Allen School News

A terrific Seattle Times op-ed by University of Washington regents Kristi Blake and Craig Cole:

“The cost of educating a student at the University of Washington is about $400 less today, in inflation adjusted dollars, than it was 20 years ago …  The next time anyone questions why public university tuition is rising faster than inflation, remember this:  Twenty years ago, the state government paid 80 percent of the cost of a student’s education and a student paid 20 percent.  Today, the state pays 30 percent of the cost, and the student pays 70 percent.  The state has systematically disinvested in our children’s future, and we view this trend with disappointment and alarm.”

Read it here.

  Read more →

When University of Texas faculty stars Doug Burger and Kathryn McKinley moved to Microsoft Research, they brought with them graduate student Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, who transferred to UW CSE and added CSE’s Luis Ceze as an advisor.

Hadi has had an amazing streak of high-profile results recently:

• A “Research Highlight” in CACM:  “Looking Back and Looking Forward: Power, Performance, and Upheaval” (full paper from ASPLOS here), July 2012.
•  Two “Research Highlights” in IEEE Micro:  “Dark Silicon and the End of Multicore Scaling” (full paper from ISCA here), and “What is Happening to Power, Performance, and Software?” (the “Looking Back …” paper), both May/June 2012.

Congratulations Hadi!  We’re fortunate to have you at UW! Read more →

UW Provost Ana Mari Cauce

Susan Eggers and Anna Karlin

Hank Levy

Time flies when you’re having fun … Hank Levy, CSE department chair and Wissner-Slivka Chair, celebrated his 60th today at a French-themed (don’t ask …) luncheon.

Happy birthday Hank, and thanks for all you’ve done for CSE and for your many friends!

Yum!

Yum!

More Bruce Hemingway photographs of the event here.

(One of the high points of the luncheon:  University of Washington Provost Ana Mari Cauce, ever a great friend of CSE and ever a good sport, drew herself a fake French mustache (the rest of us wore stick-ons) … and then discovered that the pen contained permanent ink.  We hope her afternoon meetings went well!) Read more →

“No. 1: Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue.

“The Seattle metro area has posted 12% tech job growth over the past two years and 7.6% STEM growth, handily beating the performance of Silicon Valley.  More important still to potential job-seekers, the Puget Sound regions has grown consistently in good times and bad, boasting a remarkable 43% increase in tech employment from 2001 through 2011 and an 18% expansion in STEM.”

Read the Seattle page here.

Read the full article here. Read more →

Hearty congratulations to ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award winner Seth Cooper (CSE Ph.D. alum and Director of UW CSE’s Center for Game Science), and to new ACM Fellows Carl Ebeling (CSE faculty), Hugues Hoppe (CSE Ph.D. alum, now at Microsoft Research), Dan Suciu (CSE faculty), Dean Tullsen (CSE Ph.D. alum, now at UCSD), Amin Vahdat (CSE Ph.D. half-alum, now at UCSD and Google), and David “Where The Hell Was He?” Wetherall (CSE faculty). Read more →

UW CSE alums (plus Ed Lazowska) at the WibiData Office Warming Party

In 2011, UW CSE alums Christophe Bisciglia and Aaron Kimball left their hugely successful “big data” startup Cloudera to found WibiData.

This evening, WibiData held an office warming party at their new digs, 375 Alabama in San Francisco.  The UW CSE alumni turnout was extraordinary!  (Ed Lazowska was in town for the ACM Turing Centenary Celebration and dropped by.)

More photos here. Read more →

Capstone Design Courses are the hallmark of the UW CSE education.  In these courses, teams of students design and implement complex hardware, software, and embedded system projects of their own invention.  This allows them to deeply explore the areas they personally care about.

This video montage, prepared for our June 2012 graduation ceremony, quickly highlights all of the 2011-12 UW CSE Capstone Design Courses.  Longer videos profiling specific courses are available here.

Take a look at the amazing things that our students achieve! Read more →

In the flurry of activities leading up to June 9th’s commencement, we failed to note an extraordinary accomplishment that took place on the previous Saturday, June 2.

The Washington Husky crew went an unprecedented 5 for 5 in the Grand Finals of the 110th IRA Championships, winning their fourth national championship in six years – with CSE senior Tom Lehmann rowing 3-seat in the Varsity 8.  Read about this amazing performance here.

The Husky crew represents UW’s longest tradition of excellence in any field, academic or athletic.  UW CSE is proud of our students’ participation in this superb program.  One of Tom’s predecessors, 2005 CSE alum Brett Newlin, will again row for the United States in the Olympics this summer. Read more →

Bruce Hemingway doesn’t just teach our digital design courses and photograph our departmental events – he combines the two in a spectacular course, “The Science and Art of Digital Photography.”  Check out the course here, and some of the wonderful student accomplishments here. Read more →

Several years ago, we established the tradition of honoring two outstanding UW Computer Science & Engineering alumni each year as part of our graduation ceremony.

In doing this, we have three objectives:

• First, of course, we want to honor some of our most distinguished alumni by recognizing their extraordinary achievements.
• Second, we want to ensure that today’s graduates know that they are part of a long tradition of excellence and accomplishment.
• Finally, we hope to inspire today’s graduates – we know that future winners of this award are likely here today as members of the UW CSE graduating class.

Today, we were proud to confer the UW CSE 2012 Alumni Achievement Awards upon John K. Bennett and Wen-Hann Wang.

Bennett, an expert in the design, implementation, and evaluation of distributed systems, holds an endowed professorship in computer science and in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he directs the ATLAS Institute, the Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society – a campus-wide entrepreneurial catalyst and incubator for innovative interdisciplinary research, education, and creative work.

Wang, a computer architect, is vice president of Intel Labs in Hillsboro, Oregon, and director of circuits and systems research.  During more than 20 years at Intel, Wang’s assignments have included two postings to Shanghai and dozens of trips abroad to Russia, the Middle East, and Latin America.  Closer to home travels include spring and fall visits to Seattle as Intel’s liaison to the UW.

Read more about Bennett and Wang in the Spring 2012 issue of our newsletter, Most Significant Bits, here.  See scads of wonderful Bruce Hemingway photographs of CSE’s 2012 graduation ceremony here. Read more →