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June 2, 2020

Faculty/staff honors: East Asia Resource Center grant; career awards in robotics, information processing

Recent honors to University of Washington faculty and staff have come from the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group, the Freeman Foundation and the IEEE.

Allen School’s Dieter Fox honored by national engineering institute

Dieter Fox, professor in the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, is the recipient of the 2020 RAS Pioneer Award from the Robotics & Automation Society of the national engineering institute IEEE.

The award, established in 1998, recognizes individuals who through research, development or engineering have had a significant impact in the robotics or automation fields. It comes with a $2,000 cash award.

Fox was honored in particular “for pioneering contributions to probabilistic state estimation, RGB-D perception, machine learning in robotics, and bridging academic and industrial robotics research.” RGB-D is a term for imaging of color and depth in robotics.

Fox, who joined the UW is 2000, is director of the Robotics and State Estimation Laboratory and senior director of robotics research at NVIDIA. He will receive the honor during the society’s annual conference, which is being held online through August 31.

He is a fellow of both the IEEE and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and has published more than 240 technical papers. He also co-authored the 2005 textbook “Probabilistic Robotics.”

IEEE is the accepted name for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, whose focus has grown beyond those technical interests in recent years.

Read more on the Allen School website.

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Information School’s Chirag Shah honored for work on info retrieval, language processing

Chirag Shah, associate professor in the Information School, has received the 2019 Karen Spärck Jones Award — a career achievement honor in natural language processing and information retrieval — from the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group.

The award has been given annually since 2008 by the information retrieval group in tandem with the British Computer Society. It is named for a pioneering British computer scientist and professor at the University of Cambridge who died in 2007.

“Chirag is a well-recognized thought leader in the areas of collaborative and social information seeking,” the group said in its award announcement. “He has been a trailblazer in collaborative information retrieval and social information retrieval, effectively having defined and shaped these disciplines and established himself as a leading world expert in these areas.”

Shah joined the UW in 2019 and directs the iSchool’s InfoSeeking Lab.

In 2016, Jaime Teevan, affiliate associate professor in the iSchool who works at Microsoft Research, also received this award.

Read more on the Information School website.

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Continued support: East Asia Resource Center grant OK’d for 23^rd year

Even amid uncertain times, some things are unchanged: The UW East Asia Resource Center will receive grant funding from the Freeman Foundation — for the 23^rd year in a row.

The center is located in the Jackson School of International Studies, and its mission is “to deepen educators’ understanding of East Asia and improve their teaching about the region.” The center provides professional development and teaching resources about East Asia to elementary and secondary school teachers in the United States.

The Freeman Foundation will give the center $324,025 for the 2020-2021 school year, starting in August. The private, philanthropic foundation was established in 1994 to remember businessman Mansfield Freeman, a co-founder of the insurance and financial conglomerate American International Group, Inc, better known as AIG. The foundation announced the grant renewal in April.

The grant will pay for professional development opportunities and teaching seminars for K-12 educators in Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Montana and Idaho, as well as intensive summer programs for teachers, book clubs, writing groups and possible workshops.

For more information on the East Asia Resource Center, contact Kristi Roundtree, director, at barnesk@uw.edu.

Tag(s): Chirag Shah • College of Arts & Sciences • College of Engineering • East Asia Resource Center • Information School • Jackson School of International Studies • Jaime Teevan • Kristi Roundtree • Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering

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