Allen School News

Many thanks to Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times for wonderful coverage of today’s UW Computer Science & Engineering Industry Affiliates Meeting!

“Qi Shan was remarkably calm demonstrating his advanced photo-manipulation research Wednesday at the University of Washington.

“Shan’s ‘photo uncrop’ technology was among dozens of demos that students presented during the Computer Science & Engineering Department’s annual showcase for industry partners. The audience included recruiters, investors and researchers, including representatives of big tech companies such as Microsoft, Intel and Samsung. Some flew across the country to see what and who are emerging from the labs.

“Demos were just part of the event. The agenda included several recruiting session and activities highlighting research that seems ready for commercialization …

“As part of Ph.D. work he expects to complete in early 2015, Shan developed technology that can assemble a panoramic image, pixel by pixel, with ‘computational photography.’ He worked on the project with UW CSE faculty members Brian Curless and Steve Seitz, along with Google employee Carlos Hernandez and Yasutaka Furukawa, a former UW researcher who worked on Google Maps and is now an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

“With the technology, an image of a person standing in the doorway of a cathedral could be expanded to include the rest of the building and the block on which it sits. The expanded picture would be generated through an analysis of imagery found online, including aerial images and photo collections such as Flickr …

“When I asked Shan whether the technology could end up with a company such as Adobe, Google or Microsoft, he said Google is a possibility – especially since he was heading there for a job interview a few hours after finishing the demo.”

Read more – and watch a video – here. Read more →

UW undergraduate and graduate students at last week’s Grace Hopper Conference

GeekWire writes:

“Satya Nadella set off a firestorm last week after advising women to not explicitly ask for a raise, but rather rely on “good karma” …

“We caught up with some University of Washington computer science students who were representing their school at the conference (read how the UW is trying to increase women representation in computing here). Read on to hear what they had to say about Nadella’s comments and women in technology as a whole.”

UW CSE undergraduates Jennifer Kang and Karolina Pyszkiewicz,and UW CSE graduate student Amrita Mazumdar are interviewed. Topics include:

• On Nadella’s comments and what it says about the tech industry
• On why it is important to get more females interested in computer science

Read it here!

Read a related Crosscut article by UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska here. Read more →

Congratulations to Simon Peter, Jialin Li, Irene Zhang, Dan R.K. Ports, Doug Woos, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson, and Timothy Roscoe – authors of Arrakis: The Operating System is the Control Plane, just named one of three Best Papers of this week’s 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI).

“In Arrakis, we ask the question whether we can remove the OS kernel entirely from normal application execution. The kernel only sets up the execution environment and interacts with an application in rare cases where resources need to be reallocated or name conflicts need to be resolved. The application gets the full power of the unmediated hardware, through an application-specific library linked into the application address space. This allows for unprecedented OS customizability, reliability and performance. Interesting research questions arise in this scenario.”

More information on Arrakis here. Read more →

The June issue of Columns – the University of Washington Alumni Magazine – features work by CSE professor Gaetano Borriello and students including Rohit Chaudhri, Brian DeRenzi, and Saloni Parikh, in the article “Mobile Medicine”:

“For infants in sub-Saharan Africa who are born pre-term, with low birth weight or with HIV, access to human breast milk can mean the difference between life and death. Human milk banks have been established to solve this problem, but they tend to be expensive, requiring electricity, computer access and clean water. These are often scarce commodities in this part of the world.

“Faculty and students at the UW are rapidly innovating to solve problems like this. The prevailing attitude among these motivated faculty and students: a good idea is a good idea regardless of the source and collaboration – especially novel collaboration – produces better solutions than a scientist working in isolation.

“A collaboration between UW Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) and PATH, a Seattle-area non-governmental organization, has led to a simple, ingenious solution to the breastfeeding dilemma.”

The article closes with this inspiring message:

“Borriello, who has taught at the UW for 25 years, says that students are quite different now. Like Parikh, DeRenzi and Chaudhri, they want to use technology to work on things that really matter. ‘During the dotcom boom, people were in it for the money. They wanted the degree to get into that world and cash in,’ says Borriello. He says there undoubtedly will be more projects emerging from the UW that help research efforts and provide answers that contribute to improved global health.”

Read more in Columns here. Learn more about Open Data Kit, a tool that provides the data collection foundation for this work, here. Read a related recent article – about the collaboration between UW CSE and the global health care provider AMPATH – here.

