Allen School News

UW CSE’s DawgBytes is one of three programs recently selected by mobile marketing company TUNE (formerly HasOffers) and Seattle Women in Technology as beneficiaries of a new partnership that aims to cultivate more women leaders in technology fields. DawgBytes, which hosts girls-only and co-ed summer day camps in computing, in addition to engaging in teacher support, community partnerships and other outreach activities, is part of a long tradition at UW CSE of encouraging women to pursue computer science education and careers.

Each summer, DawgBytes engages 88 middle and high school girls in computer science through our girls-only camps and reaches many more through its co-ed camps, including a session for elementary school students. This is part of a multi-pronged approach aimed at increasing the diversity of our student body and of our industry. We outperform our peers when it comes to cultivating the next generation of women computer scientists, awarding 30 percent of our CS bachelor’s degrees to women (roughly twice the national average). We also have made it a priority to recruit women who are rising stars in the field to the UW CSE faculty, including recent hires Maya Cakmak (robotics), Yejin Choi (natural language processing), Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman (computer vision), Franzi Roesner (security and privacy), and Emina Torlak (programming languages and software engineering).

While UW CSE is a recognized leader in advancing women in computer science education and careers, there is more work to be done. To support our efforts and those of other like-minded organizations, TUNE, in partnership with Seattle WiT, is encouraging donations to DawgBytes, Tech Trek and Ada Developers Academy in the run-up to its big annual event, Postback, which will be held July 23-24 in Seattle.

Read more about the partnership on the TUNE company blog here and check out the details on Postback 2015 here.

Check out our DawgBytes 2015 summer camp lineup here.

Read earlier coverage of UW CSE’s nationally recognized efforts to engage more women in computer science here, here and here.

Many thanks to our friends at TUNE and Seattle Women in Technology for their support! Read more →

Amazon ranks Seattle as the #1 “well-read city.”

NerdWallet ranks Seattle top 5 in opportunities for new STEM grads (but you wouldn’t want to live in the other 4).

Read more here and here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. alum Brian Ferris is the patron saint of transit riders. Not only did he create the wildly popular app OneBusAway while a Ph.D. student here, but now he has gone one better: he and his team at Google have added enhanced real-time transit data to Google Maps for a handful of cities, including Seattle. The new feature will enable transit riders to make judgments about which mode or route to use based on actual traffic conditions and transit performance, using data from King County Metro and Sound Transit.

Brian is quoted by GeekWire on the new functionality:

“With traffic congestion in Seattle getting worse every year, real-time information is essential for making our transit system usable … I might not be able to build a new light-rail line through Seattle or add new bus service myself, but I can help build tools to make everyone’s commute a little more pleasant.”

Read more on GeekWire here and on VentureBeat here.

Thanks, Brian, for helping to keep Seattle commuters – including many of us here at UW CSE – rolling! Read more →

A terrific new short video from the Washington Tech Industry Association, “Why Washington,” explains why the Puget Sound region is the software capital of America.

Watch it here. Read more →

We’re delighted to announce that Sergey Levine, who works at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, graphics, and animation, will join the UW CSE faculty.

Sergey pioneered the recent trend in using deep learning to create neural network controllers for animated characters and robots. His learning techniques enable robots to solve control tasks that have been elusive using traditional approaches. This past week he won the Best Robotic Manipulation Paper Award at ICRA, the IEEE flagship robotics conference, for his work on learning controllers for complex manipulation tasks.

Sergey received his Ph.D. in 2014 from Stanford University and joins CSE following a postdoc with Pieter Abbeel at UC Berkeley.

Welcome, Sergey!

(We had previously announced the recruiting this year of Ras Bodik, Sham Kakade, and Dan Ports. More news to follow!) Read more →

UW CSE’s Steve Seitz is the engineering lead on Jump, announced this week as a dramatic enhancement of Google’s Cardboard “VR for the masses” system. UW CSE postdoc alum Sameer Agarwal leads the computer vision team that built the assembler – work carried out at Google Seattle by the computer vision group that Steve assembled and leads there. The Jump team also includes UW CSE bachelors alums Riley Adams and Sam Riesland.

