Allen School News

Whitman College is a top liberal arts college in eastern Washington. They have raised $8M from Microsoft and other friends to launch a computer science program – not because anyone would go to Whitman for vocational reasons, but rather:

“As we see how computation has literally pervaded every aspect of our lives over last 20, 30 years, it seems reasonable that computational thinking and computer science in particular should be a part of a person’s liberal education.”

We’re delighted that our 2006 Ph.D. alum Janet Davis has been recruited by Whitman to lead this new program!

Read more in GeekWire here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Richard Ladner penned the cover article for the March/April 2015 issue of Interactions Magazine, the flagship publication of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI). In the article, “Design for User Empowerment,” he advocates that users of technology who have disabilities should be empowered to solve their own accessibility problems, drawing on nearly 10 years of experience at the helm of the National Science Foundation-supported AccessComputing alliance.

Richard explains how, with self-determination and technical expertise, people with disabilities can analyze, design, build and test technologies that suit their specific needs. He promotes the concept of universal design, in which interactive systems can be easily configured to be usable by people with varying abilities without having to rely on third-party assistive technologies.

“A person who is disabled and has the right technical expertise has the power to solve their own accessibility problems,” Richard writes. “The key to technical expertise is access to education, the cornerstone of innovation and progress.”

Read the full article here. Read more →

Today marked the debut of the new zipline in the Microsoft Atrium of UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. A good time was had by all! Read more →

The 2015 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships – the most prestigious graduate fellowships in science and engineering – were announced today. To our delight, UW has the second largest number of fellowship recipients in the “Computer and Information Science and Engineering” category of any institution in the country!

Yvonne

NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding student researchers who have demonstrated their potential for significant achievements in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Congratulations to the UW students who were recognized today:

Fellowship awards

Cynthia Bennett (HCDE): Human Computer Interaction

Carlo

Yvonne Chen (CSE): Human Computer Interaction

Carlo del Mundo (CSE): Computer Architecture

Alex Mariakakis (CSE): Human Computer Interaction

Laurel Orr (CSE): Databases

Pavel Panchekha (CSE): Formal Methods, Verification, and Programming Languages

Alex

Hannah Rashkin (CSE): Natural Language Processing

John Robinson (HCDE): Human Computer Interaction

Anna Kornfeld Simpson (CSE): Computer Security and Privacy

Doug Woos (CSE): Formal Methods, Verification, and Programming Languages

Honorable mentions

Laurel

Kira Goldner (CSE): Algorithms and Theoretical Foundations

Daniel Gordon (CSE): Robotics and Computer Vision

Jacob Schreiber (CSE): Machine Learning

Go Team!

Doug

Anna

Hannah

Pavel

UW CSE students Karolina Pyszkiewicz, Katie McCorkell, Karan Goel, and Christopher Su. (Andy Li had hit the road prior to the photo-op.)

Five UW CSE undergraduates attended F8 this week – the Facebook developer conference in San Francisco.

“Join us at the intersection of creativity and technology. Product experts from Facebook, Instagram, Parse, Oculus, LiveRail and other apps will share what we’ve learned and built for developers. You’ll get access to our latest tools, new product demos and thought-provoking discussions to help you plan for your next build and beyond.”

Learn more about F8 here. Facebook Seattle is growing to 2000 developers! Read more →

UW CSE hosts alumni events annually at major employers of our students (Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Tableau, …) and in geographies where large numbers of our alumni live and work (Seattle, the East Side, the Bay Area, …).

Tonight was Amazon night – the largest employer of UW CSE graduates in each of the past three  years. Read more →

UW CSE professor James Fogarty just returned from collecting the prestigious Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence at his Ph.D. alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University.

The award, which James shares with his Ph.D. adviser, Scott Hudson; fellow CMU alumni Daniel Avrahami, Chris Harrison and Johnny Lee; and current CMU student Robert Xiao, honors an impressive body of research into “innovative and practical physical interaction techniques.” Their work produced more than 25 papers on subjects ranging from novel uses of sensors, to wearable displays, to 3-D printing.

According to award committee chair Mahadev Satyanarayanan, “The Newell Award committee was impressed with the highly innovative and deep contributions to user interface design made by this team over a decade-long period. Their work spans the full spectrum of research in this space, with a high degree of originality in every aspect.”

The annual award pays tribute to Newell’s research style, summed up in his observation that, “Good science responds to real phenomena or real problems. Good science is in the details. Good science makes a difference.”

We couldn’t agree more. Congratulations to James and his colleagues for this well-deserved recognition of their outstanding work!

Read CMU’s press release on the award here. Read more →

The New York Times reports on Facebook’s initiative to provide Internet access in under-served regions of the world:

“Taking to the skies to beam Internet access down from solar-powered drones may seem like a stretch for a tech company that sells ads to make money. The business model at Facebook, which has 1.4 billion users, has more in common with NBC than Boeing …

“‘The Amazons, Googles and Facebooks [and Microsofts!] are exploring completely new things that will change the way we live,’ said Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. ‘There are other companies out there like Hewlett-Packard and IBM, but they aren’t doing the really huge things anymore.'”

Read more here. Read more →

The Guardian reports on scientific advances in global health care, highlighting FoneAstra, a collaboration between UW CSE Ph.D. student Rohit Chaudhri, Microsoft Research India, and Seattle global health non-profit PATH.

“For thriving societies, you need healthy communities. But despite significant advances in global health over the past decade, millions of people are still without access to basic healthcare …

“In partnership with global health organisation PATH and the University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering, the team developed a simple mobile phone app that could play a game-changing role in getting life-saving donated breast milk to newborns. The FoneAstra monitor is one of this year’s winners of GSK and Save the Children’s Healthcare Innovation Award, which aims to help support and scale-up innovations coming out of developing countries that reduce child deaths.”

Learn more about FoneAstra here and here. Read more in The Guardian here. Read more →

We’re celebrating our own version of March Madness after Team Hillarious*, a group of students from UW CSE, captured second place at the Pacific Rim Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (PRCCDC) over the weekend. PRCCDC is an annual competition that serves as the regional semi-finals for the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, a.k.a. the “big dance of data defense.” Teams of college students from Washington, Oregon and Idaho do battle against teams of hackers composed of cybersecurity industry experts who volunteer their time to test the students’ mettle. Fourteen teams participated in this year’s regional competition, which took place at Highline College.

Congratulations to Team Hillarious captain Kristina Savelesky, co-captain Kevin Fan, teammates Daniel Arens, Matt Carver, Stanley Hsieh, Alex Kirchhoff, Spencer Walden and Bo Wang, and team advisor Melody Kadenko – way to go!

*If you are wondering if that is a typo, it isn’t. Team Hillarious got its name when, a few years ago, the UW students frustrated a team of hackers with their defensive prowess. In response, the hackers left a note on the door that said, “You think you’re so hillarious, don’t you?” We thought that was hilarious, and so the name stuck.

UW CSE’s Team Hillarious, left to right: Spencer Walden, Matt Carver, Stanley Hsieh, Kristina Savelesky, Melody Kadenko, Bo Wang, Dan Arens, Kevin Fan, and Alex Kirchhoff