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Allen School recognizes Janet Davis and Paul Mikesell with 2023 Alumni Impact Awards

Janet Davis, wearing glasses, brown shirt and orange sweater, smiles for a portrait in front of a brown background. A gold diagonal line separates her photo from Paul Mikesell's, in which he is wearing a gray jacket and hat and smiling in front of a white-and-red machine against a blue sky. The Allen School has selected Janet Davis and Paul Mikesell as the 2023 recipients of its Alumni Impact Award, which recognizes former students who have made significant contributions to the field of computing. Davis and Mikesell will be formally honored during the Allen School’s graduation celebration on June 9 — demonstrating for a new class of alumni what can be achieved with an Allen School education. Read more →
June 6, 2023

Allen School and AI2 researchers earn CHI Best Paper Award for new tool enabling personalized tracking of citations in scientific literature

Screenshot of CiteSee user interface with key identifying the reader's own citations, previously cited papers, citations also found in recently opened papers, saved citations and recently opened but not saved papers. The lower part of the screen shows an abstract with highlighted citations that indicate the category. The review of existing literature is an essential part of scientific research — and citations play a key role. In the course of their review, a researcher may encounter dozens, or even hundreds, of inline citations that may or may not be linked to papers that are directly relevant to their work. A team that includes Allen School professor Amy Zhang, professor emeritus Daniel Weld and collaborators at AI2 and University of Pennsylvania envisioned a more personalized experience. Their paper, “CiteSee: Augmenting Citations in Scientific Papers with Persistent and Personalized Historical Context,” recently earned a Best Paper Award at CHI 2023. Read more →
June 2, 2023

Allen School undergraduate Lawrence Tan stays curious, while learning how to lead

Lawrence Tan, wearing black glasses, a blue suit jacket, white shirt and floral navy tie, smiles in front of a blurred background of a green tree. Before his Entrepreneurship class earlier this year, Lawrence Tan saw starting a business as byzantine, an endeavor fraught with pitfalls for potential newcomers. But that changed after the Allen School sophomore and his team began building their idea for a smart note-taking platform, fine-tuning their pitch to investors and learning from those who have been there before.  Read more →
June 1, 2023

Harmonizing social impact with coding chops, UW College of Engineering Dean’s Medalist Sidharth Lakshmanan puts collaboration center stage

Singing in the University Chorale helped Sidharth Lakshmanan, a student in the Allen School’s fifth-year master’s program, become a better coder. Finding the right key, he found, was all about teamwork. The multitalented Lakshmanan has put collaboration center stage during his time at the University of Washington. Having obtained his bachelor’s degree from the Allen School in March, he was recently awarded the College of Engineering Dean’s Medal for Academic Excellence in recognition of both his scholarship and his contributions to the broader computer science and engineering community. Read more →
May 25, 2023

‘I was especially drawn to CS as a ticket to anywhere’: Allen School alum Anne Dinning receives College of Engineering Diamond Award

Anne Dinning, wearing a patterned black and white shirt, smiles for a portrait in front of a blurred white background. After graduating with her doctorate from NYU in 1990, Anne Dinning (B.S., ‘84) was considering a career in academia when she met computer scientist David Shaw through a friend. She was intrigued by the opportunity to develop software for a small company operating in a pioneering field, and joined the D. E. Shaw group as one of the investment and technology firm’s first 20 employees. The UW College of Engineering recently recognized Dinning with a 2023 Diamond Award, which honors alumni and friends who have made outstanding contributions to the field of engineering. Read more →
May 24, 2023

Perfect match(ing): Professor Thomas Rothvoss wins 2023 Gödel Prize for proving the exponential complexity of a core problem in combinatorial optimization

Portrait of Thomas Rothvoss smiling in a blue-green t-shirt with hazy blue sky and part of an old sand-colored building overlooking a city behind him. University of Washington professor Thomas Rothvoss, a member of the Allen School’s Theory of Computation group with a joint appointment in the UW Department of Mathematics, has received the 2023 Gödel Prize for “The matching polytope has exponential extension complexity.” In the paper, Rothvoss proved that linear programming — a core technique in combinatorial optimization for modeling a large class of problems that are polynomial-time solvable  — cannot be used to solve the perfect matching problem in polynomial time. Read more →
May 23, 2023

Setting the table for a brighter future: With help from robots, Allen School researchers are making social dining more accessible

Two people seated at a table set with dishes and cutlery, with a pitcher just visible in the center on a black tablecloth. One person is wearing a mask; the other person’s mask is down and their mouth is open to receive a baby carrot poised facing the person at the end of a fork held by a robotic arm attached to their wheelchair. Few occasions better illustrate the human experience than sharing stories over a meal. Yet for people with motor impairments, the act of dining itself can invite undue pressure. Caregivers can get distracted while feeding their clients, who may feel self-conscious about interrupting the ongoing conversations to remind their caregiver to feed them a bite. A simple hangout with friends or family can turn into a source of potential embarrassment. The meal becomes more functional than social — and potentially, a process to be endured rather than a time for celebration. That’s changing thanks to an innovative partnership between Allen School robotics researchers and the assistive technology nonprofit Tyler Schrenk Foundation. Read more →
May 18, 2023

Allen School’s Simon Du and Sewoong Oh to advance AI for responding to threats both natural and human-made as part of NSF-led National AI Research Institutes

Side-by-side portraits of Simon Du and Sewoong Oh, divided by a slanted white line. Du is wearing a dark blue-grey button-down shirt with blurred foliage in the background. Oh is wearing eyeglasses with thin, round dark frames and a black t-shirt against a warmly lit building interior. From natural disasters to cyberattacks, events requiring rapid, coordinated responses of varying complexity and scale could be addressed more efficiently and effectively with the help of artificial intelligence. That’s the thinking behind two new National AI Research Institutes involving University of Washington researchers, including Allen School professors Simon Shaolei Du and Sewoong Oh, and funded by the National Science Foundation. Read more →
May 17, 2023

National Science Foundation recognizes seven Allen School students for advancing research in molecular computing, robotics, security and more

Graffiti-style UW block "W" logo stenciled and spray-painted in bright purple on a mottled grey surface The National Science Foundation (NSF) recognized seven Allen School students as part of its 2023 Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) competition. The NSF GRFP supports students for their potential to demonstrate excellence and innovation in teaching and research early in their careers. The students — six graduate students and one undergraduate student — were recognized in the Comp/IS/Eng or Engineering categories.  Read more →
May 16, 2023

Allen School’s Husky 100 honorees give back to the UW community and beyond as scientists, educators, entrepreneurs and leaders

The word "Washington" in University of Washington font in white on a purple fabric banner mostly obscuring campus buildings, backed by a pale blue sky and a burst of sunlight above the "o" Six Allen School students were recently named to the 2023 class of the Husky 100, an honor recognizing undergraduate and graduate students who are making the most of their time at the University of Washington. Husky 100 students make connections in and out of the classroom, making a positive impact on campus and in their communities. This year’s Allen School inductees are living those values, proving Huskies are stronger when in a pack.  Read more →
May 8, 2023

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