Allen School News

July 8-12 marked the second session of this summer’s UW CSE summer day camps for high school girls.  A fantastic group of 21 students joined us for a week of computing fun!  Many thanks to Google for donating Android phones for project work.

CSE senior Sam Hopkins is the recipient of the 2013 UW Arts & Sciences Dean’s Medal for the Natural Sciences, awarded to the top graduating student in the Natural Sciences division of UW’s College of Arts & Sciences.  Sam – the son of long-time UW Chemistry chair Paul Hopkins – entered UW at age 15 through the Early Entrance Program, and will head to Ithaca in the fall as a computer science graduate student at Cornell.  Sam is the 11th CSE student since the year 2000 to receive a Dean’s Medal in Arts & Sciences or Engineering – an extraordinary record by CSE’s extraordinary students.

There’s a lovely profile of Sam in this month’s Arts & Sciences newsletter, Perspectives, here. Read more →

UW CSE professor (and UCSD Ph.D. alum) Yoshi Kohno, UCSD professor (and UW CSE Ph.D. alum) Stefan Savage, and their students spent two years exploring the security vulnerabilities of modern automobiles and working with vehicle manufacturers and Federal regulatory agencies to address them.

It took Fox News only 4 minutes and 34 seconds to sensationalize it beyond recognition.

Sigh … watch the result here.  Better, read about the research here. Read more →

You can’t make up stuff that’s this unlikely!

Recent Ph.D. alum Yaw Anokwa, co-developer of the widely-used Open Data Kit platform for data collection via mobile phones, and co-founder of the Seattle startup Nafundi focused on applications for challenging environments such as the developing world, is featured in an advertisement for Nordstrom’s new “Citizens of Humanity” jeans.

Watch the video!  It provides a superb overview of Yaw’s work.  (And he cleans up really well – good news in light of his July 27 wedding to UW CSE lecturer and K-12 outreach coordinator Hélène Martin.)

Says Yaw:  “Turns out a Ph.D. in computer science can be used to launch a modeling career …” Read more →

Monday and Tuesday marked the 14th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit.

The Seattle Times devoted much of its coverage to the “Lab of Things” platform created and demonstrated by UW CSE Ph.D. alum A.J. Brush:

“Lab of Things is a platform for research that uses connected devices in the home, allowing researchers who need to collect data from homes for their studies to more easily manage and collect and analyze data.

“Researchers, such as those working in health care or computer interaction, often conduct studies of people in their homes.

“But one of the most limiting factors is how often they are allowed into their subjects home — if, for instance, they must go every time sensor software needs updating, said Arjmand Samuel of Microsoft Research in Redmond.

“Lab of Things should make it easier for researchers to deploy studies in homes. All it requires is a wireless network, and for the researcher to bring in a home hub — a laptop or even a netbook running Windows 7 or 8 — that can talk to the sensors set up in the home.

“When a sensor detects an activity, for example, it can send an email to the researcher. Software updates can be deployed over the air without going into people’s homes.

“All the data collected goes into a cloud owned by the researcher, allowing her to analyze it more easily, said A.J. Brush of Microsoft Research in Redmond.

“Researchers also are able to see what is happening on their mobile devices.

“The beta version of Lab of Things is available for download, and some researchers are already using it, Brush said.”

Read the article here.  Learn about Lab of Things here.

(Ratul Mahajan, who architected the platform and co-leads the project, is also a UW CSE Ph.D. alum.) Read more →

Wednesday’s Future of Software Engineering symposium – FuSE 2013, held in Redmond WA following the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit – has been dedicated to UW CSE professor David Notkin, who passed away in April.  See the program here.  Watch videos here.  Learn more about David here. Read more →

In WrestleBrania, a sensor on your forearm measures electrical stimuli, driving an electromechanical arm wrestling robot (covered in pink fur).

The fact that this video is on the CSE News page rather than Tom’s Biology News page gives you a hint at the outcome …

Thanks to UW’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, which developed WrestleBrania and was demonstrating it for K-12 students (and the occasional faculty passers-by …).

Watch the video here. Read more →

Akiva, Emma, and CRA’s Andy Bernat

Emma offers remarks on behalf of the family

Akiva and Emma

At the ACM Awards Banquet last month, David Notkin’s daughter Emma and son Akiva accepted the Computing Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann Award on David’s behalf.  We just received these photographs from Andy Bernat at CRA.  Thanks once again to ACM and CRA for recognizing David’s tireless efforts to broaden participation in our field.

ACM and CRA’s video tribute to David is here; Habermann Award citation here. Read more →

As computing devices become smaller and more numerous, powering them becomes more difficult; wires are often not feasible, and batteries add weight, bulk, cost, and require recharging/replacement that is impractical at large scales. Devices that use ambient backscatter communication solve this problem by leveraging existing TV and cellular transmissions, rather than generating their own radio waves. This novel technique enables ubiquitous communication where devices can communicate among themselves at unprecedented scales and in locations that were previously inaccessible.

The work – by UW CSE’s Vincent Liu, Aaron Parks, Vamsi Talla, Shyam Gollakota, David Wetherall, and Josh Smith – was featured by ExtremeTech.

Read the ExtremeTech article here.  Read the SIGCOMM paper here.  See the project web page here.

Go team! Read more →

Michaela Monstream, Holy Names Academy

Payton Quinn, Seattle Prep

The Seattle Times profiles three entering UW CSE freshmen:

“The number of incoming freshmen who listed computer science as their desired major has more than doubled in just three years at the University of Washington, which has one of the nation’s top computer science schools …

“At the UW, where hundreds of students are turned away from the computer science program every year for a lack of space, the money ‘still won’t meet the demand,’ Lazowska said by email. ‘But every journey begins with a few steps, and these are important steps’ …

“Lazowska said he thinks students are realizing that ‘Computer science has ‘change the world’ potential like no other field’ …

Nirupama Suneel, Skyline High School

“Students are also seeing that both computer science and ‘computational thinking,’ a problem-solving method that uses computer science techniques, is valuable in many fields, Lazowska said. Many of UW’s computer-science grads go on to study such fields as biology, law, medicine and bioengineering, he said.

“And of course, the degree can lead to a good job.”

Read the article here.

Learn more about the field, and about UW CSE, here. Read more →