Allen School News

“Rain or shine, Seattle has quickly become the center of the most intensive engineering in cloud computing: the design and management of global-scale data centers …

“Besides talent that knows how to build infrastructure, Seattle has a number of leading cloud software companies. Tableau Software, a leader in the computer visualization of large sets of data, is across the street from Google in Fremont. Concur, used for online expense forms, is in Bellevue, near Microsoft Azure. Other companies include Chef, which produces open source cloud automation software; Apptio, a cloud monitoring company, and Socrata, which stores and publishes over 100,000 data sets for 150 government organizations …

“Another factor is the growing presence of the University of Washington’s computer science department, now considered a leader in distributed computing. ‘There’s an argument that Seattle owns the cloud now,’ said Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the university. ‘Universities are always part of the axis’ in building out a regional tech center, he said.

“The university, which awards about 250 computer science degrees a year, is now working on courses in machine learning, which is how computers, particularly in the cloud, study and adapt based on big streams of data.

“‘The cloud and big data are closely connected,’Mr. Lazowska said. ‘We’re incredibly lucky to be in Seattle.'”

Read more here. Read more →

UW CSE and Brave New Software partnered to develop uProxy, a project seeded by Google Ideas.

One out of every three people live in societies where free expression is severely restricted. When corrupt or repressive groups control the Internet’s infrastructure, they often subject their citizens’ Internet traffic to censorship, surveillance, and misdirection. uProxy enables friends to provide each other with a trusted pathway to the web.

This week, Googlers and UW CSE students are participating in a uProxy hackathon in the Allen Center.

Learn more about uProxy here and here. Read more →

A memorial service was held today for Eliana Hechter, who died on Wednesday, April 16, 2014.

Eliana was briefly a CSE major, but graduated magna cum laude from the University of Washington in 2006 – at the age of 18 – with a degree in mathematics. She received a Goldwater Scholarship and was a 2006 Rhodes Scholar – at the time the second-youngest person to ever receive the Rhodes. She was also selected for a Marshall Scholarship but declined in order to accept the Rhodes. At Oxford University Eliana earned her Ph.D. in statistics. At the time of her death she was a first-year medical student at the joint Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program.

Eliana is survived by her father, former UW professor Michael Hechter. Her mother, Debra Friedman, passed away in January 2014 from cancer; Debra was the chancellor of UW Tacoma at the time of her death but previously had been instrumental in establishing Undergraduate Academic Affairs on the Seattle campus, where she was a strong supporter of CSE. Read more →

During …

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California Chrome lost.  You should have put your money on UW CSE academic advisor Tina Donahue instead.  Tina took the Women’s Category 4 race in the 2014 Ballard Criterium by 15 lengths, as well as taking all but one of the intermediate sprint prizes (and you’d have to be nuts to sprint for a gift certificate to the Lock & Keel).

Congratulations Tina! Read more →

Dr. James Mickens, renowned researcher in the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft’s Redmond lab and recipient of the 2040 ACM A.M. Turing Award, delivered a stirring keynote at today’s UW CSE Potentially Computer Science Conference 2014 (PoCSci ‘14), “The Premier Sham Conference for Potentially Computer Science Research.”

PoCSci is the conference that in 2002 – its second year – revolutionized the field of Potentially Computer Science Research through Doug Zongker’s work “Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken” (YouTube video of Zongker’s presentation at AAAS 2007 here).

James’s slides are unfortunately Microsoft Confidential (hence the black rectangles on the image above), due to extreme measures recently taken by Peter Lee (Corporate Vice President and Head of Microsoft Research) to protect Microsoft’s intellectual assets and to shield the public from what happened to the University of Michigan’s computer science Ph.D. program in the 20 years between his own graduation and James’s. However, you can see some of James’s related work here and here (our thanks to Edward Snowden for providing these links).

Presentations that followed James’s keynote included:

• A. Conrad Nied. OneSnackAway: The Next Generation in Mobile Snack Apps
• Alex Mariakakis and Vincent Lee. The Marauder’s Map
• Doug Woos. Angry Ltac: An Expressive DSL for Verifying Trivial Lemmas About Linked Lists
• Benjamin Wood. PIGINT: Pig Brother + Pig Data, building from related work presented at PoCSci 2013
• Jeremy Hyrkas, Pavel Panchekha, and Karl Koscher. Karaoke talks

Many thanks to James for getting PoCSci ’14 off to an appropriate start. Read more →

Regular readers of this space will recall that three weeks ago Luis Ceze’s knee was destroyed at a social event organized by Hank Levy.

