Allen School News

The Allen School has selected Janet Davis and Paul Mikesell as the 2023 recipients of its Alumni Impact Award, which recognizes former students who have made significant contributions to the field of computing. Davis and Mikesell will be formally honored during the Allen School’s graduation celebration on June 9 — demonstrating for a new class of alumni what can be achieved with an Allen School education. 

Janet Davis (Ph.D., ‘06) shares “joy in making things” while teaching the next generation

Janet Davis’ path to earning her doctorate wasn’t straightforward. She changed research areas more than once, and got a taste of what it was like to be in front of a classroom giving a lecture, rather than behind a desk listening to one. Her first experience teaching didn’t go as planned. She discovered, she said, how her skills could evolve. 

“But I had a growth mindset,” Davis said. “If I was going to teach, I wanted to learn how to teach well, and I knew that with practice I could improve.”

It was a mindset that served her well during the remainder of her time at the University of Washington. She took a seminar on computer science education, registered for classes in undergraduate education, participated in several teaching workshops and continued to pursue teaching assistant opportunities when they appeared. When she graduated in 2006, she was familiar with several areas of study and felt more comfortable planning a class. So much so, that she decided she’d make a career out of teaching. 

“My time at UW was a challenging and transformative experience that cemented my commitment to undergraduate education,” she said. “Now it is tremendous fun to learn alongside my students.”

The 2023 Alumni Impact Award honoree continues to make a difference both in the classroom and beyond. She was recently awarded full professorship at Whitman College, where she created the institution’s computer science program. Before joining the liberal arts college in Walla Walla, Washington, she spent nine years teaching at Grinnell College in Iowa, honing her craft and preparing for a life dedicated to passing along knowledge to the next generation. 

“Janet is a true leader who embodies the character of Whitman College,” said professor Ed Lazowksa, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair Emeritus at the Allen School. “When Whitman’s leadership approached me with the idea of launching a computer science program in 2012, I knew just the person who could build something really special.” 

Professor emeritus Alan Borning, Davis’ co-advisor during her time at UW, agreed. Borning recalled her enthusiasm participating in a reading group on the social aspects of informatics that he and her other co-advisor, Batya Friedman, led. It was a hint of what was to come.

“Janet has been a real leader in computer science education, particularly in liberal arts colleges,” Borning said, “and has been exceptionally effective in combining top-rate teaching with undergraduate research.”

Davis has taken the idea of a liberal arts education to heart, while combining it with her love for computer science and problem solving. At Whitman, for instance, students declare a major during their second year. It’s at that time that Davis asks the deep questions, prompting students to think more about a calling rather than just a career. 

“Some students talk about career prospects, and I encourage them to think twice about whether taking CS courses is how they want to spend the rest of their time at Whitman,” she said. “Others talk about their delight in solving puzzles, their triumphs over difficult problems or their hope for making a difference in the world. Those students make my day. But the ones with whom I feel a special sympathy are those who share their joy in making things.”

Davis shares her “joy in making things” across the liberal arts landscape. She’s a member of the Liberal Arts Computer Science Consortium (LACS), a co-leader of the SIGCSE Committee on Computing Education in Liberal Arts Colleges (SIGCSE-LAC) and a member of the Computing Research Association’s Committee on Education (CRA-E). 

“With SIGCSE-LAC, I’m part of a group developing a process for how liberal arts faculty can use national curricular guidelines to develop their own distinctive curriculum,” she said. “And as part of my work for CRA-E, I am co-organizing a summer workshop for graduate students considering teaching-oriented faculty careers.” 

Several of her students have gone on to academic careers themselves. When they’ve hit a roadblock, she shares some wisdom that can only come through experience and from mentors who have been there before. 

These days, she is the mentor. 

“You have to test your ideas to know if they are good or bad, and you can always iterate to make them better,” she said. “These ideas were important for me as the founder of a new academic program, and I share them with my students whenever the need arises. Beginning is the only way to discover what you have to say and what you still need to learn.”

Paul Mikesell (B.S., ‘96) stays ready for the future, without forgetting his roots

In the 1980s, a 9-year-old Paul Mikesell booted up his Commodore 64 and stared, transfixed by the message on the screen. Was it a declaration? A directive? Or something more? 

“It greeted you with its iconic ‘READY’ prompt,” he said of the popular home computer, “and since that day I’ve been trying to answer the question ‘ready for what?’”

It’s a challenge that Mikesell, the founder and CEO of Carbon Robotics and 2023 Alumni Impact Award honoree, has met time and again. In 2001, he and a friend founded Isilon Systems, producing the world’s fastest scale-out clustered file system and storage platform. In the five years that followed, the startup grew to about 800 employees but neared the verge of collapse before its initial public offering in 2006. Then in 2010, EMC bought the company for $2.25 billion. 

Around the time of Isilon’s IPO, Mikesell left to co-found Clustrix, for which he helped invent a massively parallel scale-out clustered database system. Once again, he was at the heart of building something from the ground up. Again, he and his team took on considerable risk. 

And yet again, they succeeded. Clustrix was acquired by database giant MariaDB in 2018. 

“Every tech startup I’ve been at has almost died multiple times — and none of them have actually died,” Mikesell said. “It has always been the amazing people at the company that makes the company a success, and I’m incredibly grateful for everyone on these teams and that we managed to pull through.”

Carbon Robotics, which makes AI-enabled robotics for agriculture, is the latest of his ventures. Its main product, the LaserWeeder, allows farmers to kill weeds in their fields without relying on herbicides or hard-to-source farm labor. The AI-powered weeder, the first of its kind, launched early last year, with plans to be delivered to farms across 17 U.S. states and three Canadian provinces as well as internationally. Since its founding in 2018, Carbon Robotics has raised roughly $67 million in funding. 

“Carbon Robotics is one of Seattle’s most successful startups,” Lazowska said. “The LaserWeeder is tremendously cost-effective and it rides the wave of organic farming.”

Yet even more than his various companies and their financial success, Mikesell said he is most proud of the camaraderie he’s built over time. He’s worked with several of the same people on multiple ventures, for instance — relationships that have taken root and have only grown since. 

“I hope that means that they feel they were treated well, given trust and respect,” he said, “and were able to grow and hopefully make some nice economic compensation along the way.”

Mikesell adds the Alumni Impact Award to a growing collection of honors. At the recent GeekWire Awards ceremony in Seattle, Carbon Robotics won Hardware/Gadget/Robotics of the Year. 

He’s remained ready for whatever the vagaries of entrepreneurship have thrown at him. He credited his time at UW for giving him the skills and confidence to venture out, take risks and keep answering whatever questions the future has in store. 

“When the internet arrived it was immediately clear that everything was going to change, and I needed to be a part of it,” he said. “The promise of unexplored capabilities, tools, toys and efficiencies has kept me going ever since.” Read more →

The review of existing literature is an essential part of scientific research — and citations play a key role by enabling researchers to trace the origins of ideas, put the latest progress into context and identify potential directions for future research. In the course of their review, a researcher may encounter dozens, or even hundreds, of inline citations that may or may not be linked to papers that are directly relevant to their work. While there are tools that can predict how a cited paper contributed or weigh its influence on a particular work, those are one-size-fits-all approaches that do not reflect a reviewer’s personal interests and goals.

