Allen School News

You don’t need a telescope to see the entrepreneurial impact of the University of Washington thanks to the new Seattle Tech Universe Map. The map, which was developed by our friends at the Washington Technology Industry Association and Madrona Venture Group, illustrates the evolution of our local tech ecosystem and the extent to which companies and organizations large and small have contributed to its growth.

UW shines brightly as an engine of innovation and local company creation in large part due to the entrepreneurial faculty and students of UW CSE. Our stellar contributions include machine learning startup Dato; adaptive education provider Enlearn; and Impinj, a leader in RFID technology – to name only a few. Also lighting up our economy: the entrepreneurial spirit of employees from companies such as Microsoft and Amazon – including countless alumni of UW CSE! All told, more than 600 information technology companies, and the connections between them, are represented on the map.

View the Seattle Tech Universe Map on the WTIA website here. Learn more about the project from the WTIA blog post here and the Madrona Venture Group post here. Also, check out some nice coverage of the map’s release by the Seattle Times, Re/code, GeekWire and Xconomy. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. alum Wen-Hann Wang completed his 24-year tenure at Intel today. To mark the occasion, Intel named him its first-ever Senior Fellow Emeritus – a tremendous honor that recognizes Wen-Hann’s many outstanding contributions during nearly a quarter of a century with the company.

Wen-Hann earned his Ph.D. from UW CSE in 1989 working with professor Jean-Loup Baer. He joined Intel in 1991 as an Intel® Pentium® Pro platform architect, working on the highly successful P6 product family. His platform architecture and analysis work was instrumental in the creation of the Intel® Xeon® processor product line.

Wen-Hann went on to serve in a variety of roles, including platform infrastructure research manager in the company’s then-new Microprocessor Research Lab and director of the Emerging Platforms Lab. He spent nine years in various management roles as part of Intel’s Software and Services Group (SSG), for which he was instrumental in establishing a presence in the People’s Republic of China. Later, he oversaw Intel Labs’ circuits and systems research, and in 2013, he was appointed Corporate Vice President and Managing Director of Intel Labs – positions he held until his retirement today.

Wen-Hann is a fellow of the IEEE, holds 15 patents and has received numerous technical awards, including the inaugural ACM/IEEE ISCA Influential Paper Award in 2003 and an ACM SIGMETRICS best paper award in 1990. UW CSE recognized him with our Alumni Achievement Award in 2012.

Read our profile of Wen-Hann from the autumn 2011 issue of our newsletter, Most Significant Bits, here and a 2012 article about his Alumni Achievement Award here.

Congratulations to Wen-Hann, from all of your friends at UW CSE! Read more →

Each year, UW CSE throws open the doors of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering to middle and high school students and their families as part of Computer Science Education Week. This year, students and parents are invited to join us on Saturday, December 5th from 1:00 to 5:00 pm at our computing open house, which features interactive demonstrations and hands-on activities that celebrate the wonderful world of computing.

Try your hand at games for learning and scientific discovery developed by UW CSE’s Center for Game Science; learn about encryption with members of the Security & Privacy Lab; meet Rosie the Robot; and much more!

Don’t miss the chance to interact with our faculty, students and industry partners, and to learn more about the exciting new technologies being developed here at UW CSE!

Learn more and RSVP here. And don’t forget to participate in the Hour of Code – learn more about that here. Read more →

Team Orz (from left): Jingchen Hu, WenBo Cui and Forrest Sun

Five teams of UW CSE students competed at the Pacific Northwest regional for the ACM’s annual International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) last weekend. Once again, our students made a strong showing, sweeping the top five spots at the Puget Sound competition site and holding their own against some formidable opponents from other top institutions in the broader regional contest. Twelve CSE undergraduates and three graduate students participated.

Puget Sound was one of six sites that determined which teams from the Northwest region – which includes Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, northern and central California, western Nevada and Hawaii – will move on to compete in the world finals next May.

