Allen School News

Teachers who attend our summer CS4HS workshop give it high marks

Registration is now open for UW CSE’s popular CS4HS professional development workshop for educators to be held July 6-8 on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus.

CS4HS is designed for teachers who have no previous computer science knowledge or programming experience. Aimed at middle and high school math and science teachers, CS4HS offers three action-packed days of insights and best practices that empower educators to incorporate computational thinking into their teaching and inspire their students’ curiosity about this rapidly expanding field.

Workshop participants learn computational problem solving and acquire the vocabulary to share these concepts in the classroom. They also gain an understanding of the relationship between computer science and other disciplines and how to convey the field’s impact on people and communities in a way that engages and excites students.

Don’t take our word for it, though—check out the testimonials from past CS4HS participants:

“I was super impressed with the caliber of speakers and information…This was a ‘class act’ in every way. Even the food was impressive!”

CS4HS participants visit one of UW CSE’s research labs

“As a high school Math teacher I was curious and excited to learn how this workshop on Computer Science might prove useful in my class. In the end, I can say absolutely that this workshop changed my teaching.”

“This was the most fun I’ve had in a professional development, EVER!”

Educators earn 20 clock hours from the Washington Science Teachers Association for attending the workshop. That, plus a continental breakfast and lunch each day, a welcome reception on the evening of the opening day, parking or transit reimbursement, and dorm accommodation for out-of-town participants, is included in the $50 registration fee.

CS4HS is a joint undertaking between UW CSE, Carnegie Mellon University, and Tim Bell’s CS Unplugged. Since 2007, nearly 500 Washington educators have completed the workshop in order to incorporate computer science into their classrooms. Teachers interested in attending CS4HS this summer can learn more and register here. Read more →

Left to right: Emo Todorov, Vikash Kumar, and Sergey Levine

Researchers in UW’s Movement Control Laboratory have built a dexterous robot hand that learns from experience, enabling it not only to perform tasks that are typically challenging for robots, but also improve its performance without human intervention. In contrast to a typical robotics application in which each individual movement must be programmed, the autonomous learning system developed by CSE Ph.D. student Vikash Kumar, CSE and Applied Mathematics professor Emo Todorov, and CSE professor Sergey Levine enables the robot to refine its movements as it practices a task.

From the UW News release:

“‘Hand manipulation is one of the hardest problems that roboticists have to solve,’ said lead author Vikash Kumar…’A lot of robots today have pretty capable arms but the hand is as simple as a suction cup or maybe a claw or a gripper.’

“By contrast, the UW research team spent years custom building one of the most highly capable five-fingered robot hands in the world. Then they developed an accurate simulation model that enables a computer to analyze movements in real time. In their latest demonstration, they apply the model to the hardware and real-world tasks like rotating an elongated object.

“With each attempt, the robot hand gets progressively more adept at spinning the tube, thanks to machine learning algorithms that help it model both the basic physics involved and plan which actions it should take to achieve the desired result.”

The robot hand used to demonstrate the team’s autonomous learning system was developed in by Kumar, Todorov and UW CSE Ph.D. alum Zhe Xu (now a postdoc at Yale). Levine, a pioneer in the use of deep learning to create neural network controllers for robots, worked on the project while completing his postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley prior to joining the UW CSE faculty this year.

“‘Usually people look at a motion and try to determine what exactly needs to happen —the pinky needs to move that way, so we’ll put some rules in and try it and if something doesn’t work, oh the middle finger moved too much and the pen tilted, so we’ll try another rule,’ said senior author and lab director Emo Todorov…

“‘It’s almost like making an animated film — it looks real but there was an army of animators tweaking it. What we are using is a universal approach that enables the robot to learn from its own movements and requires no tweaking from us.'”

The team will present its findings at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2016) later this month in Stockholm, Sweden. Read the research paper here, and the news release here. Watch a video demonstration here, and check out coverage by Wired, CNN Money, Gizmag, GeekWire, Fox News, Business Insider, and ZDNet.

A robot hand that learns by doing? That deserves a high-five! Read more →

Karanbir Singh thanks donors for supporting UW CSE undergraduates

UW CSE’s Scholarship and Fellowship Donor Recognition Luncheon is an annual tradition and one of our favorite events of the year. On Thursday, we held our 2016 luncheon to honor the individuals, families and organizations whose generosity keeps a CSE education within reach for undergraduate students regardless of means, and also enables us to recruit the most talented graduate students to our research program. With their support, UW CSE’s 29 endowed scholarship funds and 19 endowed fellowship funds are assisting 98 UW CSE undergraduate and graduate students this year to obtain a first-rate education and research experience.

