Nearly a decade ago, well before mixed reality and the metaverse went mainstream, a team of researchers from the University of Washington’s UbiComp Lab and Microsoft Research were making noise within the human-computer interaction community with a novel approach to on-body sensing. Their technique, which leveraged transdermal ultrasound signals, turned the human body into an input surface for pressure-aware continuous touch sensing and gesture recognition without requiring extensive, not to mention expensive, instrumentation.
Last week, that same team collected the… Read more →
The sound of touch: UW and Microsoft researchers earn ISS 10-year Impact Award for advancing innovative interaction technique via on-body sensing
Nearly a decade ago, well before mixed reality and the metaverse went mainstream, a team of researchers from the University of Washington’s UbiComp Lab and Microsoft Research were making noise within the human-computer interaction community with a novel approach to on-body sensing. Their technique, which leveraged transdermal ultrasound signals, turned the human body into an input surface for pressure-aware continuous touch sensing and gesture recognition without requiring extensive, not to mention expensive, instrumentation.
Last week, that same team collected the… Read more →
A winning combination: Allen School recruits nine new faculty with expertise in computational neuroscience, machine learning, quantum computing, and more
When it comes to recruiting at the University of Washington, the latest promising commits to the Husky football team tend to grab most of the headlines. Here in the Allen School, we’re pursuing our own version of “Purple Reign” on a different playing field: the intense competition that is faculty recruiting in computer science and computer engineering.
The results of the 2022 season are in, and the Allen School scored nine outstanding educators and researchers who are rising stars in… Read more →
Technology for all: Kelly Mack earns ARCS Dorothy L. Simpson Leadership Award for championing accessibility through research and service-leadership
Allen School Ph.D. student Kelly Mack is a problem solver who aims to ensure that other researchers take accessibility and disability into account — both in their research methods and during their design process. She has carried this accessibility mindset into her work with industry, where she helped establish the first disability-focused employee resource group as an intern at Snap Inc., and into her leadership of a chapter of Girls Who Code, where for the past five years she… Read more →
Reaching to the moon, getting VOCAL, and other highlights from the Allen School’s 2022 Research Showcase
‘I love the elegance of math’: Simon Du named Samsung AI Researcher of the Year for exploring deep questions surrounding deep learning
When Allen School professor Simon Shaolei Du opened his inbox on a cloudy Friday morning in October, he wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary, let alone a trip around the world.
The website had slated the announcement for late September. When the date came and went, Du put the thought from his mind. Yet there it was. A click, a glow, then a smile.
“It was very short notice, actually,” he said, grinning again.
Next, plane tickets and slide… Read more →
What it’s like to be the first: Allen School community members share their stories to mark the National First-Generation College Celebration
For first-generation college students, navigating the complexities of higher education can be intimidating. Often there isn’t a blueprint from which to work. Yet for the more than 30% of undergraduates across the University of Washington who are first-generation students, it’s far from a solo journey.
In honor of the National First-Generation College Celebration taking place today, the Allen School is highlighting members of its community who are among the first in their families to pursue a college degree. Here… Read more →
Allen School researchers team up with clinicians and global health experts to repurpose inexpensive earphones to screen babies for hearing loss
A picture of health: Google Fellowship recipient Xin Liu combines machine learning and mobile sensing through an equity lens to support remote health assessment
When COVID consigned doctor-patient interactions from the clinic to a computer screen, Allen School Ph.D. candidate Xin Liu already had his finger on the pulse of that paradigm shift. Since his arrival at the University of Washington in 2018, Liu has worked with professor Shwetak Patel in the UbiComp Lab to combine mobile sensing and machine learning to real-world problems in health care, with a focus on developing non-contact, camera-based physiological screening and monitoring solutions that are accessible by all… Read more →
Lost in translation no more: IBM Fellowship winner Akari Asai asks — and answers — big questions in NLP to expand information access to all
Growing up in Japan, Akari Asai never imagined that she would one day pursue a Ph.D. at the Allen School focused on developing the next generation of natural language processing tools. Asai hadn’t taken a single computing class before her arrival at the University of Tokyo, where she enrolled in economics and business courses; her first foray into computer science would come thousands of miles from home, while studying abroad at the University of California, Berkeley. The experience would alter… Read more →
Jeffrey Heer wins Test of Time Award at IEEE VIS for helping the visualization community better understand challenges facing data analysts
Allen School professor Jeffrey Heer received a Test of Time Award at the 2022 IEEE Visualization & Visual Analytics Conference this week, marking the third consecutive year that his work has been recognized with the honor.
Heer, the co-director of the Interactive Data Lab, co-authored the winning paper, “Enterprise Data Analysis and Visualization: An Interview Study,” which provided key insights into understanding how data analysts operate and the challenges they encounter in their workflows. The paper was… Read more →