Allen School News

A familiar face was back on campus today: UW CSE bachelor’s alum Brandon Ballinger (’06), former Google engineer and co-founder of fraud detection software company Sift Science (alongside fellow UW CSE alum Jason Tan) – and most recently, one of a small team of developers recruited to help fix the federal government’s online health insurance marketplace, Healthcare.gov.

Brandon graciously agreed to talk about his experience with around 35 undergrads as part of our Leadership Seminar Series, in which CSE alumni and friends share with current students what it takes to be effective in a startup, small company, large company, or less common environment.

What Brandon found upon arrival in the other Washington was not so much a big, hairy technical problem, but a people problem. The government had engaged 55 companies as contractors to work on different parts of the site, many of whom didn’t communicate well with each other and, and things went downhill, sometimes focused less on solutions and more on avoiding blame. Enter Brandon and his colleagues. They brought not only technical expertise but also lessons they had learned working in high-functioning teams in the private sector. By helping the people behind Healthcare.gov to work better together – emphasizing solutions to problems rather than who caused them, prioritizing expertise over rank, and teaching them to triage – they were able to build Healthcare.gov into a more reliable, user-friendly site.

Brandon also talked to the students about his experience working on the Android operating system when it was still in its infancy (as opposed to the market leader it is now). He pointed out that his work on Android speech recognition spanned things he had learned across the UW CSE curriculum: “The latest framework will change; CS fundamentals will last your whole career.” (See the 3 slides linked from the image to the right.). Students also learned what it’s like to discover your startup co-founder has bailed on you – via email – the night before your big interview with Y Combinator, and what areas of computer engineering he wished he had known more about when choosing a career path. (Shout out to the site reliability engineers!)

Read a fascinating Wired article about how Brandon and his team helped turn around Healthcare.gov here.

Our thanks to Brandon for delivering a fascinating (and eye-opening) talk! Read more →

When the son of one of our faculty members was asked to show a picture of a building he likes to his pre-school class, he chose the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

The photo he shared is of the Allen Center’s façade, but his dad told us that the elevators are really his favorite part of the building, and asked us to ensure that the new CSE-II building, currently in the pre-design phase, has cool elevators too.

Architects, please take note! Read more →

UW CSE is partnering with online real estate marketplace Zillow to stage a weekend hackathon February 6-8, with participation from the White House, U.S. Department of Commerce and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

“Hack Housing: Empowering Smarter Decisions” will encourage the development of creative solutions that harness the power of big data to better meet the needs of first-time homebuyers, senior citizens, and low-income renters. Participants in the hackathon will have access to newly-released government data sets on federal housing programs, the location of accessible apartments, and transit information. In addition, Zillow will make available its data on home values and rents.

Zillow co-founder and serial entrepreneur Rich Barton will open the event by sharing his experiences of using technology to bring power to the people across a variety of industries. After a day and a half of hard work, participants will present their solutions to a judging panel of local tech leaders, entrepreneurs and federal government officials. The winning team will receive a $10,000 prize.

The hackathon will take place at Zillow’s headquarters in downtown Seattle. Find more details, including official rules, and register to participate here. Read more →

The University of Washington’s eScience Institute and GitHub are co-hosting an Academia Town Hall next Monday, February 2nd, to explore the role of software in academic institutions and how they can adapt to better support the use of important software tools.

Panelists include UW CSE alum Dan Halperin, director of research in scalable data analytics at the eScience Institute; Marina Meila, associate professor of statistics at UW; researchers Katy Huff and Fernando Perez of the University of California, Berkeley; Dan Katz, program director at the National Science Foundation; and Jamie Kinney, manager of scientific computing at Amazon Web Services. The discussion will be moderated by Arfon Smith of GitHub.

The town hall is 6:00-9:00 pm in the Physics/Astronomy Auditorium (PAA 102) on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. The formal program will be followed by a cocktail reception in the WRF Data Science Studio.

Interested undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, faculty, UW technology staff, and interested members of the broader community are encouraged to attend this free event. Learn more and register here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Richard Ladner has been honored with the 2015 Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) Community Award “in recognition of excellence and leadership in increasing access to computing for students with disabilities.”

Richard accepted the award at the STEM-CP: Computing Education for the 21^st Century (CE21) PI Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, where he delivered a keynote address titled “Accessibility Is Not Enough.” The purpose of the CE21 meeting is to build community around the efforts of the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) to broaden participation in computing and strengthen computer science education.

Richard has devoted more than a decade to accessibility research and has been a strong advocate for broadening participation in computing and using technology to enrich the lives of people with disabilities. Read more about his work in this excellent GeekWire article.

Congratulations to Richard on this well-deserved recognition!

  Read more →

Lilian de Greef

UW CSE’s Lilian de Greef and Irene Zhang have been named 2015 Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellows. Only 12 recipients were selected from among 169 nominees received by the company for this highly competitive fellowship, which provides financial support as well as the opportunity to work alongside leading computer scientists as part of a 12-week paid internship at Microsoft Research.

