Allen School News Archive

“It’s so important for anyone to feel seen and to be heard”: Allen School’s Aerin Malana champions inclusivity and the visibility of first gen students

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 →

April 17, 2020

Allen School’s Team Combo fights hard for each other in the first-ever ICPC North American Championship

Team Combo (left to right): Milin Kodnongbua, Nonthakit Chaiwong, Phawin Prongpaophan, Sorawee Porncharoenwase

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 →

April 14, 2020

Allen School senior Kimberly Ruth awarded College of Engineering Dean’s Medal

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 →

April 13, 2020

Privacy and the pandemic: UW and Microsoft researchers present a “PACT” for using technology to fight the spread of COVID-19

Darren Cowley/Flickr

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 →

April 8, 2020

Allen School’s Parker Ruth named a 2020 Goldwater Scholar

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 →

April 2, 2020

New Virtual Reality Systems course turns students into makers

Students were provided with a kit to build their own head-mounted display, including an LCD, an HDMI driver board, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), lenses, an enclosure, and all cabling

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 →

March 31, 2020

“Hey, check out this 450-pound dog!” Allen School researchers explore how users interact with bogus social media posts

Is that a superstorm over Sydney, or fake news?

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 →

March 19, 2020

Computer Science student and Sophomore Medalist Louis Patsawee Maliyam dances to his own beat

Mark D. Stone/University of Washington

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 →

March 9, 2020

Remembering Paul Young (1936 – 2019)

Former chairs (left to right) Jerre Noe, Paul Young, Jean-Loup Baer, Ed Lazowska

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 →

March 5, 2020

Allen School and AI2 researchers earn Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI for advancing new techniques for testing natural language understanding

The team onstage at AAAI 2020 (from left): conference program co-chair Vincent Conitzer, Ronan Le Bras, Yejin Choi, Chandra Bhagavatula, Keisuke Sakaguchi, and conference program co-chair Fei Sha

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 →

March 3, 2020

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