Allen School News

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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Professor Jeffrey Heer, who leads the Allen School’s Interactive Data Lab, and former student Dominik Moritz (Ph.D., ‘19), who was co-advised by Allen School adjunct professor and information science professor Bill Howe, were each honored for their impact on interactive visualization research at IEEE VIS 2020 this week, the flagship conference in the field of visualization and visual analytics. Heer received the IEEE InfoVis 10-Year Test of Time Award for his 2010 paper,… Read more →

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Our first undergraduate student spotlight of the new academic year features Nayha Auradkar, a junior from Sammamish, Washington who is majoring in computer science with a minor in neural computation and engineering. Auradkar currently serves as chair of the University of Washington chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery for Women (ACM-W), working to cultivate a strong, supportive community of women in the Allen School. In her leadership role, she hopes to increase programming, engagement and awareness among the… Read more →

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Save the dates! Another exciting season of the Allen School’s Distinguished Lecture Series kicks off on Oct. 29. Join us to hear experts in technology activism, quantum computational supremacy, multi-chip processing, cloud infrastructure, and computer architecture. All lectures with the exception of the November 19th Lytle Lecture, will be live streamed on the Allen School’s YouTube channel at 3:30 p.m. Pacific… Read more →

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Yin Tat Lee, a professor in the Allen School’s Theory of Computation group and visiting researcher at Microsoft Research, has earned a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering for his work on faster optimization algorithms that are fundamental to the theory and practice of computing and many other fields, from mathematics and statistics, to economics and operations research. Each year, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation bestows this prestigious recognition upon a small number of early-career scientists and engineers… Read more →

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Over the past 20 years, indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) has emerged as a potentially powerful cryptographic method for securing computer programs by making them unintelligible to would-be hackers while retaining their functionality. While the mathematical foundation of this approach was formalized back in 2001 and has spawned more than 100 papers on the subject, much of the follow-up work relied upon… Read more →

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Manaswi Saha, a Ph.D. student working with Allen School professor Jon Froehlich, has been named a 2020 Google Ph.D. Fellow for her work in human computer interaction focused on assistive technologies and artificial intelligence for social good. Her research focuses on collecting data and building tools that can improve the understanding of urban accessibility and serve as a mechanism for advocacy, urban planning, and policymaking. Saha, who is one of 53 students throughout the world to be selected… Read more →

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In the spring of 2016, social media users turned a friendly online chatbot named Tay — a seemingly innocuous experiment by Microsoft in which the company invited the public to engage with its work in conversational learning  — into a racist, misogynistic potty mouth that the company was compelled to take offline the very same day that it launched. Two years later, Google released its Smart Compose tool for Gmail, a feature designed to… Read more →

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Allen School Ph.D. students Vivek Jayaram and John Thickstun have been named 2020 Qualcomm Innovation Fellows for their work in signal processing, computer vision and machine learning using the latest in generative modeling to improve source separation. In their paper, “Source Separation with Deep Generative Priors,” published at the 2020 International Conference on Machine Learning, the team addresses perceptible artifacts that are often found in source separation algorithms. Jayaram and Thickstun… Read more →

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