Mark Griffith — Amazon employee No. 1,037 and the third hire for what would become Fulfillment by Amazon — is retiring after more than two decades with the Seattle-area tech giant.

Griffith spent most of his career at FBA, which handles shipping, customer service, and returns for third-party businesses. He was director of software engineering for FBA and then for Amazon payments. His final role was director of seller fulfillment services.

Griffith penned a lengthy reflection on Substack in which he shares his career journey, what he learned from working at the company, and pithy personal and professional advice.

“I have given my ALL to Amazon for 8 hours+ a day for a long time – but I’ve never given it everything – that is too dangerous – I don’t live to work – I work to live. I work hard; I try to work empathetically and smart and help others – but I am ready to let others carry on,” Griffith said.

— DigitalOcean named Vinay Kumar as chief product and technology officer of the infrastructure-as-a-service company. Kumar, based in Seattle, was previously with Oracle for more than 11 years, leaving the role of senior vice president of cloud engineering.

Paddy Srinivasan, CEO of DigitalOcean, highlighted Kumar’s experience building cloud and AI platforms at scale, his “tremendous product strategy acumen” and his understanding of the “operational rigor required for mission-critical workloads.”

— Chris Hundley has joined Seattle RFID tech company Impinj as executive VP of enterprise solutions.

“Impinj has built an incredible foundation as the market leader in RAIN RFID, with strong momentum helping businesses wirelessly connect billions of items across use cases including loss prevention, shipment verification, and asset management,” Hundley said on LinkedIn.

Hundley is the founder and former CEO of the marketing automation startup Siftrock, which was acquired by Drift in 2018. He was also chief technology officer and president of AudioEye, which aimed to make digital technology inclusive for people with disabilities.

— Lindsay Bayne is now senior director of advocacy at UiPath, a New York-based company that helps businesses automate repetitive, complex tasks.

Bayne was previously at Microsoft for more than a decade, leaving the role of director of the Growth Innovation and Strategy Team.

“I’m honored to join and partner with this incredibly talented team, advocate for our incredible customers, and help showcase the real-world impact of automation and AI,” Bayne said on LinkedIn.

— Christin Camacho is now head of go-to-market for BuildQ, an AI platform for clean energy development and due diligence. Camacho joins the company following nearly seven years at LevelTen Energy, a Seattle-based clean energy marketplace, where she served as vice president of marketing. She previously worked at Redfin.

“BuildQ’s AI accelerates every stage of development for large wind, solar, and storage projects. Ultimately, that means more clean energy projects get built, faster, and that’s a mission I’ve dedicated my career to,” Camacho said via email.

In her new role, Camacho will work with Maryssa Barron, a former LevelTen colleague and founder and CEO of BuildQ.

— Lowell Bander, founding general manager of Seattle’s 9Zero, is changing roles at the climate tech entrepreneurial hub. Bander is taking the title of ecosystem advisor as the organization looks for a new leader. Bander is also an advisor on Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s transportation and environment transition team.

— Nate Frazier is now community liaison for the Oregon AI Accelerator. The Portland organization aims to coordinate the state’s entrepreneurial groups, investors and universities to foster AI innovation.

— The Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology has named the first cohort for its SeaBridge Fellowship, a research training program. In March, the effort received a $10 million grant from the Washington Research Foundation. The scientists will receive two years of financial support plus funding for career development, mentorship training and networking. They include:

• Changho Chun, a postdoctoral scholar in the University of Washington’s Department of Rehabilitation Medicine who is doing research that could aid in treating ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).
• Ian Linde, a postdoc in the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutch Cancer Center studying the conditions under which gene mutations lead to breast cancer tumors.
• Abigail Nagle, a postdoc in the UW Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology investigating communications between connective tissue and heart muscle tissue.
• Stephanie Sansbury, a postdoc in the UW Department of Biochemistry and Institute for Protein Design researching processes around engineered protein nanoparticles in pursuit of therapeutics.
• Zachary Stevenson, a postdoc in the UW Department of Genome Sciences studying synthetic cellular circuits to broaden the scope of cell programming.
• Julie Trolle, a postdoc in the UW Department of Genome Sciences aiming to engineer cancer-fighting T cells that express multiple genes, thereby improving their ability to kill tumor cells.
• Arata Wakimoto, a postdoc in the UW Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology investigating embryonic development as relates to congenital spine and neural tube disorders.
• Rachel Wellington, a postdoc in Translational Science and Therapeutics Division of Fred Hutch researching cellular recording technologies in the differentiation of stem cells.

Washington Sen. Patty Murray believes the future of artificial intelligence shouldn’t be dictated solely by billionaires and shareholders.

