Allen School News

UW CSE’s Haichen Shen

UW CSE faculty and students are on a roll when it comes to conference awards. Last week, we reported that a team of researchers in our natural language processing group earned one of only two Best Paper Awards granted from among 600 submissions at EMNLP 2015. This week, we are celebrating more recognition at UbiComp 2015, where UW CSE Ph.D. student Haichen Shen and his team captured a Best Paper Award and the inaugural Gaetano Borriello Best Student Paper Award, named this year in honor of the late, great UW CSE professor – a fitting tribute, given Gaetano’s devotion to students and leadership within the ubiquitous computing community.

The winning paper, Enhancing Mobile Apps to Use Sensor Hubs without Programmer Effort, presents MobileHub, a system that automatically rewrites applications to leverage a smartphone’s sensor hub to enable continuous sensing apps to function without draining the device’s battery. By buffering sensor data until an application needs to act on it, MobileHub conserves a device’s power by allowing the application and the main processor to remain idle. This is a critical area of research in ubiquitous computing: reducing power consumption is going to be vital in order to fully realize the potential of continuous sensing apps, such as those developed for health monitoring. The paper was co-authored by Shen and former postdoc Aruna Balasubramanian (now a faculty member at Stony Brook University), affiliate faculty member Anthony LaMarca of Intel Labs, and former faculty member David Wetherall (now at Google).

UW CSE’s Gaetano Borriello

Two other UbiComp papers with UW CSE connections were recognized with Honorable Mentions:

HyperCam: A collaboration between UW and Microsoft Research proposes a low-cost, easy-to-use hyperspectral imaging system that improves upon the typical RGB camera sensors used in ubiquitous computing applications. UW co-authors include CSE Ph.D. students Mayank Goel, Alex Mariakakis, and Eric Whitmire, professor Gaetano Borriello, and CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel.

DoppleSleep: Researchers at UW, Cornell and Michigan State University put forward a contactless sensing system that uses short-range Doppler radar to monitor sleep quality. UW co-authors include CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel, HCDE professor (and CSE adjunct) Julie Kientz, and EE graduate student Ruth Ravichandran.

Congratulations to Haichen and the entire team at UbiComp 2015! You make UW proud!

And we once again remember our friend and colleague Gaetano and his extraordinary contributions to UW CSE, the field, and the world. Read more here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Zach Tatlock – a.k.a. Mr. “I wear open sandals even in the snow” – has finally succumbed to peer pressure from his colleagues and is trying out a new foot covering technology known as “shoes.”

As part of the experiment, Zach even learned to tie shoestrings by watching YouTube videos on the topic. (Note the use of so-called “socks” as well!)

Way to go, Zach! Read more →

UW researchers have developed a prototype of a low-power, wearable system that can sense an individual’s interactions with different devices, from household appliances to motor vehicles. The new technology, MagnifiSense, analyzes near-field electromagnetic radiation from common components to measure usage in a variety of indoor and outdoor settings – and with a high degree of accuracy.

MagnifiSense was developed by a team of researchers at UW’s Ubiquitous Computing Lab, led by CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel, that includes UW EE Ph.D. students Edward Wang and Tien-Jui Lee, CSE Ph.D. students Alex Mariakakis and Mayank Goel, and CSE Ph.D. alum Sidhant Gupta (now at Microsoft Research). The team submitted a paper outlining MagnifiSense’s effectiveness and potential applications as part of the UbiComp 2015 conference taking place in Osaka, Japan this week.

From the UW news release:

“In today’s smart home, technologies can track how much energy a particular appliance like a refrigerator or television or hair dryer is gobbling up. What they don’t typically show is which person in the house actually flicked the switch.

“A new wearable technology developed at the University of Washington called MagnifiSense can sense what devices and vehicles the user interacts with throughout the day, which can help track that individual’s carbon footprint, enable smart home applications or even assist with elder care….

“‘It’s another way to log what you’re interacting with so at the end of the day or month you can see how much energy you used,’ said Shwetak Patel, Washington Research Foundation Endowed Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering, who directs the UW Ubicomp Lab.

“‘Right now, we can know that lights are 20 percent of your energy use. With this, we divvy it up and say who consumed that energy,’ Patel said.”

The researchers plan to test MagnifiSense on more devices and to reduce their proof-of-concept so that the technology is small enough to be embedded in wrist-sized devices, such as a smartwatch.

Read the entire news release here. Read the research team’s paper here.

Magnificent work, team! Read more →

Donald Tsang, a UW CSE graduate student from 1990-93, passed away unexpectedly at his home in Seattle on Wednesday September 2. He was 47.

Donald earned a Bachelor of Science in EECS from Berkeley in 1990. He spent three years in the UW CSE graduate program before he followed his passion for working in startups. He was one of the earliest developers at Amazon.com, creating the technology that secures customers’ credit cards. Donald also worked at a number of other Seattle-based startups, including Marchex, Ground Truth, Relevant Data, and OpenCar, returning to Amazon for a few years between start-ups. He most recently worked at the Seattle office of Disney, working on the Playmation game platform.

Donald is survived by his wife, Daisy (Chai), his two daughters Daniella and Constantina, and his mother-in-law, Xundu Wu, all at home in Seattle; his parents, Floris and Annel Tsang, his sister Dale Tsang and her children Abby and Jeremy Tsang Hall, all of Berkeley, California; many aunts, uncles, and cousins around the world; and countless friends. Donald was preceded in death by his father-in-law, Haili Chai.