The regional competition is fierce, including teams from UW CSE, Stanford, UC Berkeley and a number of other schools. Two teams of CSE undergradate students – Orz and Eternal Flame – placed in the top 10 overall, and all five teams placed in the top 20. (A total of seventy teams competed in UW CSE’s division.) Everyone made their coach, UW CSE Ph.D. student Daniel Epstein, proud:

Orz: WenBo Cui, Jingchen Hu, Forrest Sun (Puget Sound site champions, 7th in the region)

Eternal Flame: Victor Chen, Jasper Hungunin, Vladimir Korukov (10th in the region)

Voila: Hessam Bagherinezhad, Kiana Ehsani, Xin Yang (12th in the region)

Last1: Ziyu Wang, Qian Yan, Yuhao Zhu (13th in the region)

Java the Hutt: Zach Frohardt, Gunnar Onarheim, Calob Symonds (19th in the region, and honorable mention by UW CSE News for the best team name)

Way to go, everyone! Read more →

Researchers from UW CSE and EE announced in June that they had developed Power Over WiFi, “PoWiFi” for short, to harvest energy from Wi-Fi routers to wirelessly power devices. The technology, which has appeared in MIT Technology Review, Wired, BBC News, and several other media outlets, was chosen this week as one of Popular Science’s “Best of What’s New 2015” – a list of the top 100 innovations that the magazine believes will shape the future and change the world.

From the UW media release:

“The technology made headlines earlier this year when researchers published an online paper showing how they harvested energy from Wi-Fi signals to power a simple temperature sensor, a low-resolution grayscale camera and a charger for a Jawbone activity tracking bracelet….

“Although initial experiments harvested relatively small amounts of power, the UW team believes there’s opportunity to make the PoWiFi system more efficient and robust.

“‘In the future, PoWiFi could leverage technology power scaling to further improve the efficiency of the system to enable operation at larger distances and power numerous more sensors and applications,’ said co-author Shyam Gollakota, assistant professor of computer science and engineering.”

In addition to Gollakota, the research team includes CSE and EE professor Josh Smith, EE graduate students Vamsi Talla, Bryce Kellogg, and Saman Naderiparizi, and former CSE postdoc Ben Ransford. They will present their final paper on PoWiFi at the ACM’s CoNEXT 2015 conference in Heidelberg, Germany this December.

Read the Popular Science article here, and the UW media release here. Check out our previous blog coverage of the project here and here.

Congratulations to the entire PoWiFi team! Read more →

UW CSE professor Alvin Cheung was honored by his alma mater this week with the George M. Sprowls Award, which recognizes the most outstanding Ph.D. theses in computer science submitted to MIT each year.

Cheung received the award for his dissertation titled “Rethinking the Application-Database Interface,” in which he puts forward a novel approach for optimizing the performance of applications that interact with database management systems (DBMSs). Cheung showed that real-world applications are sped up by multiple orders of magnitude when both the programming system and the DBMS are considered in tandem, using a combination of declarative database optimization and modern program analysis and synthesis techniques.

See the MIT announcement here. Or, hey, test your mettle by reading Alvin’s winning dissertation here.

Congratulations, Alvin! Read more →

UW CSE was honored to host a very special gathering this morning to celebrate the contributions of Bill Gates Sr. to our university, the community, the world, and countless lives on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

Bill is a UW double-alum (Bachelors and Law School), a giant in the legal profession and in the community, and long-time co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Throughout his life, Bill has been hands-on in his support for education, reproductive and child health, the arts, the United Way, and many other civic causes. He has been a longtime supporter of his alma mater, serving as a UW Regent from 1997 to 2012 and leading the UW’s Creating Futures campaign. In 2013, UW bestowed upon Bill its highest alumni honor, designating him Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus.

To honor Bill’s amazing legacy, nearly 100 individuals who have been touched by Bill’s generosity of spirit assembled stories of lessons they had learned from him into a book: Thanks for Showing Up in My Life: Lessons We Learned from Bill Gates Sr. The project was spearheaded by Marty Smith (a long-time legal colleague of Bill’s, and former Chair of the Technology Alliance, a civic organization Bill founded in the mid-90’s), Susannah Malarkey (Executive Director of the Technology Alliance since its inception), Ed Lazowska (UW CSE professor and long-time Technology Alliance board member), and Dan Evans (former Governor and U.S. Senator, and a dear friend of Bill’s for more than 50 years). Contributors included UW President Ana Mari Cauce, PATH President & CEO Steve Davis, Starbucks Chairman & CEO Howard Schultz, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, and others from Bill’s past and present.

