Allen School News

Chris Diorio, Yoky Matsuoka, and Shwetak Patel – plus virtual onlookers

On Wednesday, Madrona Venture Group hosted an Internet of Things media dinner in San Francisco.  Media attendees included journalists from Forbes, Fortune, NPR, the New York Times, Recode, Tech Review, Thomson Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Xconomy.

The panel was moderated by Madrona Managing Director Tom Alberg.  Panelists:

• Chris Diorio, co-founder and CTO of UW CSE startup Impinj (and former UW CSE faculty member), a leader in the RFID space.
• Shwetak Patel, co-founder UW CSE startup SNUPI Technologies (and current (and future!) UW CSE and EE faculty member), whose Wally system is revolutionizing environmental sensing for the home.
• Yoky Matsuoka, VP of Technology for Nest (and former UW CSE faculty member), innovator in smart thermostats recently acquired by Google.

Many thanks to Tom and our many other friends at Madrona for continuing to feature UW CSE! Read more →

UW CSE affiliate professor (and Microsoft Research staff member) Sumit Gulwani has received the 2014 ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions by young investigators in the area of programming languages.

Sumit has made pioneering contributions to the field of programming languages, especially in the areas of program analysis and program synthesis. Building on his foundational work in program analysis including using randomized algorithms, improving abstract interpretation, and reasoning about programs as continuous functions, Sumit recognized the important connection between program verification and program synthesis

Congratulations Sumit!  Read more here. Read more →

At today’s University of Washington Awards of Excellence ceremony, UW Provost Ana Mari Cauce presented CSE professor Gaetano Borriello with the 2014 Marsha L. Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award, and CSE Ph.D. alumnus (and UW-Tacoma professor) Donald Chinn with one of seven 2014 Distinguished Teaching Awards.

Congratulations Gaetano and Donald!

Read more →

Julia Schumacher, Sand Point Elementary School

Sand Point Elementary, a public school near the University of Washington, has started to incorporate programming classes into their curriculum. They are using the wildly popular Scratch language, which lets the students visually compose programs that animate small sprites on the screen. These sprites can be controlled by the user and can interact with each other.

“By exposing students at a young age to programming, we begin to build in them an idea of the potential for their futures. Instead of being consumers of technology, they are now creators of technology. It’s very empowering” says Julia Schumacher, school librarian and computer lab teacher.

With the help of UW CSE’s Allison Obourn and Magda Balazinska, the school ran a pilot set of 12 class sessions with 5th grade students this past year. The team plans to expand the offering next year. “Our goal is to teach some programming to the kids before they begin to think whether programming is fun or not or whether it is for them or not. Programming should simply be one of the many tools children learn in school” says Magda.

Students were enthusiastic: “Scratch is cool and I like to make the sprites move” and “I love to play the games on Scratch and it’s cool that we can make our own now.”

One of the most exciting outcomes of this pilot program is that, after this series of classes, students would choose to continue to write programs on their own whenever they had free time in the computer lab. “It is important to introduce students to computer science to increase access to the field” concludes Allison.

(Sand Point Elementary is a diverse school: over 60% free-and reduced lunch participants, 27% English language learners, 29% African American, 29% White, 26% Asian, 16% Hispanic, and 4% Native American.) Read more →

UW News reports:

“Computer scientists from the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle have created the first fully automated computer program that teaches everything there is to know about any visual concept. Called Learning Everything about Anything, or LEVAN, the program searches millions of books and images on the Web to learn all possible variations of a concept, then displays the results to users as a comprehensive, browsable list of images, helping them explore and understand topics quickly in great detail.”

Read more here. Read more →

Check out the Spring 2014 issue of most significant bits, the UW CSE alumni magazine.  Stories include:

• Multiple initiatives in “big data”
• New members of the CSE faculty
• Alumni Achievement Awards to Jeff Dean (Ph.D. 1996) and Gail Murphy (Ph.D. 1996)
• College of Engineering Diamond Award to Brad Fitzpatrick (B.S. 2002)
• Przemek Pardyak (A.B.D. 2000) and Usermind
• Christophe Bisciglia (B.S. 2003) and WibiData
• Shiri Azenkot (Ph.D. 2014) wins 2014 Graduate School Medal
• Martina Unutzer (B.S. 2014) recognized in 2014 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research competition
• Gaetano Borriello wins UW’s 2014 Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award
• Richard Ladner wins SIGCHI Social Impact Award
• Shyan Oveis Gharan recognized in 2013 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award competition
• and lots more!

