This new program supports transfer of research into commercial products through prototyping, customer discovery, and market analysis. Learn how UW ECE-EFP fellows are translating their ideas into impact.
UW ECE is inviting applications for tenure-track assistant professor positions.
The Institute for Foundations of Data Science brought AI and machine learning experts together from across the nation to explore the mathematical, statistical, and algorithmic underpinnings of modern AI systems — advancing theory to better understand and improve AI technology.
In a first-of-its-kind demonstration, UW ECE and BioE Associate Professor Azadeh Yazdan and her research team have shown that applying electrical stimulation to the brain within an hour after the onset of an ischemic stroke may significantly reduce brain damage.
In a first-of-its-kind achievement, researchers at UW ECE and Princeton University have shown that a camera containing a large aperture, ultra-flat optic can record high-quality color images and video comparable to what can be captured with a conventional camera lens.
On July 5, 2025, UW ECE Professor Les Atlas officially retired and was appointed professor emeritus. Atlas has been a UW ECE professor for 41 years, making important contributions to the Department while producing groundbreaking research in machine learning and digital signal processing.
This new program supports transfer of research into commercial products through prototyping, customer discovery, and market analysis. Learn how UW ECE-EFP fellows are translating their ideas into impact.
UW ECE is inviting applications for tenure-track assistant professor positions.
The Institute for Foundations of Data Science brought AI and machine learning experts together from across the nation to explore the mathematical, statistical, and algorithmic underpinnings of modern AI systems — advancing theory to better understand and improve AI technology.
In a first-of-its-kind demonstration, UW ECE and BioE Associate Professor Azadeh Yazdan and her research team have shown that applying electrical stimulation to the brain within an hour after the onset of an ischemic stroke may significantly reduce brain damage.
In a first-of-its-kind achievement, researchers at UW ECE and Princeton University have shown that a camera containing a large aperture, ultra-flat optic can record high-quality color images and video comparable to what can be captured with a conventional camera lens.
On July 5, 2025, UW ECE Professor Les Atlas officially retired and was appointed professor emeritus. Atlas has been a UW ECE professor for 41 years, making important contributions to the Department while producing groundbreaking research in machine learning and digital signal processing.
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[_finalHTML:protected] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/spotlight/uw-ece-efp-2026-26-fellows/UW ECE Entrepreneurial Fellows Program helps turn research advances into real-world products
This new program supports transfer of research into commercial products through prototyping, customer discovery, and market analysis. Learn how UW ECE-EFP fellows are translating their ideas into impact.
UW ECE is Hiring!
UW ECE is inviting applications for tenure-track assistant professor positions.
IFDS workshop brings together experts to help make AI more reliable, robust, and trustworthy
The Institute for Foundations of Data Science brought AI and machine learning experts together from across the nation to explore the mathematical, statistical, and algorithmic underpinnings of modern AI systems — advancing theory to better understand and improve AI technology.
New study shows that electrical stimulation can reduce brain damage after stroke
In a first-of-its-kind demonstration, UW ECE and BioE Associate Professor Azadeh Yazdan and her research team have shown that applying electrical stimulation to the brain within an hour after the onset of an ischemic stroke may significantly reduce brain damage.
Ultra-flat optic pushes beyond what was previously thought possible
In a first-of-its-kind achievement, researchers at UW ECE and Princeton University have shown that a camera containing a large aperture, ultra-flat optic can record high-quality color images and video comparable to what can be captured with a conventional camera lens.
A distinguished career, marked by contributions to machine learning research and education
On July 5, 2025, UW ECE Professor Les Atlas officially retired and was appointed professor emeritus. Atlas has been a UW ECE professor for 41 years, making important contributions to the Department while producing groundbreaking research in machine learning and digital signal processing.
The new UW ECE Entrepreneurial Fellows Program, or UW ECE-EFP, helps translate research into real-world impact. On the left, UW ECE-EFP fellow Jared Nakahara adds droplets into an acoustic levitation prototype he created with his adviser, UW ECE and Allen School Professor Joshua Smith. Together, they co-founded Levity, a startup building acoustic levitators for lab automation. On the right, UW ECE-EFP fellow Sen Zhang holds MultiSensKnit, a sensor-packed knitted sleeve designed for rehabilitation assessment. Zhang created and developed MultiSensKnit with UW ECE Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo.[/caption]
According to the UW’s innovation hub, CoMotion, UW ECE consistently ranks among the University’s leading generators of startup companies. The Department has maintained this distinction for decades, alongside its strong academic reputation and longstanding history of supporting entrepreneurship. But UW ECE isn’t resting on that legacy. In early 2025, the Department created a new program aimed at fostering and developing entrepreneurs.
The new UW ECE Entrepreneurial Fellows Program, or UW ECE-EFP, is funded exclusively by royalties earned on UW ECE innovations. The Program is designed to support the transfer of research advances into commercialized impact through prototyping, customer discovery, and market analysis.
“This new program enables fellowship recipients to leverage the richness of the entrepreneurial spirit that’s within UW ECE, the UW College of Engineering, and the broader University,” said UW ECE Career and Industry Programs Manager Rebecca Carlson, who facilitates the UW ECE-EFP. “There is a wide variety of instructors and professors here who have started companies, staff and Department affiliates with industry experience, and an alumni network that can help support our fellows in their entrepreneurial endeavors.”
“Innovation starts here because our Department is a place where ideas are born and developed in a serious way.”
— UW ECE Professor and Chair Eric Klavins
Fellowship recipients receive a postdoctoral scholar salary and benefits for one year, partial salary support for their faculty adviser, mentorship from the University's network of industry experts and entrepreneurs, and support for travel and expenses. UW ECE also partners with the CoMotion Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Program to provide fellowship recipients with access to an entrepreneurial cohort and a strong support network. This close partnership with CoMotion helps fellows move their research out of the lab and into the marketplace. Current UW ECE doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars as well as those eligible for a postdoctoral scholar position in the Department can apply to the UW ECE-EFP.
“Innovation starts here because our Department is a place where ideas are born and developed in a serious way,” said UW ECE Professor and Chair Eric Klavins. “When we promote entrepreneurship through programs like this, it highlights one of the many ways universities benefit our greater society — serving as a supportive place where people can turn their dreams into reality.”
Read on to learn about the inaugural 2025–26 UW ECE-EFP fellows and how, with the help of this new program, they are each realizing their own vision for the future by turning their research projects into commercial ventures.
Jared Nakahara — Levity
[caption id="attachment_39175" align="alignright" width="550"]
Levity builds acoustic levitators for automated, contamination-free experiments requiring precise control. The prototype shown above, operated by Nakahara, uses ultrasonic sound waves — well above the threshold of human hearing — to suspend and manipulate droplets and small objects in midair without physical contact.[/caption]
Born and raised in the Seattle area, Jared Nakahara first became interested in engineering when he was in high school, during a summer program at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, a video game and arts college located in Redmond, Washington. The program was provided by the Washington Network for Innovative Careers, and it gave Nakahara his first exposure to robotics, coding, and mechatronics — technology combining mechanical engineering and electronics. Talented in sports and contemplating a career in baseball, Nakahara was inspired by the WANIC program to have a change of heart. He moved his focus from baseball to engineering. Both of Nakahara’s parents were engineers, and being familiar with the field, they encouraged this new direction for their son.
The WANIC summer program sparked what became for Nakahara a passionate interest in electrical and computer engineering. He decided to pursue engineering as a career, and he returned to DigiPen in subsequent years to teach engineering topics to pre-college students. Nakahara chose to study engineering at UW ECE, and he took his education all the way, earning his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering in 2018, 2021, and 2025, respectively.
As a UW ECE undergraduate, Nakahara was initially interested in quantum computing technologies, but after taking a course on field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, taught by UW ECE and Allen School Professor Joshua Smith, his interest shifted to neural engineering. Smith, who is a research leader in the Center for Neurotechnology, was building implantable neural interfaces for spinal cord rehabilitation. The topic fascinated Nakahara. So much so, he joined Smith’s Sensor Systems Laboratory, and when he started graduate school, Smith became his faculty adviser. Today, Nakahara is a postdoctoral scholar in Smith’s lab.
“I think the programmable laboratory space is interesting because we can potentially help to build life-saving pharmaceuticals, treatments for cancer, and personalized medicine as well as other new pharmaceuticals that could be coming to market.”
— Jared Nakahara, UW ECE postdoctoral scholar and 2025–26 UW ECE-EFP fellow
When Nakahara was a graduate student, he and Smith were inspired by transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment used for neural disorders, such as depression. With this in mind, they began investigating ways to use acoustic levitation technology to build a non-invasive stimulator for neurons. Acoustic levitation uses high-frequency sound waves (ultrasound) to suspend and move matter in liquids or gas, overcoming gravity. Around this same time, Nakahara developed an interest in robotic manipulation. He built and experimented with different acoustic levitation systems, aiming to develop a tool that could augment the capabilities of general-purpose robots, giving these robots improved manipulation precision and the ability to handle small or fragile objects without making physical contact.
“Bringing the acoustic levitator into the robotic sphere became a fascinating thing for me because I could do it very quickly, innovating on the controls as well as the hardware and software stack,” Nakahara said. “Once I went down that rabbit hole, it evolved into a much bigger thing when I realized our acoustic levitator could be used as a robotic manipulation platform.”
Through discussions with Smith, Nakahara realized that the acoustic levitator they were developing could be beneficial for laboratory experiments in bioengineering and materials science that needed to be automated, contamination-free, and executed with precision. With Smith’s support, Nakahara switched his research focus from neural engineering to acoustic levitation systems. Now, he and Smith are in the early stages of co-founding Levity, a startup company dedicated to building acoustic levitators for laboratory automation.
An acoustic levitation system for next-generation laboratory automation
[caption id="attachment_39177" align="alignright" width="550"]
Levity’s tabletop acoustic levitation system is quick to set up and operate, and it can even run remotely. Nakahara demonstrates the prototype while Smith observes — showing how easy this device is to use.[/caption]
What Levity’s acoustic levitation system does could seem like science fiction. The device uses high-frequency sound, well above the threshold of human hearing, to levitate, contain, and manipulate liquids and small objects in midair — all without touching the levitated material. This levitator is a completely enclosed tabletop system that can contain filtered air or inert gases useful for laboratory experimentation, such as helium, or argon. The sound waves it generates create three-dimensional traps, pockets of sound pressure, which provide a contactless, contamination-free way of containing, manipulating, and examining liquids, solids, and living organisms. Because it uses ultrasound, the device is inaudible to humans and safe for people to use as well as for any living organism the device might contain.
“One of the nice things our acoustic levitator can do is lift, manipulate, and contain living organisms without harming them,” Nakahara said. “You can put a living ant or mosquito into this device and examine it with a camera. You can look at the entire specimen while it’s alive, do species identification, and extract much more information than you could from a more conventional platform.”
The advantages of Nakahara and Smith’s levitator as compared to other laboratory automation systems are many. Because it is a completely enclosed, contactless system, it provides an encapsulated environment for experiments. It is capable of mixing liquids and manipulating levitated objects ranging from millimeters to nanometers in diameter— all without touching or contaminating the experimental material. It also can be programmed to automate the manipulation and data collection tasks of laboratory experiments, removing typical and often costly human errors that happen when people pipette liquids and handle materials. The device enables the user to view the reaction progress of their experiment from start to finish as well as examine it in great detail with cameras, spectrometers, or other sensors. This complete encapsulation and tight integration of the experimental procedure allows researchers to gather much more reliable data than what would otherwise be possible when using multiple pieces of equipment. And as a high-precision scientific instrument, this acoustic levitation system can measure the mass of levitated matter down to a nanogram without touching it.
In addition, Levity’s acoustic levitation system is a tabletop device that is easy to set up and use, and it can be run remotely offsite. Nakahara said that accessible, remote operation could open up a world of possibilities for users. For example, the levitator could be set up in underserved or hard-to-reach areas to run fast and accurate on-site tests for diseases. Or researchers could automate and run their experiments from outside the lab, enabling them to do other things while saving time and money. Or several of these acoustic levitators working together could be set up to operate much like a computer server farm does today — providing automated laboratory services for many different users, all from one, compact location.
Levity’s acoustic levitation system could appeal to researchers working in many different types of scientific applications. But for now, Nakahara said he sees Levity’s primary market being researchers who need liquid handling systems for DNA, proteins, and microscopic materials as part of their workflow, for example, when scientists are developing pharmaceuticals or medical diagnostics.
“I think the programmable laboratory space is interesting because we can potentially help to build life-saving pharmaceuticals, treatments for cancer, and personalized medicine as well as other new pharmaceuticals that could be coming to market,” Nakahara said. “If we can help doctors as well as the health-care industry provide faster diagnoses and better treatments, then that’s something of great benefit to everybody.”
How the Fellows Program will help Levity grow
[caption id="attachment_39180" align="alignright" width="550"]
Three acoustic levitators created by Nakahara and Smith during Levity’s prototyping phase. From left to right, in order of development: The V1 model, built to work with robotic grippers and expand their capabilities; Levity’s demonstration system, which offers a clear view of levitated objects; Levity’s contactless acoustic levitation system, which can hold up to four liquid or solid samples while manipulating the levitated objects along their vertical axes.[/caption]
Nadya Peek, an assistant professor in the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, has also contributed to this project. Nakahara said that he considers Peek to be a mentor as well as a collaborator. Peek, whose research focuses on harnessing machine precision to enable individual creativity, has contributed her expertise to help make acoustic levitation useful to researchers.
The acoustic levitation research program in Smith’s lab has already received some academic research funding through a grant Smith and Peek received in 2020 from the National Science Foundation. Smith, Peek, and Nakahara also received a grant in 2022 from the CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund, which supports innovations developed at the UW that have high commercialization potential. Now that he is a UW ECE-EFP fellow, Nakahara believes he has the resources and support needed to take Levity to the next level.
“In addition to the funding, this Program provides support, mentorship, and networking opportunities through CoMotion,” Nakahara said. “The Fellows Program also gives us access to all the connections the University itself has, so we can leverage that network. Taken together, this enables us to grow in the right way, do additional customer discovery, and validate and de-risk our ideas before the acoustic levitator goes to the marketplace.”
Nakahara is currently in the midst of building what he calls a “minimum lovable product” — a top-tier product that Levity's customer base will love so much, they won’t want to do without it. To this end, he is distributing prototype systems to labs at the UW and gathering user feedback to fine-tune the product to the user’s wants and needs. He is also planning for growth in the coming year, when he anticipates distributing acoustic levitation system prototypes to research groups at other universities as well as companies that could use these devices for bioengineering and pharmaceutical research.
Looking ahead, Nakahara said he envisions Levity’s acoustic levitation system evolving so that it could provide an even wider range of laboratory services while, at the same time, offer researchers the option to execute those functions remotely.
“The opportunity to have real-world impact that can help accelerate and maybe contribute to the next big scientific discovery is personally motivating to me, “Nakahara said. “I’m excited to see all of the awesome innovations and advances that could come downstream from providing Levity’s acoustic levitation system to talented researchers.”
Sen Zhang — MultiSensKnit
[caption id="attachment_39182" align="alignright" width="550"]
UW ECE-EFP fellow Sen Zhang holds MultiSensKnit, a smart textile for rehabilitation assessment that is wearable, comfortable, and washable. MultiSensKnit is a knitted sleeve that contains conductive yarn (the gray strip on the sleeve) and sensors that can pick up EMG and EIT signals as well as measure joint angles while worn by the user. Behind Zhang, on the whiteboard, are calculations that illustrate the working principles behind MultiSensKnit.[/caption]
Sen Zhang grew up in Anyang City in Henan Province, China. As a child, he had several creative interests, and he loved to play. He enjoyed building structures with Legos®, making small, electrical cars and toys, and sewing fabric — all activities that, looking back, served as seeds for his engineering career today.
