Allen School News

“Ricardo Martin-Brualla has created a time-lapse video that shows a massive glacier in Norway receding over the course of 10 years from a giant block of ice to a smaller frozen patch.

“But Martin-Brualla didn’t set up a camera to take photos for a decade. Instead, the University of Washington computer science Ph.D. student used computer-vision technology to find photos online of the popular landmark, warp them so they all appear to be taken from the same angle and stitch them together so it looked as if time flowed continuously.

“Martin-Brualla presented his project to a packed room Tuesday at the University of Washington Department of Computer Science & Engineering’s Industry Affiliates Meeting, part of a three-day event to showcase the department’s work. Tuesday was all about showing off student research for local companies who support the department. On Monday, more than 40 startups packed the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering on UW’s campus to meet with students. A second recruiting event will take place Wednesday, this time with more than 60 larger companies showing off their swag to recruit new workers.”

Read more – and find a link to a video of Ricardo’s amazing work – here. Read more →

Today’s the first day of the 2015 UW CSE Industry Affiliates meeting – an afternoon of recruiting by startups and small companies, followed by a “startup pitch gong show.” And it’s nuts!

Tomorrow: research interactions and our annual evening Open House, concluding with the awarding of the Madrona Prize.

Wednesday: recruiting by established companies.

A million thanks to all of our supporters in the tech community! You play a big role in making what we do possible, and in making it worthwhile! Read more →

On the 20th anniversary of Madrona Venture Group, and the day before the annual awarding of the Madrona Prize at our Industry Affiliates meeting, a lovely Seattle Times profile of its co-founder and our friend Tom Alberg.

“As one of the first investors in Amazon.com, Tom Alberg has been an active participant in the Seattle area’s tech industry for decades. He talks about those years, Amazon and investing in risky startups.”

Related: A post by Amazon’s Jay Carney, “What The New York Times Didn’t Tell You,” presenting a number of un-reported facts related to the recent New York Times article on Amazon’s workplace practices.

“The next time you see a sensationalistic quote in the Times like “nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk,” you might wonder whether there’s a crucial piece of context or backstory missing — like admission of fraud — and whether the Times somehow decided it just wasn’t important to check.” Read more →

A terrific crew of UW CSE students returned from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing just in time for a brunch for CSE’s women graduate students hosted by Magda Balazinska.

We are proud to have received, last spring, the inaugural annual award from the National Center for Women & Information Technology for Excellence in Promoting Women in Undergraduate Computing.

Read more →

UW CSE’s annual Open House for friends, alumni, and industry affiliates will take place on Tuesday October 20 from 5-7 p.m. in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Food, drink, posters, demos, friends, and the awarding of the Madrona Prize.

Please join us!  Information here! Read more →

UW CSE’s annual Industry Affiliates Meeting takes place next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday:

• Monday: recruiting by startups and smaller companies, followed by a “startup pitch gong show” and a Q&A session
• Tuesday: a day of research interactions, followed by an early evening Open House  with posters and demos for affiliate, alumni, and friend, including the awarding of the Madrona Prize
• Wednesday: recruiting by established companies

In the run-up, 315 student resumes were reviewed on Tuesday by 15 exhausted industry volunteers! Many thanks to Cynthia Claeys, Brittany Ruiz and Carolyn Balousek (Google), Greg Geiger and Kerri Keafer (Amazon), Jennifer List and John Schmid (Marchex), Liz Symes (Zillow), Ken Parker and Robert Noble (Indeed), Hilary Ayers and Anne Moergeli (Redfin), and Brooke Simpson, Chelsey Rooney, and Brandon Feicho (Microsoft)!

Next prep event: practice interviews on Thursday!

Learn more here! And please plan to attend Tuesday evening’s Open House, 5:00-7:00 p.m.! Read more →

Congratulations to us!

Ana Mari is one of us. She arrived here as a faculty member in 1986, and she’s made her career here, not just as a faculty member, but as Director of the Honors Program, Chair of Psychology, Dean of Arts & Sciences, Provost, and Interim President. She has risen through the ranks on her very considerable merits, and she is committed to the University of Washington’s missions of excellence and access.

Seattle Times, UW Today, Chair of the Board of Regents Bill Ayer’s statement, GeekWire Read more →

Eric Brewer

Melissa Westbrook and Jim Jeffries

John Bennett

Ed Lazowska

Richard Anderson, Carl Hartung, Sam Sudar, Waylon Brunette, and Nicola Dell

Melissa Westbrook and Sheree Wen

Saturday marked the Gaetano Borriello Feet on the Ground Humanitarian Symposium, held in conjunction with the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC 2015).

Following an introduction by Ed Lazowska, awards commemorating Gaetano’s achievements were presented to his wife Melissa by IEEE USA President Jim Jeffries and by UNESCO United States National Commissioner Sheree Wen. Eric Brewer (UC Berkeley) and John Bennett (University of Colorado), leaders in ICTD, presented keynotes. Richard Anderson, organizer of the symposium, chaired a panel that included Gaetano’s students Waylon Brunette, Nicola Dell, Carl Hartung, and Sam Sudar. The symposium concluded with technical presentations by Lorenzo Violante Ruiz (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies), Kiersten Israel-Ballard (PATH), Roy Want (Google) Heather Underwood (University of Colorado), and David Thau (Google).

The symposium was a wonderful way to commemorate Gaetano’s extraordinary leadership in developing and deploying appropriate technologies to improve the lives of the under-served throughout the world.

Videos of the talks will be available soon. Read more →

Pedro Domingos’ popular book about machine learning, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine will Remake our World, is #7 on the Washington Post‘s best seller list!

Watch out, The Martian – can a feature film be far behind?

Late to the party? Buy it from Amazon here!

Check out Pedro on the big screen here and here, and watch the video of his appearance at Seattle’s Town Hall here. Read more →

A number of major technical conferences have introduced “Test of Time” awards recognizing research papers that have had the greatest impact with the benefit of (typically) ten or more years of hindsight.

The “ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame” is the “Test of Time” award for the operating systems community.

At this week’s ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, UW CSE professor Tom Anderson’s 1993 ACM SOSP paper “Efficient Software-Based Fault Isolation” – co-authored with Robert Wahbe, Steve Lucco, and Susan Graham when Tom was on the faculty at UC Berkeley – was inducted into the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame. The citation reads:

This paper demonstrated that compiler or code-rewriting techniques could isolate untrusted code modules, preventing them from writing or jumping to addresses outside their “fault domain,” without the overhead of crossing hardware-enforced address space boundaries, and without much increase in execution time of code within a domain. The paper inspired substantial subsequent research, and the basic techniques have been implemented in widely-deployed software, such as Web browsers.

(We also note with pride that two other papers inducted this week to the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame were co-authored by UW CSE Ph.D. alums: “The Google File System” from the 2003 SOSP, co-authored by Shun-Tak Leung, and “MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters” co-authored by Jeff Dean.)

UW CSE faculty and students have an extraordinary record of “Award Paper” and “Test of Time” recognition at the leading networking and operating systems conferences:

Award Papers

ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP): 1979, 1985, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2003

ACM Special Interest Group on Communications and Computer Networks Conference (SIGCOMM): 1993, 2002 (Student Paper), 2008, 2011, 2013, 2015 (Student Paper)

USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI): 2002 (Student Paper), 2004, 2014

USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI): 2007 (Student Paper), 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015

Test of Time Awards

ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame: 2009 (for a 1985 paper),2015 (for Tom’s 1993 paper)

ACM Special Interest Group on Communications and Computer Networks Conference (SIGCOMM) Test of Time Award: 2014 (for a 2002 paper) Read more →