Allen School News

Today we received another remarkable testimonial to Gaetano Borriello’s impact, this one from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, headquartered in Panama:

“We have received with great sadness the news of the unexpected passing away of Professor Gaetano Borriello …

“Since the Haiti Earthquake in 2010, the International Federation of the Red Cross has exponentially used ODK for our relief and recovery programmes, changing the way we work in support of communities affected by disasters around the globe. This is Gaetano’s legacy.”

Read the full letter here. Read more →

Today we received a remarkable testimonial to Gaetano Borriello’s impact from Jane Goodall:

“It was with great sadness that we learned of Professor Borriello’s passing. Please accept our deepest condolences for your loss.

“The Institute was first introduced to Prof. Borriello and his students in 2009. Since then, the use of Open Data Kit (ODK) has transformed our approach to conservation in Africa and enabled us to greatly advance our mission of creating a world where people, animals and the environment can live in harmony.

“With ODK we have been able to empower and give voice to hundreds of village forest monitors and protected area rangers in Tanzania, Uganda, Congo and Eastern DRC so they can help conserve their forests and ecosystems for the benefit of present and future generations. More recently, Prof. Borriello and his students were instrumental in helping the Institute improve our process of collecting data in our long-term chimpanzee behavior research in Gombe, Tanzania, where I started my work in 1960.

“My colleagues who met and worked with Prof. Borriello recall his kindness, thoughtfulness and desire to be of service, as well as his humble nature and the unassuming way in which he was developing the next generation of computer scientists and engineers so they too can use their knowledge to improve the lives of others. What a great loss indeed he is to our world.”

Read the full letter here.

You might also enjoy the closing keynote that Gaetano gave at UbiComp 2014. He began by saying his remarks would not be technical but a story, a timeline about one project, ODK (Open Data Kit). If you want to know what Gaetano and some of his work was all about, this is the speech to listen to. It’s funny and fascinating. All of us are immensely proud of the reach that the work of Gaetano and his students is having around the world.

Watch the speech here. Read more →

GeekWire interviews Matt McIlwain (Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group), Chris DeVore (Managing Director of Techstars Seattle, operating inside UW’s Startup Hall), Connie Bourassa-Shaw (director of UW’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship), and Ed Lazowska (UW CSE) regarding the departure of UW President Michael Young, who has been a champion for innovation and entrepreneurship.

McIlwain: “My hope is that the Regents continue to emphasize the importance of how the UW intersects with the commercial and non-profit world in their selection of an interim and then new President.”

DeVore: “Calling it Young’s legacy is probably not giving the institution enough credit.”

Bourassa-Shaw: “Entrepreneurship and innovation have been flourishing across the University of Washington for more than a decade.”

Lazowska: “I hope the tech community will support us through this transition, as it has always supported us in the past.”

Read the article here.

Lazowska’s full remarks to GeekWire:

“I don’t want to minimize the role of the President or the impact that Mike Young has had.

“But UW is one of the nation’s and the world’s top universities. And it is a huge operation: 55,000 students, 4,300 teaching faculty, 16 schools and colleges (plus 2 branch campuses), and an annual budget of $6.3 billion (only $250 million of which comes from the state).

“One person does not run an enterprise of this scale. Ana Mari Cauce, our superb Provost, has been Mike Young’s partner since he arrived. She, like I, has devoted her entire career to UW – she’s not going anywhere. Paul Jenny, our superb Vice Provost for Planning & Budgeting, is not going anywhere. Mary Lidstrom, our superb Vice Provost for Research, is not going anywhere. Entrepreneurship and innovation is firmly in the hands of Vikram Jandhyala, our superb Vice Provost for Innovation, who’s not going anywhere. The 16 Deans and 2 Branch Campus Chancellors are not going anywhere. And all of these people would quickly agree that the Administration Building is not where the work of the University gets done – it’s in the trenches, where the faculty, students, and staff carry out the discovery, teaching, and outreach that’s our mission.

“I’ve been at UW through 6 Presidents and 2 Acting Presidents. Some were extraordinary (such as Bill Gerberding, who passed away last month). Some were downright goofy (such as Dick McCormick, who walked the plank in 2003). The trajectory of UW, and in particular the trajectory of Computer Science & Engineering, has always been upwards. That’s not going to change. I hope the tech community will support us through this transition, as it has always supported us in the past.” Read more →

With enormous sadness, we announce that our dear friend, colleague, and teacher Gaetano Borriello, the Jerre D. Noe Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, passed away this morning at his home, following a long fight with cancer.

Gaetano was dedicated to UW CSE and our students, and we were dedicated to him. Graduating from Berkeley in 1988, Gaetano applied to only a single academic department as an indication of how much he wanted to be here. Over the last six years, he fought the disease with courage, grace, optimism, and humor, continuing to teach, advise, mentor, and lead throughout. Through his work on technology for global development, Gaetano showed how research can  impact the lives of people around the world.

Our hearts go out to Gaetano’s wife Melissa, his sons Christopher and Nicholas, his mother Rosa, his brother Frank, and the rest of their family.  There will be no public service at this time, as the family wishes to grieve in private.