A Celebration of Life in Donald’s honor will be held on Sunday, September 27, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the University of Washington Center for Urban Horticulture.

Read more here.

Update: A fund has been created in memory of Donald, for the support of Daisy, Dani, and Dina. Learn more here. Read more →

Yoav Artzi, Kenton Lee and Luke Zettlemoyer of UW CSE’s natural language processing group have captured a Best Paper Award at EMNLP 2015 – one of only two best papers selected from more than 600 submissions to the conference on empirical methods in natural language processing.

The paper, Broad-coverage CCG Semantic Parsing with AMR, describes an approach for learning parsers that build Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs), a recently proposed, general formalism for representing core aspects of sentence meaning. The team’s work is a significant step over previous CCG grammar induction algorithms, as it learns to analyze a much wider range of sentence types and scales to much larger data sets. The paper will be presented at EMNLP 2015 in Lisbon, Portugal later this month.

This latest award continues UW CSE’s enviable winning streak at leading conferences, and is the second paper award for the NLP group in 2015 (just one shy of repeating the systems group’s hat trick). It is also a great start for Yoav’s new faculty career at Cornell!

Read the paper here.

Congratulations Yoav, Kenton and Luke! Read more →

The Washington State Opportunity Scholarship (WSOS) was established by the legislature in 2011 to help students from low- and middle-income families pursue degrees in STEM and health care fields in the face of rapidly rising tuition. Microsoft and Boeing donated $25 million each to get the program off the ground in 2011. Yesterday, Steve and Connie Ballmer made an $11 million gift, and Microsoft added $10 million more. All private donations are matched 1:1 with state funds.

Xconomy writes:

“Microsoft earlier this year kicked off a fundraising campaign for a new computer science building at UW with a $10 million donation. It also committed $40 million to the Global Innovation Exchange, a joint effort of the UW and Tsinghua University to create a graduate-level educational institution in Bellevue focused on technology, design, and entrepreneurship. [Microsoft Executive Vice President Brad] Smith has been instrumental in guiding Microsoft’s local contributions.

“[UW CSE’s Ed] Lazowska calls him ‘a saint.’ ‘As an individual, as a representative of Microsoft, and through the company, he has done many, many things in recent years that will make our region far stronger, now and for decades to come,’ he said.”

Xconomy also notes the shortage of capacity in computer science:

“‘The challenge is capacity, particularly in high quality programs at the bachelors level,’ said Susannah Malarkey, executive director of the Technology Alliance. ‘There is far more demand – from top students – than there is available space.

“Her organization’s latest benchmarking report (PDF), which tracks Washington’s performance against peers in areas including research capacity, investment, and education, found that in 2013, Washington ranked 39th out of the 50 states in science and engineering bachelor’s degree production per capita. (This, in part, may be why Seattle is experiencing so much angst about its current growth spurt and influx of new residents. Local technology giants and startup companies are recruiting people trained in computer science from around the world. What if more of them came from around the block?)

“At the University of Washington, home of the state’s premiere computer science program – indeed, one of the best in the country – demand for the computer science and engineering major from incoming freshmen this fall is second only to business administration, and not by much.”

Read more here.

Thank you, Steve and Connie Ballmer and Microsoft! Read more →

You’re smart enough to know that one aspect of this matters far more than any of the others: increased capacity for Computer Science & Engineering. But please humor our colleagues by reading the whole thing, here. Read more →

A terrific article on this summer’s Data Science for Social Good program spearheaded by the UW eScience Institute, which is led by CSE’s Ed Lazowska and Bill Howe.

“In June, the Institute launched the Data Science for Social Good program, an initiative that paired data scientists with students and local nonprofit and government partners. These interdisciplinary teams worked on projects to reduce family homelessness, improve paratransit bus service, foster community well-being, and map better sidewalk routes for people with mobility challenges …

“Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering, said the initiative demonstrates the utility of data science in tackling a host of societal challenges that students are eager to work on.

“‘I think people are energized by the ability to work on something that is both technically challenging and makes the world a better place,’ he said. ‘That’s what Data Science for Social Good is about.'”

Read more here. Read more →

The 2015 UW Engineering Lecture Series – three evening public lectures sponsored by the UW Alumni Association – is all CSE this year!

• Wednesday October 7: Franzi Roesner, “The Invisible Trail: Pervasive Tracking in a Connected Age”
• Wednesday October 21: Dieter Fox, “Our Robotic Future: Building Smart Robots that See in 3D”
• Wednesday November 3: Yoshi Kohno (along with Batya Friedman from the Information School and Ryan Calo from the School of Law), “Responsible Innovation: A Cross Disciplinary Lens on Privacy and Security Challenges”

All lectures are at 7:30 p.m. in Kane Hall 130.

Learn more here.

Read more →

Joe Traub – Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, as well as an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute – passed away earlier this week.

Joe was a giant of the field, and an inspiration. After receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1959, he was hired by Bell Laboratories. He continued at Bell Labs until 1970, when he began his professorial career at the University of Washington. Soon after, in 1971, he was offered the position of Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, a role in which he served until 1979. He left to help Columbia University build a Computer Science Department, and became its Founding Chair. In 1986, he was invited to start what is now the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board for the National Academies, serving as chair from 1986-92, then again from 2006-09.

Steve Lohr wrote a lovely tribute in today’s New York Times. Read more →