UW CSE Ph.D. students Lydia Chilton and Nicki Dell have been named as winners of 2013-14 Facebook Graduate Fellowships.
Lydia works with James Landay and Dan Weld on crowdsourcing. She spent the 2010-11 academic year at MSR-Asia in Beijing observing Landay trying to speak Chinese.
Nicki works with Gaetano Borriello and Linda Shapiro on computer vision, machine-learning and human-computer interaction, with a focus on designing and evaluating applications that improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions.
Lydia and Nicki were among 12 top students from the nation’s top programs who received Facebook Graduate Fellowships. UW CSE Ph.D. students Raymond Cheng and Paris Koutris were among 27 Finalists.
Congratulations to Lydia, Nicki, Raymond, and Paris! Read the Facebook announcement here. Read more →
Batman’s Kitchen, an interdisciplinary team involving students from CSE, the iSchool, EE, and pre-engineering, won the Hawaiian “Big Splash” Cyber Defense Competition held 8-10 March 2013. The competition is designed to bring practitioners in industry and government together with students in a competition environment. Teams were given a scenario of critical infrastructure in a business setting to defend against attacks by hackers (the red team) while also completing injects (e.g., setup a database, block certain websites, database audits, etc.) throughout the three-day competition.
On Day 2 of the competition, the head of the red team initiated a full-on attack against the UW team – beyond the scope of the regular competition. The team successfully protected their network for several hours while under attack. By 5pm on the final day of the competition, it was announced that the UW team had won by hundreds of points over the military teams entered in the competition.
The trophy for the competition will be awarded in Seattle next week.
UW participants:
- Melody Kadenko (team advisor and competition judge), CSE
- Bryan Eastes, CSE
- Atanas Kirilov, CSE
- Karl Koscher, CSE
- David Mah, CSE
- Michael McKeirnan, pre-engineering
- Aasav Prakash, CSE
- Jordan Puryear, iSchool
- Ed Samson, CSE
- Omar Sandoval, CSE
- Ian Smith, CSE
- Andrew Sorensen, UW Tacoma
- Carlo Valentin, iSchool
- Tim Vega, CSE
- Rafael Vertido, CSE
- Cullen Walsh, CSE alum
- Thomas Winegarden, iSchool
- Tariq Yusuf, CSE
- Lars Zornes, CSE
Go team! Read more →
The Microsoft Research Graduate Women’s Scholarship is a one-year scholarship program for outstanding women graduate students, designed to help increase the number of women pursuing a Ph.D. This program supports women in the second year of their graduate studies.
Lilian de Greef, a Harvey Mudd College undergraduate in her first year as a UW CSE Ph.D. student in Shwetak Patel’s Ubiquitous Computing Lab, has been named one of 10 recipients of 2013 Microsoft Graduate Women’s Scholarships.
Lilian joins past UW CSE recipients Katie Kuksenok, Nell O’Rourke, and Tamara Denning, plus UW CSE bachelors alum Justine Sherry who received the scholarship as a graduate student at UC Berkeley.
Congratulations to Lilian, and thanks to Microsoft! Read more →
“The capabilities of mobile devices have been expanding to serve purposes far beyond communication. More recently, this trend has centered around creating smartphone applications for medical purposes.
“A project out of the UW uses new technology to monitor safe breast milk pasteurization with a mobile device. This app, called FoneAstra, was developed by UW computer science and engineering (CSE) graduate student Rohit Chaudhri in collaboration with the Seattle-based nongovernmental organization PATH and the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE).”
“With a portable receipt printer, an android phone, and a temperature probe, hospital staff are now able to track the milk and regulate the temperature during pasteurization for around $700 instead of costing between $10,000 and $50,000.”
Read more here. Learn more about the project here. Read more →
When University of Texas faculty stars Doug Burger and Kathryn McKinley moved to Microsoft Research, they brought with them graduate student Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, who transferred to UW CSE and added CSE’s Luis Ceze as an advisor.
Hadi has had an amazing streak of high-profile results recently:
And now, another:
Congratulations again, Hadi! Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. students Nicki Dell, Katie Kuksenok, and Kyle Rector have been recognized this year’s Palantir Scholarship for Women in Technology.
Nicki, as one of two runners-up (there were two grand winners), received a $7,000 scholarship. Katie, as one of five finalists, received a $2,000 scholarship. Kyle was one of 10 semi-finalists.
Congratulations to Nicki, Katie, and Kyle – and thanks to Palantir! Read more →
Qualcomm has announced 33 finalist teams – from among 138 applications from 15 participating US schools – for the 2013 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships. The winning teams – which will be selected in March – each will receive a $100,000 Fellowship.
Congratulations to UW CSE’s 3 finalist teams:
Read more →
Congratulations to Rob Gens, who received the 2012 NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) Best Student Paper Award for his paper “Discriminative Learning of Sum-Product Networks.”
NIPS is one of the top two machine learning conferences, and this is the only award it gives. (UW CSE is two for two with papers on sum-product networks to date – Hoifung Poon won the UAI-11 Best Paper Award for the previous one.) Read more →
Control-Alt-Hack is a computer security-themed card game designed to be entertaining, give a glimpse into white hat hacking, and highlight some of the more surprising aspects of computer security. It targets kids age 14 and up. It’s fun, and also educational / awareness-building. The game designers – Tamara Denning, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Adam Shostack from UW CSE – are computer security experts, and took care to include as much juicy and accurate(ish) content as possible. Game mechanics were provided by gaming powerhouse Steve Jackson Games (Munchkin and GURPS).
Control-Alt-Hack is newly available on Amazon.com. The University of Washington will also be shipping some free copies out to educators (in industry and academia). If you’re an educator and are interested in a copy, please see the “request an educational copy” page here.
A big thank you to Intel Labs, NSF, and ACM SIGCSE for supporting the development and distribution of this game, and to Steve Jackson Games for licensing the Ninja Burger mechanics!
UW C4C press release here. Read more →
The DARPA Robotics Challenge kicked off this week with the announcement of 18 teams – 8 from universities and 10 from industry – who will be funded by DARPA to participate in the DRC. Over the next two years, these teams will compete to develop and put to the test hardware and software designed to enable robots to assist humans in emergency response when a disaster strikes.
A UW CSE team led by Emo Todorov and including Dieter Fox, Zoran Popovic, and Steve Seitz is among the competitors selected by DARPA.
Learn more about the work of UW’s Movement Control Laboratory here. Read more →
