Allen School News

Today we received a remarkable testimonial to Gaetano Borriello’s impact from Jane Goodall:

“It was with great sadness that we learned of Professor Borriello’s passing. Please accept our deepest condolences for your loss.

“The Institute was first introduced to Prof. Borriello and his students in 2009. Since then, the use of Open Data Kit (ODK) has transformed our approach to conservation in Africa and enabled us to greatly advance our mission of creating a world where people, animals and the environment can live in harmony.

“With ODK we have been able to empower and give voice to hundreds of village forest monitors and protected area rangers in Tanzania, Uganda, Congo and Eastern DRC so they can help conserve their forests and ecosystems for the benefit of present and future generations. More recently, Prof. Borriello and his students were instrumental in helping the Institute improve our process of collecting data in our long-term chimpanzee behavior research in Gombe, Tanzania, where I started my work in 1960.

“My colleagues who met and worked with Prof. Borriello recall his kindness, thoughtfulness and desire to be of service, as well as his humble nature and the unassuming way in which he was developing the next generation of computer scientists and engineers so they too can use their knowledge to improve the lives of others. What a great loss indeed he is to our world.”

Read the full letter here.

You might also enjoy the closing keynote that Gaetano gave at UbiComp 2014. He began by saying his remarks would not be technical but a story, a timeline about one project, ODK (Open Data Kit). If you want to know what Gaetano and some of his work was all about, this is the speech to listen to. It’s funny and fascinating. All of us are immensely proud of the reach that the work of Gaetano and his students is having around the world.

Watch the speech here. Read more →

GeekWire interviews Matt McIlwain (Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group), Chris DeVore (Managing Director of Techstars Seattle, operating inside UW’s Startup Hall), Connie Bourassa-Shaw (director of UW’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship), and Ed Lazowska (UW CSE) regarding the departure of UW President Michael Young, who has been a champion for innovation and entrepreneurship.

McIlwain: “My hope is that the Regents continue to emphasize the importance of how the UW intersects with the commercial and non-profit world in their selection of an interim and then new President.”

DeVore: “Calling it Young’s legacy is probably not giving the institution enough credit.”

Bourassa-Shaw: “Entrepreneurship and innovation have been flourishing across the University of Washington for more than a decade.”

Lazowska: “I hope the tech community will support us through this transition, as it has always supported us in the past.”

Read the article here.

Lazowska’s full remarks to GeekWire:

“I don’t want to minimize the role of the President or the impact that Mike Young has had.

“But UW is one of the nation’s and the world’s top universities. And it is a huge operation: 55,000 students, 4,300 teaching faculty, 16 schools and colleges (plus 2 branch campuses), and an annual budget of $6.3 billion (only $250 million of which comes from the state).

“One person does not run an enterprise of this scale. Ana Mari Cauce, our superb Provost, has been Mike Young’s partner since he arrived. She, like I, has devoted her entire career to UW – she’s not going anywhere. Paul Jenny, our superb Vice Provost for Planning & Budgeting, is not going anywhere. Mary Lidstrom, our superb Vice Provost for Research, is not going anywhere. Entrepreneurship and innovation is firmly in the hands of Vikram Jandhyala, our superb Vice Provost for Innovation, who’s not going anywhere. The 16 Deans and 2 Branch Campus Chancellors are not going anywhere. And all of these people would quickly agree that the Administration Building is not where the work of the University gets done – it’s in the trenches, where the faculty, students, and staff carry out the discovery, teaching, and outreach that’s our mission.

“I’ve been at UW through 6 Presidents and 2 Acting Presidents. Some were extraordinary (such as Bill Gerberding, who passed away last month). Some were downright goofy (such as Dick McCormick, who walked the plank in 2003). The trajectory of UW, and in particular the trajectory of Computer Science & Engineering, has always been upwards. That’s not going to change. I hope the tech community will support us through this transition, as it has always supported us in the past.” Read more →

A familiar face was back on campus today: UW CSE bachelor’s alum Brandon Ballinger (’06), former Google engineer and co-founder of fraud detection software company Sift Science (alongside fellow UW CSE alum Jason Tan) – and most recently, one of a small team of developers recruited to help fix the federal government’s online health insurance marketplace, Healthcare.gov.