The longtime lawmaker toured research facilities at the University of Washington on Friday after securing $10 million in federal funding that will allow the UW to expand the infrastructure needed for data-intensive AI workloads.

Sen. Murray said the funding will help provide a counterweight to AI development driven primarily by private capital.

“If just billionaires are creating and using AI for their own projects that make money, then we lose out on most of the benefits of AI,” Murray told GeekWire.

Universities play a critical role in ensuring AI advances serve public needs, Murray said, pointing to applications ranging from healthcare and environmental research to workforce training and job creation.

The new funding, which comes through Congressionally Directed Spending in the Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill, will support Tillicum, the UW’s next-generation computing platform that launched in October.

University leaders say the investment will enable faster research cycles and broader access — while reducing reliance on commercial cloud providers.

“This allows us to stay at the cutting edge of AI and AI research,” said Andrew Connolly, director of the eScience Institute.

Unlike private companies that ultimately answer to shareholders, public universities answer to taxpayers, said Magdalena Balazinska, director of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “That means our goal is to do what’s best for society,” she said.

Universities nationwide have struggled to keep pace with the rapid growth of AI computing demands, as private companies dominate access to large-scale infrastructure.

Balazinska called the new funding a “very significant amount,” saying that even relatively modest investments can be transformative in an academic setting. She added that access to computing resources is often the first question prospective faculty ask when considering whether they can be successful at the UW.

Murray on Friday visited the UW’s eScience Institute, a data science and AI research hub for the university, and spoke with students about their work. A recurring theme during the tour was the importance of keeping sensitive data on campus.

Several students demonstrated AI projects that rely on large volumes of personal or scientific data, including a health-focused system that uses voice input and AI analysis to track symptoms and generate summaries for doctors. Researchers said developing such tools on UW-owned infrastructure avoids sending sensitive data to third-party cloud providers. Having in-house compute also allows students and faculty to iterate more quickly.

Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, framed the funding as foundational infrastructure and key to the economy in her home state.

“If you don’t have the computers, if you don’t have the basic infrastructure, you’re stymied,” she said. “So this benefits everybody — whether it’s creating jobs, whether it’s creating better healthcare, whether it’s creating more innovators who come here to Washington state to be able to create jobs for the future and make a better way of life for all of us.”

Murray also helped secure an additional $3 million for new fan blades at the UW’s Kirsten Wind Tunnel, and $1.5 million for improvements to UW’s Radiocarbon Lab. The broader federal spending bill boosts funding for other scientific agencies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, pushing back on proposals from President Trump to sharply cut federal research spending.

— Jon Pollock is now chief product officer of Acumatica, the Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise software giant that was acquired last year by Vista Equity Partners.

Pollock joins Acumatica from childcare management software company Procare Solutions, where he was CPO and general manager of Procare’s ChildPlus division. He previously held leadership roles with Worldpay, Asurion, Dell, Polaroid and others.

“Jon has the experience, vision, and strong track record of leading dynamic teams to execute our product strategy and empower the people who use our software every day,” John Case, CEO of Acumatica, said in a statement.

Case succeeds Ali Jani, who was with the company for 16 years. Early in his career, Jani co-founded a PC manufacturing startup and a company providing software for business management operations.

— Mo Malakoutian is now the mayor of the City of Bellevue. Malakoutian joined the Bellevue City Council in 2023, was elected by his colleagues to serve as deputy mayor beginning in 2024, and was chosen as mayor this month.

Malakoutian previously worked at Amazon for more than eight years, leaving the role of senior manager of learning and development in October. He is currently the executive director of the University of Washington’s Consulting and Business Development Center with the Foster School of Business.

Malakoutian replaces Lynne Robinson, who was mayor since 2020. She remains on the Bellevue City Council.

City councilmember Dave Hamilton was appointed deputy mayor of Bellevue.

— Software engineering leader David Bettis is leaving Amazon after two decades. Bettis was most recently with Amazon Web Services, including roles focused on the company’s telehealth initiative. Earlier in his career, Bettis worked on the company’s Halo product, Amazon Go’s cashierless “Just Walk Out” technology, Kindle and other initiatives.

Bettis said on LinkedIn that he stayed at Amazon for so long because of the opportunity to work on emerging businesses, which provided “new and exciting opportunities, while staying under the same roof.”

More recently he had “explored a couple paths internally, but nothing sparked the same excitement I’d felt in previous roles. That’s when I realized it was time for a bigger change.”

The engineer added that he’ll spend most of this year deciding what full-time role comes next — maybe a smaller company, teaching, something entrepreneurial — and that he’ll be staying in Seattle.

