Allen School News

Abie Flaxman, professor of Global Health at UW’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and adjunct professor of Computer Science & Engineering, is the latest in a long line of CSE-related researchers to be recognized as a member of Technology Review‘s TR35 – an annual listing of 35 top innovators under the age of 35.

Abie is the research lead for the Computational Algorithms research team at IHME.  He is the primary architect of a software tool known as DisMod III that IHME is using to estimate the Global Burden of Disease.  He and other researchers use the tool to fill in gaps in incomplete data on stroke, malaria, depression, and other diseases from government records and surveys and to correct for inconsistencies.

UW CSE – affiliated TR35 winners in the past 5 years include faculty members Jeff Heer, Yoshi Kohno, and Shwetak Patel; Ph.D. alums Jeff Bigham, Karen Liu, Tapan Parikh, Scott Saponas, Noah Snavely, and Adrien Treuille; and adjunct/affiliate faculty members Tanzeem Choudhury, Desney Tan, and Merrie Morris.

Congratulations Abie!

Read the TR35 citation here.  Abie’s IHME web page here.

Nice Seattle Times article here. Read more →

There are many urgent problems facing the planet:  a degrading environment, healthcare systems in crisis, and educational systems that are inadequately training innovative thinkers to solve the problems of tomorrow.  A balanced approach is required to solve these problems:  balanced between design and technology, between human-centered and technology-centered approaches, and between different world cultures and ways of thinking.

The World Lab is a new research and educational institution that is ideally suited to tackle these grand challenges.  The World Lab is sited jointly between two of the world’s leading computing and human-centered design institutions, the University of Washington in Seattle and Tsinghua University in Beijing.   Founded by Computer Science professors James Landay (UW) and Yuanchun Shi (Tsinghua), and Design professors Yingqing Xu and Zhiyong Fu (Tsinghua) and Tad Hirsch (UW), the World Lab kicked off its first program this Summer, The World Lab Summer Institute.

The World Lab Summer Institute at the University of Washington brings together students from technology, design, social science and business backgrounds, and challenges them to create prototypes for products and services that solve pressing social problems.  This inaugural year, the 7-week program brings together 11 Chinese graduate students from Tsinghua with 9 Seattle students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels to work together on cross-cultural, interdisciplinary teams.

This summer’s teams have created projects on concepts as diverse as a social network to encourage reuse of home-generated trash for art projects, a phone and tablet application to support elementary school education outside of the home, a web site for creating and viewing video montages of multiple perspectives on world events and history, a tablet-based drawing application to help young children express emotions, and a wearable sensor and display to encourage taking micro-exercise breaks.

The student teams will present their final projects to the public in presentations and a poster session on Friday, August 24^th from 10 AM –1 PM in The Gates Commons of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.  For more information on attending this event, please see http://worldlab.cs.washington.edu/invite.  The Seattle presentations will be followed by presentations in Beijing on September 14^th and 15^th. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. alum Mike Piatek (now at Google Seattle) and UW CSE postdoc Aruna Balasubramanian (who completed her Ph.D. at UMass-Amherst) have been named co-runners-up for the 2012 Doctoral Dissertation Award of SIGCOMM, the ACM Special Interest Group on communications and computer networks.  Their awards were presented on August 14 at the annual SIGCOMM conference in Helsinki.  Congratulations to Mike and Aruna! Read more →

An article in New Scientist describes the work of UW CSE Ph.D. student Jinna Lei:

“Celebrity chef apps, online how-to videos and recipe-sharing websites have all joined traditional cookbooks as guides for the amateur epicurean. But wouldn’t it be nice if your kitchen could help you prepare a meal? …

“Jinna Lei at the University of Washington has also installed cameras in the kitchen to watch over novice chefs.  Lei and colleagues used Kinect-like depth-sensing cameras capable of recording both the shape and appearance of kitchen objects, allowing them to track cooking actions, such as whether a particular ingredient has been added to a bowl.

“The system uses both object and action-recognition to keep track of what the cook is doing …

“Eventually, Lei hopes the system will be able to prompt chefs when they make a mistake.”

Read the article here. Read more →

A Computing Community Consortium blog post concerning as session at last month’s CRA Conference at Snowbird chaired by CSE’s Ed Lazowska and featuring CSE’s Shwetak Patel as well as Stanford’s Daphne Koller:

“Our field has exhibited an ever-changing balance of “technology push” and “demand pull” over the years. Many currently sense a movement of the pendulum in the “demand pull” direction. I’d like to argue that this is fantastic — it’s great news for our field, great news for society, and great news for the future.”

