Allen School News

On December 19th, the Seattle Police Department will host its first-ever Hackathon.

During the past five and a half years, SPD patrol car cameras have recorded 314,636 hours (or 364 terabytes) of 911 responses plus interviews with victims, witnesses and suspects. With 1,612,554 videos already on their servers – and more on the way through an upcoming body cam pilot program – SPD is looking for automated tools to assist in redacting videos so that they can be made accessible as public records: removing faces and voices from the recordings to protect the identities of victims, witnesses, and juveniles. (The current manual redaction process can take upwards of a half hour for a one minute video.)

UW CSE’s Will Scott

SPD’s creative approach? A call to the tech community to participate in a Hackathon on December 19th. UW CSE Ph.D. student Will Scott is quoted in a Seattle Times article:

“Will Scott, a co-captain of Code for America’s Seattle brigade and a computer science graduate student at the University of Washington, said Wagers contacted him for advice on how to plan a hackathon.

“‘Police data is one of the areas that has been seen as fairly sensitive, so it’s hard to get that information out,’ Scott said …

“Partnering with public agencies to release data and ‘foster forward-thinking approaches to solving city problems’ is the stated mission of San Francisco-based Code for America. The nonpartisan organization has been likened to a Peace Corps or Teach for America for the technology world.

“Scott said he’s setting aside his innate skepticism about working with police. ‘If we want them to work for us, how can they do that if we don’t tell them what we want?’ he said.”

Will has a long history of projects related to privacy on the web, most visibly his work on uProxy, a browser extension that lets users share alternative more secure routes to the Internet. (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.)

Seattle Times article here.  SPD Hackathon web page here.  Code for America web page here.  More on Will’s various projects here. Read more →

GeekWire reports on the relocation of UW CSE startup Impinj from Fremont to South Lake Union:

“Impinj is leaving its longtime headquarters in Seattle’s quirky Fremont neighborhood, heading to larger digs in the fast-growing and ever-changing South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle …

“A 14-year-old maker of RFID products which has undergone a resurgence in recent months, Impinj plans to take over the 11th and 12th floors of [a] 14-story building, which includes amenities such as large open floor plans and rooftop decks. It plans to move in later next year.”

Read more in GeekWire here. Learn about Impinj here. Read more →

Every year, the parents of UW CSE Ph.D. student Eric Mullen give him a Christmas tree ornament. This year they outdid themselves!

(How do I get one?!?!) Read more →

UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni, CEO of Paul G. Allen’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)

A phenomenal article by John Markoff in the New York Times, discussing the approaches of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, with extensive quotation of Paul G. Allen and AI2’s CEO (and UW CSE professor) Oren Etzioni.

“Mr. Allen, who noted that he came from a family of librarians, said his decision to fund an artificial intelligence research lab was inspired by the question of how books and other knowledge might be encoded to become the basis for computer interactions in which human questions might be answered more fully.

“‘AI2 was born from a desire to create a system that could truly reason about knowledge, rather than just offer up what had been written on a subject before,’ he wrote in an email interview …

“Dr. Etzioni says that the artificial intelligence field has made incremental advances in areas like vision and speech, but that we have gotten no closer to the larger goal of true human-level systems …

“‘I really don’t want a system that can’t explain itself to be my doctor,’ he said. ‘I can just imagine sitting there with Dr. Watson and the program saying, ‘Well, we need to remove a kidney, Mr. Etzioni,’ and I’m like, ‘What?!’ and they respond, ‘Well, we have a lot of variables and a lot of data, and that’s just what the model says.’ …

“At AI2 he is motivated by Mr. Allen’s view that ‘in order to be truly intelligent, computers must understand – that is probably the critical word,’ as the Microsoft co-founder put it in a 1977 interview.”

