Thank goodness the fire marshal is otherwise occupied!
Many thanks to the companies recruiting today, and on Tuesday. And thanks to our Industry Affiliates and local alums for the great turnout at our Open House on Wednesday evening. (See our previous post about the Madrona Prize and People’s Choice Award.) Read more →
Mehrdad Hessar accepts the 2016 Madrona Prize
Each year as part of our Industry Affiliates meeting, UW CSE welcomes alumni and friends to a celebration of student research and its potential for impact. Our annual open house, which was held last night, features good food, great company, and terrific posters and demos that showcase an impressive variety of projects from the CSE labs.
The event also features the Madrona Prize, an award from our friends at Madrona Venture Group that recognizes student research with commercialization potential, and the People’s Choice Award, which is, as the name suggests, a chance for our guests to select their favorite projects.
Matt McIlwain of Madrona awarded the 11th annual Madrona Prize to “The Next Big Leap in Backscatter Communication,” presented by CSE postdoc Vamsi Talla. This project builds on previous backscatter research in the Networks & Mobile Systems Lab that enables battery-free devices to communicate by pulling power out of the air. The team, which also includes EE Ph.D. students Mehrdad Hessar and Bryce Kellogg, CSE professor Shyam Gollakota, and CSE and EE professor Josh Smith, demonstrates with its latest project that backscatter can work over distances of up to 1 kilometer, with potential applications in agriculture, home sensing, and smart medical devices.
Below is a complete run-down of the award winners and runners up who were recognized during last evening’s festivities.
2016 Madrona Prize
Winner: The Next Big Leap in Backscatter Communication (Electrical Engineering Ph.D. students Mehrdad Hessar and Bryce Kellogg; CSE postdoc Vamsi Talla; CSE professor Shyam Gollakota; CSE and EE professor Josh Smith)
Runner up: PipeGen: Data Pipe Generator for Hybrid Analytics (CSE Ph.D. student Brandon Haynes; CSE professors Alvin Cheung and Magda Balazinska)
Runner up: Just Say NO to Paxos Overhead: Replacing Consensus with Network Ordering (CSE Ph.D. students Jialin Li, Ellis Michael, Naveen Kr. Sharma, and Adriana Szekeres; CSE professor Dan R. K. Ports)
Runner up: Programming by Examples for Industrial Data Wrangling (CSE Ph.D. student Alex Polozov; Sumit Gulwani and the PROSE team at Microsoft)
Yasaman S. Sefidgar explains her research at the open house
2016 People’s Choice Award
Winner: Situated Tangible Robot Programming (CSE researcher Yasaman S. Sefidgar; EE undergraduate Prerna Agarwal; CSE professor Maya Cakmak)
Runner up: When the White Coats Leave: Unsupervised Decoding of Long-term, Naturalistic Human Neural Recordings with Automated Video and Audio Annotations (CSE Ph.D. student Nancy Xin Ru Wang; Jeff Ojemann of Seattle Children’s Hospital; UW CSE professors Ali Farhadi and Rajesh Rao; UW biology professor Bing Brunton)
Runner up: TummyTrials: Using Self-Experimentation to Detect Individualized Food Triggers (CSE Ph.D. students Ravi Karkar, Jessica Schroeder, and Daniel Epstein; CSE postdoc Laura Pina; CSE staff member Jeffrey Scofield; CSE professor James Fogarty; HCDE professors Julie Kientz and Sean Munson; Duke University professor Roger Vilardarga; Jasmine Zia of UW Medicine)
Read Madrona’s press release here, and check out the complete list of posters and demos here. Congratulations to all of our winners, and huge thanks to our friends at Madrona and to all of our alumni and friends who came out to support student research! Read more →
Researchers in the Molecular Information Systems Lab, a partnership between the UW and Microsoft Research, have been recognized for their efforts to develop a DNA-based data storage system with a “Best of What’s New” Award from Popular Science. The annual awards highlight the game-changing technologies that will shape the future. The MISL team — led by UW CSE professor Luis Ceze, CSE and EE professor Georg Seelig, and Microsoft researchers Karin Strauss and Doug Carmean — won in the software category for having set a new world record for the amount of digital data successfully stored and retrieved using strands of DNA.
This is not the first time a UW CSE project has been recognized: last year, UW CSE and EE researchers earned a Best of What’s New Award for Power Over Wi-Fi (PoWiFi) in the engineering category.
Read about the latest award winners in Popular Science here and the UW Today story here. Learn more about the DNA data storage project by visiting the MISL website here.
Congratulations to the entire MISL team! Read more →
2006 UW CSE alum Jason Tan, co-founder and CEO of Sift Science, packed the house on Tuesday at 7 p.m. for a great discussion with students about career paths. (Was it Jason, or was it the Dick’s burgers? Probably both …) UW CSE Industry Affiliates continues today …
Read more →
UW CSE enthusiastically joins in supporting the K-12 Computer Science Framework, announced on October 17.
