Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering

10/09/2026

“Inefficient, unusable, frustrating and expensive.” That’s Ph.D. student Yael Eiger’s verdict on the technology incarcerated people have to use to stay connected with their communities — connections that are known to help them successfully reenter society after serving their sentences.

Eiger became interested in technologies used by and for incarcerated people while teaching in Washington state correctional facilities. Together with her advisor in the University of Washington Security and Privacy Research Lab, Allen School professor and alum Franziska Roesner (Ph.D., ‘14), Eiger co-authored a series of papers exploring people’s experiences with technology during and after their incarceration as well as technologies used for policing and post-release monitoring. What they found was an opaque system in which the incentives for those buying or developing the tech and those forced to use it (or have it used on them) are clearly misaligned — and in which some technologies, such as surveillance cameras, end up affecting everyone.

“We can increase incarcerated people’s security and privacy in a compassionate way that doesn’t have to be at odds with the goals of lowering crime, preventing crime and making society safer,” Eiger said.

Read a UW News Q&A with Eiger and Roesner about this work: https://www.washington.edu/news/2026/10/07/why-the-technology-used-by-incarcerated-people-is-inefficient-unusable-frustrating-and-expensive/

In three recent papers, UW researchers explore technologies used in prisons and to monitor people before incarceration and after release.

10/01/2026

For early-career researchers, a CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is both a prestigious honor and a significant source of support for advancing the state of the art in their respective fields.

Five University of Washington faculty members received NSF CAREER Awards this year: Andrea Coladangelo, Matthew Golub, Ranjay Krishna, Chinmay Nirkhe and Stephanie Wang. The recipients are shaping the future of computing on a variety of fronts, from designing new video-language models that can grasp subtle differences in movement, to understanding the neural mechanisms of learning to build models that learn more like biological brains do — and more through projects spanning systems, cryptography and quantum computing.

Learn more about their work: https://www.cs.washington.edu/allen-school-blog/five-faculty-nsf-career-awards/

From left to right: NSF CAREER Award-winning faculty Andrea Coladangelo, Matthew Golub, Ranjay Krishna, Chinmay Nirkhe and Stephanie Wang.

09/29/2026

Thinking about applying to graduate school in Computer Science & Engineering?

The Pre-Application Mentorship Service (PAMS) is a graduate student-led initiative at the University of Washington designed to support prospective Allen School Ph.D. applicants as they navigate the University of Washington Graduate School application process. PAMS offers the following:

- October: 30–60 minute Zoom conversation with a current Allen School graduate student

- November: One round of feedback on your statement of purpose and CV

- A chance to ask questions about graduate school, life at the Allen School, research experiences, recommendations and more.

PAMS is open to all. Participation is separate from the official Ph.D. admissions process and does not affect admissions decisions.

Applications are being accepted through October 4 (or until volunteer capacity is reached). Learn more about PAMS and apply today:
https://www.cs.washington.edu/academics/graduate/phd-program/phd-admissions/pams/

Pre-Application Mentorship Service (PAMS)

09/15/2026

From understanding the genetic markers of disease, to identifying promising new drug candidates, to predicting how individual patients might respond to treatment, artificial intelligence is transforming biomedical research and accelerating the pace of discovery. But this transformation also raises questions about transparency, reliability and fairness of AI technologies — not just in biomedicine but across all scientific domains.

On September 20, the Nobel Prize Dialogue will bring together Nobel laureates, other leading scientists, and policy makers in Seoul, Korea, to explore “AI’s Impact on the Future of Science.” One of those leading scientists is University of Washington University of Washington College of Engineering professor Su-In Lee, who will give a talk on auditing AI in biology and healthcare.

Lee is known for pioneering the development and application of explainable AI techniques to models used in biomedical research and clinical settings to increase the transparency, interpretability and trustworthiness of these complex, high-stakes systems. She is a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and received the 2024 Samsung Ho-Am Prize — known as the “Korean Nobel Prize” — in engineering and the 2024 ISCB Innovator Award in recognition of her contributions.

The Nobel Prize Dialogue brings together Nobel laureates, leading scientists, policy makers and thought leaders to discuss global issues that affect people everywhere. Watch the livestream September 20 at https://www.nobelprize.org/ and on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thenobelprize

More details, including the full program and speaker bios: https://www.nobelprize.org/events/nobel-prize-dialogue/seoul-2026/

09/03/2026

We’re proud to celebrate the research contributions of University of Washington graduate alumni Miranda Wei (Ph.D., ‘25) and Chenzhi Zhu (Ph.D., ‘25), winners of the William Chan Memorial Dissertation Awards! Each year, Allen School faculty honor two recent Ph.D. graduates who produced outstanding doctoral dissertations with the award in memory of the late graduate student William Chan.

Wei and Zhu each tackled emerging digital threats in their dissertation research. As a member of the Security and Privacy Research Lab working with professors Franziska Roesner and Yoshi Kohno, Wei identified new methods for addressing online harassment and abuse by applying a sociotechnical approach. Zhu, who worked with professors Stefano Tessaro and Rachel Lin in the Cryptography Group, introduced secure yet efficient techniques for generating digital signatures in emerging applications.

Read more about their work, which is already having an impact in their respective fields: https://www.cs.washington.edu/allen-school-blog/miranda-wei-chenzhi-zhu-william-chan-memorial-dissertation-awards/

University of Washington College of Engineering University of Washington Graduate School UW Alumni Association

The Allen School has recognized alumni Miranda Wei (Ph.D., ‘25) and Chenzhi Zhu (Ph.D., ‘25) with 2025 William Chan Memorial Dissertation Awards, which honors outstanding doctoral dissertations...

