Allen School News

Josh Smith

An international team led by researchers at the UW has been chosen as one of three finalists in the GlaxoSmithKlein Bioelectronics Innovation Challenge—and made itself eligible for $1 million in new research funding as a result.

UW CSE and electrical engineering professor Josh Smith is working with colleagues at UW’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE), the University of Cambridge and University College London to develop an implantable device that would restore bladder function for people living with spinal cord injury or incontinence. Technology developed in Smith’s Sensor Systems Lab is being used to wirelessly power the implanted device.

From the UW News release:

“An international team led by researchers at the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE) based at the University of Washington is one of three finalists in a race to produce an implantable wireless device that can assess, stimulate and block the activity of nerves that control organs….

“‘For people with spinal cord injuries, restoring sexual function and bladder function are some of their top priorities — higher than regaining the ability to walk,’ said Chet Moritz, deputy director of the CSNE and UW associate professor of rehabilitation medicine and of physiology and biophysics.

“‘The vision is for these neural devices to be as ubiquitous as pacemakers or deep brain stimulators, where a surgeon implants the device and it’s seamless for the patient,’ he said. ‘We’re really excited to make a difference in people’s lives and to help push these technologies forward.’

Prototype implanted device designed at the UW.

“The final implantable wireless device will be able to stimulate and block electrical signals that travel along the nerves and control specific organs. Stimulating the pelvic nerve causes the bladder to empty, for example, while blocking those signals could help someone who is unable to control his or her bladder.”

The team designed its device to interact with the pelvic nerve both electronically and optically. This approach, in which light is used to control neurons, means the researchers can stimulate the pelvic nerve without having to physically touch it, thus reducing the risk of swelling and scarring that can occur with direct nerve interfaces.

“It is gratifying to see the center’s hardware research efforts paying off so quickly,” said Smith. “Selection by GlaxoSmithKline in this rigorous international competition shows that technologies emerging from the CSNE are at the leading edge of what is possible.”

In addition to the $1 million prize for reaching the finals, GSK will award $1 million to the first team to deliver a functional device in small animal models. The other UW members of the GSK competition team include physiology and biolophysics professor Greg Horwitz, physiology and biophysics postdoc Tom Richner, biology professor and eScience Institute Data Science Fellow Bingni Brunton, and Ryan Solinsky, a resident in rehabilitation medicine. The CSNE is a NSF-funded partnership of multiple research institutions that is housed at the UW and directed by UW CSE professor Rajesh Rao.

Read the full UW News release here. Learn more about the GSK Bioelectronics Innovation Challenge here.

Amazing work—congratulations to Josh and the entire team! Read more →

UW CSE alum Martha Kim, now a member of the computer science faculty at Columbia University, has been honored with a 2016 Borg Early Career Award from the Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W). This award—named in honor of the late Anita Borg, an early member of CRA-W and a leading advocate for increasing women’s participation in computing—recognizes one or two women each year in the early stages of their careers who have made significant contributions to the computing community through research and through efforts to advance women and diversity in the field.

Kim completed her Ph.D. in 2008 working with UW CSE professor Mark Oskin and currently directs Columbia’s Architecture and Design (ARCADE) Lab, where her research focuses on developing ways to increase power and efficiency and reduce energy consumption while meeting the growing demands on computing systems of big data sets. She is particularly interested in developing hardware and software techniques to improve usability of hardware accelerators and data-centric accelerator design. In each of the past three years, papers she has co-authored have been selected among IEEE’s “Top Picks in Computer Architecture” for their novelty and long-term impact. Kim has won numerous awards, including a NSF CAREER Award in 2013, in recognition of her research and teaching.

In announcing the award, CRA-W cited Kim’s outreach to high school students, including participation in conferences such as “Code Like A Girl” and service as a faculty advisor for the Artemis Project, which is a summer school for girls in grades 9 and 10 from underserved schools. Kim also served on a working group charged with revamping her own high school’s approach to STEM education. Kim’s extensive outreach efforts are bearing fruit: her first two Ph.D. graduates are women, as are two-thirds of her current Ph.D. students.

