2011 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Roxana Geambasu, now on the faculty at Columbia University, is one of 14 faculty members worldwide named 2014 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows.
Roxana’s research concerns computer systems in a broad sense, including distributed systems, the Web, security and privacy, operating systems, and databases. More specifically, her current research focuses on the challenges and opportunities created by today’s emerging technologies, such as the Web, cloud computing, and powerful mobile devices.
Roxana joins a long line of UW CSE faculty members and alums who have been honored with Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowships: Ph.D. alum Emma Brunskill (faculty at Carnegie Mellon) in 2012; faculty member Shwetak Patel and Ph.D. alum Noah Snavely (faculty at Cornell) in 2011; faculty member Luis Ceze in 2009; faculty member Magda Balazinska in 2007; and postdoc alum Aaron Hertzmann in 2006.
Congratulations Roxana! Read more →
GeekWire reports:
“Linden Rhoads, who helped boost the number of startups coming out of the University of Washington over the past six years, is stepping down as vice provost of commercialization to return to private industry …
“In a related move, the UW announced that electrical engineering professor Vikram Jandhyala will assume the new role of Vice Provost of Innovation …
“Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, said that Rhoads helped usher in a new era at the University.
“‘She has done many hugely innovative things – particularly notable because she inherited an office in complete disarray due to terrible leadership by her predecessor,’ said Lazowska.
“He added that Jandhyala is a ‘gem.’ ‘The tragedy is that he has stepped down as chair of UW’s Electrical Engineering department, where he was doing a phenomenal job,’ said Lazowska. ‘The good news is that, once he made the decision to step down from EE, the Provost recruited him for this new role.'”
Read more here. Read more →
Writes Geoff Voelker‘s fellow UW CSE Ph.D. alum and fellow UC San Diego Computer Science and Engineering faculty member Stefan Savage: “I apologize that I was unable to get the photo from the award ceremony … semi-formal … in which Geoff was surrounded by all the sorority members honoring him.”
Congratulations, Geoff! Read more →
The USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award (“The Flame”) recognizes and celebrates singular contributions to the operating systems, distributed systems, and networking communities of both intellectual achievement and service.
This year’s USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award has been presented to UW CSE professor (and UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus) Tom Anderson for multiple contributions, including the Nachos operating system course project, the PlanetLab global distributed system research platform, extraordinary student mentoring, and co-founding NSDI, the USENIX Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation.
The citation reads: “The 2014 USENIX Flame Award goes to Tom Anderson. Tom has worked tirelessly to build a thriving research and USENIX community around systems building and experimental research. Tom is the embodiment of USENIX values and has carried the community forward as much as anyone. Tom receives the USENIX Flame Award for his work on mentoring students and colleagues, constructing educational tools, building research infrastructure, creating new research communities, and communicating his substantial understanding through a comprehensive textbook.”
Congratulations Tom! (Read about it on the USENIX website here.) Read more →
The USENIX Software Tools Award recognizes significant contributions to the community that reflect the spirit and character demonstrated by those who came together in the Software Tools User Group. Recipients of the award conspicuously exhibit a contribution to the reusable code-base available to all and/or the provision of a significant enabling technology to users in a widely available form.
This year’s USENIX Software Tools Award has been presented to UW CSE professor (and UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus) Tom Anderson and his colleagues Mic Bowman, David Culler, Larry Peterson, and Mothy Roscoe for the creation of PlanetLab.
The citation reads: “The 2014 STUG Award goes to Tom Anderson, Mic Bowman, David Culler, Larry Peterson, and Timothy Roscoe for PlanetLab. PlanetLab enables multiple distributed services to run over a shared, wide-area infrastructure. The PlanetLab software system introduced distributed virtualization (aka “slicing”), unbundled management (where management services run within their own slices), and chain of responsibility (mediating between slice users and infrastructure owners). The PlanetLab experimental platform consists of 1186 machines at 582 sites that run this software to enable researchers to evaluate ideas in a realistic environment and offer long-running services (e.g., content distribution networks) for real users. The PlanetLab software package has been adopted, and extended, by numerous other projects (e.g., OneLab, CoreLab, G-Lab, VINI, M-Lab, VICCI, and OpenCloud).”
Congratulations Tom (and Mic, David, Larry, and Mothy)! (Read about it on the USENIX website here.) Read more →
Google has just announced the winners of its 2014 Google Ph.D. Fellowships.
Among the 14 winners of North American fellowships are two UW CSE Ph.D. students, Vincent Liu and Robert Gens.
Vincent works with CSE faculty member Tom Anderson (and many others) in the broad area of distributed systems and networking. His projects have touched on fault-tolerance, security, data centers, wireless networks, clean-slate Internet architecture, routing/addressing, and the economic aspects of the Internet. (His undergraduate research, at the University of Texas, was in the area of compilers and parallel systems, but he saw the light.)
