Photo of Shwetak that appeared in The Economist
T-shirt closeup
Shwetak’s fan club
Turing Award winner Silvio Micali (MIT) delivers the CSE Distinguished Lecture in his Shwetak t-shirt
What better way to celebrate the formal receipt of tenure by UW CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel than by surprising him with a simultaneous parody of his fashion sense and his MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award?
(Thanks to Shwetak’s graduate students for organizing this nice prank!)
The exponential crowdsourced funding effort for Levytown, revitalized by Brier Dudley’s recent article in the Seattle Times, continues to flourish!
Alums Jeff and Carolyn (Holmes) Hughes have put us only 12 gifts away from fully funding Levytown!
Jeff wrote: “My wife and I recently saw the update to the ‘Levytown’ fundraising and it got us thinking. As both of us are UW CSE alums … we’re interested in giving back to the department. Without a doubt, the department set us up for success in our careers just over 7 years ago … we really want to be part of this story. Sign us up!”
WE LOVE OUR ALUMS!
Update, November 7! Stimulated by Jeff and Carolyn’s generosity (and the realization that things were rapidly getting out of reach), and led by Carlos Guestrin, the CSE faculty has claimed the next level!
Only 11 more gifts to fully fund Levytown! Read more →
Roxana Geambasu and Stefan Savage
The Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award was created by the computer systems research community in 2013 to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied, providing a reminder of Ritchie’s legacy and what a difference one person can make in the field of software systems research.
At the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles today, UW CSE Ph.D. alumna Roxana Geambasu, a professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, was recognized as runner-up in the inaugural Ritchie Award competition. The winner was Mona Attariyan, a University of Michigan Ph.D. alumna now at Google Seattle.
We congratulate Roxana, and we note that Dennis Ritchie, like Roxana’s UW CSE Ph.D. advisor Hank Levy, never received a Ph.D. Read more →
The Mark Weiser Award was created in 2001 by the computer systems research community, to be given annually to an individual who has demonstrated creativity and innovation in computer systems research. The recipient must have begun his or her career no earlier than 20 years prior to nomination. The award is named in honor of Mark Weiser, a computing visionary recognized for his research accomplishments during his career at Xerox PARC.
Today, the 2013 SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award was presented to UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus (and UCSD professor) Stefan Savage. Quoting from the nomination materials:
“In the last decade, as we have grown increasingly dependent on the Internet, the Internet has become a vehicle for large-scale attacks – worms, viruses, botnets, massive flooding attacks, etc.
“Stefan Savage is, by far, the most creative person working in the hugely important fields of network security, privacy, and reliability. He has an uncanny ability to ask exactly the right question, propose exactly the right solution, and see that solution through to impact.
“Stefan’s work has not been a single contribution, but rather a collection of individually high-impact contributions that point in a single critically important direction: analyzing Internet attacks and attackers as elements of an integrated technological, societal, and economic system, and recognizing that no one-dimensional intervention has a prayer of succeeding. Our inability to select a single ‘greatest hit’ does not make The Beatles a lesser band; rather, we recognize that any one of their better songs would have been sufficient to catapult a lesser band into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame …
“Stefan stands in the very top echelon of the extraordinary group of previous Weiser Award recipients.”
Savage is the fourth UW CSE Ph.D. alum to receive the Weiser Award in its 13-year history – an incredible affirmation of UW’s track record in preparing leaders in computer systems. Brian Bershad (now with Google in Moscow) was recognized in 2004. Tom Anderson (now a UW CSE faculty member) was recognized in 2005. Jeff Dean (Google) was recognized in 2012.
Congratulations Stefan! Thanks for making us look good!
Qazzow – a UW spinout founded by iSchool professors (and CSE Adjunct Professors) Amy Ko and Jake Wobbrock and their Ph.D. alum (and University of Waterloo professor) Parmit Chilana – has announced a $500,000 seed investment from UW’s W Fund.
Qazzow is a Q&A SaaS offering that websites use to increase sales conversions by answering customer questions. The system is being tested by Ben Bridge Jeweler, Game House, Big Fish Games, PetHub, Yapta, and PlayOn.