Both of his parents were medical doctors, and they expected their son to follow in their footsteps after high school. However, Zhang heard the beat of a different drum. When it was time for him to select a university and a course of study, he decided to major in textile engineering instead of pursuing a career in medicine. Zhang attended Jiangnan University in Jiangsu Province, China, where he studied textile production. His coursework included learning how to spin yarn from source material, such as cotton, and weave or knit that yarn into fabric. His classes also taught him how spinning, weaving, and knitting could be used as industrial-scale techniques to produce finished fabrics for the marketplace.
In 2019, Zhang received his bachelor’s degree in textile engineering from Jiangnan University. He then went on to graduate studies at North Carolina State University’s Wilson College of Textiles. In 2020, he received his master’s degree from NC State in textile engineering. And in 2023, he also earned a master’s degree in statistics from NC State. During graduate school, Zhang studied smart textiles — fabrics that integrate electronic components, such as sensors and actuators. He decided that he wanted to further his study in this area, so he enrolled in the College’s doctoral program, where he did research focused on textile-based, soft, wearable robotics. In 2024, he received his doctoral degree from NC State in fiber and polymer science.
“I believe we have created something in the lab that will be helpful in the clinic. And that’s why I want to push MultiSensKnit out of the lab and into the marketplace as a real-world product."
— Sen Zhang, UW ECE postdoctoral scholar and 2025–26 UW ECE-EFP fellow
That same year, Zhang joined the lab of UW ECE Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo as a postdoctoral scholar. Luo is a leader in the development of smart textiles and wearable technologies. Her research brings together digital fabrication, human-computer/robot interaction, and applied artificial intelligence. It was a perfect fit for Zhang, and Luo’s lab provided room for him to grow in his chosen field.
“Even though the research I did in my Ph.D. program was focused on textile-based, soft, wearable robotics, I had very little experience with wearable sensors and how they could be used,” Zhang said. “Yiyue brought me into this area. She also suggested that we should explore using wearable sensors to create medical devices.”
Zhang and Luo discussed this idea with UW ECE Professor Chet Moritz. Moritz holds joint appointments in rehabilitation medicine, physiology, and biophysics, and he is co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology. Moritz leads the Restorative Technologies Lab at the UW, which develops neuroprosthetic technology to treat paralysis and other movement disorders. His lab regularly brings in people who have had a spinal cord injury, stroke, or other medical conditions to test and monitor their progress using neural devices he and his research team have designed. In their conversations with Moritz, Zhang and Luo realized that his lab might provide an opportunity for them to gather valuable user feedback on wearable technology that could assess a patient’s progress with rehabilitation exercises.
In-home rehabilitation assessment using wearable technology
[caption id="attachment_39184" align="alignright" width="550"]
Zhang with his adviser, UW ECE Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo, who wears a MultiSensKnit prototype on her arm. Zhang developed MultiSensKnit under Luo’s guidance.[/caption]
With guidance from Luo, Zhang developed MultiSensKnit — a smart textile for rehabilitation assessment that is wearable, comfortable, and washable. MultiSensKnit is a soft, knitted sleeve Zhang produced by knitting conductive yarn with traditional yarn on an industrial-scale knitting machine in Luo’s lab. The conductive yarn is made out of stainless-steel fibers, which are spun together to form the yarn. Although the yarn is made out of steel, it feels like traditional yarn, soft to the touch. And because stainless steel is rust, stain, and corrosion resistant, the material is washable and wearable for long periods of time.
MultiSensKnit is a multimodal sensing smart textile. This knitted sleeve is embedded with electromyography, or EMG, sensors to measure the electrical activity of muscles and nerves in the bicep, triceps, and front of the arm. The device can also measure joint angles as the arm is moved and muscles are flexed. And as if that weren’t enough, MultiSensKnit also contains electrical impedance tomography, or EIT, sensors to construct a map of tissues inside the arm.
Currently, wearable sensors for rehabilitation assessment are unwieldy, and most can only measure one type of signal or marker from the body. Today, patients are required to come into clinics to put on multiple types of bulky equipment for rehabilitation assessment. This is expensive and inconvenient, to say the least, but it also means that the patient will have to repeat their rehabilitation exercises several times wearing different types of sensors. This can be tiring for the patients and taxing on their bodies.
In contrast, MultiSensKnit allows patients to simply put on a soft, knitted sleeve and wear it, just like they would any other piece of clothing, from the comfort of their own home. Zhang, Luo, and their research team have also developed small printed circuit boards, or PCBs, each about the size of a smart phone, which patients can put in their pockets while they do their rehabilitation exercises. The PCBs pick up data from the sensors in MultiSensKnit and transmit the information wirelessly to the patient’s phone or computer, which then sends the data through the internet to the patient’s health care provider.
“With this device, your clothes function as a wearable sensor, which to me, is a very exciting idea,” Zhang said. “MultiSensKnit is washable, durable, and comfortable. You don’t need to worry about the sensor as you go about your daily life. You can just wear it like normal apparel.”
How the Fellows Program will help MultiSensKnit grow
[caption id="attachment_39185" align="alignright" width="550"]
This close-up of MultiSensKnit shows gray squares of conductive yarn knit into white traditional yarn. The fabric is soft, durable, and washable. Inside the gray squares are EMG and EIT sensors that track muscle and nerve signals and can even map tissues inside the arm.[/caption]
According to the World Health Organization, globally, an estimated 2.4 billion people are living with a health condition that could benefit from rehabilitation. And as people live longer and populations age, that number is expected to grow. This is a huge market. And because MultiSensKnit can be used to gather data from the body in several different ways, it could also be used for purposes other than rehabilitation, such as fitness tracking or helping athletes improve their performance. These areas also hold great potential for commercialization, but for now, Zhang said he is focusing their efforts primarily on providing the product to doctors and health-care clinics for rehabilitation assessment. He said he views the UW ECE-EFP as a key support mechanism for helping him to bring his research project to this marketplace.
“I really appreciate the entrepreneurship opportunities the fellowship provides. Because I’m a researcher, I spend much of my time in the lab. I did a lot of research on this smart sleeve, and I hope it can help to improve people’s lives,” Zhang said. “I didn’t know how to start a company and bring products to the market, so this Program is helping me learn how to create a startup, how to brand it, advertise, and move my product to the market, so people can buy it. It’s helping me not only to develop the technology but also to push this device out of our lab and into the real world.”
Zhang is also part of CoMotion’s Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Program, where alongside other PEP participants, he works, studies, and learns how to commercialize a product while creating a startup. This program at CoMotion provides regular meetings and assignments for Zhang and his cohort. He will meet with an industry mentor through the PEP, which will provide further education and networking opportunities. He is also working with CoMotion to file the patent for MultiSensKnit.
In addition to filing for a patent, next steps for Zhang to commercialize MultiSensKnit include finishing the optimization of the smart sleeve according to feedback gathered from users in Moritz’ lab, setting up clinical trials for the device, and working toward acquiring Federal Drug Administration approval for the product.
When the time comes, Zhang is envisioning two stages for distributing MultiSensKnit to the public. In the first stage, he will partner with doctors, clinics, and telehealth providers. Patients will first purchase the product based on their health care provider’s recommendation. They will then work with a technician, physical therapist, or doctor, who will customize the fit of the smart sleeve to the patient’s arm and adjust electrode locations as needed. In the next stage of development, when the product is more mature, Zhang said he could imagine patients ordering MultiSensKnit directly from a major online retailer, such as Amazon. Patients could input their arm size and other parameters, then MultiSensKnit could be customized to fit that particular individual and shipped to them.
“We are using an industrial-scale, digital knitting machine, so it’s easy to customize garments for everyone. The logic is similar to a 3D printer, where you can print anything you want in any shape you desire,” Zhang said. “So, we don’t need a clothing company to cut and sew the fabric, we can produce this smart sleeve after gathering fitting information from the intended user and ship it to their home.”
Zhang has a lot to look forward to as he develops MultiSensKnit for the marketplace. And looking back, he noted where his personal motivation for this work springs from.
“Both of my parents were doctors, and I learned a lot from them and their experience in medicine. They have inspired me to make something that will help patients with the healing process,” Zhang said. “I believe we have created something in the lab that will be helpful in the clinic. And that’s why I want to push MultiSensKnit out of the lab and into the marketplace as a real-world product.”
Applications for the 2026–27 UW ECE-EFP cohort will open in the spring. More information is available on the UW ECE-EFP webpage and from UW ECE Career and Industry Programs Manager Rebecca Carlson. Both Jared Nakahara and Sen Zhang are currently open to and seeking collaborative opportunities for their research and product development. To inquire, contact Jared Nakahara at jarednak@uw.edu and Sen Zhang at szhang66@uw.edu.
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Applications are now open for two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions at UW ECE. Visit the link below to apply via Interfolio.
Deadline: December 15, 2025
https://www.ece.uw.edu/engage/job-openings/
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_39019" align="alignright" width="600"]
The Institute for Foundations of Data Science, led by UW ECE Professor Maryam Fazel, held the 2025 IFDS Workshop on Theoretical Foundations of Applied AI in August on the UW campus. The event brought AI and machine learning experts together from across the nation to discuss and explore the mathematical, statistical, and algorithmic underpinnings of modern AI systems — advancing theory in an effort to better understand and improve the trustworthiness, reliability, and robustness of AI technology. Shown above: Aaditya Ramdas, a professor from Carnegie Mellon University, giving a talk at the workshop. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
Artificial intelligence has quickly become an indispensable part of modern life. Today, AI systems support search engines, streaming services, social media, and various online tools and products over a wide range of devices. AI also enables behind-the-scenes automation in a vast array of fields, including security, finance, transportation, and health care. With such widespread use taking place, it’s fair to say that the world is now in the early stages of running on and reaping the benefits of AI and related technologies.
But alongside these benefits, people are beginning to deal with serious problems and challenges that come with this powerful technology. For example, online misinformation and disinformation has long been a problem for societies around the world, and AI is turning up the volume on these issues by making it easy to produce fake information, images, and videos. It’s also been well-documented that algorithms underpinning AI can be biased in a multitude of different ways, skewing toward unfavorable or damaging outcomes. In addition, wide use of AI is raising new cybersecurity vulnerabilities and opportunities for hackers to up their game.
With all of the above in mind, the Institute for Foundations of Data Science brought AI and machine learning experts from across the nation to the UW to discuss and explore the mathematical, statistical, and algorithmic underpinnings of modern AI systems. The IFDS Workshop on Theoretical Foundations of Applied AI was held in August 2025 at the Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering on the UW campus. This gathering of experts focused on discussing, exploring, and advancing theoretical understanding in an effort to improve the trustworthiness, reliability, and robustness of AI technology.
[caption id="attachment_39022" align="alignleft" width="425"]
UW ECE Professor Maryam Fazel is an international leader in the study of artificial intelligence and machine learning. In addition to directing the Institute for Foundations of Data Science and co-organizing the IFDS workshop described in this article, Fazel organizes and speaks at other notable conferences, workshops, and events that bring researchers together worldwide, such as the 2025 International Conference on Machine Learning (see the ICML description and link below). Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
“The IFDS supports cross-collaborations between faculty and student researchers from many different departments at several universities. We have collaborative projects in progress as well as published papers and talks that tackle the challenges of modern AI,” said UW ECE Moorthy Family Professor Maryam Fazel, who is the director of the IFDS and was a co-organizer of the event. “This workshop provided another step in that direction. It brought people from different perspectives together and led to even more collaboration opportunities.”
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the IFDS is a partnership between the UW and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of California Santa Cruz, and the University of Chicago. The mission of the Institute is to develop a principled approach to the analysis of complex, automated, decision-making algorithms and ever larger and potentially biased data sets that play an increasingly important role in industry, government, and academia.
“I’d like everyone to appreciate that this workshop was more than a series of lectures — it was a gathering of minds focused on making AI more principled, reliable, and understood,” said Kevin Jamieson, an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, member of the IFDS leadership team, and co-organizer of the event. “This workshop reflects the IFDS’ deep commitment to pushing the boundaries of both foundational theory and real-world impact.”
Advancing theoretical understanding to improve AI systems
[caption id="attachment_39026" align="alignright" width="525"]
Participants in the 2025 IFDS Workshop on Theoretical Foundations of Applied AI at the Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering on the UW campus. Photo provided by Professor Maryam Fazel.[/caption]
The IFDS workshop brought together mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, and other AI and machine learning experts from across the country. One of the main topics speakers and attendees discussed was how algorithms that underpin AI learn from data and how that learning process could be better understood and improved. AI models used for a variety of applications, including large language models, such as ChatGPT, learn from data in multiple ways that are still not well understood by researchers.
For example, in addition to being trained on massive volumes of data acquired from the internet, large language models can also apply multi-step reasoning and in-context learning techniques to answer information requests and solve problems. These generative AI systems can be of great service to users when they work as intended. However, large language models sometimes generate false, misleading, or nonsensical information — occurrences that are called “machine hallucinations.” Why these hallucinations happen is too often a mystery to those who produce large language models as well as to data science experts.
“This workshop showcased how modern mathematical theory is evolving to explain and advance state-of-the-art AI methodologies, including large language models,” said Robert Nowak, a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison electrical and computer engineering department. “Advancing the mathematical foundations of AI is essential to eventually designing systems that are as trustworthy and robust as other complex engineered technologies, such as wireless networks and the internet.”
Other workshop topics included the role artificial neural networks play in AI systems, over-parameterization (where AI models have far more learning parameters than training data), how to make AI systems more robust to cyber-attacks and hacking, and reinforcement learning, especially as applied to robotics. Throughout the workshop, special attention was paid to highlighting connections between theory and practice.
UW ECE Professor Maryam Fazel was also a program co-chair for the 2025 International Conference on Machine Learning, which was held from July 13 to 19 in Vancouver, Canada. The ICML is the oldest, second-largest, and among the fastest-growing conferences of its kind in the world. Conference attendees examined and discussed topics such as privacy, safety, algorithmic biases, and intellectual property concerns. Much like the IFDS workshop described in this article, the ICML facilitated a process that built groundwork for solutions to some of the most urgent and complex problems in AI and machine learning today. Learn more.
Organizers of the event noted that this workshop provided a venue for researchers from different fields to discuss common issues with AI technologies and work on solutions together.
“The variety of perspectives on AI foundation models was very exciting to see,” said Zaid Harchaoui, a professor in the UW Department of Statistics, member of the IFDS leadership team, and co-organizer of the workshop. “The understanding of these models requires concepts and tools from mathematics, statistics, computer science, and information theory.”
Next steps for many of the faculty and student researchers in attendance will be to move the fresh knowledge, insights, and collaboration opportunities they gained through this event into their daily work. Fazel said that she will be applying several things she learned at the workshop in her own research. She also underscored the value a strong theoretical understanding can bring to improving AI performance.
“AI is developing rapidly. I think the pace is faster than any other technological development in the past. And, unfortunately, theory and understanding have fallen behind while the technology has continued to move forward,” Fazel said. “Addressing challenges and making improvements to AI models and methods requires us to gain a better and deeper understanding of how AI systems work. This understanding can then help us to solve the challenges and make AI technology more reliable, robust, and trustworthy.”
Abstracts and full videos of all talks from this workshop can be found on the event website. Information about related events and activities is available on the IFDS website. More information about UW ECE Professor Maryam Fazel is available on her bio page.
