Allen School News

Allen School professors Alvin Cheung and Shayan Oveis Gharan were named 2019 Sloan Research Fellows in Computer Science by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship Program recognizes early-career scientists and engineers who have already distinguished themselves through their research and exhibit the potential to make substantial contributions in their respective fields. Alvin Cheung engages in cross-disciplinary research as a member of the Allen School’s Database and Programming Languages & Software Engineering groups. In his young career,… Read more →

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Yesterday, nearly 300 friends of the Paul G. Allen School gathered to celebrate the dedication of the new Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering on the UW Seattle campus. UW and Allen School leadership were joined onstage by special guests Bill Gates, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, and Microsoft President & Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith in thanking the more than 500 individual donors, local technology companies, and state taxpayers for… Read more →

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The Allen School family mourns the passing of professor emeritus Ted Kehl, one of the original group of seven faculty members who founded the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington in the 1960s, and someone who was instrumental in introducing Seattle to a hardware revolution in the form of very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuit design — a development that transformed computing and modern society. Kehl earned his Ph.D. at University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1961 and joined the… Read more →

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On Friday, March 1st, the Paul G. Allen School will open the doors of the new Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering to the community. Friends, alumni, and campus and regional partners are invited to join us for an afternoon of building tours, demos, and interactive media that will showcase how the Bill & Melinda Gates Center will enable us to educate more of Washington’s students for high-impact careers, advance scientific discovery and innovation, and make… Read more →

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Three University of Washington faculty who are recognized leaders in human-computer interaction (HCI) research — Allen School professor Jennifer Mankoff and Information School professors (and Allen School adjunct professors) Batya Friedman and Jacob Wobbrock — have been honored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) with election to the CHI Academy. The CHI Academy is composed of individuals who have made substantial, cumulative contributions to the field of… Read more →

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In yet another sign of the Puget Sound region’s emergence as a center of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence research, NVIDIA last week marked the official opening of its new AI Robotics Research Lab just blocks away from the Allen School and University of Washington’s Seattle campus. Led by Allen School professor Dieter Fox, NVIDIA’s new lab in the UW CoMotion building will bring together multidisciplinary teams to… Read more →

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Someone in the United States dies from an opioid overdose every 12 and a half minutes, according to data from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the rise in fatalities stemming from illicit opioid use is widely recognized as a public health epidemic. Many of these deaths could be prevented by rapid detection and intervention, including the administration of naloxone to reverse the effects of an overdose. Now, thanks to researchers in the Allen… Read more →

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Three members of the Allen School family were recently named Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in recognition of their professional achievements. Professor Rastislav (Ras) Bodik of the Allen School’s Programming Languages & Software Engineering (PLSE) group, former postdoc Aaron Hertzmann of Adobe Research, and alumnus Alec Wolman (Ph.D., ‘02) of Microsoft Research were among the 56 ACM members worldwide to be recognized in the 2018 class of Fellows for their outstanding technical contributions in computing and information… Read more →

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Allen School Ph.D. student Ewin Tang has landed a spot on Forbes’ 2019 list of “30 Under 30” in science for developing a method that enables a classical computer to solve the “recommendation problem” in roughly the same time that a quantum computer could — upending one of the most prominent examples of quantum speedup in the process. Her algorithm offers an efficient solution to a core machine learning problem which models the task of predicting user preferences from incomplete… Read more →

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A team of researchers in the Networks & Mobile Systems Lab led by Allen School professor Shyam Gollakota and the Autonomous Insect Robotics (AIR) Laboratory led by Mechanical Engineering professor Sawyer Fuller have designed a new mobile platform that combines sensing, computation, and communication in a package small enough to be carried by a bumblebee. Dubbed Living IoT, the system allows nature to take its course while enabling new capabilities in agricultural and environmental monitoring. Living IoT’s reliance on… Read more →

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