the CAREER Award will help Du and his team design a resource-efficient framework to make modern machine learning technologies more accessible, better optimized and easier to evaluate. From both a theory and a practice standpoint, the project also aims to make measurable gains — characterizing the properties of over-parameterization while also deploying algorithms on real-world applications. 

By gaining a deeper understanding of over-parameterization, its benefits and drawbacks, Du hopes to form a mathematical theory that rigorously characterizes the optimization and generalization properties of neural networks. 

“Deep learning technology has been very successful in practice but its theoretical understanding is still limited,” Du said. “One prominent feature that distinguishes neural nets from previous machine learning models is over-parameterization — neural nets use many more parameters than what is needed. I found this phenomenon of neural nets very interesting as it requires a radically different theory to understand.”

Kevin Jamieson: Closing the loop on a new paradigm in machine learning

Are you aware that every time you scroll through social media or binge-watch on a streaming platform, you’re participating in an adaptive experimental design? The algorithms behind these platforms are constantly testing hypotheses and using your engagement as evidence. With machine learning, these systems curate content based on your preferences and behavior, and the success of their design is directly linked to the accuracy of their recommendations.

It’s one example of closed-loop learning, a learning paradigm that Kevin Jamieson, who earned his bachelor’s from the UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and is now the Guestrin Endowed Professor in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the Allen School, explores in his NSF CAREER proposal. In “Non-asymptotic, instance-optimal closed-loop learning,” he illustrates the practical impact of harnessing closed-loop data collection strategies. While existing efforts in data collection can help provide recommendations for one’s entertainment feed, for instance, other areas — especially those in science and healthcare — have proven more imposing, both in terms of time and cost. As a result, closed-loop strategies have not yet been widely adopted in places such as medical labs, due to lower predictability and higher stakes. 

With his CAREER Award project, Jamieson seeks to crystallize closed-loop constructs into effective and reliable data-collection strategies. One instance of this playing out, he suggests, deals with clinical drug trials. As the algorithm adapts, the time needed to identify a cure could decrease significantly. Ambitious yet applicable, it’s an insight that could save lives.

“When a patient walks into the clinic with a particular health state, taking actions like running tests can help determine what the true state of health is, and other actions like prescribing medication can move the state towards more favorable states and outcomes,” Jamieson said. “My work aims to minimize the number of patients and actions required to learn the optimal way to act in this environment.”

Jeff Nivala: Pursuing new information architectures based on synthetic polymers   

For Jeff Nivala, noticing the little things is something of second nature. 

When he was a Bioengineering undergraduate at UW, Nivala took part in the Genetically Engineered Machines Competition (iGEM), an international contest that tasked teams with building “the coolest, most world-changing technologies” through synthetic biology. But beyond the sights of the competition, something else caught his eye: iGEM’s logo. 

With a green biological cell and a mechanical gear intertwining among its letters, the emblem exemplified the field’s potential to the budding scientist. 

“This visual struck a chord with me that we can engineer and program things at the molecular level using biology,” he said. “This concept is really cool and we are only at the beginning stages of its development.”

Now a professor in the Allen School, Nivala is also co-director of the Molecular Information Systems Lab. He earned an NSF CAREER Award for “Machine-guided design of enzymatically-synthesized polymers optimized for digital information storage,” which explores the growing field of synthetic biology and how scientists can leverage the advantages of molecular information storage. Some of these pros include high densities, long shelf lives and low energy costs. 

But challenges remain. Reading and writing the data, for example, is costly when done at the molecular level. Nivala’s research seeks to address this concern by developing a new information storage medium based on synthetic polymers — a scalable solution at a lower cost.

Moreover, inexpensive, laptop-powered nanopore readers can quickly decode the polymers. Featuring lower latency and higher throughput, the system stands as an innovative alternative to traditional mass spectrometry. 

Noticing the little things, it turns out, can have big consequences. The result, Nivala said, may be a brighter future. 

“Biology and technology are both incredible in their own ways,” Nivala said. “Biology has created amazing things — just look at the living things outside your window or your own body. And then there are the incredible advancements humanity has made, especially in the age of silicon and modern electronic computing. But what if we could combine these two forces? This is the future that I hope my research can contribute to, even if it’s just a small nudge in this direction.”

With support from the CAREER Award, Nivala will also create a special topics course focused on molecular computing and information storage. Looking back — and beyond — Nivala said, provides perspective and illustrates the promise realized in the present, moment by moment, molecule by molecule. 

“I am truly humbled and honored to have been awarded the NSF CAREER Award,” Nivala said. “Even now, as I devote much of my time to mentoring and guiding the next generation of scientists, I am constantly learning from more experienced colleagues that I work with here at UW. So receiving this award is a time of reflection for me, as I am reminded of the many individuals who have contributed to my success. At the same time, it is an exciting opportunity to look forward to the future and the exciting work that lies ahead.”

Chris Thachuk: Programming molecules and advancing synthetic biology

Chris Thachuk bridges the gap between computer science and synthetic biology, focusing on creating programmable matter at the molecular level. He earned a CAREER Award for “Facile molecular computation and diagnostics via fast, robust, and reconfigurable DNA circuits,” an exercise in turning the stuff of science fiction into a reimagination of what can be made real. 

In his proposal, Thachuk asks if we can envision a future where “smart,” programmable molecules process information and manipulate matter in the unseen world. From the 30-ton ENIAC — about the weight of three adult elephants — to the wearable devices of today, computers have gotten progressively smaller as technology has advanced. 

