Allen School News

Please take a minute to sign Code.org’s #CSforAll petition – launched yesterday by America’s top leaders from business, politics, and education:

“As business leaders, elected officials, educators, and members of the public, we join forces to deliver a bipartisan message about opportunity and the American Dream. Technology is transforming society at an unprecedented rate. Whether it’s smartphones or social networks, self-driving cars or personalized medicine, nothing embodies the American Dream so much as the opportunity to change or even reinvent the world with technology. And participating in this world requires access to computer science in our schools. We ask you to provide funding for every student in every school to have an opportunity to learn computer science.”

Read more (and sign!) here! Read more →

UW CSE affiliate professor Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research in Redmond, has been recognized with the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award for his groundbreaking contributions in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.

The Newell Award recognizes career contributions that have breadth within computer science and/or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. Horvitz’s work does both, combining the theoretical with the practical and leveraging human and machine intelligence to deliver technologies that improve people’s lives. He has made countless, lasting contributions to Microsoft and to the field of computing through his work in the areas of time-critical decisions, information retrieval, health care, urban infrastructure, sustainability and development. His trailblazing research has produced computational models for assisting physicians in minimizing patient readmissions; predictive analytics for traffic flow and routing; and techniques for prioritizing and interpreting email.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jeannette Wing says of Horvitz, “He asks big questions: How do our minds work? What computational principles and architectures underlie thinking and intelligent behavior? How can computational models perform amidst real-world complexities such as sustainability and development? How can we deploy computation systems that deliver value to people and society?”

The Newell Award is a fitting acknowledgment of the scale and importance of Horvitz’s work. Read more about his many accomplishments on the Microsoft blog here and in the ACM press release here.

Congratulations, Eric! Read more →

“Test of Time” awards recognize research papers that, with the benefit of a decade’s hindsight, are viewed as having had particularly great impact.

SIGMOBILE, the Association for Computing Machinery’s special interest group focused on mobile computing and communications, has just introduced a Test of Time award and has selected Place Lab: Device Positioning Using Radio Beacons in the Wild as one of the inaugural winners.

Place Lab was a collaboration between researchers at UW CSE, Intel Research Seattle, Intel Research Cambridge, UC San Diego and the UW iSchool. The project ushered in a new era of location-aware computing and laid the foundation for many of the mobile apps that people take for granted today, from checking the weather forecast, to choosing a restaurant, to navigating their commute. The work of the Place Lab team helped to revolutionize mobile computing—and many other industries along with it.

In its award citation, SIGMOBILE hailed Place Lab as “a seminal effort to achieve accurate localization of mobile devices using existing infrastructure. It showed through painstaking experiments that leveraging a combination of Wi-Fi and GSM beacons enabled positioning with 20-30 meter median accuracy and close to 100% coverage throughout a major metropolitan area. The work directly informed localization techniques that have come to be used in billions of mobile devices.”

The Place Lab team included the late UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello; Ph.D. alum and affiliate faculty member Anthony LaMarca, then a member of Intel Labs and now Intel Principal Engineer at the Intel Science & Technology Center at the UW; Ph.D. alum Jeff Hightower, now an engineering manager at Google; and then-bachelor’s students James Howard, Jeff Hughes and Fred Potter.

This is the second such award for Place Lab—a paper describing other aspects of the work captured the 10-year Impact Award at UbiComp 2015. Read the original research paper here, and learn more about the SIGMOBILE Test of Time Award here.

Congratulations to the entire team! Read more →

Thousands of K-12 students, teachers, and parents visit UW each year for Engineering Discovery Days. Today: elementary and middle schoolers. Tomorrow, high schoolers. Amazing energy! Read more →

Balloting is open for the 2016 GeekWire Awards in several categories. Check ’em all out here.

But be sure to vote for UW CSE’s 3D Face Reconstruction in the “Innovation of the Year” category, here.

Congratulations to Supasorn Suwajanakorn, Steve Seitz and Ira Kemelmacher for being nominated!

  Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. students Hanchuan Li and Alex Mariakakis are one of eight teams selected to receive a 2016 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship. They won one of these coveted awards with their proposal for IDCam, a hybrid RFID-computer vision system that enables simultaneous localization and identification for individuals and objects that will increase our understanding of how people interact with the physical world.

IDCam observes how RFID tags instrumented on everyday objects are disturbed by their motion, and then correlates that information with visual motion information. The team envisions a variety of potential applications for the system. For example, retailers could use IDCam to observe the identity and location of merchandise with which their customers interact in their stores in order to gain a deeper understanding of people’s preferences and behaviors.

The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship program recognizes and supports graduate students engaged in research that advances futuristic ideas and embodies the company’s values of innovation, execution and partnership. Each winning team receives a $100,000 fellowship and mentoring by Qualcomm engineers, and the competition is fierce: this year, 129 teams submitted proposals, of which 34 were selected as finalists and invited to present their ideas at Qualcomm’s headquarters in San Diego.

Li and Mariakakis were nominated by CSE and Electrical Engineering professor Shwetak Patel, who leads the UbiComp Lab, and former CSE postdoc Alanson Sample at Disney Research.

