Allen School teaching professor and alumna Lauren Bricker (Ph.D., ’98) received a STEM Educator of the Year Award from GeekWire for her leadership in advancing computer science education. Bricker is one of three local education leaders to be recognized with the award, which GeekWire created this year to honor innovative educators in the Pacific Northwest who are inspiring students to achieve more in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math.
“If Pacific Northwest computer science education was a solar… Read more →
Allen School professors Emina Torlak and Xi Wang receive Amazon Research Award for their advancements in critical infrastructure software
Professor Anna Karlin elected to the National Academy of Sciences
Professor Anna Karlin of the University of Washington’s Theory of Computation group recently became the first Allen School faculty member to be elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Karlin, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering and serves as Associate Director for Graduate Studies at the Allen School, was honored for her significant contributions to algorithms and algorithmic game theory. She joins a distinguished community of scholars elected by their… Read more →
Allen School students recognized for excellence in research by the National Science Foundation
Ten Allen School students earned recognition from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of its latest round of Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awards, which honor outstanding students who are pursuing full-time research-based degrees with the potential to produce innovative contributions in science and engineering.
Since 1952, this prestigious competition has provided support for graduate education in NSF-supported STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. The Allen School honorees — eight Ph.D. students and two undergraduate students — were… Read more →
Allen School student Victor Zhong named an Apple Scholar for his efforts to teach machines to generalize by reading natural language specifications
Victor Zhong, a Ph.D. student working with Allen School professor Luke Zettlemoyer in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group, has been selected as a recipient of the Apple Scholar in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning fellowship. Zhong, one of 15 student researchers recognized as Apple Scholars this year, was selected based on his innovative research, his contributions as an emerging leader in his area and his unique commitment to take risks and push the envelope in machine learning… Read more →
Allen School student Kuo-Hao Zeng named J.P. Morgan Ph.D. Fellow for his work in visual forecasting in artificial intelligence
Kuo-Hao Zeng, a Ph.D. student working with Allen School professor Ali Farhadi, has been named a 2021 J.P. Morgan Ph.D. Fellow for his research focused on the problem of forecasting for decision making in artificial intelligence (AI). While Zeng’s work is in the context of visual forecasting and action, his algorithms and findings can be extended well beyond pixels, for example, they can facilitate policy learning for robotics applications.
Zeng aims to use his Fellowship to help AI… Read more →
New Allen School major Alina Chandra intends to use computer science to reshape systems and improve peoples’ lives
Our latest undergraduate student spotlight features Olympia, Washington native Alina Chandra, who joined the Allen School community this spring quarter. Chandra was a biochemistry major with a minor in global health, but decided her talents would be more impactful in computer science. She recently was named the 2019-2020 Freshman Presidential Medalist at the University of Washington in recognition of her high GPA, rigor of classes and number of honors courses. Chandra is also a student in the university’s Honors … Read more →
Taskar Center researchers offer a roadmap for more robust modeling of pedestrian mobility on a city-wide scale
Many approaches to measuring and supporting city-wide mobility lack the level of detail required to truly understand how pedestrians navigate the urban landscape, not to mention the quality of their journey. Transit apps can direct someone to the nearest bus stop, but they may not account for obstacles or terrain on the way to their destination. Neighborhood walkability scores that measure proximity to amenities like grocery stores and restaurants “as the crow flies” are useful if traveling by jetpack, but… Read more →
Dan Suciu wins ICDT Test of Time Award for a novel construction of a decision diagram called ‘query compilation’
Allen School professor Dan Suciu was honored for his impact on data management research at the 2021 International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT) with the Test of Time Award for his paper, “Knowledge Compilation Meets Database Theory: Compiling Queries to Decision Diagrams.”
In the winning paper, Suciu and then-student Abhay Jha (Ph.D., ‘12), now a senior machine learning scientist at Amazon, explored more efficient ways to construct decision diagrams — tools that simplify the task of computing the… Read more →
Allen School’s Jeffrey Heer elected to CHI Academy
Allen School professor Jeffrey Heer has been honored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) with election to the CHI Academy. The Academy is composed of researchers who have made substantial, cumulative contributions to the field of human-computer interaction through the development of new explorative directions and innovations and have influenced the work of their peers. He is one of only eight new members elected to the CHI Academy this year.
Heer, who… Read more →
