Allen School News

More on Wednesday’s Technology Alliance “State of Technology” annual luncheon, and UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska’s on-stage interview with Expedia, Zillow, and GlassDoor founder Rich Barton:

“Nevertheless, Washington innovation is thriving by several measures …

“How does Washington reconcile the tech sector’s continued success with the paltry investment in generating talent, the key input to innovation economies?

“Imports.

“It’s no secret that Washington has been a leader in attracting smart, entrepreneurial people for generations, from Boeing to Bezos to Barton.  It consistently ranks among the top states for in-migration of people with college degrees.

“Anecdotal support abounds. In an informal poll of the nearly 800 technology executives in the audience Wednesday, a very large chunk — perhaps half the people in the room—identified themselves as ‘imports.’

“Rich Barton, the serial entrepreneur behind Expedia, Zillow, and GlassDoor, said in an on-stage interview at the event that he too is an import.

“While money isn’t necessarily the only solution, Washington is clearly underfunding education relative to its peer states.

“‘That’s ridiculous.  We’re a high-tech state.  We’re a wealthy state.  I can’t believe that’s going on, and I don’t really understand why,’ Barton said.

“But when he expressed his support for a state income tax to fund education, and the audience was asked if they agreed, only a few hands went up.”

Ayup …  Read more here. Read more →

Our new favorite ranking of world universities – the University Ranking by Academic Performance from the Informatics Institute of Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey – ranks UW sixth in the United States and eighth internationally in academic performance.  ‘Nuff said … read all about it in the UW Daily here. Read more →

UW CSE is thrilled to welcome Shayan Oveis Gharan and Zach Tatlock as the newest members of the faculty.

Shayan has just finished his Ph.D. at Stanford.  He will spend next year as a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley before joining us during the 2014-15 academic year.  His research involves the development of provably efficient algorithms for problems that seem intractable.  He has worked on the classical Traveling Salesman Problem (see an article about this work in Wired), on clustering in massive graphs using spectral methods, and on stochastic optimization.  Along the way he has introduced many new techniques, like maximum entropy sampling and the use of higher eigenvalues of graphs, that can be used to tackle an array of other computational tasks.  Shayan is also an avid fan of foreign cinema.  His wife Farnaz Ronaghi is the co-founder of NovoEd, a massive online learning startup.

Zach will finish his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego this summer and join us soon thereafter.  His research seeks to improve software reliability and security by developing new tools that help ensure correctness.  His work on program verification has leveraged and extended a variety of technologies from the programming languages community, including theorem provers, SMT solvers, and type systems.  He uses program verification to build systems with proven guarantees, most notably a web browser with a formal and machine-checked proof that different browser tabs cannot affect each other.  A key technique in his work is identifying high-leverage interfaces at which to prove deep properties so that most of a system can remain untrusted without invalidating the proofs.

Welcome Shayan and Zach! Read more →

Maile Hadley, Zoran Popović, and Margaret Larson

“Schools across Washington State are being challenged to complete 250,000 Algebra problems in one week …  The challenge runs June 3 – 7 …

“Zoran Popović, Director of the UW’s Center for Game Science, and Maile Hadley, Educational Technology Director for the Technology Alliance, a non-profit organization of leaders from our state’s technology-based businesses, joined host Margaret Larson to talk about the Washington State Algebra Challenge, while students Elena and Chase demonstrated the game.”

Watch a terrific video interview here!  Learn more about the Washington State Algebra Challenge here.  Learn about the Center for Game Science here. Read more →

A second GeekWire report on yesterday’s annual Technology Alliance “State of Technology” luncheon:

“Despite the fact that Washington state is actually falling behind in key areas, [Technology Alliance Chair Cheryl] Vedoe said the tech industry is moving forward and thriving.  However, the innovation economy is moving forward, largely through the import of talent from other places.

“‘It seems you can grow an innovation economy by largely relying on imported talent.  And that’s what we are doing — relying on imported talent.  The question for us to consider as a state is:  Is that really what we want to do?  Don’t we want those children who grow up here in Washington, our own citizens, to have a fair shot at the jobs that we are creating here?'”

Read more from GeekWire here. Read more →

GeekWire reports on the Technology  Alliance “State of Technology” luncheon:

“If you’re a squirrel, make sure you stay well clear of Rich Barton.  The founder of Expedia and Zillow on Wednesday offered some key advice from his dad:  a driving lesson from the road that he’s used in business to this day.

“My dad used to say:  ‘kill the squirrel,” noted Barton.  In other words, don’t swerve out of the way or change course just because a pesky little creature gets in your way …

“That was just one nugget of wisdom from Barton as he spoke during a Q&A discussion with University of Washington computer science professor Ed Lazowska at the annual Tech Alliance luncheon in downtown Seattle.  In the wide-ranging talk, Barton touched on everything from the disruption in online education to the lack of women in computer science to why he supports a statewide income tax — a political statement that drew very light applause.”  [Note:  Washington has the most regressive tax system in the nation.  God bless Rich, and others such as Nick Hanauer and Bill Gates Sr., for speaking up in favor of a more equitable and compassionate path.  And – while admitting that government, unlike businesses and individuals, may not always make optimal spending decisions – god help those who think that their success is due solely to their personal effort, and thus they should get to keep it all.]

Read more from GeekWire here. Read more →

Steve Lohr reports in the New York Times:

“A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm … not only selects a dozen ‘disruptive’ technologies from a candidate list of 100, but also measures their economic impact.

“By 2025, the 12 technologies … have the potential to deliver economic value of up to $33 trillion a year worldwide, according to the McKinsey researchers.”

The top six on the list:

• Mobile internet
• Automation of knowledge work
• Internet of Things
• Cloud
• Advanced Robotics
• Autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles

As we have opined before, “All computer science, all the time …”

Read the New York Times article here. Read more →

UW CSE postdoctoral fellow Evangelos Theodorou has received the 2012 King-Sun Fu Best Transactions on Robotics Paper Award for the paper “Reinforcement Learning With Sequences of Motion Primitives for Robust Manipulation,” co-authored with Freek Stulp and Stefan Schaal.  The paper appeared in Volume 28, No. 6, pages 1360-1370, 2012.  (T-RO typically receives over 650 submissions each year!)

Congratulations to Evangelos! Read more →

Sam Hopkins, a senior majoring in Computer Science and in Mathematics, has been selected to receive the 2013 University of Washington College of Arts & Sciences Deans Medal for the Natural Sciences.

Four senior medals are awarded annually by the College of Arts & Sciences:  to the top graduating student in the Arts, the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Natural Sciences.

Sam – incidentally the son of long-time UW Chemistry chair Paul Hopkins – will be a Computer Science graduate student at Cornell University in the fall, supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship that he received in March.

Sam is the fifteenth CSE student to win the Dean’s Medal in Arts & Sciences or in Engineering.  Most recently, last month Computer Engineering senior Raymond Zhang was named the recipient of the 2013 University of Washington Deans Medal in Engineering.

Congratulations to Sam, to Raymond, and to all of CSE’s superb students! Read more →

“The incredible talent that the University of Washington pumps out every year was on display during Tuesday’s Seattle Tech Meetup, as five startups with UW ties gave five-minute pitches to the crowd at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

“But unfortunately for the state, the UW is one of the few bright spots amidst an otherwise struggling education system with regard to producing tech talent. While Washington ranks fourth in the nation for tech-related companies, the state comes in a disappointing 46th for participation in science and engineering graduate programs.

“And that’s exactly why Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the UW, stood at the podium as the final speaker on Tuesday and implored the crowd to start supporting education in Washington.

“‘My ask is for you to become advocates for better education at every level in this state,’ Lazowska said.

“He asked the audience to raise their hands if they were from Washington — the vast majority of them grew up elsewhere and have moved here. It was a perfect example, Lazowska said, of how Washington is the No. 1 importer in the nation per capita of bachelors-educated individuals.

“Yet while it’s great that people come here for the abundance of jobs, the state isn’t exactly doing a good job of grooming homegrown talent.

“‘Our state is the ass end of the donkey in just about every aspect of education and in just about every aspect of preparing Washington’s kids for Washington’s jobs,’ Lazowska said …

“‘Before long, these will be your kids we’re talking about,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do to improve the situation?'”

Read more here.  Lazowska’s slides are here. Read more →