Thachuk seeks to create new design principles and architectures centered around robust “field-programmable” DNA circuits, which will be reconfigurable by non-experts without sophisticated equipment. Dubbed “DNA strand displacement (DSD) architectures,” these tiny testaments to the imagination carry an abundance of possibilities for a number of fields, including global health, diagnostics, environmental monitoring, molecular manufacturing, and more.

These architectures will be put to the test next year in an undergraduate molecular computation course to be offered by Thachuk and supported by this award. As part of the course, Allen School students, with no assumed wet lab experience, will design, build and experimentally validate state-of-the-art molecular circuits and other nanoscale devices. 

For Thachuk, it’s an elegant pairing between technical goals and educational outcomes. 

“Ideas from computer science will be the driving force behind future progress in programmable control at the nanoscale and in similarly complex environments,” Thachuk said. “The best way to accelerate that path is by exposing CSE students to these broader perspectives on computing early in their training through undergraduate classes that explore the fuzzy boundaries of disciplines.”

Yulia Tsvetkov: Harnessing the power of language against online bias

When Yulia Tsvetkov started reading social science literature about gender bias, she realized some of her personal experiences were not unique to her. 

“I also realized that as a natural language processing and machine learning researcher, I have a constructive and powerful way to combat such discrimination,” she said, “while solving interesting scientific and technical problems that I’m passionate about.”

Now an NSF CAREER Award and Sloan Research Fellowship recipient, Tsvetkov is using her talents to help others fight bias online. With “Language technologies against the language of social discrimination,” she targets a growing phenomenon in how we interact on the internet. While the growth of social networking services has produced several benefits, it’s also provided a medium for implicit bias to enter, often unimpeded.

Moreover, the effects of bias, Tsvetkov outlines, are manifold — each being harmful in nature. 

At UW, her research group focuses on developing practical solutions to NLP problems and understanding how language online shapes or is shaped by societal conditions. Tsvetkov’s CAREER Award project aims to create NLP technologies to combat societal biases that find their way into the collective discourse.

The developed models will be able to detect and counteract implicit bias and harmful speech. Her work also involves building new methods to interpret these deep-learning models, with the end goal of creating a safer and more civil cyberspace. 

“If we are able to detect such language at scale, there are opportunities to empower people and prevent them from being the targets of discrimination,” she said. “I’m excited about this topic because in addition to its potential social impact, there are exciting and timely technical challenges we’ll need to solve.”

Amy Zhang: Empowering vulnerable users online, with a little help from their friends

Sometimes we need a little help from our friends. At least, that’s the idea behind Squadbox, a crowdsourcing tool that Amy Zhang developed while a doctoral student at MIT. Squadbox assembled a “squad” of capeless crusaders (friends) who would use their powers of familiarity and solidarity to filter messages and safeguard users from attacks. Who needs a shield made of vibranium when you have a built-in support system? 

As director of the Social Futures Lab at the Allen School, Zhang is continuing to unite in order to fight online harassment. In “Tools for user and community-led social media curation,” she outlines methods for creating a safer and healthier online environment. Users today, especially those from marginalized communities, are at the mercy of a platform’s content filters, which often fail at distinguishing the harmful from the benign. This phenomenon can create a bottleneck of homogenized content, wherein the most vulnerable are left without recourse. 

Zhang’s research seeks to solve this problem. Using a mixed-methods approach, her work will gather information from a range of users facing the greatest challenges under current designs, including marginalized individuals who are often targets of harassment, neurodiverse users, journalists and content creators, among others. 

Another goal involves lowering the barrier to entry. By building collaborative systems and consulting user feedback, Zhang’s research will allow users to curate their platforms without the need for technical expertise or a large time commitment. One project in the works, for example, has users designing their own filters to keep platforms safe and accessible. 

“I am honored to receive early career funding for this proposal and have the opportunity to impact the future of social technology, particularly given the quickly changing landscape of social media today,” Zhang said. “Through my research, I look forward to introducing new tools into that landscape that empower people and communities to take control of their online social environments and that better serve the needs of marginalized users. I am excited that this funding will additionally support education and outreach to engage the next generation of computer scientists and the public on the social ramifications of technology design.” Read more →

After enrolling at the University of Washington, Ayan Gupta found himself fielding questions about getting into college. Family and friends who had children in high school often asked him for advice. A few were using college counselors, while most were not. Gupta saw how the use of a counselor could make or break an application. 

“The difference in preparedness and outcomes was evident,” he said. “Even though we live in a pretty affluent area, access to college advising is sparse and often difficult to come by.”

That gave Gupta, a Redmond native, and his fellow Allen School student and co-founder Faraz Qureshi the idea for Cledge, a college advising platform that uses artificial intelligence to help students plan their path forward — without the need to hire an expensive private advisor. The platform gathers data on areas such as career goals, extracurriculars and scholarships, and provides recommendations on how to improve one’s chances in the application process. 

In just two years since Cledge’s founding, their idea has borne fruit. The team, which also includes Allen School junior Ricky Liao and sophomores Scott Wynn and Joe Sluis, recently won the Herbert B. Jones Foundation Grand Prize of $25,000 at the 26th annual Dempsey Startup Competition organized by the UW Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship. In last year’s competition, Cledge had made the Sweet 16 round. Following the startup’s success, Gupta said that Cledge is looking to expand its team and bring on other interested students across the university.

Not bad for a young startup for which there was no shortage of challenges. 

