Allen School News

There was a time when cookies were exclusively considered something to be savored — back when chips referred to chocolate rather than silicon. Once “cookies” became synonymous with online tracking, privacy researchers weren’t so sweet on the concept. That includes Allen School professors Franziska Roesner and Tadayoshi Kohno, who investigated the online tracking ecosystem for their 2012 paper “Detecting and Defending Against Third-Party Tracking on the Web.” Roesner, Kohno and co-author David Wetherall received a Test of Time Award at NSDI 2023 for their influential work. Read more →

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Single-cell genomics is revolutionizing biomedical research by enabling high-volume analysis of gene expression at the cellular level to understand the origins of disease and identify targets for potential treatment. To accelerate this progress, researchers are increasingly turning their attention to artificial intelligence (AI) tools to analyze these connections at scale. But the size and complexity of the resulting datasets, combined with noise and systematic biases in experimentation, make it difficult to build meaningful AI models from which to derive new biological insights. Professors Su-In Lee and Sara Mostafavi are working on solutions to the problem Read more →

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The 1939 movie “The Wizard of Oz” opens in black and white. After a tornado sweeps up her Kansas home and drops it with a thud, Dorothy, the story’s protagonist, opens the front door and is greeted by a world of color. “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” she says. Allen School senior Matt Deitke is not from Kansas, nor has he been to the Land of Oz. Yet he experienced a similar revelation, minus the intervention from Hollywood or Mother Nature. When Deitke was in high school, he spent long hours using Adobe Photoshop to manually — and tediously — colorize images for school projects. That changed when he encountered a different kind of technical wizardry, one that opened up a new world of color. Read more →

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SIGCHI, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, has honored four researchers with ties to the University of Washington with 2023 SIGCHI Awards. Allen School alum Nicola (Nicki) Dell (Ph.D., ‘15), a leader in applying technologies to safeguard victims of technology-enabled intimate partner violence (IPV), received a Societal Impact Award, while Dhruv (DJ) Jain (Ph.D., ‘22), received an Outstanding Dissertation Award for his work on technologies to enhance… Read more →

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Allen School undergraduates Jan Buzek and Nuria Alina Chandra are among five University of Washington students to be named 2023 Goldwater Scholars by the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. The Goldwater Scholars program recognizes and supports outstanding students who intend to pursue careers in mathematics, engineering and the natural sciences.  Buzek is a junior studying computer science and mathematics who counts Allen School… Read more →

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In February, University of Washington student group Impact++ won one of the tracks at the Tech For Change Civic Tech (TFC) Hackathon held at Boston University. The hackathon tasked student teams with building creative solutions in the interest of changing public policy. This year’s competition included three tracks: education, election turnout and government policy rooted in social… Read more →

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Biomedical research has yielded troves of data on protein function, cell types, gene expression and drug formulas that hold tremendous promise for assisting scientists in responding to novel diseases as well as fighting old foes such as Alzheimer’s, cancer and Parkinson’s. Historically, their ability to explore these massive datasets has been hampered by an outmoded model that relied on painstakingly annotated data, unique to each dataset, that precludes more open-ended exploration. But that may be about to change. Read more →

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To say Anat Caspi’s mission is pedestrian in nature would be accurate to some degree. And yet, when looked at more closely, one realizes it’s anything but. In 2015, the Allen School scientist was thinking about how to build a trip planner that everyone could use, similar to Google Maps but different in striking ways. Current tools didn’t account for various types of pedestrians and the terrain they confronted on a daily basis. What if there were barriers blocking the sidewalk? A steep incline listing to and fro? Stairs but no ramp? Read more →

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According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, one out of every three adults in the United States have prediabetes, a condition marked by elevated blood sugar levels that could lead to the development of type 2 diabetes. The good news is that, if detected early, prediabetes can be reversed through lifestyle changes such as improved diet and exercise. The bad news? Eight out of 10 Americans with prediabetes don’t know that they have it... Read more →

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A little more than two decades ago, University of Washington professor Georg Seelig began planting the seeds of a career in theoretical physics, seeking elegant solutions to the mysteries of the natural world. Last month, Seelig, a faculty member in the Allen School and Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, was hailed as the “DNA Computer Scientist of the Year” by the International Society for Nanoscale Science, Computation and Engineering (ISNSCE), who named him the winner … Read more →

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