— In another Amazon departure, Steven Hatch has resigned from his role as head of engineering with AWS Bedrock. Hatch, based in New York City, has been with Amazon for nearly 18 years, working in areas including with Audible, Amazon Prime delivery experience, computer vision and most recently in AI.

Hatch said on LinkedIn that he’s “closing a chapter that changed how I think, lead, and build. I’m proud of my achievements. But the real story was about the people, the learning, and the craft.”

Hatch did not disclose his next move, but said there would be “more soon.”

— Warren McNeel left T-Mobile after more then 25 years with the Bellevue-based telecom juggernaut. McNeel has been in the wireless sector for three decades, and most recently served as T-Mobile’s senior vice president of information technology.

McNeel said on LinkedIn that he wanted to spend time with his family “and begin thinking about the next chapter of my professional journey.”

“I’ve had the privilege of leading some of the best technology and product teams in the industry,” he added. “I couldn’t be more proud of the innovations, technology transformations, and results these teams delivered.”

— Seattle-based Gates Foundation appointed Sri Mulyani  Indrawati to its governing board. Indrawati was Indonesia’s first female minister of finance and the former managing director and chief operating officer of the World Bank.

“She adds fresh perspective for the board as it guides the foundation’s direction over the next 20 years,” said CEO Mark Suzman.

The Gates Foundation announced two additional leadership changes:

• Hari Menon is now president of the organization’s Global Growth and Opportunity Division. Menon has been with the foundation for nearly 20 years.
• Ankur Vora is president of the newly-created Africa and India Offices Division as well as retaining his role as chief strategy officer.

— Reverb, a Seattle-based HR consulting and leadership development firm, is officially expanding into the Colorado market with the hiring of Renee Fischer. Fischer, who resides in Denver, is a business development and human resources consultant.

— Sabah Öney joined the board of directors of Seattle’s Fred Hutch Cancer Center. Öney is the president and CEO of Dispatch Bio, a Bay Area startup that is developing a treatment for solid tumors. He is also a co-founder of the protein design company Vilya.

— Seattle-based Cascadia Capital, an investment bank serving clients globally, promoted Kerri Hagen to managing director within the its Financial Sponsors Group. Hagen has been with the firm for more than three years.

— Seattle software engineering startup FlintLab named Diwakar as its head of engineering. Diwakar, who was previously based in India, joins from the semiconductor company AMD. Past employers include Ericsson, RSA Security and others.

FlintLab launched in 2024 and describes itself as an “AI-powered infrastructure platform as a service” company. Co-founders Krishna Seerapu and Jinesh M.D previously held roles at Amazon and elsewhere.

— Life Science Washington announced four new members of its board of directors:

• Arden Yang, vice president of Innovation at the Allen Institute
• LisaMarie Curda, a partner focused on audit and assurance with Deloitte
• Jie D’Elia, CEO of the bio-pharmaceutical company SystImmune
• Chris Holt, vice president of cell therapy external manufacturing with Bristol Myers Squibb

Astronomers say they’ve found an asteroid that spins faster than other space rocks of its size.

The asteroid, known as 2025 MN45, is nearly half a mile (710 meters) in diameter and makes a full rotation every 1.88 minutes, based on an analysis of data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. “This is now the fastest-spinning asteroid that we know of, larger than 500 meters,” University of Washington astronomer Sarah Greenstreet said today at the American Astronomical Society’s winter meeting in Phoenix.

Greenstreet, who serves as an assistant astronomer at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab and heads the Rubin Observatory’s working group for near-Earth objects and interstellar objects, is the lead author of a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that describes the discovery and its implications. It’s the first peer-reviewed paper based on data from Rubin’s LSST Camera in Chile.

2025 MN45 is one of more than 2,100 solar system objects that were detected during the observatory’s commissioning phase. Over time, the LSST Camera tracked variations in the light reflected by those objects. Greenstreet and her colleagues analyzed those variations to determine the size, distance, composition and rate of rotation for 76 asteroids, all but one of which are in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. (The other asteroid is a near-Earth object.)

The team found 16 “super-fast rotators” spinning at rates ranging between 13 minutes and 2.2 hours per revolution — plus three “ultra-fast rotators,” including 2025 MN45, that make a full revolution in less than five minutes.

Greenstreet said 2025 MN45 appears to consist of solid rock, as opposed to the “rubble pile” material that most asteroids are thought to be made of.

“We also believe that it’s likely a collisionary fragment of a much larger parent body that, early in the solar system’s history, was heated enough that the material internal to it melted and differentiated,” Greenstreet said. She and her colleagues suggest that the primordial collision blasted 2025 MN45 from the dense core of the parent body and sent it whirling into space.

