Allen School News

Allen School professor Yejin Choi and her colleagues Keisuke Sakaguchi, Ronan Le Bras and Chandra Bhagavatula at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) recently took home the Outstanding Paper Award from the 34th Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI–20). The winning paper, “WinoGrande: … Read more →

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In the latest Allen School undergrad spotlight, Nathan Wacker, can proudly say he’s helped build something that is truly out of this world. The third-year Allen School student from Seattle worked on HuskySat-1, a 3U CubeSat that was launched into space on November 2, 2019 and left Northrup Gruman’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft on January 31. Allen School: What interested you in working on HuskySat-1, and what was your job in the Husky Satellite Lab? Nathan Wacker: I… Read more →

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British scientist Rosalind Franklin, who spent the early 1950s researching the structure of DNA at King’s College London, should have won the Nobel Prize. She very well may have, except that her untimely death from ovarian cancer at the age of 37 meant that the Nobel Committee, which does not award posthumously, did not even consider her. For it was Franklin, not the famous scientific duo… Read more →

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Professor Hanna Hajishirzi, a professor in the Natural Language Processing group and director of the Allen School’s H2Lab, and Yin Tat Lee, a professor in the Theory of Computation group, have been named 2020 Sloan Research Fellows by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The program recognizes early-career scientists in the United States and Canada who are nominated and judged by their peers based on their creativity, leadership, and achievements in research. “I am thrilled that the… Read more →

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The UW Reality Lab has launched a new incubator where students can develop innovative projects in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) with guidance and resources from lab faculty and staff. The Reality Lab, which launched two years ago, allows researchers to focus on the pursuit of leading-edge research and educating the next generation of innovators in this growing field. The incubator gives students a space to work on AR/VR projects while fostering a community… Read more →

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Sometimes a ring symbolizes a promise, sometimes it shows a person’s birth month or mood, and sometimes it’s a statement about their taste in jewelry. But thanks to researchers in the Allen School’s Ubicomp Lab, a ring can now do a lot more. The latest in smart technology, the AuraRing is a ring and wristband combination with high-fidelity input tracking. The combination is… Read more →

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February 1 marked five years since the passing of professor Gaetano Borriello. Gaetano famously applied to only one program – ours – when he entered the academic job market in 1988 after earning his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He spent the next 27 years on the Allen School faculty, six of those valiantly fighting the cancer that would eventually take him from us. Gaetano is one of several leaders, and dare we say, legends, whom the… Read more →

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Behavioral studies in labs on university campuses are overwhelmed with participants who are WEIRD: western, educated, and from industrialized, rich and democratic countries. They are usually college students participating in the studies for class credit.  In an effort to expand these… Read more →

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From computer science to linguistics and kickboxing to baking, this month’s undergraduate student spotlight, Noelle Merclich, is driven to creating a welcoming environment in the Allen School, serving others and always being kind and compassionate. During a month when people are making and struggling to stick to new resolutions, the Maple Valley, Wa., native and junior computer science major resolved long ago to do her best and try new things every day.  Allen School: Why did you choose to… Read more →

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Tree-based machine learning models are among the most popular non-linear predictive learning models in use today, with applications in a variety of domains such as medicine, finance, advertising, supply chain management, and more. These models are often described as a “black box” — while their predictions are based on user inputs, how the models arrived at their predictions using those inputs is shrouded in mystery. This is problematic for some use cases, such as medicine, where the patterns and individual… Read more →

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