Allen School News

“It’s a branch of the city that’s become an urban jungle filled with a particular type of bird.

“‘Five yellow cranes right in the middle, four of them you can see from here,’ said Hellmut Golde, peering out a window at the Mirabella Retirement Community off of Denny Way.

“‘There’s development on every block, from Denny Way to Valley,’ said John Pehrson, who, along with Golde, has lived at Mirabella for the past six years. The men, aged 88 and 85 respectively, say they’ve been fascinated at the growth. But when they saw the plans for a new complex across the street, they weren’t smiling.

“‘There is very little green space,’ said Pehrson, as he pointed down to the small pocket park on Fairview. ‘It seems like a travesty to take down trees that are 70 years old in the middle of this development.’

“Those trees are part of a small private park near The Seattle Times old headquarters. A Canadian developer Onni had submitted plans to bulldoze the trees as part of a massive mixed use development. Pehrson, Golde and a group of Mirabella residents cried foul.

“‘It gives shelter to the birds and it’s important for ecological reasons,’ said Hellmut.

“The group has put together a photo book on the history of the park and the benefits to their neighborhood. They also vowed to take extreme measures, even for a pair of octogenarians.”

Read more and watch the KING 5 News video here. Read more →

According to GeekWire, Uber is the 51st company to open an engineering center in Seattle. (See GeekWire‘s interactive map of Seattle engineering centers here.)

At the Uber Seattle Engineering Center launch party last night, speakers included Uber’s new Head of Seattle Software Engineering Tim Prouty (a 2006 UW CSE alum), Tim’s Bay Area boss, Uber’s Director of Infrastructure Engineering Paul Mikesell (a 1996 UW CSE alum), and UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska. Uber Senior Software Engineer Sunil Garg, a 2010 UW CSE alum, came up from the Bay Area for the event.

(Since this was partly a recruiting event, we will refrain from mentioning the other UW CSE alums in the audience …)

  Read more →

Ras Bodik, an expert in programming languages and computer architecture, will join the UW CSE faculty this coming fall. Ras is currently Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ras is widely known for groundbreaking work in programming languages, and for applying programming language ideas to a broad range of fields, such as biology, human-computer interaction, and computer architecture. His current research involves making it easier for both programmers and non-programmers to write computer programs using program synthesis, a technique for computer-aided construction of software. Ras developed the idea of algorithmic synthesis using sketches (partial programs) and constraint solving. At the application level, he has used this idea to develop novel compilers for low-power computing, parallel layout engines for Web browsers, and tools for generating explanatory hypotheses from biological experiments.

Ras’s arrival creates a truly world-class programming languages group in UW CSE that crosses into systems, databases, security, architecture, and other areas. Ras joins recent hires Emina Torlak, Alvin Cheung, Xi Wang, and Zach Tatlock, and senior faculty  members Dan Grossman and Mike Ernst.

Welcome to UW CSE, Ras! Read more →

Whitman College is a top liberal arts college in eastern Washington. They have raised $8M from Microsoft and other friends to launch a computer science program – not because anyone would go to Whitman for vocational reasons, but rather:

“As we see how computation has literally pervaded every aspect of our lives over last 20, 30 years, it seems reasonable that computational thinking and computer science in particular should be a part of a person’s liberal education.”

We’re delighted that our 2006 Ph.D. alum Janet Davis has been recruited by Whitman to lead this new program!

Read more in GeekWire here. Read more →

Today marked the debut of the new zipline in the Microsoft Atrium of UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. A good time was had by all! Read more →

UW CSE students Karolina Pyszkiewicz, Katie McCorkell, Karan Goel, and Christopher Su. (Andy Li had hit the road prior to the photo-op.)

Five UW CSE undergraduates attended F8 this week – the Facebook developer conference in San Francisco.

“Join us at the intersection of creativity and technology. Product experts from Facebook, Instagram, Parse, Oculus, LiveRail and other apps will share what we’ve learned and built for developers. You’ll get access to our latest tools, new product demos and thought-provoking discussions to help you plan for your next build and beyond.”

Learn more about F8 here. Facebook Seattle is growing to 2000 developers! Read more →

UW CSE hosts alumni events annually at major employers of our students (Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Tableau, …) and in geographies where large numbers of our alumni live and work (Seattle, the East Side, the Bay Area, …).

Tonight was Amazon night – the largest employer of UW CSE graduates in each of the past three  years. Read more →

The New York Times reports on Facebook’s initiative to provide Internet access in under-served regions of the world:

“Taking to the skies to beam Internet access down from solar-powered drones may seem like a stretch for a tech company that sells ads to make money. The business model at Facebook, which has 1.4 billion users, has more in common with NBC than Boeing …

“‘The Amazons, Googles and Facebooks [and Microsofts!] are exploring completely new things that will change the way we live,’ said Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. ‘There are other companies out there like Hewlett-Packard and IBM, but they aren’t doing the really huge things anymore.'”

Read more here. Read more →

The Guardian reports on scientific advances in global health care, highlighting FoneAstra, a collaboration between UW CSE Ph.D. student Rohit Chaudhri, Microsoft Research India, and Seattle global health non-profit PATH.

“For thriving societies, you need healthy communities. But despite significant advances in global health over the past decade, millions of people are still without access to basic healthcare …

“In partnership with global health organisation PATH and the University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering, the team developed a simple mobile phone app that could play a game-changing role in getting life-saving donated breast milk to newborns. The FoneAstra monitor is one of this year’s winners of GSK and Save the Children’s Healthcare Innovation Award, which aims to help support and scale-up innovations coming out of developing countries that reduce child deaths.”

Learn more about FoneAstra here and here. Read more in The Guardian here. Read more →

UW CSE’s Shyam Gollakota has received an NSF CAREER Award – the 28th current UW CSE faculty member to have been recognized through this program and its predecessors.

The NSF CAREER Program “offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.”

Shyam leads UW CSE’s Networks and Mobile Systems Lab and works on various topics including computer networks, human-computer interaction and mobile health.  Recent topics have included battery-free computing and communication, and wireless gesture recognition and Wi-Fi imaging.

In addition to an NSF CAREER Award, Shyam has been recognized with an Alfred Sloan Research Fellowship, named one of Forbes 30 under 30, listed as a Next Generation Tech Influencer, named one of MIT Technology Review‘s Innovators Under 35, and received the 2012 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Congratulations Shyam! Read more →