Rob works with CSE faculty member Pedro Domingos. He studies deep learning (multi-layer neural networks), seeking architectural principles that will allow computers to understand the megapixels of our visual world as rapidly as we do.
Congratulations to Vincent and Rob, and thanks to Google! (Google has been very generous in supporting UW CSE’s extraordinary students through this highly competitive program. Adrian Sampson was a 2013 winner. Tom Bergan was a 2011 winner. Roxana Geambasu and Mike Piatek were 2009 winners.)
See the Google announcement here. Read more →
An article in the Seattle Times makes it clear. Between 1991 and 2014, per-capita taxpayer support for the University of Washington has decreased 62% – from $95 per capita to $36 per capita. (Per-capita taxpayer support for Washington’s community college system has decreased by only 28%, and is now 2.5 times as great as support for UW: $89 vs. $36.)
Sometimes, you get what you pay for …
Read the article here. Read more →
Andrew Putnam presents Catapult at ISCA
In a paper presented by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Andrew Putnam at this week’s International Symposium on Computer Architecture, Microsoft researchers described the use of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to deliver performance improvements of as much as 95 percent on Bing search. It’s incredibly cool and high-impact work!
The paper, “A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large-Scale Datacenter Services,” had 23 authors(!). In addition to Andrew, the principal technical contributors to the work were Doug Burger (Director of Client & Could Apps at Microsoft Research, and a UW CSE adjunct professor), Adrian Caulfield (MSR, and a UW CSE bachelors alum who received his Ph.D. at UCSD from UW CSE Ph.D. alum Steve Swanson), Derek Chiou (University of Texas faculty member), and Eric Chung (MSR).
Quoting from the abstract: “Datacenter workloads demand high computational capabilities, flexibility, power efficiency, and low cost… To advance datacenter capabilities beyond what commodity server designs can provide, we have designed and built a composable, reconfigurable fabric to accelerate portions of large-scale software services. Each instantiation of the fabric consists of a 6×8 2-D torus of high-end Stratix V FPGAs embedded into a half-rack of 48 machines… In this paper, we describe a medium-scale deployment of this fabric on a bed of 1,632 servers, and measure its efficacy in accelerating the Bing web search engine… Under high load, the large-scale reconfigurable fabric improves the ranking throughput of each server by a factor of 95% for a fixed latency distribution – or, while maintaining equivalent throughput, reduces the tail latency by 29%.”
Read the paper here. Read a Wired article here. Read a Microsoft press release here. Read more →
UW CSE’s 2013-14 Ph.D. graduates
A record 317 degrees were conferred by UW CSE on Saturday: 205 Bachelors students, 84 Masters students, and 28 Doctoral students were recognized at UW CSE’s graduation ceremony in Meany Hall Theater.
Congratulations to all of our students! And a few special shout-outs:
- Gaetano Borriello received the ACM Student Chapter Teaching Award. (Gaetano also received the 2014 University of Washington Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award.)
- Jennifer Apacible received CSE’s Undergraduate Service Award.
Zorah and Gaetano give each other the giggles
- Nick Martindale received CSE’s Outstanding Undergraduate Honors Thesis Award.
- Samantha Courts and Eric Lei shared CSE’s Outstanding Computer Science Senior Award.
- Yanling He received CSE’s Outstanding Computer Engineering Senior Award.
- Sunjay Cauligi, Zach Cava, Tristan Huber, and Hye In Kim received the Bob Bandes Memorial Excellence in Teaching Award (presented to the best of the best of our 100+ teaching assistants). Nathaniel Guy and Riley Porter received Honorable Mention.
Congratulations to all of our wonderful graduates!
- Jeff Dean (Google) and Gail Murphy (University of British Columbia), both 1996 Ph.D. graduates, received the 2014 UW CSE Alumni Achievement Awards.
Bruce Hemingway photographs:
Mayank Goel photographs here.
Steve Ballmer wows the crowd
In the afternoon, at UW’s 139th commencement in Husky Stadium,
Steve Ballmer received an honorary Doctor of Science degree (nominated by CSE’s Ed Lazowska) and gave a rousing address.
Again, congratulations, one and all! Read more →
UW EE Ph.D. student Julie Medero will join the Computer Science faculty at Harvey Mudd College in the fall.
A few of the many Mudders now in UW CSE and EE gathered with Julie in the Atrium to tell her all the things they had kept to themselves while she was considering the job. (Just kidding! Mudd is a phenomenal school and one of our top sources of Ph.D. students!)
Left to right: Dan Halperin (CSE and eScience Institute), Lilian de Greef (CSE), Edward Wang (EE), Calvin Loncaric (CSE), Eric Mullen (CSE), and Julie.
Congratulations to Julie on landing a great position, and to HMC on landing a great faculty member. And … keep sending us those great students! Read more →
