Allen School News

Thursday marked the public debut of the Global Innovation Exchange, an exciting partnership between the University of Washington and Tsinghua University, established with $40 million in foundational support from Microsoft.

GIX will bring together students, faculty, professionals and entrepreneurs from around the world to collaborate on real-world technology and design projects. It will be based on a new campus located in Bellevue’s Spring District.

GIX is a long-term play. In the fullness of time there will be many programs. All will share a set of key characteristics that define GIX:

• project-based education
• global teams and perspective
• close integration of technology, design, and entrepreneurship

The first program, designed by a team led by UW CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel, will be a 15-month Masters program focused on the creation of digital devices that combine sensors, effectors, communication, advanced algorithms, and user interfaces to provide actionable information about the world. Think of Microsoft Band as an example of such a device, or your smart phone.

The project-based nature is a particular distinction. Teams of students from different disciplines and cultures will collaborate on a project over the entire 15 months of the program. Coursework will tightly integrated with project work.

Importantly, GIX is, for now, focused on Masters programs. As it grows, it surely will have an impact on our region’s technology workforce: our leading-edge tech companies hire students at the Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D. level, and GIX alumni will have unique and highly attractive characteristics. GIX does not, however, impact our region’s critical shortage of Bachelors capacity in Computer Science and other fields of Engineering. Nor is GIX a research institute, although UW’s research capabilities will be strengthened because faculty will be added who will have research programs on the Seattle campus.

GIX is an element of the University of Washington’s Innovation Imperative, which also involves major expansion of UW CSE (also generously supported by Microsoft), and strengthened ties all across UW to the region’s innovation ecosystem.

UW CSE is thrilled to be partnering with Tsinghua, Microsoft, and other UW units in this exciting experiment!

• GIX website
• New York Times article
• Seattle Times article
• GeekWire post
• Video
• University of Washington Innovation Imperative

UW CSE faculty member (and unofficial department photographer) Bruce Hemingway has released his picks among the final projects submitted by students in his Spring 2015 CSE131 course, The Science and Art of Digital Photography.

Interestingly, the major with the greatest number of students enrolled in the course was math, followed by a mix of the sciences, various engineering fields and economics. As Bruce says, it’s “art for geeks!” In total, more than 180 students from 38 different majors or pre-majors explored the fundamentals of digital photography in his class, including computational imaging, photographic composition and design, and the future of internet-enabled photography.

Bruce’s teaching combines art and history with science and technology, with some truly stunning results. Check out his top picks from among the students’ final projects here. Read more →

The 16 Data Science for Social Good student researchers (selected from among 140 applicants) join eScience Institute staff to kick off the “Social” part at Agua Verde on afternoon one of the summer-long program.

UW’s eScience Institute, led by CSE faculty members Bill Howe and Ed Lazowska, kicked off its new summer program, Data Science for Social Good, this week. Focusing on the theme of urban science, the program enables teams of students, faculty and community stakeholders to tap into eScience members’ expertise and powerful data analysis and visualization tools to address issues affecting urban environments, including public health and safety, sustainability, transportation, education and social justice.

Two participating projects have connections to UW CSE’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology: Open Sidewalk Graph for Accessible Trip Planning, or Access Map, an award-winning online tool developed by UW students under the guidance of CSE’s Alan Borning and Anat Caspi that enables people with limited mobility to plan an accessible route through the city; and ParaTransit To Go, a project led by Caspi to improve the quality of King County Metro Paratransit services for passengers with disabilities in King County while making those services more cost-effective to operate.

In addition to the accessibility projects, the DSSG accepted two other proposals aimed at improving urban communities: Assessing Community Well-Being Through Open Data and Social Media, a project by Third Place Technologies which leverages social media and open data sources to identify emerging issues in neighborhoods, with a focus on underserved communities; and Predictors of Permanent Housing for Homeless Families in King, Snohomish & Pierce County, a project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which aims to identify the factors that contribute to homelessness and the barriers to families finding permanent housing in order to better prioritize resources and reduce local families’ need for temporary shelter.

Read more about Data Science for Social Good here, and find more information about the participating projects here.

