“Nothing about us without us.”
That statement has become a rallying cry for people with disabilities to ensure they have a direct voice in shaping the policies and conditions that, in turn, shape their access to employment, education, and lately, technology. With the growing proliferation of human-centered applications powered by artificial intelligence, it has become clear that the question of who will benefit from these emerging technologies will be determined in no small part by who makes them.
Venkatesh Potluri… Read more →
Apple Scholar in AI/ML Venkatesh Potluri advances artificial intelligence for accessible UI design that empowers developers as well as users
“Nothing about us without us.”
That statement has become a rallying cry for people with disabilities to ensure they have a direct voice in shaping the policies and conditions that, in turn, shape their access to employment, education, and lately, technology. With the growing proliferation of human-centered applications powered by artificial intelligence, it has become clear that the question of who will benefit from these emerging technologies will be determined in no small part by who makes them.
Venkatesh Potluri… Read more →
Allen School’s Sewon Min is taking natural language processing to the next level to tackle real-world problems
When Sewon Min first arrived at the University of Washington as an exchange student in the fall of 2016, little did she know how those three months would change the course of her academic career. After completing a brief stint as an undergraduate research assistant under the guidance of Allen School professors Hannaneh Hajishirzi and Ali Farhadi, she returned to Seoul National University in Korea to complete her bachelor’s degree. In the interim, Hajishirzi “tried really hard” to convince… Read more →
Goldwater Scholar Alex Mallen aims to make sense of the world — and make a positive impact — through research in beneficial AI
When he was a student in high school, computer science major Alex Mallen had what he describes as a “rough” introduction to research. Fortunately, the Bellevue, Washington, native didn’t let that experience deter him at the University of Washington, where as a freshman he decided to try again as a step toward pursuing a Ph.D. after graduation. Mallen’s persistence has paid off in the form of multiple, positive research experiences that have helped him to solidify his plans to enroll… Read more →
With CoAI, UW researchers demonstrate how predictive AI can benefit patient care — even on a budget
NLP for all: Professor and 2022 Sloan Research Fellow Yulia Tsvetkov is on a quest to make natural language tools more equitable, inclusive and socially aware
Less than a year after her arrival at the University of Washington, professor Yulia Tsvetkov is making her mark as the newest member of the Allen School’s Natural Language Processing group. As head of the Tsvetshop — a clever play on words that would likely stymie your typical natural language model — Tsvetkov draws upon elements of linguistics, economics, and the social and political sciences to develop technologies that not only represent the leading edge of artificial intelligence and natural… Read more →
Allen School and AI2 researchers paint the NeurIPS conference MAUVE and take home an Outstanding Paper Award
Recent advances in open-ended text generation could enable machines to produce text that approaches or even mimics that generated by humans. However, evaluating the quality and accuracy of these large-scale models has remained a significant computational challenge. Recently, researchers at the Allen School and Allen Institute for AI (AI2) offered a solution in the form of MAUVE, a practical tool for assessing modern text generation models’ output compared to human-generated text that is both efficient and scalable. The team’s… Read more →
Allen School’s Luke Zettlemoyer elected Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics for expanding the frontiers of natural language processing
Luke Zettlemoyer, a professor in the Allen School’s Natural Language Processing group and a research director at Meta AI, was recently elected a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for “significant contributions to grounded semantics, semantic parsing, and representation learning for natural language processing.” Since he arrived at the University of Washington in 2010, Zettlemoyer has focused on advancing the state of the art in NLP while expanding its reach into other areas of artificial intelligence such… Read more →
Allen School undergraduates recognized by the Computing Research Association for advancing health sensing, programming languages and systems research
The Allen School has a proud tradition of nurturing undergraduate student researchers whose work has the potential for real-world impact. This year, three of those students — Jerry Cao, Mike He and Yu Xin — earned honorable mentions from the Computing Research Association (CRA) as part of its 2022 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards competition for their contributions in health sensing and fabrication, programming languages and machine learning, and building robust computer systems.
Jerry Cao
The CRA recognized senior Jerry… Read more →
Allen School alumni Maarten Sap and Ivan Evtimov earn dissertation awards for contributions to more socially aware and secure AI
During their time at the Allen School, recent alumni Maarten Sap (Ph.D., ‘21) and Ivan Evtimov (Ph.D., ‘21) tackled some of the thorniest issues raised by emerging natural language processing and machine learning technologies — from endowing NLP systems with social intelligence while combating inequity and bias, to addressing security vulnerabilities in the convolutional neural networks that fuel state-of-the-art computer vision systems. Recently, the faculty honored both for their contributions with the William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award, which was… Read more →
Richard Ladner elected AAAS Fellow for his leadership in making computing education and careers accessible to people with disabilities
Allen School professor emeritus Richard Ladner has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for his “distinguished contributions to the inclusion of persons with disabilities in the computing fields.” One of 26 leading scientists in the organization’s Information, Computing & Communications section to attain the rank of Fellow this year, Ladner has devoted the past two decades to research and advocacy aimed at making computing education and careers more accessible while designing technologies… Read more →