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‘Take advantage of the doors that open’: Allen School celebrates the Class of 2023

Closeup of graduates in regalia from behind, focused on a black undergraduate cap with gold tassel decorated by hand with fabric flowers, gold cord and beads, and glitter and the words "there's a great big beautiful tomorrow" written in script On Friday, June 9, more than 4,000 family and friends from near and far gathered on the University of Washington campus to celebrate the Allen School’s 2023 graduates. The celebration commenced with a casual open house and meet-and-greet with faculty and staff in the Paul G. Allen Center and Bill & Melinda Gates Center. It culminated in a formal event in the Hec Edmundson Pavilion at the Alaskan Airlines Arena, where graduates made the brief journey across the stage to mark the start of a new journey as Allen School alumni. Read more →
June 22, 2023

Making a difference, one symphony at a time: Concert piano or computer, Allen School undergraduate Michael Gu strikes the right key

Michael Gu, wearing a black shirt and a blue suit jacket, smiles for a portrait in front of a white and gray wall with a picture frame to his right. Allen School undergraduate Michael Gu balances performing as a concert pianist with coding as a computer science student. The winner of the UW School of Music's annual concerto competition is using his creative talents, both in the classroom and beyond, to help his community. Read more →
June 20, 2023

‘One of a kind’: Allen School administrator extraordinaire Jennifer Worrell receives College of Engineering Professional Staff Award

Portrait of Jennifer Worrell wearing a black and tan patterned shirt with a black scarf around her neck and draped over one shoulder, smiling and leaning against a concrete wall inside the Gates Center atrium. The atrium is softly lit, with black and metal railings along two floors of the building visible behind her. “There is not one area of the school that she does not touch in some way.” “She” is Jennifer Worrell, the Allen School’s director of finance and administration. And that observation was made by a colleague advancing her successful nomination for a 2023 Professional Staff Award from the University of Washington College of Engineering. Each year, these awards honor faculty, research and teaching assistants, and staff like Worrell whose extraordinary contributions benefit the college community. Read more →
June 13, 2023

‘Not a job for a mere mortal’: Assistant Director for Diversity & Access Chloe Dolese Mandeville receives UW Distinguished Staff Award

Studio portrait of Chloe Dolese Mandeville smiling against a black background. Champion, advocate, role model…based on her colleagues’ descriptions, Chloe Dolese Mandeville sounds like a regular Girl Scout. Which, it so happens, she is: for the past two and a half years, the Allen School’s Assistant Director for Diversity & Access has volunteered as a troop leader for the Girl Scouts of Western Washington, hosting activities on campus and inspiring girls to see computing as a potential career path. It is but one example of the many ways in which Dolese Mandeville has helped students to engage with the field — efforts that have now earned her a 2023 Distinguished Staff Award from the University of Washington. Read more →
June 7, 2023

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

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