Daniel Chen, '22, wins prestigious Marshall Scholarship

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

University of Washington Information School alum Daniel Guorui Chen, Informatics ’22, has been named a Marshall Scholar, one of the highest honors available to college graduates in the U.S. Chen plans to attend the University of Cambridge. “I was so surprised when I learned I was awarded. This is such an honor,” Chen, 19, said. “The Marshall Scholarship is a great example of taking U.S. and U.K. perspectives and putting them together to work and discover and push for better health, not just for these two countries, but for the world at large.” Founded by an act of the British P

ACM honors iSchool's Shah as Distinguished Member

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

UW Information School Professor Chirag Shah is among 67 global scholars recognized this year as Distinguished Members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for their outstanding contributions to the computing field.  The ACM is the world’s largest computing society. It recognizes up to 10 percent of its worldwide membership as distinguished members based on their professional experience, groundbreaking achievements and longstanding participation in computing. The ACM has three tiers of recognition: fellows, distinguished members and senior members. The Distinguished Member

Winfo holds first in-person hackathon in 3 years

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

The University of Washington Women in Informatics group (affectionately known as Winfo) gathered on a Saturday in December for its 11th annual hackathon. In a ballroom at the Husky Union Building, 190 students in 50 groups developed unique projects as part of the event. Students designed apps that offer a variety of benefits, such as letting users learn more about different cultures, protecting older adults from cyber attacks, and accessing telemedicine from remote areas. The event was the first in-person hackathon Winfo has hosted in three years. Dean Anind Dey attended and said, “Winfo

MLIS alum helps bring pronouns to UW directories

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Members of the University of Washington community have lacked a tool to declare their pronouns in directory listings, but soon they will have one. Master of Library and Information Science alum Lauren Manes is helping make it happen through her work on a new pronoun tool.  Manes is a user experience designer at the UW and the primary designer on the pronoun tool project. The pronoun tool, a project started by Identity and Access Management, will be a designated space within the centralized UW system where students with a UW NetID can declare any and all or no pronouns. This information

iSchool's Wobbrock honored for lasting impact

Tuesday, December 6, 2022

The Association for Computing Machinery has honored Information School Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock and colleagues with a 10-year lasting impact award for their groundbreaking work improving how computers recognize stroke gestures. Wobbrock and co-authors Radu-Daniel Vatavu (University Stefan cel Mare of Suceava, Romania) and Lisa Anthony (University of Florida) were presented with the 2022 Ten Year Technical Impact Award in November at the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI). The award honors their 2012 paper titled Gestures as point clouds: A $P recognizer for use

TV language creators visit Informatics class

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Upper-level students at the University of Washington Information School were in for a treat recently, when conlangers Jessie Sams and David Peterson spoke with class. Presenting on the process of constructing new languages and the challenges of using existing software, the pair shared about their experiences creating spoken languages for shows, games and movies, including “Game of Thrones,” “The Witcher,” “Paper Girls” and “Dune.” Assistant Teaching Professor Jeremy Zaretzky invited the speakers to join his Informatics 442: Cooperative Software Development class for the day,

Q&A: iSchool researchers on the turbulence at Twitter

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Katherine Cross is a Ph.D. candidate at the Information School whose research focuses primarily on the dynamics of online harassment, particularly on social media. Anna Lauren Hoffmann is an iSchool associate professor who researches the ethical challenges and risks of technologies, and much of her work has focused on Facebook. We spoke to them Nov. 9 about the upheaval at Twitter since Elon Musk took over the company in late October. Q: Twitter recently cut half its workforce, including its human rights, accessibility, ethical AI, communications, curation, and public policy teams. What goo

MLIS alum holds tech giants to account

Monday, November 7, 2022

Gennie Gebhart’s job is far from simple. But she sums it up simply. “I mostly yell at tech companies,” she said. “When I really want to boil down my job description, I say, ‘I make my living yelling at any tech company that is not standing by its users in any number of ways.’” Gebhart is this year’s recipient of the Graduate of the Last Decade (GOLD) Alumni Impact Award, which celebrates recent graduates for their contributions to the information field. Gebhart is the activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that defends civil liberties i

