A team of researchers from the Allen School and University of Washington Department of Electrical Engineering has been named a finalist for Amazon’s inaugural Alexa Prize. The UW team, which is the only North American competitor to make it to the next round, earned one of only three available places for Sounding Board, a conversational agent developed to engage users in thoughtful, informative discussion and transform how people interact with everyday devices in their homes.
The Alexa Prize… Read more →
Snap a selfie, screen for pancreatic cancer with new app from UW researchers
They say that the eyes are a window to the soul; with a new smartphone app developed by researchers at the University of Washington, they are now also a window to one’s health. Members of the Allen School’s UbiComp Lab, working with clinicians at UW Medicine, developed BiliScreen to enable anyone to snap a selfie and get screened for pancreatic cancer. The app detects adult jaundice — an early symptom of the disease — to enable more timely… Read more →
UW’s Sham Kakade and Maryam Fazel earn NSF TRIPODS Award to advance the state of the art in data science
A team of University of Washington researchers co-led by Sham Kakade, a professor in the Allen School and Department of Statistics, and Electrical Engineering Professor Maryam Fazel have secured a $1.5 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop new algorithmic tools that will advance the state of the art in data science. The funding will support the researchers’ project titled “Algorithms for Data Science: Complexity, Scalability, and Robustness” as part of the agency’s Transdisciplinary… Read more →
Allen School’s open-source TVM framework bridges the gap between deep learning and hardware innovation
Deep learning has become increasingly indispensable for a broad range of applications, including machine translation, speech and facial recognition, drug discovery, and social media filtering. This growing reliance on deep learning has been fueled by a combination of increased computational power, decreased data storage costs, and the emergence of scalable deep learning systems like TensorFlow, MXNet, Caffe and PyTorch that enable companies and organizations to analyze and extract value from vast amounts of data with the help of neural networks.… Read more →
First-Choice Majors of UW Confirmed Incoming Freshmen
The trend continues – at the University of Washington, and across the nation. The two charts shown here tell the story: they show the ten top first-choice majors of UW confirmed incoming freshmen from fall 2010 to fall 2017, and the first-choice College of Engineering majors of UW confirmed incoming freshmen over the same period.… Read more →
Allen School researchers reveal how smart devices can be turned into surveillance devices with music
Researchers from the Allen School’s Networks & Mobile Systems Lab and Security and Privacy Research Lab teamed up on a new project, CovertBand, to demonstrate how smart devices can be converted into surveillance tools capable of secretly tracking the body movements and activities of users and their companions. CovertBand turns off-the-shelf devices into active sonar systems with the help of acoustic pulses concealed in music. The team’s findings reveal how increasingly popular smart home assistants and other connected devices… Read more →
Allen School professor Franziska Roesner recognized with TR35 Award
Allen School professor Franziska Roesner has been recognized with a 2017 TR35 Award, MIT Technology Review’s annual celebration of the world’s 35 top innovators under the age of 35. Roesner is honored in the “Inventors” category, recognizing the visionary individuals who are creating the breakthroughs and building the technologies that will shape the future.
Roesner co-directs the Allen School’s Security and Privacy Research Lab, where she analyzes the security and privacy risks of existing and emerging technologies… Read more →
Allen School faculty and alumni gather at annual DARPA ISAT meeting
Every August, the members of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Information Science and Technology study group (DARPA ISAT) gather in Woods Hole, Massachusetts for their annual summer meeting to discuss the future of computing and communications technologies.
As professor and past ISAT Chair Ed Lazowska notes, the Allen School tends to be “wonderfully over-represented” at these meetings and on the ISAT study group in general. No fewer than 11 current members have Allen School connections, including three newly… Read more →
Allen School researchers expose cybersecurity risks of DNA sequencing software
In an illustration of just how narrow the divide between the biological and digital worlds has become, a team of researchers from the Allen School released a study revealing potential security risks in software commonly used for DNA sequencing and analysis — and demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to infect software systems with malware delivered via DNA molecules. The team will present its paper, “Computer Security, Privacy, and DNA Sequencing: Compromising Computers with Synthesized DNA, … Read more →
Allen School’s Zachary Tatlock and Neutrons software verification project featured in Communications of the ACM
Verifying that software runs safely and reliably is a mandate for mission-critical systems ranging from avionics to automobiles. A system of special significance to professor Zachary Tatlock and colleagues in the Allen School’s Programming Language and System Engineering (PLSE) group is the Clinical Neutron Therapy System (CNTS) at the UW Medical Center. One of only three radioactive therapy systems of its kind in the United States, the CNTS directs powerful radiation to patients’ heads to treat cancers of the tongue… Read more →