From the book’s foreword:

“As we go about our daily lives, our actions send out ripples – just like the ripples emanating from a single pebble dropped into a shallow pond. And like the ripples from that pebble, the ripples we send out interact with and affect those around us in ways we may never fully understand. If you could somehow capture just a portion of the ripples a single person has sent out over the course of that one lifetime, you would have a wonderful and amazing view into who that person is, how that life has been lived, and the impact that person has had on others.

“This book is an attempt to do just that for a very special person, Bill Gates Sr. Each of the storytellers has had the great fortune of being one of the many people impacted by the ‘ripples’ Bill Sr. has sent out over his 90 years of ‘showing up’ and living life to the fullest.”

Few people have created so many ripples and touched so many people’s lives through their leadership, philanthropy and just plain human decency as Bill Gates Sr. The University of Washington – not to mention the world! – is a better place thanks to him.

Happy birthday and thank you, Bill, from all of us here at UW CSE!

(In addition to the photos below, many more here and here.)

UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska pays tribute to Bill as his longtime friend Llew Pritchard looks on

Governor Dan Evans shares one of many stories on friendship and compassion from the “book of Bill”

UW President Ana Mari Cauce offers a toast and leads the singing of “Happy Birthday”

Bill looks over the book with Ruth Gerberding, widow of former UW President Bill Gerberding

Bill with Marty Smith, his former colleague from Preston Gates & Ellis, and UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska

Bill thanks everyone for joining in the celebration

We’re so good we’re competing against ourselves! Not only is Ph.D. student Ricardo Martin nominated in the Video category for time-lapse mining from internet photos, but Nanocrafter, the game developed by UW CSE’s Center for Game Science to advance synthetic biology research, is nominated in the Interactive category.

While theoretically only one can win the “People’s Choice” award, we are hoping there will be a tie and both UW CSE projects will be able to share bragging rights (in addition to winning their respective categories, of course). Vote for Nanocrafter here, and for Ricardo Martin here – you can cast one vote in each category.

You know how the saying goes…vote early and vote often! Read more →

MIT Technology Review recently published a nice article about robotics research led by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Igor Mordatch, who worked with UW CSE professor Emo Todorov in the Movement Control Laboratory before taking up a postdoc position with Pieter Abbeel at UC Berkeley. Igor is the lead researcher on a project in which Darwin, a humanoid robot with simulated neural networks, learns how to move by “imagining” how to do it, and to adjust its movements based on real-world conditions.

From the article:

“Like many toddlers, Darwin sometimes looks a bit unsteady on its feet. But with each clumsy motion, the humanoid robot is demonstrating an important new way for androids to deal with challenging or unfamiliar environments. The robot learns to perform a new task by using a process somewhat similar to the neurological processes that underpin childhood learning….

“‘It practices in simulation for about an hour,’ says Igor Mordatch, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley who carried out the study. ‘Then at runtime it’s learning on the fly how not to slip.'”

The article also quotes UW CSE professor Dieter Fox, who is enthusiastic about the potential for neural network learning in robotics.

“‘I’m very excited about this whole research direction,’ Fox says. ‘The problem is always if you want to act in the real world. Models are imperfect. Where machine learning, and especially deep learning comes in, is learning from the real-world interactions of the system.'”

Read the full article and watch a video featuring Darwin here. Read more →

UW CSE is a recognized powerhouse in software engineering research. Our strength was once again on display at ASE 2015, the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, where postdoc René Just captured the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for the paper, “Do Automatically Generated Unit Tests Find Real Faults? An Empirical Study of Effectiveness and Challenges.”

Just and colleagues at the University of Sheffield and University of Luxembourg analyzed the effectiveness of three automated unit test generation tools, which are used by software developers in place of more burdensome manual testing to identify faults in their code. The researchers evaluated each tool on 357 real-world faults. They found that while the automatically generated test suites detected more than half of the faults overall, only 19.9 percent of the individual test suites detected a fault, and 15.2 percent were flaky. The team’s insights will support the development of more reliable automated unit test generators that achieve a higher fault detection rate.

Overall, UW authors had five papers accepted to ASE, and another six papers at the conference were authored by previous advisees or postdocs of UW CSE professor Michael Ernst – a strong but not unexpected showing from members past and present of our world-class PLSE group!

Read the award-winning paper here. Congratulations to René and to the entire PLSE team! Read more →