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_38883" align="alignright" width="550"]
In a first-of-its-kind demonstration, UW ECE and BioE Associate Professor Azadeh Yazdan and her research team have shown that applying electrical stimulation to the brain within an hour after the onset of an ischemic stroke may significantly reduce brain damage. This work is an important step forward for stroke intervention research, and it points toward a new way of treating stroke soon after it occurs. Shown above: Yazdan examines a 50-micron-thick brain section, which is stained to highlight important structural features of brain cells. Photo by Mark Stone / University of Washington[/caption]
Azadeh Yazdan has a clear vision for her neural engineering research — to translate this work into clinical applications that can make a positive and even profound difference in people’s lives. And Yazdan, who is the Washington Research Foundation Innovation Associate Professor of Neuroengineering in UW ECE and the UW Department of Bioengineering, is well on the way to making her vision a reality. As a neural engineer, she tackles some of the most devastating and difficult-to-treat diseases and afflictions people can face, such as Alzheimer’s disease, mental health disorders, and stroke. These health conditions affect the lives of millions of people around the world.
For example, take just one condition Yazdan is investigating, ischemic stroke. Globally, over 7.6 million people suffer an ischemic stroke each year, causing significant health, economic, and lifestyle impacts to those that undergo the stroke as well as to their loved ones. An ischemic stroke is common, making up well over 70% of the strokes that occur. It happens when a blood vessel to the brain becomes blocked, cutting off blood flow and leading to brain cell death.
Neural engineers have been working for several years now toward using electrical brain stimulation to treat stroke, encouraged by successes in other areas, such as deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease. It is well-known that prompt treatment for strokes is crucial to obtaining better outcomes. However, most medical researchers and health practitioners have shied away from attempting to use electrical stimulation to treat a stroke soon after it occurs, when it is considered an “acute” stroke, for fear of causing further damage to the brain.
But now, in a first-of-its-kind demonstration recently described in the journal Nature Communications, Yazdan and her research team have shown that applying electrical stimulation to the brain within an hour after the onset of an ischemic stroke may significantly reduce brain damage. This work is an important step forward for stroke intervention research, and it points toward a new way of treating stroke soon after it occurs.
“The number of people that this treatment could impact is really high, and I think that out of all the research I’ve done so far, this work is the closest to translation." — UW ECE and BioE Associate Professor Azadeh Yazdan
“This finding was something that was very surprising and unexpected, not only for us, but for the field,” Yazdan said. “In the acute phase after a stroke, the brain is highly sensitive due to network damage and imbalance, which significantly increases the risk of seizures. Consequently, electrical brain stimulation is typically avoided during this period. However, our findings suggest that targeted stimulation can have a neuroprotective effect and may even help prevent seizures or other pathological neural events that contribute to further brain injury.”
[caption id="attachment_38887" align="alignleft" width="450"]
UW BioE doctoral students Jasmine Zhou (left) and Karam Khateeb (right). Zhou was lead author of the research team’s paper in Nature Communications. Photos provided by Jasmine Zhou and Karam Khateeb.[/caption]
This research took place in Yazdan’s Neural Engineering and Rehabilitation Design Lab at the UW and in the Washington National Primate Research Center on the UW campus. The study was led by Yazdan and Jasmine Zhou, a UW doctoral student in bioengineering, with assistance from Karam Khateeb, another UW doctoral student in bioengineering.
“Currently, there are two main treatments for acute ischemic stroke: dissolving the clot with medication or removing it mechanically to restore blood flow. While both methods can be highly effective, many patients cannot receive these treatments because they arrive too late, do not meet eligibility criteria, or lack access to specialized care,” Zhou said. “Our research points to a potential new option that could be delivered in the critical early hours after stroke, when brain injury is still reversible, to help prevent further damage. By preserving vulnerable tissue early on, patients may have a greater chance of recovery, improved independence, and a better quality of life.”
Yazdan and her research team received guidance and support from a number of experts in medicine and engineering, including UW ECE Professor Chet Moritz, who holds joint appointments in rehabilitation medicine, physiology, and biophysics. Moritz is also the co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology, of which Yazdan is a faculty member. UW Professor Emeritus Eberhard Fetz, who is from neurobiology and biophysics and is a member of the Center for Neurotechnology, also contributed his expertise. Another UW contributor to this work was Professor Greg Horwitz, also from neurobiology and biophysics. Horwitz offered guidance and expertise on immunohistochemistry analysis for the research team. Further assistance was provided by the surgeons and veterinarians at the Washington National Primate Research Center.
An unexpected finding with great potential
[caption id="attachment_38890" align="alignright" width="550"]
The red area in the graphic above shows irreversible brain damage after ischemic stroke and, from left to right, how that damage increases significantly within a 24 to 48-hour period without effective treatment. Yazdan and her research team believe that their approach could slow this progression at the earliest stage, shown in the far-left image, and dramatically improve the patient’s chances for recovery. This illustration is from The New England Journal of Medicine, van der Worp HB and van Gijn J, “Acute Ischemic Stroke,” N Engl J Med. 357.6 (2007): 572-579. Copyright © 2007 Massachusetts Medical Society. Reprinted with permission from Massachusetts Medical Society.[/caption]
A research breakthrough can sometimes happen unexpectedly, and that was the case with this finding. In 2020, Yazdan was designing experiments at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that would be safe to conduct in-person while still contributing toward the larger vision for her work. Most of Yazdan’s research focuses on neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections, especially in response to trauma or injury. With this focus in mind, she and Zhou put together an experiment that would use targeted electrical brain stimulation following stroke to study neuroplasticity.
In the experiment, the research team applied a form of electrical brain stimulation called “theta burst,” which is a rapid, rhythmic pattern designed to influence neural activity directly adjacent to a damaged area in the brain. The team expected to observe the brain’s neuroplasticity in response to the stimulation. But instead, what they discovered was that the electrical stimulation they applied to the brain was reducing neural activity in tissue surrounding the damaged area. This quieting of neurons had an unexpected, neuroprotective effect — significantly reducing lesion volume, inflammation, and cellular stress markers. Remarkably, in some cases, the damaged area of the brain was reduced by almost half.
“This was a notable and unexpected finding, but it was enabled by a series of technologies that were developed in my lab,” Yazdan said. “We had developed technologies that allowed us to monitor the changes in neural activity and blood flow across brain networks with high spatial and temporal resolution.”
Initially surprised by the results of their experiment, Yazdan, Zhou, and their research team followed up with additional experiments and almost three years of data collection and analysis to confirm the findings prior to publishing the results of their study.
Opportunities to impact people’s lives for the better
Yazdan emphasized that although this is a notable advance, the research is still in its early stages, and there is much that warrants further investigation. She has filed for a patent, and she said her next steps will include a longer-term study that could look at changes in function, behavior, and recovery. She would also like to explore the possibilities for this type of electrical stimulation to reduce cortical damage resulting from other kinds of strokes in different areas of the brain. Combining electrical stimulation protocols in various ways for both neuroprotection and neuroplasticity in acute and chronic (long-term) stroke management is something she intends to explore as well in the coming years.
Even with many studies still ahead of her, Yazdan remains focused on evolving this treatment for stroke to the point where it could be used in clinics. She also noted that this stimulation protocol could help to pave a road to new treatments for other types of damage to the nervous system, such as spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury.
“The number of people that this treatment could impact is really high, and I think that out of all the research I’ve done so far, this work is the closest to translation,” Yazdan said. “That is really exciting to me, the possibility that it could move forward to a point that we see it used in clinical applications. I think it goes back to patient care and the ways we can minimize damage after these types of injuries. This treatment holds great potential to not only improve the quality of life for stroke survivors, but also for their families and caregivers.”
Learn more about this research by reading “Early intervention with electrical stimulation reduces neural damage after stroke in non-human primates” in the journal Nature Communications. More information about professor Yazdan is available on her UW ECE bio page. Funding for this study was provided by many sources acknowledged in the Nature Communications paper, including the Weill Neurohub, which brings together researchers and clinicians at the UW, UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and the Allen Institute to speed the development of new treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases.
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_38749" align="alignright" width="550"]
In a first-of-its-kind achievement, researchers at UW ECE and Princeton University have shown that a camera containing a large aperture, ultra-flat optic can record high-quality color images and video comparable to what can be captured with a conventional camera lens. Shown above: an illustrative comparison of a standard refractive lens next to an ultra-flat optic developed by the research team. The ultra-flat optic is hundreds of times smaller and thinner. When this metalens replaces a conventional camera lens or stack of lenses, the savings in volume, weight, and device battery life can be substantial. Illustration by Liz Sabol / Princeton University[/caption]
Cameras are everywhere. For over two centuries, these devices have grown increasingly popular and proven to be so useful, they have become an indispensable part of modern life. Today, they are included in a vast range of applications — everything from smartphones and laptops to security and surveillance systems to cars, aircraft, and satellites imaging the earth from high above. And as an overarching trend toward miniaturizing mechanical, optical, and electronic products continues, scientists and engineers are looking for ways to create smaller, lighter, and more energy-efficient cameras for these technologies.
Ultra-flat optics have been proposed as a solution for this engineering challenge, as they are an alternative to the relatively bulky lenses found in cameras today. Instead of using a curved lens made out of glass or plastic, many ultra-flat optics, such as metalenses, use a thin, flat plane of microscopic nanostructures to manipulate light, which makes them hundreds or even thousands of times smaller and lighter than conventional camera lenses. But there is one, big problem. A type of optical distortion known as “chromatic aberration” limits the ability of ultra-flat optics to produce high-quality color images when the optic has a large aperture — the opening in the lens that allows light into the camera. A large aperture increases light throughput to create images similar to what most cameras can produce today. For years, this fundamental limitation of ultra-flat optics has been seen by many as an impassable barrier.
That is, until now.
[caption id="attachment_38766" align="alignright" width="550"]
This research advance is an outgrowth of a collaboration between UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar (left) and Felix Heide (center), an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University. UW ECE Professor Karl Böhringer (right) also contributed to the effort. Photos by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE, and Steven Schultz / Princeton University[/caption]
In a first-of-its-kind achievement described in a Nature Communications paper, researchers at UW ECE and the computer science department at Princeton University have shown that a camera containing a large aperture, ultra-flat optic can record high-quality color images and video comparable to what can be captured with a conventional camera lens. This notable accomplishment challenges a commonly held belief that sharp, full-color imaging would be impossible using a single, large-aperture metalens.
The ultra-flat optic the research team developed is a metalens that is only one micron thick. When affixed to its supporting substrate, it is still only 300 microns thick — about the width of four human hairs laid side by side. Altogether, it is hundreds of times smaller and thinner than a standard refractive lens. So, when this metalens replaces a conventional camera lens or stack of lenses, the savings in volume, weight, and device battery life can be substantial.
This ultra-flat optic could be applied to almost any camera, and it would be especially useful for any imaging system constrained by size or weight. Smartphone and laptop cameras are among the first applications for this metalens that come to mind, but it could be applied to a vast range of other technologies, such as cars, drones, or satellites that need lightweight imaging systems. Even medical instruments, such as endoscopes and angioscopes, could benefit from the smaller systems that this ultra-flat optic could enable, allowing physicians to see deeper inside the body to diagnose and treat diseases.
“Our work shows capability, what can be done with ultra-flat optics. I think our research pushes the field forward, and there will be a lot more of this type of work in the future.” — UW ECE Research Assistant Professor Johannes Fröch
This achievement is an outgrowth of a longstanding collaboration between the senior authors of the paper, Arka Majumdar, a UW ECE professor who holds a joint appointment in physics, and Felix Heide, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University. Majumdar, Heide, and their research teams have produced some dramatic advances in optics over the last few years, such as shrinking a camera down to the size of a grain of salt while still capturing crisp, clear images, and engineering a camera that can identify images at the speed of light. Majumdar’s lab team also has a strong track record of reimagining optics for smartphone cameras and other devices. This latest research advance emerged from a previous joint effort overseen by Majumdar and Heide, which was led by Ethan Tseng, a doctoral student in Heide’s lab who was also a co-author of this paper.
[caption id="attachment_38773" align="alignright" width="375"]
Lead authors UW ECE Research Assistant Professor Johannes Fröch (left) and Praneeth Chakravarthula, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (right)[/caption]
Lead authors of the paper were UW ECE Research Assistant Professor Johannes Fröch and Praneeth Chakravarthula, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chakravarthula was a postdoctoral scholar in Heide’s lab at Princeton University when this research took place.
“Previously, it was assumed that the larger the metalens is, the fewer the colors there are that can be focused,” Fröch said. “But we went beyond that and beat the limit.”
“We treated this as a holistic system,” Chakravarthula added. “That allowed us to leverage the complementary strengths of optics and computation, where we didn’t design these different parts of the imaging system sequentially, but instead, we jointly optimized them to maximize performance.”
Other co-authors of the paper included UW ECE alums Shane Colburn, Alan Zhan, Forrest Miller, Anna Wirth-Singh, and Zheyi Han as well as former UW ECE postdoctoral researcher Quentin Tanguy and Jipeng Sun, a doctoral student in Heide’s lab. UW ECE Professor Karl Böhringer also co-authored the paper and contributed to the effort, supervising the students who fabricated the ultra-flat optic in the Washington Nanofabrication Facility. Böhringer is the director of the Institute of Nano-Engineered Systems, of which Majumdar is a faculty member.
AI-powered computation enables high-resolution images
In most imaging systems, multiple refractive lenses are used because a single lens cannot bring all colors into focus. This issue, specifying “chromaticity,” becomes exacerbated in ultra-flat optics. Many scientists and engineers even consider metalenses to be hyperchromatic because all the light cannot be brought into focus at a given point. This limits the ability of ultra-flat optics to have broader apertures and still be able to do well in terms of imaging visible light.
“We treated this as a holistic system. That allowed us to leverage the complementary strengths of optics and computation, where we didn’t design these different parts of the imaging system sequentially, but instead, we jointly optimized them to maximize performance.” — Praneeth Chakravarthula, assistant professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Previous to this research advance, it was not thought possible to build metalenses with large apertures that can produce a high-quality image. Most earlier efforts with metalenses were working with camera apertures that were less than one millimeter in size. In comparison, the aperture in the camera the research team engineered is one centimeter in size, significantly larger. The team demonstrated that with a strong computational backend co-designed with the optical hardware, even larger apertures are possible.
“People have tried purely physics-based or heuristic, handcrafted optical designs to address this issue, but in our work, we treat it as a computational problem,” Chakravarthula said. “We used AI tools to figure out what should be the shape of these lens structures and what should be the corresponding computation.”
The computational backend of the team’s optical system incorporated AI — a probabilistic diffusion-based neural network. This AI-powered backend takes in the data received from the ultra-flat optic and outputs images with lower haze, better color accuracy, more vivid hues, and better noise reduction. This all results in high-quality color images that are almost indistinguishable from what can be captured with a conventional camera.
“Previously, I was always considering problems from the optical side of the system,” Fröch said. “But this project really showed me that if you consider the whole system and then try to leverage the strength of each part — the optics and the computational backend — they can work synergistically to produce this really good image quality that we’ve shown here.”
Working toward even sharper images, new modalities
[caption id="attachment_38776" align="alignright" width="375"]
The camera prototype designed by the research team. This engineering prototype contains the ultra-flat optic with a one-centimeter lens aperture. Photo provided by Johannes Fröch[/caption]
Next steps for the research team include further refining and improving image quality produced by their ultra-flat optic. They are also planning to explore different modalities for the optical system they developed that could be useful for augmenting human vision. These modalities involve capturing and working with information from light that is beyond what is visible to the human eye.