Astronomers have previously detected fast-spinning asteroids that measure less than 500 meters wide, but this is the first time larger objects have been found with rotational rates that are faster than five minutes per revolution. The Rubin team’s other two ultra-fast rotators have rates of 1.9 minutes and 3.8 minutes.

What would it be like to take a spin on 2025 MN45? Imagine riding on a Ferris wheel — say, the Seattle Great Wheel, which typically makes three revolutions in 10 to 12 minutes. Now make the wheel more than 10 times taller, and make the rotation rate at least twice as fast. It’d feel as if you were going more than 40 mph.

“If you were standing on it, it would probably be quite the ride to be going around on the outside edge of this thing that’s the size of eight football fields,” Greenstreet said.

But the significance of the study goes beyond imagining an extraterrestrial amusement ride.

“This is only the beginning of science for the Rubin Observatory,” Greenstreet said. “We are already seeing that we can study smaller asteroids at farther distances than we’ve ever been able to study before. And being able to study these fast rotators further, we’re going to learn a lot of really crucial information about the internal strength, composition and collisional histories of these primitive solar system bodies that date back to the formation of the solar system.”

---

The study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, “Lightcurves, Rotation Periods, and Colors for Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s First Asteroid Discoveries,” lists 71 co-authors. Authors from the University of Washington include Greenstreet as well as Zhuofu (Chester) Li, Dmitrii E. Vavilov, Devanshi Singh, Mario Jurić, Željko Ivezić, Joachim Moeyens, Eric C. Bellm, Jacob A. Kurlander, Maria T. Patterson, Nima Sedaghat, Krzysztof Suberlak and Ian S. Sullivan.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The University of Washington was one of the founding members of the consortium behind the project, which benefited from early contributions by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and software executive Charles Simonyi. The observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope was named in honor of Simonyi’s family.

New research tied to the University of Washington School of Medicine adds to mounting concerns among educators about smartphone use in schools.

U.S. adolescents between the ages of 13–18 spend more than one hour per day on phones during school hours, with “addictive” social media apps accounting for the largest share of use, according to new research published in JAMA.

The findings add to the ongoing argument made by teachers, parents and policymakers that has led schools and districts around the country, including some in Seattle, to ban phones during school hours. 

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study tracked 640 teens whose parents consented to passive monitoring software on their Android smartphones from September 2022 to May 2024, according to UW Medicine.

• Adolescents spent an average of 1.16 hours per day on smartphones during school hours.
• Social media apps Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat accounted for most use, followed by YouTube and games.
• Older adolescents (16–18) and teens from lower-income households reported higher smartphone use than their peers.

“These apps are designed to be addictive,” said Dr. Dimitri Christakis, the paper’s senior author. “They deprive students of the opportunity to be fully engaged in class and to hone their social skills with classmates and teachers.”

Christakis is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and practices at Seattle Children’s Hospital. 

Based on a national sample of students, the results build on findings published last year in JAMA Pediatrics. That study had fewer participants but also included iPhone users.

At least 32 states and the District of Columbia require school districts to ban or restrict students’ use of cell phones in schools. The effect of those policies “remains to be seen,” Christakis said.  

“To date they’ve been very poorly enforced, if at all. I think the U.S. has to recognize the generational implications of depriving children of opportunities to learn in school,” he added.

A majority of school districts in Washington state planned to have policies in place at the start of the school year last fall to limit students’ use of cellphones and other devices such as smart watches.

Seattle Public Schools has not issued a district-wide policy, though at least three public middle schools in the district have banned phones at school, and at least one high school prohibits their use during classes.

The UW’s Youth Advisory Board, a group of approximately 20 teens from Seattle-area schools, recently published its first memo tackling the contentious issue of phones in school. The memo weighs the pros and cons of phone bans and offers recommendations on how schools should draft and communicate their policies. 

Related:

• The kids have spoken: Teens’ holistic approach to school phone policies rivals adult rules
• The right call? A year after school’s phone ban, educators and parents love it, but kids aren’t so sure

Founders in the Seattle area are busy building software for health insurance, AI model tuning, construction processes, and hospital operations.

Our latest Startup Radar spotlights four early stage tech startups in the region: Amera, Clara, Oiyko, and Specbook AI.

Read on for brief descriptions of each company — along with pitch assessments from “Mean VC,” a GPT-powered critic offering a mix of encouragement and constructive criticism.

Check out past Startup Radar posts here, and email me at taylor@geekwire.com to flag other companies and startup news.

Amera

Founded: 2025

The business: Targeting health insurance payers with software that automates the claims processing workflow. Its product converts medical claim documents into structured data, replacing manual entry and supporting newer payment models. Amera is generating revenue, working with multiple plan administrators, and participating in the Fall 2025 cohort at Y Combinator.