Gaetano was also recognized in the June issue of Columns as the recipient of the 2014 Marsha L. Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award. UW CSE department chair Hank Levy is quoted:

“Gaetano once told me that he treats every student as a peer. He sees graduate students as our future colleagues, and therefore he treats them with the respect and collegiality that a colleague would deserve. This is true at every level – graduate student, undergraduate, or high-school student – all are potential future colleagues and deserve the same respect.”

Read about Gaetano and UW’s other 2014 faculty award winners here. Read more →

The ACM Student Research Competition  is an internationally recognized venue celebrating undergraduate and graduate student research.  In the Grand Finals, first, second, and third place awards are made in both undergraduate and graduate student categories, considering students from all geographies and all research areas.

In the 2014 Grand Finals:

• Graduate student, second place: UW CSE graduate student Sai Zhang.

Sai was recognized for research that addresses configuration errors, which cause correct software to behave in undesired ways.  Sai created techniques and tools that enable programmers and end-users to find and fix configuration errors.

• Undergraduate student, second place: UW CSE incoming graduate student James Bornholt, currently at the Australian National University.

While an undergraduate at ANU, James did multiple internships at Microsoft Research. At ANU and MSR he did research on dealing with uncertainty in mainstream programming languages – for example, dealing with uncertainty from sensor readings in mobile applications.

• Undergraduate student, third place: UW CSE incoming graduate student Carlo Del Mundo, currently at Virginia Tech.

Carlo worked at Virginia Tech on accelerating fast Fourier transform on modern GPU hardware.

Congratulations to Sai, James, and Carlo! Learn about all the winners here. Read more →

Today’s monthly “Science Roundtable” on WXXI/NPR Connections featured UW CSE Ph.D. student Karl Koscher discussing online security in the wake of Heartbleed, former UW CSE faculty member (and current University of Rochester department chair) Henry Kautz discussing artificial intelligence, and Henry’s Ph.D. alum (and current Google[x] data scientist) Adam Sadilek discussing trend-tracking via Twitter.

Listen here. Read more →

Each year the University of Washington College of Engineering presents “Community of Innovators” awards to a half dozen faculty and staff members.

This year’s Classified Staff Innovator:  CSE’s Joel Cohn.

This year’s Student Innovator for Research:  CSE’s Shiri Azenkot.

This year’s Faculty Innovator for Research:  HCDE faculty member and CSE Adjunct faculty member Julie Kientz.

This year’s Faculty Innovator for Teaching and Learning:  EE faculty member and CSE Adjunct faculty member Eric Klavins.

Congratulations Joel, Shiri, Julie, and Eric! Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. student Vincent Liu and UW EE Ph.D. student Vamsi Talla, working with UW CSE professor Shyam Gollakota and UW CSE+EE professor Josh Smith, are one of 9 teams to receive 2014 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships.

Out of 137 submitted proposals (from 18 schools) Qualcomm first selected 34 finalists, then the 9 winning teams, each of whom are awarded a $100,000 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship.

Vincent and Vamsi are working on the Ambient Backscatter project.

Another of the 9 winning teams:  Georgia Tech Ph.D. students Amir Yazdanbakhsh and Bradley Thwaites, advised by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Hadi Esmaeilzadeh and UW CSE Affiliate professor (and Microsoft Research Director of Client & Cloud Apps and Hadi’s Ph.D. co-advisor with UW CSE’s Luis Ceze) Doug Burger.

(Last year, UW CSE Ph.D. students Theirry Moreau and Adrian Sampson, advised by UW CSE professors Luis Ceze and Dan Grossman, were one of 8 winning teams.)

Go team! Read more →

It’s a guessing game parents like to ponder: What will my child look like when she grows up? For better or for worse, research by UW CSE professors Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman and Steve Seitz and UW CSE graduate student Supasorn Suwajanakorn has yielded software that answers this question!

Using a single photo of a 3-year-old, the software automatically renders facial images at multiple ages. The researchers tested their rendered images against those of 82 actual people photographed over a span of years. In an experiment asking random users to identify the correct aged photo for each example, they found that users picked the automatically rendered photos about as often as the real-life ones.

The work is described in the UW News release here and the research project web page here.  (Both include example images and videos.)  A paper will be presented at CVPR this week.

Scary … Read more →

Friday was UW CSE Ski Day 2014 – faculty, staff, and students enjoying more than 100″ of snow at Stevens Pass.  Hank was all smiles until Tina smoked him … Read more →