Allen School News

Last Saturday, 36 3-person teams competed in UW’s local runoff for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition to determine the 5 teams that will represent UW in the regional ICPC runoff on November 3.  The international ICPC finals will be held in St. Peterburg Russia from June 30 – July 4.  Unlike the World Series, the ICPC truly is an international competition – it’s been 15 years since a US team won!

Faculty members Stuart Reges and Marty Stepp organized the competition, along with student helpers Victoria Wagner, Janette Sui, Caitlin Harding, and Valerie Liang and Google staffers (and CSE alums) Queena Chen and Ethan Apter.  Google was our official sponsor and provided food, prizes, and swag.

Below is a list of the top six teams:

#1 TAUNT (TAUNT’s An UnNamed Team): Sam Hopkins, Steve Rutherford, Kevin Clark
#2 UW Psychokinesis: Vaspol Ruamviboonsuk, Siwakon Srisakaokul, Lee Lee Choo
#3 O(0): Melanie Jensenworth, Raymond Zhang, Noah Siegel
#4 Stone Code Killas: Galen Knapp, Cody Thomas, Tobias Kahan
#5 6189456: Benjamin Sidhom, Chris Clark, Michael Fain
#6 Honey Badgers: Tyler Rigsby, Melissa Winstanley, Jenny Abrahamson

The #1 team can’t make it to the November 3 regional contest, but the other five will all be representing us.

You can find more detailed results along with information about the problems at this url:

http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~reges/acm/results.html

Congratulations to all the participants, thanks to Google, and good luck to the five UW CSE teams in the regional contest! Read more →

UW CSE’s most successful Industry Affiliates meeting ever was followed by our most successful graduate student pumpkin carving TGIF ever, with 54 jack-o-lanterns produced, and countless pounds of guck on the floor of the atrium.  (Thanks to Kyle Rector for organizing the event … and the cleanup.) Read more →

Please join us for the second 2012-13 UW CSE Distinguished Lecture.

On Tuesday October 30 at 3:30, Brad Smith – Microsoft’s General Counsel and Executive Vice President for Legal and Corporate Affairs – will speak on “Creating an Environment for Innovation.”

Additional information here. Read more →

CSE Ph.D. students Shiri Azenkot and Kyle Rector, along with CSE professor Richard Ladner and iSchool (and CSE adjuct) professor Jake Wobbrock won the ASSETS 2012 Best Paper Award at the 14th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility for their paper “PassChords:  Secure multi-touch authentication for blind people.”

The paper presents a new non-visual technique, PassChords, for user authentication on a touch screen using mult-finger taps, rather than entering a traditional PIN on a virtual keypad.   In a study with 13 blind participants, PassChords was 3 times faster for entering a PIN than using a traditional PIN keypad with a screen reader.  The PIN strength, measured in empirical entropy, was about the same for both methods.

Congratulations to Shiri, Kyle, Richard, and Jake! Read more →

A terrific GeekWire article, with a huge number of great photos, on the UW CSE Open House held on Wednesday evening:

“We all remember school science fairs – lots of posters, people and presentations packed into a large area.  Consider Wednesday evening at University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering something similar, but instead a souped-up version hosted by computer science buffs.

“As part of UW CSE’s Industry Affiliates Annual Meeting, 89 research groups made up of over 150 grad students set up shop in rooms within the UW’s high-tech Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering to show off their latest work in a poster and demo session.  Industry representatives, regional alumni and friends of the department were on hand to see everything from animated learning games to candid portrait selection derived from video.”

Read more, and see lots of terrific photos, here. Read more →

Today’s the day – 50 top companies recruiting UW CSE students.  It’s a zoo!

Pity poor Google:  Somehow they had to top last year’s stunt of Yin Lu running around in a Cookie Monster costume handing out chocolate chip cookies.  The brainstorm:  Gummy Sushi.  (They had to go all the way to Mill Creek to find a bakery that was willing to fabricate the little beauties …)

Tuesday was recruiting day for 50 startup companies.   Wednesday was the Affiliates research interaction day, plus open house.  Tomorrow we sleep in!

Many Bruce Hemingway photographs here.

Read more →

Matt McIlwain (center) congratulates Madrona Prize winners Eric Larson and Mayank Goel

The research day of the UW CSE Industry Affiliates Meeting concludes with an open house (reception, posters, lab tours) for Affiliates attendees and regional alumni and friends.