Read more here. Read more →

UW alums and Decide.com co-founders Brian Ma, Hsu Han Ooi, Ian Ma and Hsu Ken Ooi spell out “UW” in their West Mercer Street headquarters. Photo by Joshua Bessex.

A wonderful profile of the four students who worked with UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni to create Decide.com:

“Brian and Ian Ma, along with Han Hsu and Ken Hsu, all UW alumni, started Decide.com after dreaming up an idea several years ago in between their day jobs at Google, Zillow, Microsoft, and Zaaz, respectively.

“‘I noticed my girlfriend went back dozens of times a day to check prices on websites,’ Brian Ma said. ‘I thought that was such a waste, so why not build something that could help the consumer out?’

“With that kernel of an idea, the four went to Oren Etzioni, professor of computer science at the UW and noted Internet entrepreneur … Etzioni’s enthusiasm and the shaping of a plan for a startup resulted in all four quitting their jobs.

“‘I called up my parents and told them I had good news,’ Ken Hsu said. ‘And when we met, I told them I had quit my job; my parents were like, ‘Well your brother still has a good job.’ And I told them, ‘Well, he has some good news too.’ …

“Both Brian Ma and Ken Hsu cited the computer science department at the UW as a major factor in their success. Decide has more than 10 UW alumni on its staff.

“‘The CS department is simply amazing,’ Brian Ma said. ‘Oren [Etzioni] is the smartest, most intelligent guy.'”

Read more here.  Try Decide.com here. Read more →

Yanping Huang, a UW CSE Ph.D. student, is one of 50 recipients of International Predoctoral Fellowships from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

HHMI launched the International Student Research Fellowships Program last year to support international students during their third to fifth years of graduate school in the United States.  “We are pleased to be able to support some of the world’s most outstanding graduate students in the biomedical sciences” says William R. Galey, program director for HHMI’s graduate and medical education programs.

Congratulations Yanping!  Information the program here.  List of recipients here. Read more →

An excellent article by Steve Lohr in Sunday’s New York Times.

“This has been the crossover year for Big Data …

“Big Data is a shorthand label that typically means applying the tools of artificial intelligence, like machine learning, to vast new troves of data beyond that captured in standard databases.  The new data sources include Web-browsing data trails, social network communications, sensor data and surveillance data …

“‘The term itself is vague, but it is getting at something that is real,’ says Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University.  ‘Big Data is a tagline for a process that has the potential to transform everything.’ …

“In late 2008, Big Data was embraced by a group of the nation’s leading computer science researchers, the Computing Community Consortium, a collaboration of the government’s National Science Foundation and the Computing Research Association, which represents academic and corporate researchers.  The computing consortium published an influential white paper, ‘Big-Data Computing: Creating Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Commerce, Science and Society.‘  Its authors were three prominent computer scientists, Randal E. Bryant of Carnegie Mellon University, Randy H. Katz of the University of California, Berkeley, and Edward D. Lazowska of the University of Washington.  Their endorsement lent intellectual credibility to Big Data.”

Read the article here.  Read more CCC white papers on Big Data and Data Analytics here.  Learn about the University of Washington eScience Institute here. Read more →

This week, nearly 100 middle school and upper school teachers and counselors joined UW CSE for CS4HS – a Google-sponsored program to expose them to computer science and computational thinking.

CS4HS was launched 6 years ago by UW, UCLA, and Carnegie Mellon.  Today, CS4HS programs are held at dozens of colleges and universities across the country.  Participant feedback is hugely positive.

Many thanks to Google (both “central” and Seattle) for its sponsorship of our program.  And many thanks to Tom Cortina from Carnegie Mellon for joining us for a sixth summer to help make the UW offering a success.

CS4HS materials here.  Photosynth panorama of participants here. Read more →

Google’s Computing and Programming Experience (CAPE) is a multi-week summer program, held at several Google engineering facilities, designed to inspire excitement about computer science for incoming 9th grade (graduating 8th grade) students.

Melissa Winstanley represented UW CSE at several sessions this summer designed to expose students to the nation’s top computer science programs.  Thanks, Melissa!  And, thanks Google – both for hosting CAPE, and for including UW CSE.

Information on CAPE here.  Photographs here. Read more →