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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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Cryptography Research Group

The Cryptography Group advances the foundations and applications of cryptography, including public-key and symmetric cryptography, obfuscation, attribute-based and functional encryption, secure multi-party computation, quantum cryptography and more.

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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

Faculty


Centers & Initiatives

The NSF AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation (ACTION) seeks to change the way mission-critical systems are protected against sophisticated, ever-changing security threats. In cooperation with (and learning from) security operations experts, intelligent agents will use complex knowledge representation, logic reasoning, and learning to identify flaws, detect attacks, perform attribution, and respond to breaches in a timely and scalable fashion.

IFDS organizes its research around four core themes: complexity, robustness, closed-loop data science, and ethics and algorithms. By making concerted progress on these fundamental fronts, IFDS aims to lower several of the barriers to better understanding of data science methodology and to its improved effectiveness and wider relevance to application areas.

Highlights


Allen School News

Kasikci was recognized for his work developing techniques for systems that are both efficient and dependable, which can help prevent bugs that can lead to data loss, security vulnerabilities and costly critical infrastructure failures.

Allen School News

Mahajan (Ph.D., ‘05) was recognized for his work on Batfish, an open source network configuration analysis tool that helps find errors and prevent costly outages that could disrupt air travel, banking, communications and more.

Allen School News

Winners Andrew Alex and Megan Frisella aim to advance research in user-scheduled programming languages, while fellow Allen School winner Zixian Ma and UW ECE collaborator Yushi Hu will develop multi-modal AI agents capable of performing complex tasks.