To illustrate, many animals, such as butterflies, can see far beyond the spectrum of light visible to humans and gain useful information from different characteristics of light, such as its polarization — the orientation of light waves as they travel through space. Animals use this information to find food, evade predators, and attract mates. In a similar fashion, humans can use light beyond what people are able to see to enable multimodal sensing for polarization or spectral information. An example of this is light detection and ranging, or LiDAR, which is currently being used in autonomous vehicles and in smartphones to assist with augmented reality, virtual reality, and depth-perception applications. The research team anticipates that their ultra-flat optic could be applicable to these sorts of technologies.
Commercialization of this ultra-flat optic is also a distinct possibility in the near future. Metalenses are suitable for mass manufacturing in foundries using nanoprint lithography, which makes the optics affordable and scalable. The team is currently talking with a UW professor in the ophthalmology department, who is interested in creating small, lightweight, hand-held devices that would be easier to use for eye inspections. Fröch also said there are startups that might be interested in commercializing this technology. He noted as well that the team’s research could open new avenues for others in the field of optics to explore.
“I think the overall takeaway here is that even when there are perceived limitations to solving a certain problem, it doesn’t mean it’s not possible to solve it,” Fröch said. “Our work shows capability, what can be done with ultra-flat optics. I think our research pushes the field forward, and there will be a lot more of this type of work in the future.”
The article, “Beating spectral bandwidths for large aperture broadband nano-optics,” was published March 28 in Nature Communications. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Sony Young Faculty Award, an Amazon Science Research Award, and a Google Ph.D. Fellowship.
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UW ECE Professor Emeritus Les Atlas. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
On July 5, 2025, UW ECE Professor Les Atlas officially retired and was appointed professor emeritus. Atlas has been a professor in the Department for 41 years, with an adjunct appointment in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. During his time at the UW, Atlas has made many important contributions to UW ECE while producing groundbreaking research in machine learning and digital signal processing.
“Les has impacted generations of students and researchers here at the UW, and really, across the world,” said UW ECE Professor and Chair Eric Klavins in his introduction to Atlas’ last UW ECE Research Colloquium in May 2025. “I’ve appreciated having Les as a colleague during my 20 years in the Department. It’s been wonderful to hear his ideas and be inspired by his enthusiasm for engineering and everything we do in our Department.”
Atlas started his career at UW ECE in 1984 as an assistant professor, shortly after receiving his doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. At Stanford, he studied digital signal processing, and his dissertation research was focused on cochlear implants, electronic medical devices that help people with severe hearing loss perceive sound. As a Stanford graduate student, he was also part of a research team that developed the world’s first portable, real-time speech processor for a cochlear implant. This speech processor is now part of the permanent collection of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
“My time at UW ECE has been life-changing. The academic environment here is accepting of ideas outside of the mainstream, and the quality of the students, faculty, and staff is outstanding." — UW ECE Professor Emeritus Les Atlas
Atlas noted that when he joined UW ECE, he was interested in building on this research as well as drawing inspiration from biological systems for the next generation of electronics. He did just that in 1987, in a research collaboration that replaced simple multiplication operations in an artificial neural network with a “convolution” operation. An artificial neural network is a computational model inspired by the structure and function of the human brain. It also forms the basis for artificial intelligence. The convolution-based approach that Atlas and his colleagues introduced allowed learning components, known as “weights,” to be shared across different input locations, drastically reducing the amount of information the network needed to learn from limited data. This approach, initially applied to speech sounds, became foundational for what is now known as a “convolutional neural network” — a type of deep learning artificial neural network initially used for analyzing audio and visual data, such as sounds, images, and videos. Today, convolutional neural networks are integral to computer vision, speech and audio recognition, autonomous systems, and are within many other artificial intelligence applications, such as ChatGPT.
[caption id="attachment_38672" align="alignleft" width="425"]
Atlas (center) alongside UW alumnus David Cohn (left) and Allen School Professor Emeritus Richard Ladner (right) at Atlas’ May 2025 UW ECE Research Colloquium. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Atlas, Cohn, and Ladner were early trailblazers in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The trio introduced new ways for artificial neural networks to cope with limited training data. Their work was based on UW research exploring how babies learn to understand speech. Photo provided by David Cohn of Port Townsend, WA.[/caption]
Atlas and his colleagues were the first to explicitly substitute convolution for multiplication within data-trainable artificial neural networks. Their work was, in part, built on concepts introduced in the “neocognitron,” an artificial neural network proposed in 1980 by Kunihiko Fukushima. Coincidentally, also in 1987, Professor Alex Waibel at Carnegie Mellon University independently proposed a time-delay neural network, which is mathematically equivalent to a convolutional neural network. Waibel covered this topic, and more, in a recent UW ECE Research Colloquium. Others, including Yann LeCun, vice president and chief AI scientist at Meta, made strong contributions to convolutional neural networks, culminating in LeNet-5. (LeCun delivered the UW ECE 2024 Lytle Lecture.) These contributions, in addition to work by Atlas and his colleagues, were all ingredients that contributed to the modern boom in artificial intelligence.
A bit later in his career, Atlas became inspired by research conducted by UW professors Patricia Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff, co-directors of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the UW, who were exploring how babies learn to understand speech by using information selected from their environment. With their research in mind, Atlas and his collaborators developed strategies for artificial neural networks to intelligently select the most informative data points to learn from. He, along with his colleagues, UW alumnus David Cohn and Professor (now Emeritus) Richard Ladner in the Allen School, introduced now-standard concepts in machine learning, such as “selective sampling” (published in 1989) and “active learning” (published in 1994). These concepts offered new ways for artificial neural networks to cope with limited data.
Over the years, Atlas has been a leader in signal processing research and educational activity in the Pacific Northwest. He has had many leadership roles in the Department and in the field of electrical and computer engineering, such as co-chairing the 1998 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. His graduate students have also had significant impact — securing top faculty positions, initiating the first machine learning seminar at Google, receiving multiple Technical Emmy Awards, and founding companies, such as Redfin.
Atlas was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin and then attended Stanford, where he received his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Senior Fulbright Scholar, a Virginia Merrill Bloedel Scholar, and he has received numerous other awards and editorial roles throughout his distinguished career. His early machine learning research was funded by a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award. His work has also been funded by a number of other businesses and organizations, including the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, and the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation.
Looking forward to his new status as a professor emeritus, Atlas said that he plans to continue to enjoy his research collaborations and selected advisory roles at UW ECE. He also said that he was excited about finally getting the time to pursue a keen interest in dramatic acting — something he has wanted to do since he was a child.
“My time at UW ECE has been life-changing,” Atlas said. “The academic environment here is accepting of ideas outside of the mainstream, and the quality of the students, faculty, and staff is outstanding. I was able to propose ideas which initially got some people angry, yet I still was able to pursue those ideas. I anticipate continuing to contribute to the Department for many years to come as a professor emeritus.”
More information about Professor Emeritus Les Atlas is available on his UW ECE bio page.
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[post_content] => Article by Wayne Gillam, Photos by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_39171" align="alignright" width="550"] The new UW ECE Entrepreneurial Fellows Program, or UW ECE-EFP, helps translate research into real-world impact. On the left, UW ECE-EFP fellow Jared Nakahara adds droplets into an acoustic levitation prototype he created with his adviser, UW ECE and Allen School Professor Joshua Smith. Together, they co-founded Levity, a startup building acoustic levitators for lab automation. On the right, UW ECE-EFP fellow Sen Zhang holds MultiSensKnit, a sensor-packed knitted sleeve designed for rehabilitation assessment. Zhang created and developed MultiSensKnit with UW ECE Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo.[/caption]
According to the UW’s innovation hub, CoMotion, UW ECE consistently ranks among the University’s leading generators of startup companies. The Department has maintained this distinction for decades, alongside its strong academic reputation and longstanding history of supporting entrepreneurship. But UW ECE isn’t resting on that legacy. In early 2025, the Department created a new program aimed at fostering and developing entrepreneurs.
The new UW ECE Entrepreneurial Fellows Program, or UW ECE-EFP, is funded exclusively by royalties earned on UW ECE innovations. The Program is designed to support the transfer of research advances into commercialized impact through prototyping, customer discovery, and market analysis.
“This new program enables fellowship recipients to leverage the richness of the entrepreneurial spirit that’s within UW ECE, the UW College of Engineering, and the broader University,” said UW ECE Career and Industry Programs Manager Rebecca Carlson, who facilitates the UW ECE-EFP. “There is a wide variety of instructors and professors here who have started companies, staff and Department affiliates with industry experience, and an alumni network that can help support our fellows in their entrepreneurial endeavors.”
“Innovation starts here because our Department is a place where ideas are born and developed in a serious way.”
— UW ECE Professor and Chair Eric Klavins
Fellowship recipients receive a postdoctoral scholar salary and benefits for one year, partial salary support for their faculty adviser, mentorship from the University's network of industry experts and entrepreneurs, and support for travel and expenses. UW ECE also partners with the CoMotion Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Program to provide fellowship recipients with access to an entrepreneurial cohort and a strong support network. This close partnership with CoMotion helps fellows move their research out of the lab and into the marketplace. Current UW ECE doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars as well as those eligible for a postdoctoral scholar position in the Department can apply to the UW ECE-EFP.
“Innovation starts here because our Department is a place where ideas are born and developed in a serious way,” said UW ECE Professor and Chair Eric Klavins. “When we promote entrepreneurship through programs like this, it highlights one of the many ways universities benefit our greater society — serving as a supportive place where people can turn their dreams into reality.”
Read on to learn about the inaugural 2025–26 UW ECE-EFP fellows and how, with the help of this new program, they are each realizing their own vision for the future by turning their research projects into commercial ventures.
Jared Nakahara — Levity
[caption id="attachment_39175" align="alignright" width="550"] Levity builds acoustic levitators for automated, contamination-free experiments requiring precise control. The prototype shown above, operated by Nakahara, uses ultrasonic sound waves — well above the threshold of human hearing — to suspend and manipulate droplets and small objects in midair without physical contact.[/caption]
Born and raised in the Seattle area, Jared Nakahara first became interested in engineering when he was in high school, during a summer program at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, a video game and arts college located in Redmond, Washington. The program was provided by the Washington Network for Innovative Careers, and it gave Nakahara his first exposure to robotics, coding, and mechatronics — technology combining mechanical engineering and electronics. Talented in sports and contemplating a career in baseball, Nakahara was inspired by the WANIC program to have a change of heart. He moved his focus from baseball to engineering. Both of Nakahara’s parents were engineers, and being familiar with the field, they encouraged this new direction for their son.
The WANIC summer program sparked what became for Nakahara a passionate interest in electrical and computer engineering. He decided to pursue engineering as a career, and he returned to DigiPen in subsequent years to teach engineering topics to pre-college students. Nakahara chose to study engineering at UW ECE, and he took his education all the way, earning his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering in 2018, 2021, and 2025, respectively.
As a UW ECE undergraduate, Nakahara was initially interested in quantum computing technologies, but after taking a course on field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, taught by UW ECE and Allen School Professor Joshua Smith, his interest shifted to neural engineering. Smith, who is a research leader in the Center for Neurotechnology, was building implantable neural interfaces for spinal cord rehabilitation. The topic fascinated Nakahara. So much so, he joined Smith’s Sensor Systems Laboratory, and when he started graduate school, Smith became his faculty adviser. Today, Nakahara is a postdoctoral scholar in Smith’s lab.
“I think the programmable laboratory space is interesting because we can potentially help to build life-saving pharmaceuticals, treatments for cancer, and personalized medicine as well as other new pharmaceuticals that could be coming to market.”
— Jared Nakahara, UW ECE postdoctoral scholar and 2025–26 UW ECE-EFP fellow
When Nakahara was a graduate student, he and Smith were inspired by transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment used for neural disorders, such as depression. With this in mind, they began investigating ways to use acoustic levitation technology to build a non-invasive stimulator for neurons. Acoustic levitation uses high-frequency sound waves (ultrasound) to suspend and move matter in liquids or gas, overcoming gravity. Around this same time, Nakahara developed an interest in robotic manipulation. He built and experimented with different acoustic levitation systems, aiming to develop a tool that could augment the capabilities of general-purpose robots, giving these robots improved manipulation precision and the ability to handle small or fragile objects without making physical contact.
“Bringing the acoustic levitator into the robotic sphere became a fascinating thing for me because I could do it very quickly, innovating on the controls as well as the hardware and software stack,” Nakahara said. “Once I went down that rabbit hole, it evolved into a much bigger thing when I realized our acoustic levitator could be used as a robotic manipulation platform.”
Through discussions with Smith, Nakahara realized that the acoustic levitator they were developing could be beneficial for laboratory experiments in bioengineering and materials science that needed to be automated, contamination-free, and executed with precision. With Smith’s support, Nakahara switched his research focus from neural engineering to acoustic levitation systems. Now, he and Smith are in the early stages of co-founding Levity, a startup company dedicated to building acoustic levitators for laboratory automation.
An acoustic levitation system for next-generation laboratory automation
[caption id="attachment_39177" align="alignright" width="550"] Levity’s tabletop acoustic levitation system is quick to set up and operate, and it can even run remotely. Nakahara demonstrates the prototype while Smith observes — showing how easy this device is to use.[/caption]
What Levity’s acoustic levitation system does could seem like science fiction. The device uses high-frequency sound, well above the threshold of human hearing, to levitate, contain, and manipulate liquids and small objects in midair — all without touching the levitated material. This levitator is a completely enclosed tabletop system that can contain filtered air or inert gases useful for laboratory experimentation, such as helium, or argon. The sound waves it generates create three-dimensional traps, pockets of sound pressure, which provide a contactless, contamination-free way of containing, manipulating, and examining liquids, solids, and living organisms. Because it uses ultrasound, the device is inaudible to humans and safe for people to use as well as for any living organism the device might contain.
“One of the nice things our acoustic levitator can do is lift, manipulate, and contain living organisms without harming them,” Nakahara said. “You can put a living ant or mosquito into this device and examine it with a camera. You can look at the entire specimen while it’s alive, do species identification, and extract much more information than you could from a more conventional platform.”
The advantages of Nakahara and Smith’s levitator as compared to other laboratory automation systems are many. Because it is a completely enclosed, contactless system, it provides an encapsulated environment for experiments. It is capable of mixing liquids and manipulating levitated objects ranging from millimeters to nanometers in diameter— all without touching or contaminating the experimental material. It also can be programmed to automate the manipulation and data collection tasks of laboratory experiments, removing typical and often costly human errors that happen when people pipette liquids and handle materials. The device enables the user to view the reaction progress of their experiment from start to finish as well as examine it in great detail with cameras, spectrometers, or other sensors. This complete encapsulation and tight integration of the experimental procedure allows researchers to gather much more reliable data than what would otherwise be possible when using multiple pieces of equipment. And as a high-precision scientific instrument, this acoustic levitation system can measure the mass of levitated matter down to a nanogram without touching it.
In addition, Levity’s acoustic levitation system is a tabletop device that is easy to set up and use, and it can be run remotely offsite. Nakahara said that accessible, remote operation could open up a world of possibilities for users. For example, the levitator could be set up in underserved or hard-to-reach areas to run fast and accurate on-site tests for diseases. Or researchers could automate and run their experiments from outside the lab, enabling them to do other things while saving time and money. Or several of these acoustic levitators working together could be set up to operate much like a computer server farm does today — providing automated laboratory services for many different users, all from one, compact location.
Levity’s acoustic levitation system could appeal to researchers working in many different types of scientific applications. But for now, Nakahara said he sees Levity’s primary market being researchers who need liquid handling systems for DNA, proteins, and microscopic materials as part of their workflow, for example, when scientists are developing pharmaceuticals or medical diagnostics.
