Allen School News

Oren Etzioni – CEO of Paul G. Allen’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and long-time UW CSE professor – writes in Wired:

“Deep learning is rapidly ‘eating’ artificial intelligence. But let’s not mistake this ascendant form of artificial intelligence for anything more than it really is. The famous author Arthur C. Clarke wrote, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ And deep learning is certainly an advanced technology – it can identify objects and faces in photos, recognize spoken words, translate from one language to another, and even beat the top humans at the ancient game of Go. But it’s far from magic. …

“Machine learning is far from being a ‘genie’ that is ready to spring from a bottle and run amok. Rather, it is a step in a decades-long (or, perhaps, centuries-long) research endeavor to understand intelligence and to construct human-level AI.”

Great essay! Read it here. Read more →

Anat Caspi, director of UW CSE’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, is attending the United States of Women Summit convened by the White House this week. She was invited to participate in recognition of her efforts to lead change on issues important to women and girls.

The summit is bringing together 5,000 people from all industries and walks of life to celebrate the progress that has been made to advance gender equality and identify the actions needed to move forward. It is organized around six pillars: economic empowerment, health and wellness, educational opportunity, preventing violence against women, entrepreneurship and innovation, and leadership and civic engagement. Caspi checks several of those boxes as an advocate for participatory design and using technology to improve quality of life for people of all abilities in her role at the Taskar Center. The center—which was established in memory of the late UW CSE professor Ben Taskar—taps into UW CSE’s strength in accessibility, sensing and novel interfaces to develop and deploy technologies that will increase independence for individuals with motor and speech impairments.

Caspi has been an invaluable resource to students interested in accessible design. She has advised students participating in the City of Seattle’s Hack the Commute competition and in the eScience Institute’s Data Science for the Social Good program. Caspi is also an instructor in our Accessibility Capstone course for undergraduates.

The United States of Women Summit runs today and tomorrow in Washington, D.C. and features First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and a who’s who list of leaders from business, entertainment, academia, non-profits and government. Sessions are being streamed live online. Find out more about the summit and supporting activities by visiting the USOW website here. Read more →

14 of UW CSE’s 23 2016 Ph.D. graduates

UW CSE awarded a record 391 degrees at our department graduation ceremony on Friday evening. (We are rapidly growing toward a total of 460 degrees per year, and hope to be funded to grow to 600 degrees per year – roughly double the number of just two years ago! An additional building is part of the plan.)

256 Bachelors degrees were awarded in Computer Science and Computer Engineering. Thirty percent of the Computer Science Bachelors recipients were women – not nearly at parity, but double the national average for our peers.

112 Masters degrees were awarded: 49 in our part-time evening/distance Professional Masters Program, and 63 to full-time students.

23 Ph.D.s were awarded.

At the ceremony:

• Ruth Anderson – a 2006 UW CSE Ph.D. – received the ACM Student Chapter Undergraduate Teaching Award.
• Bran Amour Hagger received CSE’s Undergraduate Service Award.
• Darby Losey received CSE’s Undergraduate Honors Thesis Award.
• Viktor Farkas and Krittika D’Silva received CSE’s Outstanding Computer Science Senior Award and Outstanding Computer Engineering Senior Award, respectively.
• The Bob Bandes Memorial Excellence in Teaching Award recognized graduate student teaching assistants Adrian Sham and Nick Shahan, and undergraduate student teaching assistants Michael Lee and Melissa Galloway. Honorable mentions went to undergraduate student TAs Megan Hopp and Chloe Lathe.
• Albert Greenberg (Ph.D. 1983) and Stefan Savage (Ph.D. 2002) received this year’s CSE Alumni Achievement Awards.

Congratulations one and all!

Check out the graduation program here. (Additional photos to come!) Read more →

A super GeekWire article:

“What happens when a group of talented computer science students at the University of Washington get to play with a HoloLens device for 10 weeks as part of a first-of-its-kind class?

“Well, a little bit of everything.

“The UW hosted a demo day on Thursday afternoon for its first-ever virtual and augmented reality capstone class that gave students from one of the nation’s top computer science departments a chance to develop apps for Microsoft’s HoloLens device.

“The energy inside the UW CSE building was buzzing as attendees tested out an array of fun and entertaining futuristic applications that ranged from making spring rolls to playing chess to learning piano to flying paper airplanes to destroying giant eyeballs.”

Read the GeekWire article here, and coverage by TechCrunch here. Find links to project websites through the course website here. Additional photos here.

Each year UW CSE offers a variety of “capstone courses” on various themes, in which teams of students conceive and carry out complex projects. These experiences are a key reason our students are in such high demand. The themes of some of this year’s capstones include robotics, games, accessibility, digital animation, computer animation, and augmented/virtual reality.

The AR/VR capstone was a first, nationally – an opportunity for students to work with the very latest technology, coached by some of the greatest minds in AR and VR from academia and industry. Microsoft, Google, Oculus, and Valve sponsored the course in tremendously important ways – for example, Microsoft provided 25 Hololens systems and extensive technical support.

Read more →

At UW CSE’s graduation ceremony on Friday evening, 1983 Ph.D. alum Albert Greenberg and 2002 Ph.D. alum Stefan Savage will be recognized as the recipients of UW CSE’s 2016 Alumni Achievement Awards.

We inaugurated this award for two purposes: first, to recognize some of our most accomplished alumni; second, to make it clear to each year’s new graduates that they are joining a long line of men and women who have built upon their UW CSE education to change the world.

Albert Greenberg

Albert Greenberg, 1983 UW CSE Ph.D.

Albert Greenberg has worked on the front lines of grand scale networking and cloud computing for more than two decades, first at Bell Labs/AT&T and then at Microsoft.

