“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, these awards honor faculty, research and teaching assistants, and staff like Worrell whose extraordinary contributions benefit the college community. Read more →
‘One of a kind’: Allen School administrator extraordinaire Jennifer Worrell receives College of Engineering Professional Staff Award
“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, these awards honor faculty, research and teaching assistants, and staff like Worrell whose extraordinary contributions benefit the college community. Read more →
‘Not a job for a mere mortal’: Assistant Director for Diversity & Access Chloe Dolese Mandeville receives UW Distinguished Staff Award
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. Read more →
Allen School recognizes Janet Davis and Paul Mikesell with 2023 Alumni Impact Awards
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. Read more →
Allen School and AI2 researchers earn CHI Best Paper Award for new tool enabling personalized tracking of citations in scientific literature
The review of existing literature is an essential part of scientific research — and citations play a key role. 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. A team that includes Allen School professor Amy Zhang, professor emeritus Daniel Weld and collaborators at AI2 and University of Pennsylvania envisioned a more personalized experience. Their paper, “CiteSee: Augmenting Citations in Scientific Papers with Persistent and Personalized Historical Context,” recently earned a Best Paper Award at CHI 2023. Read more →
Allen School undergraduate Lawrence Tan stays curious, while learning how to lead
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. Read more →
Harmonizing social impact with coding chops, UW College of Engineering Dean’s Medalist Sidharth Lakshmanan puts collaboration center stage
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. 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. Read more →
‘I was especially drawn to CS as a ticket to anywhere’: Allen School alum Anne Dinning receives College of Engineering Diamond Award
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. 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. Read more →
Perfect match(ing): Professor Thomas Rothvoss wins 2023 Gödel Prize for proving the exponential complexity of a core problem in combinatorial optimization
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 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. Read more →
Setting the table for a brighter future: With help from robots, Allen School researchers are making social dining more accessible
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. Read more →
Allen School’s Simon Du and Sewoong Oh to advance AI for responding to threats both natural and human-made as part of NSF-led National AI Research Institutes
From natural disasters to cyberattacks, events requiring rapid, coordinated responses of varying complexity and scale could be addressed more efficiently and effectively with the help of artificial intelligence. That’s the thinking behind two new National AI Research Institutes involving University of Washington researchers, including Allen School professors Simon Shaolei Du and Sewoong Oh, and funded by the National Science Foundation. Read more →