A team of researchers from the Allen School, Allen Institute for AI, and the University of Pennsylvania envisioned a more personalized experience. The resulting paper, “CiteSee: Augmenting Citations in Scientific Papers with Persistent and Personalized Historical Context,” recently earned a Best Paper Award at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2023).

CiteSee assists researchers with scientific literature reviews by creating personalized visual cues to contextualize previously encountered citations. These cues make it easier to identify potentially relevant papers which they have yet to consider — and keep tabs on those they encountered previously — based on their reading and saving history.

To inform their design of the tool, the team conducted exploratory interviews to understand how researchers make sense of inline citations as they read as well as what limitations and needs come up when completing literature reviews. 

”We discovered that researchers had trouble determining which citations were important,” explained co-author and Allen School professor Amy Zhang, director of the Social Futures Lab. “They also wanted to keep better track of the context around their saved citations, especially when those papers appeared as citations in multiple publications.”

Based on their findings, Zhang and her colleagues built three key features into CiteSee to personalize the reader’s experience. These included the means to augment known paper citations, discover unknown paper citations, and assist users in keeping track of and triaging how they had previously interacted with papers to make better sense of inline citations as they read. CiteSee applies visual cues to indicate to readers whether a particular citation is one they have previously encountered, such as a previously visited paper, a saved paper, a paper that the reader has cited in the past or the reader’s own paper. 

“A user can adjust the time frame around papers they have read to fine-tune CiteSee’s visual augmentation of inline citations,” noted Zhang. “They can also easily reference the citing sentence for that same citation across multiple papers, enabling them to truly customize the literature review experience.”

The research team assessed how useful CiteSee would be in practice through both a controlled laboratory study and a field deployment. In the lab study, the researchers aimed to validate CiteSee’s ability to identify relevant prior work during the literature review process. They found that leveraging personal reading history had a significant impact on CiteSee’s ability to identify relevant citations for the users.

The goal of the field deployment was to observe how CiteSee would perform in a real-world literature review setting. Based on their observations and subsequent interviews, the team found that participants actively engaged with augmented inline citations. They also found that having the ability to view the citations in context aided the participants to make connections across papers. In addition, when participants opened reencountered citations, they were three times more likely to discover relevant prior work than through other methods. Overall, participants found that CiteSee enabled them to keep better track of reencountered citations, process current papers for relevant citations, recall previously read papers and understand relationships through sensemaking across multiple papers. Two-thirds of the participants continued to engage with CiteSee following the research period.

Beyond this, the team identified a couple of features to potentially incorporate into CiteSee in the future, such as providing the means to specify the current literature review context and also to differentiate between multiple simultaneous literature searches.   

In addition to Zhang, co-authors of the paper include Allen School professor emeritus Daniel Weld, general manager and chief scientist for Semantic Scholar at AI2; Allen School alumni Jonathan Bragg (Ph.D., ‘18) and Doug Downey (Ph.D., ’08), who are both senior research scientists at AI2; lead author Joseph Chee Chang, senior research scientist at AI2; AI2 scientist Kyle Lo; and University of Pennsylvania professor Andrew Head.

Three additional papers by Allen School researchers received honorable mentions at this year’s CHI conference.

Amanda Baughan, a fifth-year Ph.D. student advised by Allen School adjunct professor Alexis Hiniker, a faculty member in the Information School, was lead author of “A Mixed-Methods Approach to Understanding User Trust after Voice Assistant Failures.” Baughan and her co-authors at Google Research developed a crowdsourced dataset of voice assistant failures to analyze how failures affect users’ trust in their voice assistants and approaches for regaining trust.

Allen School professor Katharina Reinecke, director of the Wildlab, co-authored “Why, When, and for Whom: Considerations for Collecting and Reporting Race and Ethnicity Data in HCI.” In an effort to improve the field’s engagement of diverse participants and generate safe, inclusive and equitable technology, Reinecke and her collaborators at Stanford University, University of Texas at Austin and Northeastern University investigated current approaches to the collection of race and ethnicity data and offered a set of principles for HCI researchers to consider concerning when and how to include such data in future.

Allen School professor Leilani Battle (B.S., ’11) co-director of the Interactive Data Lab, Allen School alumna and lead author Deepthi Raghunandan (M.S., ’16) and colleagues at the University of Maryland explored the iterative process of sensemaking in their paper, “Code Code Evolution: Understanding How People Change Data Science Notebooks Over Time.” The team analyzed over 2500 Jupyter notebooks from Github to determine how notebook authors participate in sensemaking activities such as branching analysis, annotation and documentation, and offered recommendations for extensions to notebook environments to better support such activities.

For more information on CiteSee, read a related AI2 blog post here. In addition to Best Paper honors, multiple UW and Allen School-affiliated researchers were individually recognized with SIGCHI Awards at this year’s conference. These include Nicola Dell (Ph.D., ‘15), now faculty at Cornell University, and Outstanding Dissertation Award recipient Dhruv Jain (Ph.D., ‘21), now a faculty member at the University of Michigan. For a comprehensive overview of all UW authors’ contributions at CHI 2023, read the DUB roundup here. Read more →

Before his Entrepreneurship class earlier this year, Lawrence Tan saw starting a business as byzantine, an endeavor fraught with pitfalls for potential newcomers. But that changed after the Allen School sophomore and his team began building their idea for a smart note-taking platform, fine-tuning their pitch to investors and learning from those who have been there before. 

“Going into the class, I viewed the process of starting a company as a nebulous, secretive practice reserved for well-connected businesspeople,” Tan said. “Hearing the instructors and the guests they invited speak about their personal startup experiences helped dispel this notion and showed me that there are many possible paths to entrepreneurship available for anyone who has an idea, regardless of what career path they come from.”

Taught by professor Ed Lazowska and Greg Gottesman, managing director for Pioneer Square Labs, along with professor emeritus Oren Etzioni, advisor and board member for the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and a technical director of the AI2 Incubator, the entrepreneurship class has been a favorite of Allen School students for the past decade. Etzioni joined the class as an instructor this year. 

“Everyone I talked to said that it was the best class they had ever taken at the UW,” Tan said. “After taking it myself I absolutely share this sentiment and I find myself recommending the class to every fellow CSE student I meet.” 

Tan discovered it through word of mouth in the school’s undergraduate labs. The course requires students to form teams and develop a software startup idea, quickly putting them in the crucible and through their paces. Create, pitch, pivot and repeat. 

For the course, 75 students are selected from the Allen School’s undergraduate and graduate programs, the Foster School of Business MBA program, the Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design program (MHCI+D) and other design programs.

“It was an incredible opportunity to grow my confidence and leadership skills,” Tan said. “While I had worked on group projects in other CSE classes, leading a team of nine members across business, design and computer science disciplines required a completely different level of coordination and planning.”

With each iteration, teams receive feedback from instructors, special guests and fellow students. At the end, the goal is to persuade a potential investor to offer a second meeting. 

When it came time to make the team’s final pitch, Tan stepped up and delivered the key points of the presentation that tied for the top performance in a class of eight amazing teams. It was the culmination of pushing the limits of his comfort zone, he said, a synthesis of learning how to pilot a project and keep it on track.

“Lawrence had the courage to demonstrate AutoNote ‘live’ to the assembled venture professionals by taking notes on another team’s presentation,” Lazowska said. “The demo was a triumph — to the extent that one of the VCs is talking with the team about pursuing the project as a startup. Lawrence is only a sophomore — he punches far, far, far above his weight!”

