Allen School News

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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Our latest Allen School undergraduate student spotlight features Aerin Malana, a sophomore from Kent, Washington, majoring in computer science with a diversity minor. Malana has a passion for advocacy and equity, specifically in tech, and has become a leader in inclusivity at the Allen School. She serves as vice chair of the Association for Computing Machinery for Women (ACM-W) and has co-founded Gen1, an organization for first generation Allen School students. Despite the fact that the University of… Read more →

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Back in February — before the days of widespread flight cancelations, stay-at-home orders and mass Zoom meetings — a group of Allen School students who have a penchant for programming headed to Georgia Tech in Atlanta to do battle in the 2020 North American Championship of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). The group, known as Team Combo, had cinched their spot by capturing fourth place… Read more →

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Kimberly Ruth, a senior graduating from the University of Washington this spring with bachelor’s degrees in computer engineering and mathematics, has been awarded the College of Engineering’s Dean’s Medal for Academic Excellence. Each year, the college recognizes two graduating students for academic excellence; Ruth’s combination of exemplary grades, rigorous coursework, hands-on research experience, and leadership on campus and off illustrate why she was chosen for the honor. “We have a very strong program and many of our students… Read more →

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If you build it, they will come.  That statement might hold true for a baseball field in rural Iowa — in the days before social distancing, that is — but what about when it comes to building mobile technologies to fight a global pandemic?  In the balance between individual civil liberties and the common good, there is an obvious tension between the urge to deploy the latest, greatest tools for tracking the spread of COVID-19 and the preservation… Read more →

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Allen School senior Parker Ruth is one of three students from the University of Washington to be named a winner as part of the 2020 Goldwater Scholarship competition sponsored by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship & Excellence in Education Foundation. The scholarship program is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the nation focused on supporting exceptional undergraduates who aim to pursue research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering fields. Ruth, who is majoring in computer engineering and… Read more →

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Over a video conference presentation, Eugene Jahn showed viewers an augmented reality program he created to help aspiring Michael Jordans shoot the perfect basket, showing the best path and angle to become a better shooter. The Allen School sophomore is a student in the Virtual Reality Systems CSE 490V taught… Read more →

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We’ve all seen the images scrolling through our social media feeds — the improbably large pet that dwarfs the human sitting beside it; the monstrous stormcloud ominously bearing down on a city full of people; the elected official who says or does something outrageous (and outrageously out of character). We might stop mid-scroll and do a double-take, occasionally hit “like” or “share,” or dismiss the content as fake news. But how… Read more →

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