Allen School News

IEEE Spectrum highlights the work of UW CSE Ph.D. alum (and current Yale postdoc) Zhe Xu and CSE and Applied Mathematics professor Emo Todorov, who developed a robotic hand that achieves true human-like dexterity and could serve as a model for the development of neuroprosthetics and limb regeneration research.

From the article:

“Because of the inherent complexity of a real human hand, biomimetic anthropomorphic hands inevitably involve lots of compromises to get them to work properly while maintaining a human-ish form factor. Zhe Xu and Emanuel Todorov from the University of Washington, in Seattle, have gone crazy and built the most detailed and kinematically accurate biomimetic anthropomorphic robotic hand that we’ve ever seen, with the ultimate goal of replacing human hands completely….”

“Besides being an extraordinarily beautiful piece of craftsmanship, the UW hand is able to very closely mimic a wide variety of grasps when controlled with a waldo remote manipulator. Users can also perform complicated in-hand manipulation without force feedback, which the researchers attribute to the kinematics of their hand so closely matching that of a real human hand.”

The article describes how Xu and Todorov were able to mimic the structure of a human hand using a combination of 3-D printing (bones), polyethylene strings (ligaments and tendons), and laser-cut rubber sheets (soft tissue).

This is a really cool piece of technology from UW CSE’s Movement Control Laboratory. Read the full article and view a video demonstration at IEEE Spectrum here, and read the research paper here. Check out the Gizmodo article here. Read more →

Shwetak Patel (left) and Luke Zettlemoyer

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced today that UW CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel and UW CSE professor Luke Zettlemoyer have been selected to receive a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The award, which is the highest honor the U.S. government bestows upon scientists and engineers in the early stage of their careers, is designed to support promising young researchers who show exceptional potential to advance the frontiers of scientific knowledge in the 21st century and demonstrate a commitment to community service.

Patel and Zettlemoyer are among 106 scientists and engineers selected from across the country to receive this honor. From the White House press release:

“‘These early-career scientists are leading the way in our efforts to confront and understand challenges from climate change to our health and wellness,’ President Obama said. ‘We congratulate these accomplished individuals and encourage them to continue to serve as an example of the incredible promise and ingenuity of the American people….’

“This year’s recipients are employed or funded by the following departments and agencies: Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of the Interior, Department of Veterans Affairs, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, and the Intelligence Community. These departments and agencies join together annually to nominate the most meritorious scientists and engineers whose early accomplishments show the greatest promise for assuring America’s preeminence in science and engineering and contributing to the awarding agencies’ missions.”

Patel, who directs the UW’s UbiComp Lab and is a recognized expert in sensor systems research, was nominated for a PECASE by the National Science Foundation “for inventing low-cost, easy-to-deploy sensor systems that leverage existing infrastructures to enable users to track household energy consumption and make the buildings we live in more responsive to our needs.”

Zettlemoyer, a member of UW CSE’s world-class Natural Language Processing group, was nominated by the Department of Defense “for his outstanding research accomplishments in computational semantics, in particular for innovative new machine learning approaches for problems in natural language understanding.”

Patel and Zettlemoyer will be formally recognized at a White House ceremony in the spring. They join some pretty select company, including previous PECASE recipients Tom Anderson and Carlos Guestrin on the UW CSE faculty.

Read the White House press release here. Read the UW News press release here.

Congratulations, Shwetak and Luke! Read more →

UW CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel of the UbiComp Lab is featured in a new documentary, “The Human Face of Big Data,” that will air on PBS next week. The award-winning film examines how our growing capacity to collect and analyze data enables us to understand our world and ourselves in new ways—and at what cost.

From the documentary’s website:

“‘The Human Face of Big Data’ captures…an extraordinary revolution sweeping, almost invisibly, through business, academia, government, healthcare, and everyday life. It’s already enabling us to provide a healthier life for our children. To provide our seniors with independence while keeping them safe. To help us conserve precious resources like water and energy. To alert us to tiny changes in our health, weeks or years before we develop a life-threatening illness. To peer into our own individual genetic makeup. To create new forms of life.  And soon, as many predict, to re-engineer our own species. And we’ve barely scratched the surface…”

The filmmakers point out that more data has been generated since 2003 than in all of previously recorded history.

“It’s the data that creates understanding and knowledge,” Patel says in the PBS trailer. The film features two of his lab’s projects, ElectriSense and HydroSense, which are capable of collecting data at the individual appliance level for energy usage and water consumption, respectively.

Local station KCTS 9 and the Seattle International Film Festival have teamed up to offer a free special screening and discussion session with filmmaker Sandy Smolan tomorrow, February 17th, and the documentary premieres on PBS nationwide next Wednesday, February 24th. It will be available to stream online as of the following day, and will be broadcast internationally in 25 countries later this year.

Now that is what we call “must-see TV!” Read more →

Our very own Steve Seitz, who splits his time between UW CSE’s GRAIL group and Google, features prominently in a recent article by Xconomy’s Ben Romano that explores the technology behind Google Cardboard and Google Jump. Referring to Seitz as Google’s “teleportation lead” (which has to be one of the coolest tech job titles we have come across thus far), the article looks at what’s next in the quest to bring virtual reality to the masses and our region’s emergence as a center of VR innovation.

From the article:

“Regardless of the viewing device, virtual reality needs content. And much of Google’s work to enable creation of virtual reality content—from high-end video capture rigs for professionals to a more accessible way of taking virtual reality panorama photographs with your smartphone—has been carried out by a Google team in Seattle, led by Seitz…

“‘One of the applications that I am most excited about in VR is teleportation,’ said Seitz…’So basically, trying to take you somewhere that you’re not. Really that’s the goal of VR.’