Leadership: CEO Deep Kapur previously worked at Microsoft, Protocol Labs, and most recently Rupa Health. Co-founder Louise Tanski was also at Rupa Health and co-founded QueryStax (acquired by Moonshot Brands).

Mean VC: “You’re solving a real pain point in healthcare admin, and early revenue plus YC traction suggest you’re on the right track. The key will be proving your structured data actually drives measurable cost or accuracy improvements — not just faster paperwork.”

Clara

Founded: 2022

The business: A self-described “AI-powered operating room orchestration” platform for hospitals. Clara aims to be like Apple’s “Find My” app, but for patient care, helping hospital staff quickly locate equipment and people. The company has raised around $375,000 and is working with a lab at the University of Washington on a non-clinical pilot. 

Leadership: CEO Melinda Yormick has more than a decade of operating room experience as a registered nurse and nurse manager. She was named a 2025 “Up and Comer” at the PSBJ Healthcare Leadership Awards. Co-founder Aaron Cooke was previously a senior software engineer at Viome and Julep.

Mean VC: “The problem is clear to anyone who’s worked in a hospital, and your background gives you credibility where it counts. But unless you can tie this to patient outcomes or hard ROI, hospital budgets may treat it as a luxury.”

Oikyo

Founded: 2025

The business: Helps companies fine-tune AI models using their own data, enabling employees to add business-specific context. The company is participating in WTIA’s startup accelerator. 

Leadership: Co-founders Saptak Sen and Suchi Mohan first met at Microsoft in India in 2001. Sen, the CEO at Oiyko, was most recently a vice president at Tetrate and head of container integrations at AWS. Mohan was a senior technical program manager at Microsoft for more than four years.

Mean VC: “Fine-tuning with business context is a sharp idea, especially as enterprises grow wary of generic AI outputs. Still, you’ll need to show how you differ from the wave of enterprise LLM tooling coming from giants and better-funded peers.”

Specbook AI

Founded: 2025

The business: Builds AI agents for industrial and civic projects that can quickly analyze data and perform tasks such as design reviews and reviewing construction submittals. Specbook AI is working with large construction companies and municipalities. Contracted revenue is in the six figures. 

Leadership: Co-founders Gordon Hempton and Wes Hather co-founded Outreach, the Seattle-based sales software company. More recently they launched two startups: B2B sales software company FullContext and virtual work platform Spot.

Mean VC: “Digitizing construction reviews and civic workflows is overdue, and six-figure contracts suggest you’re solving a real pain. To scale, you’ll need to prove your product can handle diverse requirements without slipping into custom consulting.”

A divided three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the University of Washington violated a computer science professor’s First Amendment rights when it investigated and reprimanded him for posting a parody land acknowledgment in a syllabus.

The professor, Stuart Reges, has taught at UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering since 2004. In January 2022, he included his own land acknowledgment in a syllabus for an introductory programming course, pushing back against the school’s recommendation that faculty include a statement recognizing Coast Salish peoples.

His version invoked philosopher John Locke’s labor theory of property to argue the opposite point — that indigenous peoples could claim “almost none” of the land occupied by UW.

The statement sparked student complaints, a public apology from the Allen School, a disciplinary investigation lasting more than a year, and a separate section of the course taught by another instructor. 

Reges was ultimately not formally sanctioned, but was warned that repeating the statement could lead to discipline — a threat the court said itself violated the First Amendment.

Represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Reges sued the UW in 2022. A district court sided with UW, but the Ninth Circuit reversed that decision last Friday, Dec. 19.

Writing for the majority, Judge Daniel Bress said student discomfort cannot justify retaliation against a professor’s speech on matters of public concern. 

Judge Sidney Thomas dissented, arguing that the disruption that Reges’ statement caused to Native students’ learning outweighed his First Amendment speech interests.

Potential next steps for the University of Washington could include asking for a rehearing from the full Ninth Circuit or an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. If the university does neither, the case returns to district court to determine remedies.

The UW said in a statement that it is weighing its options. “We maintain that we have a responsibility to protect our students and that the UW acted appropriately,” the UW statement said.

What happens if you let teens craft the rules that dictate their use of phones at school? You get policy ideas with a nuanced, holistic perspective that rival those being officially issued by the adults in leadership.

The University of Washington’s Youth Advisory Board, a group of approximately 20 teens from Seattle-area schools, recently published its first memo tackling this contentious issue. The memo weighs the pros and cons of phone bans and offers recommendations on how schools should draft and communicate their policies.

