Faculty

Richard Anderson is a Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics from Reed College in 1981, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1985.

Anderson joined the University of Washington in 1986, after a one-year Postdoc at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, CA. In 1987 he received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator award. He spent the 1993-1994 academic year as a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Science, in Bangalore, India, and the 2001-2002 academic year a visiting researcher in the Learning Sciences and Technology group at Microsoft Research. While at Microsoft, he led the development of Classroom Presenter, a tool for delivering presentations from the TabletPC.

Anderson was a founder of the then-department’s Professional Master’s Program and led efforts in Tutored Video Instruction long before MOOC’s became popular. He was the 2007 recipient of the UW College of Engineering Faculty Innovator for Teaching Award. He was the department’s associate chair for educational programs from 2004 through 2009. Anderson spent 2009-2011 on an extended sabbatical, working at PATH, a Seattle based NGO working on health technologies for low resource environments. He continues to work with the Digital Health Solutions group at PATH on a range of projects including Projecting Health. In 2015 he founded the UW Digital Financial Services research group with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to address challenges in introducing financial technologies in the developing world.

Anderson’s main research interest is in Computing for the Developing World. He has done a substantial amount of work in educational technology, focusing on the Community Led Video Education model, first in the Digital StudyHall project and later in Projecting Health. He is now managing the Open Data Kit project which is developing mobile data management tools on the Android platform. Other areas of work in ICTD include work on Global Health and Financial Technologies.

Previously, Anderson has worked in the theory and implementation of algorithms, including parallel algorithms, computational geometry, and scientific applications. He has also worked on applying model checking to the formal verification of software systems, N-Body simulation, and pen-based computing.