Read past blog coverage of the participating Taskar Center projects here. Read more →

UW CSE faculty member Dan Grossman was recognized with the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award at yesterday’s ACM SIGPLAN Awards Banquet, which is held each year during the PLDI conference. Dan received the award in recognition of his leadership in developing undergraduate curriculum for programming languages while serving on the steering committee for the ACM IEEE-CS Computer Science Curricula 2013. As part of that effort, Dan led a group responsible for rewriting the sections on programming languages from scratch.

From the award citation:

“Dan Grossman has made significant contributions to programming languages education. Roughly once a decade, the ACM and IEEE Computer Society publish revised curriculum recommendations for undergraduate-level computer science education. The 2001 Curriculum Recommendations included very little PL content, mostly material suitable for a CS1 course. As a member of the 2013 ACM/IEEE-CS Computing Curriculum Steering Committee, Dan was largely responsible for the revisions to the PL curriculum that reintroduced substantial up-to-date PL topics into the curriculum. This effort included convincing the steering committee and soliciting input from many members of the PL community. As part of these efforts, Dan also served as the chair of the SIGPLAN Education Board during his term as Member-at-Large on the SIGPLAN Executive Committee. Serving currently on the ACM Education Board, he continues to be an effective advocate for excellence in programming languages education.”

During brief remarks, Dan pointed to the impact that service aligned with one’s passions can have. He also thanked his collaborators on the curriculum effort and acknowledged the great mentors he has had in UW CSE, remembering by name departed faculty members Gaetano Borriello and David Notkin.

Earlier in the banquet, PLDI 2015 recognized three distinguished papers, including the UW CSE paper Automatically Improving Accuracy for Floating Point Expressions as previously reported here.

Congratulations to Dan on this well-deserved recognition – and way to go, team! Read more →

Zorah Fung took UW’s introductory computer science course, CSE142, as an incoming freshman in the fall of 2010. She was surprised to find how much she enjoyed the course. According to Zorah, “CS wasn’t even something on my radar for me to consider until I took the course.” She only signed up for it because she couldn’t get into a psychology class that was full.

Five years later she has received Bachelors and Masters degrees from CSE. Along the way she was deeply involved in the undergraduate TA program for the 14X classes, and she was the summer instructor for CSE142 in 2014 – receiving teaching evaluations that were higher than some faculty in the department have ever achieved. She also completed two internships at Google and another at Sift Science (a fraud detection startup founded by UW CSE alums).

Most recently Zorah taught this spring’s CSE142 to nearly 1,000 students, mentored by CSE Principal Lecturer Stuart Reges, who reports hearing from many students in the course who have been inspired by Zorah in the same way that the course inspired her five years ago. “She’s a great role model and her high energy level is infectious,” Reges said. He mentioned that he had particularly heard from young women taking the class who said that having a confident, successful woman teaching the course encourages them to consider computer science as a possible major.

And the best news of all? Zorah has just joined the CSE faculty as a Lecturer. (She plans to work for Sift Science for six months before returning to Seattle in January to teach.)

Welcome Zorah!

(We had previously announced the recruiting this year of Ras Bodik, Sham Kakade, Sergey Levine, Dan Ports, and Katharina Reinecke.) Read more →

UW CSE awarded 364 degrees at our department graduation ceremony on Friday evening – an event that was moved this year to Hec Edmundson Pavilion (UW’s basketball stadium) because our students, families, friends, and faculty no longer fit in 1200-seat Meany Theater, UW’s largest auditorium.

234 Bachelors degrees were awarded in Computer Science and Computer Engineering. One third of the Computer Science Bachelors recipients were women – still not nearly at parity, but substantially more than double the national average for our peers.

105 Masters degrees were awarded: 51 in our part-time evening/distance Professional Masters Program, and 54 to full-time students.