“The whole point of the memo was to bring teen experiences into real policy conversations,” said Jaden Hong, a sophomore at Eastlake High School and board participant. “I think it matters that our ideas get into the hands of the principals, district leaders and even state-level decision makers or legislators who are actively shaping phone and tech rules.”

The Youth Advisory Board’s memo was informed by a UW study and questionnaires on the impacts of phone rules at middle and high schools in Washington. The regulations ranged from all-day bans to restrictions during lunch and passing periods. The board’s key suggestions for high school policies include:

• Compromise: Preferred policies allow phone use during breaks between classes and lunch, but not during academic time, as opposed to all-day bans.
• Reframing: Use neutral language around the policy, avoiding polarizing terms like “ban” or “phone free.”
• Inclusion/communication: Input is needed from students, parents and teachers, and should include polls and classroom discussions to get buy-in. Clearly communicate the policies.
• Consistency: Make the rules school-wide and don’t vary them by teacher or class.
• Diverse needs: Students with responsibilities outside of school (like some jobs) or with medical needs require leniency.
• Social engagement: Educators need to foster social engagement during class lessons as well as structured social activities outside of academics.
• Digital wellness: Beyond tech literacy, teens welcome classes on digital wellness and the healthy use of devices.

What the research showed

Lucía Magis-Weinberg, a developmental psychologist and head of the International Adolescent Connection and Technology Laboratory at the UW, conducted the surveys that helped inform the students’ opinions. Roughly 4,400 students, teachers and parents responded to the initial inquiry.

In the answers to questionnaires, teachers emphasized that with limited phone access, there are fewer distractions in the classroom, more social engagement and less bullying. Teens said the restrictions reduced the amount of cheating.

On the downside, teens and parents were concerned that communications were more difficult, such as friends making plans, scheduling with family, or in the case of an emergency. Teens and teachers noted that phones had positive instructional uses and could aid students with specific academic or language challenges.

“As a student, sometimes it’s hard to look outside of yourself,” said Abbie Huang, a board participant who also attends Eastlake. She said that reading teachers’ comments on student engagement and realizing that a lot of students are OK with phone restrictions broadened her opinion.

“It was really cool to see other schools and the way they approached it, and just other people’s perspectives that I didn’t think about before,” she added.

Current policy landscape

The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction allows local districts to set their own phone policies. The office reported that 75% of the state’s districts were implementing restrictions — either banning phones during class time or throughout the school day.

Oregon, by contrast, took a statewide approach, prohibiting phone use during school hours in the state’s K-12 public schools.

Seattle Public Schools has not issued a district-wide policy, though at least three public middle schools in the district have banned phones at school, and at least one high school prohibits their use during classes.

UW researchers shared the Youth Advisory Board’s memo at last week’s Washington Educational Research Association conference in Tacoma.

Broader tech concerns: AI and social media

Board participants agreed that student input is equally crucial for other pressing tech issues, including rising teen use of artificial intelligence and chatbots, as well as ongoing concerns about social media’s impact on young people.

“I really want to highlight how important it is to get the youth voice in there,” said Rotem Landesman, a UW graduate student in the Information School helping lead the Youth Advisory Board. Teens need to be represented in drafting policies and guidelines, she added, as tech is being integrated into schools “at such a rapid pace.”

Recent data from the Pew Research Center highlights the challenge:

• Some 64% of U.S. teens report having used an AI chatbot, and 31% do so daily.
• The vast majority of teens are engaging with social media, with 92% using YouTube and 68% on TikTok.

For both AI and social media, experts worry about mental health harms, misinformation, privacy and other concerns — while regulating the technology’s use remains difficult.

Sirjana Kaur, a senior at Redmond High School and board participant, said that her AP literature course forbids the use of AI due to concerns about cheating, requiring students to do all of their writing longhand and in class. The year-end AP test, which potentially provides students with college credits, will be done on a computer.

“There’s definitely a lot of work” to be done around AI regulations, she said. “I think there’s a balance that needs to be struck between avoiding AI, but also not making things even harder for students.”

Don’t take your eyes off the road to read new research from the University of Washington.

In partnership with Toyota Research Institute, UW researchers are exploring how modern touch screens in cars affect driving now that dashboard knobs and buttons are increasingly a thing of the past. The results could help auto manufacturers design safer, more responsive screens and in-car interfaces.

The team’s study, which was presented this fall at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Busan, Korea, adds to what we already know about the dangers of distracted driving when it comes to phone use.

Participants driving a vehicle simulator and interacting with a touch screen (see video above) were given memory tests that mimic the mental effort demanded by traffic conditions and other distractions, the UW reported. Sensors tracked their gaze, finger movements, pupil diameter and electrodermal activity.

