Allen School News Archive

While COVID-19 gets most of the headlines these days, another epidemic has been plaguing communities for years before the emergence of the novel coronavirus. The opioid epidemic, which the United States declared a public health emergency in 2017, has impacted millions of lives — many permanently. According to the latest figures… Read more →

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While 18 months of pandemic-induced remote learning and research may have brought a feeling of stasis to many areas of our lives, there is one where the opposite is true: Allen School faculty hiring. Over the past two hiring cycles, the school managed to move forward via virtual campus tours and interviews conducted via Zoom, with the result that 15 new faculty members have joined or will soon be joining our community. As we return to campus and settle into… Read more →

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In honor of today’s National First-Generation College Celebration, the Allen School continues our annual tradition of spotlighting some of our own first-gen community members and what the opportunity to pursue a bachelor’s degree means to them. As the first in their families to navigate the complicated college application process and the array of internship, study abroad and extracurricular activities, these students are using perseverance, resilience and drive to figure it all out on their own or find the resources… Read more → Tags: B.S./M.S. news, Faculty news, Husky Experience, PMP news, Staff news, undergraduate news

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Allen School professor Jeffrey Heer, who leads the Interactive Data Lab, received a Test of Time Award at the 2021 IEEE Visualization & Visual Analytics Conference for his work on “D3: Data-Driven Documents.” In the winning paper, which was published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics in 2011, Heer and his colleagues propose a new framework called D3 to create a representation-transparent approach to visualization for the web. The team’s work has been cited… Read more →

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Allen School professor Maya Cakmak, who directs the Human-Centered Robotics Lab, was recently named a 2021 Trailblazer by the University of Washington’s Disabilities, Internetworking, and Technology Center (DO-IT). The Trailblazer awards honor members of the DO-IT community who forge new pathways to increase the potential for people with disabilities to succeed in college, careers and life. Cakmak was honored for her continued work with DO-IT’s AccessEngineering, AccessComputing and Summer Study Program. The initiatives introduce students with… Read more →

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Allen School teaching professor Barbara Mones has had a remarkable career in education as director of Animation Production for the Animation Research Labs, director of the Reality Studio and as leader of both the Facial Expression Research Group and the Octopus Research Group. In recognition of her outstanding work, Mones was recently honored with the 2021 Distinguished Educator Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH) for her… Read more →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 Lab… Read more →

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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 →

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