“We have had to be scrappy since we don’t have much money to work with as students,” Gupta said. “We have learned to create connections and network to get the resources we need.”

During the competition, the team members received plenty of advice, from changing their business model to modifying the website. But they found success when zeroing in on ideas that aligned with their broader mission statement. 

“The competition helped Ayan and me really focus on what we needed to improve with Cledge’s pitch and not someone else’s dream for what the company could be,” said Qureshi, who, like Gupta, was a junior at the time of the event.

Liao, one of the lead developers for Cledge, agreed that the competition brought out the best in the team and its product. With members dealing with exams and homework on the side, he recalled, it was difficult to collaborate at times. But eventually they found a workflow that clicked, and the outcome was more than he could have hoped for, he said. 

“I remember walking into the pitching hall and being blown away by all the amazing innovative ideas that were being showcased, and I was proud to have been among them with Cledge,” Liao added. “I had learned a lot more about the problem that Cledge is here to tackle after many encounters trying to pitch the product as well as facing questions. Throughout the entire competition, my confidence in our technology had only grown.”

For Wynn, whose background is in theoretical computer science and mathematics, the competition was an opportunity to take his skills from the classroom and apply them to a real-world endeavor. 

“With the competition, I realized that through algorithms, mathematics could form the foundation for countless groundbreaking innovations in technology,” Wynn said. “Which I hope to contribute to through leading Cledge’s Student Metrics team and much of the algorithm development.”

The Allen School was well-represented at the competition. In addition to Cledge, the fourth-place team, Waltz, featured students from the Allen School’s 2023 Entrepreneurship course. Waltz built a platform for media companies and content creators to easily translate and dub content into more than 100 languages, while also maintaining the emotion and intonation of the speaker.

“It’s exciting to see entrepreneurship blossoming among Allen School undergraduates,” said professor Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair Emeritus at the Allen School and one of the instructors for the Entrepreneurship course. 

Gupta had been a student in the course in 2022, Lazowska added, and was a teaching assistant for the course in 2023. Read more about Cledge in a related GeekWire story here. Read more →

On Friday, June 9, more than 4,000 family and friends from near and far gathered on the University of Washington campus to celebrate the Allen School’s 2023 graduates. The celebration commenced with a casual open house and meet-and-greet with faculty and staff in the Paul G. Allen Center and Bill & Melinda Gates Center. It culminated in a formal event in the Hec Edmundson Pavilion at the Alaskan Airlines Arena, where graduates made the brief journey across the stage to mark the start of a new journey as Allen School alumni.

‘Remember tonight‘

In her remarks opening the evening’s program, Magdalena Balazinska, professor and director of the Allen School, observed that most of those seated before her in their caps and gowns started their Allen School education prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Balazinska congratulated them for overcoming the challenges and isolation of the intervening years to emerge victorious. She also noted that, while this milestone is cause for celebration, still more challenges — as well as opportunities — await them. And they should fear neither.

“When opportunities arise, take them. If you hesitate because opportunities are often scary and they often look like a lot of work, remember tonight. Remember how loud your families, your friends, the faculty, the staff have cheered for you, how much they believe in you, and take the opportunity,” Balazinska advised them. “Like generations that preceded you, you will face personal challenges, and the world around you will face challenges. Remember: you have a very strong education. Use that education, your passion, your kindness, your cleverness to have an impact on the people and the world around you.”

Recognizing the impact of those who came before

As if to illustrate the point, the Allen School welcomed back two graduates who have applied their education, along with their passion, kindness and cleverness, in very different ways: 2023 Alumni Impact Award recipients Janet Davis (Ph.D., ‘06) and Paul Mikesell (B.S., ‘96).

Allen School professor and Bill & Melinda Gates Chair Emeritus Ed Lazowska noted that the award is not only intended to honor outstanding alumni for their contributions throughout their careers, but also to remind the new graduates that they are joining a long and distinguished line of former Allen School students who have built on their education to change the world. Davis’ contributions include building Whitman College’s computer science program from the ground up to reflect that institution’s liberal arts traditions. Mikesell helped build scalable data storage company Isilon Systems into a multi-billion dollar company before expanding into agricultural technology by founding Carbon Robotics, a Seattle-based startup whose LaserWeeder provides farmers with a cost-effective, environmentally friendly alternative to pesticides.

‘Take advantage of the doors that open’

This year’s graduation speaker, Barbara Liskov, traveled from Boston to share her wisdom and encouragement with the newly minted graduates. Liskov is an Institute Professor of MIT — the highest institutional honor bestowed upon faculty — and received the A.M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery for her contributions to the theory and practice of programming language and systems design. She is also, as Lazowska noted in welcoming her to the stage, ”a wonderful human being — an example of what we should all strive to be.”

Before she touched down in Seattle, Liskov was asked what message she hoped the newly minted graduates would take away from their big day. 

“One thing that strikes me when I look back on my career is the importance of the unexpected,” Liskov explained. “Doors close and doors open. It’s important in your career not to be discouraged when doors close and to take advantage of the doors that open. You may end up doing something quite different from where you started, and this is absolutely ok.”

Liskov delivered that message and more to those gathered in the arena, drawing from a career spanning six decades. As the first woman in computer science at MIT — at a time when there were only 10 women on the entire faculty numbering nearly 1,000 — Liskov was a trailblazer in more ways than one. Having reluctantly accepted a position with industry when she couldn’t land a faculty position following her own graduation with a Ph.D. from Stanford, she relayed how she turned that disappointment into opportunity by transitioning her research from artificial intelligence to systems. 