While driving, participants had to touch specific targets on a 12-inch touch screen, similar to how they would interact with apps and widgets. They did this while completing three levels of an “N-back task,” a memory test in which the participants hear a series of numbers, 2.5 seconds apart, and have to repeat specific digits. 

Researchers found that when people try to multitask behind the wheel, their driving and their ability to use a touch screen both suffer. The simulator car drifted in its lane, and speed and accuracy using the screen declined while driving.

“Touch screens are widespread today in automobile dashboards, so it is vital to understand how interacting with touch screens affects drivers and driving,” said co-senior author Jacob O. Wobbrock, a UW professor in the Information School. “Our research is some of the first that scientifically examines this issue, suggesting ways for making these interfaces safer and more effective.”

Popular Mechanics wrote about the mental bandwidth and finger precision that many modern infotainment screens require in cars.

Based on the UW/Toyota findings, researchers suggest future in-car touch screen systems might use simple sensors in the car — eye tracking, or touch sensors on the steering wheel — to monitor drivers’ attention and cognitive load. Based on these readings, the car’s system might adjust the touch screen’s interface to make important controls more prominent and safer to access.

Pacific Northwest tech and cancer researchers are publicly releasing an AI tool that can perform sophisticated tumor analysis in a fraction of the time and cost of existing methods, potentially making cutting-edge cancer insights available to far more patients.

The GigaTIME model uses artificial intelligence to virtually generate detailed immune system data from standard pathology slides — analysis that would normally require days of lab work and thousands of dollars per sample.

The breakthrough could accelerate the shift toward precision medicine, where treatments are tailored to each patient’s specific cancer biology, said Hoifung Poon, general manager of Microsoft Research’s Real-World Evidence program.

Traditional pathology slides show tumor and immune cells but offer limited insights into whether a patient’s immune system is actively fighting cancer. A more sophisticated technique called multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) analysis peers closely into the tumor’s microenvironment, adding information about whether immune cells are working based on which proteins are present.

But mIF analysis “just for one sample, could easily take days and cost thousands of dollars,” Poon said, severely limiting its use in routine care.

GigaTIME bypasses that bottleneck by generating the information virtually by simply analyzing standard pathology slides.

“GigaTIME is about unlocking insights that were previously out of reach,” said Dr. Carlo Bifulco, chief medical officer of Providence Genomics and a medical director at the Providence Cancer Institute.

The project brings together researchers from Microsoft; Providence facilities in Renton, Wash., and Portland; and the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. They’re publishing a peer-reviewed study today in the journal Cell and releasing the tool online for free on Hugging Face, GitHub and Microsoft Foundry.

Last year the three institutions released GigaPath, a model for diagnosing cancer.

The initiatives are part of the Seattle-area’s growing efforts to integrate complex health datasets using AI to facilitate advances in medicine. The Allen Institute last month released the Brain Knowledge Platform for neuroscience research, while biotech startup Synthesize Bio has built tools for designing experiments and predicting their outcomes using publicly available data. And the Fred Hutch Cancer Center helped produce a privacy-protecting, data-sharing model through the Cancer AI Alliance.

The scale of the GigaTIME project is giant:

• Researchers trained the model on a Providence dataset of 40 million cells, pairing pathology slides with mIF data examining 21 different proteins.
• They applied GigaTIME to samples from 14,256 cancer patients across 51 hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics in the Providence system.
• The work produced a virtual population of approximately 300,000 mIF images that cover 24 cancer types and 306 cancer subtypes.

Poon has even bigger ambitions that include blending together data gleaned from cell and biopsy samples plus CT radiology reports, MRIs and other diagnostics to create a more holistic picture of a patient. These advanced models could potentially offer predictions about how a disease might progress or respond to treatment.

The new tools could one day help curb the massive costs and time associated with clinical trials by providing better insights for selecting drug candidates and designing studies.

The goal is making advanced cancer care both more effective and more widely accessible.

“I’m personally biased, but I think there can’t be a more exciting time than right now,” Poon said, pointing to the convergence of AI capabilities and digital medical records as “two really powerful forces.”

Authors of the paper “Multimodal AI generates virtual population for tumor microenvironment modeling” are Jeya Maria Jose Valanarasu, Hanwen Xu, Naoto Usuyama, Chanwoo Kim, Cliff Wong, Peniel Argaw, Racheli Ben Shimol, Angela Crabtree, Kevin Matlock, Alexandra Q. Bartlett, Jaspreet Bagga, Yu Gu, Sheng Zhang, Tristan Naumann, Bernard A. Fox, Bill Wright, Ari Robicsek, Brian Piening, Carlo Bifulco, Sheng Wang and Hoifung Poon.

