Teaching Professor · University of Washington Bothell

Yusuf Pisan

Computer scientist. Educator. Builder of AI-assisted tools since March 2026.

Yusuf Pisan
PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Northwestern University (1998). Teaching Professor at the Computing & Software Systems division of University of Washington Bothell, where I have taught since 2017. Before Seattle: 20 years in Sydney at UTS, and visiting appointments at Harvey Mudd, USC, WPI, and ITU Copenhagen.
My research group T4G (Tech for Good) works on CS education, AI systems, and video games. I founded the UTS Games Studio and the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment. I received the UWB Distinguished Teaching Award in 2023.

Education2AI on Substack

I write about AI in education, classroom experiments, and building with LLMs — from a CS professor who has been doing it hands-on since March 2026.

Recent AI Projects

I have been building AI-assisted applications since March 2026 — games, voting tools, classroom experiments, automation, and more. A few highlights:

Digital Yusuf

Chat with an AI version of me, built on 155 K characters of persona data from 30+ public sources. No RAG — the entire persona lives in the system prompt.

Accessibility Lens

See any web page through four sets of eyes: low vision, color blindness, keyboard-only, and screen reader. 11 WCAG 2.1 rules checked, with Claude-generated fixes.

Ranked Voting

Full-stack ranked-choice voting app using Instant Runoff Voting. Drag-and-drop ballots, Supabase auth, step-by-step round display.

Daily Project Ideas

Every morning at 5 am a cron job reads five subreddits, surfs the web, and commits three new project ideas to GitHub. The prompt is in version control.

Teaching

25+ years of teaching across three continents, from 8-student seminars to 700-student lectures. Current courses at UW Bothell include CSS 343 (Data Structures), CSS 382 (AI), CSS 385 (Game Dev), and CSS 430 (Operating Systems). UWB Distinguished Teaching Award, 2023.

Research

T4G (Tech for Good) works at the intersection of CS education, artificial intelligence, and video games. My PhD in AI (Northwestern, 1998) focused on qualitative reasoning and diagrammatic problem-solving.

Connect

I write regularly on Substack and welcome LinkedIn connections from people I have met. Email: pisan@uw.edu