Allen School News

More than 200 students attended our career panel

Each fall, UW CSE organizes a series of events aimed at current undergraduates hoping to snag an internship to gain practical experience or to line up their first job looking ahead to graduation. To help them put their best foot forward and get the most out of the recruitment process, we ask UW CSE alums to pass on the wisdom they have gained from years in gainful employment, and local recruiters to share their insights and advice for students experiencing the process for the first time.

Last week, three alums – Victoria Wagner (B.S., ’14), Allison Wilbur (B.S., ’12), and Albert Wong (B.S., ’04) – joined Facebook recruiter Vince Sison in front of a packed house of more than 200 students for a panel discussion on how to land the job or internship of their dreams. Wagner completed internships at LinkedIn and Facebook while a student at UW CSE and has spent the past two and half years as a software engineer at Tableau. Wilbur began her career with the Fulfillment by Amazon team before moving on to positions at Zulily and Madrona Venture Labs; this past summer, she joined local startup ReplyYes as a software engineer. Wong began his career as a software developer at Amazon before joining Google. There, he spent 10 years working with various teams in the Kirkland, Beijing and Seattle offices, mentoring several engineers along the way. In 2014, Wong made the move from private to public sector, becoming a consultant for the United States Digital Service. All three offered a wealth of insights to students who are about to embark on their own career paths.

Students speak with volunteers at our résumé review workshop.

This week, 27 volunteers, including another proud UW CSE alum, Babak Dabagh (B.S., ’14), took over the atrium of the Allen Center for our résumé review workshop. Roughly 200 students went through the process — some of them multiple times! — to obtain feedback from recruiters and tech leaders from more than a dozen local companies, including Amazon, Ericsson, Facebook, Google, Indeed, Marchex, Microsoft, Qualtrics, Qumulo, RealSelf, Redfin, RetailMeNot, Whitepages, and Zillow.

Both events are designed to prepare our students to put their best foot forward at our fall recruiting fairs next week — one for startups and one for established companies — that are among the highlights of our annual Industry Affiliates meeting.

Sandwiched between the two fairs is UW CSE’s annual research day and open house on Wednesday, October 19th. That day, we invite members of the community to learn more about the people and projects that make UW CSE great. If you haven’t marked your calendars to join us next Wednesday, please do! You can RSVP to the open house here.

Thank you to our terrific alumni and volunteers who have spent time with our students the past two weeks! Read more →

Mark Zuckerberg writes (on Facebook, naturally):

“Priscilla and I are excited to share that Brian Pinkerton is joining the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as Chief Technology Officer... Bringing engineering to social change is the basic idea of our work, and one of the unique capabilities we can provide.”

Brian was most recently the Vice President & General Manager of A9, Amazon’s product search and advertising technology subsidiary, located in Palo Alto.

He received his UW CSE Ph.D. in 2000 – working with Ed Lazowska and John Zahorjan – for the design and evolution of WebCrawler, the first successful full-text web search engine.

Recode article here. Read more →

UW CSE alumni and friends are encouraged to register and join us for the 2016 UW CSE Open House, held in conjunction with our annual Industry Affiliates Meeting. Food, drink, lab tours, posters, demos, the Madrona Prize, the People’s Choice Award, and a preview of the CSE2 project – a second building that will provide the space for us to double our enrollment.

Information here! We hope to see you on Wednesday October 19, 5:00-7:45 p.m., in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering! Read more →

The Wall Street Journal reports today on the latest project to emerge from UW CSE’s Networks & Mobile Systems Lab: the ability to transmit passwords through the human body instead of over the air, where they are vulnerable to hacking. Such on-body transmissions would make it possible to open electronic smart locks or securely connect to wearable medical devices, such as glucose monitors, using the fingerprint sensors and touchpads commonly found on smartphones and laptops.

