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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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SAMPL

SAMPL is an interdisciplinary machine learning research group exploring problems across the system stack, including deep learning frameworks, specialized hardware for training and inference, new intermediate representations and more.

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Database Group

The UW Database Group does theoretical, systems and user-centered work in multimodal database management systems; generative AI and data management; complexity of query evaluation and optimization; scalable, interactive data visualization; and more.


Faculty Members

Faculty

Faculty


Centers & Initiatives

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.

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.

Highlights


Allen School News

In a Q&A, professor Kurtis Heimerl and postdoc Esther Han Beol Jang (Ph.D., ‘24) discuss their work with residents of two Seattle tiny house villages on how they can leverage smart technologies to improve living conditions, balanced against concerns such as cost and continuity of deployment.

Allen School News

To help make datasets easier to explore, in 2015, a team of researchers led by Heer introduced Voyager, a system that automatically generates and recommends charts and visualizations based on statistical and perceptual measures — which earned the InfoVis 10-Year Test of Time Award at IEEE VIS 2025.

GeekWire

At the Allen School’s Research Showcase and Open House, school leaders celebrated the work of faculty and student researchers — and offered a blueprint for collaboratively tackling a set of human-centered problems for even greater impact.