Allen School News

Front row: Amelia Phillips (Dean at host Highline CC), Melody Kadenko (CSE - team advisor), Barbara Endicott-Popovsky (UW iSchool), Joel Ware (Boeing). Middle row: Mick Ayzenberg (CSE team), Henry Baba-Weiss (CSE team), Jake Appelbaum (CSE team coach), Miles Sackler (CSE team captain), Miro Enev (CSE team). Back row: Billy Kozma (SPAWAR), Drew Kesselring (Boeing), Ian Finder (CSE team), Karl Koscher (CSE team), Landon Meernik (CSE team), Lars Zornes (CSE team), Cullen Walsh (CSE team).

Last year, UW surprised itself by winning the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.  It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that the UW team – composed entirely of CSE students – rocked at this weekend’s Fifth Annual Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, winning a return ticket to the nationals.  UW’s score exceeded the combined scores of the second, third, and fourth place teams.

Congratulations to team members Mick Ayzenberg, Henry Baba-Weiss, Ian Finder, Karl Koscher, Landon Meernik, Cullen Walsh, Lars Zornes, Miro Enev (grad alternate), Max Sherman (undergrad alternate), Miles Sackler (Team Captain), Melody Kadenko (Team Advisor), and Jake Appelbaum (Team Co-Advisor).

Team Advisor Melody Kadenko says:  “I am SO PROUD of them!!!  Further, it proves that it’s not necessarily our team training and practice that can account for so many wins (since we don’t do much of that).  It’s the CSE curriculum that teaches our students how to analyze, find solutions, think abstractly.  The only thing left to teach during training/practice is how to not have a meltdown when something goes horribly wrong, and how to keep the profanity to a minimum when judges are present.”

Go team! Read more →

Work by UW CSE’s Sidhant Gupta is featured on Hack A Day:

“What if you could add gesture recognition to your computer without making any hardware changes? This research project seeks to use computer microphone and speakers to recognize hand gestures. Audio is played over the speakers, with the input from the microphone processed to detect Doppler shift. In this way it can detect your hand movements (or movement of any object that reflects sound).”

Read the post and watch the amazing video here. Read more →

UW CSE 3rd year Ph.D. student (and newly-crowned Facebook Fellow) Adrian Sampson discusses green computing, Harvey Mudd College as a h(e)aven for geeks, the value to industry of fundamental research, graduate student recruiting, and the State of Washington’s failure to invest in computer science educational capacity on KUOW’s “Weekday” with Steve Scher.

The interview begins at 21:45 here. Read more →

Adrian Sampson

After considering nearly 300 applications, Facebook has announced 12 winners and 30 finalists for 2012-2013 Facebook Fellowships.

Winners each receive full payment for their 2012-2013 tuition, a $30,000 stipend to cover study expenses, $5,000 for conference travel, and $2,500 for a personal computer.

Congratulations to UW CSE Ph.D. student Adrian Sampson and UW Information School Ph.D. student Jeff Huang, who are among the 12 winners, and to UW CSE Ph.D. student Alan Ritter, who was among the 30 finalists.

See the Facebook announcement here.  See a Seattle Times article here. Read more →

Julia Schwarz

Gabe Cohn

Franzi Roesner

Gabe Cohn, Franzi Roesner, and Julia Schwarz are three of the twelve winners (from 198 nominees) of this year’s Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowships.

Gabe is a UW EE Ph.D. student working with Shwetak Patel on embedded systems and VLSI in ubiquitous computing applications.  He was an undergraduate at Caltech.

Franzi is a UW  CSE Ph.D. student working with Yoshi Kohno in the areas of security, privacy, and systems.  She was an undergraduate at UT Austin.

Julia, a UW CSE bachelors alum who is now a Ph.D. student in the CMU HCI Institute, also was selected.

Congratulations to Gabe, Franzi, and Julia – and many thanks to Microsoft! Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. student Dan Halperin is quoted in a New York Times article on work at Microsoft Research, led by Victor Bahl and involving Dan and UW CSE professor David Wetherall, “experimenting with wireless links, mounted atop server racks, to supply extra bandwidth for moving data along at crunch times.”

“The Microsoft team forged ahead with the project, building and testing a system with tiny directional antennas at the top of each rack to send and receive data. A central controller monitors traffic patterns, finds network bottlenecks, configures the antennas and turns on the wireless links when more bandwidth is required, says Daniel Halperin, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, who worked on the project as an intern at Microsoft. Signals go out on a horizontal plane and are steered right or left. The design sped up traffic by at least 45 percent in 95 percent of the cases tested, Mr. Halperin says.”

Read the New York Times article here.  Read the joint UW/MSR research paper, “Augmenting Data Center Networks with Multi-Gigabit Wireless Links,” here.  See the slides from Dan’s SIGCOMM 2011 presentation on the work here. Read more →

“The break-in is one of the boldest known infiltrations in what has become a regular confrontation between US companies and Chinese hackers.

“Bradley Shear, George Washington University professor and Attorney At Law with the Law Office of Bradley S. Shear, LLC, Alexei Czeskis, Security and Privacy Research Lab with the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, and Paul Rosenweig, Principal with Red Branch Consulting and a visiting fellow at Heritage, talk about this complex operation, which involved at least 300 internet addresses.”

Listen to the story here. Read more →