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Software & Hardware Systems

Our researchers are driving innovation across the entire hardware, software and network stack to make computer systems more reliable, efficient and secure. 

From internet-scale networks, to next-generation chip designs, to deep learning frameworks and more, we build and refine the devices and applications that individuals, industries and, indeed, entire economies depend upon every day.


Research Groups & Labs

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Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab

The ICTD Lab explores how technology can improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions through research spanning HCI, systems, communication and data analytics.

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Programming Languages & Software Engineering Group (PLSE)

The Programming Languages and Software Engineering Group advances fundamental research and practical applications in programming environments, program analysis, language design, synthesis, compilers, testing, verification and security.


Faculty Members

Faculty


Centers & Initiatives

MEM-C is a NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center that integrates materials innovations with theory and computation to advance spin-photonic nanostructures and elastic layered quantum materials, aided by an “AI Core” that integrates artificial intelligence-driven materials discovery.

The UW Center for the Future of Cloud Infrastructure (FOCI) aims to foster a tight partnership between practitioners and researchers in both industry and academia to define the next generation of cloud infrastructure to achieve new levels of security, reliability, performance along with cost-efficiency and environmental sustainability.

Highlights


Allen School News

Cardinality estimation helps guide decisions on every aspect of query execution, but current methods often have large errors. To address this, Suciu introduced a more accurate and efficient cardinality estimator, LpBound, which provides a guaranteed upper bound on the query output size.

Allen School News

Balazinska was elected to the WSAS, which provides scientific and technical advice to state policymakers, based on her “contributions in data management for data science, big data systems, cloud computing, and image/video analytics and leadership in data science education.”

Allen School News

A team of University of Washington and NVIDIA researchers developed FlashInfer, a versatile inference kernel library that can help make large language models faster and more adaptable, and received a Best Paper Award at MLSys 2025 for their work.