Allen School News

UW CSE professor Martin Tompa welcomed “a veritable horde” of undergraduate students to the first weekly Schnapsen game of the winter quarter. Schnapsen is the national card game of Austria, which Tompa uses to illustrate many probability topics in his CSE 312 course. Tompa published the definitive guide to winning at Schnapsen last September.

The very active UW Schnapsen Club provided pizza and hand-made cookies in the shapes of the Austrian card suits. Club members partnered with novice Schnapsen players from CSE 312 to teach them the basics.

Tompa reflected, “In the age of distributed video games, it’s surprising and heart-warming that so many students are engaged in this old-school, face-to-face activity and having so much fun with it.”

The students play every Friday afternoon from 3:00 to 5:00 pm, and they welcome all comers. Read our previous coverage of Tompa’s devotion to Schnapsen here. Read more →

Aditya Vashistha, a third-year Ph.D. student working in the Information & Communications Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab led by UW CSE professor Richard Anderson, has been selected as a Facebook Graduate Fellow for 2016-2017. The highly competitive program is designed to support emerging leaders who demonstrate the potential to advance Facebook’s mission of making the world more open and connected.

Social media platforms play an essential role in people’s lives, and they are an increasingly vital tool for those engaged in political activism and to manage crisis response in communities across the globe. Vashistha’s research is focused on enabling people of low incomes and low literacy to access social media platforms and crowdsourcing systems so they can reap the benefits of these increasingly popular technologies, particularly the creation of voice-based platforms for people with basic mobile phones and no Internet connectivity and the development of voice-based social media and crowdsourcing platforms for people with smartphones and only intermittent Internet connectivity.

In addition to receiving financial support for academic years 2016-17 and 2017-18, Vashistha will have the opportunity to present his research and meet with engineers at Facebook’s headquarters.

Vashistha has been on a roll lately, having previously earned a Best Student Paper Award at ASSETS 2015, a Best Paper Award at CHI 2015 and the 2014 Access Facebook Award.

Two other UW graduate students were named finalists by Facebook: CSE’s Konstantin Weitz, who works with professor Michael Ernst in the Programming Languages & Software Engineering group, and Alexis Hiniker, who works with professor (and CSE adjunct faculty member) Julie Kientz in Human Centered Design & Engineering.

Congratulations to Aditya on this latest win, and to Konstantin and Alexis for their strong showing in this year’s competition! Read more →

We remember Doug Walker, a long-time friend of UW CSE and co-founder in 1981 of WRQ, a top-20 software company in its day. Doug went missing Thursday afternoon while snowshoeing with friends on Granite Mountain in the Cascades, and was found dead on Friday by a search and rescue team.

It’s impossible to convey what Doug (always along with his wife Maggie) has meant to the Seattle community. Obviously WRQ. Philanthropy – to the University of Washington, the Seattle Parks Foundation, the Hutch, MOHAI, and many other causes – including the co-founding of Social Venture Partners and the Seattle Parks Foundation. Conservation. Mountaineering. Cycling.

A truly wonderful human being, who died doing what he loved.

NBC News here. Seattle Times here, here, and here. GeekWire here. Seattle PI here. KING5 TV here. New York Times here. Wall Street Journal here. Excellent biography here. Read more →

Economics columnist Jon Talton wrote an interesting piece for the Seattle Times exploring how our economy has changed and the complexion of the future job market given globalization, automation and the rise of the “gig economy,” among other forces that are reshaping how people work and live. UW CSE professor Pedro Domingos provided his take on the potentially radical changes in store, a topic to which he gave much thought in writing his recent book, The Master Algorithm.

From the column:

“Pedro Domingos, computer science professor at the University of Washington and author of The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World, says, ‘It’s not going to be a smooth ride by any stretch of the imagination.’

“Yet he is not a pessimist.

“‘Over the next five to 20 years, some occupations will disappear, but lots of occupations will be created,’ he says. With machine learning, humans and computers will be teamed up. ‘What in my job can be done by machine learning, and what can’t? What will be very hard to replace?’….

“‘In the long run, we will get to the point, in our lifetime, where computers and robots can do everything better than people,’ he says. ‘This will mark the transition to a very different economy.’

“‘With such measures as a guaranteed universal income, this won’t be a problem. People might say, oh, the U.S. is falling backward because only 25 percent of people are working. No. This can be a great thing. People will find satisfaction in other things.'”

There’s more to it – check out the entire column here. Read more →