For the 7th year, Madrona Venture Group awarded the Madrona Prize to the students whose research had the greatest commercial potential.  In addition, the People’s Choice Awards were given to the most popular research poster or demo in each lab.

Congratulations to all the winners – and to all the participants (89 posters/demos involving more than 150 students).  And thanks to Madrona for their long-standing encouragement of our entrepreneurial activities.

(Students are denoted by * in the list below)

Madrona Prize

Winner

SpiroSmart: Using a Microphone to Measure Lung Function on a Mobile Phone, by * Eric C. Larson, * Mayank Goel, Gaetano Borriello, Sonya Heltshe (Children’s Hospital), Margaret Rosenfeld (Children’s Hospital), Shwetak N. Patel.

Runners up

FreeDOM: a New Baseline for the Web, by * Raymond Cheng, * Will Scott.

Wireless Power for Left Ventricular Assist Device, by * Ben Waters, * Scott Wisdom, * Brody Mahoney, * Chen Shi, Joshua Smith.

Hank Levy with People’s Choice Award winners

People’s Choice Awards

Candid Portrait Selection from Video, by * Juliet Fiss, Aseem Agarwala, Brian Curless.

Serving Massive Earth Simulations over the Internet, by * Scott Moe, Bill Howe.

RGB-D Mapping: Using Kinect-style Depth Cameras for Dense 3D Modeling of Indoor Environments, by * Peter Henry, * Michael Krainin, * Evan Herbst, * Xiaofeng Ren, Dieter Fox.

Rethinking Storage for Non-Volatile Memory, by * Peter Hornyack, * Katelin Bailey, Luis Ceze, Steve Gribble, Hank Levy.

ODK Sensors: A Sensor Integration Framework for Android at the Application-Level, by * Waylon Brunette, * Rohit Chaudhri, * Mayank Goel, Gaetano Borriello.

Extremer Extraction: Interactive Learning of Relation Extractors with Weak Supervision, by * Raphael Hoffmann.

Fine-Grained Entity Recognition, by * Xiao Ling, Dan Weld.

Gesture Coder: Programming Multi-Touch Gestures by Demonstration, by * Hao Lü, Yang Li (Google).

Origin-Bound Certificates: A Fresh Approach to Strong Client Authentication for the Web, by * Alexei Czeskis.

Prefab: Modifying an Graphical Interface, by * Morgan Dixon, James Fogarty.

User Interface Toolkit Mechanisms for Securing Interface Elements, by * Franziska Roesner, James Fogarty, Tadayoshi Kohno. Read more →

Carlos Guestrin – UW CSE’s Amazon Professor of Machine Learning – delivered a luncheon keynote on his GraphLab machine learning system at the 2012 UW CSE Industry Affiliates Meeting.

Learn more about Carlos and his research here. Read more →

David Pogue’s PBS NOVA Science NOW featured the work of UW CSE’s Yoshi Kohno and the UW CSE Security and Privacy Research Lab as the final segment of the episode “Can Science Stop Crime?”

In addition to Yoshi, those featured include Yoshi’s wife Taryn Kohno, UW CSE Ph.D. alum Dan Halperin, and UW CSE Ph.D. students Karl Koscher, Franzi Roesner, Alexei “Crash” Czeskis – and the work of these and others.

Watch this terrific 12-minute PBS NOVA Science NOW segment!

Read more →

Our friends at GeekWire cover Sujal Patel’s terrific talk on startups during the first day of UW CSE’s 2012 Industry Affiliates Meeting:

“The University of Washington computer science department sends more than half of its grads to just four companies:  Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.  And while those tech giants pay well – on average more than $100,000 for software developers – they’ve certainly moved well beyond the startup phase.

“So, what’s it going to take to get more computer science grads to consider making the startup plunge?

“Hearing from folks like Isilon co-founder Sujal Patel – who sold his Seattle startup to EMC for a cool $2.25 billion in 2010 – certainly can help.  In one of the most compelling and informative talks I’ve seen on the wonders of the entrepreneurial journey, Patel laid out no fewer than six reasons why startups are better than big companies.”

Read more of John Cook’s terrific article  here. Read more →