Allen School News

Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering, received UW’s David B. Thorud Leadership Award at today’s ceremony recognizing the 2015 recipients of the annual UW Awards of Excellence. In the words of the nomination:

“Ed has been a truly extraordinary leader for many years and in many settings – national, regional, institutional, and departmental. I will touch on all four in this letter, but the recent leadership accomplishment that stimulates this nomination is Ed’s role in creating and leading the University of Washington eScience Institute, a cross-campus collaboration that has established UW as a recognized leader in data-intensive discovery.

“National leadership: Ed is widely viewed as the computer science research community’s highest impact national leader and spokesperson …

“Regional leadership: Ed is one of UW’s most visible and effective advocates with the region’s civic leadership …

“Departmental leadership: UW CSE’s rise from a ‘top-ten also-ran’ to the first rank of the nation’s computer science programs began during Ed’s 8 years as department chair.

“Institutional leadership: Ed’s role in creating and leading the University of Washington eScience Institute – a cross-campus collaboration that has established UW as a recognized leader in data-intensive discovery – illustrates his extraordinary performance in all of the areas identified as nomination criteria for the Thorud Award.”

Congratulations, Ed! Read more →

On Thursday, in the run-up to this year’s graduation ceremonies, EE professor (and CSE Ph.D. alum) Scott Hauck was named to the newly-created Gaetano Borriello Professorship for Educational Excellence – a professorship created jointly by EE and CSE to commemorate Gaetano’s enormous contributions.

In nominating Scott to this position, EE chair Radha Poovendran and CSE chair Hank Levy wrote:

“Gaetano joined the University of Washington faculty in 1988, and passed away decades before his time in 2015, following an extended battle with cancer. At the time of his death he was the Jerre D. Noe Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, and Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering, Human Centered Design and Engineering, and Information …

“Gaetano was an extraordinary faculty member in every respect. While his research had tremendous impact, his focus was first and foremost on his students, on our educational programs in EE and CSE, and on continually strengthening the bridges between our two departments. He exemplified our mission at the University of Washington: 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.

“Given this context, it is not difficult to identify the most appropriate person to be the inaugural holder of the Gaetano Borriello Professorship for Educational Excellence: Professor Scott Hauck of the Department of Electrical Engineering. It is our honor and pleasure to recommend, with great confidence and enthusiasm, that Scott Hauck be awarded the Borriello Professorship …

“This is a clear case of the apple (Scott) not falling far from the tree (Gaetano, his mentor):

“Scott is a strong researcher: an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, multiple ‘Best Paper’ awards, etc.

“Scott is dedicated to his students, and more broadly to educational excellence. He is a recipient, like Gaetano, of the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award. He also is a recipient of the UW College of Engineering Faculty Innovator Award for Teaching & Learning, the UW Electrical Engineering Outstanding Research Advisor Award, and the Northwestern University Electrical and Computer Engineering Best Teacher Award. His own students have followed in his footsteps, receiving strong recognition for their accomplishments.

Gaetano’s wife Melissa Westbrook and Scott Hauck with a plaque commemorating Scott’s appointment as the first holder of the Gaetano Borriello Professorship for Educational Excellence

“Scott has selflessly devoted enormous energy to the improving the interface between CSE and EE. He has been a leader of the ExCEL effort since its inception – ExCEL has led to the hiring of a set of truly extraordinary faculty members appointed jointly between EE and CSE. Scott’s contributions include helping to launch the effort, serving as Co-Chair of the joint CSE/EE Recruiting Committee for a number of years, and calming the waters on both sides when turbulence arises. More recently, he has led an effort to create a unified undergraduate Computer Engineering curriculum spanning EE and CSE, requiring significant flexibility and compromise on the part of both departments – flexibility and compromise that probably only Scott would have been able to negotiate. For these and other efforts, Scott received the UW Electrical Engineering Faculty Service Award.”

Congratulations Scott! Read more →

This afternoon, UW CSE graduate student and faculty women took advantage of another ho-hum we’re-so-tired-of-this sunny 80 degree afternoon for a group tea / happy hour that filled the patio of the UW Club. Read more →

Raj Rao is ready for his closeup with NBC Learn

On Wednesday, June 10^th, CSE professor Raj Rao, director of the National Science Foundation’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, will participate in a Twitter chat hosted by NBC Learn as part of its “Mysteries of the Brain” series.

Raj spoke to NBC Learn about brain-computer interfaces as part of a collection of eight videos, produced in partnership with the NSF, that explore the latest research into how the brain works with the help of leading scientists in the field. NBC Learn plans to make lesson plans for middle and high school students, developed by the National Science Teachers Association, available for use in connection with the series later this summer.

Watch the video series, including the interview with Raj and a demonstration of his brain-computer interface research, here.

Join the Twitter chat with Raj and his fellow brain researchers Wednesday afternoon from 3:00 to 4:00 pm Pacific (6:00 to 7:00 pm Eastern) using the hashtag #ExplainTheBrain and by following @NeuralE_Ctr on Twitter.

