Allen School News

Amazon.com (2), Starbucks (5), Costco (12), Nordstrom (17), and Microsoft (24).

Go team!  Read more here. Read more →

  Friday marked the annual UW CSE WinterFest, presented by the UW CSE ACM student chapter and sponsored by Facebook (thank you!)

Food … games … music …

Students, faculty, and staff had a terrific time! Read more →

UW CSE startup SNUPI Technologies (co-founded by faculty Shwetak Patel and Matt Reynolds, graduate student Gabe Cohn, and alum Jeremy Jaech) is featured in this month’s Seattle Business magazine:

“The so-called internet of things, in which objects transfer data without requiring human interaction, is so hot that Google recently invested $3.2 billion in Nest Labs, which sells a ‘smart’ household thermostat that learns the owner’s behavior to reduce energy use.

“This infatuation isn’t lost on SNUPI Technologies, which is debuting its Wally ‘home-sensing’ network online (wallyhome.com) and at home shows across the country.

“Wally’s low-power wireless system detects potential environmental hazards by monitoring moisture, temperature and humidity changes inside a home. ‘Wally provides peace of mind to homeowners,’ says CEO [and UW CSE alum] Jeremy Jaech. ‘If we can set a model for what is normal in your home, we can tell you when it’s not normal.'”

Read more here.  Learn about SNUPI Technologies’ first product, Wally, here. Read more →

AllSee is the first gesture-recognition system that can operate on a range of computing devices including those with no batteries. AllSee consumes three to four orders of magnitude lower power than state-of-the-art systems and can enable always-on gesture recognition for smartphones and tablets. It extracts gesture information from existing wireless signals (e.g., TV transmissions), but does not incur the power and computational overheads of prior wireless approaches.

UW CSE’s Shyam Gollakota, Bryce Kellogg, and Vamsi Talla are the innovators.

UW News article here.  AllSee project webpage here. Read more →

A partial ROC Cabinet reshuffle was announced February 26 by Premier Jiang Yi-huah.

The premier named Chang San-cheng the inaugural Minister of Science and Technology, and named 1990 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Jason Yi-Bing Lin as Deputy Minister with a portfolio that includes the National Science Council, Taiwan’s NSF.  Jiang emphasized the importance of continuing the NSC’s tradition of cultivating a strong fundamental research capability, assisting academia to direct its resourceful creativity toward innovative entrepreneurship, and enhancing the global competitiveness of local high-tech industries.

Lin has had enormous career impact. Following his UW CSE Ph.D. (where he worked with Ed Lazowska), he spent five years at Bell Communications Research before joining the faculty of National Chiao Tung University in his native Taiwan. His research interests include personal communications, mobile computing, intelligent network signaling, computer telephony integration, and parallel simulation. The author of five books, hundreds of papers, and dozens of patents, he is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. He currently serves as Dean of the College of Computer Science at NCTU, and as NCTU Vice President, as well as holding a lifetime Chair Professorship.

Congratulations Jason!  Read more here.  Jason’s personal web page here. Read more →

UW CSE professors Tom Anderson, Shyam Gollakota, Ira Kemelmacher, and Dan Weld have been named as recipients in the latest round of Google Faculty Research Awards.

Google received 691 proposals from 46 countries on 6 continents, and made 115 awards.

Other UW recipients were Jeff Bilmes (EE; CSE adjunct professor), Chris Rudell (EE), and Jake Wobbrock (iSchool; CSE adjunct professor).

UW CSE Ph.D. alums fared extraordinarily well in the competition: Hadi Esmaeilzadeh (Georgia Tech faculty), Zack Ives (Penn faculty), Ethan Katz-Bassett (USC faculty), Miryung Kim (UT Austin faculty), and Chris Re (Stanford faculty) were recipients.

Go team! Learn more here! Read more →

“Wondering what steps you can take to reduce your cancer risk? Dr. Anne McTiernan, a cancer prevention researcher in the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, offers the following tips …”

Read them here. Read more →

President Obama recently sent a hand-written note of apology to University of Texas Senior Lecturer in Art History Ann Collins Johns, resolving a flap that began a few weeks previously when, during an event at a GE gas engine plant in Wisconsin, the President emphasized that Americans would be better off if more of them could work in the manufacturing industry. “Manufacturing jobs typically pay well,”  he said. And while some young people might not think of the skilled trades as a lucrative career, Obama added, they can probably earn more “than they might [with] an art history degree.”

CNN asked UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska to provide a 650-word written commentary, on 6 hours’ notice. He complied. They rejected it. But through the magic of the interweb, you can read it here. Read more →

Writing in the Computing Community Consortium blog, Ran Libeskind-Hadas discusses desiderata for computer science courses for non-majors, specifically calling out UW CSE’s introductory course “Data Programming” as well as courses at Berkeley and Harvey Mudd College. Read more in the CCC blog here. Read more →

2006 UW CSE bachelors alum Jon Su received his Ph.D. from Stanford, spent several years as a Research Scientist at Intel’s Parallel Computing Lab, then co-founded PhiSix Fashion Labs, a Bay Area technology company helping apparel e-tailers increase sales and reduce returns through the application of innovative 3D modeling and physical simulation technologies – creating 3D models of clothing from photos, pattern files and other sources and simulating the behavior of the garments.

This week, PhiSix was acquired by eBay (which previously acquired UW CSE startup Decide.com).

Jon comes from an amazing family: his sister Sara is a 2002 UW CSE bachelors alum who received her Ph.D. from MIT (like Jon, in computer graphics), spent several years as a faculty member at Tufts, and is now at Google.

Congratulations Jon!  Learn about PhiSix and the eBay acquisition in TechCrunch here. Read more →