Ability Summit 2026: in-person and digital
CREATE Advisory Board member Ed Summers is a featured speaker, joining Jenny Lay-Flurrie and other leaders in accessibility and AI innovation. Note that the online conference is limited to the keynote presentation, a showcase of accessibility products built into Microsoft products and services. Free , In person on the Microsoft Redmond campus - both days , Online - May 19 keynote only, "Engage with disabled experts, accessibility professionals, and technology leaders. Experience product demos and training opportunities that will deepen your knowledge of accessibility across industries.".
Event interval: Ongoing event. Accessibility Contact: EventAccess@microsoft.com. Event Types: Conferences. Diversity Equity Inclusion. Target Audience: All interested in accessibility‑first, AI‑powered innovation to boost education, jobs, productivity.
Tuesday, May 19, 2026 – Wednesday, May 20, 2026.
Microsoft Conference Center, Redmond, WA.
For more info visit abilitysummit.event.microsoft.com. Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: Toward Robust DNA Strand Displacement Circuits through Systematic Multi-Axis Design Optimization
Speaker: Tiernan Kennedy, Advisor: Chris Thachuk, Supervisory Committee: Chris Thachuk (Chair), Eric Klavins (GSR, Electrical and Computer Engineering), Jeffrey Nivala, Georg Seelig (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Paul Yager (Bioengineering), Abstract: Molecular computation using biochemical components offers a path toward streamlining complex pharmaceutical and biotechnological processes. Nucleic acid strand displacement circuits have emerged as a powerful substrate for implementing systems spanning molecular signal transduction, logic, and dynamic chemical reaction networks. Yet despite major advances, practical deployment remains constrained by off-target interactions and other operational failure modes.
This dissertation advances a robustness-by-design framework for molecular computation by addressing four major classes of failure modes through three complementary optimization strategies spanning computational network architecture, sequence-level encoding, and chemical alphabet design. These…
Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM.
Open Source Assistive Technology Hackathon
GitHub will celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) by hosting the Open Source Assistive Technology Hackathon focused on empowering participants to build skills and make real contributions to the assistive technology tools people rely on every day. Free to participate , Sign up, Who Should Attend People with lived experience who want to innovate on assistive technology , Developers with disabilities , Developers with a desire to help improve and customize assistive technologies , Professionals working in the field of special education, rehabilitation engineering, biomedical engineering, and other fields that can benefit from free open source assistive technology , Open source AT maintainers, New to open source? No problem!
We’ll walk through core GitHub contribution workflows (including NVDA and keyboard-only navigation), so you can practice navigating repositories, issues, pull requests, and code reviews with confidence. Whether you’re new to contributing or ready to level up, you’ll leave with…
Event interval: Ongoing event. Accessibility Contact: mlama007@github.com. Event Types: Diversity Equity Inclusion. Meetings. Special Events. Workshops. Target Audience: Innovators in assistive tech, developers w/ disabilities, pros in special ed, rehab, biomed, ...
Thursday, May 21, 2026 – Friday, May 22, 2026.
GitHub headquarters, 88 Colin P Kelly Jr St, San Francisco, CA 94107.
For more info visit www.eventbrite.com. Memorial Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Spring. Event Types: Academics.
Monday, May 25, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. CREATE Accessibility Seminar - Spring 2026
The CREATE Accessibility Seminar, CSE 590w – Accessibility Research, brings students and faculty together to explore a variety of topics relating to accessibility and technology.
In spring, Ph.D. students share their research presentations and facilitate discussion.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering (CSE2). Campus room: 287. Accessibility Contact: gclepper@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Diversity Equity Inclusion. Student Activities. Target Audience: CREATE Ph.D. students and other UW students, faculty, and staff.
Monday, May 25, 2026, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM.
For more info visit create.uw.edu. Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: AI-Assisted Video Data Management for Compositional and High-Level Queries
Speaker: Enhao Zhang, Advisors: Magda Balazinska, Ranjay Krishna, Supervisory Committee: Magda Balazinska (Chair), Ranjay Krishna (Chair), Eric Klavins (GSR, Electrical and Computer Engineering), Brandon Haynes (Microsoft Gray Systems Lab), Dan Suciu, Abstract: Video data is increasingly used in a variety of domains including drone analytics, robotics, urban traffic management, civil engineering, medical education, and biological research. Users of these datasets often need to find complex events in the videos that involve multiple objects, attributes, relationships, and temporal patterns. The rapid advances in artificial intelligence have significantly enhanced video analytics capabilities. As a result, video data management systems have re-emerged as an active area of research. However, existing systems still face three major challenges: users must often possess database expertise to formulate compositional queries that search for complex events in the video data, suitable visual modules that extract…
Tuesday, May 26, 2026, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM.
Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: Rational protein modeling and design with local and rotation-equivariant neural networks
Speaker: Gian Marco Visani, Advisor: Armita Nourmohammad, Supervisory Committee: Armita Nourmohammad (Chair, Physics), Alex Meeske (GSR, Microbiology (Medicine)), David A. C. Beck (Chemical Engineering), Bill Noble (Genome Sciences), Abstract: Proteins carry out their diverse biological roles - from catalysis to immune recognition - by engaging in specific
physical interactions with other molecules.
These interactions are mediated by the protein's three-dimensional structure: the precise spatial arrangement of
atoms at a binding site determines which molecules the protein can interact with, and how strongly.
Predicting how a protein's structure gives rise to specific interactions - and how changes to the protein's amino-acid
sequence alter them - is therefore central to understanding disease mechanisms and designing novel therapeutics.
Physics-based approaches such as Molecular Dynamics and Rosetta provide principled, generalizable models of these
interactions, but remain severely bottlenecked by…
Wednesday, May 27, 2026, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM.
CREATE Community Day
CREATE Community Day is an annual half-day forum for discussing the concerns about and approaches to sustainable accessibility research and a showcase of research led by CREATE and HuskyADAPT. Student researchers highlight their work and showcase a variety of individual and team projects. Directions and Parking , Zoom link to be provided , Accessibility: Building FAQs | Email, Panel topics and speakers are being finalized and will be announced soon.
1:15–2:30 p.m. - Community Day panel discussion #1 (hybrid)
2:45–4:00 p.m. - Community Day panel discussion #2 (hybrid)
4:00–5:00 p.m. - Research Showcase co-hosted with HuskyADAPT (in-person only).
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering (CSE2). Campus room: Zillow Commons. Accessibility Contact: oliviapb@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Diversity Equity Inclusion. Exhibits. Information Sessions. Meetings. Special Events. Target Audience: Anyone interested in research on accessible technology & making the world accessible through tech.
Wednesday, May 27, 2026, 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM.
For more info visit create.uw.edu. CREATE & HuskyADAPT Research Showcase
The closing event for CREATE’s Community Day, this Research Showcase is co-sponsored by HuskyADAPT. Approximately 30 undergraduate and graduate student teams from at least eight majors/programs and all three UW campuses share their projects, covering a wide range of research.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering (CSE2). Campus room: Zillow Commons. Accessibility Contact: oliviapb@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Diversity Equity Inclusion. Exhibits. Special Events. Student Activities. Target Audience: Anyone interested in research on accessible technology and making the world accessible through tech.
Wednesday, May 27, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
For more info visit create.uw.edu. Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: Breaking the language model monolith
Speaker: Weijia Shi, Advisors: Noah Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Supervisory Committee: Noah A Smith (Chair), Luke Zettlemoyer (Chair), Lucy Lu Wang (GSR, Information School), Colin Raffel (University of Toronto), Abstract: Language models (LMs) are typically monolithic: a single model storing all knowledge and serving every use case. This design presents significant challenges; they often generate factually incorrect statements, require costly retraining to add or remove information, and face serious privacy and copyright issues. In this talk, I will discuss how to break this monolith by introducing modular architectures and training algorithms that separate capabilities across composable components. I’ll cover two forms of modularity: (1) External modularity, which augments LMs with external tools like retrievers to improve factuality and reasoning; and (2) internal modularity, which builds inherently modular LMs from decentrally trained components to enable flexible composition and an unprecedented level of…
Thursday, May 28, 2026, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM.
Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: Designing LLM-Powered Systems to Support Social Impact Ideation
Speaker: Rock Pang, Advisor: Katharina Reinecke, Supervisory Committee: Katharina Reinecke (Chair), Benjamin Mako Hill (GSR, Communication - Department of), Jeffrey Heer, Jaime Teevan (Information School), Amy Xian Zhang, Abstract TBA.
Friday, May 29, 2026, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: Fixing the Foundation: Principled Approaches to Data Curation and Scaling
Speaker: Sneha Kudugunta, Advisor: Luke Zettlemoyer, Supervisory Committee: Luke Zettlemoyer (Chair), Lucy Lu Wang (GSR, Information School), Pang Wei Koh, Ranjay Krishna, Abstract: Training models at the scales used today is dependent on (1) curating large-scale datasets and (2) perfecting how we make scaling decisions. The datasets collected for pretraining contain trillions of tokens across different modalities, domains, and languages, often from messy sources such as crawled internet content. This necessitates extensive curation, filtering, and cleaning. Then, practitioners must determine the optimal training setting for their desired compute budget: typically by extrapolating from smaller training runs using scaling laws. Yet these two pillars are often studied separately: modern models are trained on heterogeneous and actively curated datasets like data, but most scaling-law research assumes a fixed data distribution and does not account for how changing dataset composition affects scaling behavior.…
Friday, May 29, 2026, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM.
Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: Mitigating the Impact of Data Movement in Memory-Intensive Applications
Speaker: Aditya Kamath, Advisor: Simon Peter, Supervisory Committee: Simon Peter (Chair), Ang Li (GSR, Electrical and Computer Engineering), Marco Canini (KAUST), Arvind Krishnamurthy, Abstract: Modern memory-intensive workloads move terabytes of data through hierarchies of interconnects whose bandwidth and latencies have failed to scale with compute. The result is that the dominant bottleneck today is no longer a singular memory wall between compute and memory, but layers of connections with distinct performance characteristics. Caches, memory controllers, and inter-device interconnects all have an impact on the performance that applications observe.
To overcome the limitations imposed by different bottleneck layers, we must identify application characteristics that enable mitigation. We identify and characterize mitigations into three categories: we avoid data movement across certain layers by eliding unnecessary copies, we hide data movement by overlapping transfers with complementary work, and we…
Monday, June 1, 2026, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM.
CREATE Accessibility Seminar - Spring 2026
The CREATE Accessibility Seminar, CSE 590w – Accessibility Research, brings students and faculty together to explore a variety of topics relating to accessibility and technology.
In spring, Ph.D. students share their research presentations and facilitate discussion.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering (CSE2). Campus room: 287. Accessibility Contact: gclepper@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Diversity Equity Inclusion. Student Activities. Target Audience: CREATE Ph.D. students and other UW students, faculty, and staff.
Monday, June 1, 2026, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM.
For more info visit create.uw.edu. Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: Measuring Harms and Empowering Users: Case Studies in Online Advertising and Generative AI
Speaker: Tina Yeung, Advisor: Franziska Roesner, Supervisory Committee: Franziska Roesner (Chair), Benjamin Mako Hill (GSR, Communication - Department of), Joseph Calandrino (CMU), Tadayoshi Kohno, Emily Tseng (Human Centered Design and Engineering), Abstract: The internet and generative AI were both promised as democratizing technologies – tools that would empower people to do and create more in their everyday lives. But, these ecosystems share an important flaw: unable to find sustainable monetization models, companies have converged on strategies that leverage users’ data, time, and attention (and more), often at the cost of people's digital safety and well-being. As researchers, one of the hardest things about trying to improve these ecosystems for users is their opacity – many online and generative AI companies engage in behavior that is (intentionally) obfuscated from anyone trying to examine them. I focus on two main threads across my research: uncovering the harms caused by online advertising…
Tuesday, June 2, 2026, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: The Science of Synthetic Data for Language Models: Search, Verification, and Diversity
Speaker: Jaehun Jung, Advisor: Yejin Choi, Supervisory Committee: Yejin Choi (Chair), Aylin Caliskan (GSR, Information School), Zaid Harchaoui (Statistics), Pang Wei Koh, Abstract TBA.
Thursday, June 4, 2026, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM.
Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: Physical and Computational Approaches Towards More Scalable Molecular Systems
Speaker: Ashley Stephenson, Advisors: Luis Ceze, Jeff Nivala, Karin Strauss, Supervisory Committee: Jeffrey Nivala (Chair), Jorge A Marchand (GSR, Chemical Engineering), Luis H Ceze, Sheng Wang, Abstract TBA.
Thursday, June 4, 2026, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM.
Instruction Ends - Spring 2026
Dates of Instruction
Instruction ends.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Spring. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, June 5, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Final Examinations - Spring 2026
Dates of Instruction
Week of final examinations for spring quarter.
Event interval: Ongoing event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Spring. Event Types: Academics.
Saturday, June 6, 2026 – Friday, June 12, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: Interpretable scientific machine learning and governing law discovery
Speaker: Mars Gao, Advisor: Nathan Kutz, Supervisory Committee: Jose Nathan Kutz (Chair, Applied Mathematics), Brad Lipovsky (GSR, Earth and Space Sciences), Matt Golub, Sewoong Oh, Banghua Zhu (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Abstract TBA.
Monday, June 8, 2026, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM.
Information session: Professional Master's in Computer Science
Click here to register for an upcoming session!
The Allen School’s Professional Master’s Program (PMP) is a part-time program designed for software professionals in the Puget Sound region interested in acquiring critical skills to move into positions and projects of greater responsibility and impact. Courses meet one weekday evening per week and are taught in-person on the UW Seattle campus.
Online information sessions are a low-barrier opportunity for prospective students to learn more about the PMP and ask questions directly to program staff. We will share information about PMP courses and learning outcomes and an overview of the application process, including tips for preparing your materials. We hope you will join us!
