Allen School News

The Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing – NIAC – is a joint initiative of the University of Washington and the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).  Xconomy reports on “NIAC Day” – a day of seminars and working sessions inaugurating NIAC:

“Ed Lazowska, UW computer science professor, director of the eScience Institute, and a key link between PNNL and the university, put aspirations for NIAC—unveiled early this year—in context of the ‘dawn of a new era of discovery.’

“Data-intensive scientific discovery, he says, joins computational science as another arrow in the quiver for researchers, complementing the older methods of theory, experiment, and observation.

“A proliferation of low-cost sensors and simulations is creating a torrent of data that presents enormous opportunities and huge challenges. Smart homes, smart cars, smart health, smart robots operating in unstructured environments—all are enabled by advances in areas such as machine learning, computer vision, and cloud computing.

“‘The big data revolution is what’s putting the smarts in everything,’ Lazowska says. (He is leading a discussion on data-driven discovery at Xconomy’s upcoming public forum: Big Insight—Making Sense of Big Data in Seattle on Nov. 19.)

“For data-intensive science to reach its potential, the onus is on computer scientists to build tools that can be used directly by oceanographers, biologists, geologists, and even sociologists and researchers in other fields, without having to wait for a data scientist to run reports for them. (He likened this potential bottleneck to the database administrators who sat between researchers and their data in the 1970s.)”

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

The paper “Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations with Google Street View” has received the Best Paper Award at the 2013 ASSETS conference – the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing.

Among the authors: Shiri Azenkot and Megan Campbell are UW graduate students. Kelly Minckler and Rochelle Ng are UW undergraduates.  Cynthia Bennett is a staff research assistant working with Professor Richard Ladner.  Jon Froehlich is a former Ph.D. student at UW, now an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland.  Groups at the University of Washington and University of Maryland were working on similar projects using crowdsourcing with Google Street View to identify physical landmarks at bus stop locations that would be useful for blind bus riders.   They combined forces to study areas of Seattle and Washington DC in several interesting studies.

UW researchers also received the Best Paper award at ASSETS 2012.

  Read more →

Google’s Marion Daly

Or as Marion Daly says in her email auto-response: “Thanks for your email. I’m out of the office right now attending a very important costume competition at UW. However, don’t fear (unless you’re watching a horror movie or have just chopped of a digit while carving a pumpkin) I’ll be back online this afternoon.”

This year’s winners

Googler-as-Cookie-Monster has an illustrious history in CSE; see Yin Lu here. Read more →

“‘We need to grow our degree programs at all levels to meet the demand for computing education, both for our own majors and outside,’ said Hank Levy, the department’s Wissner-Slivka Chair …

“Finally, Lazowska said that ‘Washington’s kids must have the opportunity to become educated for Washington’s jobs.’ It’s a topic he’s sounded off on before …

“‘We need more space and more faculty to meet these needs,’ Lazowska said.”

Read more in GeekWire here.

Follow the Levytown exponential crowdsourced fundraising effort here! Read more →

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel, gives a spectacular talk at last week’s Leadership Conference of the Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce:

“Right now we are an average state when it comes to computer science in schools. And by average I mean pathetic. Because as a country, we’re actually quite pathetic. Only 5% of the high schools in the entire country currently offer the AP course in computer science. In Washington state we have 771 high schools and last year the number that offered the AP course in computer science was 35. There will be some state in this country that becomes the first state to get computer science into every high school, and I ask, “Why not Washington?” We are a leader in this field. We recognize, we understand, that it is a field that is foundational not just for creating software but franky for creating almost everything.”

It’s worth 30 minutes of your time to watch Brad’s remarks, here. Read more →

Our crowd-sourced exponential fundraising effort for Levytown had stalled after Eric Rudder put up $400, doubling Gaetano Borriello’s $200, doubling Shyam Gollakota’s $80, doubling Marc Fiuczynski’s $40, doubling Dieter Fox’s $20, etc.

However, as a result of Brier Dudley’s column in today’s Seattle Times, Johnson Apacible has put up $800, leaving us only 16 gifts from having our new building fully funded.