“I think the programmable laboratory space is interesting because we can potentially help to build life-saving pharmaceuticals, treatments for cancer, and personalized medicine as well as other new pharmaceuticals that could be coming to market,” Nakahara said. “If we can help doctors as well as the health-care industry provide faster diagnoses and better treatments, then that’s something of great benefit to everybody.”
How the Fellows Program will help Levity grow
[caption id="attachment_39180" align="alignright" width="550"] Three acoustic levitators created by Nakahara and Smith during Levity’s prototyping phase. From left to right, in order of development: The V1 model, built to work with robotic grippers and expand their capabilities; Levity’s demonstration system, which offers a clear view of levitated objects; Levity’s contactless acoustic levitation system, which can hold up to four liquid or solid samples while manipulating the levitated objects along their vertical axes.[/caption]
Nadya Peek, an assistant professor in the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, has also contributed to this project. Nakahara said that he considers Peek to be a mentor as well as a collaborator. Peek, whose research focuses on harnessing machine precision to enable individual creativity, has contributed her expertise to help make acoustic levitation useful to researchers.
The acoustic levitation research program in Smith’s lab has already received some academic research funding through a grant Smith and Peek received in 2020 from the National Science Foundation. Smith, Peek, and Nakahara also received a grant in 2022 from the CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund, which supports innovations developed at the UW that have high commercialization potential. Now that he is a UW ECE-EFP fellow, Nakahara believes he has the resources and support needed to take Levity to the next level.
“In addition to the funding, this Program provides support, mentorship, and networking opportunities through CoMotion,” Nakahara said. “The Fellows Program also gives us access to all the connections the University itself has, so we can leverage that network. Taken together, this enables us to grow in the right way, do additional customer discovery, and validate and de-risk our ideas before the acoustic levitator goes to the marketplace.”
Nakahara is currently in the midst of building what he calls a “minimum lovable product” — a top-tier product that Levity's customer base will love so much, they won’t want to do without it. To this end, he is distributing prototype systems to labs at the UW and gathering user feedback to fine-tune the product to the user’s wants and needs. He is also planning for growth in the coming year, when he anticipates distributing acoustic levitation system prototypes to research groups at other universities as well as companies that could use these devices for bioengineering and pharmaceutical research.
Looking ahead, Nakahara said he envisions Levity’s acoustic levitation system evolving so that it could provide an even wider range of laboratory services while, at the same time, offer researchers the option to execute those functions remotely.
“The opportunity to have real-world impact that can help accelerate and maybe contribute to the next big scientific discovery is personally motivating to me, “Nakahara said. “I’m excited to see all of the awesome innovations and advances that could come downstream from providing Levity’s acoustic levitation system to talented researchers.”
Sen Zhang — MultiSensKnit
[caption id="attachment_39182" align="alignright" width="550"] UW ECE-EFP fellow Sen Zhang holds MultiSensKnit, a smart textile for rehabilitation assessment that is wearable, comfortable, and washable. MultiSensKnit is a knitted sleeve that contains conductive yarn (the gray strip on the sleeve) and sensors that can pick up EMG and EIT signals as well as measure joint angles while worn by the user. Behind Zhang, on the whiteboard, are calculations that illustrate the working principles behind MultiSensKnit.[/caption]
Sen Zhang grew up in Anyang City in Henan Province, China. As a child, he had several creative interests, and he loved to play. He enjoyed building structures with Legos®, making small, electrical cars and toys, and sewing fabric — all activities that, looking back, served as seeds for his engineering career today.
Both of his parents were medical doctors, and they expected their son to follow in their footsteps after high school. However, Zhang heard the beat of a different drum. When it was time for him to select a university and a course of study, he decided to major in textile engineering instead of pursuing a career in medicine. Zhang attended Jiangnan University in Jiangsu Province, China, where he studied textile production. His coursework included learning how to spin yarn from source material, such as cotton, and weave or knit that yarn into fabric. His classes also taught him how spinning, weaving, and knitting could be used as industrial-scale techniques to produce finished fabrics for the marketplace.
In 2019, Zhang received his bachelor’s degree in textile engineering from Jiangnan University. He then went on to graduate studies at North Carolina State University’s Wilson College of Textiles. In 2020, he received his master’s degree from NC State in textile engineering. And in 2023, he also earned a master’s degree in statistics from NC State. During graduate school, Zhang studied smart textiles — fabrics that integrate electronic components, such as sensors and actuators. He decided that he wanted to further his study in this area, so he enrolled in the College’s doctoral program, where he did research focused on textile-based, soft, wearable robotics. In 2024, he received his doctoral degree from NC State in fiber and polymer science.
“I believe we have created something in the lab that will be helpful in the clinic. And that’s why I want to push MultiSensKnit out of the lab and into the marketplace as a real-world product."
— Sen Zhang, UW ECE postdoctoral scholar and 2025–26 UW ECE-EFP fellow
That same year, Zhang joined the lab of UW ECE Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo as a postdoctoral scholar. Luo is a leader in the development of smart textiles and wearable technologies. Her research brings together digital fabrication, human-computer/robot interaction, and applied artificial intelligence. It was a perfect fit for Zhang, and Luo’s lab provided room for him to grow in his chosen field.
“Even though the research I did in my Ph.D. program was focused on textile-based, soft, wearable robotics, I had very little experience with wearable sensors and how they could be used,” Zhang said. “Yiyue brought me into this area. She also suggested that we should explore using wearable sensors to create medical devices.”
Zhang and Luo discussed this idea with UW ECE Professor Chet Moritz. Moritz holds joint appointments in rehabilitation medicine, physiology, and biophysics, and he is co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology. Moritz leads the Restorative Technologies Lab at the UW, which develops neuroprosthetic technology to treat paralysis and other movement disorders. His lab regularly brings in people who have had a spinal cord injury, stroke, or other medical conditions to test and monitor their progress using neural devices he and his research team have designed. In their conversations with Moritz, Zhang and Luo realized that his lab might provide an opportunity for them to gather valuable user feedback on wearable technology that could assess a patient’s progress with rehabilitation exercises.
In-home rehabilitation assessment using wearable technology
[caption id="attachment_39184" align="alignright" width="550"] Zhang with his adviser, UW ECE Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo, who wears a MultiSensKnit prototype on her arm. Zhang developed MultiSensKnit under Luo’s guidance.[/caption]
With guidance from Luo, Zhang developed MultiSensKnit — a smart textile for rehabilitation assessment that is wearable, comfortable, and washable. MultiSensKnit is a soft, knitted sleeve Zhang produced by knitting conductive yarn with traditional yarn on an industrial-scale knitting machine in Luo’s lab. The conductive yarn is made out of stainless-steel fibers, which are spun together to form the yarn. Although the yarn is made out of steel, it feels like traditional yarn, soft to the touch. And because stainless steel is rust, stain, and corrosion resistant, the material is washable and wearable for long periods of time.
MultiSensKnit is a multimodal sensing smart textile. This knitted sleeve is embedded with electromyography, or EMG, sensors to measure the electrical activity of muscles and nerves in the bicep, triceps, and front of the arm. The device can also measure joint angles as the arm is moved and muscles are flexed. And as if that weren’t enough, MultiSensKnit also contains electrical impedance tomography, or EIT, sensors to construct a map of tissues inside the arm.
Currently, wearable sensors for rehabilitation assessment are unwieldy, and most can only measure one type of signal or marker from the body. Today, patients are required to come into clinics to put on multiple types of bulky equipment for rehabilitation assessment. This is expensive and inconvenient, to say the least, but it also means that the patient will have to repeat their rehabilitation exercises several times wearing different types of sensors. This can be tiring for the patients and taxing on their bodies.
In contrast, MultiSensKnit allows patients to simply put on a soft, knitted sleeve and wear it, just like they would any other piece of clothing, from the comfort of their own home. Zhang, Luo, and their research team have also developed small printed circuit boards, or PCBs, each about the size of a smart phone, which patients can put in their pockets while they do their rehabilitation exercises. The PCBs pick up data from the sensors in MultiSensKnit and transmit the information wirelessly to the patient’s phone or computer, which then sends the data through the internet to the patient’s health care provider.
“With this device, your clothes function as a wearable sensor, which to me, is a very exciting idea,” Zhang said. “MultiSensKnit is washable, durable, and comfortable. You don’t need to worry about the sensor as you go about your daily life. You can just wear it like normal apparel.”
How the Fellows Program will help MultiSensKnit grow
[caption id="attachment_39185" align="alignright" width="550"] This close-up of MultiSensKnit shows gray squares of conductive yarn knit into white traditional yarn. The fabric is soft, durable, and washable. Inside the gray squares are EMG and EIT sensors that track muscle and nerve signals and can even map tissues inside the arm.[/caption]
According to the World Health Organization, globally, an estimated 2.4 billion people are living with a health condition that could benefit from rehabilitation. And as people live longer and populations age, that number is expected to grow. This is a huge market. And because MultiSensKnit can be used to gather data from the body in several different ways, it could also be used for purposes other than rehabilitation, such as fitness tracking or helping athletes improve their performance. These areas also hold great potential for commercialization, but for now, Zhang said he is focusing their efforts primarily on providing the product to doctors and health-care clinics for rehabilitation assessment. He said he views the UW ECE-EFP as a key support mechanism for helping him to bring his research project to this marketplace.
“I really appreciate the entrepreneurship opportunities the fellowship provides. Because I’m a researcher, I spend much of my time in the lab. I did a lot of research on this smart sleeve, and I hope it can help to improve people’s lives,” Zhang said. “I didn’t know how to start a company and bring products to the market, so this Program is helping me learn how to create a startup, how to brand it, advertise, and move my product to the market, so people can buy it. It’s helping me not only to develop the technology but also to push this device out of our lab and into the real world.”
Zhang is also part of CoMotion’s Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Program, where alongside other PEP participants, he works, studies, and learns how to commercialize a product while creating a startup. This program at CoMotion provides regular meetings and assignments for Zhang and his cohort. He will meet with an industry mentor through the PEP, which will provide further education and networking opportunities. He is also working with CoMotion to file the patent for MultiSensKnit.
In addition to filing for a patent, next steps for Zhang to commercialize MultiSensKnit include finishing the optimization of the smart sleeve according to feedback gathered from users in Moritz’ lab, setting up clinical trials for the device, and working toward acquiring Federal Drug Administration approval for the product.
When the time comes, Zhang is envisioning two stages for distributing MultiSensKnit to the public. In the first stage, he will partner with doctors, clinics, and telehealth providers. Patients will first purchase the product based on their health care provider’s recommendation. They will then work with a technician, physical therapist, or doctor, who will customize the fit of the smart sleeve to the patient’s arm and adjust electrode locations as needed. In the next stage of development, when the product is more mature, Zhang said he could imagine patients ordering MultiSensKnit directly from a major online retailer, such as Amazon. Patients could input their arm size and other parameters, then MultiSensKnit could be customized to fit that particular individual and shipped to them.
“We are using an industrial-scale, digital knitting machine, so it’s easy to customize garments for everyone. The logic is similar to a 3D printer, where you can print anything you want in any shape you desire,” Zhang said. “So, we don’t need a clothing company to cut and sew the fabric, we can produce this smart sleeve after gathering fitting information from the intended user and ship it to their home.”
Zhang has a lot to look forward to as he develops MultiSensKnit for the marketplace. And looking back, he noted where his personal motivation for this work springs from.
“Both of my parents were doctors, and I learned a lot from them and their experience in medicine. They have inspired me to make something that will help patients with the healing process,” Zhang said. “I believe we have created something in the lab that will be helpful in the clinic. And that’s why I want to push MultiSensKnit out of the lab and into the marketplace as a real-world product.”
Applications for the 2026–27 UW ECE-EFP cohort will open in the spring. More information is available on the UW ECE-EFP webpage and from UW ECE Career and Industry Programs Manager Rebecca Carlson. Both Jared Nakahara and Sen Zhang are currently open to and seeking collaborative opportunities for their research and product development. To inquire, contact Jared Nakahara at jarednak@uw.edu and Sen Zhang at szhang66@uw.edu.
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[post_content] => Article by Wayne Gillam, Photos by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_39171" align="alignright" width="550"] The new UW ECE Entrepreneurial Fellows Program, or UW ECE-EFP, helps translate research into real-world impact. On the left, UW ECE-EFP fellow Jared Nakahara adds droplets into an acoustic levitation prototype he created with his adviser, UW ECE and Allen School Professor Joshua Smith. Together, they co-founded Levity, a startup building acoustic levitators for lab automation. On the right, UW ECE-EFP fellow Sen Zhang holds MultiSensKnit, a sensor-packed knitted sleeve designed for rehabilitation assessment. Zhang created and developed MultiSensKnit with UW ECE Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo.[/caption]
According to the UW’s innovation hub, CoMotion, UW ECE consistently ranks among the University’s leading generators of startup companies. The Department has maintained this distinction for decades, alongside its strong academic reputation and longstanding history of supporting entrepreneurship. But UW ECE isn’t resting on that legacy. In early 2025, the Department created a new program aimed at fostering and developing entrepreneurs.
The new UW ECE Entrepreneurial Fellows Program, or UW ECE-EFP, is funded exclusively by royalties earned on UW ECE innovations. The Program is designed to support the transfer of research advances into commercialized impact through prototyping, customer discovery, and market analysis.
“This new program enables fellowship recipients to leverage the richness of the entrepreneurial spirit that’s within UW ECE, the UW College of Engineering, and the broader University,” said UW ECE Career and Industry Programs Manager Rebecca Carlson, who facilitates the UW ECE-EFP. “There is a wide variety of instructors and professors here who have started companies, staff and Department affiliates with industry experience, and an alumni network that can help support our fellows in their entrepreneurial endeavors.”
“Innovation starts here because our Department is a place where ideas are born and developed in a serious way.”
— UW ECE Professor and Chair Eric Klavins
Fellowship recipients receive a postdoctoral scholar salary and benefits for one year, partial salary support for their faculty adviser, mentorship from the University's network of industry experts and entrepreneurs, and support for travel and expenses. UW ECE also partners with the CoMotion Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Program to provide fellowship recipients with access to an entrepreneurial cohort and a strong support network. This close partnership with CoMotion helps fellows move their research out of the lab and into the marketplace. Current UW ECE doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars as well as those eligible for a postdoctoral scholar position in the Department can apply to the UW ECE-EFP.
“Innovation starts here because our Department is a place where ideas are born and developed in a serious way,” said UW ECE Professor and Chair Eric Klavins. “When we promote entrepreneurship through programs like this, it highlights one of the many ways universities benefit our greater society — serving as a supportive place where people can turn their dreams into reality.”
Read on to learn about the inaugural 2025–26 UW ECE-EFP fellows and how, with the help of this new program, they are each realizing their own vision for the future by turning their research projects into commercial ventures.
Jared Nakahara — Levity
[caption id="attachment_39175" align="alignright" width="550"] Levity builds acoustic levitators for automated, contamination-free experiments requiring precise control. The prototype shown above, operated by Nakahara, uses ultrasonic sound waves — well above the threshold of human hearing — to suspend and manipulate droplets and small objects in midair without physical contact.[/caption]
Born and raised in the Seattle area, Jared Nakahara first became interested in engineering when he was in high school, during a summer program at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, a video game and arts college located in Redmond, Washington. The program was provided by the Washington Network for Innovative Careers, and it gave Nakahara his first exposure to robotics, coding, and mechatronics — technology combining mechanical engineering and electronics. Talented in sports and contemplating a career in baseball, Nakahara was inspired by the WANIC program to have a change of heart. He moved his focus from baseball to engineering. Both of Nakahara’s parents were engineers, and being familiar with the field, they encouraged this new direction for their son.