Is an interstellar spacecraft zooming through our solar system? That’s the big question for fans of unidentified flying objects — and for a researcher at the University of Washington who analyzed the speculation over the interstellar comet known as 3I/ATLAS.

Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the UW Center for an Informed Public, focused on 3I/ATLAS to track how social-media influencers use over-the-top speculation to fill in information gaps.

“I’ve written previously on how expert opinions can fuel conspiracy theorizing through elite-driven rumoring and amplification,” Bayar explained in an email to GeekWire. “My academic interest in philosophy, epistemology and the politics of conspiracy theories, plus a personal interest in space-related conspiracy theories, led me to look more closely at 3I/ATLAS.”

His analysis, published this week, is titled “Alien of the Gaps: How 3I/ATLAS Was Turned into a Spaceship Online.” The title takes inspiration from a concept known as “God of the Gaps,” which traces how thinkers through the ages explained phenomena they couldn’t fully understand by appealing to the influence of higher powers.

In ancient Greece, those higher powers might have been the gods on Mount Olympus. Bayar argues that a similar process exists today: “Where natural explanations feel incomplete, we substitute a different higher agency, not Zeus this time, but extraterrestrials,” he writes.

Such questions came into the spotlight when 3I/ATLAS was spotted in July. The object’s trajectory suggested that it was only the third known celestial interloper coming into the solar system from far beyond. Even after astronomers built up evidence to classify it as a comet, 3I/ATLAS exhibited enough anomalous behavior to sustain speculation about alien technology.

Exactly how was that speculation sustained? A key figure is Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Years before 3I/ATLAS was found, Loeb and a colleague raised the possibility that a previously sighted interstellar object known as ‘Oumuamua “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”

Loeb hit upon the alien-technology theme repeatedly in follow-up research papers and a book published in 2023. This year’s discovery of 3I/ATLAS gave a fresh boost to his speculative musings. To track how such musings influenced online discussions about 3I/ATLAS, Bayar used a media analytics platform called Brandwatch to analyze roughly 700,000 posts about the comet that were published on the X social-media channel between July 1 and Nov. 21.

“Almost 280,000 of the 700,000 posts invoke aliens or ET technology — about 40% of the 3I/ATLAS conversation on X,” Bayar writes. About 130,000 posts reference Loeb by name or by his status as a Harvard scientist. More than 82,000 posts explicitly pair his name with the alien-technology hypothesis.

“To be fair, at times, Avi Loeb states that 3I/ATLAS is most likely a natural interstellar comet,” Bayar says. “But he then spends far more time walking through its supposed ‘anomalies’ and entertaining the alien-technology hypothesis. For most audiences, the volume and emphasis of that speculation effectively buries the initial caveat and recenters the story around the alien frame rather than the natural-comet explanation.”

All that feeds into a broader online ecosystem that Bayar calls the “mystery economy.”

“Our information systems reward the production of mystery and speculation,” he writes. “That reward is amplified by a ready-made ecosystem of websites, content creators across platforms who produce, spread and amplify speculative takes. Those creators need a steady supply of ‘new’ material, and Loeb’s ever-growing list of anomalies, even when indirectly refuted by organizations like NASA, feeds that need for sustained mystery and endlessly recyclable content.”

In case you’re curious about the anomalies, Penn State astronomer Jason Wright, who focuses on studies of extrasolar planets and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, ticks through Loeb’s list (and offers explanations that don’t involve aliens) in a blog post that was published last month.

But the point behind Bayar’s research has more to do with social-media dynamics than with planetary science. The insights gained from studying the “Alien of the Gaps” could well be applied to other spheres of conspiratorial theorizing, ranging from vaccine denialism to the search for a Jan. 6 pipe-bomb suspect.

Bayar had to limit his statistical analysis to posts about 3I/ATLAS on X, but he saw signs that information was flowing between different online platforms. “One of the most frequently appearing terms in the 3I/ATLAS conversation on X is ‘@YouTube,’ suggesting that many X accounts are reacting to or sharing YouTube videos,” he told GeekWire.

“Because of data-access constraints, we can’t confidently identify a single ‘nexus’ of spread,” Bayar said. “What we can say is that the conversation on X is both widely distributed and largely contained within alien-adjacent communities: Total volume is still under a million posts, which suggests it hasn’t broken out into a truly mass-viral story beyond the UFO/UAP crowd.”

That could change, however. 3I/ATLAS is due to make its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 19, which means there’ll be further opportunities for astronomical imagery — and for speculative online buzz.

Thanks to Julien De Winter for permission to republish a Nov. 25 image of 3I/ATLAS that was captured by Victor Sabet and De Winter using a Starfront Observatories telescope in Texas.

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