Congratulations to Liang He for receiving the Bob Bandes Memorial Teaching Award (Honorable Mention). The award page provides excerpts from my nomination letter (repeated below): I strongly recommend Liang He for the Bob Bandes Memorial Teaching Award. He has TA'd for me twice during the pandemic — both for studio-based courses that traditionally require specialized hardware and equipment. These are not typical CSE courses and are extraordinarily difficult to teach and TA for. Liang has worked tirelessly to adapt our physically-oriented lectures and coursework to online. He helped solder, prepare, and package over 50 hardware kits and worked with CSE staff to deliver them to students. This is a HUGE atypical effort for a CSE TA, especially given the short turnaround time of the quarters. Liang maintains a spirit of positivity and creative encouragement for the students and graciously shares his expertise and time.

I am honored and humbled to receive the 2021 College of Engineering Outstanding Faculty Award. It is truly a recognition of my students for their resilience, adaptability, and mutual support throughout the pandemic, of my spouse who is a wonderful co-parent and provides constant support (including building a teaching studio in our basement), of the UW CSE staff who provide the amazing infrastructure and services to teach our students, and of my Allen School, MHCID, College of Engineering, and UW DUB colleagues (staff and faculty) who all helped get through this unprecedented year. I am grateful to you all.  The Allen School did a nice writeup here.

Congratulations to Manaswi Saha for successfully passing her General Exam on "Designing Interactive Computational Tools for Understanding Urban Accessibility at Scale." Thanks to committee members Bill Howe, Jeff Heer, Bo Zhao, and Anat Caspi. More pictures here.  

Congratulations to Makeability Lab PhD student Dhruv Jain on receiving the Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant for his PhD work on designing and studying sound sensing and feedback techniques for people who are d/Deaf and hard of hearing. I also want to explicitly acknowledge and thank Microsoft and Microsoft Research, more specifically, for running a program to support those "who are underrepresented in the field of computing."

Both of our ASSETS'19 papers were nominated for 'Best Paper' at ASSETS'19:

1. Weld, G., Jang, E., Li, A., Zeng, A., Heimerl, K., Froehlich, J. E. (2019). Deep Learning for Automatically Detecting Sidewalk Accessibility Problems Using Streetscape Imagery. Proceedings of ASSETS 2019.
2. Jain, D., Desjardins, A., Findlater, L., Froehlich, J. E. (2019). Autoethnography of a Hard of Hearing Traveler. Proceedings of ASSETS 2019.

We were honored that both of our papers submitted to ASSETS'19 were accepted for publication:

• Autoethnography of a Hard of Hearing Traveler led by UW CSE PhD student, Dhruv Jain, and co-authored by Jain, Audrey Desjardins (School of Art + Art History + Design), Leah Findlater (HCDE), and Jon Froehlich
• Deep Learning for Automatically Detecting Sidewalk Accessibility Problems Using Streetscape Imagery led by UW CSE PhD students, Galen Weld and Esther Jang, and co-authored by Weld, Jang, Anthony Li (UMD ugrad), Aileen Zeng (UW CSE ugrad), Kurtis Heimerl (UW CSE prof), and Jon Froehlich.