The WANIC summer program sparked what became for Nakahara a passionate interest in electrical and computer engineering. He decided to pursue engineering as a career, and he returned to DigiPen in subsequent years to teach engineering topics to pre-college students. Nakahara chose to study engineering at UW ECE, and he took his education all the way, earning his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering in 2018, 2021, and 2025, respectively.
As a UW ECE undergraduate, Nakahara was initially interested in quantum computing technologies, but after taking a course on field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, taught by UW ECE and Allen School Professor Joshua Smith, his interest shifted to neural engineering. Smith, who is a research leader in the Center for Neurotechnology, was building implantable neural interfaces for spinal cord rehabilitation. The topic fascinated Nakahara. So much so, he joined Smith’s Sensor Systems Laboratory, and when he started graduate school, Smith became his faculty adviser. Today, Nakahara is a postdoctoral scholar in Smith’s lab.
“I think the programmable laboratory space is interesting because we can potentially help to build life-saving pharmaceuticals, treatments for cancer, and personalized medicine as well as other new pharmaceuticals that could be coming to market.”
— Jared Nakahara, UW ECE postdoctoral scholar and 2025–26 UW ECE-EFP fellow
When Nakahara was a graduate student, he and Smith were inspired by transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment used for neural disorders, such as depression. With this in mind, they began investigating ways to use acoustic levitation technology to build a non-invasive stimulator for neurons. Acoustic levitation uses high-frequency sound waves (ultrasound) to suspend and move matter in liquids or gas, overcoming gravity. Around this same time, Nakahara developed an interest in robotic manipulation. He built and experimented with different acoustic levitation systems, aiming to develop a tool that could augment the capabilities of general-purpose robots, giving these robots improved manipulation precision and the ability to handle small or fragile objects without making physical contact.
“Bringing the acoustic levitator into the robotic sphere became a fascinating thing for me because I could do it very quickly, innovating on the controls as well as the hardware and software stack,” Nakahara said. “Once I went down that rabbit hole, it evolved into a much bigger thing when I realized our acoustic levitator could be used as a robotic manipulation platform.”
Through discussions with Smith, Nakahara realized that the acoustic levitator they were developing could be beneficial for laboratory experiments in bioengineering and materials science that needed to be automated, contamination-free, and executed with precision. With Smith’s support, Nakahara switched his research focus from neural engineering to acoustic levitation systems. Now, he and Smith are in the early stages of co-founding Levity, a startup company dedicated to building acoustic levitators for laboratory automation.
An acoustic levitation system for next-generation laboratory automation
[caption id="attachment_39177" align="alignright" width="550"] Levity’s tabletop acoustic levitation system is quick to set up and operate, and it can even run remotely. Nakahara demonstrates the prototype while Smith observes — showing how easy this device is to use.[/caption]
What Levity’s acoustic levitation system does could seem like science fiction. The device uses high-frequency sound, well above the threshold of human hearing, to levitate, contain, and manipulate liquids and small objects in midair — all without touching the levitated material. This levitator is a completely enclosed tabletop system that can contain filtered air or inert gases useful for laboratory experimentation, such as helium, or argon. The sound waves it generates create three-dimensional traps, pockets of sound pressure, which provide a contactless, contamination-free way of containing, manipulating, and examining liquids, solids, and living organisms. Because it uses ultrasound, the device is inaudible to humans and safe for people to use as well as for any living organism the device might contain.
“One of the nice things our acoustic levitator can do is lift, manipulate, and contain living organisms without harming them,” Nakahara said. “You can put a living ant or mosquito into this device and examine it with a camera. You can look at the entire specimen while it’s alive, do species identification, and extract much more information than you could from a more conventional platform.”
The advantages of Nakahara and Smith’s levitator as compared to other laboratory automation systems are many. Because it is a completely enclosed, contactless system, it provides an encapsulated environment for experiments. It is capable of mixing liquids and manipulating levitated objects ranging from millimeters to nanometers in diameter— all without touching or contaminating the experimental material. It also can be programmed to automate the manipulation and data collection tasks of laboratory experiments, removing typical and often costly human errors that happen when people pipette liquids and handle materials. The device enables the user to view the reaction progress of their experiment from start to finish as well as examine it in great detail with cameras, spectrometers, or other sensors. This complete encapsulation and tight integration of the experimental procedure allows researchers to gather much more reliable data than what would otherwise be possible when using multiple pieces of equipment. And as a high-precision scientific instrument, this acoustic levitation system can measure the mass of levitated matter down to a nanogram without touching it.
In addition, Levity’s acoustic levitation system is a tabletop device that is easy to set up and use, and it can be run remotely offsite. Nakahara said that accessible, remote operation could open up a world of possibilities for users. For example, the levitator could be set up in underserved or hard-to-reach areas to run fast and accurate on-site tests for diseases. Or researchers could automate and run their experiments from outside the lab, enabling them to do other things while saving time and money. Or several of these acoustic levitators working together could be set up to operate much like a computer server farm does today — providing automated laboratory services for many different users, all from one, compact location.
Levity’s acoustic levitation system could appeal to researchers working in many different types of scientific applications. But for now, Nakahara said he sees Levity’s primary market being researchers who need liquid handling systems for DNA, proteins, and microscopic materials as part of their workflow, for example, when scientists are developing pharmaceuticals or medical diagnostics.
“I think the programmable laboratory space is interesting because we can potentially help to build life-saving pharmaceuticals, treatments for cancer, and personalized medicine as well as other new pharmaceuticals that could be coming to market,” Nakahara said. “If we can help doctors as well as the health-care industry provide faster diagnoses and better treatments, then that’s something of great benefit to everybody.”
How the Fellows Program will help Levity grow
[caption id="attachment_39180" align="alignright" width="550"] Three acoustic levitators created by Nakahara and Smith during Levity’s prototyping phase. From left to right, in order of development: The V1 model, built to work with robotic grippers and expand their capabilities; Levity’s demonstration system, which offers a clear view of levitated objects; Levity’s contactless acoustic levitation system, which can hold up to four liquid or solid samples while manipulating the levitated objects along their vertical axes.[/caption]
Nadya Peek, an assistant professor in the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, has also contributed to this project. Nakahara said that he considers Peek to be a mentor as well as a collaborator. Peek, whose research focuses on harnessing machine precision to enable individual creativity, has contributed her expertise to help make acoustic levitation useful to researchers.
The acoustic levitation research program in Smith’s lab has already received some academic research funding through a grant Smith and Peek received in 2020 from the National Science Foundation. Smith, Peek, and Nakahara also received a grant in 2022 from the CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund, which supports innovations developed at the UW that have high commercialization potential. Now that he is a UW ECE-EFP fellow, Nakahara believes he has the resources and support needed to take Levity to the next level.
“In addition to the funding, this Program provides support, mentorship, and networking opportunities through CoMotion,” Nakahara said. “The Fellows Program also gives us access to all the connections the University itself has, so we can leverage that network. Taken together, this enables us to grow in the right way, do additional customer discovery, and validate and de-risk our ideas before the acoustic levitator goes to the marketplace.”
Nakahara is currently in the midst of building what he calls a “minimum lovable product” — a top-tier product that Levity's customer base will love so much, they won’t want to do without it. To this end, he is distributing prototype systems to labs at the UW and gathering user feedback to fine-tune the product to the user’s wants and needs. He is also planning for growth in the coming year, when he anticipates distributing acoustic levitation system prototypes to research groups at other universities as well as companies that could use these devices for bioengineering and pharmaceutical research.
Looking ahead, Nakahara said he envisions Levity’s acoustic levitation system evolving so that it could provide an even wider range of laboratory services while, at the same time, offer researchers the option to execute those functions remotely.
“The opportunity to have real-world impact that can help accelerate and maybe contribute to the next big scientific discovery is personally motivating to me, “Nakahara said. “I’m excited to see all of the awesome innovations and advances that could come downstream from providing Levity’s acoustic levitation system to talented researchers.”
Sen Zhang — MultiSensKnit
[caption id="attachment_39182" align="alignright" width="550"] UW ECE-EFP fellow Sen Zhang holds MultiSensKnit, a smart textile for rehabilitation assessment that is wearable, comfortable, and washable. MultiSensKnit is a knitted sleeve that contains conductive yarn (the gray strip on the sleeve) and sensors that can pick up EMG and EIT signals as well as measure joint angles while worn by the user. Behind Zhang, on the whiteboard, are calculations that illustrate the working principles behind MultiSensKnit.[/caption]
Sen Zhang grew up in Anyang City in Henan Province, China. As a child, he had several creative interests, and he loved to play. He enjoyed building structures with Legos®, making small, electrical cars and toys, and sewing fabric — all activities that, looking back, served as seeds for his engineering career today.
Both of his parents were medical doctors, and they expected their son to follow in their footsteps after high school. However, Zhang heard the beat of a different drum. When it was time for him to select a university and a course of study, he decided to major in textile engineering instead of pursuing a career in medicine. Zhang attended Jiangnan University in Jiangsu Province, China, where he studied textile production. His coursework included learning how to spin yarn from source material, such as cotton, and weave or knit that yarn into fabric. His classes also taught him how spinning, weaving, and knitting could be used as industrial-scale techniques to produce finished fabrics for the marketplace.
In 2019, Zhang received his bachelor’s degree in textile engineering from Jiangnan University. He then went on to graduate studies at North Carolina State University’s Wilson College of Textiles. In 2020, he received his master’s degree from NC State in textile engineering. And in 2023, he also earned a master’s degree in statistics from NC State. During graduate school, Zhang studied smart textiles — fabrics that integrate electronic components, such as sensors and actuators. He decided that he wanted to further his study in this area, so he enrolled in the College’s doctoral program, where he did research focused on textile-based, soft, wearable robotics. In 2024, he received his doctoral degree from NC State in fiber and polymer science.
“I believe we have created something in the lab that will be helpful in the clinic. And that’s why I want to push MultiSensKnit out of the lab and into the marketplace as a real-world product."
— Sen Zhang, UW ECE postdoctoral scholar and 2025–26 UW ECE-EFP fellow
That same year, Zhang joined the lab of UW ECE Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo as a postdoctoral scholar. Luo is a leader in the development of smart textiles and wearable technologies. Her research brings together digital fabrication, human-computer/robot interaction, and applied artificial intelligence. It was a perfect fit for Zhang, and Luo’s lab provided room for him to grow in his chosen field.
“Even though the research I did in my Ph.D. program was focused on textile-based, soft, wearable robotics, I had very little experience with wearable sensors and how they could be used,” Zhang said. “Yiyue brought me into this area. She also suggested that we should explore using wearable sensors to create medical devices.”
Zhang and Luo discussed this idea with UW ECE Professor Chet Moritz. Moritz holds joint appointments in rehabilitation medicine, physiology, and biophysics, and he is co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology. Moritz leads the Restorative Technologies Lab at the UW, which develops neuroprosthetic technology to treat paralysis and other movement disorders. His lab regularly brings in people who have had a spinal cord injury, stroke, or other medical conditions to test and monitor their progress using neural devices he and his research team have designed. In their conversations with Moritz, Zhang and Luo realized that his lab might provide an opportunity for them to gather valuable user feedback on wearable technology that could assess a patient’s progress with rehabilitation exercises.
In-home rehabilitation assessment using wearable technology
[caption id="attachment_39184" align="alignright" width="550"] Zhang with his adviser, UW ECE Assistant Professor Yiyue Luo, who wears a MultiSensKnit prototype on her arm. Zhang developed MultiSensKnit under Luo’s guidance.[/caption]
With guidance from Luo, Zhang developed MultiSensKnit — a smart textile for rehabilitation assessment that is wearable, comfortable, and washable. MultiSensKnit is a soft, knitted sleeve Zhang produced by knitting conductive yarn with traditional yarn on an industrial-scale knitting machine in Luo’s lab. The conductive yarn is made out of stainless-steel fibers, which are spun together to form the yarn. Although the yarn is made out of steel, it feels like traditional yarn, soft to the touch. And because stainless steel is rust, stain, and corrosion resistant, the material is washable and wearable for long periods of time.
MultiSensKnit is a multimodal sensing smart textile. This knitted sleeve is embedded with electromyography, or EMG, sensors to measure the electrical activity of muscles and nerves in the bicep, triceps, and front of the arm. The device can also measure joint angles as the arm is moved and muscles are flexed. And as if that weren’t enough, MultiSensKnit also contains electrical impedance tomography, or EIT, sensors to construct a map of tissues inside the arm.
Currently, wearable sensors for rehabilitation assessment are unwieldy, and most can only measure one type of signal or marker from the body. Today, patients are required to come into clinics to put on multiple types of bulky equipment for rehabilitation assessment. This is expensive and inconvenient, to say the least, but it also means that the patient will have to repeat their rehabilitation exercises several times wearing different types of sensors. This can be tiring for the patients and taxing on their bodies.
In contrast, MultiSensKnit allows patients to simply put on a soft, knitted sleeve and wear it, just like they would any other piece of clothing, from the comfort of their own home. Zhang, Luo, and their research team have also developed small printed circuit boards, or PCBs, each about the size of a smart phone, which patients can put in their pockets while they do their rehabilitation exercises. The PCBs pick up data from the sensors in MultiSensKnit and transmit the information wirelessly to the patient’s phone or computer, which then sends the data through the internet to the patient’s health care provider.
“With this device, your clothes function as a wearable sensor, which to me, is a very exciting idea,” Zhang said. “MultiSensKnit is washable, durable, and comfortable. You don’t need to worry about the sensor as you go about your daily life. You can just wear it like normal apparel.”
How the Fellows Program will help MultiSensKnit grow
[caption id="attachment_39185" align="alignright" width="550"] This close-up of MultiSensKnit shows gray squares of conductive yarn knit into white traditional yarn. The fabric is soft, durable, and washable. Inside the gray squares are EMG and EIT sensors that track muscle and nerve signals and can even map tissues inside the arm.[/caption]
According to the World Health Organization, globally, an estimated 2.4 billion people are living with a health condition that could benefit from rehabilitation. And as people live longer and populations age, that number is expected to grow. This is a huge market. And because MultiSensKnit can be used to gather data from the body in several different ways, it could also be used for purposes other than rehabilitation, such as fitness tracking or helping athletes improve their performance. These areas also hold great potential for commercialization, but for now, Zhang said he is focusing their efforts primarily on providing the product to doctors and health-care clinics for rehabilitation assessment. He said he views the UW ECE-EFP as a key support mechanism for helping him to bring his research project to this marketplace.
“I really appreciate the entrepreneurship opportunities the fellowship provides. Because I’m a researcher, I spend much of my time in the lab. I did a lot of research on this smart sleeve, and I hope it can help to improve people’s lives,” Zhang said. “I didn’t know how to start a company and bring products to the market, so this Program is helping me learn how to create a startup, how to brand it, advertise, and move my product to the market, so people can buy it. It’s helping me not only to develop the technology but also to push this device out of our lab and into the real world.”
Zhang is also part of CoMotion’s Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Program, where alongside other PEP participants, he works, studies, and learns how to commercialize a product while creating a startup. This program at CoMotion provides regular meetings and assignments for Zhang and his cohort. He will meet with an industry mentor through the PEP, which will provide further education and networking opportunities. He is also working with CoMotion to file the patent for MultiSensKnit.