Ph.D. alum Sunny Consolvo searches for a safer internet

Thursday, November 3, 2022

Bullying, trolling and other forms of hate and harassment are intensifying online. Attackers hunt down home addresses, hijack accounts, disrupt chat rooms, sexually harass people, post racial slurs, issue harmful threats, and extract and publish revealing private information. iSchool alum Sunny Consolvo, Ph.D. ’08, studies how best to safeguard against such ever-evolving assaults in her role as a Google researcher focused on security, privacy, safety and anti-abuse topics. “It’s a very, very complicated space. It’s not always clear how to do things the right way,” says Consolvo, t

Ph.D. students work on the misinformation puzzle

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Misinformation is everywhere, and it gets more sophisticated all the time: doctored photos, made-up news stories, fake videos so convincing it’s nearly impossible to spot the deception. What people believe drives how they act, and this misinformation has real-world, sometimes dangerous, effects.iSchool students are helping tackle this problem while gaining experience in running and interpreting research projects. Yeonhee (Johnny) Cho and Lidia Morris (pictured above), who are both earning Ph.D.s in Information Science, are working on misinformation escape rooms — games in which player

Informatics student hacks her way to an A in cybersecurity course

Monday, October 31, 2022

Informatics students know how to work hard and earn high grades. One student, Marie O’Connell, found another way to ensure that she earned an A: by hacking her professor.  Andrew Reifers, an associate teaching professor at the University of Washington Information School, offers students a unique opportunity in his INFO 415: Emerging Topics in Information Assurance and Cybersecurity course. “If one of you can hack me successfully, you get an A in my class,” he tells students on the first day. An Informatics and French double major, O’Connell decided to take Reifers up on

At Shaw Lecture, author entertains with humor and history

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

“When we remember, we are doing something very powerful and sacred” - Joseph Bruchac Over 200 alumni, staff, faculty, students and friends of the University of Washington Information School attended the 2022 Spencer G. Shaw Lecture. Professor Shaw’s career spanned nearly seven decades and included service as a public librarian, an educator, and a world-renowned expert on storytelling and library service to children. A group of librarians from six library systems selected Joseph Bruchac as this year’s speaker. Bruchac joins an esteemed group of speakers who have given the Shaw Le

iSchool's Batya Friedman asks the hard questions

Thursday, October 20, 2022

Batya Friedman taps away at a rock on a remote hillside east of the Cascades. With each strike of her hammer, she brings out the beauty she sees within the stone and transforms a small piece of this landscape of jagged peaks.   Friedman’s approach to stone carving is a lot like her groundbreaking work in technology design: methodical, thoughtful, and inspired by her desire to make the world a little better. It’s an approach that’s made the longtime professor an influential international researcher and a key figure in the growth of the University of Washington Information Schoo

iSchool's Teodorescu takes honors for research on improving patent process

Thursday, October 20, 2022

Mike Teodorescu, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School, recently marked his arrival by taking top honors in the Technology Innovation Management Division (TIM) at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Seattle. Teodorescu is a co-author of both the Best Paper Award Winner and the Best Paper Runner-up Award of the TIM division at the conference, which selected one best paper and two runners-up out of more than 600 submissions. The papers are co-authored with Dr. Andrew Toole, Chief Economist of the U.S. Patent and Trade Office (USPTO);

‘Co-Designing for Trust’ team receives NSF Convergence Accelerator Phase 2 funding

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

“Co-Designing for Trust,” a multi-institutional team working in Texas and Washington state to design community-centered solutions to mitigate the impacts of misinformation, has advanced to Phase 2 of the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program. A new, $5 million grant will allow academic and community researchers to scale up work they started last fall in Phase 1 through a series of community workshops.  The Co-Designing for Trust team is made up of an interdisciplinary set of researchers and practitioners from the University of Washington, The University of