Less than a year after her arrival at the University of Washington, professor Yulia Tsvetkov is making her mark as the newest member of the Allen School’s Natural Language Processing group. As head of the Tsvetshop — a clever play on words that would likely stymie your typical natural language model — Tsvetkov draws upon… Read more
Recent advances in open-ended text generation could enable machines to produce text that approaches or even mimics that generated by humans. However, evaluating the quality and accuracy of these large-scale models has remained a significant computational challenge. Recently, researchers at the Allen School and Allen Institute for AI (AI2) offered a solution in the form… Read more
Luke Zettlemoyer, a professor in the Allen School’s Natural Language Processing group and a research director at Meta AI, was recently elected a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for “significant contributions to grounded semantics, semantic parsing, and representation learning for natural language processing.” Since he arrived at the University of Washington in… Read more
The Allen School has a proud tradition of nurturing undergraduate student researchers whose work has the potential for real-world impact. This year, three of those students — Jerry Cao, Mike He and Yu Xin — earned honorable mentions from the Computing Research Association (CRA) as part of its 2022 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards competition for… Read more
During their time at the Allen School, recent alumni Maarten Sap (Ph.D., ‘21) and Ivan Evtimov (Ph.D., ‘21) tackled some of the thorniest issues raised by emerging natural language processing and machine learning technologies — from endowing NLP systems with social intelligence while combating inequity and bias, to addressing security vulnerabilities in the convolutional neural… Read more
Allen School professor emeritus Richard Ladner has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for his “distinguished contributions to the inclusion of persons with disabilities in the computing fields.” One of 26 leading scientists in the organization’s Information, Computing & Communications section to attain the rank of Fellow… Read more
Mohit Shridhar, a Ph.D. student working with Allen School professor Dieter Fox, has been named a 2022-2023 NVIDIA Graduate Fellow for his research in building generalizable systems for human-robot collaboration. Shridhar’s work is focused on connecting language to perception and action for vision-based robotics. Shridhar aims to use deep learning to connect abstract concepts to… Read more
“You are what you eat,” as the saying goes. But not everyone has the same degree of choice in the matter. An estimated 19 million people in the United States live in so-called food deserts, where they have lower access to healthy and nutritious food. More than 32 million people live below the poverty line… Read more
As the world watched COVID-19 grow from a mysterious virus in far-off places to a planetary pandemic, news outlets worked hard to keep the world informed on how, where and why it was spreading. At the start of the outbreak, Matthew Conlen, a Ph.D. student in the Allen School’s Interactive Data Lab, was working as… Read more
Earlier this month, the Allen School held a virtual celebration showcasing efforts to increase diversity in computing and honoring members of our community who have demonstrated their commitment to diversity, excellence and leadership. An annual tradition, the event this year also offered Allen School leaders an opportunity to share highlights from its five-year strategic plan… Read more