In addition to filing for a patent, next steps for Zhang to commercialize MultiSensKnit include finishing the optimization of the smart sleeve according to feedback gathered from users in Moritz’ lab, setting up clinical trials for the device, and working toward acquiring Federal Drug Administration approval for the product.
When the time comes, Zhang is envisioning two stages for distributing MultiSensKnit to the public. In the first stage, he will partner with doctors, clinics, and telehealth providers. Patients will first purchase the product based on their health care provider’s recommendation. They will then work with a technician, physical therapist, or doctor, who will customize the fit of the smart sleeve to the patient’s arm and adjust electrode locations as needed. In the next stage of development, when the product is more mature, Zhang said he could imagine patients ordering MultiSensKnit directly from a major online retailer, such as Amazon. Patients could input their arm size and other parameters, then MultiSensKnit could be customized to fit that particular individual and shipped to them.
“We are using an industrial-scale, digital knitting machine, so it’s easy to customize garments for everyone. The logic is similar to a 3D printer, where you can print anything you want in any shape you desire,” Zhang said. “So, we don’t need a clothing company to cut and sew the fabric, we can produce this smart sleeve after gathering fitting information from the intended user and ship it to their home.”
Zhang has a lot to look forward to as he develops MultiSensKnit for the marketplace. And looking back, he noted where his personal motivation for this work springs from.
“Both of my parents were doctors, and I learned a lot from them and their experience in medicine. They have inspired me to make something that will help patients with the healing process,” Zhang said. “I believe we have created something in the lab that will be helpful in the clinic. And that’s why I want to push MultiSensKnit out of the lab and into the marketplace as a real-world product.”
Applications for the 2026–27 UW ECE-EFP cohort will open in the spring. More information is available on the UW ECE-EFP webpage and from UW ECE Career and Industry Programs Manager Rebecca Carlson. Both Jared Nakahara and Sen Zhang are currently open to and seeking collaborative opportunities for their research and product development. To inquire, contact Jared Nakahara at jarednak@uw.edu and Sen Zhang at szhang66@uw.edu.
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Applications are now open for two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions at UW ECE. Visit the link below to apply via Interfolio.
Deadline: December 15, 2025
https://www.ece.uw.edu/engage/job-openings/
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_39019" align="alignright" width="600"] The Institute for Foundations of Data Science, led by UW ECE Professor Maryam Fazel, held the 2025 IFDS Workshop on Theoretical Foundations of Applied AI in August on the UW campus. The event brought AI and machine learning experts together from across the nation to discuss and explore the mathematical, statistical, and algorithmic underpinnings of modern AI systems — advancing theory in an effort to better understand and improve the trustworthiness, reliability, and robustness of AI technology. Shown above: Aaditya Ramdas, a professor from Carnegie Mellon University, giving a talk at the workshop. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
Artificial intelligence has quickly become an indispensable part of modern life. Today, AI systems support search engines, streaming services, social media, and various online tools and products over a wide range of devices. AI also enables behind-the-scenes automation in a vast array of fields, including security, finance, transportation, and health care. With such widespread use taking place, it’s fair to say that the world is now in the early stages of running on and reaping the benefits of AI and related technologies.
But alongside these benefits, people are beginning to deal with serious problems and challenges that come with this powerful technology. For example, online misinformation and disinformation has long been a problem for societies around the world, and AI is turning up the volume on these issues by making it easy to produce fake information, images, and videos. It’s also been well-documented that algorithms underpinning AI can be biased in a multitude of different ways, skewing toward unfavorable or damaging outcomes. In addition, wide use of AI is raising new cybersecurity vulnerabilities and opportunities for hackers to up their game.
With all of the above in mind, the Institute for Foundations of Data Science brought AI and machine learning experts from across the nation to the UW to discuss and explore the mathematical, statistical, and algorithmic underpinnings of modern AI systems. The IFDS Workshop on Theoretical Foundations of Applied AI was held in August 2025 at the Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering on the UW campus. This gathering of experts focused on discussing, exploring, and advancing theoretical understanding in an effort to improve the trustworthiness, reliability, and robustness of AI technology.
[caption id="attachment_39022" align="alignleft" width="425"] UW ECE Professor Maryam Fazel is an international leader in the study of artificial intelligence and machine learning. In addition to directing the Institute for Foundations of Data Science and co-organizing the IFDS workshop described in this article, Fazel organizes and speaks at other notable conferences, workshops, and events that bring researchers together worldwide, such as the 2025 International Conference on Machine Learning (see the ICML description and link below). Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
“The IFDS supports cross-collaborations between faculty and student researchers from many different departments at several universities. We have collaborative projects in progress as well as published papers and talks that tackle the challenges of modern AI,” said UW ECE Moorthy Family Professor Maryam Fazel, who is the director of the IFDS and was a co-organizer of the event. “This workshop provided another step in that direction. It brought people from different perspectives together and led to even more collaboration opportunities.”
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the IFDS is a partnership between the UW and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of California Santa Cruz, and the University of Chicago. The mission of the Institute is to develop a principled approach to the analysis of complex, automated, decision-making algorithms and ever larger and potentially biased data sets that play an increasingly important role in industry, government, and academia.
“I’d like everyone to appreciate that this workshop was more than a series of lectures — it was a gathering of minds focused on making AI more principled, reliable, and understood,” said Kevin Jamieson, an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, member of the IFDS leadership team, and co-organizer of the event. “This workshop reflects the IFDS’ deep commitment to pushing the boundaries of both foundational theory and real-world impact.”
Advancing theoretical understanding to improve AI systems
[caption id="attachment_39026" align="alignright" width="525"] Participants in the 2025 IFDS Workshop on Theoretical Foundations of Applied AI at the Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering on the UW campus. Photo provided by Professor Maryam Fazel.[/caption]
The IFDS workshop brought together mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, and other AI and machine learning experts from across the country. One of the main topics speakers and attendees discussed was how algorithms that underpin AI learn from data and how that learning process could be better understood and improved. AI models used for a variety of applications, including large language models, such as ChatGPT, learn from data in multiple ways that are still not well understood by researchers.
For example, in addition to being trained on massive volumes of data acquired from the internet, large language models can also apply multi-step reasoning and in-context learning techniques to answer information requests and solve problems. These generative AI systems can be of great service to users when they work as intended. However, large language models sometimes generate false, misleading, or nonsensical information — occurrences that are called “machine hallucinations.” Why these hallucinations happen is too often a mystery to those who produce large language models as well as to data science experts.
“This workshop showcased how modern mathematical theory is evolving to explain and advance state-of-the-art AI methodologies, including large language models,” said Robert Nowak, a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison electrical and computer engineering department. “Advancing the mathematical foundations of AI is essential to eventually designing systems that are as trustworthy and robust as other complex engineered technologies, such as wireless networks and the internet.”
Other workshop topics included the role artificial neural networks play in AI systems, over-parameterization (where AI models have far more learning parameters than training data), how to make AI systems more robust to cyber-attacks and hacking, and reinforcement learning, especially as applied to robotics. Throughout the workshop, special attention was paid to highlighting connections between theory and practice.
UW ECE Professor Maryam Fazel was also a program co-chair for the 2025 International Conference on Machine Learning, which was held from July 13 to 19 in Vancouver, Canada. The ICML is the oldest, second-largest, and among the fastest-growing conferences of its kind in the world. Conference attendees examined and discussed topics such as privacy, safety, algorithmic biases, and intellectual property concerns. Much like the IFDS workshop described in this article, the ICML facilitated a process that built groundwork for solutions to some of the most urgent and complex problems in AI and machine learning today. Learn more.
Organizers of the event noted that this workshop provided a venue for researchers from different fields to discuss common issues with AI technologies and work on solutions together.
“The variety of perspectives on AI foundation models was very exciting to see,” said Zaid Harchaoui, a professor in the UW Department of Statistics, member of the IFDS leadership team, and co-organizer of the workshop. “The understanding of these models requires concepts and tools from mathematics, statistics, computer science, and information theory.”
Next steps for many of the faculty and student researchers in attendance will be to move the fresh knowledge, insights, and collaboration opportunities they gained through this event into their daily work. Fazel said that she will be applying several things she learned at the workshop in her own research. She also underscored the value a strong theoretical understanding can bring to improving AI performance.
“AI is developing rapidly. I think the pace is faster than any other technological development in the past. And, unfortunately, theory and understanding have fallen behind while the technology has continued to move forward,” Fazel said. “Addressing challenges and making improvements to AI models and methods requires us to gain a better and deeper understanding of how AI systems work. This understanding can then help us to solve the challenges and make AI technology more reliable, robust, and trustworthy.”
Abstracts and full videos of all talks from this workshop can be found on the event website. Information about related events and activities is available on the IFDS website. More information about UW ECE Professor Maryam Fazel is available on her bio page.
[post_title] => IFDS workshop brings together experts to help make AI more reliable, robust, and trustworthy
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_38883" align="alignright" width="550"] In a first-of-its-kind demonstration, UW ECE and BioE Associate Professor Azadeh Yazdan and her research team have shown that applying electrical stimulation to the brain within an hour after the onset of an ischemic stroke may significantly reduce brain damage. This work is an important step forward for stroke intervention research, and it points toward a new way of treating stroke soon after it occurs. Shown above: Yazdan examines a 50-micron-thick brain section, which is stained to highlight important structural features of brain cells. Photo by Mark Stone / University of Washington[/caption]
Azadeh Yazdan has a clear vision for her neural engineering research — to translate this work into clinical applications that can make a positive and even profound difference in people’s lives. And Yazdan, who is the Washington Research Foundation Innovation Associate Professor of Neuroengineering in UW ECE and the UW Department of Bioengineering, is well on the way to making her vision a reality. As a neural engineer, she tackles some of the most devastating and difficult-to-treat diseases and afflictions people can face, such as Alzheimer’s disease, mental health disorders, and stroke. These health conditions affect the lives of millions of people around the world.
For example, take just one condition Yazdan is investigating, ischemic stroke. Globally, over 7.6 million people suffer an ischemic stroke each year, causing significant health, economic, and lifestyle impacts to those that undergo the stroke as well as to their loved ones. An ischemic stroke is common, making up well over 70% of the strokes that occur. It happens when a blood vessel to the brain becomes blocked, cutting off blood flow and leading to brain cell death.
Neural engineers have been working for several years now toward using electrical brain stimulation to treat stroke, encouraged by successes in other areas, such as deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease. It is well-known that prompt treatment for strokes is crucial to obtaining better outcomes. However, most medical researchers and health practitioners have shied away from attempting to use electrical stimulation to treat a stroke soon after it occurs, when it is considered an “acute” stroke, for fear of causing further damage to the brain.
But now, in a first-of-its-kind demonstration recently described in the journal Nature Communications, Yazdan and her research team have shown that applying electrical stimulation to the brain within an hour after the onset of an ischemic stroke may significantly reduce brain damage. This work is an important step forward for stroke intervention research, and it points toward a new way of treating stroke soon after it occurs.
“The number of people that this treatment could impact is really high, and I think that out of all the research I’ve done so far, this work is the closest to translation." — UW ECE and BioE Associate Professor Azadeh Yazdan
“This finding was something that was very surprising and unexpected, not only for us, but for the field,” Yazdan said. “In the acute phase after a stroke, the brain is highly sensitive due to network damage and imbalance, which significantly increases the risk of seizures. Consequently, electrical brain stimulation is typically avoided during this period. However, our findings suggest that targeted stimulation can have a neuroprotective effect and may even help prevent seizures or other pathological neural events that contribute to further brain injury.”
[caption id="attachment_38887" align="alignleft" width="450"] UW BioE doctoral students Jasmine Zhou (left) and Karam Khateeb (right). Zhou was lead author of the research team’s paper in Nature Communications. Photos provided by Jasmine Zhou and Karam Khateeb.[/caption]
This research took place in Yazdan’s Neural Engineering and Rehabilitation Design Lab at the UW and in the Washington National Primate Research Center on the UW campus. The study was led by Yazdan and Jasmine Zhou, a UW doctoral student in bioengineering, with assistance from Karam Khateeb, another UW doctoral student in bioengineering.
“Currently, there are two main treatments for acute ischemic stroke: dissolving the clot with medication or removing it mechanically to restore blood flow. While both methods can be highly effective, many patients cannot receive these treatments because they arrive too late, do not meet eligibility criteria, or lack access to specialized care,” Zhou said. “Our research points to a potential new option that could be delivered in the critical early hours after stroke, when brain injury is still reversible, to help prevent further damage. By preserving vulnerable tissue early on, patients may have a greater chance of recovery, improved independence, and a better quality of life.”
Yazdan and her research team received guidance and support from a number of experts in medicine and engineering, including UW ECE Professor Chet Moritz, who holds joint appointments in rehabilitation medicine, physiology, and biophysics. Moritz is also the co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology, of which Yazdan is a faculty member. UW Professor Emeritus Eberhard Fetz, who is from neurobiology and biophysics and is a member of the Center for Neurotechnology, also contributed his expertise. Another UW contributor to this work was Professor Greg Horwitz, also from neurobiology and biophysics. Horwitz offered guidance and expertise on immunohistochemistry analysis for the research team. Further assistance was provided by the surgeons and veterinarians at the Washington National Primate Research Center.
An unexpected finding with great potential
[caption id="attachment_38890" align="alignright" width="550"] The red area in the graphic above shows irreversible brain damage after ischemic stroke and, from left to right, how that damage increases significantly within a 24 to 48-hour period without effective treatment. Yazdan and her research team believe that their approach could slow this progression at the earliest stage, shown in the far-left image, and dramatically improve the patient’s chances for recovery. This illustration is from The New England Journal of Medicine, van der Worp HB and van Gijn J, “Acute Ischemic Stroke,” N Engl J Med. 357.6 (2007): 572-579. Copyright © 2007 Massachusetts Medical Society. Reprinted with permission from Massachusetts Medical Society.[/caption]
A research breakthrough can sometimes happen unexpectedly, and that was the case with this finding. In 2020, Yazdan was designing experiments at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that would be safe to conduct in-person while still contributing toward the larger vision for her work. Most of Yazdan’s research focuses on neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections, especially in response to trauma or injury. With this focus in mind, she and Zhou put together an experiment that would use targeted electrical brain stimulation following stroke to study neuroplasticity.
In the experiment, the research team applied a form of electrical brain stimulation called “theta burst,” which is a rapid, rhythmic pattern designed to influence neural activity directly adjacent to a damaged area in the brain. The team expected to observe the brain’s neuroplasticity in response to the stimulation. But instead, what they discovered was that the electrical stimulation they applied to the brain was reducing neural activity in tissue surrounding the damaged area. This quieting of neurons had an unexpected, neuroprotective effect — significantly reducing lesion volume, inflammation, and cellular stress markers. Remarkably, in some cases, the damaged area of the brain was reduced by almost half.
“This was a notable and unexpected finding, but it was enabled by a series of technologies that were developed in my lab,” Yazdan said. “We had developed technologies that allowed us to monitor the changes in neural activity and blood flow across brain networks with high spatial and temporal resolution.”
Initially surprised by the results of their experiment, Yazdan, Zhou, and their research team followed up with additional experiments and almost three years of data collection and analysis to confirm the findings prior to publishing the results of their study.
Opportunities to impact people’s lives for the better
Yazdan emphasized that although this is a notable advance, the research is still in its early stages, and there is much that warrants further investigation. She has filed for a patent, and she said her next steps will include a longer-term study that could look at changes in function, behavior, and recovery. She would also like to explore the possibilities for this type of electrical stimulation to reduce cortical damage resulting from other kinds of strokes in different areas of the brain. Combining electrical stimulation protocols in various ways for both neuroprotection and neuroplasticity in acute and chronic (long-term) stroke management is something she intends to explore as well in the coming years.
