Allen School News

UW CSE professor Emina Torlak has been named the recipient of the 2016 Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize from the Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets (AITO), an organization devoted to advancing research in object-oriented technology. Torlak—a member of UW CSE’s Programming Languages & Software Engineering group (PLSE), which is widely recognized as one of the best in the business—will be honored at the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) in Rome this summer.

The Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize recognizes an early career researcher who demonstrates exceptional potential in the areas of programming and simulation. The prize is named for Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, whose pioneering work in object-oriented programming transformed software design and development. Torlak is being recognized for her work on automated tools for analyzing and synthesizing software artifacts. Examples include Rosette, a new solver-aided programming language that enables programmers to create their own domain-specific tools for verification, synthesis, and debugging, and Kodkod, an efficient constraint solver for relational logic used in a variety of applications, including code checking and test-case generation.

Read AITO’s citation honoring Torlak here.

The broader UW CSE family is no stranger to the Dahl-Nygaard Prize. Former faculty member Craig Chambers won the senior prize in 2011, and two of our Ph.D. alumni received the junior prize: Jonathan Aldrich in 2007, and Gail Murphy in 2005.

Way to go, Emina! Read more →

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 →

Supasorn Suwajanakorn (photo credit: Abhishek Sugam)

Advances in computing have disrupted many industries, from financial services and retail, to travel and real estate. Could psychic readings be next?

In a story posted on MyNorthwest.com, KIRO Radio reporter Rachel Belle foresees the day when you will be able to interact with a 3-D model of your dearly departed. And it will all be thanks to members of UW CSE’s GRAIL Group. From the article:

“Five years ago I sat down with my Grandma Sue and a tape recorder and interviewed her for two hours. I asked her to tell me stories of her childhood in New York City, her marriage, anything about her life. I learned that she got married at 16 years old in a jail, along with several other young women and their soldier fiancés. They later divorced and, on tape, she advised me not to marry a bum.

“Unfortunately, a few weeks later I accidentally deleted the recording. And before I could schedule another visit to re-record, she died. Now, the only recording I have of Grandma Sue’s thick, New York accent is a five second video on an old, out-of-service cellphone.

“What if you could have one more conversation with someone who passed away? Or many conversations? Would you do it? Eventually, this may be possible. Computer scientists at the University of Washington are working on bringing photos and video to life.”

Belle is referring to research by CSE graduate student Supasorn Suwajanakorn and professors Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman and Steve Seitz in which they construct and animate 3-D models of celebrities from photos and videos. The project—What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks?—is attracting a lot of interest and promises to advance the state of the art in animation and augmented reality.

We predict you will want to read the full article here, and check out our past coverage of the project here.

IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: Richard Anderson notes that the recent research by Suwajanakorn, Kememacher-Shlizerman and Seitz ignores prior work on “Necrocomputing” carried out in 2001 by UW CSE Ph.D. student Craig Kaplan, now a faculty member at the University of Waterloo. We regret this lapse in scholarship. See Kaplan’s talk on the subject here.
Read more →

UW CSE professor Ben Taskar passed away tragically, in his 30’s, in 2013, of sudden and severe heart failure.

UW CSE has commemorated Ben in a number of ways, including the establishment of the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, and of the annual Ben Taskar Memorial Lecture.

Today, the inaugural Ben Taskar Memorial Lecture was delivered to a packed house by Ben’s Stanford Ph.D. advisor and founder of Coursera, Daphne Koller.

The event began with remarks honoring Ben by UW CSE professor Carlos Guestrin – like Ben, a Daphne Koller Ph.D. alumnus and machine learning star – and a overview of the Taskar Center by its director (and Ben’s wife) Anat Caspi.

Daphne followed her own remarks honoring Ben with an inspirational talk describing the mission and impact of Coursera.

“Anyone, anywhere can transform their life by accessing the world’s best learning experience.”

That is the vision of Coursera, which has transformed access to higher education through a robust platform for delivering massive open online courses (MOOCs) to people around the world.

Daphne talked about the growth of Coursera as an online learning platform and the impact that it has had on learners and instructors. She shared some impressive numbers: four years ago, the first online courses offered by Stanford reached around 100,000 learners. Today, Coursera has surpassed 17 million registered learners around the globe, with more than 130 institutions and 1,000 instructors offering classes on the platform (including the UW, which was an early partner). And it is opening up pathways to learning for people who would not otherwise have access to quality higher education: 40% of active learners on Coursera are from emerging economies.