The course helped Tan see how to turn an abstract idea into a real business. Yet its ethos — create and collaborate — has been part and parcel of Tan’s experience from the start of his UW career. 

In just two years at the Allen School, the Vancouver native has already made his mark. As a freshman, he joined Advanced Robotics at the University of Washington (ARUW), picking things up quickly from the club’s seniors. They helped him learn everything from high-level code architecture to the intricacies of processing camera, motion sensor and wheel odometry data, all of which are crucial to a robotics computer vision system. 

They’ve also helped him grow as a leader. Worried about missing a week of classes during summer quarter, Tan had to be convinced to attend last year’s RoboMaster North America competition. They had their reasons — Tan led the design and implementation of a dual-camera system for the team’s robot fleet, which proved vital in attaining victory. At the competition last year, it was the only system of its kind. 

“Going into the competition, there was an element of anticipation and surprise, as each team had hidden their most advanced and innovative new developments for the entire year in order to gain a competitive advantage,” Tan said. “It was interesting to hear about the different approaches each team took to design their robots and the software architectures that supported them, and it was incredibly rewarding to see our secret dual-turret sentry rapidly defeat an opposing robot during the final match of the competition.”

For the ARUW team, it was déjà vu. The team had defended its title from 2021.

“Through my experience at ARUW, I have learned how exciting it is to work on new and challenging projects,” he said. “The projects I am the most proud of are the ones where I had to put a lot of thought and research into a feature that our team had never attempted before.”

Tan has also been a teaching assistant for two computer science courses and has worked on research in the Social Futures Lab with Allen School professor Amy Zhang and Human Centered Design & Engineering Ph.D. student Kevin Feng. There, he is working on new AI-powered interfaces to help users better curate their social media feeds. 

The research dovetails with his interest in human-computer interaction. Whether with people or computers, he sees working in concert — and remaining curious — as the solution to most challenges. 

“Nowadays, I feel like the more I learn, the more areas I realize I don’t know anything about,” he said, laughing. “I hope that wherever I go, I continue to meet new people and uncover new things to learn.” Read more →

Singing in the University Chorale helped Sidharth Lakshmanan, a student in the Allen School’s fifth-year master’s program, become a better coder. Finding the right key, he found, was all about teamwork.  

“Choir has helped me realize that when every part works together in harmony — no pun intended — the end result is often so much better than if only one of those parts is very strong,” he said. “This has improved me as a computer scientist because I find that I am learning to strike a balance between readability and performance in the code I write.”

The multitalented Lakshmanan has put collaboration center stage during his time at the University of Washington. Having obtained his bachelor’s degree from the Allen School in March, he was recently awarded the College of Engineering Dean’s Medal for Academic Excellence in recognition of both his scholarship and his contributions to the broader computer science and engineering community. 

“Receiving this award means a lot to me because this award represents all of the hard work I have put into each and every day at UW,” he said. “But I would not be where I am without the support of my amazing family, friends and mentors! Each and every one of them have been super supportive, carrying me through times of need. This award represents my thankfulness to those who supported me along the way.”

When he’s not singing in the choir, Lakshmanan directs his attention to a number of projects in computer science and mentorship. From the start of his research journey, he said, his goal was to make a positive impact in the lives of others. For instance, through his work with the Allen School’s Makeability Lab led by professor Jon Froehlich, he helped develop Project Sidewalk, a crowd-sourcing application that allows users to classify sidewalks and make cities more accessible. He implemented and deployed a validation schema to more than 10 cities that allowed users to vote on classifications, helping make the data more robust. 

Lakshmanan subsequently joined the Molecular Information Systems Lab, where he is currently leading a research project on the structural embedding for protein sequences using machine learning techniques in collaboration with MISL co-director Jeff Nivala and Ph.D. student Phil Leung. The team has submitted a paper to the 2023 International Conference on Learning Representations and is in the revision process.

“Though I do not come from a biology background,” Lakshmanan said, “the machine learning challenges of this application fascinate me.”

Lakshmanan also joined SAMPL where he contributed to a project led by professor Luis Ceze and Ph.D. student Zihao Ye on Sparse Tensor IR, a compilation abstraction that offers composable formats and composable transformations for deep learning workloads. As part of the research, Lakshmanan wrote data-dependent GPU kernels to be able to outperform current state-of-the-art libraries.

Besides his research efforts, Lakshmanan was also one of the first 10 members of the Husky Coding Project, a club on campus that gives people of all majors and academic backgrounds an opportunity to work on a large-scale, coding-related team project for an entire year. He is now an education and technology lead of the club and has helped it grow to more than 80 members. 

“We often hear ‘you need experience to gain experience,’ meaning that it is difficult for students early in their UW careers and non-computer science majors to get software internships,” he said. “I am really proud of the club’s mission to expand opportunities in this space, so this is one of my main extracurriculars that I spend my time on.”

Among his schoolwork, his varied research projects and helping lead the Husky Coding Project, he’s found time to participate in the University Chorale. The UW choir gives him another creative outlet, he said, one that allows him to access a different part of his brain. But coding and choir connect in more ways than one, he added, especially when it comes to working together for a better outcome. 

“One of the things I love about choir is that every section is like its own team that needs to coordinate both internally and externally,” he said. “So often, it is not ‘how do I sound?’, it is more ‘how do we sound, and how am I a part of that sound?’ ”

Whether with chords or with code, Lakshmanan continues to seek harmony wherever he goes. He will take that mindset to internships with Palantir and SpaceX later this year, and continue with his master’s studies at UW, where time, he said, has flown by. 

“I loved that every time I would start translating my thoughts to code or singing with the choir, I would enter a flow state that would turn hours to minutes,” he said, smiling. “This is why I came to this field and to UW.” Read more →

After graduating with her doctorate from NYU in 1990, Anne Dinning (B.S., ‘84) was considering a career in academia when she met computer scientist David Shaw through a friend. She was intrigued by the opportunity to develop software for a small company operating in a pioneering field, and joined the D. E. Shaw group as one of the investment and technology firm’s first 20 employees. Shaw, the founder, had recruited individuals not afraid to take a nontraditional path, ones whose academic mindset led them to think differently about the financial industry and ultimately change how hedge funds did business.

“Similar to my experience in academia,” Dinning said, “I knew right away at the D. E. Shaw group that I was part of an environment filled with very smart people working together to invent new things.” 

As one of the trailblazers of quantitative investing, the D. E. Shaw group now has more than 2,000 employees worldwide and manages over $60 billion in capital. Dinning, the firm’s managing director, led many of its investment strategies, including energy, benchmark-relative equities and long-short equities. 

“Anne was one of the first people to join the firm and one of the top people who was managing the firm over the years as it grew,” Shaw said. “And she was a key mind who was involved in thinking out what the field of quantitative finance was going to mean, shaping the culture and the nature of the firm. She’s just remarkable in many dimensions, but in terms of raw brilliance and competence, she’s pretty much off the charts.”

Besides her role as managing director, Dinning is also a member of D. E. Shaw’s Executive Committee. As an Allen School alum, she’s remained engaged with her alma mater through her membership on the school’s Advisory Board and a professorship established in her father’s name. Along with Michael Wolf, Dinning also established two other professorships, one named for professor emeritus Richard Ladner, who advised her undergraduate research, and one named for professor emeritus Jean-Loup Baer, who taught the first computer science course she took at UW.