Even with many studies still ahead of her, Yazdan remains focused on evolving this treatment for stroke to the point where it could be used in clinics. She also noted that this stimulation protocol could help to pave a road to new treatments for other types of damage to the nervous system, such as spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury.
“The number of people that this treatment could impact is really high, and I think that out of all the research I’ve done so far, this work is the closest to translation,” Yazdan said. “That is really exciting to me, the possibility that it could move forward to a point that we see it used in clinical applications. I think it goes back to patient care and the ways we can minimize damage after these types of injuries. This treatment holds great potential to not only improve the quality of life for stroke survivors, but also for their families and caregivers.”
Learn more about this research by reading “Early intervention with electrical stimulation reduces neural damage after stroke in non-human primates” in the journal Nature Communications. More information about professor Yazdan is available on her UW ECE bio page. Funding for this study was provided by many sources acknowledged in the Nature Communications paper, including the Weill Neurohub, which brings together researchers and clinicians at the UW, UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and the Allen Institute to speed the development of new treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases.
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_38749" align="alignright" width="550"] In a first-of-its-kind achievement, researchers at UW ECE and Princeton University have shown that a camera containing a large aperture, ultra-flat optic can record high-quality color images and video comparable to what can be captured with a conventional camera lens. Shown above: an illustrative comparison of a standard refractive lens next to an ultra-flat optic developed by the research team. The ultra-flat optic is hundreds of times smaller and thinner. When this metalens replaces a conventional camera lens or stack of lenses, the savings in volume, weight, and device battery life can be substantial. Illustration by Liz Sabol / Princeton University[/caption]
Cameras are everywhere. For over two centuries, these devices have grown increasingly popular and proven to be so useful, they have become an indispensable part of modern life. Today, they are included in a vast range of applications — everything from smartphones and laptops to security and surveillance systems to cars, aircraft, and satellites imaging the earth from high above. And as an overarching trend toward miniaturizing mechanical, optical, and electronic products continues, scientists and engineers are looking for ways to create smaller, lighter, and more energy-efficient cameras for these technologies.
Ultra-flat optics have been proposed as a solution for this engineering challenge, as they are an alternative to the relatively bulky lenses found in cameras today. Instead of using a curved lens made out of glass or plastic, many ultra-flat optics, such as metalenses, use a thin, flat plane of microscopic nanostructures to manipulate light, which makes them hundreds or even thousands of times smaller and lighter than conventional camera lenses. But there is one, big problem. A type of optical distortion known as “chromatic aberration” limits the ability of ultra-flat optics to produce high-quality color images when the optic has a large aperture — the opening in the lens that allows light into the camera. A large aperture increases light throughput to create images similar to what most cameras can produce today. For years, this fundamental limitation of ultra-flat optics has been seen by many as an impassable barrier.
That is, until now.
[caption id="attachment_38766" align="alignright" width="550"] This research advance is an outgrowth of a collaboration between UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar (left) and Felix Heide (center), an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University. UW ECE Professor Karl Böhringer (right) also contributed to the effort. Photos by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE, and Steven Schultz / Princeton University[/caption]
In a first-of-its-kind achievement described in a Nature Communications paper, researchers at UW ECE and the computer science department at Princeton University have shown that a camera containing a large aperture, ultra-flat optic can record high-quality color images and video comparable to what can be captured with a conventional camera lens. This notable accomplishment challenges a commonly held belief that sharp, full-color imaging would be impossible using a single, large-aperture metalens.
The ultra-flat optic the research team developed is a metalens that is only one micron thick. When affixed to its supporting substrate, it is still only 300 microns thick — about the width of four human hairs laid side by side. Altogether, it is hundreds of times smaller and thinner than a standard refractive lens. So, when this metalens replaces a conventional camera lens or stack of lenses, the savings in volume, weight, and device battery life can be substantial.
This ultra-flat optic could be applied to almost any camera, and it would be especially useful for any imaging system constrained by size or weight. Smartphone and laptop cameras are among the first applications for this metalens that come to mind, but it could be applied to a vast range of other technologies, such as cars, drones, or satellites that need lightweight imaging systems. Even medical instruments, such as endoscopes and angioscopes, could benefit from the smaller systems that this ultra-flat optic could enable, allowing physicians to see deeper inside the body to diagnose and treat diseases.
“Our work shows capability, what can be done with ultra-flat optics. I think our research pushes the field forward, and there will be a lot more of this type of work in the future.” — UW ECE Research Assistant Professor Johannes Fröch
This achievement is an outgrowth of a longstanding collaboration between the senior authors of the paper, Arka Majumdar, a UW ECE professor who holds a joint appointment in physics, and Felix Heide, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University. Majumdar, Heide, and their research teams have produced some dramatic advances in optics over the last few years, such as shrinking a camera down to the size of a grain of salt while still capturing crisp, clear images, and engineering a camera that can identify images at the speed of light. Majumdar’s lab team also has a strong track record of reimagining optics for smartphone cameras and other devices. This latest research advance emerged from a previous joint effort overseen by Majumdar and Heide, which was led by Ethan Tseng, a doctoral student in Heide’s lab who was also a co-author of this paper.
[caption id="attachment_38773" align="alignright" width="375"] Lead authors UW ECE Research Assistant Professor Johannes Fröch (left) and Praneeth Chakravarthula, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (right)[/caption]
Lead authors of the paper were UW ECE Research Assistant Professor Johannes Fröch and Praneeth Chakravarthula, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chakravarthula was a postdoctoral scholar in Heide’s lab at Princeton University when this research took place.
“Previously, it was assumed that the larger the metalens is, the fewer the colors there are that can be focused,” Fröch said. “But we went beyond that and beat the limit.”
“We treated this as a holistic system,” Chakravarthula added. “That allowed us to leverage the complementary strengths of optics and computation, where we didn’t design these different parts of the imaging system sequentially, but instead, we jointly optimized them to maximize performance.”
Other co-authors of the paper included UW ECE alums Shane Colburn, Alan Zhan, Forrest Miller, Anna Wirth-Singh, and Zheyi Han as well as former UW ECE postdoctoral researcher Quentin Tanguy and Jipeng Sun, a doctoral student in Heide’s lab. UW ECE Professor Karl Böhringer also co-authored the paper and contributed to the effort, supervising the students who fabricated the ultra-flat optic in the Washington Nanofabrication Facility. Böhringer is the director of the Institute of Nano-Engineered Systems, of which Majumdar is a faculty member.
AI-powered computation enables high-resolution images
In most imaging systems, multiple refractive lenses are used because a single lens cannot bring all colors into focus. This issue, specifying “chromaticity,” becomes exacerbated in ultra-flat optics. Many scientists and engineers even consider metalenses to be hyperchromatic because all the light cannot be brought into focus at a given point. This limits the ability of ultra-flat optics to have broader apertures and still be able to do well in terms of imaging visible light.
“We treated this as a holistic system. That allowed us to leverage the complementary strengths of optics and computation, where we didn’t design these different parts of the imaging system sequentially, but instead, we jointly optimized them to maximize performance.” — Praneeth Chakravarthula, assistant professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Previous to this research advance, it was not thought possible to build metalenses with large apertures that can produce a high-quality image. Most earlier efforts with metalenses were working with camera apertures that were less than one millimeter in size. In comparison, the aperture in the camera the research team engineered is one centimeter in size, significantly larger. The team demonstrated that with a strong computational backend co-designed with the optical hardware, even larger apertures are possible.
“People have tried purely physics-based or heuristic, handcrafted optical designs to address this issue, but in our work, we treat it as a computational problem,” Chakravarthula said. “We used AI tools to figure out what should be the shape of these lens structures and what should be the corresponding computation.”
The computational backend of the team’s optical system incorporated AI — a probabilistic diffusion-based neural network. This AI-powered backend takes in the data received from the ultra-flat optic and outputs images with lower haze, better color accuracy, more vivid hues, and better noise reduction. This all results in high-quality color images that are almost indistinguishable from what can be captured with a conventional camera.
“Previously, I was always considering problems from the optical side of the system,” Fröch said. “But this project really showed me that if you consider the whole system and then try to leverage the strength of each part — the optics and the computational backend — they can work synergistically to produce this really good image quality that we’ve shown here.”
Working toward even sharper images, new modalities
[caption id="attachment_38776" align="alignright" width="375"] The camera prototype designed by the research team. This engineering prototype contains the ultra-flat optic with a one-centimeter lens aperture. Photo provided by Johannes Fröch[/caption]
Next steps for the research team include further refining and improving image quality produced by their ultra-flat optic. They are also planning to explore different modalities for the optical system they developed that could be useful for augmenting human vision. These modalities involve capturing and working with information from light that is beyond what is visible to the human eye.
To illustrate, many animals, such as butterflies, can see far beyond the spectrum of light visible to humans and gain useful information from different characteristics of light, such as its polarization — the orientation of light waves as they travel through space. Animals use this information to find food, evade predators, and attract mates. In a similar fashion, humans can use light beyond what people are able to see to enable multimodal sensing for polarization or spectral information. An example of this is light detection and ranging, or LiDAR, which is currently being used in autonomous vehicles and in smartphones to assist with augmented reality, virtual reality, and depth-perception applications. The research team anticipates that their ultra-flat optic could be applicable to these sorts of technologies.
Commercialization of this ultra-flat optic is also a distinct possibility in the near future. Metalenses are suitable for mass manufacturing in foundries using nanoprint lithography, which makes the optics affordable and scalable. The team is currently talking with a UW professor in the ophthalmology department, who is interested in creating small, lightweight, hand-held devices that would be easier to use for eye inspections. Fröch also said there are startups that might be interested in commercializing this technology. He noted as well that the team’s research could open new avenues for others in the field of optics to explore.
“I think the overall takeaway here is that even when there are perceived limitations to solving a certain problem, it doesn’t mean it’s not possible to solve it,” Fröch said. “Our work shows capability, what can be done with ultra-flat optics. I think our research pushes the field forward, and there will be a lot more of this type of work in the future.”
The article, “Beating spectral bandwidths for large aperture broadband nano-optics,” was published March 28 in Nature Communications. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Sony Young Faculty Award, an Amazon Science Research Award, and a Google Ph.D. Fellowship.
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[post_content] => [caption id="attachment_38668" align="alignright" width="575"] UW ECE Professor Emeritus Les Atlas. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
On July 5, 2025, UW ECE Professor Les Atlas officially retired and was appointed professor emeritus. Atlas has been a professor in the Department for 41 years, with an adjunct appointment in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. During his time at the UW, Atlas has made many important contributions to UW ECE while producing groundbreaking research in machine learning and digital signal processing.
“Les has impacted generations of students and researchers here at the UW, and really, across the world,” said UW ECE Professor and Chair Eric Klavins in his introduction to Atlas’ last UW ECE Research Colloquium in May 2025. “I’ve appreciated having Les as a colleague during my 20 years in the Department. It’s been wonderful to hear his ideas and be inspired by his enthusiasm for engineering and everything we do in our Department.”
Atlas started his career at UW ECE in 1984 as an assistant professor, shortly after receiving his doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. At Stanford, he studied digital signal processing, and his dissertation research was focused on cochlear implants, electronic medical devices that help people with severe hearing loss perceive sound. As a Stanford graduate student, he was also part of a research team that developed the world’s first portable, real-time speech processor for a cochlear implant. This speech processor is now part of the permanent collection of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
“My time at UW ECE has been life-changing. The academic environment here is accepting of ideas outside of the mainstream, and the quality of the students, faculty, and staff is outstanding." — UW ECE Professor Emeritus Les Atlas
Atlas noted that when he joined UW ECE, he was interested in building on this research as well as drawing inspiration from biological systems for the next generation of electronics. He did just that in 1987, in a research collaboration that replaced simple multiplication operations in an artificial neural network with a “convolution” operation. An artificial neural network is a computational model inspired by the structure and function of the human brain. It also forms the basis for artificial intelligence. The convolution-based approach that Atlas and his colleagues introduced allowed learning components, known as “weights,” to be shared across different input locations, drastically reducing the amount of information the network needed to learn from limited data. This approach, initially applied to speech sounds, became foundational for what is now known as a “convolutional neural network” — a type of deep learning artificial neural network initially used for analyzing audio and visual data, such as sounds, images, and videos. Today, convolutional neural networks are integral to computer vision, speech and audio recognition, autonomous systems, and are within many other artificial intelligence applications, such as ChatGPT.
[caption id="attachment_38672" align="alignleft" width="425"] Atlas (center) alongside UW alumnus David Cohn (left) and Allen School Professor Emeritus Richard Ladner (right) at Atlas’ May 2025 UW ECE Research Colloquium. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Atlas, Cohn, and Ladner were early trailblazers in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The trio introduced new ways for artificial neural networks to cope with limited training data. Their work was based on UW research exploring how babies learn to understand speech. Photo provided by David Cohn of Port Townsend, WA.[/caption]
Atlas and his colleagues were the first to explicitly substitute convolution for multiplication within data-trainable artificial neural networks. Their work was, in part, built on concepts introduced in the “neocognitron,” an artificial neural network proposed in 1980 by Kunihiko Fukushima. Coincidentally, also in 1987, Professor Alex Waibel at Carnegie Mellon University independently proposed a time-delay neural network, which is mathematically equivalent to a convolutional neural network. Waibel covered this topic, and more, in a recent UW ECE Research Colloquium. Others, including Yann LeCun, vice president and chief AI scientist at Meta, made strong contributions to convolutional neural networks, culminating in LeNet-5. (LeCun delivered the UW ECE 2024 Lytle Lecture.) These contributions, in addition to work by Atlas and his colleagues, were all ingredients that contributed to the modern boom in artificial intelligence.
A bit later in his career, Atlas became inspired by research conducted by UW professors Patricia Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff, co-directors of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the UW, who were exploring how babies learn to understand speech by using information selected from their environment. With their research in mind, Atlas and his collaborators developed strategies for artificial neural networks to intelligently select the most informative data points to learn from. He, along with his colleagues, UW alumnus David Cohn and Professor (now Emeritus) Richard Ladner in the Allen School, introduced now-standard concepts in machine learning, such as “selective sampling” (published in 1989) and “active learning” (published in 1994). These concepts offered new ways for artificial neural networks to cope with limited data.
Over the years, Atlas has been a leader in signal processing research and educational activity in the Pacific Northwest. He has had many leadership roles in the Department and in the field of electrical and computer engineering, such as co-chairing the 1998 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. His graduate students have also had significant impact — securing top faculty positions, initiating the first machine learning seminar at Google, receiving multiple Technical Emmy Awards, and founding companies, such as Redfin.
Atlas was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin and then attended Stanford, where he received his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Senior Fulbright Scholar, a Virginia Merrill Bloedel Scholar, and he has received numerous other awards and editorial roles throughout his distinguished career. His early machine learning research was funded by a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award. His work has also been funded by a number of other businesses and organizations, including the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, and the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation.
Looking forward to his new status as a professor emeritus, Atlas said that he plans to continue to enjoy his research collaborations and selected advisory roles at UW ECE. He also said that he was excited about finally getting the time to pursue a keen interest in dramatic acting — something he has wanted to do since he was a child.
“My time at UW ECE has been life-changing,” Atlas said. “The academic environment here is accepting of ideas outside of the mainstream, and the quality of the students, faculty, and staff is outstanding. I was able to propose ideas which initially got some people angry, yet I still was able to pursue those ideas. I anticipate continuing to contribute to the Department for many years to come as a professor emeritus.”
More information about Professor Emeritus Les Atlas is available on his UW ECE bio page.
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