Read more here! Read more →

Microsoft General Counsel and Executive Vice President Brad Smith writes:

“Today represents an important milestone in our litigation concerning the U.S. Government’s attempt to use a search warrant to compel Microsoft to obtain and turn over email of a customer stored in Ireland. That’s because 10 groups are filing their ‘friend of the court’ briefs in New York today.

“Seldom has a case below the Supreme Court attracted the breadth and depth of legal involvement we’re seeing today. Today’s ten briefs are signed by 28 leading technology and media companies, 35 leading computer scientists, and 23 trade associations and advocacy organizations that together represent millions of members on both sides of the Atlantic.”

UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska led the 35 academic amici in the case, working with attorneys from Klarquist in Portland OR.

A video in which Lazowska explains the thrust of the academic amici’s argument is here.

The academic amici’s brief is here.  A list of all amici – academic and other – is here.

The Microsoft News website with a variety of background material is here. Read more →

UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska addresses the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board’s “Committee on Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure to Support US Science in 2017-2020.”

• “We have a crazy obsession with buying shiny objects – the bigger and more expensive, the better!”
• “We’re investing 9:1 in hardware over software – it ought to be the reverse!”
• “We have a dogged resistance to utilizing commercial software, services, and systems. We purchase our own. We operate our own. We roll our own. Often with amateurs. Why?”
• “Establish the use of commercial cloud services as the strong default for science at all scales. Every request to purchase computing equipment that won’t fit on a desktop should be rigorously justified. Invest in intellectual infrastructure, software infrastructure, and outsourced services, not big shiny objects.“

Check out the slides here. Read more →

“Many students in Stuart Reges’ computer science classes pull all-nighters, cramming in hopes of acing the introductory courses at the University of Washington.

“Little do they know that their professor is doing the same – just in front of an oven and with spatula in hand.

“A principal lecturer at the UW, Reges has baked chocolate chip cookies for his students during finals week for the past six years, a tradition that first began when he taught at Stanford in the early 80s. Back then, he had about 25 students in his class …

“But now – as the interest in computer science has grown and the UW program expands – class sizes have swelled. This year, Reges is teaching CSE 142 – a class with 1,000 students – and CSE 143 — a class with 400 students. (In fact, he’s responsible for about 1.5 percent of all credit hours at the university!)

“That means he baked 1,400 cookies for his students during finals week. That’s 116 dozen, or as colleague Ed Lazowska notes: 154,000 calories.

“Reges is not just a master cookie maker. He’s a darned good computer science professor, too. He won the UW Distinguished Teaching Award in 2011.

“No word yet on whether the sugar high helped students perform better on the finals.”

Read the full article in GeekWire here. Read more →

“The gist of our strategy was to use electrodes arranged on one person’s scalp to pick up brain waves, a technique known as electroencephalography … The signal would dictate how to electrically stimulate the recipient’s brain.”

Read more here.

  Read more →

UW News reports:

“University of Washington computer scientists have partnered with members of the Carbon Washington grassroots campaign to create an online tool that lets residents calculate how a state carbon tax swap proposed by the organization would impact them financially.

“The calculator offers information users can’t find elsewhere and is meant to be a neutral, unbiased tool.

“‘The tool should be very useful to voters trying to decide their position on the carbon tax policy. Many people will have broader societal motivations to vote one way or the other, but some may have serious worries about the impact of the tax on their own finances,’ said the tool’s creator, Justin Bare, a UW doctoral student advised by Alan Borning, a professor of Computer Science & Engineering.”

Read more here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. alum Anne Condon, Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, offers thoughts on addressing the gender imbalance in the field.

“It’s still the case today that anybody with a good high school background in science can get into computer science without any programming experience. But people probably think that without a computer background, they will get behind. That really isn’t true …

“High school students get very little exposure to computer science. I think they have preconceived ideas that are not accurate – that it’s not as interesting as science or engineering. But it’s really a very exciting field with huge opportunities. I’m also not sure girls are getting encouragement from teachers, counselors and parents.”

Read more here. Read more →