Read the CRA-W award citation here, and a nice post on the Columbia CS department blog here.

Way to go, Martha! Read more →

Ras Bodik accepts the Influential Paper Award at ISCA.

Professor Ras Bodik, a member of UW CSE’s Programming Languages & Software Engineering (PLSE) group, collected the 2016 ACM SIGARCH and IEEE-CS TCCA ISCA Influential Paper Award (a “test of time” award) at the International Symposium on Computing Architecture being held this week in Seoul, South Korea. Bodik and his co-authors, former University of Wisconsin-Madison Ph.D. students Brian Fields and Shai Rubin, received the award for their 2001 ISCA paper, Focusing Processor Policies via Critical-Path Prediction, in which they introduced a simple yet effective hardware predictor of instruction criticality to optimize performance.

The predictor employs a dependence-graph model of the microarchitectural critical path that incorporates both data and machine-specific dependences to identify execution bottlenecks, and uses a token-passing algorithm to compute the critical path without having to actually build the dependence graph. By focusing processor policies on critical instructions, the predictor enables the prioritization of critical instructions for scarce resources, and suppressed speculation on non-critical instructions to reduce the risk of misspeculations. 

Ras Bodik, Luis Ceze and Karin Strauss at ISCA 2016.

Bodik and his colleagues demonstrated their predictor was capable of supporting fine-grain optimizations and producing significant improvements in performance—as high as 21%, and 10% on average, in the case of cluster instruction scheduling and steering.

Read the winning paper here.

Congratulations, Ras!

Ras is at ISCA with CSE professor Luis Ceze and affiliate faculty member Karin Strauss of Microsoft Research. In addition to Ras’ big win, they are cheering on their colleague from the Molecular Information Systems Lab, CSE affiliate faculty member Doug Carmean of Microsoft Research, who delivered a keynote talk titled Quantum and Cryo and DNA oh my! Sights Along the New Yellow Brick Road. Read more →

Anat Caspi, director of UW CSE’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, is attending the United States of Women Summit convened by the White House this week. She was invited to participate in recognition of her efforts to lead change on issues important to women and girls.

The summit is bringing together 5,000 people from all industries and walks of life to celebrate the progress that has been made to advance gender equality and identify the actions needed to move forward. It is organized around six pillars: economic empowerment, health and wellness, educational opportunity, preventing violence against women, entrepreneurship and innovation, and leadership and civic engagement. Caspi checks several of those boxes as an advocate for participatory design and using technology to improve quality of life for people of all abilities in her role at the Taskar Center. The center—which was established in memory of the late UW CSE professor Ben Taskar—taps into UW CSE’s strength in accessibility, sensing and novel interfaces to develop and deploy technologies that will increase independence for individuals with motor and speech impairments.

Caspi has been an invaluable resource to students interested in accessible design. She has advised students participating in the City of Seattle’s Hack the Commute competition and in the eScience Institute’s Data Science for the Social Good program. Caspi is also an instructor in our Accessibility Capstone course for undergraduates.

The United States of Women Summit runs today and tomorrow in Washington, D.C. and features First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and a who’s who list of leaders from business, entertainment, academia, non-profits and government. Sessions are being streamed live online. Find out more about the summit and supporting activities by visiting the USOW website here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Maya Cakmak, whose research focuses on human-robot interaction, has received a NSF CAREER Award. She is the 31st current CSE professor to be recognized through this program or its predecessors, which is the most prestigious category of awards offered by the National Science Foundation in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars. The award will support Cakmak’s efforts to develop robots that end-users can program to address their specific needs and the environments in which they live.

While robots have the potential to enhance quality of life and increase independence for people living with disabilities, it is difficult to anticipate all possible scenarios when programming general-purpose robots. Cakmak seeks to address this difficulty by empowering users with diverse abilities and without technical backgrounds to program their assistive robots to perform real-world tasks within the settings in which they will be deployed. As part of the project, she will develop new methods and tools that encompass situated programming (programing through direct interactions with the robot and its environment), simplified programming (programming using highly simplified languages), and abstracted programming (manipulating abstractions of program entities for which programs are synthesized automatically).