The data tell a compelling story on their own, but Daphne also shared personal anecdotes that illustrate the tremendous impact that Coursera and MOOCs in general have had on people’s lives around the globe—real people who gained access to a world of learning they otherwise would not have had.

In keeping with the day’s theme of accessibility, Daphne shared the touching story of Jerry Vickers. Vickers was diagnosed with ALS, for which the life expectancy is around 18 months. After losing his ability to move his limbs, Vickers spent what precious time remained of his life studying programming and a variety of other subjects on Coursera using a tablet controlled with his eye movements. From the Indian baker who took business classes so she could save her female friends from being sold into servitude, to the professor whose course about human trafficking enabled victims to pursue restitution for their own tragic experiences with it, Daphne’s stories revealed what a powerful—and empowering—tool MOOCs have become for both learners and instructors.

The standing-room-only lecture capped off a day of workshops and events focused on accessibility to mark the first anniversary of UW CSE’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology. Today’s program was a terrific way to honor Ben’s memory, and a terrific celebration of the work being done at the Taskar Center. Many thanks to Daphne for sharing the Coursera story with us. Read more →

Museum visitors interact with RHINO the robot

A paper co-authored by UW CSE professor Dieter Fox in his graduate student days was one of two papers selected this year for special recognition by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) with its Classic Paper Award, which recognizes papers that have been the most influential in the field. AAAI will show Fox and his colleagues the love during the opening ceremony of its 2016 conference on February 14th in Phoenix, Arizona.

The winning paper, “The Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot,” was originally presented at the 15th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence held in 1998 in Madison, Wisconsin. In it, the research team described RHINO, an autonomous, interactive robot that was designed to entertain and assist the public in highly dynamic environments.

Dieter Fox

The team focused on two priorities when building RHINO: achieving safe and reliable navigation at high speeds, and providing an intuitive and appealing user experience. Fox and his colleagues incorporated a number of innovations in localization, mapping, collision avoidance, and planning into RHINO’s software to enable it to operate under challenging conditions without having to modify the environment to aid its navigation. Because RHINO’s main purpose was to interact with people, they also placed special emphasis on user interaction, taking care to make the robot interface intuitive and user-friendly for non-experts—a relatively new concept in robotics research at the time. The team then put RHINO through its paces over the course of six days in the crowded Deutsches Museum Bonn in Germany. In addition to visitors interacting with RHINO in person, people around the world had the ability to control RHINO remotely via the Web.

In a related article on the RHINO experiment, the team noted that while most people found the robot entertaining, some took the entertainment too far and attempted to “break the system.” (In at least one case, someone who must not have received enough affection as a child attempted to lead RHINO dangerously close to a stairwell.) Happily, such attempts failed, and the robot was able to fulfill a total of 2,400 requests to tour the museum, either in-person or online—a whopping 99.75% success rate.

Fox’s Ph.D. research was a significant contribution to the paper, which was co-authored by Fox’s advisor, Armin Cremers, and colleagues at the University of Bonn, Aachen University of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University. Their RHINO experiment pointed to the future of robotics with its focus on adaptability and human-computer interaction. It was a truly astounding result at the time, for which the team deserves this accolade from the AAAI today.

Congratulations, Dieter! Read more →

UW CSE professor Richard Anderson recently spoke to KPLU’s Jennifer Wing about our new Digital Financial Services Research Group that was announced last week. The new group, which aims to accelerate the development of secure mobile banking services for people in the developing world, is a collaboration between UW CSE’s Information & Communications Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab, Security and Privacy Research Lab, and the iSchool.

From the radio segment:

“In developing and third-world countries, moving money around digitally can be very complicated and risky. Computer science professors and students at the University of Washington are trying to make that task easier and safer.

“In remote parts of India or Africa, ‘It’s very common for a farmer to leave his village, go the city, drive a taxi and then, every month, he wants to send his wages back to his family,’ said Richard Anderson…

“But how can that taxi driver do that without worrying about financial security threats and identity theft?”

Read or listen to the full segment online here.

Read our previous coverage of the new group here and the UW news release here. Read more →