Dear Friends of Engineering,

As we usher in 2018, I’m excited to share news about growth in the University of Washington College of Engineering that will allow us to serve students pursuing high-demand careers, promote new industry partnerships and advance our world-class research programs.

We recently opened the doors to the Institute for Nano-engineered Systems (NanoES), housed in a new $88 million facility on the UW’s Seattle campus. The institute will support researchers in nanoscale science and engineering and enable entrepreneurship at the earliest stages of research projects in fields ranging from energy and materials science to computation and medicine.

The Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering celebrated an important milestone for its second campus building in December. A final $15 million gift from Bill and Melinda Gates brought fundraising for the $110 million building to a close, as the College continues its campaign to build capacity and enable more Washington students to pursue engineering degrees.

With generous support from Facebook, Google, Huawei and Intel, we are creating the UW Reality Lab, a new $8 million augmented and virtual reality center to accelerate innovation in the field and educate the next generation of researchers. We are excited to see where new academic-industry collaborations will take us in Seattle, one of the world’s most active centers for augmented reality and virtual reality innovation.

I’m also delighted to congratulate our UW Sounding Board team, who in November won Amazon’s inaugural Alexa Prize and bested 100 international teams vying to design an artificial intelligence agent that can carry on sustained conversation. Their bot conversed for more than 10 minutes, more than double the time of their closest competition.

Thank you again for reading Washington Engineer and taking the time to learn how the UW is transforming Washington and the world.

Michael B. Bragg
Frank & Julie Jungers Dean of Engineering