“The Ladner Professorship is now held by professor Jennifer Mankoff, who is a world expert on technology to benefit people with disabilities,” said Ladner, who noted Dinning’s commitment to supporting inclusion and accessibility efforts. “Anne’s history of giving goes back to her time as a student at UW.” 

Those efforts, Ladner recalled, included her senior thesis project on a text editor that would be useful for those who are DeafBlind and have little experience with technology. During her senior year, Dinning helped organize a fundraising event at her sorority Delta Gamma for the American Association of the DeafBlind Convention that was held at UW in 1984. 

“In the end the sorority raised $2,000,” said Ladner, an organizer of the convention, “which was one of the largest contributions we received.”

Dinning’s legacy of service has only grown since. She has served on the boards of several organizations, including Partners in Health, the Robin Hood Foundation and Code.org, among others. 

“I got to know Anne when she traveled to Haiti to visit some of the work that Partners in Health does there,” said Ophelia Dahl, co-founder of the global health nonprofit. “Anne came in full of curiosity and questions — there was no aspect of the work that she wasn’t interested in. PIH and I, as a friend, have lucked out by knowing Anne and knowing that she’s going to be connected to this work, and in it for the long haul.” 

The UW College of Engineering recently recognized Dinning with a 2023 Diamond Award, which honors alumni and friends who have made outstanding contributions to the field of engineering. Dinning received the Dean’s Award and was honored at the college’s Diamond Awards event held on May 18.

Learn more about the 2023 Diamond Award honorees here and read more about Dinning’s UW and professional experiences below. 

Allen School: Congratulations on being named a 2023 UW College of Engineering Diamond Award honoree. What does this distinction — and UW — mean to you? 

Anne Dinning: I grew up in the Seattle area, and I enrolled at the University of Washington in 1980, back when it was a much easier process to get into college. I’ve been fortunate to stay in close contact with UW now for four-plus decades, but my connection to the university goes back even further, as my dad got his B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from UW in the 1960s and has been a lifelong member of the UW community. So this award has a special significance for me and my family.

When I was in school, the computer science department was still relatively new and back then was part of the College of Arts & Sciences. It’s a thrill for me to see how much the department has grown, advancing to become a real powerhouse in the field. 

Allen School: Can you talk about your experiences at UW and how they helped inform where you are now? 

AD: I have so many memories from my time at UW, and I think about them frequently when I visit campus. I still have a pin that professor Ed Lazowska gave to students as a badge of honor for surviving his CS451 class on operating systems. I remember how hard that class was. I’ve carried that pin and that memory with me through a number of significant challenges over the course of my career. When I was a senior at UW, I had the opportunity to work with professor Richard Ladner and one of his graduate students on creating a text editor for the DeafBlind community, a large community in the Seattle area. That was the first time I remember contributing to something where I could see how my work in computer science could be used to meaningful effect in the real world. 

Allen School: I read that you became interested in computer science aboard a train while studying abroad. Can you talk a bit more about this experience and how it impacted your career path? 

AD: During my freshman year at UW, I studied abroad for a quarter in France. One day I was on a train and struck up a conversation with the person sitting next to me, who asked about my interests. I said I liked order and organization and was thinking about a future as a librarian or an accountant. He suggested I think about computer programming — a skill that was, even at the time, very portable and adaptable. 

I’d never had a computer at home and had never really interacted with one at all. That conversation with a stranger on a train sparked my interest: I was especially drawn to CS as a ticket to anywhere. I signed up for my first computer science class in my next quarter at UW with professor Jean-Loup Baer. 

Allen School: Any anecdotes from your early days at the firm? 

AD: For my first assignment, I was asked to research a market that was new to the firm. Upon reading some related academic work, I realized how much I didn’t know. I remember loading mag tapes, formatting and cleaning data, and figuring out how to conduct analysis on that data. It was a big opportunity for me, and I had the chance to learn from what went right and what went wrong along the way. (I even managed to crash the firm’s whole database one afternoon!) 

Allen School: What sparked your interest in computational finance? 

AD: It was such a thrill the first time I built my own forecasting algorithm, because I had the chance to see in real time if the model I’d built was working. We used simulations to assess how a forecast might work in real-life trading, and when I was running simulations on that first forecast, I would wake up every two hours over the weekend to check my simulations and launch a new batch. I was lucky enough to have a terminal at my house, and I can still hear the chirps and beeps of that modem dialing in every two hours. 

Allen School: What challenges in your career changed your perspective or helped you grow as a leader? 

AD: I’ve been in the financial industry since 1990, and while the D. E. Shaw group has had a lot of successes, we’ve also faced our share of challenging moments and market crises along the way. 

Those moments have taught me a lot about myself as a leader. When I think back on some of those times, it occurs to me that much of the value I provided wasn’t just in setting our strategic course with my senior colleagues, but rather, in doing things like sitting with our traders who trade overnight and making sure they had the support, the calm and the access they needed to execute what needed to get done. I’ve learned that my style of leadership is often best expressed with my sleeves rolled up. Read more →

University of Washington professor Thomas Rothvoss, a member of the Allen School’s Theory of Computation group with a joint appointment in the UW Department of Mathematics, has received the 2023 Gödel Prize recognizing outstanding papers in theoretical computer science for “The matching polytope has exponential extension complexity.” In the paper, Rothvoss proved that linear programming — a core technique in combinatorial optimization for modeling a large class of problems that are polynomial-time solvable  — cannot be used to solve the perfect matching problem in polynomial time. He originally presented these results at the 46th Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2014).

Rothvoss shares this year’s accolade with researchers Samuel Fiorini and Serge Massar of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Hans Raj Tiwary of Charles University in Prague, Sebastian Pokutta of the Zuse Institute Berlin and Technische Universität Berlin, and Ronald de Wolf of the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica and the University of Amsterdam. Two years before Rothvoss published his seminal result, that team proved the extension complexity of the polytope for the Traveling Salesperson Problem is exponential — confirming that there is no polynomial-sized extended formulation, and therefore no small linear program, that can be used to solve the TSP. 

That result provided a partial, yet definitive, answer to a problem posed by theoretician Mihalis Yannakakis two decades prior. For Rothvoss and his colleagues in the tight-knit theory community, it was a watershed moment.

“Most of the time in complexity theory, we deal in conjectures but can’t actually prove any of them,” Rothvoss said. “On a good day, we can maybe prove that one conjecture implies another. So it was rather surprising when Sam and the rest of that group proved, completely unconditionally, the exponential extension complexity of the TSP polytope.”

The group further proved that its result extended to the maximum cut and stable-set polytopes, as well. But that proof, significant as it was, only answered the question for problems that are NP-hard. Inspired by the progress Fiorini and his collaborators had made, Rothvoss aimed to settle Yannakakis’ question once and for all when it comes to linear programs applied to polytopes that are not NP-hard — that is, well-understood polytopes, such as that of the perfect matching problem, for which polynomial-time algorithms for optimizing linear functions are known to exist. 

And settle it, he did.

“I focused on it full-time for half a year,” Rothvoss recalled. “A couple of the technical aspects of that 2012 paper were also useful for my purposes, such as a technique drawn from Razborov’s classic paper on communication complexity, while others I had to modify.