Albert earned his Ph.D. at UW CSE in 1983 working on the development of efficient algorithms for multiple access channels alongside professors Richard Ladner and Martin Tompa. Before his arrival at UW CSE, he earned his Bachelor’s in Mathematics from Dartmouth College.

At Bell Labs/AT&T in New Jersey, Albert rose to division manager for network measurement engineering and research, and then to executive director and AT&T Fellow. He returned to Seattle in 2007, joining Microsoft as a Principal Researcher. For the past six years he has served as Distinguished Engineer and Director of Development for Microsoft’s Azure Networking, the company’s global cloud computing infrastructure platform that spans millions of servers around the globe and helps make Seattle the leader in cloud computing. Albert’s responsibilities encompass physical and virtual datacenter networking design and management, overseeing teams in Redmond, Mountain View, Hyderabad, Dublin, and Beijing.

The UW CSE Alumni Achievement Award is the latest in a string of honors for Albert. Earlier this year he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering – the profession’s highest honor. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and has received the SIGCOMM Award for his lifetime contribution to the field of communications networks, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, and multiple “Test of Time” awards for his research.

Stefan Savage

Stefan Savage, 2002 UW CSE Ph.D.

As a leader in the Systems & Networking and Computer & Network Security groups at the University of California San Diego, professor Stefan Savage has tackled everything from computer worms and online scams, to distributed attacks, insidious global consumer fraud networks, and automobile systems hacking. He is being honored twice this month for his outstanding research in network security and efforts to fight cyber crime: tonight he receives the UW CSE Alumni Achievement Award, and tomorrow, he collects the 2015 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences.

Stefan earned his Ph.D. from UW CSE in 2002 working with professors Brian Bershad and Tom Anderson. His route to computer science academia was unorthodox. Having begun his studies as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University in physics and cognitive science, he wound up earning a degree in applied history instead. He then spent two years working in a computer science lab at CMU before following Bershad to Seattle, earning admission to UW CSE’s doctoral program a year later.

Stefan received job offers from MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU, Cornell, UCSD, and several others. He joined UCSD for the cultural fit and turned his attention to battling cyber drug crime and shutting down counterfeit software sales by tracking the flow of money. Stefan also co-founded the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security with UW CSE professor Yoshi Kohno to draw attention to the security vulnerabilities of modern automobile systems, and established the Center for Evidence Based Security Research in collaboration with the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley. He won the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award in 2013, earning plaudits for his “uncanny ability to ask exactly the right question, propose exactly the right solution, and see that solution through to impact.”

Read more about Albert and Stefan in MSB here. Read about previous recipients of the UW CSE Alumni Achievement Award here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Maya Cakmak, whose research focuses on human-robot interaction, has received a NSF CAREER Award. She is the 31st current CSE professor to be recognized through this program or its predecessors, which is the most prestigious category of awards offered by the National Science Foundation in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars. The award will support Cakmak’s efforts to develop robots that end-users can program to address their specific needs and the environments in which they live.

While robots have the potential to enhance quality of life and increase independence for people living with disabilities, it is difficult to anticipate all possible scenarios when programming general-purpose robots. Cakmak seeks to address this difficulty by empowering users with diverse abilities and without technical backgrounds to program their assistive robots to perform real-world tasks within the settings in which they will be deployed. As part of the project, she will develop new methods and tools that encompass situated programming (programing through direct interactions with the robot and its environment), simplified programming (programming using highly simplified languages), and abstracted programming (manipulating abstractions of program entities for which programs are synthesized automatically).

Cakmak’s proposal also includes a strong education and outreach component. Among other things, she plans to continue engaging K-12 students with disabilities in robotics through the DO-IT scholars program and expand UW CSE outreach programs with robotics-related activities.

Learn more about the project on the NSF award page here.

Congratulations, Maya! Read more →

Yesterday, Forbes published a terrific interview with UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. During the conversation with magazine contributor Peter High, Etzioni shared his thoughts on a wide range of topics, including how artificial intelligence can benefit humanity, what he learned from starting multiple companies, and how his own students and interns help him to stay on the cutting edge of a fast-moving field.

Etzioni explained that he and institute founder Paul Allen aim to build a team “that punches above its weight” to advance AI research, saying, “Ultimately, to me, the computer is just a big pencil. What can we sketch using this pencil that makes a positive difference to society, and advances the state of the art, hopefully in an out-sized way?”

Read the full interview here or listen to the audio here. Read more →

At this week’s Code conference, Bill Gates had a recommendation for the audience: Read “The Master Algorithm” by UW CSE’s Pedro Domingos.

Read about it in recode here and in Quartz here.

Learn about Pedro and “The Master Algorithm” here.

  Read more →

Again this year, UW CSE played host to the finalists in the Technology Alliance’s Youth Apps Challenge.

Youth Apps Challenge is a two-part program that introduces both teachers and students to the power and potential of programming. Youth Apps motivates teams of middle and high school students from across Washington to develop innovative computer applications that address everyday problems.

This year more than 50 teams of students (each with a faculty sponsor) submitted apps to the challenge. Fifteen finalists were selected to showcase their apps today in a live exhibition and pitch contest at the Allen Center.

Congratulations to all of the amazing participants in the 2016 Youth Apps Challenge – and to their amazing teachers and amazing parents! Read more →

Impinj, the Seattle-based RFID solutions company founded by UW CSE professor Chris Diorio and his legendary Caltech Ph.D. mentor Carver Mead, has filed for an IPO.

The RFID market took longer than the company expected to develop, but has taken off in the past few years.

RFID is “The Internet of Everything” (at a recent presentation, Diorio’s “prop” was a belt he had just purchased at Macy’s that sported an RFID tag), and Impinj has a leadership position.

Read more in GeekWire here. Read more →