Allen School News

Lilian de Greef

UW CSE’s Lilian de Greef and Irene Zhang have been named 2015 Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellows. Only 12 recipients were selected from among 169 nominees received by the company for this highly competitive fellowship, which provides financial support as well as the opportunity to work alongside leading computer scientists as part of a 12-week paid internship at Microsoft Research.

Lilian works with Shwetak Patel in the UbiComp Lab. Her interests include computer vision, embedded systems, machine learning and human-computer interaction. Lilian and her UbiComp colleagues developed BiliCam, a smartphone-based system for monitoring newborn jaundice.

Irene Zhang

Irene works with Hank Levy and Arvind Krishnamurthy in the Computer Systems Lab. Her research focuses on systems for large-scale, distributed applications, including the design of new operating system abstractions for mobile/cloud applications as part of the Sapphire project.

Past winners of this prestigious award at UW CSE include Yoav Artzi and Mayank Goel (2014); Gabe Cohn and Franzi Roesner (2012); and Morgan Dixon (2011).

Congratulations to Lilian and Irene, and thanks to Microsoft Research for recognizing and supporting these rising stars in computer science! Read more →

From the smallest start-up to industry leaders operating on a global scale, companies from around the region descended on the Allen Center this week to pitch job opportunities to UW CSE students.

Company and student turnout for the two-day event has been terrific. Yesterday, recruiters representing around 40 local start-ups pitched an entrepreneurial career path to hundreds of our undergraduate and graduate students. Today, established companies get their chance, with representatives from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and many more taking over the atrium.

Once again, we hit maximum capacity for our established company recruiting day – meaning some employers unfortunately wound up on a waiting list.

Thanks to all of our Industry Affiliates and students who turned out for the event – and good luck with those interviews! Read more →

Refraction 2, the award-winning game from UW CSE’s Center for Game Science in which players use fractions to save lost animals in space, is now available as a free download for the iPad.

Refraction won the grand prize in the Disney Learning Challenge at SIGGRAPH 2010. The game challenges players to expand their knowledge of fractions as they bend, split and redirect lasers to free animals trapped in spaceships. Originally developed for children nine to 11 years old, Refraction 2 is educational fun for all ages.

iPad users can begin their fraction-fueled animal rescue adventure here.

A version for Android users is coming soon. And be sure to keep an eye out for other great titles from the Center for Game Science! Read more →

The Seahawks banner has returned to the exterior of UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

Back in New England, the truck delivering a Patriots banner to the Stata Center backed into the building and dented it.  More dents to come … Read more →

Department chair Hank Levy traveled to our state capital today at the invitation of the House Higher Education Committee to address the growing demand for computer science graduates in Washington and the role of UW CSE in meeting that demand.

Speaking before the committee, Hank emphasized the role that UW CSE plays in supplying top computer science graduates to large information and communication technology (ICT) employers such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google; local startups that do not have the resources to recruit on a global scale; and companies outside of the ICT sector that employ significant numbers of technical talent. He also shared data on student demand, noting the sharp increase in the number of incoming UW students who signal their intent to major in CSE – more than any other field of engineering – and his expectation that enrollment in CSE’s introductory courses will exceed 5,000 students this year.

“We have become, with your support, one of the very top computer science programs in the nation,” Hank told the committee.

Highlighting Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that the Puget Sound region is “the software capital of America,” with more developers here than can be found in Silicon Valley, Hank shared state and national data illustrating how future demand for computer science graduates will outstrip that of other STEM fields. Meeting this need, he said, is critical to Washington’s economy; with additional state support, UW CSE would be able to double degree production from 300 to 600 per year.

“The state will always be a net importer of talent – that is just inherent in the exciting and incredible growth of Washington,” Hank observed at the conclusion of his testimony. “But students here who have the ability and desire to prepare for these top jobs need to have the opportunity to do that, and our goal is to give them that opportunity.”

Other presenters included Michael Schutzler, CEO of the Washington Technology Industry Association; Microsoft recruiter Becky Tucker; and Lysandra Donigian, Google’s Manager of Technical Student Outreach for North America. All of them pointed to UW CSE as a vital producer of sought-after talent for Washington’s high tech employers and advised the committee to make the program’s expansion a high priority.

Download a PDF of Hank’s presentation to the committee here.

Watch a video of the work session, courtesy of TV-W, here. Read more →

Nineteen young women from Washington State have been named regional winners of 2015 Aspirations in Computing Awards from NCWIT – the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

Among them is Mayukha Vadari, and 11th grader at Redmond High School, who spent last summer as a research intern working with UW CSE professor Magda Balazinska and other faculty and students from UW CSE and UW Astronomy.

Mayukha’s biography on the NCWIT awards website begins: “This summer (2014), Mayukha had her dream internship at the University of Washington’s Computer Science department, working on a problem for the astronomy department. It combined space and the beginning of the universe, big data analytics and computer science, all areas of great interest to her. Her task was to improve a service that visualized galaxy formation to allow more parameters. The project she was working on involved showing the merger history of a galaxy: visualizing the historical view of how galaxies were formed as they merged or separated to get to their final (present) state.”

Congratulations to Mayukha, and to all 19 winners and 20 runners-up from Washington State in the 2015 NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Awards.  Read about them all here. Read more →

Shwetak Patel has been appointed as the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering.

Shwetak’s research interests are in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, Sensor-Enabled Embedded Systems, and User Interface Software and Technology. He is particularly interested in developing new sensing technologies with an emphasis on energy monitoring and health applications for the home.

He was a founder of Zensi, Inc., a residential energy monitoring company, which was acquired by Belkin, Inc. in 2010. He is also a co-founder of SNUPI Technologies, a low-power wireless sensor company. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2011), Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2011), Sloan Research Fellowship (2012), TR-35 Award (2009), World Economic Forum Young Global Scientist Award (2013), and an NSF CAREER Award (2013). He was named Top Innovator of the Year by Seattle Business Magazine, and Newsmaker of the Year by Seattle Business Journal in 2011. Earlier work was also honored by the New York Times as a top technology of the year in 2005. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community, and was selected as a Seattle Shaper in 2012.

Congratulations, Shwetak. And many thanks to our friends at the Washington Research Foundation – WRF has supported UW CSE and UW as a whole in so many ways over so many years! Read more →

It’s becoming a welcome annual event: decorating the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering with multi-story banners celebrating the success of Paul’s Seattle Seahawks! Read more →

This evening the University of Washington community celebrated the life of Bill Gerberding, our longest-serving President and a very special human being.

More information in a previous post here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. alum Brian Ferris and Ph.D. student Caitlin Bonnar take two of the region’s transit agencies to task in an op-ed in the Seattle Transit Blog for ongoing issues with the quality of the data they provide to OneBusAway, the Transit App, Google, and other transit information sources.  (Brian wrote all the original code for OneBusAway, and Caitlin currently coordinates maintenance and development of the iPhone app.)  Read it here, along with numerous comments from other riders. Read more →