25 Ph.D. degrees were awarded.

At the ceremony:

• Introduced by UW President Ana Mari Cauce, Microsoft general counsel and executive vice president Brad Smith announced a $10 million commitment from Microsoft to a second building for CSE.
• Professor James Lee received the ACM Student Chapter Undergraduate Teaching Award.
• Katie McCorkell and Clint Malcolm received CSE’s Undergraduate Service Award.
• Brett Boston received CSE’s Undergraduate Honors Thesis Award.
• AJ Klatt and Sunjay Cauligi received CSE’s Outstanding Computer Science Senior Award and Outstanding Computer Engineering Senior Award, respectively.
• Graduate student teaching assistant Sonja Khan and undergraduate student teaching assistants Michael Johnson and Ryan McMahon received the Bob Bandes Memorial Excellence in Teaching Awards. Graduate student TAs Irene Zhang and Nathaniel Mote and undergraduate student TA Jack Warren received honorable mention.
• Tim Paterson (B.S. 1978) and Kevin Jeffay (Ph.D. 1989) received this year’s CSE Alumni Achievement Awards.

Congratulations one and all!

Check out the program here. Check out coverage from our friends at GeekWire here.

  Read more →

At UW CSE’s graduation ceremony on Friday evening, 1978 Bachelors alum Tim Paterson and 1989 Ph.D. alum Kevin Jeffay will be recognized as the recipients of UW CSE’s 2015 Alumni Achievement Awards.

We inaugurated this award for two purposes: first, to recognize some of our most accomplished alumni; second, to make it clear to each year’s new graduates that they are joining a long line of men and women who have built upon their UW CSE education to change the world.

Tim Paterson

Tim’s email address is DosMan. In the most succinct possible way, this tells his story.

Tim was among the first UW undergraduate alums in Computer Science – he received his Bachelors degree in 1978. He joined a tiny company called Seattle Computer Products as its only engineer. Tim designed a single-board computer based on Intel’s new 8086 processor, which SCP started shipping in 1979. The computer needed an operating system, so Tim designed a system called 86-DOS, which SCP started shipping in 1980. Microsoft came knocking around that time; Microsoft first licensed and then purchased 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products. When the first IBM PC shipped in 1981, it was running that system – re-branded by IBM as PC DOS. Tim worked on several additional releases of the system, both at Seattle Computer Products and at Microsoft. His life has taken many interesting turns since that time – from 8 years on the Visual Basic team to 5 years of competing in BattleBot tournaments.

We’re proud to recognize Tim with a UW Computer Science & Engineering Alumni Achievement Award, as the original author of what was the world’s most widely used operating system – more than that, the most widely used computer program – for two decades.

Kevin Jeffay

Kevin has spent his entire 26-year post-CSE career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is now the Gillian T. Cell Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, and Chair of the Department of Computer Science – the nation’s second-oldest computer science department.

As a graduate student at UW, Kevin worked with Professor Alan Shaw in the area of real-time operating systems. At UNC, his work has included real-time systems, multimedia systems, and computer network architecture. He’s made important contributions in all of those areas. An additional point of pride for those of us in UW CSE is that Kevin has always been deeply engaged with students – he’s won multiple awards for his teaching, and for many years he’s coached UNC’s team in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, including two trips to the World Finals.

Read more about Tim and Kevin in MSB here. Read about previous recipients of the UW CSE Alumni Achievement Award here. Read more →

At this evening’s UW CSE graduation ceremony, Microsoft Executive Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith will announce a commitment from the company of $10 million to kick-start a campaign to build a second Computer Science & Engineering building on the UW campus.

Microsoft’s gift represents the first corporate commitment to a public-private partnership to assemble $110 million in funding to construct a new 130,000-square-foot CSE building. The new facility will provide the capacity needed to double the number of degrees we award annually.

“This is an investment in students who will become the innovators and creators of tomorrow,” Smith said. “We hope this first corporate commitment to a new UW CSE building inspires others – individual donors, companies and those in state government — to support a project vital to the future of our state.”

Conceptual drawing of CSE2 interior

“Kids who grow up in the state of Washington deserve the opportunity to be educated for jobs at the forefront of our region’s innovation economy,” said Ed Lazowska, UW’s Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering. “That’s what we do in UW CSE. It’s incredibly painful to have to turn away highly qualified students from our program due to lack of space and lack of enrollment funding. Microsoft provided the first corporate gift to the Allen Center – a building that has transformed our capabilities. We can’t thank them enough for once again leading the way.”

Thank you, Microsoft!

See coverage by UW News, Microsoft, Seattle Times, GeekWire, Xconomy, KIRO7 TV News, KOMO4 TV News.

