Allen School News

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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Allen School undergraduate Louis Patsawee Maliyam balances a long-standing love of computing with a passion for the arts. It’s a combination that has served him well at the University of Washington, where he believes his major in computer science and minor in dance has widened his world and prepared him for the future. It has already propelled him to the top of his class, earning him the Sophomore Medalist award from the UW President’s Office… Read more →

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The Allen School community was sad to learn recently that former chair and professor emeritus Paul Young passed away in December. Young was a gifted computer scientist who spent five years as chair of what was then known as the University of Washington Department of Computer Science. During his tenure, Young advanced UW’s reputation as a national leader in computer science education and research, advocated for more… Read more →

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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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