UW CSE students have done very well in this competition in recent years, including past winners Carlo del Mundo and Vincent Lee (2015), Vincent Liu (2014, with EE student Vamsi Talla), and Thierry Moreau and Adrian Sampson (2013).

Way to go, Alex and Hanchuan! Read more →

UW CSE professor Anna Karlin and Ph.D. alum Jeff Dean have been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The American Academy, established in 1780, is one of the nation’s oldest and most revered learned societies whose members are among the most accomplished individuals in their disciplines—disciplines that span mathematics, the biological and physical sciences, medicine, the social sciences, business, government, humanities and the arts. Karlin and Dean are among only six computer scientists who were elected to the Academy this year out of 212 new members.

Karlin is the Microsoft Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and a member of UW CSE’s Theory group. Her research primarily focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms, particularly probabilistic and online algorithms. She also works at the interface between theory and other areas, such as economics and game theory, data mining, operating systems, networks and distributed systems. In addition to her research and teaching within CSE, Karlin designed and taught a course for non-majors that examined the intellectual underpinnings and societal impacts of computer science. Before her arrival at UW CSE, Karlin spent five years as a researcher at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center. As one of the founding members of rock band Severe Tire Damage, she has the distinction of having participated in the first-ever live music broadcast on the internet in 1993. Karlin earned her Ph.D. from Stanford in 1987 and is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. She joins CSE faculty members Susan Eggers and Ed Lazowska as fellows of the Academy.

Dean is a Google Senior Fellow, where he leads the Google Brain project. Since he joined Google in 1999, Dean has contributed to a number of significant developments at the company, including five generations of crawling, indexing and query serving systems; the initial development of the company’s AdSense for Content product; MapReduce, which simplifies the development of large-scale data processing applications; BigTable, a large-scale, semi-structured storage system that underpins a number of Google products; the system design for Google Translate; and the design of DistBelief and TensorFlow for large-scale training and deployment of deep learning models—among many others. Dean earned his Ph.D. from UW CSE in 1996 working with Craig Chambers on whole-program optimization techniques for object oriented languages. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009 and is a fellow of the ACM and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Karlin, Dean and their fellow new members will be inducted at a ceremony in October in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Read the Academy press release here.

Congratulations to Anna and Jeff on this outstanding recognition! Read more →

The University of Washington Board of Regents has approved the first interdisciplinary master’s degree program to be offered through the Global Innovation Exchange (GIX), a partnership between the UW and Tsinghua University launched last spring with support from Microsoft. The new Master of Science in Technology Innovation (MSTI) degree was developed with the collaboration of UW CSE and other units within the College of Engineering, the Foster School of Business, the iSchool and the School of Law.

From the UW News release:

“Launching in fall 2017, the newly approved 15-month degree focuses on the technology development, design thinking, and entrepreneurial skills needed to invent, build and launch innovative products using connected devices – a vital element in the development of the ‘Internet of Things.’ Under the guidance of leading UW professors and industry mentors, students will gain hands-on experience in the processes required to create new technology solutions, plus the business skills to bring them to market.”

UW CSE and Electrical Engineering professor Shwetak Patel led the development of the MSTI curriculum, and also serves as chief technology officer of GIX. According to Patel, “The program’s intent is to teach students just enough in each area to build their confidence in pursuing their own innovations in high-impact fields, such as health and sustainability, and improving standards of living both locally and globally….Technology innovation requires developing a global mindset to have a true impact.”

Students enrolled in GIX will engage in project-based learning encompassing user-centered design, technology development, and entrepreneurship. Participants may choose to pursue a dual-degree option in which they will have an opportunity to study in Beijing and earn a Master of Engineering in Information Technology from Tsinghua University. Application information will be available in July.

Read the full UW news release here, and learn more about the MSTI here.

Photo credit: Matt Hagen/University of Washington Read more →

On Thursday UW CSE hosted an alumni event at Amazon’s still-under-construction new buildings on 7th Avenue in downtown Seattle. Amazon is one of the largest employers of UW CSE graduates, and UW CSE is one of the largest sources of new graduates to Amazon.

Can’t wait for those domes to be finished! Read more →

More Hall Annex interior

GeekWire reports on a King County Superior Court ruling that UW may replace More Hall Annex – an abandoned research nuclear reactor building that a local preservation group has tried to nominate as a landmark under a city ordinance – with a facility that will enable the expansion of UW Computer Science & Engineering.

“On Thursday, Judge Suzanne Parisien ruled that the ordinance does not apply to the UW, adding that ‘public purpose requires that the campus continue to be developed to meet the growing and changing education needs of the State’ …

“Ed Lazowska, the computer science department’s Bill & Melinda Gates Chair, told GeekWire that the having the second building across the street from the existing space is ‘essential.’

More Hall Annex exterior

“The [new building] won’t merely duplicate spaces we already have — it will provide spaces that we currently lack and that all of us will use, such as a large lecture theater, several large classrooms, many dedicated undergraduate labs and project spaces, and a large robotics lab,’ Lazowska said. ‘So the space currently occupied by More Hall Annex is the only practical site.

“Added Lazowska: ‘The [new building] is essential if we’re to continue to grow, allowing us to prepare more of Washington’s kids for Washington’s top tech jobs.'”

Read more here. Read more →