Faculty

MIKE TEODORESCU Going wherever his curiosity leads

By Jim Davis

Inventors who are women received just 13% of all patents awarded in 2019 in the U.S., a disparity seen around the world.

What can be done about it? Mike Teodorescu asked that very question. Most inventors on their first try at a patent receive a rejection letter filled with legal jargon. Many abandon their attempt at that point.

Teodorescu and his colleagues found that inventors who receive a simple phone call explaining their options have vastly better chances of successfully obtaining a patent. For women, the odds increase by 29%.

Teodorescu isn’t a patent attorney. He’s a researcher whose sense of curiosity has led him to study a wide number of topics, from space stations to medical equipment to informing public policy on the patent process.

This fall, Teodorescu brings this inquisitiveness to the Information School as an assistant professor.

Generally, academics study one subject intensely. But Teodorescu found the iSchool to be open-minded about “studying things that you’re passionate about.”

Teodorescu will start by teaching two data-science courses for the iSchool’s Master of Science in Information Management program. He’ll also recruit Ph.D. students for 2023-24 to assist with his current research areas — machine-learning fairness, innovation economics and biomedical engineering.

Teodorescu has a strong technical knowledge and breadth of understanding bolstered by his interests, said Dan Frey, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology mechanical engineering professor. They collaborated on a medical startup, and later, on a U.S. Agency for International Development-supported project studying fairness of machine-learning implementations in emerging economies.

“When he talks about a subject, he doesn’t just stick to the script,” Frey said. “He can go off and tell a story about some engagement that he had and he never would’ve had those experiences if it weren’t for his natural curiosity. It’s really made him a stronger teacher.”

Teodorescu grew up in Iași, a university-filled city in Romania founded in the 14th century. In high school, he placed three times, including two grand prizes, in 2003, 2004 and 2005 in the worldwide National Space Society Space Settlement Contest sponsored by NASA.

Two of the years, Teodorescu traveled to NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. Those visits led him to decide to go to college in America. In 2007, he started his undergraduate career at Harvard, majoring in computer science after taking CS 50, one of the university’s most popular classes.

As an undergraduate, Teodorescu interned at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. After graduating in 2011, Teodorescu

SANDY LITTLETREE Exploring the story of tribal libraries

By Jessi Loerch

Libraries are a vital part of Indigenous communities, but there’s very little academic research that focuses on those libraries. Sandy Littletree is working to change that.

“A lot of people, when you say ‘libraries,’ get warm, fuzzy feelings about books and story time, and that’s great,” said Littletree, who was recently hired as an assistant professor at the Information School. “But there are really complex issues of information access for Native communities.”

In her new role, Littletree is excited to have more time to dig deep into her research, which focuses on Indigenous systems of knowledge and how they intersect with library and information science. Before being hired for the tenure-track position, Littletree was a teaching professor at the iSchool, where she also earned her Ph.D.

Tribal libraries are a relatively recent development, and they have not been well researched. Littletree wants to help remedy that.

“There is so much complexity to these issues that don’t often get the opportunity to be investigated or highlighted,” she said.

Littletree, an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation (Diné) from her father’s side and Eastern Shoshone from her mother’s side, says it’s important to have researchers working to understand that complexity. Native communities face a variety of issues, including a history of colonization and boarding schools that attempted to take away their knowledge and culture. Each community and sovereign tribal nation will deal with its information needs in a different way, and researchers like Littletree need to understand that complexity.

For her dissertation, Littletree studied the history of tribal libraries, looking to understand how those institutions came to be. She didn’t grow up with a tribal library in her community, and she wanted to understand more about their development and their important role. Those libraries have helped preserve and share Indigenous knowledge, as well as offering a place for gathering and cultural and language renewal. She’s continued doing research in that area since.

Among Littletree’s current research is a Mellon Foundation-supported project called “Centering Washington Tribal Libraries: Building Relationships and Understanding Libraries from the Stories of their Communities.” Along with Cindy Aden, iSchool professor of practice, Littletree is working to build relationships and understanding of what is happening at tribal libraries around the state.

Littletree is also working on a second Mellon Foundation-supported project, “Data Services for Indigenous Scholarship and Sovereignty.” Indigenous data has a history of bad management from non-Natives. This project is working to help overcome that by creating a framework that will ensure Indigenous

LIBRARIES, continued on Page 43

LUCY WANG

Harnessing technology for better health care

By Mary Lynn Lyke

Scientific papers can be daunting, with convoluted findings, baffling jargon and key takeaways buried in a blur of details. Lucy Lu Wang uses artificial intelligence (AI) to make these documents more accessible and usable. “I’m trying to find better ways of surfacing relevant information and making it discoverable,” says Wang, who joined the iSchool faculty as an assistant professor this fall.

Wang comes to the iSchool from Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), where she has worked several years as a postdoctoral young investigator. At AI2, she helped develop methods to extract useful information from scientific documents using data science techniques and natural language processing — the branch of AI that enables computers to process human language, rapidly summarizing large volumes of text.