USA Today writes:

“But the biggest news involves Google’s new partnership with camera-maker GoPro, which could solve the missing link for VR: enough content to make using the headsets worthwhile. GoPro is putting the finishing touches on a merry-go-round-like rig that will support 16 GoPro Hero4 cameras whose spherical footage will record the content VR watchers will see.”

Read the USA Today article and watch the video here.

Read about Jump in the context of Google’s overall VR effort in The Verge here.

Article in Wired with specific reference to Seitz’s team’s contributions here.

And learn about all of UW’s phenomenal work in computer graphics and computer vision here. Read more →

Each summer, UW CSE welcomes middle school and high school teachers from around the state at our computer science education workshop, CS4HS. Math and science teachers are invited to participate in an action-packed, three-day program designed to give them the knowledge and resources to integrate computer science into their classrooms and to build student interest in our exciting and rapidly growing field.

The 2015 workshop will take place July 15th – 17th at UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Thanks to the generous donors who support CSE’s K-12 outreach programs, the registration fee for teachers is just $50. CS4HS participants will enjoy breakfast and lunch each day, an evening networking reception, parking or transit reimbursement, dorm accommodations for out-of-town participants, and 20 clock hours from the Washington Science Teachers Association – not to mention fantastic demos, faculty and guest presentations, hands-on learning, and idea sharing among peers.

Teachers who have no computer science background or programming experience are welcome and encouraged to attend. CS4HS is a joint undertaking between UW CSE, Carnegie Mellon University and Tim Bell’s CS Unplugged.

Interested educators are invited to apply for a slot at the 2015 workshop here. Read more →

UW CSE’s Melody Kadenko has received the 2015 UW College of Engineering Professional Staff Award.

Melody manages more than 100 research grants from multiple agencies. In her “spare time,” she mentors UW’s National Collegiate Cyberdefense Competition team, and shakes the tin cup to fund the CSE espresso room (appropriating a page from the NPR playbook: “We need $2500 before I quit sending email!”).

A faculty member writes, “Melody uses creativity and persistence to solve any kind of thorny research grant problem.”

A student writes, “Melody has been the single most useful person I’ve met since coming to UW.”

Melody writes, “I’m ‘Plan B.’ If you want the rules followed in every detail, see Alicen. When that doesn’t work, come see me. I’m OK with that.”

Congratulations, Melody! And thanks for your many years of phenomenal work as part of the UW CSE team! Read more →

UW’s Undergraduate Academic Affairs office recently published a great article on CSE undergrad Krittika D’Silva, who decided to double-major in computer science and bioengineering after taking one of our introductory courses. The article, “Undergrad sees change in the palm of her hand,” describes how Krittika arrived at the intersection of the two fields, which earned her a 2014-2015 Levinson Emerging Scholars Award.

After being accepted to CSE, Krittika worked with the late professor Gaetano Borriello on the development of hands-free smart phone technology for use by health care providers in low-resource environments to aid diagnosis and prevent the spread of infection. She currently works in bioengineering professor Paul Yager‘s lab on the development of portable kits that diagnose the bacterial infection MRSA at the point of care with the help of an Android app – an approach that could be used to improve diagnosis and care of patients with other diseases.

Read more about Krittika and her research here.

Check out previous coverage of Krittika’s work on the CSE blog here. Read more →

The new method for creating time-lapse videos developed by UW CSE’s GRAIL Group and Google was featured on a recent segment of the PBS NewsHour. As part of “NewsHour Shares,” its series of eye-catching stories from around the Web, PBS highlighted the videos created by graduate student Ricardo Martin Brualla, professor Steve Seitz and Google’s David Gallup of famous locations such as the Vatican and the Las Vegas strip – all from photos posted online.

As PBS anchor Judy Woodruff noted, “Where it once took months or years to create these videos, they can now do it almost instantly in an effort to help document our ever-changing world.”

Watch the video and read the transcript here.

Read our earlier blog post and media coverage featuring the time-lapse video project here. Read more →