Each year, we invite two recipients—one undergraduate and one graduate—to share their personal stories of how they came to UW CSE and what their scholarship or fellowship has meant to them. At the 2016 luncheon, Karan Singh and Annie Ross shared their stories and offered thanks on behalf of all of the students who have benefited from our donors’ support.

Singh is a third-year undergraduate student and recipient of the Burkhardt Family Endowed Scholarship. He serves as a teaching assistant for CSE’s introductory programming courses and has been accepted into the combined B.S./M.S. program. Singh told of his path from pre-med to computer science, when he was inspired to trade pipettes for programming. He looks forward to putting his computer science education to good use in order to improve education and health care.

Annie Ross thanks donors for giving student researchers the gift of time

Ross is a first-year Ph.D. student and the holder of the Wilma Bradley Endowed Fellowship. She works with CSE professor James Fogarty and CSE adjunct faculty member Jacob Wobbrock of the iSchool in the area of human-computer interaction. Ross discovered computer science after taking a CS course for the sake of a technical challenge while majoring in film production. She decided to pursue her Ph.D. in human-computer interaction as it gives her an opportunity to combine the creativity and human connection she found in film with her love of math and science.

Ross cited the supportive atmosphere as one of the reasons she chose UW CSE. But it was her fellowship that gave her the freedom to explore research areas that personally interest her which has defined her graduate school experience. Ross closed her remarks by recalling a conversation she had with her benefactor that perfectly illustrates the lasting impact of our donors’ generosity on our students.

“I had the absolute pleasure of having lunch with Ms. Bradley, the donor for my scholarship, earlier this year. Something she said really rang true with me: ‘One of the greatest gifts we can give to one another is time,’” said Ross.

“I’d like to take a moment to thank all of the generous donors who, through your fellowships and scholarships, have given us time to explore our interests and focus on our passions.”

Read about our terrific donors and the students they support in the luncheon program here.

Watch a video here of the remarks by Karan Singh and Annie Ross.

Our heartfelt thanks to all who support UW CSE and our students! Read more →

UW faculty and students are gearing up for the Association of Computing Machinery’s CHI 2016 conference that begins this weekend in San Jose, California. As the top conference for human-computer interaction research, CHI offers a terrific opportunity to showcase the breadth and depth of the University of Washington’s expertise in HCI and design as well as the strength of our interdisciplinary collaborations. UW CSE professor James Fogarty put together a terrific overview of UW-authored papers featured at this year’s conference for the DUB website—including three Best Paper Awards representing the top one percent of submissions.

Katharina Reinecke

UW CSE professor Katharina Reinecke co-authored one of the winning papers, Enabling Designers to Foresee Which Colors Users Cannot See, with professors David Flatla of University of Dundee and Christopher Brooks of the University of Michigan. For that project, Reinecke and her fellow researchers collected data through LabintheWild to examine the effect of real-world lighting conditions on people’s ability to differentiate colors in websites and infographics. The team then developed an image-processing tool, ColorCheck, that enables designers to identify color pairings that may pose a problem for some users of digital content.

Of the nine UW-authored papers that earned Honorable Mentions—given to the top five percent of submissions to CHI—five were co-authored by CSE faculty and/or students. The projects deal with an array of HCI-related topics, including accessibility, health sensing, gesture tracking, and virtual reality:

Finexus: Tracking Precise Motions of Multiple Fingertips Using Magnetic Sensing, by UW Electrical Engineering Ph.D. alum Ke-Yu Chen, CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel, and Sean Keller of Oculus Research, is a system that uses magnets to precisely track finger movements for a more elegant and immersive virtual reality experience (more on Finexus here).

FingerIO: Using Active Sonar for Fine-Grained Finger Tracking, by UW CSE Ph.D. student Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, EE Ph.D. student Vikram Iyer, CSE affiliate faculty member Desney Tan of Microsoft Research, and CSE professor Shyam Gollakota, enables users to interact with smartphones and smartwatches by writing or gesturing on any surface or in mid-air using sonar (more on FingerIO here).

Incloodle: Evaluating an Interactive Application for Young Children with Mixed Abilities, by UW Human Centered Design & Engineering Ph.D. student Kiley Sobel, CSE Ph.D. student Kyle Rector, HCDE graduate student Susan Evans, and HCDE professor and CSE adjunct faculty member Julie Kientz, presents a picture-taking app that advances our understanding of how interactive technology can facilitate inclusive play among children with diverse abilities.