“But before you can teleport with virtual reality to Iceland or the surface of Mars, someone or some thing has to go there first with a camera to capture the sights and sounds.”

That is where Seitz and his team, in collaboration with camera maker GoPro, come in—along with some heavy-duty computing power furnished by Google.

The article offers a comprehensive look at the company’s evolving ecosystem of VR technologies, including the challenges Seitz and his colleagues have to overcome in order to deliver a truly immersive experience, and looks at what may be on the horizon now that VR is no longer just in the realm of science fiction. Check out the complete article here, and read our past coverage of Seitz’s work on Google VR here and here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Yejin Choi, an expert in natural language processing, was selected as one of 10 young scientists to watch in the field of artificial intelligence in the latest issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems. The list, which is published biennially, celebrates rising stars in the field and is based on nominations by senior AI researchers in academia and industry.

Choi’s research combines natural language processing, machine learning and computer vision in seeking to connect language with visual intelligence and with social and emotional intelligence. By enabling computers to detect nonliteral or implied meaning, she aims to develop their capacity to “read between the lines”—an essential component of successful social interactions between people.

From the article:

“Natural language is at the heart of our everyday lives. We use it to communicate complex ideas, ranging from summaries of what we’ve seen or experienced to subtle cues about our beliefs, goals, and opinions. Importantly, meaning is conveyed not just by what’s literally said but also by what’s left to the listener to infer. This ability to reason beyond what is said explicitly is crucial for efficient human-computer communications.”

Read the full article here. Way to go, Yejin!

UW CSE has assembled a superb group of faculty in NLP: in addition to Yejin, core faculty include Noah Smith and Luke Zettlemoyer, with contributions from Pedro Domingos, Oren Etzioni, and Dan Weld. Learn more about our NLP research here. Read more →

Election to the National Academy of Engineering is one of the highest professional honors accorded an engineer. Today the NAE announced its Class of 2016. Two UW CSE Ph.D. alums, Tom Anderson and Albert Greenberg, are among the eight new members elected in Computer Science & Engineering.

Tom is “one of our own” in two ways: he received his Ph.D. from UW CSE in 1991 (working with Ed Lazowska and Hank Levy), and after joining the faculty at UC Berkeley and being promoted to tenure there, he returned to join the UW CSE faculty, where he is the Warren Francis and Wilma Kolm Bradley Chair in Computer Science & Engineering. Tom – who has made fundamental contributions to the design, analysis, and instrumentation of computer systems, computer networks, and distributed systems – has previously been honored with the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers & Communication Award, the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award, more than 20 Best Paper and Test-of-Time awards, and election as an ACM Fellow. He was elected to NAE “for contributions to the design of resilient and efficient distributed computer systems.”

Albert received his Ph.D. from UW CSE in 1983 (working with Richard Ladner and Martin Tompa). He spent 13 years at AT&T Research in network research. In 2007 he returned to Seattle to join Microsoft Research, and 3 years later he moved from research to the engineering organization as Distinguished Engineer and Director of Development for Microsoft Azure Networking. Albert has been honored with the SIGCOMM award for lifetime contributions to the field of communication networks, and, like Tom, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers & Communication Award, multiple Test-of-Time awards, and election as an ACM Fellow. He was elected to NAE “for contributions to the theory and practice of operating large carrier and data center networks.”

Tom joins UW CSE faculty members Susan Eggers, Ed Lazowska, and Hank Levy as Members of the National Academy of Engineering.

Tom and Albert join UW CSE graduate program alums Jeff Dean (Google Senior Fellow), Ed Felten (Professor of Computer Science and of Public Affairs at Princeton), and Hank Levy as NAE Members.

Congratulations to Tom and Albert!

NAE announcement here. UW News article here. Read more →

DawgBytes – “A Taste of CSE,” UW CSE’s K-12 outreach program – will be hosting one-day midwinter break workshops for high school students on February 16 and 20.

Learn more here.

Learn more about the wide range of DawgBytes here.; lots of news on the DawgBytes Facebook page here. Read more →

Qi Lu and Harry Shum, two of the four engineering members of Microsoft’s Senior Leadership Team, spent the day at UW CSE today participating in a wide variety of research interactions.

In the photo, Qi and Harry join Ed Lazowska in the wetlab housing a joint project between UW (principally Luis Ceze and Georg Seelig) and Microsoft Research (principally Doug Carmean and Karin Strauss) concerning extremely high density DNA-based data storage. Read more →

A belated post celebrating the second annual UW CSE Women’s Research Day, held on Saturday January 23.

Undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty women from UW CSE, as well as colleagues from regional companies, spent the day in research presentations, panel discussions, lab tours, and a poster session – all celebrating the role of women in the computing research ecosystem in UW CSE and the region.

Facebook page here. Read more →

UW CSE’s Shayan Oveis Gharan has received an NSF CAREER Award – the 29th UW CSE faculty member to have been recognized through this program and its predecessors.

The NSF CAREER Program “offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.”

Shayan is one of the most recent additions to UW CSE’s Theoretical Computer Science Group. His research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms. With his coauthors, he gave the first asymptotic improvement in the approximation ratio for the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) in over 30 years, for which he won the best paper award at SODA 2010. He followed this up by doing the same for the standard TSP problem on graphs, improving Christofides’ famous 3/2 bound from 1976; for that, he won the best paper award at FOCS 2011. Most recently, by proving a generalization of the famous Kadison-Singer Conjecture, Shayan and Nima Amari have given an improved bound on the integrality gap of the classical Held-Karp relaxation for Asymmetric TSP. In addition to his work in approximation algorithms, Shayan is well-known for fundamental contributions in algorithmic spectral graph theory.

Congratulations Shayan! Read more →