“In particular, we knew the so-called rectangle covering lower bound used by Fiorini et al. to great effect in the case of TSP would not suffice for the matching polytope,” he continued. “In fact, the rectangle cover number for matchings is polynomial in the number of vertices, so it turned out that a more general technique — hyperplane separation lower bound — works instead.”

In the process of arriving at his proof, Rothvoss confirmed that Edmonds’ characterization of the matching polytope, made nearly half a century earlier, is essentially optimal. According to Allen School professor James R. Lee, his colleague’s work was — and remains — a significant insight with ramifications in mathematics, algorithm design and operations research.

“Thomas’ work is a masterful combination of ideas from two seemingly disparate areas of TCS,” said Lee. “It’s the synthesis of really profound insights of Yannakakis and Razborov from three decades ago, weaving together polyhedral combinatorics and communication complexity to settle a problem that essentially predates the era of P vs. NP.”

Rothvoss previously received the Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize from the Mathematical Optimization Society and the American Mathematical Society for the same work. He is also the past recipient of a Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and Best Paper Awards at STOC, the Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) organized by the ACM and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the Conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization (IPCO). 

The Gödel Prize, named for mathematical logician Kurt Gödel, is co-sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). Rothvoss and his fellow honorees will be formally recognized at STOC 2023 in Orlando, Florida next month. Learn more about the Gödel Prize here. Read more →

Few occasions better illustrate the human experience than sharing stories over a meal. Yet for people with motor impairments, the act of dining itself can invite undue pressure. Caregivers can get distracted while feeding their clients, who may feel self-conscious about interrupting the ongoing conversations to remind their caregiver to feed them a bite. A simple hangout with friends or family can turn into a source of potential embarrassment. The meal becomes more functional than social — and potentially, a process to be endured rather than a time for celebration. 

That’s changing thanks to an innovative partnership between Allen School robotics researchers and the assistive technology nonprofit Tyler Schrenk Foundation. Led by Ph.D. student Amal Nanavati, postdoc Patrícia Alves-Oliveira and community researcher Tyler Schrenk, the group conducted a study using an assistive robot in social dining contexts.

Prior robot-assisted feeding research has focused on the functional aspects of feeding, such as enabling a robot to recognize food on a plate and deliver it to the user’s mouth. But less attention has been devoted to dining’s social aspects, such as etiquette and conversational norms. 

For the Allen School team, it was a chance to bring all parties to the table. The roboticists engaged with target users of the technology throughout the technology design process, not just at the end to evaluate the system.

“Too often, we as roboticists develop tools that work well in a lab, but not in the dynamic, nuanced, social environments that users want to use them in,” Nanavati said. “If we truly want to take a user-centered approach to developing robot-assisted feeding systems, we have to meet users where they are and develop for the contexts in which they want to use the technology.”

Nanavati and his co-authors, which also include Ph.D. student Ethan K. Gordon and professors Maya Cakmak and Siddhartha Srinivasa, won the Best Design Paper Award at the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2023).

As part of the study, which was developed with support from UW CREATE’s student minigrant, the researchers created videos to familiarize participants with robot-assisted feeding systems and to facilitate the conversations around users’ preferred features. After incorporating feedback from participant interviews, they then developed design principles and an implementation guide for robot-assisted social dining to enable other researchers to easily contribute to this space. The design was wholly collaborative, with researchers and participants working together. 

“It is an honor to be recognized with a Best Paper Award in a competitive international conference with a work about disabilities and robotics,” Alves-Oliveira said. “It shows that the HRI community recognizes the importance of working equally with a community researcher throughout the research process, and that we have much to learn about designing robotic systems for contexts outside of the lab.”

The team’s community researcher, Tyler Schrenk, was paralyzed in a diving accident in 2012. Since then, he’s become an expert in assistive technology, helping companies in the field empower users and provide greater independence through their creations. As president of the Washington state-based foundation that bears his name, he has helped provide more than $110,000 worth of assistive technologies to individuals with mobility impairments across the world. 

Both Nanavati and Alves-Oliveira credited Schrenk for providing crucial insights and helping recruit participants for the study, which is one of the few to involve a “community researcher,” a member of the target community who collaborates with the team throughout the entire research process, from early ideation all the way to research publication. 

“I believe the future of caregiving and at-home nursing care is the assistive robotic field,” Schrenk said. “Assistive robotics are a must for those living with disabilities.” 

Currently, many challenges affect at-home care. Schrenk pointed to a lack of available caregivers as well as challenges with receiving care that is tailored to one’s needs and preferences. Another hurdle is giving users an increased sense of autonomy. With assistive robots, users would be empowered to complete tasks when they want to and in their own way, augmenting the support that human caregivers can provide them. 

“Tyler helped define the direction of the project and provided context for much of the data analysis,” Nanavati said. “This collaboration helped us reach much deeper insights and challenged us to adapt research norms to make them more accessible.”

A meal should be memorable, Alves-Oliveira added, and not for a potential faux pas from the machine. No spilled food, no extraneous movements. First and foremost, the user should be in control. 

Together, the team has set the table for a brighter future, a place where everyone feels welcome. 

“No matter what culture we belong to, there are moments at the table that can be compared to a sacred ritual — we share important moments of our lives while sharing food,” Alves-Oliveira said. “We discovered that people with motor impairments are missing out on this social exchange because they are distracted by challenges during dining or they avoid social dining altogether. We wanted to bring back this meaningful experience to them with the help of a robot.”

Read the research paper here, watch a video presentation of the work here, and see some of the ways in which robot-assisted social feeding can go wrong here.  Read more →

Since 2020, communities around the globe have endured more than 1,100 natural disasters combined. From floods and drought to earthquakes and wildfires, these events contribute to human suffering and economic upheaval on a massive scale. So, too, do pandemics; since the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 at the end of 2019, nearly 7 million people have died from COVID-19. 

Then there is the human, economic and geopolitical toll caused by cyberattacks. While there is no way to know for certain, one oft-cited study estimated hackers launch “brute force” attacks against a computer once every 39 seconds, the equivalent of roughly 800,000 attacks per year. The fallout from malicious actors gaining unauthorized access to these and other systems — ranging from an individual’s laptop to a country’s electrical grid — is projected to cost as much as $10.5 trillion worldwide by 2025.

Whether natural or human-made, events requiring rapid, coordinated responses of varying complexity and scale could be could be addressed more efficiently and effectively with the help of artificial intelligence. That’s the thinking behind two new National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes involving University of Washington researchers, including Allen School professors Simon Shaolei Du and Sewoong Oh, and funded by the National Science Foundation.

AI Institute for Societal Decision Making

Allen School professor Simon Shaolei Du will contribute to the new AI Institute for Societal Decision Making (AI-SDM) led by Carnegie Mellon University. The institute will receive a total of $20 million over five years to develop a framework for applying artificial intelligence to improve decision making in public health or disaster management situations, when the level of uncertainty is high and every second counts, drawing on the expertise of researchers in computer science, social sciences and humanities along with industry leaders and educators.

“AI can be a powerful tool for alleviating the human burden of complex decision making while optimizing the use of available resources,” said Du. “But we currently lack a holistic approach for applying AI to modeling and managing such rapidly evolving situations.”

