Two University of Washington Bothell computer scientists, Michael Stiber and Brent Lagesse, have won Fulbright scholar awards for advanced research in Europe.

Stiber is a professor of computing and software systems (CSS) and associate dean of the School of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM). Lagesse is an assistant professor in CSS.

Stiber plans a three-month stay this summer at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague to work with colleagues investigating how brain cells encode information.

“My collaborators have a great deal of expertise in abstract mathematical models of information representation in neurons,” Stiber said. “I have expertise in building high-performance simulations of neural networks and in analyzing simulation results. We plan to combine these approaches.”

Lagesse plans a four-to-five month stay in the spring and summer of 2018 at the University of Cambridge in England to work with one of the leading researchers in the world in crowd sensing, focusing on cybersecurity. Crowd sensing is the technology that generates information from sensors that people mostly carry on their phone: cameras, microphones, GPS, thermometer, etc.

“Crowd sensing lets us take this information from large numbers of people and better understand the world we live in,” Lagesse said. “The goal of the research I’ll be doing during the Fulbright is to simultaneously prevent bad data from being used to make decisions and to prevent the data that is being collected from being used against the people collecting data.”