Noting that where she ended up “was not at all where I might have predicted when I got started,” Liskov suggested that many of the graduates seated before her are likely to experience the same. And while they should not be deterred by detours, they should remain true to themselves.

“There will be setbacks, and there will be opportunities,” she said. “When there are setbacks, you want to persevere. When there are opportunities, you want to decide whether it’s a good idea for you to accept them. And these decisions that you make, you need to make by thinking about what’s going to work for you.”

Liskov also hoped the graduates would think about what that work will mean for the world at large. Pointing to technologies that enabled remote learning during the pandemic, computer-assisted surgery, and other contributions, she noted that computer science has created “marvelous opportunities.” But it also has created problems like fake news, bias stemming from the naive use of machine learning, and potential misuse of recent developments in AI.

“As you do your job, think about what’s ethical to do. If you develop tools, think about tools that will be good for humanity,” Liskov advised, noting that the entire field has an obligation to contribute its technical knowledge to mitigating such problems.

“I had a wonderful career. I had a lot of fun,” she concluded, “and I hope all of you have the same in your careers.”

Celebrating scholarship and service

Outstanding Senior Awards

Liskov’s words would have resonated with the recipients of the Allen School’s Outstanding Senior Awards, which recognize superior scholarship, potential for leadership and the ability to both apply and create new knowledge. While it is a nearly impossible task to choose from among the outstanding graduates each year — all of whom would have demonstrated some combination of those qualities to be admitted in the first place — five were singled out for their extraordinary contributions.

Maggie Jiang distinguished herself as an insightful and creative researcher in the Allen School’s Security and Privacy Research Lab who wasn’t afraid to ask questions about technology and scientific methodology. Operating at a level associated with experienced Ph.D. students, Jiang contributed to the publication of a longitudinal study of public opinion around the use of contact tracing apps to slow the spread of COVID-19 and concerns over individual privacy. She will continue on at the Allen School as a student in the combined B.S./M.S. program.

Sarah Khan was honored for her contributions as a teaching assistant for CSE Startup, a course for first-year students focused on problem solving, communication and computational thinking skills. In that role, Khan contributed to the development of curriculum for the Allen School Scholars Program and STARS with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity and the diversity of student experiences. Khan, who double-majored in computer science and education, communities and organizations, will continue her studies in the Allen School’s B.S./M.S. program.

Lansong (Ryan) Li was recognized for his remarkable contributions to interdisciplinary research projects bridging natural language processing and social computing. As a member of the Social Futures Lab, Li worked with UW and external collaborators to develop a harm-reduction framework for assessing and triaging misinformation online. He also explored how to leverage state-of-the-art neural network models to assess misinformation believability. Li will pursue a master’s degree at Stanford University following his graduation from the Allen School.

Alex Mallen is known as an ambitious and talented researcher with a passion for AI safety. As a member of the H2Lab, he spearheaded a project that sought to identify when large language models’ outputs can become untrustworthy — revealing his skills at building diagnostic datasets and running experiments in the process. Mallen, who is an active member of the grassroots research collective EleutherAI, previously earned a prestigious Goldwater Scholarship on his way to earning his undergraduate degree in just three years at the Allen School. 

Katherine Murphy earned recognition as an outstanding leader as a teaching assistant for Software Design and Implementation for nine quarters. Having taken over the course software infrastructure when many experienced TAs were about to graduate, she worked with the rest of the teaching team to keep the course running smoothly and ensure continuity across multiple instructors and offerings. Although many of her contributions were behind the scenes, Murphy was responsible for the positive experiences many of her fellow graduates had in the course.

Best Senior Thesis Award

Each year, the school recognizes an undergraduate student for original research contributions through the Best Senior Thesis Award. The recipient of this award has completed an independent research project under the supervision of one or more faculty members culminating in a thesis presenting their results. The school received eight nominations this year, from which it selected one award winner and one honorable mention recipient.

Ximing Lu received the 2023 Best Senior Thesis Award for “The Art of Algorithm and Knowledge in the Era of Extreme-Scale Neural Models.” In her thesis, Lu demonstrated how to empower small to moderate sized neural language models to work competitively against industry-scale models. A prolific researcher working under the supervision of Yejin Choi, the Brett Helsel Career Development Professor in the Allen School and Senior Research Director at AI2, Lu has already published multiple papers in the preeminent venues for natural language processing. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the Allen School.

Matt Deitke earned an honorable mention for his thesis, “Scaling Embodied Artificial Intelligence: Massive 3D Simulations to Real-World Distributional Robustness.” That work, which Deitke completed under the supervision of professor Ali Farhadi, explored ways to improve robots’ abilities to generalize to novel scenarios.

Undergraduate Service Awards

Since 2011, the Allen School has recognized graduating seniors who devoted their time and energy to building community and benefiting their fellow students through various events and activities throughout their time on campus. This year, the school recognized five outstanding graduates with Undergraduate Service Awards.

Camila Christensen (B.S., ‘22) has been “an amazing Allen School ambassador” — particularly to transfer students. Christensen served as a teaching assistant for the school’s transfer seminar, which supports newly arrived students to acclimate to the program, in addition to supporting various outreach efforts and serving as a frequent volunteer for Allen School events.

Described as “an incredible leader,” Hayoung Jung has been an engaged member of the student group Computing Community (COM^2) throughout his time on campus. He applied his leadership skills during the pandemic to analyzing and reporting on how COVID-19 was impacting his fellow students. Jung, who double-majored in computer science and political science, was recognized in the Husky 100 last year.