Congratulations, team! Read the GeekWire post here. Read more →
Seattle’s Lakeside School profiles UW CSE Ph.D. alumna Lauren Bricker, who has transformed the school’s computer science programs since arriving in 2007.
“In junior high, Lauren Bricker insisted on being allowed to take shop instead of home ec – and ran away with the top prize. In high school, introduced to programming in math class, she spent every lunch hour seeing what she could make old Apple IIGs and TRS-80s do. In college, she sped through a theoretical math major in three years. In industry, she advanced as a self-taught software engineer before returning for a Ph.D. in computer science …
“As a teacher at Lakeside, she enlists that same fierce determination on behalf of her students.”
The article is an element of a Lakeside fundraising appeal, and we need the money more than they do, but still, it’s great! Read it here. Learn about UW CSE’s vibrant K-12 outreach initiative, DawgBytes, here and here. Read more →
UW CSE startup SNUPI has announced Wally. Our friends at GeekWire write:
“Worried about toxic mold or pesky water leaks in your home?
“Never fear, Wally is here.
“That’s the new consumer brand from SNUPI Technologies, the latest startup effort from Seattle serial entrepreneur [and UW CSE alumnus] Jeremy Jaech …
“WallyHome – which works in conjunction with an always-on Internet connection – is designed to detect environmental hazards around the home by monitoring moisture, temperature and humidity changes. The wild thing is that the company says no batteries are needed, with the system set to work continuously for 10 years. It does this by bypassing traditional Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections, instead using the copper wiring in the walls of a home as an antenna. (More on the technology behind the system here.)
“Jaech has partnered with some of the top minds at the University of Washington on SNUPI, including [CSE and EE] professors Shwetak Patel and Matt Reynolds, as well as doctoral student Gabe Cohn.”
Read more here. Check out the Wally webpage here. Read more →
Shiri Azenkot
Franzi Roesner
MIT’s “Rising Stars in EECS” is an annual workshop that brings together top graduate and postdoc women in EECS for two days of scientific discussions and informal sessions aimed at navigating early stages of the academic career.
UW CSE Ph.D. students Franzi Roesner and Shiri Azenkot will present their research in the first session of the workshop. Franzi will speak on “Third-Party Web Tracking: Detection, Measurement, and Prevention.” Shiri will speak on “DigiTaps: Eyes-Free Number Entry on Touchscreens with Minimal Audio Feedback.”
Congratulations Franzi and Shiri! Read more →
The brain-to-brain interface experiment of UW CSE’s Rajesh Rao continues to attract extraordinary attention.
Discover features an in-depth explanation of the experiment and its implications, here:
“Finally, in August 2013, University of Washington scientists Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco succeeded in making one leap everyone was waiting for: A human-to-human brain-to-brain interface. By strapping one person into a non-invasive EEG helmet, and strapping the second into a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) helmet, the researchers mind-melded themselves – for the sake of science.
“The experiment went like this: Rao and Stocco sat across campus from one another, watching the same video game. Rao, wearing an EEG helmet, was at the controls – but instead of using his hand to hit the spacebar to fire, he simply imagined moving his hand.
“Every time he did this, with near-instantaneous speed, a computer converted Rao’s brain signals into a digital signal and beamed it to Stocco’s TMS helmet. That helmet converted the signal into a burst of magnetic stimulation delivered to the precise region of Stocco’s motor cortex that controlled his right hand. Stocco’s hand would then twitch involuntarily, tapping the spacebar and (sometimes) scoring a hit in the game.”
Science focuses on the implications, here:
“Restoration of normal function has driven development of devices such as cochlear implants for deafness, deep-brain stimulators for Parkinson’s disease, and bionic eyes for the blind, but there has long been a fascination with using similar technologies to “neuroenhance” healthy individuals, helping them control emotions, improve memory and cognition, and even communicate wordlessly with others …” Read more →
The paper “Crowdsourcing Multi-Label Classification for Taxonomy Creation” by UW CSE’s Jonathan Bragg, Mausam, and Dan Weld has been selected as the recipient of the Best Paper distinction at the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP-2013).
Congratulations to Jonathan, Mausam, and Dan! Read more →