Allen School News

UW CSE continues its phenomenal record in hiring!

The addition of Ras Bodik – formerly a full professor at UC Berkeley – builds on other recent hires to give UW what is arguably the top programming languages group in the world.

Sham Kakade – formerly at Microsoft Research New England – augments other faculty in machine learning in CSE and other departments to make UW a true powerhouse in this critically important field.

Kurtis Heimerl, a UW CSE bachelors alum and UC Berkeley Ph.D. alum, will join us after concluding activity at his startup, focused on technology for the developing world.

Sergey Levine sits at the interface between machine learning and robotics; he’s finishing a postdoc at Berkeley, following receipt of his Ph.D. from Stanford.

Dan Ports, a superb MIT computer systems Ph.D., joined our faculty following a postdoc at UW.

Katharina Reinecke joins us this fall from an assistant professorship at the University of Michigan. Her research concerns the culturally appropriate presentation of information – a novel and important twist on HCI.  She is an experimentalist who builds systems that allow approaches to be investigated “in the wild.”

Thomas Rothvoss, arguably one of the top two young theoretical computer scientists (the other one is already on our faculty), moved part of his appointment to CSE from the Mathematics departments.

Last but not least, Zorah Fung, a CSE bachelors alum, has joined our teaching-track faculty, splitting her time between CSE and Bay Area CSE alumni startup Sift Science.

Read more about all of these terrific folks here. Read more →

DawgBytes (“A Taste of CSE”), UW CSE’s vibrant K-12 outreach program, has just concluded a summer of daycamps for elementary, middle school, and high school students, and the 9th year of our CS4HS teacher workshop. The academic year will be just as exciting. Check it out here! Read more →

Nicola (Nicki) Dell has earned the 500th Ph.D. awarded by UW Computer Science & Engineering – a milestone by any measure!

Nicki was advised on her thesis – “Mobile Camera-Based Systems for Low-Resource Settings” – by Gaetano Borriello and Linda Shapiro. In January, she will be starting her new position as an Assistant Professor at Cornell Tech in New York City.

Nicki was born in Zimbabwe and received a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of East Anglia (UK) in 2004 and an M.S. in Computer Science & Engineering from UW in 2011. Her research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) with a focus on designing, building, and evaluating novel computing systems that improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions. Her research and outreach activities have been recognized through several awards and fellowships, including a Graduate Facebook Fellowship, a Google Anita Borg Scholarship, and a Palantir Scholarship for Women in Technology. She has completed internships at Microsoft Research in Redmond, USA and in Bangalore, India and has led the Change group at the University of Washington since 2011.

Learn more about Nicki and her research from her website here and a short video here. Check out the roster of UW CSE Ph.D. recipients here.

Who will receive UW CSE Ph.D. number 2**9? We’ll find out soon! Read more →

The Google/CSE table at the UW Annual Recognition Gala: Darcy Nothnagle, Stephen Court, Dana Prouty, Jeff Prouty, Ed Lazowska, Lee Smith, Charlie Reis, Kate Everitt, Nicki Dell, Steve Seitz, and Lyndsay Downs

Google was honored on Friday, at the University of Washington Annual Recognition Gala, as the latest UW Presidential Laureate – individuals and organizations who have donated more than $10 million to the University of Washington.

The vast majority of Google’s generosity has come to CSE, in the form of research gifts and matches of philanthropic gifts by employees. We’re extremely grateful to companies such as Google for their support of our work.

At the event, recent UW CSE Ph.D. alum Nicki Dell described one aspect of the impact of Google’s generosity: the creation of Open Data Kit by Gaetano Borriello’s research group, used throughout the world for data collection in low-resource environments.

Jeff Prouty manages to heft Google’s UW Presidential Laureate Commemorative Globe

Yesterday we were thrilled to announce that UW CSE Ph.D. student Haichen Shen and his team captured a Best Paper Award and the inaugural Gaetano Borriello Best Student Paper Award at  UbiComp 2015, the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, currently underway in Osaka Japan. (The Gaetano Borriello Best Student Paper Award was named this year for long-time UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello, who passed away earlier this year, decades before his time.)

But wait – there’s more!

Today, the UbiComp 2015 10 Year Impact Award – recognizing the paper presented at UbiComp 10 years ago that has had the greatest impact – was awarded to the paper “Place Lab: Device Positioning Using Radio Beacons in the Wild” by a team including UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello, UW CSE Ph.D. alum and Intel Principal Engineer Anthony LaMarca (then at Intel Research Seattle), UW CSE Ph.D. alum and Google Software Engineering Manager Jeff Hightower (then at Intel Research Seattle), and (then) UW CSE Bachelors students James Howard, Jeff Hughes, and Fred Potter.

Pop quiz: Who won the UbiComp 2014 10 Year Impact Award? Answer: UW CSE’s Gaetano Borriello and Jeff Hightower!

Extra credit: Who won the UbiComp 2013 10 Year Impact Award? Answer: UW CSE’s Don Patterson, Lin Liao, Dieter Fox, and Henry Kautz!

