Allen School News

As a student at Seattle’s Hamilton International Middle School, Leo Maddox Schneider demonstrated early mastery of mathematics and languages, was an avid gamer and athlete, and carved out a reputation as a budding conservationist. Enthusiastic about learning from an early age, Leo had already taken to heart his mother Sylvia Bolton’s advice to find something that he loved and was passionate about and to make that his profession. As she… Read more →

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Last spring, Newport High School student Sophia Lin of Bellevue, Washington, was eager to start coding. Having applied to several summer coding programs, she was ready to learn. Unfortunately, as the pandemic spread, they were all canceled. Seeing her younger sister’s disappointment, Allen School senior Elizabeth Lin decided to be her coding teacher. With the help of her twin sister Christin, a senior in the University of Washington’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, the two created… Read more →

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While the internet is so critical for employment, education and communication, millions of Americans in rural and urban areas still do not have access to affordable connections. This lack of access further contributes to digital and economic inequality, especially during a pandemic when many schools and jobs have been moved online. A team of University of Washington researchers led by professor Kurtis … Read more →

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Deep learning has been immensely successful in recent years, spawning a lot of hope and generating a lot of hype, but no one has really understood why it works. The prevailing wisdom has been that deep learning is capable of discovering new representations of the data, rather than… Read more →

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The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society, has named Allen School professor emeritus Pedro Domingos and professor Daniel Weld among its class of 2020 AAAS Fellows honoring members whose scientifically or socially distinguished efforts have advanced science or its applications. Both Domingos and Weld were elected Fellows in the organization’s Information, Computing, and Communication section for their significant impact in artificial intelligence and machine learning research. Pedro Domingos Domingos was honored by… Read more →

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The robust impact that the Allen School and the University of Washington have in contributing to accessible technology was recognized at the 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computer and Accessibility (ASSETS 2020) held virtually last month. Researchers from the Allen School and the UW contributed to the Best Student Paper, Best Artifact and the Best Paper.  A team led by UW Human Centered Design & Engineering alumna and Carnegie Mellon University postdoc Cynthia Bennett earned the Best Student Paper… Read more →

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Robots have traditionally been deployed for dull, dirty or dangerous tasks. What if robots instead could be used to support the sophisticated and iterative work of domain experts such as chemical engineers or synthetic biologists?  A University of Washington research project led by Allen School adjunct faculty member and Human-Centered Design and Engineering professor Nadya Peek and Allen School and Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Josh Smith, “NRI: FND: Multi-Manipulator Extensible Robotic Platforms,” received… Read more →

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In honor of the National First-Generation College Celebration on November 8, our latest Allen School spotlight highlights some of our own first-gen community members. Approximately 20 percent of the school’s undergraduate student body is the first in their family to pursue a four-year degree. Each is an academic trailblazer, navigating their way through the entire college experience as the first in their family to pursue a bachelor’s degree. Some are still finding their footing with the help of Gen1, a… Read more →

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Kicking off the fall quarter by celebrating diversity in computing has become an Allen School tradition. This year the celebration went virtual, with around 80 people logged on to honor students who embody the school’s commitment to diversity and excellence and to hear from members of the community who participated in the Grace Hopper Celebration, the world’s… Read more →

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Many people have had the experience of being poked in the back by those annoying plastic tags while trying on clothes in a store. That is just one example of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, which has become a mainstay not just in retail but also in manufacturing, logistics, transportation, health care, and more. And who wouldn’t recognize the series of black and white lines comprising that old grocery-store standby, the scannable barcode? That invention — which originally dates back… Read more →

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