To tackle the problem, AI-SDM researchers will make progress on three key priorities to augment — not replace — human decision making, underpinned by fundamental advances in causal inference and counterfactual reasoning. These include developing computational representations of human decision-making processes, devising robust strategies for aggregating collective decision making, and building multi-objective and multi-agent tools for autonomous decision-making support. Du will focus on that third thrust, building on prior, foundational work in reinforcement learning (RL) with long-time collaborators Aarti Singh, professor at CMU who will serve as director of the new institute, and Allen School affiliate professor Sham Kakade, a faculty member at Harvard University, along with CMU professors Jeff Schneider and Hoda Heidari.

Adapting RL to dynamic environments like that of public health or disaster management poses a significant challenge. At present, RL tends to be most successful when applied in data-rich settings involving single-agent decision making and using a standard reward-maximization approach. But when it comes to earthquakes, wildfires or novel pathogens, the response is anything but straightforward; the response may span multiple agencies and jurisdictions, the sources of data will not have been standardized, and each incident response will unfold in an unpredictable, situation-dependent manner. Compounding the problem, multi-agent decision making algorithms have typically performed best in scenarios where both planning and execution are centralized — an impossibility in the evolving and fragmented response to a public health threat or natural or human-made disaster, where the number of actors may be unknown and communications may be unreliable. 

Du and his colleagues will develop data-efficient multi-agent RL algorithms capable of integrating techniques from various sources while satisfying multiple objectives informed by collective social values. They will also explore methods for leveraging common information while reducing sample complexity to support effective multi-agent coordination under uncertainty.

But the algorithms will only work if humans are willing to use them. To that end, Du and his collaborators will design graduate-level curriculum in human-AI cooperation and work through programs such as the Allen School’s Changemakers in Computing program to engage students from diverse backgrounds — just a couple of examples of how AI-SDM partners plan to cultivate both an educated workforce and an informed public.

“There is the technical challenge, of course, but there is also an educational and social science component. We can’t develop these tools in a vacuum,” Du noted. “Our framework has to incorporate the needs and perspectives of diverse stakeholders — from elected officials and agency heads, to first responders, to the general public. And ultimately, our success will depend on expanding people’s understanding and acceptance of these tools.”

In addition to CMU and the UW, partners on the AI-SDM include Harvard University, Boston Children’s Hospital, Howard University, Penn State University, Texas A&M University, the University of Washington, the MITRE Corporation, Navajo Technical University and Winchester Thurston School. Read the CMU announcement here.

AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation

Allen School professor Sewoong Oh and UW lead Radha Poovendran, a professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, will contribute to the new AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and OperatioN (ACTION). Spearheaded by the University of California, Santa Barbara, the ACTION Institute will receive $20 million over five years to develop a comprehensive AI stack to reason about and respond to ransomware, zero-day exploits and other categories of cyberattacks. 

”Attackers and their tactics are constantly evolving, so our defenses have to evolve along with them,” Oh said. “By taking a more holistic approach that integrates AI into the entire cyberdefense life cycle, we can give human security experts an edge by rapidly responding to emerging threats and make systems more resilient over time.”

The complexity of those threats, which can compromise systems while simultaneously evading measures designed to detect intrusion, calls for a new paradigm built around the concept of stacked security. To get ahead of malicious mischief-makers, the ACTION Institute will advance foundational research in learning and reasoning with domain knowledge, human-agent interaction, multi-agent collaboration, and strategic gaming and tactical planning. This comprehensive AI stack will be the foundation for developing new intelligent security agents that would work in tandem with human experts on threat assessment, detection, attribution, and response and recovery.

Oh will work alongside Poovendran on the development of intelligent agents for threat detection that are capable of identifying complex, multi-step attacks and contextualizing and triaging alerts to human experts for follow-up. Such attacks are particularly challenging to identify because they require agents to sense and reason about correlating events that span multiple domains, time scales and abstraction levels — scenarios for which high-quality training data may be scarce. Errors or omissions in the data can lead agents to generate a lot of false positives, or conversely, miss legitimate attacks altogether. 

Recent research using deep neural networks to detect simple backdoor attacks offers clues for how to mitigate these shortcomings. When a model is trained on data that includes maliciously corrupted examples, small changes in the input can lead to erroneous predictions. Training representations of the model on corrupted data is an effective technique for identifying such examples, as the latter leave traces of their presence in the form of spectral signatures. Those traces are often small enough to escape detection, but state-of-the-art statistical tools from robust estimation can be used to boost their signal. Oh will apply this same method to time series over a network of agents to enable the detection of outliers that point to potential attacks in more complex security scenarios.

Oh and Poovendran’s collaborators include professors João Hespanha, Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna at UCSB, Elisa Bertino, Berkay Celik and Ninghui Li at Purdue University, Nick Feamster at the University of Chicago, Dawn Song at the University of California, Berkeley and Gang Wang at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The group’s work will complement Poovendran’s research into novel game theoretic approaches for modeling adversarial behavior and training intelligent agents in decision making and dynamic planning in uncertain environments — environments where the rules of engagement, and the intentions and capabilities of the players, are constantly in flux. It’s an example of one of the core ideas behind the ACTION Institute’s approach: equipping AI agents to be “lifelong learners” capable of continuously improving their domain knowledge, and with it, their ability to adapt in the face of novel attacks. The team is keen to also develop a framework that will ensure humans continue to learn right along with them.

“One of the ways this and other AI Institutes have a lasting impact is through the education and mentorship that go hand in hand with our research,” said Oh, who is also a member of the previously announced National AI Institute for Foundations in Machine Learning (IMFL). “We’re committed not just to advancing new AI security tools, but also to training a new generation of talent who will take those tools to the next level.”

In addition to UCSB and the UW, partners on the ACTION Institute include Georgia Tech, University of California, Berkeley, Norfolk State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and University of Virginia. Read the UCSB announcement here and a related UW ECE story here.

The ACTION Institute and AI-SDM are among seven new AI Institutes announced earlier this month with a combined $140 million from the NSF, its federal agency partners and industry partner IBM. Read the NSF announcement here.

Read more →

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recognized seven Allen School students as part of its 2023 Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) competition. The NSF GRFP supports students for their potential to demonstrate excellence and innovation in teaching and research early in their careers. The students — six graduate students and one undergraduate student — were recognized in the Comp/IS/Eng or Engineering categories. 

“Allen School students strive for excellence in research and innovation,” said professor Anna Karlin, associate director for graduate studies at the Allen School. “This year’s NSF GRFP honorees exemplify determination and creativity to push the boundaries in fields as diverse as molecular computing, robotics, security and more.”

Tyler Han

First-year Ph.D. student Tyler Han earned a fellowship for his work in the Robot Learning Lab under the direction of Allen School professor Byron Boots, co-founder and CEO of UW spinout Overland AI​​.

Han’s research focuses on advancing localization, planning, perception and control for high-speed off-road autonomous vehicles operating in unstructured and unpredictable environments. Through his work with the University of Washington’s RACER (Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency) team and with the support from the NSF GRFP, Han aims to improve the speed and maneuverability of autonomous vehicles using methods like inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), which allows robots to learn from data generated through human driving. With IRL, these robots will better handle situations in which environmental features present complicated situations, like speeding through banked turns or crashing through vegetation.