Lilian works with Shwetak Patel in the UbiComp Lab. Her interests include computer vision, embedded systems, machine learning and human-computer interaction. Lilian and her UbiComp colleagues developed BiliCam, a smartphone-based system for monitoring newborn jaundice.

Irene Zhang

Irene works with Hank Levy and Arvind Krishnamurthy in the Computer Systems Lab. Her research focuses on systems for large-scale, distributed applications, including the design of new operating system abstractions for mobile/cloud applications as part of the Sapphire project.

Past winners of this prestigious award at UW CSE include Yoav Artzi and Mayank Goel (2014); Gabe Cohn and Franzi Roesner (2012); and Morgan Dixon (2011).

Congratulations to Lilian and Irene, and thanks to Microsoft Research for recognizing and supporting these rising stars in computer science! Read more →

From the smallest start-up to industry leaders operating on a global scale, companies from around the region descended on the Allen Center this week to pitch job opportunities to UW CSE students.

Company and student turnout for the two-day event has been terrific. Yesterday, recruiters representing around 40 local start-ups pitched an entrepreneurial career path to hundreds of our undergraduate and graduate students. Today, established companies get their chance, with representatives from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and many more taking over the atrium.

Once again, we hit maximum capacity for our established company recruiting day – meaning some employers unfortunately wound up on a waiting list.

Thanks to all of our Industry Affiliates and students who turned out for the event – and good luck with those interviews! Read more →

Refraction 2, the award-winning game from UW CSE’s Center for Game Science in which players use fractions to save lost animals in space, is now available as a free download for the iPad.

Refraction won the grand prize in the Disney Learning Challenge at SIGGRAPH 2010. The game challenges players to expand their knowledge of fractions as they bend, split and redirect lasers to free animals trapped in spaceships. Originally developed for children nine to 11 years old, Refraction 2 is educational fun for all ages.

iPad users can begin their fraction-fueled animal rescue adventure here.

A version for Android users is coming soon. And be sure to keep an eye out for other great titles from the Center for Game Science! Read more →

Department chair Hank Levy traveled to our state capital today at the invitation of the House Higher Education Committee to address the growing demand for computer science graduates in Washington and the role of UW CSE in meeting that demand.

Speaking before the committee, Hank emphasized the role that UW CSE plays in supplying top computer science graduates to large information and communication technology (ICT) employers such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google; local startups that do not have the resources to recruit on a global scale; and companies outside of the ICT sector that employ significant numbers of technical talent. He also shared data on student demand, noting the sharp increase in the number of incoming UW students who signal their intent to major in CSE – more than any other field of engineering – and his expectation that enrollment in CSE’s introductory courses will exceed 5,000 students this year.

“We have become, with your support, one of the very top computer science programs in the nation,” Hank told the committee.

Highlighting Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that the Puget Sound region is “the software capital of America,” with more developers here than can be found in Silicon Valley, Hank shared state and national data illustrating how future demand for computer science graduates will outstrip that of other STEM fields. Meeting this need, he said, is critical to Washington’s economy; with additional state support, UW CSE would be able to double degree production from 300 to 600 per year.

“The state will always be a net importer of talent – that is just inherent in the exciting and incredible growth of Washington,” Hank observed at the conclusion of his testimony. “But students here who have the ability and desire to prepare for these top jobs need to have the opportunity to do that, and our goal is to give them that opportunity.”

Other presenters included Michael Schutzler, CEO of the Washington Technology Industry Association; Microsoft recruiter Becky Tucker; and Lysandra Donigian, Google’s Manager of Technical Student Outreach for North America. All of them pointed to UW CSE as a vital producer of sought-after talent for Washington’s high tech employers and advised the committee to make the program’s expansion a high priority.

Download a PDF of Hank’s presentation to the committee here.

Watch a video of the work session, courtesy of TV-W, here. Read more →

The accolades keep rolling in for UW CSE’s Shyam Gollakota.

In August, he captured one of MIT Technology Review’s coveted TR35 Awards recognizing 35 innovators under the age of 35 for the originality and impact of their work. Today, he joins the Forbes list of 30-Under-30 in energy for his work on ambient backscatter, which uses existing wireless signals to power battery-free communications.

Forbes characterizes Shyam as a “standout” among the list of young inventors and entrepreneurs who are creating technology and founding companies with the objective of “saving or conserving energy, rather than creating it.”

We couldn’t agree more, which is why we featured Shyam’s research in the latest issue of CSE’s own newsletter, Most Significant Bits.

Shyam made the cut for the Forbes list with just six months to spare. But hey, there are still the “under 40” awards to look forward to.

Congratulations on yet another well-deserved recognition, Shyam!

Read the Forbes profile here. Read more →