We are pleased to report that Luis has surfaced once again (he has been seen by us only in X-rays up to this point), sporting a lasting memento of Hank’s hospitality.

Says Luis, who looks in the bright side of everything: “Now that I have a handicapped sticker, I can go to Capitol Hill for dinner and find parking!”

Addendum, echoing a Facebook exchange:

Jim Larus: Hank is still on the loose – are you nervous?

Ed Lazowska: Hank and Ronit fled to France a week ago. We assume he’s seeking asylum and we’ll never see him again. So we feel reasonably secure here for the time being.

There were more than 850 students in UW’s introductory programming class last quarter. Total enrollment in the past year was 2,700.

“Young adults today are realizing how computer science knowledge can help them succeed at not just being a software developer, but with nearly any job. Heck, even journalists like us are being encouraged to take a few Javascript and HTML courses.

“‘Kids are waking up,’ said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the UW. ‘Every field is becoming an information field, and if you can program at a level beyond an intro course, it’s a huge value to you.'”

Read more here. Read more →

Brad Fitzpatrick and family

Brad Fitzpatrick and Dean of Engineering Michael Bragg

At the 2014 UW College of Engineering Diamond Awards celebration on Thursday night, 2002 CSE Bachelors alum Brad Fitzpatrick received the Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement. Brad is a widely respected leader in the open-source community, improving software development culture and creating open source projects used by millions of web sites around the world. Early-on, he created Memcached to support the exploding user community of his social network startup LiveJournal – today used by most web-scale services including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Wikipedia and Craigslist. For the past five years he has been at Google, working on the Go programming language and Camlistore.

Congratulations to Brad and the other Diamond Award recipients: Eric B. Denton, P.E., ’51 BS & MS Chemical Engineering, who brought computer automation to the timber industry; Simon Sze, ’60 MS Electrical Engineering, who invented FLASH memory and wrote Physics of Semiconductor Devices, one of the most cited works in contemporary engineering; Randy Kurosky, ’88 BS Ceramic Engineering, co-inventor of two ceramic oxide powder processes and engineer of over 3,000 different metallic oxide compositions; and Daniel J. Evans, ’48 BS, ’49 MS Civil Engineering, former Governor, U.S. Senator, university president, and civic leader.

Watch a video celebrating Brad’s accomplishments here. Read more →

On Tuesday evening, UW CSE hosted the awards ceremony for Western Washington’s Youth Apps Challenge.

Sponsored by the Technology Alliance, the Youth Apps Challenge provided middle school and high school students the opportunity to design and build apps. Teams of up to five students were eligible to participate. Prizes for the winning students included Android tablets, t-shirts, and visits to local technology companies.

The apps were amazing! Learn more here. Read more →

On Monday and Tuesday, UW CSE’s Richard Ladner hosted a workshop that brought together 19 blind or vision-impaired college students in science and engineering fields from across the nation, 13 blind or vision-impaired STEM professionals, and a number of regional civic, technology, and education leaders.  It was a truly inspirational two days.

The students themselves were hugely impressive – many of them are sure to become leaders in STEM fields.

The professionals were extraordinary. To mention just a few (read about them all here):

• A blind Ph.D. atmospheric scientist working at NOAA.
• A blind Ph.D. in linguistics working at Nuance.
• A blind Ph.D. cancer biologist working at the Advanced Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory at the University Health Network in Toronto.
• A blind history and computer science major who works at the Defense Information Systems Agency.

Civic, technology, and education leaders who participated included Zillow CTO Dave Beitel, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, University of Washington Provost Ana Mari Cauce, State Representative (and technology entrepreneur) Reuven Carlyle, UW Materials Science professor Kannan Krishnan, UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska, and founder and director of UW’s DO-IT Center and Access Technology Center Sheryl Burgstahler.

It’s impossible to describe the impact of this event on all of the attendees!

Learn more about Empowering Blind Students in Science and Engineering here. Read more →