Allen School News

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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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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