From the article:

“Like an errant pass from an NFL quarterback, passwords sent through the air via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth can be intercepted, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Passwords are also a hassle to remember, which is why we tend to opt for simpler ones—but that, too, creates big security risks.

“Now researchers at the University of Washington have found a way to eliminate the airtime and the hassle—by using the human body as a conduit for passing security codes from one device to another….

“The technology involves no physical keys or cards that could be lost, stolen or copied—and unlike some biometric systems, it doesn’t require a digital fingerprint stored at the door (from which it might be stolen). Passwords for each door could be unique yet easily shared with a roommate or spouse. Since these passwords would rely on your device’s memory, not your own, they could be very complex and strong.”

UW EE Ph.D. students Mehrdad Hessar and Vikram Iyer developed the system working with UW CSE professor Shyam Gollakota. The team presented its results in a research paper at the UbiComp 2016 conference in Heidelberg, Germany last month.

As Gollakota explained in the UW News release, “Fingerprint sensors have so far been used as an input device. What is cool is that we’ve shown for the first time that fingerprint sensors can be re-purposed to send out information that is confined to the body.”

Read the full Wall Street Journal article here, and the UW News release here. See additional coverage by The Atlantic, IEEE Spectrum, Yahoo! News, Quartz, Engadget, New Atlas, Vocativ, SlashGear, and Inverse, and watch the KING 5 News story here. Read more →

Amazon and the University of Washington announced today that the company has committed $10 million to support the construction of a second building for UW CSE. The new facility, affectionately dubbed “CSE2,” will provide sufficient space for UW CSE to double annual degree production.

“The University of Washington is a world-class institution, and we are lucky to have thousands of UW graduates inventing and pioneering in Seattle – including right here at Amazon,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.

“We’re proud to support UW as they expand their computer science program, which will benefit the whole community.”

In recognition of Amazon’s generosity, UW CSE will name the 250-person auditorium and gallery on the ground floor of the building after the company.

The gift is the latest in a history of strategic investment by the company in the UW—and CSE in particular—including funding the Amazon Professorships in Machine Learning to recruit two highly sought-after faculty members to Seattle: CSE professor Carlos Guestrin and Statistics professor and CSE adjunct Emily Fox.

David Zapolsky, senior vice president and general counsel at Amazon, wrote on the company blog today about the need to expand our capacity to educate more of tomorrow’s innovators.

“We want to make sure that UW continues to educate inventors of tomorrow, and one of the best ways to do that is making sure more young people have access to high quality STEM education….we’re proud to help with a $10 million donation towards development of a new, state of the art Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) building that will double the number of graduates each year.”

The new building will be located across the street from the existing Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering on the UW’s Seattle campus. In addition to Amazon’s gift, major commitments to the project include $10 million from Microsoft, $32.5 million from the Washington State Legislature, and $9 million from the UW. LMN Architects, which designed the Allen Center, is nearing completion of the design for CSE2. Together, the two facilities will enable UW CSE to provide an unparalleled education and research experience.

UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska observed, “Over the past 20 years, Amazon has grown into one of the leading and most innovative companies in the world, UW CSE has grown into one of the leading and most innovative computer science programs in the world, and Seattle has grown into one of the one of the leading and most innovative technology hubs in the world. Amazon’s gift will help make it possible for UW CSE to prepare more of Washington’s students for careers in Washington’s booming technology sector. It’s an investment in our collective future.”

Read the UW News release here and Amazon’s blog post here. Learn more about the campaign to build CSE2 here, and view the CSE2 image gallery here. Also check out this video featuring UW CSE alum Lisa Boucher, now a senior software engineer at Amazon.com, Lazowska, and CSE chair Hank Levy talking about the company’s impact on UW and the region.

Read more about the announcement in GeekWire’s initial report and follow-up story, Seattle Times, Xconomy, TechFlash, KUOW, Crosscut and The Daily.