Samuel Levy has served as a developer for Impact++, a student group focused on the intersection of computing and social good, and as an Allen School peer adviser, assisting his fellow students with advice and resources. For the past year, Levy has served as a lead peer adviser and is known as “an exceptional leader, advocate, and student employee.”

Eman Mustefa co-founded GEN1, a student group focused on building community among Allen School students who are the first in their families to pursue a four-year degree. Passionate about supporting women of color in computing, Mustefa has also “generously stepped up, time and time again” to share her experiences with K-12 students as an Allen School Ambassador.

Earning a reputation as an “outreach and recruitment rockstar,” Lynn Nguyen volunteered for more high school visits and information sessions than any other member of the Allen School Ambassadors team. A community-minded leader who is exceptional at supporting students, Nguyen is also described as the glue that held various events and activities together.

A tip of the hat to great teaching

Bob Bandes Memorial Awards

Teaching assistants play a vital role in the Allen School’s educational mission, serving not only its own majors but also thousands more students across campus who enroll in computing courses. More than 750 students served as Allen school TA’s in 2022-2023, supporting student learning through office hours, tutoring and review sessions while assisting instructors with various course administration duties. As teaching professor Justin Hsia observed, “We could not do what we do without you.” During the annual graduation celebration, the school recognizes outstanding TA’s from the preceding academic year with the Bob Bandes Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching. Out of over 700 total nominations spread out over 200 individual TA’s, the school selected three winners and three runners up who went above and beyond to provide a supportive student experience.

Winner Anthony Chung has supported six different courses over nine quarters as an undergraduate TA, including multiple courses in the Allen School’s Introduction to Computer Programming series, Data Structures and Algorithms, and Distributed Systems. Chung was lauded for his “clear intent to do right by all of his students” through his diligence in providing them with clear feedback and consistent grading. He was also proactive in identifying areas where students were struggling, offering solutions such as the creation of alternative visualizations to assigned problems and hosting one-on-one Zoom calls with students outside of office hours.

Fellow winner Wen Qiu has been a TA for 12 quarters, first as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student in the Allen School’s B.S./M.S. program, for Web Programming, Data Programming and Intermediate Data Programming. In addition, she served as the instructor for the latter course last summer. Known for her going to “tremendous lengths” to share her expertise not only with students in her courses but also her fellow TA’s, Qiu earned accolades for “seeing something needed to be done and jumping in and doing it.” One student nominator noted, “She would be an amazing professor!” Qiu also founded and served as president of the Association for Computing Education (ACE).

The final winner, Sylvia Wang, served as a TA or head TA for nine quarters across five different courses, including Intermediate Data Programming, Data Structures and Parallelism, Systems Programming and Database System Internals. Wang’s teaching style resonated with her students, who described her as kind, encouraging, supportive, patient and helpful. “She stays with each student until they understand the concepts they’re struggling with and does not let any student leave with any confusion.” She was also an excellent advocate for both students and other TA’s, including being proactive in identifying how an assignment that multiple students struggled with could be adjusted to improve the experience of everyone in the class.

Honorable mentions went to Melissa Lin, Sudheesh Singanamalla and Ben Zhang.

Lin, a student in the B.S./M.S. program, has served as a TA for eight quarters spanning the introductory series, Foundations of Computing I and II, and Data Structures and Algorithms and earning students’ appreciation for giving 110% to her students — even at 8:30 in the morning.

Singanamalla, a Ph.D. student, served as a TA for graduate-level courses in Computer Systems and Computer Security and Privacy, where his wisdom and compassion for students “shined brightly in all aspects of his work.”

Zhang, an undergraduate, TA’ed for multiple offerings of the Foundations of Computing series, earning plaudits for being thorough and proactive, making his sections “very welcoming and open” and responding to questions that seem ambiguous with examples generated from his own understanding.

Undergraduate Teaching Awards

Each year, student leaders in COM^2 — formerly the UW chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery — recognize selected faculty members for contributing to the Allen School’s educational mission and enriching the student experience through the Undergraduate Teaching Awards. This year, the group highlighted two professors for their role in “shaping our minds and inspiring our achievements.”

Andrea Coladangelo, a professor in the Allen School’s Cryptography and Theory of Computation groups, was honored for his first quarter of teaching. “He has worked tirelessly this quarter to build up the quantum computing course, expanding the frontiers of knowledge for his students,” COM^2 Chair Vidisha Gupta said.

“What distinguishes him, however, is his ability to discern the ‘real’ question behind the question.” 

Known not only for his technical expertise but also for his kindness and generosity with his time, Coladangelo earned students’ admiration for his willingness to provide one-on-one help and to modify his teaching to better accommodate his class.

Teaching professor Ryan Maas (M.S.’18) was recognized for his impact that reaches far beyond the classroom.

Maas is known for his “captivating lectures” that make challenging concepts seem easy. But what truly sets him apart, Gupta noted, is his extraordinary care and dedication to his students.

“No question is too repetitive or silly for him, as he treats each inquiry with patience and thoughtfulness,” she said. “Ryan’s commitment to his students’ success extends beyond teaching, as he provides guidance and support to help them excel academically and grow as individuals.”

Congratulations to all of our Allen School graduates! And remember — our doors will always be open to you! Read more →

When the applause faded, Michael Gu sat down, shook his sleeves from his wrists and nodded to the conductor. Violins rose around him, waiting. After another pause, he began to play. 

