Allen School News

Earlier this month, the Allen School held a virtual celebration showcasing efforts to increase diversity in computing and honoring members of our community who have demonstrated their commitment to diversity, excellence and leadership. An annual tradition, the event this year also offered Allen School leaders an opportunity to share highlights from its five-year strategic plan to increase diversity, equity, inclusion and access (DEIA), spanning curriculum and programs, professional development, policies and procedures, internal community… Read more →

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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 →

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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 →

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Last week marked the end of an academic year unlike any other — and the culmination of all of the hard work, hopes and dreams of a graduating class unlike any other. With the resumption of in-person pomp and circumstance precluded due to ongoing pandemic-related restrictions at the University of Washington, the Allen School marked this important milestone with a virtual tribute highlighting the Class of 2021’s commitment to excellence and service — and acknowledging their perseverance in… Read more →

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Parker Ruth, a senior who will graduate this spring with bachelor’s degrees in computer engineering and bioengineering, has been awarded the College of Engineering’s Dean’s Medal for Academic Excellence. Each year, the college selects two students to receive this award in recognition of their academic achievement, leadership, and engagement in research and extra-curricular activities. Ruth exemplifies these qualities with departmental honors in both of his majors, his contributions to multiple research projects, his leadership roles and his work… Read more →

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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 →

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Joy He-Yueya applies data science techniques to measures of patient behavior to assess how they might predict the onset of schizophrenia symptoms. Meanwhile, Ximing Lu uses machine learning to improve cancer diagnosis and explores how neural language models can advance commonsense reasoning. Parker Ruth builds mobile sensing systems to detect and monitor a variety of health conditions, while Jenny Liang develops programming techniques to support developer education and collaboration. And Emily Bascom contributes to research aimed at promoting user privacy… Read more →

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Allen School alumnus Aditya Vashistha (Ph.D., ‘19) received the 2020-2021 WAGS/ProQuest Innovation in Technology Award from the Western Association of Graduate Schools for his doctoral dissertation on “Social Computing for Social Good in Low-Resource Environments.” The award recognizes a graduate thesis or dissertation that presents an innovative technology with a creative solution to a significant problem. Vashistha, now a computing and information science professor at Cornell University, completed his Ph.D. working with professor Richard Anderson in the Information … Read more →

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The University of Washington’s Undergraduate Research Program has recognized six Allen School students for excelling in their area of research. Skyler Hallinan, Raida Karim and Ximing Lu were selected as Levinson Emerging Scholars and Jerry Cao, Jakub Filipek and Millicent Li were named Washington Research Foundation (WRF) Fellows. Both the Levinson Scholars, funded by Art (UW ‘72) and Rita Levinson, and the WRF Fellows are chosen for their innovative research in bioscience and other related fields. The scholarships… Read more →

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The University of Washington has established a new endowed professorship, the Senosis–Paul G. Allen Endowed Professorship in Computer Science & Engineering, through the generosity of professors Shwetak Patel and Julie Kientz. The $1 million endowment, which was made possible in part by the acquisition of Patel’s mobile health startup Senosis Health by Google in 2017, will support recruitment and retention of Allen School faculty who pursue high-impact research aimed at solving meaningful, real-world problems… Read more →

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