Allen School News

UW CSE’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology (TCAT) announced today that two of its projects were selected to participate in the eScience Institute‘s Data Science Incubation Program this summer focusing on Data Science for Social Good. Both TCAT projects address commuting and transportation needs in King County, with an emphasis on enhancing access for individuals with mobility impairments.

The first project, ParaTransit To Go, is a collaboration between TCAT and King County Metro Transit’s Accessible Services group to improve and optimize paratransit services, a demand-responsive mode of public transportation in which passengers are picked up at or near their doorstep and delivered to their specified destination. The second project, Access Map, was created by a team of students as part of the City of Seattle’s Hack the Commute competition under the guidance of TCAT director Anat Caspi and CSE professor Alan Borning. After Access Map captured first place in the civic competition, TCAT continued to support the effort and solicited the help of the eScience Institute to advance the data science end of development.

“Part of TCAT’s mission is to provide longevity to worthy student projects that might otherwise be abandoned upon the developers’ graduation or upon completion of their thesis,” said Caspi. “With Access Map, TCAT was involved from start, but that is not necessarily the case with other projects that we foster.”

“It is great to partner with eScience to provide continuity for projects with high social value and enable more students to contribute to large scale civic data projects like these,” she continued. “Engaging a diversity of stakeholders is critical to building strong and sustainable access technology efforts.”

The UW eScience Institute receives major support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Washington Research Foundation, and the University of Washington. This summer’s Data Science for Social Good incubator session is sponsored in part by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation and an emerging campus-wide initiative called Urban@UW. Read more →

CSE graduate student Ricardo Martin Brualla and professor Steve Seitz, in collaboration with David Gallup of Google, have pioneered a new method for creating time-lapse videos of popular or historically significant landmarks from the millions of photos posted online.

Using a process they call “time-lapse mining,” the researchers sorted photos of a particular location by date and devised a method of compensating for differences in camera position and lighting quality. By warping the photos to a common viewpoint and stabilizing their appearance, they were able to create high-quality videos of the world’s most photographed sites. From skyscrapers rising to glaciers receding, the team provides dramatic examples of how the vast collection of photos uploaded to the internet can be used to understand how our surroundings have changed over time.

The team will present its findings at SIGGRAPH 2015 in August. Visit the project page to view a video demonstration here, and read a PDF of the research paper here.

Read more about time-lapse mining and view videos in the Washington Post, CNET, Gizmodo, Engadget, The Verge, and Quartz. Read more →

Last week, Eyes on Success interviewed UW CSE professor Richard Ladner about his long-running Tactile Graphics Project, a tool for creating universally accessible graphs and charts. During the half-hour audio show, Ladner talked about the importance of tactile graphics in providing blind students with access to figures and diagrams in textbooks, and how computer vision and machine learning techniques enable more rapid translation of graphical images for this purpose. He also talked about Tactile Graphics with a Voice, which is a way to access the textual information in tactile graphics using QR-codes instead of Braille.

The Eyes on Success audio show, which was created by Pete and Nancy Torpey in 2011, has more than 200 entertaining and informative interviews with people who are blind or who work on projects that serve the blind and low-vision population. Former graduate student Jeff Bigham was featured in August 2011 sharing details on WebAnywhere, the web-based screen reader that he developed as part of his UW dissertation.

Listen to Richard’s Eyes on Success interview here.

Learn more about the Tactile Graphics Project here. Read more →

Unfortunately, this may be the last instance of an extraordinary annual event: Yun-En Liu, the graduate student instigator, is graduating. (You’d think something could be done about that …)

Today’s menu:

Real Food

Breads

• 90% rye levain
• Vollkornbrot
• Black bread
• Black Pumpernickel
• Pissaladière
• Baguette
• Challah
• Sesame breadsticks
• Grissini
• Rosemary crackers

Charcuterie

• Loukaniko
• Saucisson sec
• Cacciatore
• Chorizo Rioja
• Piccante salami
• Garlic and black pepper salami
• Wild boar salami

Cheeses and bread add-ons

• Blue 61
• Bonrus
• Black pepper d’affinois
• Robiola
• Manchego
• Truffle honey
• Quince paste

Appetizers

• Spiced cocktail nuts v1 (thyme, rosemary, cayenne)
• Spiced cocktail nuts v2 (curry, cinnamon, garlic, nutmeg)
• Spring vegetable salad
• Seafood mousse
• Salmon and crab sushi rolls
• Eggplant bruschetta and goat cheese
• Crackers with herbed Boursin cheese
• White bean, prosciutto, and horseradish bruschetta
• Traditional bruschetta
• Tuscan anchovy crostini
• Mushrooms & caper crostini
• Scherrer’s tartare (Nicole)
• Belgian endive with herbed chevre
• Blue cheese-stuffed dates with prosciutto

Tea sandwiches

• Egg salad
• Cucumber
• Ham, brie and apple

Canapés

• Balsamic tomato and pesto canapés (vegan)
• Gravlax, mustard cream cheese, chives, and crispbread
• Chicken liver pâté, mustard butter, and olive
• Beef tenderloin, horseradish cream cheese, and capers

UW CSE Ph.D. student Congle Zhang recently talked with the campus newspaper about NewsSpike-RE, a new machine learning algorithm developed at UW CSE to train computers to more efficiently and accurately parse human language using events described in news stories.

NewsSpike-RE discovers and extracts event relations from a vast array of online articles, and then employs a probabilistic graphical model to cluster sentences that describe similar events from parallel news streams.

From the article:

“NewsSpike stands out among other natural-language algorithms because of its ability to identify semantically related words from news articles. So far, it has learned to recognize more than 200 relationships, with that number growing every day.

“‘The next thing to be done … is to keep improving the performance,’ Zhang said. ‘Secondly, it’s to find a good way to let people use [NewsSpike].'”

The article also quotes CSE professor Dan Weld and research scientist Stephen Soderland. Read it in full here.

Read the published paper on NewsSpike-RE here. Read more →

UW CSE’s Professional Masters Program – a part-time evening/distance program designed for fully-employed professionals who wish to continue on their career paths while acquiring critical skills to move them into positions and projects of greater responsibility and impact – has awarded 699 degrees in the 19 years since it was introduced.

Yesterday evening, nearly 100 of these alums (including Steve Thomas, PMP graduate #1, in 1997) joined UW CSE faculty and staff at a reunion hosted at the Microsoft Visitor Center. CSE professor Yoshi Kohno provided a bit of technical content, discussing his work on computer security and privacy.

Learn more about our Professional Masters Program here. Read more →

UW CSE computational biology Ph.D. student Daniel Jones is second author on a paper that has just appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, “Let-7 family of microRNA is required for maturation and adult-like metabolism in stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes,” (abstract here), blends wet-lab biology, biochemistry, bioengineering, genomics and computer science.

Stem cell research shows enormous promise for both basic science and, ultimately, for therapy, e.g., potentially repairing tissue damage after a heart attack. Human trials of such therapies are on the horizon, but much remains unknown, and understanding these biological systems increasingly relies on “Big Data” biotechnologies including “RNAseq” – sequencing of millions of RNA molecules. RNAseq provides an unprecedented microscope into the inner workings of cells, but the massive scale, complexity, and pervasive technical biases intrinsic to these data sets demand careful algorithmic and statistical analyses to separate biological truth from technical artifact. Daniel has been driven to develop general methodologies and software for just such analyses.

Embryonic heart muscle cells implanted in a damaged adult heart may not be able to “pull their weight,” and waiting years for them to mature naturally is not an option. Hence, both monitoring and controlling the developmental trajectories of stem cells are key goals of stem cell research – what drives them to become, say, heart muscles, what markers unambiguously flag arrival to that state, and how can we both influence and measure their “maturity.”

The PNAS paper identifies a critical molecular driver of maturation of cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells), an important step towards answering these basic questions, and of potential therapeutic significance. Daniel’s analysis of RNAseq data generated by his collaborators added strong support for the biologists’ insightful hypothesis. As expected, he also identified hundreds of genes whose activity levels change systematically during cardiomyocyte maturation. Intriguingly, he also identified ~80 more subtle, previously unrecognized, molecular markers of maturation, specifically “alternatively spliced” genes, where, like calling a common subroutine with different parameters to achieve a related but different result, the cardiomyocytes make related but distinctly different proteins as they mature. This robust signal of maturation was unexpected, and its significance is still not fully understood, but the ability of sophisticated computational tools such as Daniel’s Isolator program to discern such patterns from large, complex, noisy data sets such as these is at the leading edge of modern biology.

(Thanks to UW CSE professor Larry Ruzzo, one of Daniel’s co-authors, for the above translation!) Read more →

A lengthy and fascinating article in today’s New York Times fingers 1989 UW CSE alum Nick Szabo as Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive creator of Bitcoin:

“Mr. Szabo denied that he was Satoshi … But he acknowledged that his history left little question that he was among a small group of people who, over decades, working sometimes cooperatively and sometimes in competition, laid the foundation for Bitcoin and created many parts that later went into the virtual currency. Mr. Szabo’s most notable contribution was a Bitcoin predecessor known as bit gold that achieved many of the same goals using similar tools of advanced math and cryptography.”

Intriguing. Read more here. Read more →

2015 Diamond Award honorees Alan Miller (’77 Ph.D. Materials Science & Engineering), Milt Zeutschel (’60 B.S. Electrical Engineering), Christophe Bisciglia (’03 B.S. CSE) and Yaw Anokwa (’12 Ph.D. CSE)

2012 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Yaw Anokwa and 2003 UW CSE Bachelors alum Christophe Bisciglia were two of the four alums honored at the 2015 UW College of Engineering Diamond Awards gala on Friday night.

Yaw received the Diamond Award for Distinguished Service. Christophe received the Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement.

Read more about the accomplishments of Yaw and Christophe here. Learn about the other 2015 Diamond Award honorees here. Read more →

Today the UW CSE community gathered to dedicate a bench in Sylvan Grove – adjacent to the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering – to our beloved colleague Gaetano Borriello.

The plaques read:

In memory of Gaetano Borriello, Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, 1988-2015.

Dedicated educator, valued mentor, scientist, and colleague. The innovative work of Gaetano and his students changed lives around the world.

Read some of the many tributes to Gaetano and his work:

• IEEE Pervasive
• Seattle Times
• PATH
• The International Red Cross
• Jane Goodall
• UW CSE
• The Gaetano Borriello Endowed Fellowship for Change

Read more →