About 20 minutes later, following an energetic account of Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No.1 in E-flat major, he stood up, shook the conductor’s hand and bowed. Applause greeted him once again, this time accompanied by cheers. 

It’s a sound that Gu, a first-year Allen School student, has become well acquainted with during his brief time at UW. Gu, who also studies piano performance, won the UW School of Music’s annual concerto competition in February. His rendition of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1, performed with the UW Symphony in April, celebrated that victory. The concert also featured performances from the other concerto competition winners. 

Does he ever get nervous out there? For the precocious Gu, who has been playing piano since he was little, performing music has become second nature, a chance to enter “a zone of clarity and focus.” When he lifts his hands over the keys, he said, everything — actions, thoughts, sounds — simply flows. The scenery melts away and there’s just the music left. 

These days, he’s focused on finding that same level of comfort when he lifts his hands over a computer keyboard. Liszt, at least right now, comes easier than lines of code. 

“Although I’ve had my fair share of terrifyingly difficult experiences with piano,” he said, smiling, “I would have to say that coding is harder.”

But Gu has jumped at opportunities to improve his skills. In 2021, he studied a surface modeling technique at Oregon State University in a graduate computer graphics lab. He then implemented the technique, which maintains a model’s natural movements while minimizing stretching, into a program that creates a hierarchical skeletal system for a 2-D mesh model, eventually presenting his findings to a panel of mentors, graduate students and local professionals. 

“This was my first real introduction to the world of computer science,” he said. “It really inspired me to delve deeper into the field and ultimately settle on it as a major.”

At UW, he’s combined his passions and notes that art and science overlap in more ways than one. 

“While music and computer science may seem to be different, they’re actually quite similar in that they involve creative ability,” he said. “I find it to be quite an interesting pair, as you have a combination of the classical and the modern.”

He’s used both to broaden his horizons and strengthen the communities around him. Early in his UW career, for instance, he founded DEV[0], a student organization focused on app and software development, and is currently an acting co-chair. 

During the pandemic in 2020, Gu saw the impact that music could have on communities in need. He started Musicians for Humanity, a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness for global humanitarian causes through music and art, helping raise hundreds of dollars to support the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Relief Fund as well as for high school music programs in his home state of Oregon. 

This past year, the organization opened a second branch at another high school in Gu’s hometown. Gu, who also organizes and performs in benefit concerts, said he has plans to expand Musicians for Humanity to other locations along the West Coast and use donations to provide free music instruction to underserved populations. He hopes the organization’s efforts will help make music education more accessible. 

“I’ve always been a proponent of the fact that music can heal and bring together groups of people,” he said. “As a musician, I felt that I could use my years of experience to try and make a difference.”

For Gu, making a difference is worth more than a round of applause. 

“The ability to have a creative mindset helps us become better coders, artists and people,” he said. “It has been such a great experience to share my passion for music with others and give back to the community that shaped who I am today.”  Read more →

“There is not one area of the school that she does not touch in some way.”

“She” is Jennifer Worrell, the Allen School’s director of finance and administration. And that observation was made by a colleague advancing her successful nomination for a 2023 Professional Staff Award from the University of Washington College of Engineering. Each year, the College of Engineering Awards honor faculty, research and teaching assistants, and staff like Worrell whose extraordinary contributions benefit the college community.

Now approaching two decades of service at the Allen School, Worrell started out as an office manager and moved into successively more complex roles — event coordinator, grants manager, lead grants manager — before stepping into her current position in 2017. In highlighting her achievements since taking over as the school’s first new DFA in more than 30 years, the College noted that Worrell’s “combination of warmth and organizational know-how contributes to a culture that benefits her team and the Allen School as a whole.” 

That combination makes Worrell so effective at her job, some in the school are convinced that she possesses special powers. 

“Jen is like the great and powerful Oz,” said Kellus Stone, operations analyst at the Allen School and author of the aforementioned letter. “She’s the woman behind the curtain who makes sure everything runs smoothly as folks go about their business without giving a second thought as to how it all works.”

“How it all works” has only become more complex in recent years owing to the roll-out of new systems for managing everything from payroll to print jobs that coincided with a period of rapid growth. That growth has led to the school doubling its degree production, doubling its physical space, and surpassing $75 million in yearly expenditures — with roughly half going toward research.

“Jen has been a key contributor to the Allen School’s success and why it is thriving and growing,” said Megan Russell, assistant director of human resources. “Any time there is a need for someone to fill a gap, Jen raises her hand and says, ‘I’ll do it.’ When an employee says they’re overwhelmed, she responds with, ‘What can I do to help?’ 

“She will never take any credit for it, but she deserves it,” Russell continued. “We are all better for her presence here.”

Despite her can-do attitude and willingness to fill any gap, Worrell would have been forgiven for questioning her presence here after enduring a trial by fire immediately upon ascending to her position. When she took the reins of the school’s Business Office, her first task was to implement and train her team on a new online payroll system, Workday, that was being rolled out across the University. If that wasn’t sufficiently daunting, her second task was to fill two open positions responsible for entering Allen School payroll into this same system after the incumbents left shortly after the big roll-out.

There were times, in those early days, that Worrell wasn’t sure how she would make it past lunch, let alone to the end of the day. But make it she did, repeatedly rising to the occasion while overseeing not only the Business Office, but also Research Administration and Human Resources. Two more teams, Facilities & Operations and Events, would be added to her portfolio later. Each time she was called upon for advice or assistance in response to a crisis, she would answer with a genuine smile on her face — and a genuine concern for the wellbeing of her colleagues.

