Allen School News

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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Our latest Allen School student spotlight features Jenny Liang, a Kenmore, Washington native and recent UW graduate who majored in computer science and informatics. Liang was named among the Husky 100 and earned the Allen School’s Undergraduate Service Award for her leadership, compassion, and focus on developing technology for social good in her work with the Information and Communication Technology for Development Lab (ICTD).  This summer, Liang started an internship at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) after… Read more →

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Researchers at the University of Washington will lead a team of universities in creating the Institute for Foundations of Data Science (IFDS) to tackle important theoretical and technical questions in the field. Supported by a $12.5 million, five-year grant from National Science Foundation, IFDS is one of two institutes nationwide to receive funding from the latest phase of the agency’s Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) program. The IFDS — a collaboration between UW and the Universities… Read more →

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Allen School postdoctoral researcher Joseph Jaeger and visiting researcher Nirvan Tyagi, a Ph.D. student at Cornell Tech, received the Best Paper by Early Career Researchers Award at the 40th Annual International Cryptology Conference (Crypto 2020) organized by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). Jaeger and Tyagi, who have been working with professor Stefano Tessaro of the Allen School’s Theory and Cryptography groups, earned the award for presenting a new approach to proving… Read more →

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The University of Washington is among the recipients of a five-year, $100 million investment announced today by the National Science Foundation (NSF) aimed at driving major advances in artificial intelligence research and education. The NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML) — one of five new NSF AI Institutes around the country — will tap into the expertise of faculty in the Allen School’s Machine Learning group and the UW Department of Statistics in collaboration with the University… Read more →

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In July, the Allen School kicked off its inaugural AI4ALL summer program, online. Created to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) to underrepresented pre-college students, AI4ALL is a national program that works to diversify AI by recruiting students who identify with other groups underrepresented in AI. The University of Washington’s debut this summer is the first instance of AI4ALL to focus on students with disabilities and their representation in AI. The University of Washington joined the program this year, offering a free,… Read more →

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A team of researchers that includes Allen School professor Carlos Guestrin, Ph.D. student Tongshuang Wu and alumnus and affiliate professor Marco Tulio Ribeiro (Ph.D. ’18) of Microsoft captured the Best Paper Award at the 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020). In the winning paper, “Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP Models with CheckList,” they and… Read more →

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