Event interval: Single day event. Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/s-JzzqWOTAyCx4f1Huaepg. Accessibility Contact: masters@cs.washington.edu. Event Types: Academics. Information Sessions.
Monday, June 8, 2026, 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM.
Zoom.
For more info visit www.cs.washington.edu. Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Talk: Application Defined Networks
Speaker: Xiangfeng Zhu, Advisors: Arvind Krishnamurthy, Ratul Mahajan, Supervisory Committee: Arvind Krishnamurthy (Chair), Ratul Mahajan (Chair), Akshay Gadre (GSR, Electrical and Computer Engineering), Stephanie Wang, Danyang Zhuo (Duke), Abstract TBA.
Tuesday, June 9, 2026, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM.
Quarter Break - Summer 2026
Dates of Instruction
Break between spring and summer quarters.
Event interval: Ongoing event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Summer. Event Types: Academics.
Saturday, June 13, 2026 – Sunday, June 21, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Information Session: Graduate Certificate in Modern AI Methods
The graduate certificate in Modern Artificial Methods is a new program offered by the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. The work-compatible, one-year program is designed to support recent graduates and industry professionals in using, implementing, and understanding in-depth artificial intelligence and machine learning tools and applying them in the workplace. The certificate is designed for those with STEM or business backgrounds, with courses in prominent areas of AI, including computer vision and natural language processing. Classes meet in-person on the University of Washington campus in Seattle.
Modern AI Methods program highlights: Build knowledge and skills in core and emerging areas AI and ML for a rapidly-evolving workplace , Become more than a consumer of these technologies: understand how they work, their advantages, and their limitations , Connect with a cohort of local professionals in STEM while developing marketable skills , Learn from…
Event interval: Single day event. Online Meeting Link: https://www.cs.washington.edu/academics/graduate/certificate-modern-ai/program-overview/information-sessions/. Accessibility Contact: Taylor Kessler Faulkner, cert-modern-ai@cs.washington.edu. Event Types: Academics. Information Sessions.
Monday, June 15, 2026, 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM.
Zoom.
For more info visit www.cs.washington.edu. Juneteenth
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Summer. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, June 19, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Instruction Begins - Summer 2026 - Full and A-term
Dates of Instruction
Instruction begins.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Summer. Event Types: Academics.
Monday, June 22, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Information session: Professional Master's in Computer Science
Click here to register for an upcoming session!
The Allen School’s Professional Master’s Program (PMP) is a part-time program designed for software professionals in the Puget Sound region interested in acquiring critical skills to move into positions and projects of greater responsibility and impact. Courses meet one weekday evening per week and are taught in-person on the UW Seattle campus.
Online information sessions are a low-barrier opportunity for prospective students to learn more about the PMP and ask questions directly to program staff. We will share information about PMP courses and learning outcomes and an overview of the application process, including tips for preparing your materials. We hope you will join us!
Event interval: Single day event. Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/s-JzzqWOTAyCx4f1Huaepg. Accessibility Contact: masters@cs.washington.edu. Event Types: Academics. Information Sessions.
Monday, June 22, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM.
Zoom.
For more info visit www.cs.washington.edu. Information Session: Graduate Certificate in Modern AI Methods
The graduate certificate in Modern Artificial Methods is a new program offered by the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. The work-compatible, one-year program is designed to support recent graduates and industry professionals in using, implementing, and understanding in-depth artificial intelligence and machine learning tools and applying them in the workplace. The certificate is designed for those with STEM or business backgrounds, with courses in prominent areas of AI, including computer vision and natural language processing. Classes meet in-person on the University of Washington campus in Seattle.
Modern AI Methods program highlights: Build knowledge and skills in core and emerging areas AI and ML for a rapidly-evolving workplace , Become more than a consumer of these technologies: understand how they work, their advantages, and their limitations , Connect with a cohort of local professionals in STEM while developing marketable skills , Learn from…
Event interval: Single day event. Online Meeting Link: https://www.cs.washington.edu/academics/graduate/certificate-modern-ai/program-overview/information-sessions/. Accessibility Contact: Taylor Kessler Faulkner, cert-modern-ai@cs.washington.edu. Event Types: Academics. Information Sessions.
Monday, June 29, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM.
Zoom.
For more info visit www.cs.washington.edu. Independence Day (Observed)
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Summer. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, July 3, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Instruction Ends - Summer 2026 - A-term
Dates of Instruction
Instruction ends.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Summer. Event Types: Academics.
Wednesday, July 22, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Instruction Begins - Summer 2026 - B-term
Dates of Instruction
Instruction begins.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Summer. Event Types: Academics.
Thursday, July 23, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu.