Allen School News

UW CSE’s Center for Game Science announced today that it is extending the dates of the 2015 Algebra Challenge in response to feedback from teachers. Under the new schedule, K-12 classrooms are invited to register online to participate in the challenge beginning April 27 and then to proceed at their own pace until June 5. Any classroom with access to a PC, Mac or Chromebook can participate in the challenge.

Read the Center for Game Science’s update here.

Learn more about the Algebra Challenge and sign up to participate here. Read more →

This is the third year that UW CSE has been privileged to host New Tech Seattle Meetup – the most vibrant and fastest growing tech meetup in the nation!  Thanks to Red and Greene – Red Russak and Brett Greene for supporting UW CSE! Read more →

Each spring, UW CSE and other departments in the College of Engineering welcome K-12 students, parents and teachers to Engineering Discovery Days, an action-packed program featuring hands-on demonstrations that showcase the exciting world of engineering.

The 2015 Engineering Discovery Days are this Friday, April 24 and Saturday, April 25 on the Seattle campus. While Friday registration is full, we encourage people of all ages to join us on Saturday at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering for tours and exhibits on gaming, robotics, wireless power, ubiquitous computing and more.

Also on Saturday, high school students and their families are invited to attend information sessions on UW admissions, financial aid, and other topics of interest to prospective students.

Find a complete schedule and map of the 2015 festivities here. You can view photos of last year’s event here.

We hope to see you this weekend! Read more →

UW encourages its faculty and students to “be a world of good.” Saloni Parikh – a double-major in CSE and Public Health – has heeded that call in her work on the HOPE (Home-based Partner Education and Testing) project, using UW CSE’s Open Data Kit to improve HIV screening and data collection in Africa.

UW published a nice feature story today on Saloni’s research, tracing her journey from the late professor Gaetano Borriello’s lab in Seattle to a poverty-stricken city in Kenya.

Saloni was instrumental in improving data collection by nurses and community health workers conducting HIV testing and counseling of pregnant women and their partners in Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city. Saloni programmed mobile devices to enable the collection of patient data and spent the summer of 2013 in the city of Kisumu training providers how to use them in the field. She remains involved with the HOPE project – as well as other global health projects at UW – to this day.

Read the full article here.

Check out the UW School of Public Health’s profile of Saloni here. Read more →

The Washington State Algebra Challenge, organized by UW CSE’s Center for Game Science, kicks off next Monday, and Governor Jay Inslee is helping us spread the word to classrooms around the state.

We are challenging Washington’s K-12 students to solve 250,000 story problems using Riddle Books, the fun (and free!) math game developed by the center. In a letter sent to educators, Governor Inslee notes that, in addition to the game, educators will have access to resources such as the Teacher Copilot, a portal that enables educators to view their students’ progress in real time and to adapt games for different students.

Read the Governor’s letter to educators here.

Visit the Washington State Algebra Challenge on Facebook here.

Sign up to participate in the challenge by April 26th here. Read more →

It’s that time of year again – time for the GeekWire Awards!

Vote for Carlos Guestrin for CEO of the Year here.

And while you’re at it, vote for Paul Allen as Geek of the Year here. Read more →

UW CSE professor James Lee has won a Best Paper Award at the 2015 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) for his recent breakthrough research with David Steurer of Cornell and UW CSE Ph.D. alum Prasad Raghavendra of Berkeley. Their paper shows that one of the most powerful techniques currently available for designing polynomial-time algorithms will not work for fundamental NP-complete problems such as the Traveling Salesman Problem, the Maximum Independent Set problem, and a number of other combinatorial problems.

In the award paper, James and his colleagues study the efficacy of convex programming relaxations, specifically those expressed as semidefinite programs (SDPs). SDPs can be seen as combining the rich expressiveness of linear programs with the global geometric power of spectral methods. For many problems, SDP-based algorithms are widely viewed as the strongest tool in the algorithm designer’s arsenal. This new result is a rare example where computer scientists can show formally that a powerful computational model cannot efficiently solve NP-complete problems. The paper draws on techniques and intuitions from many areas, including proof complexity, machine learning, and quantum information theory.

These results fit into a long line of James’ research exploring the rich interplay between computation and geometry, probability, and physics. Those connections are not limited to impossibility results. For instance, James’ work on spectral algorithms has the potential for impact in a variety of other areas including machine learning, data mining, scientific computing, and computer vision. See his web page for more details.

Congratulations James! Read more →

UW CSE professor Jeff Heer opened the third annual OpenVis Conf, a two-day gathering devoted to best practices and the latest technology tools for data visualization on the Open Web, earlier this month.

While many visualization tools require steep tradeoffs between ease of use and expressiveness, Jeff and his team in the Interactive Data Lab focus on creating tools that enable more efficient visualizations and richer data exploration by a broad base of users. Jeff’s presentation at OpenVis Conf, “Raising the Bar (Chart): The Next Generation of Visualization Tools,” highlighted several projects at UW CSE aimed at making data visualization more useful – and more user-friendly.

Watch the video of Jeff’s keynote here.

View Jeff’s slides in PDF here. Read more →

James Fogarty

UW CSE professor James Fogarty, PhD students Felicia Cordeiro and Daniel Epstein, and Dub group researcher Elizabeth Bales co-authored a paper with researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology examining mobile food journaling.

The paper, Barriers and Negative Nudges: Exploring Challenges in Food Journaling, identifies various pitfalls that prevent users from persisting with their food journals and considers how technology can more effectively help people meet their goals when it comes to developing healthy eating habits. The team’s findings, which were based on a survey of 141 current and past food journalers and an analysis of more than 5,500 posts in community forums, will be presented at the ACM’s CHI 2015 conference in Seoul, South Korea later this month.

From the UW press release:

“Food journals are an important method for tracking food consumption and can support a variety of goals, including weight loss, healthier food choices, detecting deficiencies, identifying allergies and determining foods that trigger other symptoms,” said co-author James Fogarty, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering.

“Instead of attempting to capture the elusive ‘everything,’ the results suggest creating a diversity of journal designs to support specific goals,” Fogarty said.

Based on their findings, the team at UW is exploring how photo-based journaling might reduce barriers to journaling by augmenting or eliminating altogether the need to focus on detailed nutritional input, while the Georgia Tech team is testing the use of a mobile device’s microphone to recognize eating sounds and nudge users to log their food.

Read the full press release here. Read more →

A lovely tribute to UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello appears in the April-June 2015 issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing:

Gaetano Borriello was a mentor to many of us, spending much of his time helping others in our community. In doing so, he touched many lives, from his students and colleagues at UW to mothers and children in Tanzania. His legacy will live on through the efforts he began and through the impact and influence he has had in this community and around the world. He will be missed by all who had the privilege to work with him.

Thanks to Maria Ebling of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center for celebrating Gaetano’s remarkable contributions so beautifully in this article.

Read it here. Read more →