Pdf here.  Html here. Read more →

Several years ago, we established the tradition of honoring two outstanding UW Computer Science & Engineering alumni each year as part of our graduation ceremony. In doing this, we have three objectives:

• To honor some of our most distinguished alumni by recognizing their extraordinary achievements.
• To ensure that graduating students know that they are joining a long tradition of excellence and accomplishment.
• To inspire current members of the UW CSE graduating class.

The recipients of the 2014 UW CSE Alumni Achievement Awards are Jeff Dean and Gail Murphy.

Jeff – a 1996 Ph.D. alum – is Senior Fellow at Google. Working with his colleague Sanjay Ghemawat, Jeff is responsible for much of Google’s groundbreaking scalable infrastructure, such as MapReduce and BigTable.  More recently he has turned his attention to “deep learning.” Jeff is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the ACM, and recipient of the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, the ACM Infosys Foundation Award, and the UW College of Engineering Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement.

Gail – also a 1996 Ph.D. alum – is Professor of  Computer Science and Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia. She is also a co-founder and Chief Scientist at Tasktop Technologies Incorporated. Her research interests are in software engineering with a particular interest in improving the productivity of knowledge workers, including software developers.

Read more about Jeff and Gail in MSB here.  Learn about our previous UW CSE Alumni Achievement Award winners here. Read more →

In the New York Times special section on Cloud Computing (which also identified Seattle as the “the center of the most intensive engineering in cloud computing”), CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Dean – Google Senior Fellow – is quoted extensively:

“Jeff Dean, a research fellow at Google, focuses on accelerating the progress of artificial intelligence in tasks like computer vision and understanding the meaning of words. Until a few years ago, for example, Google image searches were executed mainly by identifying the text labels affixed to pictures. Today, many images are identified by software analyzing the patterns of digital pixels in a picture or video. And, Mr. Dean said, the technology can pick out a leopard in a picture, and know it is not a lion or a cheetah, recognizing the distinctive pixel patterns of various big cats.

“Mobilizing the firepower of Google’s large cloud data centers, Mr. Dean said, enables his team to ‘bring a lot of computation to bear on these kinds of problems.’ …

“His team’s advanced artificial intelligence research, known as deep learning, is ‘loosely inspired by knowledge of how the brain works,’ Mr. Dean said. But there are things the human brain does that silicon-based computing still only aspires to …

“‘We don’t have a great handle on how to build those kinds of dynamically evolving memory systems,’ Mr. Dean said. ‘Google and others are working on that, but it’s really nascent.'”

Read more here.

Jeff will receive the 2014 University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering Alumni  Achievement Award at our graduation ceremony on Saturday. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. alum Stefan Savage – star professor at UCSD CSE – turned 45 today.

At some point Stefan had expressed a fondness for Adirondack chairs. His UCSD faculty colleagues, led by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Geoff Voelker, came through.

Said Stefan, after reality met fantasy head-on:

“What is theory with these?  Is this some kind of New England Calvinist thing where sitting on your lawn on a nice day felt too good so, inspired by church pews, they designed the most awkward sitting experience they could whereby you could prove, through your own clear pain, that you were not engaging in the deadly sin of sloth?

“Seriously, what other chair can simultaneously hurt your back, knees and hips … while still providing multiple opportunities for splinter placement?  It is a marvel of anti-ergonomics …”

(We presume that’s Klingon for “Thanks for the thoughtful gift!”) Read more →

Ed Lazowska comments in response to this New York Times article:

“The real message in this article is easy to miss:

“‘Moonshots’ are heroic engineering efforts that draw upon decades of fundamental research. Without fundamental research, there can be no moonshots.

“So, who’s doing it? ‘Back in the day,’ IBM Research and Bell Labs invested in fundamental research, alongside the Federal government. Today, to first approximation, only Microsoft (through Microsoft Research) does so. Google X, as Astro Teller states, is in the moonshot business. Most other companies are in the ‘nothing but engineering the next release of the product’ business, or in the ‘R&D via M&A business.’

“God bless Microsoft Research for augmenting the Federal investment in fundamental research in information technology: Microsoft spends roughly as much on Microsoft Research as the National Science Foundation spends on computer science research – 95% of it published in the open literature, and much of it in collaboration with university researchers.”

Read the article, and this comment and others, here. Read more →