The Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering annually holds a ceremony to celebrate graduates from across our academic programs and recognize select students with awards for academic excellence, leadership, innovation, and contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Graduating students may invite their friends and family; tickets are not required.
2026 Graduation & Awards Ceremony
Friday, June 12
10 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Husky Union Building (HUB) Ballroom, UW Seattle
Agenda
| 9:15 a.m. | Graduating student check-in begins |
| 9:30 a.m. | Doors open for families and friends |
| 10 a.m. | Graduation ceremony + Welcome remarks by HCDE Professor & Chair Julie Kientz + Graduation address by Ram Shankar Siva Kumar + Recognition of graduates + Presentation of awards |
| 12 p.m. | Conclusion |
2026 guest graduation speaker
Ram Shankar Siva Kumar
Data Cowboy at Microsoft | Author of "Not With A Bug"
Ram Shankar Siva Kumar is a Data Cowboy working on the intersection of machine learning and security. At Microsoft, he founded the AI Red Team, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and engineers to proactively attack AI systems and defend from attacks.
His recent book on attacking AI systems, NOT WITH A BUG has been called “Essential Reading” by Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer and received wide praise from industry leaders at DeepMind, OpenAI as well as policy makers and academia. He is donating his proceeds of the book royalty to Black In AI.
His work on AI and Security has appeared in industry conferences like RSA, BlackHat, Defcon, BlueHat, DerbyCon, MIRCon, Infiltrate, academic workshops at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, IEEE S&P, ACM - CCS. His work has been covered by Bloomberg, VentureBeat, Wired, and Geekwire. He founded the Adversarial ML Threat Matrix, an ATT&CK style framework enumerating threats to machine learning. His work on adversarial machine learning appeared notably in the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) Final report presented to the United States Congress and the President.
He is currently a Tech Policy Fellow at UC Berkeley and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where he is broadly investigating two questions: How do we assess the safety of ML systems? What are the policy and legal ramifications of AI, in the context of security? He is also a Technical Advisory Board Member at the University of Washington.
Information for graduating students
RSVP for the HCDE graduation ceremony
The HCDE Graduation RSVP form is open. All HCDE BS, MS, and PhD students graduating Autumn 2025 through Summer 2026 should complete the form by April 17 to:
- Confirm participation in the ceremony
- Indicate how their name should appear in the printed program
- Be eligible for departmental awards
Complete the HCDE Graduation RSVP form.