March 2013
| Investigators | Award | Amount | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
 Luke Zettlemoyer (CSE) |
Learning Scalable Models for Grounded Semantic Parsing Aims to take semantic parsing to the next level with reasoning that considers a sentence's linguistic and situated context. This will allow new applications (such as conversational understanding) and scaling up to highly complex domains. The project boosts educational and outreach efforts, including freely shared content on semantics topics, diversity initiatives, and early exposure of students to language understanding problems. (CAREER award) |
$92,141 | 09/01/2013 |
 Cynthia Atman |
Engineering Education Pioneers and Trajectories of Impact Reviews past efforts to improve engineering education by bringing together graduate students and successful leaders and change agents for interviews. Researchers will analyze and publish the interviews to inform continuing efforts to better integrate innovations in teaching and learning into existing engineering curricula. |
$373,052 | 06/01/2013 |
 Daniel M. Ratner |
Low-cost silicon photonic biosensors for enhanced label-free detection in complex
media Aims to advance silicon photonic biosensor technology towards clinical use by dramatically reducing the size and cost of the optical source while enhancing performance through (1) the combination of novel integrated silicon nanophotonic devices designed for use with low-cost lasers and (2) interfacial chemistries optimized for label-free detection in complex biological media including blood, plasma, and serum. |
$300,000 | 06/01/2013 |
 Dan Suciu (Principal), Bill Howe, Magdalena Balazinska (Co-Principals) |
Mid-Scale: DCM: A Formal Foundation for Big Data Management Explores the foundations of big data management with the ultimate goal of significantly improving the productivity in big data analytics by accelerating the bottleneck step of data exploration. A theoretical study will yield new fundamental results regarding data transformations in modern massive-scale systems. A systems study will lead to a multi-platform software middleware for expressing and optimizing ad hoc data analytics techniques. The results and software will accessible at http://myriadb.cs.washington.edu. (BIGDATA award) |
$1,966,667 | 01/01/2013 |
 Michael Dodd |
Degradation and Deactivation of Extracellular and Intracellular Antibiotic Resistance Genes
during Disinfection Processes Provides the first systematic investigation into the use of disinfectant and antiseptic agents expressly for the degradation and deactivation of intact antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). The resulting data will help optimize disinfection processes in aquatic environments and health-care settings. The project will also improve fundamental understanding of DNA reactivity toward various disinfectants and antiseptics and the mechanisms by which bacterial cells are inactivated during disinfection processes. The project will server as a platform for developing STEM laboratory modules and partnerships with groups of STEM teachers and underrepresented students from regional high schools. (CAREER award) |
$408,493 | 01/01/2013 |
 Ben Taskar |
Statistical Learning of Language Universals Undertakes a novel approach to building effective information retrieval, extraction, and translation systems for electronic text in a vast array of languages, combining elements of supervised and unsupervised learning without assuming any specific knowledge of the target language. Language-independent "universals" are statistically estimated from dozens of languages for which annotated corpora exist, and these learned universals are used to predict the part-of-speech categories of unannotated languages. By facilitating the rapid creation of language-independent linguistic analysis tools, this project has the potential to revolutionize the documentation of endangered languages. (ROBUST INTELLIGENCE award) |
$109,887 | 01/01/2013 |