Cakmak’s proposal also includes a strong education and outreach component. Among other things, she plans to continue engaging K-12 students with disabilities in robotics through the DO-IT scholars program and expand UW CSE outreach programs with robotics-related activities.

Learn more about the project on the NSF award page here.

Congratulations, Maya! Read more →

Yesterday, Forbes published a terrific interview with UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. During the conversation with magazine contributor Peter High, Etzioni shared his thoughts on a wide range of topics, including how artificial intelligence can benefit humanity, what he learned from starting multiple companies, and how his own students and interns help him to stay on the cutting edge of a fast-moving field.

Etzioni explained that he and institute founder Paul Allen aim to build a team “that punches above its weight” to advance AI research, saying, “Ultimately, to me, the computer is just a big pencil. What can we sketch using this pencil that makes a positive difference to society, and advances the state of the art, hopefully in an out-sized way?”

Read the full interview here or listen to the audio here. Read more →

Shwetak Patel

Electronics company Belkin International and plumbing and HVAC supplier Uponor Corp. recently announced the formation Phyn, a $40 million joint venture to further scale their intelligent water innovations based on technology that was developed by CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel working with students in the UW’s UbiComp Lab.

The Belkin technology is based on HydroSense—a pressure-based sensor for monitoring home water usage developed by Patel, CSE Ph.D. alum Jon Froehlich, and EE Ph.D. alum Eric Larson—and ElectriSense, a plug-in sensor that monitors home energy consumption at the device level that was developed by Patel and CSE Ph.D. alum Sidhant Gupta. Froehlich and Larson are now faculty members at University of Maryland, College Park and Southern Methodist University, respectively, and Gupta is a researcher at Microsoft Research.

Belkin licensed the technology when it acquired Patel’s home sensing startup, Zensi, six years ago. As part of that deal, Belkin opened its Wemo Labs in Seattle under Patel’s leadership. The new venture, Phyn, will operate a research facility in Seattle as part of its efforts to bring projects such as Belkin’s Wemo Water system, which is built on the UW-licensed technology, to market.

Wemo Water system

From the GeekWire article:

“Phyn’s R&D lab, in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood, is starting with 10 engineers, and the company plans to continue expanding the team, said Ryan Kim, the newly named Phyn CEO, who was previously Belkin’s vice president of engineering. Kim said in an email to GeekWire that the company ‘continues to be committed to and invested in both our relationship with UW and our R&D office in Seattle.’

“‘We’ve found the quality of thinking as well as the quality of execution by the team at the lab, under Shwetak’s guidance, to be excellent, cooperative, and highly productive,’ Kim said. ‘Phyn will absolutely continue to work closely with Shwetak and the lab as we move forward.'”

Read the full GeekWire article here and a related Seattle Times article here.

UW CSE and EE professor Matt Reynolds collaborated on the ElectriSense project. Collaborators on the HydroSense project include former Mechanical Engineering undergraduate Tim Campbell, EE Ph.D. alum Gabe Cohn, EE Ph.D. students Tien-jui Lee and Elliot Saba, EE Master’s alum Eric Swanson, CSE professor James Fogarty, and EE professor Les Atlas. Read more →

MISL researchers Georg Seelig, Luis Ceze, and Karin Strauss

Scientific American published a terrific article this week highlighting the work of UW and Microsoft researchers in the Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL) as part of a broader examination of efforts to re-purpose DNA as a digital data storage medium. The magazine spoke with UW CSE and Electrical Engineering professor Georg Seelig and Microsoft researcher and CSE affiliate professor Karin Strauss about the project, which is generating a lot of buzz for its potential to revolutionize digital storage—offering massive expansion in both density and durability—in the age of big data.

