Allen School News

Anyone who believes the adage “Rome wasn’t built in a day” hasn’t met the members of the Allen School’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory (GRAIL). Ten years ago, postdoc Sameer Agarwal, Ph.D. student Ian Simon, alumnus Noah Snavely, professor Steve Seitz, and affiliate professor Richard Szeliski of Microsoft Research demonstrated how to digitally reconstruct the Italian capital in 3D using the large cache of photos shared on the internet. Last week, the team was one of… Read more →

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The strength and enduring impact of the Allen School and University of Washington’s contributions in accessible technology were on full display at the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, known as ASSETS, last month in Pittsburgh. Current or former Allen School researchers had a hand in three award-winning papers recognized at the conference, with a mix of current students, faculty, and alumni all represented.  The Best Student Paper Award was… Read more →

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Researchers from the Allen School’s UNSAT group took home one of two Best Paper Awards and a Distinguished Artifact Award at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 27th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2019) in Ontario, Canada last week. The winning paper, “Scaling symbolic evaluation for automated verification of systems code with Serval,” introduces a new framework for building automated verifiers for systems software. Serval was developed by Allen School Ph.D. student and lead author Luke Nelson;… Read more →

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Fall is back and so is the Allen School’s Undergrad Spotlight! This month’s student feature is Bellevue, Washington native Manoj Sarathy. Even before his arrival as part of the school’s expanded Direct to Major admissions program, the freshman computer science major was using machine learning to help environmental conservationists track and organize wildlife data. He was recently featured in the Seattle Times and on King 5 News for his work supporting wolverine recovery in Washington.   Allen School: Why did… Read more →

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Genetic genealogy websites enable people to upload their results from consumer DNA testing services like Ancestry.com and 23andMe to explore their genetic makeup, familial relationships, and even discover new relatives they didn’t know they had. But how can you be sure that the person who emails you claiming to be your Uncle Phil really is a long-lost relation? Based on what a team of Allen School researchers discovered when interacting with the largest third-party genetic genealogy service, you… Read more →

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Allen School Ph.D student Manaswi Saha has won an Amazon Catalyst award to support her research on “Combining computational and visualization techniques to understand urban accessibility at scale.” The award, which comes with $10,000 of funding attached, will support Saha’s dissertation research working with Allen School professor Jon Froehlich in the Makeability Lab. “More than 30 million people have some form of disability in the U.S. Of these, half report using mobility aids. In spite of the growing need… Read more →

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Doctors, parenting magazines and parents themselves recommend using white noise to help babies fall and stay asleep. Continuous, monotonous sounds like ocean waves, raindrops on a rooftop or the rumbling noise of an airplane can lull a newborn to sleep and help him or her rest longer. It… Read more →

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As a community committed to diversity and inclusion, the Allen School celebrates and values differences in its members. Yesterday (Oct. 10), the School held its annual diversity in computing reception, a favorite event highlighting the School’s broadening participation in organizations that honor diversity in computing. Students, faculty and staff that attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing  earlier in October and the ACM Richard Tapia … Read more →

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The volume of content posted on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media platforms every moment of the day, from all over the world, is monumental. Unfortunately, some of it is biased, hate-filled language targeting members of minority groups and often prompting violent action against them. Because it is impossible for human moderators to keep up with the volume of content generated in real-time, platforms are turning… Read more →

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Mark your calendars! Another exciting season of the Allen School’s Distinguished Lecture Series kicks off on Oct. 10. During the 2019-2020 season, we will explore deep learning, domain-specific architectures, recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, and so much more. All lectures take place at 3:30 p.m. in the Amazon Auditorium on the ground floor of the Bill & Melinda Gates Center on the University of… Read more →

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