Bill Howe

Bill Howe is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington's Information School, with adjunct appointments in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering. He serves as Founding Program Director and Faculty Chair of the UW Data Science Masters Degree, Founding Associate Director and Senior Data Science Fellow at the UW eScience Institute, Director of the Urbanalytics Lab, and Co-Founding Director of the Center for Responsible AI Systems and Experiences. He also co-founded Urban@UW and created the first Data Science MOOC through Coursera.

His research focuses on making data science accessible in public sector applications with emphasis on equity, privacy, and compliance. Current interests include:

• Algorithmic fairness in urban and social contexts
• Privacy-preserving synthetic data generation
• Machine learning for heterogeneous data
• Database systems and high-performance computing
• Human-computer interaction for data systems
• Responsible AI development and deployment

Publication analysis reveals strong focus on responsible data science, with recent work emphasizing differential privacy, COVID-19 data equity, urban mobility fairness, and relational data systems. Earlier foundational work established contributions to scientific workflow systems and data pricing models.

Awards and Honors:

• Runner-up Best Paper Award (VLDB 2023)
• Best Paper Award (SIGMOD 2019)
• Best Paper Award (VIs 2019)
• Best Paper Award (InfoVis 2018)

He leads the Urbanalytics Lab and advises multiple students including An Yan (fairness in urban mobility), Sean Yang (machine learning embeddings), and Dominik Moritz (visualization systems). His projects span EZLearn for automatic claim validation, privacy-preserving synthetic data, and Myria middleware for polystores.