Researcher-Centered Design of Statistics: Why Bayesian Statistics Better Fit the Culture and Incentives of HCI, by UW CSE Ph.D. students Matthew Kay and Greg Nelson, and professor Erik Hekler of Arizona State University, demonstrates how Bayesian methods will lead to a more user-centered approach to statistical analysis in HCI research.

SpiroCall: Measuring Lung Function over a Phone Call, by UW CSE Ph.D. students Mayank Goel and Eric Whitmire, EE Ph.D. students Elliot Saba and Josh Fromm, former high school intern Maia Stiber, UW EE Ph.D. alum Eric Larson (now a professor at Southern Methodist University), CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel, and the late CSE professor Gaetano Borriello, is a tool for measuring lung function using any phone, anywhere in the world (more on SpiroCall here).

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Several more papers authored by CSE adjunct faculty and friends were designated among the best of CHI—all told, UW authors contributed a total of 39 papers to this year’s conference, representing 10 UW departments or programs and more than two dozen external university and industry partners. See the complete list of UW CHI papers here.

Way to go, team! Read more →

Front row: Shwetak and Luke. Back row: Eleanor.

UW CSE and Electrical Engineering professor Shwetak Patel and CSE professor Luke Zettlemoyer traveled to our nation’s capital to collect their Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers (PECASE). The PECASE Award is the highest honor bestowed by our nation’s government on early career researchers in science and engineering fields.

The 106 winners named in February gathered yesterday to be recognized at ceremonies hosted by the National Science Foundation and the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy. Today, awardees joined President Barack Obama at the White House, where Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also spoke.

Patel was nominated for the PECASE by the National Science Foundation for his work on home sensing systems to monitor electricity and water consumption. Zettlemoyer was nominated by the Department of Defense for developing new approaches to natural language processing. UW Chemistry professor David Masiello also received a PECASE through NSF for his work in the emerging field of theoretical molecular nanophotonics.

Read our earlier post on the PECASE announcement here.

Congratulations to Shwetak, Luke and David on this terrific achievement! Read more →

Professor Alvin Cheung, who works with UW CSE’s PLSE and database research groups, has received an Early Career Research Award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Cheung’s winning proposal, “Using Verified Lifting to Optimize Legacy Stencil Codes,” was one of 49 projects selected for funding by DOE out of 720 proposals submitted.

Cheung’s proposal describes how verified lifting can enable legacy stencil computations to leverage domain-specific languages (DSLs) and frameworks to improve performance. Stencil computations are used in many image processing, physical simulation and machine learning applications. Verified lifting is a new technique that utilizes program analysis and program synthesis to automatically infer a high-level, provably correct summary from the input code. This technique has been previously applied to database applications and programmable switches. For stencil computations, his proposal offers an alternative to the rewriting of existing applications or developing custom compilers to transform such code—practices which are both tedious and prone to bugs—while leveraging the latest developments in high-performance DSLs and domain-specific compilers to improve speed, maintainability, and portability.

Cheung, along with collaborators Shoaib Kamil, senior research scientist in the Adobe Creative Technologies Lab led by CSE affiliate faculty member David Salesin, and postdoc Shachar Itzhaky and professor Armando Solar-Lezama of MIT, will present a related paper at the PLDI 2016 conference in June. In that paper, the team describes STNG, a system that translates stencil computations from low-level Fortran code into the high-performance DSL Halide to produce median performance improvements as high as 24x.

Congratulations, Alvin! Read more →

In a desperate attempt to rehabilitate the image of MIT engineers, the Division of Student Life has agreed to provide soap in dormitories.

In recent years, renegade MIT students on the leading edge of 18th century personal hygiene had installed their own soap dispensers in residence halls, but the Division of Student Life had removed them.

Honestly – you can’t make up stuff like this. Read more here.

(Will the Stata Center be next?) Read more →

GeekWire reports on today’s State of Technology luncheon. More than 1,000 attendees heard from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, preceded by 3 tech startup CEOs: Clayton Lewis (Arivale), Forest Key (Pixvana), and Chris Diorio (Impinj). Our favorite excerpts from the GeekWire article:

“Cost of living . A competitive talent pool. The University of Washington …

“Lewis also credited the University of Washington as an important part of the technology ecosystem in Seattle. That was echoed by Diorio, who co-founded RFID-maker Impinj 16 years ago in Seattle. Diorio noted that he originally came to Seattle to work at the UW’s nationally-recognized computer science department.

“‘It was really the draw of the university and the entire ecosystem that a large prestigious university creates, and how it draws students and industries and people and faculty,’ he said. ‘The bandwidth of the community here as a consequence of that university is transformational.'”