Rachel Hong

Fellowship recipient Rachel Hong is a first-year Ph.D. student. She works with Allen School professors Jamie Morgenstern, who focuses on the social impacts of ML, and Tadayoshi (Yoshi) Kohno, co-director of the Security and Privacy Research Lab.

Combining ML, security and technology policy, Hong explores the behavior of existing ML algorithms in relation to privacy and fairness, as well as how to prevent those algorithms from being misapplied in society. As an undergraduate student, Hong was introduced to the field of algorithmic fairness through building a novel representation learning algorithm on biomedical data to help patients receiving care at a variety of hospitals in both rural and urban settings. Hong seeks to build on that foundation to improve algorithmic fairness through examining demographic biases in facial recognition technology to better understand how various modifications of training data can mitigate disparate outcomes.

Carina Imburgia

Fellowship winner Carina Imburgia is a first-year Ph.D. student who works with Jeff Nivala in the Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL).

Imburgia joined the Allen School as a graduate student after having pursued a degree in biology and working in the field of molecular biology. Harnessing her multidisciplinary background, she intends to develop and optimize new systems for processing information stored in molecular form. Imburgia proposes to improve a Cas9-based similarity search architecture, which is a programmable gene editing tool and to develop computing abstractions for processing information molecularly. Decreasing the environmental impact of data storage technologies also motivates her to explore molecular storage options that can hold significantly larger amounts of data in a compact and stable form as well as rely less heavily on energy consumption than current storage methods.

Toma Itagaki

Graduating senior Toma Itagaki received a fellowship based on his research in the Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) Lab directed by Allen School and UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering professor Shwetak Patel.

Itagaki’s research interests bridge neuroscience, ubiquitous computing and human-computer interaction (HCI). After his first undergraduate research experience at UW in the Orsborn Lab, Itagaki knew he wanted to pursue studying neuroscience. He was drawn to the UbiComp Lab, where he studied wearable sensors such as electroencephalography (EEG) headsets and smartwatches to assess the quality and consistency of data collection. These projects motivated Itagaki to explore the quantification of subjective experiences by looking at sensory brain-machine interfaces. As a Ph.D. student starting this fall at Columbia University, Itagaki intends to explore ways to leverage mobile health and brain-machine interfaces to better address post-surgical pain management.

Alexandra Michael

First-year Ph.D. student Alexandra Michael received a fellowship for her work that is co-advised by Allen School professors David Kohlbrenner in the Security and Privacy Research Lab and Dan Grossman in the Programming Languages and Software Engineering (PLSE) group.

Michael’s research combines her interests in security, programming languages and compilers. Prior to graduate school, Michael was fascinated by how computers could connect people yet put them at risk. Her work focuses on mitigating those risks by leveraging programming languages and security tools to improve the security and privacy of systems and the people who use them. She proposes to build a highly performant, secure and portable low-level language that will act as target for programs written in unsafe languages.

Lancelot Wathieu

Second-year Ph.D. student Lancelot Wathieu earned a fellowship for his work in the MISL with Allen School professors Luis Ceze and Chris Thachuk.

While Wathieu’s background is in computer engineering and mathematics, his research interests are inspired by the natural world, which led him to focus on designing molecular algorithms and systems. Molecular computing has shown promise based on what it could theoretically compute, and Wathieu proposes to put this theory into practice by building an end-to-end automated DNA computing workflow that incorporates novel circuit designs. Wathieu’s work will make molecular computing more efficient and accessible while advancing its transformative potential in domains spanning therapeutics, manufacturing and computer science.

Zachary Englhardt

Zachary Englhardt is a first-year Ph.D. student working with Patel and Allen School professor Vikram Iyer. Englhardt earned an honorable mention from NSF for his design work on embedded systems for sensing, networking and actuation.

Englhardt intends to develop internet of things (IoT) devices with masses under one gram which are capable of autonomously navigating an environment to collect data. Current sensor technologies tend to be stationary and collect data in a passive manner. Previous attempts at building sub-gram autonomous IoT devices have faced scaling challenges due to their weight and power needs. Englhardt proposes to develop a computing and robotics platform to address these challenges. By taking an interdisciplinary approach that integrates intermittent computing, embedded ML and microrobotics fabrication, Englhardt proposes to build a new hardware platform, algorithms for enabling autonomous control, and a novel approach to swarm networking for smart agriculture and other potential applications.

NSF recognized two UW graduate students outside of the Allen School with fellowships in the Comp/IS/Eng category. Claire Mitchell, a first-year Ph.D. student in the Information School, studies and designs wearable sensors to understand motor control and improve communication interfaces. Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) second-year Ph.D. student Brett Halperin employs computational cinema and media design to promote housing justice through community-based participatory research.

Learn more about the NSF GRFP program here. Read more →

Six Allen School students were recently named to the 2023 class of the Husky 100, an honor recognizing undergraduate and graduate students who are making the most of their time at the University of Washington. Husky 100 students make connections in and out of the classroom, making a positive impact on campus and in their communities. This year’s Allen School inductees are living those values, proving Huskies are stronger when in a pack. 

Grace Brigham

At the time, the free Welch’s grape juice was probably a bad idea. Yet it turned out to be what greased the wheels for Grace Brigham, whose visits to her father’s office as a youngster featured the dangerous combination of plentiful sugar and groundbreaking technology. 

“It felt like a wonderland to me,” she said, recalling the ample, well-stocked food courts. 

One day her father showed her what his team had been working on: a touch-screen table. Before the age of iPads, it was like peering through the looking glass for the younger Brigham. The memory, among other things, stuck.

“My dad definitely cringed as I put my probably grape juice-covered hands all over it but I couldn’t help myself,” Brigham said. 

The newly minted member of the Husky 100 has made the most of her time at UW through a number of projects and ventures, each putting community and social impact at the forefront. 

During her first two years, she worked as a mentor and then a program lead with Changemakers in Computing, a summer program offered by the Allen School for Washington state high school students from marginalized backgrounds. As a sophomore, she co-founded Mezzo, an app that helps plan social meetups, and competed in a number of entrepreneurship competitions with her team.

Now a third-year student, Brigham has continued to make her mark at UW. During the most recent quarter, the Redmond native began working in the Allen School’s Security and Privacy Research Lab, investigating conceptions of consent and acceptability in deepfake technology. 

Brigham is set to graduate this fall with her bachelor’s in computer science. When she turns the tassel, a toast might be in order — perhaps one involving that sweet purple potion that helped pique her interest more than a decade ago. 

“No matter what, I tried to make the most of my time and I am truly honored to be receiving recognition for that,” Brigham said. “I’m humbled to join a group of such driven, unique and inspiring individuals.”

Eric Fan

Near the beginning of his UW experience, Eric Fan took an introductory programming course that would alter his perspective. He was mesmerized by the ways in which technology could change the world, their capabilities for problem-solving and the theories behind them. 

But at the center of it all was the teaching assistant who made the concepts come alive. It was an encounter that Fan would never forget. 

“He played a significant role in my success in understanding the course content,” Fan said. “The inspiring way he taught the concepts made a significant contribution to my excitement for computer science.” 

Shortly after taking the course, Fan dove into extracurricular activities. He became a teaching assistant himself, developing a passion for education and for making the field more accessible to students from diverse backgrounds. He served on the Allen School Student Advisory Council and became a research assistant for the Ubiquitous Computing Lab. In 2022, he published a book highlighting efforts from individuals and communities who are making CS education more equitable. 