Most of her work focuses on biomedical research, where new findings are constantly discovered and published. Those publications can be challenging for people seeking cutting-edge medical information. “We’re trying to help health-care consumers make better and more data-driven health-care decisions,” says Wang, who has a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master’s in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in biomedical informatics and medical education from the University of Washington.

To help readers decipher medical research literature, Wang and her AI2 team created an experimental prototype called Paper Plain, an interactive interface with automated supports for users. Those supports include reading guides, definitions of unfamiliar terms, plain language summaries and key questions that guide health-care consumers, clinicians, clinical researchers and others to the answers they seek.

Wang also helped develop a search system called SUPP.AI that looks at almost 60,000 interactions between medications and the dietary and nutritional supplements many people routinely take. SUPP.AI was an idea of Wang’s that was quickly prototyped during the AI2 annual hackathon, she says. It now serves more than 25,000 people a month.

“The goal of both Paper Plain and SUPP.AI is not to replace the clinician-patient relationship; it’s to augment that relationship with more information to help people have better conversations with medical providers, help them ask better questions, and maybe feel like they have a way to get informed.”

Wang and her AI2 team were quick to respond when COVID-19 broke out in 2020, setting off a deluge of new scientific documents on the pandemic. In a narrow window of time, they helped other researchers create a text-mining database to dig up nuggets of relevant

information for those trying to keep up. “New results were emerging every day and a lot of them were not vetted or peer-reviewed,” says Wang. “We needed a way to distribute these results quickly to data scientists and computing researchers so they could make them accessible to policymakers and other audiences.”

As the flood of COVID findings continues — several hundred new papers are published every day — the database evolves. “We continued to release an iteration of the text-mining dataset weekly, sometimes daily, over the past two-plus years,” says Wang.

Wang is part of AI2’s Semantic Scholar team. Semantic Scholar is an AI-powered tool that searches more than 200 million academic research papers. Daniel Weld, chief scientist and general manager of the team, describes Wang as a new leader in health informatics.

“It has been tremendously exciting to watch Lucy’s trajectory at AI2, from intern and hackathon star to Young Investigator and now assistant professor at UW — I can’t wait to see what she does next,” says Weld, professor emeritus at the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.

Wang was born in China and spent much of her life on the East Coast. Seattle is her first West Coast city, and settling in here suits the young adventurer, who cycles and hikes when she’s not cooking or making her specialty sourdough bread with hand-milled rye berries, a recipe she concocted during the pandemic.

She’s also an avid mountain climber. Wang has already summited Mount Rainier, Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens. They’re just starters. “I would love to climb Mount Baker and Glacier Peak and other Cascade volcanoes at some point over the next couple of years,” she says. “Now I will have the opportunity to do that.”

She is excited about her move to the iSchool, where she’ll be teaching a course in data models and continuing her AI research. “The iSchool is a unique, highly interdisciplinary place with a long history of really impactful research,” she says. “I’m looking forward to sharing an environment with colleagues from whom I can draw new ideas to apply to the problems I’m interested in.”

Calo, King, Zaretzky move into new roles

Three faculty members familiar to the iSchool community are taking on new roles this academic year . Ryan Calo, the Lane Powell and D . Wayne Gittinger Professor in the School of Law, now holds a joint appointment in the Information School . He is a founding co-director of the interdisciplinary UW Tech Policy Lab and the UW Center for an Informed Public . A well-known law and technology scholar, Calo has testified before the German Parliament, the California Little Hoover Commission, and the full Judiciary and Commerce Committees of the United States Senate . He has organized events on behalf of the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Obama White House, and spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival and NPR’s Weekend in Washington . Calo serves as an advisor to a wide range of organizations — including the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation — and is a board member of the R Street Institute . Also taking new roles at the iSchool are Wes Eli King and Jeremy Zaretzky . Both joined the full-time faculty as assistant teaching professors . King has been at the UW since 2013, both as a graduate student and an instructor, and brings more than 20 years of technical writing and technical training experience to the classroom . King is passionate about teaching

and offers a critical informatics lens for students to adopt as they develop their career goals and imagine the future of information . As an activist-researcher, King locates their research at the intersection of technology, religion and gender . King holds a Ph .D . in Information Science and a master’s in International Studies: Comparative Ryan Calo Religion from the University of Washington . They also hold a master’s in Ministry Leadership from the Portland Seminary and a bachelor’s in Organizational and Interpersonal Communication with a concentration in Psychology and Computer Science from The Ohio State University . Zaretzky’s courses span UX and design, product management, information architecture and software development, leveraging more than 20 years of industry experience to connect learning objectives with real-world scenarios . Zaretzky co-leads the iSchool’s undergraduate Capstone program and serves as a faculty advisor for DubHacks Next, a student-run startup incubator . He is also a Venture Partner at Loyal VC, which is a global venture capital fund that has invested in more than 250 startups . During his career as a technology entrepreneur, Zaretzky launched new products; built and managed strategic relationships with customers, vendors and channel partners; negotiated complex contracts; and hired and managed teams . He also led several initiatives designed to grow the Seattle startup ecosystem, including serving as managing director of the Founder Institute accelerator program .

Wes Eli King Jeremy Zaretzky