Track the progress here. (Being conservative, we are not counting Marc Fiuczynski’s second gift, of $1,000,000.)

Seem unlikely? It worked for the Allen Center – here.

Track Levytown fundraising progress here!

Levytown update, October 29: Alums Yaw Anokwa and Hélène Martin have bested Johnson, contributing $1,600 to Levytown. Only 15 gifts to go! Who’ll be next??

Further update, October 30: Alum Sunil Garg is in for $3,200.  Only 14 more gifts needed to make Levytown a reality! Better move quickly!

Yet more, October 30: Alum Ratul Mahajan and his wife Marta Penas Centeno have doubled down on Sunil.  Only 13 more gifts needed to make Levytown a reality! Get in on the lower floors – the penthouse is expensive!

Wait! There’s more! On November 6, alums Jeff & Carolyn (Holmes) Hughes doubled down on Ratul & Marta! Only 12 more gifts to go!!!!!

November 7: The CSE faculty has claimed the next level!  11 more gifts to fully fund Levytown!

THANKS to all the participants!
Read more →

The Seattle Times reports on UW’s plans for an expanded facility for CSE, discussed at last week’s UW CSE Industry Affiliates meeting:

“Ten years after it opened, the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering still has that new-building smell.

“It’s a glorious home for the University of Washington’s esteemed computer science program, with polished wood and metal interiors that look more like Microsoft headquarters than a public school …

“More important, graduates have found jobs at pretty much all the world’s leading tech companies. The school is also an important center for research into emerging fields such as ‘big data’ analytics, machine learning and computer vision.

“The program is so successful and important that lawmakers shuffled the state’s scant education funding over the past two years to increase enrollment …

“There’s just one problem. The building is now full, and the program keeps growing.

“‘We have no more space – that’s going to be an issue for us in the future,’ Hank Levy, the department’s chairman, said last week during an annual meeting with tech companies that support the program and recruit its graduates.

“Levy then disclosed plans to build an entirely new computer science building across the street …

“The new center would house multidisciplinary programs, which are proliferating as computer science becomes integral to other fields of research.

“It could also accommodate surging demand for programming courses that’s coming from students across the university. During the past school year, 2,500 took the introductory course.

“‘More and more students are realizing they’ve got to be really well-versed in computational thinking, no matter what they’ll be doing,’ said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering.”

Read more here.  Learn more about our recent Industry Affiliates meeting here.  Learn about our home, the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering, here; learn about the Allen Center’s collection of art by UW-affiliated artists here.  Most importantly, learn about the crowd-sourced exponential funding effort for Levytown – our new building – here.  (This is a well-traveled path; see here.) Read more →

Research into the privacy and security of implantable medical electronics by UW CSE’s Yoshi Kohno and his collaborators continues to receive press attention following former Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent revelation that the wireless capabilities of his pacemaker/defibrillator had been disabled for security reasons:

“Many of the doctors hung up on him, Dr. [Kevin] Fu [of the University of Michigan] said, adding, ‘They thought I was crazy to worry about the security of a device in the chest.’

“Finally, he got together with a colleague, Tadayoshi Kohno, a computer security researcher at the University of Washington. The two investigators and their colleagues set to work seeing if they could breach the security of a defibrillator that had been removed from a patient’s chest.

“The defibrillator and the device used to program it communicated in their own language from a distance no greater than a few inches, Dr. Kohno said. The group figured out the language by turning various therapy commands on and off.

“‘We would intercept the communications,’ Dr. Kohno said. ‘Aha – this is the command that means ‘turn on,’ this is the command that means ‘turn off.’’ After they learned the communication language, ‘we could generate the commands ourselves.’

“At that time, ‘security was not on the radar yet for the medical device community,’ Dr. Fu said. ‘But there was a rapid trend toward wireless communication and Internet connectivity. We definitely raised awareness.'”

Read more here. Read more →

UW CSE chair Hank Levy joins UW Provost Ana Mari Cauce on the Husky Stadium field prior to the UW/Cal game. Read more →

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