Gaetano Borriello

Biosketch Professor Gaetano Borriello holds the Jerre D. Noe Chair of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He joined the Department in 1988 and holds a PhD in CS from the University of California at Berkeley (1988) and an MS in EE from Stanford University (1981). He was a member of the research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1980-87. From 2001-2003, he was on leave from UW to found the Intel Research laboratory in Seattle which quickly became one of the premier research labs for work in ubiquitous computing. Prof. Borriello’s career began in the areas of integrated circuits for networking, automatic synthesis of digital circuits, reconfigurable hardware, and embedded systems development tools. In 1999, he was PI for the Portolano Expedition, a DARPA-sponsored investigation on invisible computing that led to the creation of Labscape, a smart environment to record and assist the work of researchers in cell biology laboratories. In 2001, as director of Intel Research Seattle, he set in motion projects in elder care (sensor-rich homes and wearable devices) to help elders stay in their own homes longer, and in location-aware computing (the PlaceLab project) using Wi-Fi to enhance indoor location sensing that is now the dominant approach in use by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many others. More recently, Prof. Borriello is directing efforts in applying mobile technologies to the problems of public health and development in low-resource settings. His group's open-source mobile data collection tools, Open Data Kit, are in use on six continents in programs ranging across public health, documentation of human rights violations, and environmental monitoring. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, a Fulbright Scholar, and a recipient of the UW Distinguished Teaching award. In his spare time, he collects islands by walking around and/or across them.