Thank you to Jeff, David and Amazon for your generosity and continuing partnership with UW CSE! Read more →

Well, duh …

Check it out here. Read more →

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday that David Thouless, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, will share the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics with two of his colleagues.

Thouless splits the prize with Professor F. Duncan M. Haldane of Princeton University and Professor J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter,” according to the prize announcement from the Academy. Half the prize goes to Thouless while Haldane and Kosterlitz divide the remaining half. Thouless is the UW’s seventh Nobel laureate, and second in physics after Hans Dehmelt in 1989.

Congratulations David! Read more here. Read more →

UW CSE recently welcomed Yuliang Wang as a research professor working with our Computational & Synthetic Biology group. Wang brings a wealth of computational expertise imbued with a deep knowledge of relevant biology that, as CSE professor Larry Ruzzo notes, is really rare in “computational” people.

Wang obtained his B.S. in Bioengineering from Tianjin University in China. He earned his M.S. in Applied Statistics and a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign—a top-10 program in its field. He was a student of Dr. Nathan Price, who is now at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and a CSE affiliate professor. As part of his Ph.D. thesis, Wang developed breakthrough computational tools for modeling metabolic networks. Before his arrival at UW CSE, Wang held a postdoctoral fellowship at Sage Bionetworks in Seattle and was a Senior Research Associate in the Computational Biology Program at Oregon Health & Science University.

Wang is spending approximately half of his time in CSE and the other half at the UW Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, a world-class research group in a cutting-edge area of biomedicine mostly located at the university’s South Lake Union campus. He will bring value-added to both groups—forwarding the efforts of stem cell biologists, while also bringing knowledge and skills that complement CSE’s computational biology group and building additional bridges to our artificial intelligence and machine learning groups. We have no doubt that he will help us to identify new and important problem areas where CSE can make a tangible difference—and advance computational methods that will benefit not only UW CSE research, but the field at large.

Welcome to UW CSE, Yuliang! Read more →

Reuters has once again ranked the world’s 100 most innovative universities. Starting from the top:

1. Stanford
2. MIT
3. Harvard
4. University of Texas
5. University of Washington

As with all rankings in which we do well, we flash the lights, we sound the horns, and we assume the methodology was sound.

Read the overall report here. Read the University of Washington section here. Read more →

Catapult team members Adrian Caulfield (UW CSE bachelors alum, UCSD Ph.D. advised by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Steve Swanson), Eric Chung (who has risen above his crummy Berkeley and CMU education), Doug Burger (UW CSE affiliate professor), and Andrew Putnam (UW CSE Ph.D. alum)

A really terrific article in Wired describes the evolution of Microsoft’s Project Catapult – FPGA acceleration for a broad range of cloud services.

The project, incubated in Peter Lee‘s MSR NeXT organization, was led by Doug Burger, a refugee from UT Austin who is a Distinguished Engineer in MSR NeXT and an Affiliate Professor in UW CSE. A key member of the Catapult team was UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Andrew Putnam, who joined MSR immediately after graduating in 2009.

From the Wired article:

“In December of 2010, Microsoft researcher Andrew Putnam had left Seattle for the holidays and returned home to Colorado Springs. Two days before Christmas, he still hadn’t started shopping. As he drove to the mall, his phone rang. It was Burger, his boss. Burger was going to meet with Bing execs right after the holiday, and he needed a design for hardware that could run Bing’s machine learning algorithms on FPGAs.

“Putnam pulled into the nearest Starbucks and drew up the plans. It took him about five hours, and he still had time for shopping …

“At that post-holiday meeting, Burger pitched Bing’s execs on FPGAs as a low-power way of accelerating searches. The execs were noncommittal. So over the next several months, Burger and team took Putnam’s Christmas sketch and built a prototype, showing that it could run Bing’s machine learning algorithms about 100 times faster. ‘That’s when they really got interested,’ says Jim Larus, another member of the team back then who’s now a dean at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne.”

It’s a great read – here. Read more →