Brandon graciously agreed to talk about his experience with around 35 undergrads as part of our Leadership Seminar Series, in which CSE alumni and friends share with current students what it takes to be effective in a startup, small company, large company, or less common environment.

What Brandon found upon arrival in the other Washington was not so much a big, hairy technical problem, but a people problem. The government had engaged 55 companies as contractors to work on different parts of the site, many of whom didn’t communicate well with each other and, and things went downhill, sometimes focused less on solutions and more on avoiding blame. Enter Brandon and his colleagues. They brought not only technical expertise but also lessons they had learned working in high-functioning teams in the private sector. By helping the people behind Healthcare.gov to work better together – emphasizing solutions to problems rather than who caused them, prioritizing expertise over rank, and teaching them to triage – they were able to build Healthcare.gov into a more reliable, user-friendly site.

Brandon also talked to the students about his experience working on the Android operating system when it was still in its infancy (as opposed to the market leader it is now). He pointed out that his work on Android speech recognition spanned things he had learned across the UW CSE curriculum: “The latest framework will change; CS fundamentals will last your whole career.” (See the 3 slides linked from the image to the right.). Students also learned what it’s like to discover your startup co-founder has bailed on you – via email – the night before your big interview with Y Combinator, and what areas of computer engineering he wished he had known more about when choosing a career path. (Shout out to the site reliability engineers!)

Read a fascinating Wired article about how Brandon and his team helped turn around Healthcare.gov here.

Our thanks to Brandon for delivering a fascinating (and eye-opening) talk! Read more →

With enormous sadness, we announce that our dear friend, colleague, and teacher Gaetano Borriello, the Jerre D. Noe Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, passed away this morning at his home, following a long fight with cancer.

Gaetano was dedicated to UW CSE and our students, and we were dedicated to him. Graduating from Berkeley in 1988, Gaetano applied to only a single academic department as an indication of how much he wanted to be here. Over the last six years, he fought the disease with courage, grace, optimism, and humor, continuing to teach, advise, mentor, and lead throughout. Through his work on technology for global development, Gaetano showed how research can  impact the lives of people around the world.

Our hearts go out to Gaetano’s wife Melissa, his sons Christopher and Nicholas, his mother Rosa, his brother Frank, and the rest of their family.  There will be no public service at this time, as the family wishes to grieve in private.

In his honor and memory, the department has established the Gaetano Borriello Fellowship for Change. The Borriello Fellowship will support students whose work is focused on exploring how technology can improve the lives of under-served populations.  More information on the fellowship here. Read more →

UW Computer Science & Engineering is pleased to announce the establishment of the Gaetano Borriello Endowed Fellowship for Change, honoring Gaetano Borriello, UW’s Jerre D. Noe Professor of Computer Science & Engineering. The Borriello Fellowship will support University of Washington students whose work is focused on exploring how technology can improve the lives of underserved populations.

Gaetano joined the UW CSE faculty in 1988, following receipt of his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He had previously received an M.S. in EE from Stanford University, and served as a member of the research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for eight years. From 2001-2003, on leave from UW, he founded Intel Research Seattle, which quickly became one of the premier research labs for work in ubiquitous computing.

Gaetano’s career began in the areas of integrated circuits, circuit synthesis, reconfigurable hardware, and embedded system development tools. He transitioned into ubiquitous computing, and as director of Intel Research Seattle he launched projects in elder care and in location-aware computing. More recently his focus has been applying mobile technologies to the problems of public health and development in low-resource settings. His group’s open-source mobile data collection tools, Open Data Kit, are in use on six continents in programs ranging across public health, documentation of human rights violations, and environmental monitoring.

Gaetano is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, a Fulbright Scholar, and a recipient of the UW CSE Undergraduate Teaching Award, the UW Distinguished Teaching Award, and the UW Marsha L. Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award.

