Sam Wolfson

Academics

I graduated with a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Washington in summer 2020.

Teaching

While at UW and for two years after gradauting, I worked as a TA for these courses:

and was the instructor of record for these courses:

I was mentored by Justin Hsia.

Research

Security & Privacy

As a master's student, I worked with Franzi Roesner at the Security and Privacy Research Lab to design a Chrome extension that tracks a study participant's interactions with posts on social media, in an effort to learn more about disinformation and how it spreads.

Separately, as part of a security captone course, my group designed and implemented an end-to-end encrypted chat app called Cryptic. We deployed the finished product on the Internet. Additionally as part of this course another group performed a security review of our application, and we performed one on theirs.

Computer Science Principles

One of my goals when teaching CSE 120 in Winter 2020 was to help students without previous programming experience feel more confident in understanding and talking about computing concepts. To that end, I made substantial changes to the course, incorporating lower-stakes quizzes (as compared to exams) with new question types, and presentation components. I surveyed students about their experiences in the course, compared their grades to past offerings, and wrote an experience report.

Unfortunately, due to COVID, students were unable to present their capstone projects to their peers — which I had intended as a way for them to demonstrate both their learned technical and presentation skills. Working with students who did not originally intend to do computer science, and helping them to improve their technical skills in an approachable manner, is an area that I am interested in working in more.

Computational Biology

As part of a captone course, my group worked on a way to analyze and correct for mapping bias in allele-specific expression when performing RNA sequencing. The bias correction resulted in an increased R-squared value between reference and alternative allele counts on the vast majority of the genes on which we ran it, suggesting a reduction in bias.