From the article:

“Humans will generate more than 16 trillion gigabytes of digital data by 2017, and much of it will need to be archived: Think: legal, financial and medical records as well as multimedia files. Data is stored today on hard drives, optical disks or tapes in energy-hogging, warehouse-size data centers. These media last anywhere from a few years to three decades at most. Plus, says Microsoft Research computer architect Karin Strauss, ‘we’re producing a lot more data than the storage industry is producing devices for, and projections show that this gap is expected to widen….’

“In April Microsoft’s Strauss and computer scientists Georg Seelig and Luis Ceze at the University of Washington reported being able to write three image files, each a few tens of kilobytes, in 40,000 strands of DNA using their own encoding scheme—and then reading them individually with no errors. They presented this work in April at an Association for Computing Machinery conference. With the 10 million strands Microsoft is buying from Twist Bioscience, the team plans to prove that DNA data storage can work on a much larger scale. ‘Our goal is to demonstrate an end-to-end system where we encode files to DNA, have the molecules synthesized, store them for a long time and then recover them by taking DNA out and sequencing it,’ Strauss says. ‘Start with bits and go back to bits.’

Seelig and Strauss co-authored the paper referenced in the article with CSE Ph.D. student James Bornholt, Bioengineering Ph.D. student Randolph Lopez, Microsoft researcher and CSE affiliate professor Douglas Carmean, and CSE professor Luis Ceze. The team presented its work at ASPLOS 2016 earlier this year.

Read the full article here, visit the MISL website here, and check out our past blog coverage here.

Photo credit: Tara Brown Photography Read more →

VizioMetrix—the world’s first visual search engine for scientific diagrams, developed by a team at the UW’s eScience Institute—was the subject of a great article that appeared in MIT Technology Review over the weekend. The article reports on researchers’ efforts to understand the presentation of visual information in scientific literature, or viziometrics, based on a paper co-authored by Electrical Engineering Ph.D. student Po-Shen Lee, iSchool professor and Data Science Fellow Jevin West, and Associate Director, Senior Data Science Fellow and CSE affiliate professor Bill Howe.

From the article:

“Most scientists recognize the importance of good graphics for communicating complex ideas. It’s hard to describe the structure of DNA, for example, without a diagram.

“And yet, there is little if any evidence showing that good graphics are an important part of the scientific endeavor. The significance of good graphics may seem self-evident, but without evidence, it is merely a hypothesis.

“Today, that changes thanks to the work of Po-shen Lee [and] pals at the University of Washington in Seattle who have used a machine-vision algorithm to search for graphics in scientific papers and then analyze and classify them. This work reveals for the first time that graphics play an important role in the scientific process.”

The article goes on to explain how the team assembled a searchable database of 10 million scientific visuals by training a machine vision algorithm to separate multi-chart figures into their component parts and classify different types of figures. In analyzing the resulting data, the team found a significant correlation between the most successful scientific papers and the amount of information conveyed visually within the publication—information that has been largely ignored by current bibliometrics and scientometrics. This work will almost certainly influence how we present and access scientific information in the future.

Additional contributors to the VizioMetrix project include EE Ph.D. student Sean Yang, CSE Ph.D. student Maxim Grechkin, and CSE Ph.D. alum Hoifung Poon of Microsoft Research.

Read the full article here, and try VizioMetrix here. Read the research paper here. UPDATE: Check out a terrific article on VizioMetrics that appeared in the print and online edition of The Economist here. Read more →

We are thrilled to announce that Yin Tat Lee, who works in algorithms and optimization, will join the UW CSE faculty.

Lee’s research focuses on the design of fast algorithms for fundamental optimization problems. Leaders in convex optimization acknowledge that his work has yielded the most important breakthroughs in interior point methods in the past two decades. Together with his co-authors, Lee has developed the fastest known algorithms for linear programming, submodular function minimization, and the maximum flow problem. He has been the recipient of a variety of Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards from flagship theory conferences, including FOCS and SODA.

After finishing his Ph.D. at MIT, Lee will spend a one-year postdoc at Microsoft Research in Redmond  before starting at UW CSE. He joins Shayan Oveis Gharan and Thomas Rothvoss as rising stars in theory who have chosen UW CSE in recent years.

Welcome, Yin Tat! Read more →