Gaetano exemplifies why we are here:  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.  He is an inspiration to all of us.

Learn more about Change, the vibrant campus-wide community of students and faculty exploring how technology can improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions, here.

Should you wish to support the Gaetano Borriello Endowed Fellowship for Change, you may do so here. Read more →

Drew Hansen

State Reps. Drew Hansen, D-Bainbridge Island, and Chad Magendanz, R-Issaquah today announced HB 1813, a bipartisan proposal to expand computer science education in the state.

HB 1813 creates the Computer Science and Education Grant program, which funds grants to help educators who want to pursue professional development in computer science, outreach to students to inspire their interest in computer science, and assistance for school districts to pay for technology to teach computer science courses.  The bill also adopts high-quality statewide computer science teaching standards and directs the creation of a computer science endorsement for educators interested in teaching computer science.

A subsequent bill being prepared by Reps. Hansen and Magendanz will address the expansion of higher education opportunities in computer science.

Chad Magendanz

Reps. Hansen and Magendanz have devoted a huge amount of effort over the past year to understanding Washington State’s workforce gaps and exploring means to address them. Hopefully their proposals – which are visionary, intelligent, data-driven, and hard-nosed – will largely survive the sausage-making process that lies ahead.

Read more here. Read more →

When the son of one of our faculty members was asked to show a picture of a building he likes to his pre-school class, he chose the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

The photo he shared is of the Allen Center’s façade, but his dad told us that the elevators are really his favorite part of the building, and asked us to ensure that the new CSE-II building, currently in the pre-design phase, has cool elevators too.

Architects, please take note! Read more →

UW CSE is partnering with online real estate marketplace Zillow to stage a weekend hackathon February 6-8, with participation from the White House, U.S. Department of Commerce and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

“Hack Housing: Empowering Smarter Decisions” will encourage the development of creative solutions that harness the power of big data to better meet the needs of first-time homebuyers, senior citizens, and low-income renters. Participants in the hackathon will have access to newly-released government data sets on federal housing programs, the location of accessible apartments, and transit information. In addition, Zillow will make available its data on home values and rents.

Zillow co-founder and serial entrepreneur Rich Barton will open the event by sharing his experiences of using technology to bring power to the people across a variety of industries. After a day and a half of hard work, participants will present their solutions to a judging panel of local tech leaders, entrepreneurs and federal government officials. The winning team will receive a $10,000 prize.

The hackathon will take place at Zillow’s headquarters in downtown Seattle. Find more details, including official rules, and register to participate here. Read more →

The University of Washington’s eScience Institute and GitHub are co-hosting an Academia Town Hall next Monday, February 2nd, to explore the role of software in academic institutions and how they can adapt to better support the use of important software tools.

Panelists include UW CSE alum Dan Halperin, director of research in scalable data analytics at the eScience Institute; Marina Meila, associate professor of statistics at UW; researchers Katy Huff and Fernando Perez of the University of California, Berkeley; Dan Katz, program director at the National Science Foundation; and Jamie Kinney, manager of scientific computing at Amazon Web Services. The discussion will be moderated by Arfon Smith of GitHub.

The town hall is 6:00-9:00 pm in the Physics/Astronomy Auditorium (PAA 102) on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. The formal program will be followed by a cocktail reception in the WRF Data Science Studio.

Interested undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, faculty, UW technology staff, and interested members of the broader community are encouraged to attend this free event. Learn more and register here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Richard Ladner has been honored with the 2015 Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) Community Award “in recognition of excellence and leadership in increasing access to computing for students with disabilities.”

Richard accepted the award at the STEM-CP: Computing Education for the 21^st Century (CE21) PI Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, where he delivered a keynote address titled “Accessibility Is Not Enough.” The purpose of the CE21 meeting is to build community around the efforts of the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) to broaden participation in computing and strengthen computer science education.

Richard has devoted more than a decade to accessibility research and has been a strong advocate for broadening participation in computing and using technology to enrich the lives of people with disabilities. Read more about his work in this excellent GeekWire article.

Congratulations to Richard on this well-deserved recognition!

  Read more →