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Allen School’s Saadia Gabriel and Dhruv Jain win Google Research/CMD-IT LEAP Dissertation Fellowships for research aimed at detecting misinformation and advancing sound accessibility

Side-by-side portraits of Saadia Gabriel and Dhruv Jain, divided by a diagonal purple line. Gabriel, on the left, is wearing her hair pulled back from her face with a mocha-colored headband, glasses, and a grey woolen blazer over a black v-neck shirt, standing in front of a wall of interior windows framed by pale wood and concrete. Jain, on the right, is wearing glasses and a grey wool blazer over a grey v-neck sweater and white crew-neck t-shirt, standing in front of leaded pane glass doors with intricate wood framing.
Saadia Gabriel (left) and Dhruv Jain
Allen School Ph.D. students Saadia Gabriel and Dhruv (DJ) Jain each won a dissertation Fellowship from Google Research and the CMD-IT Diversifying LEAdership in the Professoriate (LEAP) Alliance. In an effort to make computer science research careers more accessible, Google Research partnered with the LEAP Alliance, which is operated by the national Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in Information Technology to increase the diversity of Ph.D. graduates in computing. Together, the… Read more →
October 14, 2021

Allen School’s Amy Zhang and Franziska Roesner win NSF Convergence Accelerator for their work to limit the spread of misinformation online

Amy Zhang
Amy Zhang (left) and Franziska Roesner
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected Allen School professors Amy Zhang, who directs the Social Futures Lab, and Franziska Roesner, who co-directs the  Security and Privacy Research Lab, to receive Convergence Accelerator funding for their work with collaborators at the University of Washington and the grassroots journalism organization Hacks/Hackers on tools to detect and help stop misinformation online. The NSF’s Convergence Accelerator program is unique in that its structure… Read more →
October 5, 2021

Professor Franziska Roesner earns Consumer Reports Digital Lab Fellowship to support research into problematic content in online ads

Franziska Roesner
Credit: Dennis Wise/University of Washington
As anyone who has visited a website knows, online ads are taking up an increasing amount of page real estate. Depending on the ad, the content might veer from mildly annoying to downright dangerous; sometimes, it can be difficult to distinguish between ads that are deceptive or manipulative by design and legitimate content on a site. Now, Allen School professor Franziska Roesner (Ph.D., ‘14), co-director of the University of Washington’s Security and Privacy Research LabRead more →
October 5, 2021

“There’s so much beauty in these tiny things”: Allen School’s Shyam Gollakota named 2021 Moore Inventor Fellow for advancing big ideas on a miniature scale

Bee wearing sensor on flower
Credit: Tara Gimmer
Allen School professor Shyam Gollakota has received a 2021 Moore Inventor Fellowship in recognition of his work at the nexus of low-power wireless communication, biology and living organisms. Gollakota, who directs the Allen School’s Networks & Mobile Systems Lab, is the first University of Washington faculty member to receive this prestigious award that nurtures the next generation of scientist-inventors. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation established the fellowship program aimed at supporting “50 inventors to shape… Read more →
October 4, 2021

Not just phoning it in: Shwetak Patel honored by Georgia Tech and Business Insider for contributions to low-power sensing and mobile health innovation

Shwetak Patel extends forearm with color calibration card for mobile app demo University of Washington professor Shwetak Patel has earned a place in the Georgia Tech College of Computing’s Hall of Fame and a spot on Business Insider’s recent list of “30 leaders under 40” who are changing health care for his innovative work combining low-power sensing, signal processing and machine learning for applications ranging from non-invasive disease screening to monitoring appliance-level energy consumption. Patel, who holds the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professorship in the Allen School and the UW Department… Read more →
September 28, 2021

“They were very unsure what to do with us”: How Golden Goose Award-winning researchers at UW and UCSD put the brakes on automobile cybersecurity threats and transformed an industry

Stephen Checkoway and Karl Koscher, wearing masks, with laptop open on roof of Chevy Impala in parking garage
UW and UCSD Golden Goose Award recipients (clockwise from top left): Stephen Checkoway, Karl Koscher, Stefan Savage and Tadayoshi Kohno
In 2010 and 2011, a team of researchers led by Allen School professor Tadayoshi Kohno and Allen School alumnus and University of California San Diego professor Stefan Savage (Ph.D., ‘02) published a pair of papers detailing how they were able to hack into a couple of Chevrolet Impalas and take command of a range of functions, from operating the windshield… Read more →
September 27, 2021

A snapshot of the future: Computing goes molecular with DNA-based similarity search from University of Washington and Microsoft researchers

Collage of cat photos arranged in a grid
Forget social media memes — searching for cat photos is serious business for members of the Molecular Information Systems Lab.
Picture this: You are a researcher in the Molecular Information Systems Lab housed at the Paul G. Allen School. You and your labmates have developed a system for storing and retrieving digital images in synthetic DNA to demonstrate how this extremely dense and durable medium might be used to preserve the world’s growing trove of data. And you have a… Read more →
August 31, 2021

Allen School’s Dhruv Jain wins Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant for his work leveraging HCI and AI to advance sound accessibility

Dhruv Jain in front of wood and glass cabinet Allen School Ph.D. student Dhruv (DJ) Jain has received a Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant for his work on “Sound Sensing and Feedback Techniques for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users.” This highly selective grant aims to increase diversity in computing by supporting doctoral students who are underrepresented in the field to “cross the finish line” during the final stages of their dissertation research.  Jain, who is co-advised by Allen School professor Jon Froehlich and Human Centered Design &… Read more →
August 18, 2021

CAREER Award-winning faculty at the Allen School advance leadership and innovation in software testing, machine learning equity, and natural language understanding

Allen Center facade with school banner and fall foliage How can we endow artificial intelligence with the ability to comprehend and draw knowledge from the immense and varied trove of online documents? Is there a way to make testing and debugging of software that pervades our increasingly technology-dependent world more efficient and robust? Speaking of pervasiveness, as technologies like machine learning are more embedded into our society, how can we be sure that these systems reflect and serve different populations equitably?  Those are the questions that Allen School professors… Read more →
August 13, 2021

University of Washington and Microsoft researchers develop “nanopore-tal” enabling cells to talk to computers

Person wearing mask piping material onto a nanopore reader connected to laptop
MISL researcher Nicolas Cardozo pipes cell cultures containing NanoporeTERs onto a portable MinION nanopore sensing device for processing as professor Jeff Nivala looks on. Dennis Wise/University of Washington
Genetically encoded reporter proteins have been a mainstay of biotechnology research, allowing scientists to track gene expression, understand intracellular processes and debug engineered genetic circuits. But conventional reporting schemes that rely on fluorescence and other optical approaches come with practical limitations that could cast a shadow over the field’s future progress. Now, thanks… Read more →
August 12, 2021

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