Oh! Did we forget to mention that today, the Pervasive 2015 10 Year Impact Award also went to a team from UW CSE and Intel Research Seattle? Pervasive – which merged with UbiComp two years ago – recognized the paper “Learning and Recognizing the Places We Go” by a familiar set of authors including UW CSE’s Jeff Hightower, Anthony LaMarca, Ian Smith, and Jeff Hughes.

Go team! Read more →

“Innovation across the UW occurs across disciplines” … but 3 of the 6 examples that the UW alumni magazine chose to highlight in its September issue are from CSE:

“Shyam Gollakota captures energy out of thin air …

“Now a phone can diagnose sleep apnea …

“Computer scientist Shwetak Patel leads the UW’s Ubiquitous Computing Lab on projects to harvest power from variations in temperature, use humans as antennae, and use cell phone cameras to judge jaundice in newborns …”

Ayup. Read more here. Read more →

This wonderful New York Times article has nothing to do with computer science, but it has everything to do with the business we’re in – higher education – and with the proper role of intercollegiate athletics.

“[Notre Dame’s] president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, … adamantly opposes a model in which college sheds what is left of its amateur ways for a semiprofessional structure…. ‘Our relationship to these young people is to educate them, to help them grow,’ he says….

“And if that somehow comes to pass, he says, Notre Dame will leave the profitable industrial complex that is elite college football, boosters be damned, and explore the creation of a conference with like-minded universities.

“That’s right: Notre Dame would take its 23.9-karat-gold-flecked football helmets and play elsewhere.

“‘Perhaps institutions will make decisions about where they want to go – a semipro model or a different, more educational model – and I welcome that,’ Father Jenkins says.”

Read more, in the New York Times, here. Read more →

Donald Tsang, a UW CSE graduate student from 1990-93, passed away unexpectedly at his home in Seattle on Wednesday September 2. He was 47.

Donald earned a Bachelor of Science in EECS from Berkeley in 1990. He spent three years in the UW CSE graduate program before he followed his passion for working in startups. He was one of the earliest developers at Amazon.com, creating the technology that secures customers’ credit cards. Donald also worked at a number of other Seattle-based startups, including Marchex, Ground Truth, Relevant Data, and OpenCar, returning to Amazon for a few years between start-ups. He most recently worked at the Seattle office of Disney, working on the Playmation game platform.

Donald is survived by his wife, Daisy (Chai), his two daughters Daniella and Constantina, and his mother-in-law, Xundu Wu, all at home in Seattle; his parents, Floris and Annel Tsang, his sister Dale Tsang and her children Abby and Jeremy Tsang Hall, all of Berkeley, California; many aunts, uncles, and cousins around the world; and countless friends. Donald was preceded in death by his father-in-law, Haili Chai.

A Celebration of Life in Donald’s honor will be held on Sunday, September 27, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the University of Washington Center for Urban Horticulture.

Read more here.

Update: A fund has been created in memory of Donald, for the support of Daisy, Dani, and Dina. Learn more here. Read more →

The Washington State Opportunity Scholarship (WSOS) was established by the legislature in 2011 to help students from low- and middle-income families pursue degrees in STEM and health care fields in the face of rapidly rising tuition. Microsoft and Boeing donated $25 million each to get the program off the ground in 2011. Yesterday, Steve and Connie Ballmer made an $11 million gift, and Microsoft added $10 million more. All private donations are matched 1:1 with state funds.

Xconomy writes:

“Microsoft earlier this year kicked off a fundraising campaign for a new computer science building at UW with a $10 million donation. It also committed $40 million to the Global Innovation Exchange, a joint effort of the UW and Tsinghua University to create a graduate-level educational institution in Bellevue focused on technology, design, and entrepreneurship. [Microsoft Executive Vice President Brad] Smith has been instrumental in guiding Microsoft’s local contributions.

“[UW CSE’s Ed] Lazowska calls him ‘a saint.’ ‘As an individual, as a representative of Microsoft, and through the company, he has done many, many things in recent years that will make our region far stronger, now and for decades to come,’ he said.”

Xconomy also notes the shortage of capacity in computer science:

“‘The challenge is capacity, particularly in high quality programs at the bachelors level,’ said Susannah Malarkey, executive director of the Technology Alliance. ‘There is far more demand – from top students – than there is available space.

“Her organization’s latest benchmarking report (PDF), which tracks Washington’s performance against peers in areas including research capacity, investment, and education, found that in 2013, Washington ranked 39th out of the 50 states in science and engineering bachelor’s degree production per capita. (This, in part, may be why Seattle is experiencing so much angst about its current growth spurt and influx of new residents. Local technology giants and startup companies are recruiting people trained in computer science from around the world. What if more of them came from around the block?)

“At the University of Washington, home of the state’s premiere computer science program – indeed, one of the best in the country – demand for the computer science and engineering major from incoming freshmen this fall is second only to business administration, and not by much.”

Read more here.

Thank you, Steve and Connie Ballmer and Microsoft! Read more →

You’re smart enough to know that one aspect of this matters far more than any of the others: increased capacity for Computer Science & Engineering. But please humor our colleagues by reading the whole thing, here. Read more →