Husky Social and Panel | The New Frontier: Startup Innovation in an AI World

Dan Grossman is a professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington where he has been a faculty member since 2003. He is the Allen School’s vice director. From 2013–2018, he held the J. Ray Bowen Professorship for Innovation in Engineering Education.

Dan completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University and his undergraduate studies at Rice University. His research interests lie in the area of programming languages, ranging from theory to design to implementation. He has collaborated actively with researchers in several other disciplines of computer science, particularly computer architecture on problems at the hardware/software interface. He has published roughly fifty papers in high-selective conferences in computer science.

Dan has served on roughly thirty conference and workshop program committees and served as the program chair for PLDI 2018. He has served on the ACM SIGPLAN Executive Committee, the Steering Committee for the ACM / IEEE-CS 2013 Computer Science Curriculum, and the ACM Education Board. He served on the CRA Board from 2014-2023, including as vice chair for two years.

Dan is the instructor for a popular MOOC on undergraduate topics in programming languages and functional programming. It first ran in 2013 and has been available continuously since 2016.

Prior to becoming a proud and obsessed dad to two sons born in 2013 and 2015, Dan enjoyed playing (poorly) and watching ice hockey, (road) bicycling, hiking, non-fiction, and enjoying good food, beer, and live theatre. Now he usually manages to read one book a month, but his kids got him into following the Seattle Mariners on a regular basis.

Dan was age 44 when he received his first tooth cavity and 46 when he had to get glasses.

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Akshay Chalana, ’19, is the CEO and co-founder of Saphira AI, a company building software to help robotics and hardware teams navigate safety, standards, and certification from prototype to real-world deployment. He previously worked at Meta, Apple, and Citadel Securities before starting Saphira.

Kurtis Heimerl is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington working on Information and Communication Technology and International Development (ICTD), specifically universal Internet access. Before that, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, working under Professors Eric Brewer and Tapan Parikh. Kurtis co-founded Endaga, which joined Facebook in 2015. Kurtis has also published widely, including top conferences such as ICTD, CSCW, CHI, MobiCom, SIGCOMM, and NSDI. He was a recipient of the 2014 MIT “35 under 35” award, the 2018 UW Diamond Award for early career achievement and has won paper awards at CHI, CSCW, ASSETS, COMPASS, NSDI, and DySPAN.

Nodira Khoussainova is the CEO and co-founder of Focused Space, a social platform that helps people make space for deep and creative work through the magic of “body doubling.” It combines 100+ weekly live coworking sessions, goal-setting tools, and a built-in community to help creatives, academics, freelancers, and entrepreneurs do their best work.

Before Focused Space, Nodira was an early co-founder at Streamlit, a widely-used AI developer tool, and led the experimentation team at Twitter. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

Outside of work, she loves hip-hop dancing, wandering around aimlessly with her curious two-year-old Noor, and reading books like her life (and sanity!) depends on it.

Joshua R. Smith is the Milton and Delia Zeutschel Professor, jointly appointed in the Allen School of Computer Science, and in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, where he leads the UW+Amazon Science Hub and the Sensor Systems Laboratory. His research focuses on inventing new sensor systems, devising new ways to power and communicate with them, and developing algorithms for using them. The research has applications in the domains of ubiquitous computing, robotics, medical devices and HCI. He is a co-founder with colleagues and former students of Jeeva Wireless, Wibotic, and Proprio. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

Smith was formerly a principal engineer at Intel Research Seattle, where he led projects in robotics, wireless power and wireless sensing. At Intel, he founded the Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WERL) project, which demonstrated wireless transfer of tens of watts of power. He also began the Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP) project, which is a battery-free platform for sensing and computation. He completed his M.S. in 1995 and his Ph.D. in 1999 at the MIT Media Lab under Neil Gershenfeld. He earned his M.A. and B.A. with Honors in Physics and Theoretical Physics from the University of Cambridge and his B.A. in Computer Science and Philosophy from Williams College.