“Jen leads the entire business administration team, and yet when I have meetings with her, she is fully present and engaged, offering helpful solutions and encouragement,” said Amber Cochran, assistant director of events for the Allen School. “She has the ability to make each staff member feel seen and valued.”

She also leads by example as the de facto head of the Staff Executive Committee, a group that comprises staff directors and assistant directors responsible for various functions that make up the administrative and operational side of the school. This group, which encompasses not only Worrell’s functional teams but also Undergraduate Student Services, Graduate Student Services, Technical Support, External Relations and Communications, engages in high-level organizational planning and develops unified policies and procedures along with consistent messaging across the entire school.

The role is challenging enough on a good day; it reached a whole new level when COVID-induced remote working scattered those directors, assistant directors and their teams across the region — and sometimes even farther afield. And yet, Worrell worked with her colleagues to quickly adapt, taking steps to ensure staff maintained a sense of connection and had the resources they needed remain both agile and resilient in the face of uncertainty.

“Jen is the linchpin — she is the central pillar of our school,” said Magdalena Balazinska, professor and director of the Allen School. “She has very deep expertise and can answer any question on almost any topic. We couldn’t have achieved our current growth without her help and leadership.”

Worrell is extending that help and leadership to assist with the latest overhaul of campus-wide systems known as the University of Washington Finance Transformation (UWFT). Her colleague Debbie Carnes, who serves with her on the Process Transformation Team, has witnessed firsthand how Worrell has employed her professional skills and personal empathy to assist UWFT program staff in understanding how changes to the administration of research grants and other fiscal processes are likely to impact operational staff college-wide.

”Jen’s longtime service to the College, ability to come up with innovative and creative solutions, resourcefulness and positivity are an asset to us all,” said Carnes, administrator for the UW Department of Chemical Engineering. “I cannot think of anyone more deserving of this award than Jen.”

Aside from her well-earned reputation as a skilled leader and a veritable fountain of knowledge about how the University works, perhaps the greatest endorsement Worrell has collected is that of colleagues who point to the time and care that she gives them — even when she is busy. Make that especially when she is busy.

“Not long ago, I ran into Jen in the hallway as she was rushing from one meeting to the next. Despite that, she stopped and asked me how I was doing,” recalled Stone. “I started to answer and then stopped myself and apologized, as I could see she was in a hurry. ‘It’s okay,’ she replied with a smile. ‘You are important, too.’

“I believe that encapsulates who Jen is at her core,” continued Stone. “She is one of a kind.”

Members of the Allen School will gather to celebrate Worrell’s recognition, and that of UW Distinguished Staff Award recipient Chloe Dolese Mandeville, at a reception on June 14. 

Learn more about the College of Engineering Awards here.

Read more →

Champion, advocate, role model…based on her colleagues’ descriptions, Chloe Dolese Mandeville sounds like a regular Girl Scout. Which, it so happens, she is: for the past two and a half years, the Allen School’s Assistant Director for Diversity & Access has volunteered as a troop leader for the Girl Scouts of Western Washington, hosting activities on campus and inspiring girls to see computing as a potential career path.

It is but one example of the many ways in which Dolese Mandeville has helped students to engage with the field — efforts that have now earned her a 2023 Distinguished Staff Award from the University of Washington. Part of the UW Awards of Excellence, the Distinguished Staff Award is the highest honor bestowed upon staff by the University. 

As the saying goes, not all heroes wear capes.

“Chloe’s responsibilities are enormous — hers is definitely not a job for a mere mortal,” said professor Dan Grossman, Vice Director of the Allen School. “But she built a strong team to help her get it done, and she is a phenomenal leader. People love working with her.”

After graduating from UW with a bachelor’s in psychology with a minor in education, Dolese Mandeville joined the Allen School’s undergraduate advising team in 2016 to assist students in charting their own educational journeys. She took a particular interest in transfer students and the unique challenges they face in acclimating to the UW, teaching a seminar designed to help ease the transition. She simultaneously worked on a transition of her own as she pursued a master’s degree in leadership in higher education. 

That degree would come in handy when, a mere two months after completing it, she took the reins of the school’s Diversity & Access program.

At the time, the Allen School’s undergraduate program had earned a national reputation for its success in recruiting and retaining women in computer science. But gender was the only area in which the school seemed to be making headway when it came to the breadth of students it serves. Not long before Dolese Mandeville assumed her present role, Jeff Dean (Ph.D., ‘96), Google Senior Fellow and Chief Scientist, and his wife Heidi Hopper approached school leaders with a challenge to extend the same energy and fervor they had devoted to growing the school’s gender diversity to other underrepresented groups. 

Dolese Mandeville embraced that challenge — and ran with it. Among her first priorities was morphing the school’s K-12 outreach programs from “broad and shallow” to “narrow and deep” by building substantive, sustainable partnerships with a set of schools and community organizations that directly served student populations the school was trying — and to that point, largely failing — to reach. With this new approach, the school soon surpassed the Seattle campus-wide average in the proportion of students who are Black or African American, from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, or among the first in their families to pursue a four-year degree. Previously, the share of the school’s students who identified with these groups was half, or less, than that of the campus as a whole.

“We are serving an increasingly diverse undergraduate population that is more reflective of the face of Washington and of technology users around the world,” said professor Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair Emeritus in Computer Science & Engineering in the Allen School. “Chloe has been instrumental in this remarkable transformation. We wouldn’t have made this progress without her.”