Join Microsoft in supporting the CSE2 campaign – information here! Read more →

Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering, received UW’s David B. Thorud Leadership Award at today’s ceremony recognizing the 2015 recipients of the annual UW Awards of Excellence. In the words of the nomination:

“Ed has been a truly extraordinary leader for many years and in many settings – national, regional, institutional, and departmental. I will touch on all four in this letter, but the recent leadership accomplishment that stimulates this nomination is Ed’s role in creating and leading the University of Washington eScience Institute, a cross-campus collaboration that has established UW as a recognized leader in data-intensive discovery.

“National leadership: Ed is widely viewed as the computer science research community’s highest impact national leader and spokesperson …

“Regional leadership: Ed is one of UW’s most visible and effective advocates with the region’s civic leadership …

“Departmental leadership: UW CSE’s rise from a ‘top-ten also-ran’ to the first rank of the nation’s computer science programs began during Ed’s 8 years as department chair.

“Institutional leadership: Ed’s role in creating and leading the University of Washington eScience Institute – a cross-campus collaboration that has established UW as a recognized leader in data-intensive discovery – illustrates his extraordinary performance in all of the areas identified as nomination criteria for the Thorud Award.”

Congratulations, Ed! Read more →

On Thursday, in the run-up to this year’s graduation ceremonies, EE professor (and CSE Ph.D. alum) Scott Hauck was named to the newly-created Gaetano Borriello Professorship for Educational Excellence – a professorship created jointly by EE and CSE to commemorate Gaetano’s enormous contributions.

In nominating Scott to this position, EE chair Radha Poovendran and CSE chair Hank Levy wrote:

“Gaetano joined the University of Washington faculty in 1988, and passed away decades before his time in 2015, following an extended battle with cancer. At the time of his death he was the Jerre D. Noe Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, and Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering, Human Centered Design and Engineering, and Information …

“Gaetano was an extraordinary faculty member in every respect. While his research had tremendous impact, his focus was first and foremost on his students, on our educational programs in EE and CSE, and on continually strengthening the bridges between our two departments. He exemplified our mission at the University of Washington: to provide an extraordinary educational experience for our students, in which they discover, pursue, and achieve their potential; to conduct leading-edge research, but in the context of education rather than purely for its own sake; ultimately, to make the world a better place through the impact of our teaching, research, and mentoring.

“Given this context, it is not difficult to identify the most appropriate person to be the inaugural holder of the Gaetano Borriello Professorship for Educational Excellence: Professor Scott Hauck of the Department of Electrical Engineering. It is our honor and pleasure to recommend, with great confidence and enthusiasm, that Scott Hauck be awarded the Borriello Professorship …

“This is a clear case of the apple (Scott) not falling far from the tree (Gaetano, his mentor):

“Scott is a strong researcher: an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, multiple ‘Best Paper’ awards, etc.

“Scott is dedicated to his students, and more broadly to educational excellence. He is a recipient, like Gaetano, of the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award. He also is a recipient of the UW College of Engineering Faculty Innovator Award for Teaching & Learning, the UW Electrical Engineering Outstanding Research Advisor Award, and the Northwestern University Electrical and Computer Engineering Best Teacher Award. His own students have followed in his footsteps, receiving strong recognition for their accomplishments.

Gaetano’s wife Melissa Westbrook and Scott Hauck with a plaque commemorating Scott’s appointment as the first holder of the Gaetano Borriello Professorship for Educational Excellence

“Scott has selflessly devoted enormous energy to the improving the interface between CSE and EE. He has been a leader of the ExCEL effort since its inception – ExCEL has led to the hiring of a set of truly extraordinary faculty members appointed jointly between EE and CSE. Scott’s contributions include helping to launch the effort, serving as Co-Chair of the joint CSE/EE Recruiting Committee for a number of years, and calming the waters on both sides when turbulence arises. More recently, he has led an effort to create a unified undergraduate Computer Engineering curriculum spanning EE and CSE, requiring significant flexibility and compromise on the part of both departments – flexibility and compromise that probably only Scott would have been able to negotiate. For these and other efforts, Scott received the UW Electrical Engineering Faculty Service Award.”

Congratulations Scott! Read more →