
Contact info:
Office: CSE2 240
Location: Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington
Box 352350
Seattle, WA 98195-2350
Phone: (206) 616-6605
email: kheimerl@cs.washington.edu
twitter: @kheimerl
CV: Curriculum Vitae
I'm Kurtis Heimerl, Associate Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. I work with the wonderful students in the Change and ICTD groups. I work broadly on the space of technology for poverty alleviation, specifically Internet Access. I have published widely, including conferences such as COMPASS, CHI, CSCW, MobiCom, PETS, and NSDI. I was a recipient of the 2014 MIT “35 under 35” award, the 2018 UW early career Diamond Award, and won “Best Paper” awards at CHI, COMPASS, PETS, and DySPAN and two "Community Awards" at NSDI. I occasionally publish on the UWCSE ICTD Blog and am a research advisor at Laude. Lastly, I co-chair the Global Alliance for Internet for All at the IETF.
My major research focus is on the topic of improving Internet access, with a focus on cellular technologies. Our goal is to empower communities to solve their own communication issues, be those issues of agency (as in community cellular, enabling local, community-owned cellular networks) or in repair (as in our work exploring repair ecosystems in the Philippines). This research is currently working on making LTE appropriate for community use, specifically in our home region of Puget Sound. In a past life I co-founded a company to commercialize this type of research, called Endaga, which then joined Facebook.
Our second research focus is on issues of environmental sustainability and conservation. We are currently working with a convervancy in Kenya on developing human-centered tools for community engagement.
I advise the following students and postdocs:
- Cynthia Dong (PhD) working on supporting the people of wildlife conservation.
- Esther Jang (PhD to Postdoc) building the Seattle Community Network.
- Emmanuel Azuh Mensah (PhD) on ML in disadvantaged environments, specifically focused on wildlife conservation use cases.
- Innocent Obi (PhD) on Internet measurement in Africa.
- Nussara 'Firn' Tieanklin (PhD) on impacts of air quality on front-line Thai populations.
And have the following alumni from our group:
- Sudheesh Singanamalla (PhD) on distributed telecom and payment systems. Co-advised with Richard Anderson. Now at Apple.
- Matt Ziegler (PhD) on conservation. Now doing a postdoc in Fisheries at UW.
- Matt Johnson (PhD) on distributed LTE. Now at Starlink.
- Pathirat Kosakanchit (masters) on Thai political twitter. Now at Cumulo.
- Kushal Shah (masters) on big data and development. Now at SoFi.
- Nick Durand (masters) on distributed LTE/5G. Now founder at OneCourt.
- Spencer Sevilla (postdoc) working on community LTE. Now building networks everywhere.