Alex Ching

University of Washington

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I am a PhD Student at the Unversity of Washington Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering advised by Dr. Shwetak Patel. My research interests are at the intersection of sensing, wearable technology, and applied machine learning with a focus on health and biosignals. I build novel embedded systems to collect physiological signals, and use signal processing and machine learning to extract useful information.

Prior to returning to grad school, I spent 10 years working as a full time engineer in industry, having worked at Meta Reality Labs, Microsoft, Magic Leap, Microsoft Research, and Valve. During my time as a student, I was fortunate to have had intern and student researcher positions at Ai2, Samsung Research America, Ball Aerospace, Cisco Systems, Intellectual Ventures Lab, and NASA Ames Research Center.

I hold a M.S. in Computer Science, B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington.

Feel free to contact me regarding academic collaborations at atching [at] cs.washington.edu

I am actively seeking research internships for Summer 2027.

news

Aug 24, 2026 Starting as a student researcher at Ai2 in the Robotics Team!
Jul 25, 2026 Our paper, Toward Reproducible XR Research: A Modular Head Worn Sensing Platform, has been accepted to the Reproduce workshop at Ubicomp 2026 in Shanghai!
May 05, 2026 Excited to have our workshop, Health Centric Wearable Devices in the Age of Physical AI, accepted to Ubicomp 2026. Please consider submitting a paper if you work in this area! Hope to see folks there!
Jun 12, 2025 Starting as a Research Intern at Samsung Research America in the Standards and Mobility Innovation (SMI) Team !
Oct 03, 2023 Returning to my PhD at UW full time after working in industry the last decade!

selected publications