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Allen School’s Alisa Liu pushes the boundaries of natural language processing with human and machine collaboration

Portrait of Alisa Liu wearing a white short-sleeved shirt with gathered short sleeves and a pendant necklace standing in front of a mosaic tiled staircase and foliage of succulents, ferns, and bushes. As people engage artificial intelligence to solve problems at a human level, reliance on such technologies has unearthed difficulties in the way that language models learn from data. Often, the models will memorize the peculiarities of a dataset rather than solving the underlying task for which they were developed. The problem has more to do with data quality than size, meaning the problem cannot be corrected by simply making the dataset larger.  Enter Alisa Liu, a Ph.D. student who… Read more →
January 27, 2023

With HAILEY, researchers demonstrate how AI can lend a helping hand for mental health support

A person with long blond hair, with only mouth and chin visible, is lying on a blue quilted blanket on short green grass in dappled sunlight. The person is wearing a black sweatshirt and propped up on their elbows, viewing a smartphone held in their well-manicured hands.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Sometimes it can be hard to find just the right words to help someone who is struggling with mental health challenges. But recent advances in artificial intelligence could soon mean that assistance is just a click away — and delivered in a way that enhances, not replaces, the human touch.  In a new paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, a team of computer scientists and psychologists at the University of Washington and Stanford University… Read more →
January 23, 2023

Luis Ceze named Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for advancing new paradigms in computer architecture and programming systems

Portrait of Luis Ceze smiling at the camera. Luis is wearing glasses with dark acrylic frames and clear lenses and a black open-necked shirt against a grey background. Since he first arrived at the University of Washington in 2007, Allen School professor Luis Ceze has worn many hats: teacher, mentor, researcher, entrepreneur, venture investor. As of this week, he can add Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery to that list after the organization bestowed upon him its most prestigious level of membership for “contributions to developing new architectures and programming systems for emerging applications and computing technologies.” A computer architect by training, Ceze has been at the… Read more →
January 19, 2023

Allen School’s Michael Duan and Anas Awadalla recognized by CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards program

Michael Duan, wearing square glasses and a navy t-shirt, smiles in front of a blurred background of green plants and pine trees. To the right on the other side of a purple line, Anas Awadalla, wearing black glasses and a navy t-shirt and a backpack, stands in front of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. The building is made of brick and the sign is black.
Michael Duan
The Computing Research Association recently honored Allen School undergraduates Michael Duan and Anas Awadalla as part of its Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards program for 2023. The annual program highlights exceptional undergraduate students from across North America for their contributions to the computing field.  Duan, who works with professor and advisor Jon Froehlich in the Makeability Lab, was selected as a finalist for his work on Scaling Crowd+AI Sidewalk Accessibility Assessments and Sidewalk Gallery: An Interactive, Filterable Image Read more →
January 13, 2023

Allen School and AI2 researchers recognized at NeurIPS for outstanding contributions in large-scale embodied AI and next-generation image-text models

The Neural Information Processing Systems logo with purple patterning surrounding the left of the text. Allen School researchers continue to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI) and in building innovative image-text models. At the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022), several members from the Allen School, along with researchers from the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), earned recognition for their work in advancing their respective fields.  Allen School undergraduate Matt Deitke, professor Ali Farhadi, affiliate professors Ani Kembhavi, director of computer vision at AI2, and Roozbeh Mottaghi,… Read more →
January 6, 2023

Allen School professors Tadayoshi Kohno and Rajesh Rao named IEEE Fellows for pioneering new directions in computing research

Side-by-side of portraits of Tadayoshi Kohno and Rajesh Rao. Kohno is wearing a light blue polo shirt; Rao is wearing wire-rimmed eyeglasses, and a dark grey suit jacket over a pale grey button-down shirt Allen School professor Tadayoshi Kohno has devoted his career to advancing security, privacy and safety in multiple industries, from cars to cardiac defibrillators, while also advancing thoughtful and inclusive approaches to technology design. Meanwhile, his colleague Rajesh Rao contributed to the progress of brain-computer interfaces from science fiction to actual science by demonstrating their very real potential to help people with neurological injury or disease. What they both have in common is the honor of being named a 2023 IEEE Read more →
January 5, 2023

Allen School team earns Best Overall Winner in the Proof of Concept Category in the 2022 IEEE Connecting the Unconnected Challenge

Four volunteers from the Seattle Connectivity Lab install a rooftop station with city scape and cloudy sky in back drop. Two years of conducting business, school, and socialization online during the COVID pandemic exposed the extent to which unequal access and inadequate connectivity is a barrier for people in both rural and urban communities. For a team led by Allen School professor Kurtis Heimerl, closing the gap in access to internet connectivity had been the focus of earlier research in far-off locales. With the pandemic highlighting connectivity challenges closer to home, the researchers turned their focus to what they… Read more →
December 22, 2022

Data science and decentralization: Bloomberg Ph.D. Fellowship recipient Suchin Gururangan makes large language models more manageable to advance social good

Suchin Gururangan, wearing a blue shirt, smiles in front of a blurred, wooded background. Starting in high school, Suchin Gururangan felt the pull of research. A summer internship piqued his curiosity. Projects in his university’s neuroscience lab fed it further.  But “life happens,” as he put it, and graduate school took a backseat for the time being. He jumped into industry, first in venture capital, then in cybersecurity. Following graduation from the University of Chicago, he moved to the Boston area. Even after landing in Seattle to join a startup, the former researcher still… Read more →
December 21, 2022

‘It’s extremely important for future students to picture themselves in computing’: Allen School celebrates Computer Science Education Week

Five people stand around a demo table with a laptop and assorted wires attached to a small square device off to the side. Three people are running the demo from one side of the table; one of the two guests on the opposite side, facing the laptop, is reaching out towards the device. The laptop screen displays simple graphics suggesting some kind of video game. There are little piles of purple tubes of chapstick and stickers branded with the Allen School logo. Each December, the Allen School invites prospective students and families to join us for a week-long celebration of Computer Science Education Week, a nationwide event that aims to inspire students, advance equity, and honor those who are contributing to the field and to society. After being compelled to go fully virtual due to the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, the school’s Diversity & Access Team was thrilled to offer a hybrid celebration this year.  Throughout the week, prospective students… Read more →
December 20, 2022

Allen School Ph.D. students Kyle Johnson and Lisa Orii receive Quad Fellowships

Kyle Johnson, wearing a dark blue tie, a light blue shirt and a grey suit jacket, smiles in front of a white background. To the right, Lisa Orii, wearing a white shirt and a black suit jacket, smiles in front of a white brick background.
Kyle Johnson (left) and Lisa Orii were named to the inaugural class of Quad Fellows
The Allen School’s Kyle Johnson and Lisa Orii have been named to the first cohort of recipients of the Quad Fellowship, a scholarship program that recognizes outstanding STEM graduate students from Australia, India, Japan and the United States.  The inaugural 100-member class includes students specializing in a number of disciplines across science, technology, mathematics and engineering. Operated and administered by Schmidt Futures, the Quad… Read more →
December 19, 2022

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