Sewoong Oh Professor, Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington sewoong@cs.washington.edu Bill & Melinda Gates Center, room 207 University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 CV | twitter | github | google scholar

News

• Congratulations to Rui Xin on the 2026 UW/META AI Mentorship Program.

• Congratulations to Gavin Brown who will be starting his tenure track position at University of Wisconsin, Madison, in Fall 2025.

• Check out SuperBPE at the project website, a super-word tokenizer that is more efficient and improves in downstream tasks. Here is the code for SuperBPE tokenizer training and OLMo-2 8B and 11B models trained with SuperBPE.

• Congratulations to Jon Hayase on winning the 2024 ICML Best Paper Award for his work during his Google internship.

• Check out our new DataComp on language models, a benchmark for fostering innovation in data-centric research.

• Congratulations to Eric Frankel (co-advised with Lillian Ratliff) on the 2024 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

• Excited to be a part of the new AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and OperatioN (ACTION) (led by Giovanni Vigna starting 2023) with a great team of colleagues.

• Congratulations to Thao Nguyen on the 2023 UW/META AI Mentorship Program.

• Congratulations to Jonathan Hayase on the 2022 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

• Excited to be a part of the new AI Institute for future edge networks and distributed intelligence (AI-EDGE) (led by Ness Shroff starting October 1st 2021) with a great team of colleagues.

• Congratulations to Xiyang Liu and Mohammad Vahid Jamali on the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2021.

• Excited to be a part of the new NSF AI Institute on Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML) (led by Adam Klivans and Alex Dimakis starting September 1st 2020) with a great team of colleagues at UW, UT Austin, MSR, and Wichita State University. UW news article

• Together with Hyeji Kim and Sreeram Kannan, I had the pleasure of giving a tutorial on ‘‘Information Theory and Deep Learning: an Emerging Interface’’ at ISIT June 2018 at Vail, Colorado. Here are the Slides. Here is a link to a video recording.

• Find out more about PacGAN, our new principled apporach to mitigate mode collapse in training Generative Adversarial Networks. slides and video recording of a talk I gave at Princeton is now available.

About

Sewoong Oh is a Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Previous to joining University of Washington in 2019, he was at the department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 2012. He received his PhD from the department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in 2011. Following his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. Sewoong's research interest is in foundations of machine learning in topics including private, secure, and robust machine learning and data-centric AI. He was co-awarded the ACM SIGMETRICS best paper award in 2015, NSF CAREER award in 2016, ACM SIGMETRICS rising star award in 2017, and GOOGLE Faculty Research Awards in 2017 and 2020.

Group

• Current
  

  • Eric Frankel (co-advised with Lillian Ratliff)
    

  • Anshul Nasery
    

  • Divyansh Pareek (co-advised with Simon Du)
    

  • Rui Xin (co-advised with Pang Wei Koh)
    

  • Sebastin Santy
    

  • Ally Du (co-advised with Banghua Zhu)
    

  • Saket Gollapudi
    

  • Chungpa Lee (visiting student, 2026-2027)
    

• Alumni
  

  • PhD 2026, Jonathan Hayase (to start as an assistant professor at UT Austin)
    

  • PhD 2026, Thao Nguyen (co-advised with Ludwig Schmidt, now at Anthropic)
    

  • PhD 2025, Melih Yilmaz (co-advised with Bill Noble, now at Amazon)
    

  • PhD 2024, Raghav Somani (now at D. E. Shaw)
    

  • PhD 2024, Xiyang Liu (now at Microsoft AI)
    

  • PhD 2022, Kiran Thekumparampil (now at Amazon)
    

  • PhD 2019, Weihao Gao (co-advised with Pramod Viswanath, now at ByteDance)
    

  • PhD 2018, Ashish Khetan (now at Amazon)
    

  • PhD 2016, Peter Kairouz (co-advised with Pramod Viswanath, now at Google)
    

  • PostDoc 2025, Gavin Brown (now assistant professor at University of Wisconsin at Madison)
    

  • PostDoc 2022, Shiyu Liang (now assistant professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
    

  • PostDoc 2019, Jungseul Ok (now associate professor at PosTech)
    

  • PostDoc 2018, Hyeji Kim (co-advised with Pramood Viswanath, now assistant professor at UT Austin)
    

  • BS/MS 2023, Rishi Jha (next position: Cornell PhD program)
    

  • BS 2019, Harshay Shah (next position: MIT PhD program)
    

  • Visiting student 2025-2026, Kyuyoung Kim
    

  • Visiting student 2025, Minhak Song (next position: Stanford PhD program)
    

  • Visiting student 2014-2016, Giulia Fanti (now Angel Jordan Associate professor at CMU)