Allen School News

A special group of friends and alumni joined us on Wednesday evening for an hour of demos by UW CSE computer vision faculty Ali Farhadi, Ira Kemelmacher, Steve Seitz and their students, followed by dinner.  Guests included Paul G. Allen, Austin & Pam Dahl, Benjamin Diament, Mike & Jenn Fridgen, Ed Fries, Bob Fries, Kirk Glerum, Ron Howell, Andy & Elana Jassy, Cam Myhrvold, Rob Short, Chris Stolte, and John & Patti Torode. Read more →

Jerry Large writes in the Seattle Times:

“Jessan Hutchison-Quillian, a young Google engineer in Seattle, uses his time and money to fight poverty and income inequality …

“Hutchison-Quillan, 27, wants this to be a more just and generous society. Achieving that can require some revolutionary action, and it’s true that his upbringing helped shape his values.

“What drew my attention to him is this:  He graduated from the University of Washington at 19 (computer science, because it was fun); in June 2007 he took a job offered by Google and decided his pay, more than $100,000, was way more than he needed to live comfortably, so he started giving a growing portion (40 percent now) to causes he believes in, and now he’s helping other people embrace philanthropy.”

In addition to his personal dedication to social justice causes (such as Social Justice Fund NW), Jessan is one of three UW CSE alums (the others are Krista Davis and Jeff Prouty) who created Google’s G-Give program and supporting software on their 20% time, and who are now full-time engineers on Google’s corporate social responsibility team.

Read this inspiring Seattle Times profile here (see also pdf and jpg).

  Read more →

The UW School of Public Health profiles Saloni Parikh, an undergraduate in UW’s interdisciplinary honors program majoring in Public Health and Computer Science:

Learn the latest about DawgBytes, UW CSE’s K-12 outreach efforts:

• Our multiple DawgBytes summer camps in computing!
• The Paul Allen Computing Challenge!
• Engineering Discovery Days!
• Programming contests!
• AP CS review and ice cream social!
• Summer opportunities for teachers!

Here’s the latest update.  Here’s the DawgBytes Facebook page. Read more →

On March 8th, twenty high school women from Washington State were honored at UW CSE with Awards for Aspirations in Computing from the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT).  We also recognized the two national NCWIT award winners from Washington State, Sampurna Basu and Alisha Saxena.

The NCWIT Awards for Aspirations in Computing honor young women at the high school level for their computing-related achievements and interests.

Awardees are selected for their computing and IT aptitude, leadership ability, academic history, and plans for post-secondary education.

On March 8th we also recognized Maureen Coulton, CS teacher at Holy Names, as the Washington State Educator Award winner.  The Holy Names CS program has grown rapidly over the past few years and has inspired many young women to pursue computing!

Many in the extended CSE community contributed to making this event a success.  Kate Starbird from Human Centered Design and Engineering gave a fantastic keynote.  Steph Burg from Microsoft (UW CSE Professional Masters Program student), Katie Chironis from Signal Studios, Krista Davis from Google (UW CSE alumna), and Colleen Ross from buuteeq Inc. (UW CSE alumna) were a great career panel.

CSE students Mike Chung, Hannah Misenar and Jessica Wong gave the girls a chance to program a PR2 robot by demonstration, and Lauren Milne exposed them to projects making technology more accessible.

CSE student Jen Kang was our fantastic photographer, and CSE professor Ed Lazowska spoke to the parents. Last but not least, CSE faculty member Hélène Martin organized and emceed the entire event.

Many thanks to Google, our primary sponsor.  And thanks to CSE alumna Sierra Michels Slettvet and friends for donating a FitBit for each winner, to the Museum of Flight for giving them passes and to Valve for providing great swag.

Congratulations to the award recipients, their parents, and their teachers.  We hope to see the award recipients as UW CSE students soon! Read more →

Kyle Rector, a fourth-year UW CSE Ph.D. student, has developed Eyes-Free Yoga, which uses Microsoft Kinect to track body movements and quickly offer verbal feedback for various yoga poses. A mix of a video game and exercise, Eyes-Free yoga makes a typically visual exercise accessible to people without sight.

Kyle is featured on the Microsoft Facebook Page and in Microsoft’s “The Fire Hose” news blog.

Learn more about Kyle and her work here. Read more →

Columns, the University of Washington alumni magazine, reports on data science activities at UW:

“Lazowska describes several challenges. Researchers are confronted with a tsunami of data that is rapidly growing in volume, velocity and variety. Even the best researchers often lack the expertise to effectively move ‘from data to knowledge to action.’ The tools and techniques are evolving rapidly. New partnerships are required. New approaches to educating the next generation of researchers, too – facilitated by a new major Interdisciplinary Graduate Education (IGERT) award to UW from the National Science Foundation. Finally, new career paths must be created for the individuals who build the tools that enable this new approach to discovery. The grant and partnership with Cal, NYU and the foundations, plus the NSF IGERT award, are allowing the UW to take a big step in enabling this ‘fourth paradigm’ and ensuring a future in which the UW will expand its role as one of the world’s powerhouse research universities.”

Read more in Columns here.  Learn more about UW’s data science activities here. Read more →

In honor of International Women’s Day, March 8, Microsoft is celebrating “five dynamic Microsoft women inspiring change in technology” – including Microsoft software developer and UW CSE Professional Masters Program student Steph Burg:

“She says she hopes her efforts at outreach will help middle- and high-school girls realize that they can be in her shoes someday.  ‘If I can show them this exists, and it’s fun, maybe I’ll be for them what that friend was for me when he said, ‘You have the right brain to do this.””

Read this and the four other profiles (including one of Harvey Mudd College President, Microsoft Board of Directors member, and UW CSE friend Maria Klawe) here. Read more →

Brad Fitzpatrick, UW CSE ’02, will receive the 2014 UW College of Engineering 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.  He is perhaps best known as the creator of LiveJournal, an Internet tool that helped popularize blogging and was one of the earliest social networks. His Memcached technology, created to support LiveJournal’s exploding user community, is used today by most web-scale services including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Wikipedia and Craigslist.

Brad and this year’s other Diamond Award recipients will be honored at an awards dinner on June 5.

Congratulations Brad!  Learn more here. Read more →

The UW Daily reports on our new graduate program in Data Science, funded by an NSF IGERT (interdisciplinary graduate education) award:

“The big data Ph.D. track is a new interdisciplinary program at the UW … Five departments are participating in the track: computer science and engineering, statistics, astronomy, oceanography, and chemical engineering. Students who are accepted into the program take courses in data management, data visualization, statistics, and machine learning, in addition to the degree requirements laid out by their home department.”

Magda Balazinska, Carlos Guestrin, and Emily Fox are quoted.

“‘The key to discovery … is increasingly centered around data analysis,’ Balazinska said.”

Read more here.  Learn about our Data Science activities here. Read more →