08/27/2026

When Malek Itani experienced Apple Airpods Pro for the first time, he had an epiphany. Amazed by the feeling of being in his own personal space, Itani, a UW Electrical & Computer Engineering Ph.D. student working in the Allen School's Mobile Intelligence Lab, thought, “Wow, we can do something here.”

Then he remembered that the model he was working with in the lab was big, incapable of processing in real time, and definitely not something you could put on a pair of earbuds.

“But what if you can?” University of Washington professor and lab director Shyam Gollakota responded.

Itani accepted the challenge, working with Gollakota and his labmates on a succession of AI hearables that enable the wearer to customize their soundscape by amplifying the sounds and voices of people they want to hear — and silencing those they don’t. After proving the concept on standard headphones, they’ve since moved on to developing systems for “superhuman” hearing on earbuds and hearing aids and started a company, Hearvana AI, to commercialize their work.

This week, Itani received a Paul Baran Young Scholar Award from the The Marconi Society, which recognizes exceptional early-career researchers whose work is advancing the future of information and communications technology (ICT). He’s one of only three scholars selected for the honor from around the world — and also the third honoree from Gollakota’s lab.

“I feel like I’ve hit a niche that’s going to be so transformational, and it’s going to be in billions of devices,” said Itani. “It’s going to change the way we hear the world.”

Read our story about Itani and his work: https://www.cs.washington.edu/allen-school-blog/malek-itani-marconi-society-ai-hearing/

University of Washington College of Engineering

In 2022, University of Washington Ph.D. student Malek Itani purchased his first pair of Apple Airpods Pro in a pre-holiday sale. When he put them in his ears, something clicked — and it wasn’t a...

08/25/2026

Did you know that the phone in your hand is a potentially powerful health screening tool, one that could save time, money and possibly even a life?

Testing for common biomarkers like cholesterol and blood sugar often requires a doctor’s visit or acquiring and learning to use at-home testing devices and/or mailing in samples — and then waiting for results. But imagine you could do the same screenings whenever and wherever it’s convenient for you, and at a fraction of the cost…

That’s the vision of University of Washington researchers like postdoc and alum Jason Hoffman (Ph.D., ‘25) and Allen School and UW Electrical & Computer Engineering professor Shwetak Patel. They lead the team that is developing ResoScreen, an accurate, easy-to-use readerless test strip for common health biomarkers that is compatible with any smartphone.

Earlier this summer, the team presented ResoScreen at Nucleate’s Demo Day, where they received the Life Science Washington Market Impact Award in recognition of their innovative, patient-focused solution. They followed that up with an Innovation Gap Fund award from UW CoMotion, which supports proof-of-concept and business development activities to advance promising innovations that could lead to new products and services — like at-home health screening!

Learn more about ResoScreen on the company’s website: https://www.resoscreen.com

Check out their recent interactive demo at : https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3772363.3799167

University of Washington College of Engineering University of Washington Graduate School UW Alumni Association

08/18/2026

Many software tools, including compilers, optimizers and synthesizers, all depend on a common core to transform long and complicated programs into a simplified equivalent. This pattern stretches across a variety of problems, from shrinking three-dimensional CAD models to optimizing SQL queries.

Previously, each problem required developing an ad hoc and application-specific search strategy. But then a team of researchers led by University of Washington professor Zachary Tatlock cracked the code. They introduced egg, an open-source library that uses e-graphs, or equality graphs, along with equality saturation to optimize term representations. Since its release, egg has inspired the emergence of an entire community, with annual workshops, multiple follow-up papers and industry adoption. The team’s paper was recently selected as a Communications of the ACM - Association for Computing Machinery (CACM) Research Highlight, which recognizes outstanding research with strong, novel contributions to the field and broad interest to the computing community.

“By making equality saturation practical, egg essentially gave everyone a powerful new hammer — and it turns out many nails were waiting,” Tatlock said.

Tatlock's collaborators include Allen School Ph.D. student Oliver Flatt; former postdoc and alum Max Willsey (Ph.D., ‘21), now faculty at UC Berkeley; and alumni Chandrakana Nandi (Ph.D., '21), now director of U.S. R&D at Certora, Remy Wang (Ph.D., '23), faculty at UCLA, and Pavel Panchekha (Ph.D., '19), now faculty at The University of Utah.

Read more about the team's egg-cellent work: https://www.cs.washington.edu/allen-school-blog/cacm-research-highlight-equality-saturation-more-practical/

University of Washington College of Engineering

(Pexels/Elif Tekkaya)

08/11/2026

A team of researchers including University of Washington professor Chinmay Nirkhe has resolved one of the biggest open problems in quantum complexity theory of the past 20 years: Are quantum proofs computationally more powerful than classical proofs?

The answer, evidently, is yes. And to prove it, Nirkhe and his colleagues identified a query complexity problem called spectral forrelation that can be verified with a short quantum proof but for which “no classical proof can provide the same advantage without requiring exponentially many queries or an exponentially long proof,” Nirkhe explained.

"The result gives strong evidence that quantum proofs are not just different encodings of classical proofs; they can be fundamentally more powerful computational objects," he said.

That result earned the researchers a Best Paper Award at the 58th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2026) in June. University of Washington College of Engineering

Chinmay Nirkhe is part of both the Allen School’s Theory Group and the Quantum Group.