The Association for Computing Machinery, Code.org, the Computer Science Teachers Association, the Cyber Innovation Center, and the National Math and Science Initiative partnered with states, school districts, and the computer science education community in creating the Framework, which promotes a vision in which all students critically engage in computer science issues, approach problems in innovative ways, and create computational artifacts with a personal, practical, or community purpose.
Learn more from the new K12CS website here. Check out the video here. One-pager here.
Also check out this great article in GeekWire about the new framework, which will make computer science — a “life skill in the 21st century,” as UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska calls it — more accessible and welcoming to all students. Read more →
GeekWire writes:
“Not many startups launch out of university research, endure two economic recessions, persevere through a slow-to-develop market, and finally file for a successful initial public offering — all while maintaining 75 percent of its original founding team 16 years later.
“But that’s the Impinj story.
“Founder and CEO Chris Diorio spoke at the 9Mile Labs Demo Day on Thursday afternoon in Seattle, discussing how Impinj got off the ground and sharing some leadership advice he’s picked up after helping lead the Seattle-based maker of Radio Frequency Identification technology since 2000…
“It’s been quite the journey for Diorio, who founded Impinj in 2000 with fellow researcher Carver Mead. He recounted traveling to California to meet Mead in Silicon Valley and taking the startup leap. After the founders decided to launch a company, Diorio told Mead he was worried about his job as a computer science professor at the University of Washington.
“‘Don’t worry, you’ll get a company started in 18 months and be back at the university — just take a short leave, nothing to it,’ Mead told Diorio.
“’16 years later, we IPO’d,’ Diorio, who is still an associate professor at the UW, recalled on Thursday. ‘Carver was at the ceremony and I asked him about those 18 months. He said, ‘what’s an order of magnitude among friends?””
Read more here. Read more →
On Thursday evening, UW CSE women faculty, staff, alumni, and friends celebrated ~30 UW CSE women students headed to the 2016 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing – the world’s largest gathering of women technologists.
UW CSE Ph.D. alumna Lauren Bricker, who has taught computer science for the past decade at Seattle’s Lakeside School following a career in the tech industry, spoke to the students about her experience working in the field, her experience opening the eyes of young women to the wonders of the field, and her experience attending the Grace Hopper conference. UW CSE’s Raven Alexander, Elise deGoede Dorough, and Ed Lazowska also addressed the group.
UW CSE is recognized as a leader in encouraging women to pursue bachelors degrees in computer science – winner, in 2015, of the inaugural NCWIT Award for Excellence in Promoting Women in Undergraduate Computing. Read more →
Thomas Rothvoss, who holds a joint appointment in the UW Department of Computer Science & Engineering and the Department of Mathematics, has been named a 2016 Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering. This prestigious fellowship administered by the David & Lucile Packard Foundation recognizes and supports the most innovative early-career scientists and engineers in the nation.
Rothvoss’ research focuses on the intersection of mathematics and computer science and the development of techniques to find approximate solutions to computationally hard problems. He is one of only two researchers recognized by the Packard Foundation this year in the Computer/Information Sciences category—and one of 18 fellows in total.
Rothvoss joined UW CSE in 2015—the same year another rising talent in theoretical computer science, Shayan Oveis Gharan, arrived at the department. The Packard Fellowship is the latest in an impressive list of recent honors earned by members of UW CSE’s Theory group, including Oveis Gharan’s selection as one of Science News’ 10 Scientists to Watch and Anna Karlin’s election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The group continues to grow in both size and stature as we look forward to welcoming new faculty member Yin Tat Lee, an expert in designing fast algorithms, next year.
The Packard Fellowship program was inspired by Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard’s recognition that his company’s success derived in large part from university research and development. Each year, the honorees are selected from among 100 faculty members nominated by universities across the United States. A panel of internationally recognized scientists evaluates the nominees and forwards its recommendations to the foundation’s board of trustees. The winners each receive a grant worth $875,000 over five years, which is intended to provide them with the freedom to explore new frontiers in their respective fields.
Rothvoss is one of two current faculty members to have received this coveted award, the other being 2002 fellow Raj Rao. Learn more about the Packard Fellowships here, and read Rothvoss’ citation here.
This is a tremendous honor not just for Thomas, but for UW CSE, UW Mathematics, and the whole of the University.
Congratulations, Thomas! Read more →
A team from UW CSE’s Natural Language Processing group has earned Best Paper accolades at EMNLP 2016, the conference on empirical methods in natural language processing. CSE Ph.D. student Kenton Lee, postdoc Mike Lewis, and professor Luke Zettlemoyer won for their paper Global Neural CCG Parsing with Optimality Guarantees.
The winning paper describes an approach for learning a recursive neural network for CCG parsing — a core subproblem in broad coverage semantic analysis of text. The model is not only state of the art in terms of accuracy but also provides optimality certificates, nearly always proving a proof that the best parse was found under the learned model. It is the first neural parser of any kind to provide such guarantees.
The paper is one of only two selected for Best Paper recognition from more than 900 submissions. The team will present its findings at the EMNLP conference in Austin, Texas early next month. This is the second year in a row that the UW NLP group has won at EMNLP, with Lee and Zettlemoyer repeating their feat from 2015.
Go team! Read more →