Thanks, guys! Read more here. Read more →

SpiroCall team members, from left: Shwetak Patel, Mayank Goel and Elliot Saba

Researchers in the UbiComp Lab led by UW CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel have come up with a way to measure lung function using any phone, anywhere in the world. SpiroCall accurately measures lung function over a telephone call, enabling patients and doctors to monitor chronic lung diseases such as asthma and cystic fibrosis without requiring frequent visits to a clinic. The project extends the benefits of SpiroSmart, the smartphone app developed by the same team of researchers as an alternative to the traditional spirometry test, to people who only have access to older style mobile phones or landlines.

From the UW News release:

“‘We wanted to be able to measure lung function on any type of phone you might encounter around the world — smartphones, dumb phones, landlines, pay phones,’ said Shwetak Patel…’With SpiroCall, you can call a 1-800 number, blow into the phone and use the telephone network to test your lung function’….

“‘People have to manage chronic lung diseases for their entire lives,’ said lead author Mayank Goel, a UW CSE doctoral student. ‘So there’s a real need to have a device that allows patients to accurately monitor their condition at home without having to constantly visit a medical clinic, which in some places requires hours or days of travel.'”

Co-authors include UW EE Ph.D. students Elliot Saba and Josh Fromm, UW CSE Ph.D. student Eric Whitmire, former high school intern and California Institute of Technology freshman Maia Stiber, UW EE Ph.D. alum Eric Larson (now on the faculty of Southern Methodist University), and the late UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello.

The researchers will present SpiroCall at the CHI 2016 conference that begins later this week in San Jose, California.

Read the full news release here, and check out the project web page here. Read the research paper here, and watch the YouTube video here.

Photo credit: Dennis Wise/University of Washington Read more →

Four UW CSE students—Krittika D’Silva, Victor Farkas, Karolina Pyszkiewicz and Sarah Yu—have been selected as members of the inaugural class of the Husky 100. This new award recognizes 100 undergraduate and graduate students from across the three UW campuses who are making the most of their time as members of the UW community—and making a difference inside and outside of the classroom.

Krittika D’Silva is a senior majoring in computer engineering and bioengineering. She works with UW CSE professor Luis Ceze in the Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL) on a groundbreaking project that uses DNA molecules for long-term data storage. Previously, D’Silva worked with the late UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello and Ph.D. alum Nicki Dell on the development of smartphone apps to improve health care for low-income people in remote regions. She also spent more than two years as a research assistant in the Department of Bioengineering on improving the design of prosthetic devices to increase patient comfort. D’Silva plans to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science at Cambridge University as a Gates Cambridge Scholar.

Victor Farkas is a senior computer science major who arrived at the UW four years ago from Slovakia after accepting an athletic scholarship to join the UW men’s tennis team. In his freshman year, Farkas successfully managed his academic and athletic responsibilities and overcame the language barrier to earn the highest grade point average among UW student-athletes. He has exhibited leadership on and off the court as co-captain of the tennis team, a research assistant in the Robotics & State Estimation Lab, and a teaching assistant for CSE’s Computer Security course. Farkas has completed internships at Amazon, Google and International Software, and he plans to extend his time at the UW to complete CSE’s fifth-year master’s program.

Karolina Pyszkiewicz is a junior who earned direct admission into the computer science major from Seattle’s Holy Names high school. She is generous in volunteering her time to various CSE outreach activities and particularly effective at engaging young women in computer science, having served as a counselor for UW CSE’s DawgBytes summer day camps, an officer of the UW chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a Google Student Ambassador. Pyszkiewicz completed an internship at Microsoft while still in high school, and has completed internships at Facebook and Google since her arrival at UW CSE. In addition to being a UW CSE endowed scholarship recipient, she was named a Washington State Opportunity Scholar and a NASA Space Grant Scholar.

Sarah Yu is a senior majoring in computer science, economics and international studies. She spent last spring as a Cybersecurity Research Fellow in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group in partnership with the UW’s Jackson School of International Studies. Previously, Yu worked with the Seattle Red Cross as a Jackson-Munro Public Service Fellow, an award that aims to develop undergraduate students’ potential as leaders while working on a public service project. She has completed internships at Amazon and Lagoon Conservation, and for the past six years she has served in various capacities as a volunteer with the American Red Cross.

We are very proud to have Krittika, Victor, Karolina and Sarah as members of the UW CSE family. Learn more about the Husky 100 program here, and read profiles of the 2016 class here.

Congratulations to all! Read more →