Read past blog coverage of Raj and his research here, here and here. Read more →

Another team of UW CSE researchers has captured Best Paper honors. This time, postdoc Richard Newcombe, professor Dieter Fox of the UW Robotics and State Estimation Lab and professor Steve Seitz of CSE’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory (GRAIL) are bringing home the glory with their paper “DynamicFusion: Reconstruction and Tracking of Non-rigid Scenes in Real-Time” at IEEE’s International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) currently taking place in Boston, MA.

DynamicFusion is the first dense SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) system capable of reconstructing dynamic scenes in real-time. It moves beyond systems such as KinectFusion, an approach to real-time 3-D reconstruction that, while a major advance, assumes that the observed scene is static. DynamicFusion generalizes KinectFusion’s dense, real-time tracking and mapping to yield detailed and complete reconstructions of subjects in motion. The research team demonstrated the system using a variety of subjects in different scenes, including snuggling with a stuffed animal, making funny faces, drinking tea, and performing “jazz hands.”

View the YouTube video demonstrating how DynamicFusion works here. Read the winning paper, selected out of more than 2,000 conference submissions, here.

Congratulations to Richard, Dieter and Steve! Read more →

Last week, the CSE blog reported on an exciting new research project led by Shyam Gollakota, who heads UW CSE’s Networks & Mobile Systems Lab, and CSE & EE professor Josh Smith of the Sensor Systems Lab, plus a team of CSE and EE graduate students and postdocs. The project, affectionately dubbed “PoWiFi,” harnessed energy from Wi-Fi signals to wirelessly power battery-free devices – in this case, temperature and camera sensors – and to wirelessly recharge batteries.

In addition to MIT Technology Review, a host of other media outlets have picked up the story. Read more about the international buzz generated by PoWiFi courtesy of Wired, BBC News, Christian Science Monitor, Popular Science and PC Magazine (to name a few).

Read the research paper here. Congratulations to Shyam, Josh and the entire team – Vamsi Talla, Bryce Kellogg, Ben Ransford and Saman Naderiparizi! Read more →

Katharina Reinecke, currently Assistant Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, will be joining UW CSE next fall.

Katharina’s research focuses on Human-Computer Interaction, specifically on understanding the cultural implications of user interfaces and designing interfaces that are culturally adaptive. She is particularly known for developing LabInTheWild, an online virtual lab for conducting behavioral studies, which she has used to obtain data from over 2.5 million visitors from over 200 countries.  Before joining Michigan, Katharina received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Zurich, Switzerland in 2010, followed by a three-year postdoc at Harvard.

Welcome, Katharina!

(We had previously announced the recruiting this year of Ras Bodik, Sham Kakade, Sergey Levine, and Dan Ports. More news to follow!) Read more →

At today’s annual “State of Technology” luncheon sponsored by the Tech Alliance and attended by 750+ regional leaders, Madrona Venture Group’s Tom Alberg interviewed Steve Singh of Seattle’s Concur Technologies, acquired by SAP in late 2014 for $8.3 billion.

UW CSE came up several times in the conversation:

Regarding funding for increased enrollment: “UW CSE could double its degree production and Concur would hire all of them!”

Regarding funding for a new building: “It’s a few tens of millions of dollars in a $40 billion annual budget. Give me a break!”

Thanks, Tom and Steve, for your tremendous support! Read more →

Jeremy Stribling delivers the PoCSci ’15 keynote address

Today marked the 15th annual UW CSE Symposium on Potentially Computer Science (PoCSci ’15) “The Premier Sham Conference for Potentially Computer Science Research.”

PoCSci is the conference that in 2002 – its second year – revolutionized the field of Potentially Computer Science research through Doug Zongker’s work “Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken” (YouTube video of Zongker’s presentation at AAAS 2007 here). Fittingly, Zongker was honored this year with the PoCSci “Test of Time” award.

The keynote was delivered by Jeremy Stribling, the creator of the SciGen random paper generator. While SciGen has been featured in venues ranging from Nature to Reddit, Jeremy was, by his own admission, a mere shadow of last year’s PoCSci keynote speaker, Dr. James Mickens, recipient of the 2040 ACM A.M. Turing Award.

Doug Zongker receives the PoCSci ’15 “Test of Time” award

Our thanks to the PoCSci organizing committee, Brandon Holt and Irene Zhang. Read more →

Shwetak Patel

UW Daily reporter Arunabh Satpathy writes:

“A house that knows when you’re inside. A cellphone that doubles as a spirometer. A sensor that gauges how much energy is being consumed and by what device. These are some of the applications of a developing field of computing called ‘ubiquitous computing,’ or ‘ubicomp.’

“Shwetak Patel, professor in the Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering, defines ubicomp as ‘the next paradigm of computing.’

“‘Computing is going to be pushed into everywhere into the environment,’ Patel said.”

Mayank Goel

Shwetak goes on to explain how continuous interaction between humans and sensors has transformed the automobile. He also talks about the potential benefits of extending these interactions into the home where, for example, sensors could be used to monitor the health of a person inside.

The article also quotes UW CSE Ph.D. student Mayank Goel, whose research focuses on novel uses of mobile phone sensors. One of his projects is focused on using a smart phone’s accelerometer to stabilize the keyboard and reduce texting errors. Another project, SpiroSmart, turns a smart phone’s microphone into a spirometer for measuring lung function.

Read the entire article here.

Learn more about the UbiComp Lab here. Read more →