“The highlights of my Husky Experience have centered around communities and the opportunities to serve,” said Fan, who grew up in the Seattle area. “Having been invested in by several individuals and communities around me, I’ve been inspired to give back.”

Fan completed his master’s degree in computer science this year and is currently teaching CSE 390B. 

“The communities I’ve been a part of, including course staff teams, Allen School student groups and fellowships, have all helped me find my place at a large public university,” Fan said. “I cherish the relationships I’ve developed over the years at UW and am thankful for all the ways they have encouraged me.”

Richard Li

In his high school AP Computer Science class, Richard Li received a smartphone from his teacher with the challenge to “do something cool with it.” The phone ran the first version of Android. There was no documentation or support online. 

“Although the coding process was painful, it was also tremendously exciting to see code running on a physical device external to the computer,” said Li, a South Carolina native. “Running code on a physical device opened up new opportunities to interact with the physical world using features such as motion sensors and cameras. This particular facet and interest guided many future decisions, leading to being in a Ph.D. program and my current research areas.”

It was one of Li’s first forays into analyzing how technology could influence its environment and the end user. At UW, he has conducted research in the wearable and ubiquitous computing space, developing human-centered systems in healthcare, physiology and more. On various projects, he’s worked with advisors James Fogarty, Shwetak Patel, Sean Munson, Cindy Lin, George Ionnaou and Philip Vutien. The fourth-year Ph.D. student chose computer science, he said, because he found the major to be inherently interdisciplinary — solutions, even if they are outside of one’s remit, are encouraged.

The prolific academic environment, along with the university’s proximity to many of tech’s biggest players, has helped Li grow as a scientist, he added. 

“UW’s incredibly supportive community is renowned, well-known internationally,” Li said. “Being in Seattle opens up opportunities to collaborate with partners in the community as well as in industry. Four years later, I’m happy to report that UW has delivered both of these things.”

Li, who plans to graduate in June 2025, continues to do cool things with technology. Working with a team that included computer scientists, engineers and clinicians, he helped develop Beacon, a handheld device that allows for at-home screening of liver disease. He’s also currently working on the design of a smartwatch band with embedded electronics. The design will allow scientists to monitor how well it fits the user’s wrist, he said, while improving the device’s other capabilities using this measurement. The project is advised by Patel.

For Li, his Husky Experience illustrates his former teacher’s request. After graduation, he plans on pursuing a professorship and teaching students to go out and seek solutions — to “do something cool” with their newfound knowledge. 

“I’m honored to be named to the Husky 100,” he said. “It’s rewarding to be acknowledged for the honor of contributing to the UW community, from conducting incredible research to mentoring the next generation of young scientists and engineers.”

Amanda Ong

Amanda Ong entered UW intending to major in biology. But the summer before her freshman year, Ong had an opportunity to work with a team of UW researchers investigating the spectroscopic signatures of nitrogen aggregates in nanodiamonds, proving that diamonds may be forever but plans are rarely written in stone. 

As part of the ALVA program, Ong made the most of an opportunity to work in the Li Lab, a computational chemistry laboratory at UW headed by professor Xiaosong Li. There, she marveled at the supercomputer utilized in the experiment and how it powered the project from start to finish. She eventually switched her major to computer science. 

“Wow!” she said of her eureka moment. “Programming, which had previously seemed so abstract, suddenly had a concrete application.”

Since then, Ong has become an integral member of the UW community. The Redmond native has fostered her interest in CS education through roles with the Society of Women Engineers and the Association for Computing Education, besides working as a teaching assistant for CSE 160, a course she will teach this summer. Currently, she is working with professor Jeffrey Herron in the Herron Lab to develop a testing framework for the OMNI-BIC microservice, which is a microservice designed to facilitate neuromodulation research.

She’s also empowered members of the greater UW community and beyond. As president of the Seattle nonprofit Young Leaders Program, she introduced several prosocial initiatives, including a virtual career events series and a project with the City of Seattle Office of Labor Standards. For the latter, students worked with minority-owned businesses to educate them on the city’s labor laws. 

The fifth-year student completed her undergraduate degree in computer science at UW with a minor in neural computation. She plans to graduate with her master’s in computer science this spring. 

“As a student at UW, I am continually inspired by the fearlessness of my peers, faculty and staff in pursuing their beliefs and passions to create a better environment for those around them,” Ong said. “It’s an honor to be selected for the Husky 100 as it recognizes the same qualities I strive to emulate. I’m particularly proud to be representing the Allen School as a part of such a diverse and inspiring cohort of students.”

May Wang

May Wang wears her school spirit proudly. As co-founder of Dawg Outfitters, a UW merchandise startup, she’s engaged in the endeavors of entrepreneurship in addition to helping put other Huskies in cozy hoodies. 

The Calgary native’s Husky Experience is defined by warmth — whether that’s in the community or in the type of cloth featured in her company’s merchandise. (It’s a high-stitch fleece.)

“Having my work and involvement recognized by UW not only makes me feel valued as a student and as a leader, but has also given me the opportunity to learn about and appreciate the inspiring contributions of fellow Husky 100 students,” Wang said. “Furthermore, it has allowed me to reflect on my own impact on the community. I hope that my work can be an inspiration to others, encouraging them to pursue their passions and make the most of their Husky Experience.”

Wang, a fourth-year computer science student, has performed a number of roles while at UW. When she’s not programming or investigating better ways to safely store passwords, she takes up mentorship opportunities through her work as a teaching assistant and in the Residential Life department, helping younger students along in their own journeys. 

Wang plans to graduate this spring. She said she hopes to continue pursuing entrepreneurship after her time at UW comes to close. 

“I am excited to apply my experiences with technology, leadership and entrepreneurship towards my goal of inspiring others beyond the UW community,” she said.

Duaa Zaheer

When Duaa Zaheer first arrived on the UW campus, she felt like a small fish in a pond much larger than Drumheller Fountain. Her high school graduating class had 38 students — a far cry from the more than 40,000 she would soon encounter.

“I started out my experience as an anxious and overwhelmed freshman who didn’t know where she fit in at a school as big as the UW,” Zaheer said. “Over time, I slowly found myself building community and a support network through groups around campus with students sharing the same interests, passions and skills.” 

By taking active roles in organizations such as Women in Informatics and Impact++, she’s grown as a leader, helping foster a more inclusive environment and build technology for social good. As president of the Pakistani Students Association, she’s shared her love for her culture through community outreach efforts and programs. 

Connecting communities informs Zaheer’s Husky Experience, which will culminate in June when she graduates with her bachelor’s degree in computer science and a minor in informatics. While reflecting on her time at UW, the Redmond native expressed gratitude at staying close to home, while experiencing opportunities that she couldn’t have imagined at the beginning of her freshman year. 

One of those included meeting UW’s cuddliest member, Dubs II. At the Husky 100 celebration this year, Zaheer shook paws with the university’s 14th live mascot as an honored guest, hobnobbing with its biggest cheerleader. 

For Zaheer, it’s just one of several cherished memories that have been a product of the last four years. 

“The Husky 100 is symbolic of the journey I took to reach the well-supported and enlightened point of my college experience I’m at today,” she said. “It is a sign that I’ve left an impact on my school despite how small I felt at the beginning of the journey.” Read more →