Allen School News

To our extended Allen School community, Traditionally, June marks a time of great joy and celebration at the Allen School, as we send off our graduates into the world to push the limits of innovation and apply computing for the benefit of humanity. If this were a normal year, we would be gathering with friends and families tomorrow in Hec Edmundson Pavilion on the University of Washington campus in Seattle to cheer on our bachelor’s and master’s recipients as they… Read more →

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The IEEE Robotics & Automation Society has announced Allen School professor Dieter Fox as the recipient of a 2020 RAS Pioneer Award in recognition of his “pioneering contributions to probabilistic state estimation, RGB-D perception, machine learning in robotics, and bridging academic and industrial robotics research.” The society will formally honor Fox, director of the University of Washington’s Robotics and State Estimation Laboratory and senior director of robotics research at NVIDIA, during the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA … Read more →

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Elise Dorough, Director of Graduate Student Services for the Allen School, was recently honored by the University of Washington’s College of Engineering with a 2020 Professional Staff Award. In announcing the award, the College cited Dorough’s success in managing the growth of the full-time Ph.D. program and her leadership in transforming the graduate advising process to be more efficient, effective and responsive to the needs of both the students and their faculty advisors. It also highlighted her role… Read more →

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Ten years ago, a team of security and privacy researchers at the University of Washington and University of California, San Diego published a paper, “Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile,” describing how they were able to override critical safety systems and take control of a range of vehicle functions of what was later revealed to be a… Read more →

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Allen School professor Franziska Roesner has earned an Undergraduate Research Mentor Award from the University of Washington. This honor recognizes her commitment to guiding undergraduate researchers to achieve success as research scholars. Students presenting their work at the annual Undergraduate Research Symposium were invited to nominate their mentors for this award and a committee selected the honorees. This year, five out of 188 nominated mentors were chosen.  Roesner, co-director of the Security and Privacy Research Lab, mentors eight undergraduate… Read more →

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Allen School research professor Yuliang Wang received the Jaconnette L. Tietze Young Scientist Award from the John H. Tietze Foundation Trust for his work on novel approaches for identifying and restoring intercellular communication in diseases affecting complex tissues such as the heart, kidney, and brain. The award is administered by the University of Washington’s Institute for Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine (ISCRM), where Wang is a core faculty member, to recognize and support junior faculty conducting stand-out research related… Read more →

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Four Allen School undergraduates — Andrew Hu, Jenny Liang, Parker Ruth and Savanna Yee — have been selected for the 2020 class of the Husky 100. Each year, the Husky 100 program honors 100 University of Washington students across its three campuses , in a variety of disciplines, who are making the most of their time as Huskies to have a positive impact on the UW community.  Andrew Hu Andrew Hu is a senior majoring in computer science and education,… Read more →

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Earlier this month, the Allen School commemorated Women’s Research Day, an annual event that celebrates the research contributions of women and nonbinary people in the school and the greater Seattle area. While this year’s event was compelled to move from the Allen Center atrium to Zoom due to COVID-19, the online format didn’t dampen participants’ enthusiasm for the program. Allen School professor emerita Susan Eggers, professor and director Magdalena Balazinska, and a… Read more →

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Jungo Kasai, a Ph.D. student working with Allen School professor Noah Smith on natural language processing (NLP), has been named a 2020 IBM Ph.D. Fellow. Kasai, who is one of only 24 students from a total of 140 universities around the world to be selected for a fellowship, was recognized in the “Artificial Intelligence/Cognitive Computing” category for his focus on the problem of cross-lingual transfer.  Deep learning has made incredible gains for NLP, but most of the… Read more →

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Emerging technologies like augmented and mixed reality have the potential to transform the way we experience the world and interact with each other. But like most technologies that, in their infancy, opened up exciting new avenues of engagement — the web, mobile phones, social networks, and so on — mixed reality also has a potential dark side. And it’s one that is made even more fraught by the interplay between the physical and virtual world.  To encourage developers of these… Read more →

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