The notion of transformation comes up repeatedly in conversations about Dolese Mandeville’s impact. It is among the many superlatives offered by members of the Allen School’s undergraduate student services team who work alongside her every day.

“Chloe’s compassion, skill, talent and hard work have truly had a transformational effect on the Allen School student experience,” said Crystal Eney, director of undergraduate student services. “Chloe’s tenacity and creativity are among her greatest strengths, and the Diversity & Access team has risen leaps and bounds from where it started under her leadership.”

Another word that is mentioned in connection with Dolese Mandeville is “fierce” — but her peers are quick to point out that such fierceness is accompanied by compassion and kindness. And, they note, her leadership is paying dividends not only for UW but also for the broader field of computing.

“Chloe’s impact on the Allen School and computing is vast and unparalleled. Her leadership in building equitable, justice-oriented programs and systems while centering the student experience is one of Chloe’s greatest strengths.” observed Leslie Ikeda, who manages the Allen School Scholars Program, “If anyone can transform the work we are doing to support our field’s most vulnerable populations, it’s Chloe.”

The program Ikeda manages, formerly known as Allen School Startup, was initially conceived as an immersive, four-week summer experience to assist incoming first-year students who are first-generation, low-income and/or from underserved communities in their transition to college. It has since evolved under Dolese Mandeville’s direction into a comprehensive, year-long cohort-based program with wraparound support. The summer bridge course remains, but that is now accompanied by increased staff support, one-to-one mentorship, workshops that supplement students’ first-year coursework, a new study hall course and community-building events throughout the year.

“Our mission is to educate the next generation of outstanding computer scientists and computer engineers who reflect the diverse needs, backgrounds and experiences of people in society at large,” said Juliet Quebatay, senior program manager for K-12 outreach programs. “Chloe supports us all with time, energy, constructive feedback and a clear vision of where we want to go — all while creating realistic, sustainable collaborations and programming that will help the school get there.”

“Us all” is the close-knit team of full-time professional staff that Dolese Mandeville has assembled to execute on that vision. In addition to Quebatay and Ikeda, the team includes Christina Huynh, academic adviser for the Allen Scholars; Kayla Shuster Sasaki, who focuses on high school and transfer student recruiting, and EJ Pinera, who works directly with Allen School student groups such as Ability, Women in Computing (WiC), GEN1, Minorities in Tech (MiT) and Q++ — to name only a few. Like much of the school’s current DEIA-focused initiatives, those groups got their start with Dolese Mandeville’s encouragement.

“Chloe championed the importance of student groups in building community and a sense of belonging for all students in the Allen School,” Pinera said. 

Dolese Mandeville also championed a mentorship initiative alongside undergraduate students called Changemakers in Computing. CiC is a summer program for rising juniors and seniors in Washington state high schools interested in exploring technology and its intersection with society and justice. Through a combination of culturally relevant project-based learning and networking opportunities, the program empowers students from marginalized backgrounds to engage with computing as a potential career while building a community of future computer scientists and engineers who will be changemakers in the field. Importantly, CiC is completely free to participants; meals, public transportation to campus and all activities are covered by the program, as is an education stipend, to ensure that a lack of financial resources is no barrier to student participation. 

The program has grown from serving roughly 20 high school students when it was launched in 2021 to 40 students in the most recent cohort. Encouraging students to lead the way, as she did with CiC — and backing them up with the tools and resources that will help them to succeed — is characteristic of Dolese Mandeville’s approach.

“Chloe prioritizes student voices,” said Chelsea Navarro, senior academic adviser. “She takes actions big and small to ensure that students of all backgrounds feel that they belong and can thrive here.”

Those actions include teaming up with Pinera, Assistant Director of Advising Jenifer Hiigli and Senior Academic Adviser Rakeb Million to push for the creation of physical spaces in the school’s buildings that reflect its values around DEIA. Spaces such as the Diversity & Access student lounge and a dedicated prayer/meditation room offer places where students can support each other, share experiences and honor their whole selves.

In addition to taking concrete steps that contribute to a more welcoming and inclusive culture, Dolese Mandeville is also committed to setting the school up for success over the long haul.

“Chloe is amazing and an incredible asset to the Allen School. Our entire community — students, staff and faculty — benefit from her presence,” said professor Tadayoshi Kohno, the Allen School’s associate director for diversity, equity, inclusion and access. “In summer 2020 Chloe and I started working on a 5-year strategic plan to guide our DEIA work, and her vision, leadership and wisdom have been instrumental in getting us to where we are today.”

“Where we are today” is a testament to how effective Dolese Mandeville has been in helping the Allen School rise to the challenge issued by Hopper and Dean since she stepped into her role.

“I see firsthand, every day, the amount of energy, compassion and thought Chloe puts into building out our DEIA efforts,” said Hiigli. “The Allen School would absolutely not be the same if she had not been here building these programs over the past several years. 

“Chloe’s work has benefited thousands of computer science students in countless ways.”

Two of Dolese Mandeville’s Allen School colleagues were also among the nominees for 2023 Distinguished Staff Awards: Senior Academic Adviser Chelsea Navarro, in the individual impact category, and Robotics Lab Manager Selest Nashef, in the individual collaboration category.

Dolese Mandeville and her fellow honorees will be formally recognized at a campus ceremony on June 8.

Learn more about the UW Awards of Excellence here. Read more →