In his honor and memory, the department has established the Gaetano Borriello Fellowship for Change. The Borriello Fellowship will support students whose work is focused on exploring how technology can improve the lives of under-served populations.  More information on the fellowship here. Read more →

UW Computer Science & Engineering is pleased to announce the establishment of the Gaetano Borriello Endowed Fellowship for Change, honoring Gaetano Borriello, UW’s Jerre D. Noe Professor of Computer Science & Engineering. The Borriello Fellowship will support University of Washington students whose work is focused on exploring how technology can improve the lives of underserved populations.

Gaetano joined the UW CSE faculty in 1988, following receipt of his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He had previously received an M.S. in EE from Stanford University, and served as a member of the research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for eight years. From 2001-2003, on leave from UW, he founded Intel Research Seattle, which quickly became one of the premier research labs for work in ubiquitous computing.

Gaetano’s career began in the areas of integrated circuits, circuit synthesis, reconfigurable hardware, and embedded system development tools. He transitioned into ubiquitous computing, and as director of Intel Research Seattle he launched projects in elder care and in location-aware computing. More recently his focus has been applying mobile technologies to the problems of public health and development in low-resource settings. His group’s open-source mobile data collection tools, Open Data Kit, are in use on six continents in programs ranging across public health, documentation of human rights violations, and environmental monitoring.

Gaetano is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, a Fulbright Scholar, and a recipient of the UW CSE Undergraduate Teaching Award, the UW Distinguished Teaching Award, and the UW Marsha L. Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award.

Gaetano exemplifies why we are here:  to provide an extraordinary educational experience for our students, in which they discover, pursue, and achieve their potential; to conduct leading-edge research, but in the context of education rather than purely for its own sake; ultimately, to make the world a better place through the impact of our teaching, research, and mentoring.  He is an inspiration to all of us.

Learn more about Change, the vibrant campus-wide community of students and faculty exploring how technology can improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions, here.

Should you wish to support the Gaetano Borriello Endowed Fellowship for Change, you may do so here. Read more →

Drew Hansen

State Reps. Drew Hansen, D-Bainbridge Island, and Chad Magendanz, R-Issaquah today announced HB 1813, a bipartisan proposal to expand computer science education in the state.

HB 1813 creates the Computer Science and Education Grant program, which funds grants to help educators who want to pursue professional development in computer science, outreach to students to inspire their interest in computer science, and assistance for school districts to pay for technology to teach computer science courses.  The bill also adopts high-quality statewide computer science teaching standards and directs the creation of a computer science endorsement for educators interested in teaching computer science.

A subsequent bill being prepared by Reps. Hansen and Magendanz will address the expansion of higher education opportunities in computer science.

Chad Magendanz

Reps. Hansen and Magendanz have devoted a huge amount of effort over the past year to understanding Washington State’s workforce gaps and exploring means to address them. Hopefully their proposals – which are visionary, intelligent, data-driven, and hard-nosed – will largely survive the sausage-making process that lies ahead.

Read more here. Read more →

The Seahawks banner has returned to the exterior of UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

Back in New England, the truck delivering a Patriots banner to the Stata Center backed into the building and dented it.  More dents to come … Read more →

Nineteen young women from Washington State have been named regional winners of 2015 Aspirations in Computing Awards from NCWIT – the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

Among them is Mayukha Vadari, and 11th grader at Redmond High School, who spent last summer as a research intern working with UW CSE professor Magda Balazinska and other faculty and students from UW CSE and UW Astronomy.

Mayukha’s biography on the NCWIT awards website begins: “This summer (2014), Mayukha had her dream internship at the University of Washington’s Computer Science department, working on a problem for the astronomy department. It combined space and the beginning of the universe, big data analytics and computer science, all areas of great interest to her. Her task was to improve a service that visualized galaxy formation to allow more parameters. The project she was working on involved showing the merger history of a galaxy: visualizing the historical view of how galaxies were formed as they merged or separated to get to their final (present) state.”

Congratulations to Mayukha, and to all 19 winners and 20 runners-up from Washington State in the 2015 NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Awards.  Read about them all here. Read more →

Shwetak Patel has been appointed as the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering.

Shwetak’s research interests are in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, Sensor-Enabled Embedded Systems, and User Interface Software and Technology. He is particularly interested in developing new sensing technologies with an emphasis on energy monitoring and health applications for the home.

He was a founder of Zensi, Inc., a residential energy monitoring company, which was acquired by Belkin, Inc. in 2010. He is also a co-founder of SNUPI Technologies, a low-power wireless sensor company. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2011), Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2011), Sloan Research Fellowship (2012), TR-35 Award (2009), World Economic Forum Young Global Scientist Award (2013), and an NSF CAREER Award (2013). He was named Top Innovator of the Year by Seattle Business Magazine, and Newsmaker of the Year by Seattle Business Journal in 2011. Earlier work was also honored by the New York Times as a top technology of the year in 2005. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community, and was selected as a Seattle Shaper in 2012.

Congratulations, Shwetak. And many thanks to our friends at the Washington Research Foundation – WRF has supported UW CSE and UW as a whole in so many ways over so many years! Read more →

It’s becoming a welcome annual event: decorating the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering with multi-story banners celebrating the success of Paul’s Seattle Seahawks! Read more →