We’re delighted to announce that Sergey Levine, who works at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, graphics, and animation, will join the UW CSE faculty.
Sergey pioneered the recent trend in using deep learning to create neural network controllers for animated characters and robots. His learning techniques enable robots to solve control tasks that have been elusive using traditional approaches. This past week he won the Best Robotic Manipulation Paper Award at ICRA, the IEEE flagship robotics conference, for his work on learning controllers for complex manipulation tasks.
Sergey received his Ph.D. in 2014 from Stanford University and joins CSE following a postdoc with Pieter Abbeel at UC Berkeley.
Welcome, Sergey!
(We had previously announced the recruiting this year of Ras Bodik, Sham Kakade, and Dan Ports. More news to follow!) Read more →
UW CSE’s Steve Seitz is the engineering lead on Jump, announced this week as a dramatic enhancement of Google’s Cardboard “VR for the masses” system. UW CSE postdoc alum Sameer Agarwal leads the computer vision team that built the assembler – work carried out at Google Seattle by the computer vision group that Steve assembled and leads there. The Jump team also includes UW CSE bachelors alums Riley Adams and Sam Riesland.
USA Today writes:
“But the biggest news involves Google’s new partnership with camera-maker GoPro, which could solve the missing link for VR: enough content to make using the headsets worthwhile. GoPro is putting the finishing touches on a merry-go-round-like rig that will support 16 GoPro Hero4 cameras whose spherical footage will record the content VR watchers will see.”
Read the USA Today article and watch the video here.
Read about Jump in the context of Google’s overall VR effort in The Verge here.
Article in Wired with specific reference to Seitz’s team’s contributions here.
And learn about all of UW’s phenomenal work in computer graphics and computer vision here. Read more →
Each summer, UW CSE welcomes middle school and high school teachers from around the state at our computer science education workshop, CS4HS. Math and science teachers are invited to participate in an action-packed, three-day program designed to give them the knowledge and resources to integrate computer science into their classrooms and to build student interest in our exciting and rapidly growing field.
The 2015 workshop will take place July 15th – 17th at UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Thanks to the generous donors who support CSE’s K-12 outreach programs, the registration fee for teachers is just $50. CS4HS participants will enjoy breakfast and lunch each day, an evening networking reception, parking or transit reimbursement, dorm accommodations for out-of-town participants, and 20 clock hours from the Washington Science Teachers Association – not to mention fantastic demos, faculty and guest presentations, hands-on learning, and idea sharing among peers.
Teachers who have no computer science background or programming experience are welcome and encouraged to attend. CS4HS is a joint undertaking between UW CSE, Carnegie Mellon University and Tim Bell’s CS Unplugged.
Interested educators are invited to apply for a slot at the 2015 workshop here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Melody Kadenko has received the 2015 UW College of Engineering Professional Staff Award.
Melody manages more than 100 research grants from multiple agencies. In her “spare time,” she mentors UW’s National Collegiate Cyberdefense Competition team, and shakes the tin cup to fund the CSE espresso room (appropriating a page from the NPR playbook: “We need $2500 before I quit sending email!”).
A faculty member writes, “Melody uses creativity and persistence to solve any kind of thorny research grant problem.”
A student writes, “Melody has been the single most useful person I’ve met since coming to UW.”
Melody writes, “I’m ‘Plan B.’ If you want the rules followed in every detail, see Alicen. When that doesn’t work, come see me. I’m OK with that.”
Congratulations, Melody! And thanks for your many years of phenomenal work as part of the UW CSE team! Read more →
UW’s Undergraduate Academic Affairs office recently published a great article on CSE undergrad Krittika D’Silva, who decided to double-major in computer science and bioengineering after taking one of our introductory courses. The article, “Undergrad sees change in the palm of her hand,” describes how Krittika arrived at the intersection of the two fields, which earned her a 2014-2015 Levinson Emerging Scholars Award.
After being accepted to CSE, Krittika worked with the late professor Gaetano Borriello on the development of hands-free smart phone technology for use by health care providers in low-resource environments to aid diagnosis and prevent the spread of infection. She currently works in bioengineering professor Paul Yager‘s lab on the development of portable kits that diagnose the bacterial infection MRSA at the point of care with the help of an Android app – an approach that could be used to improve diagnosis and care of patients with other diseases.
Read more about Krittika and her research here.
Check out previous coverage of Krittika’s work on the CSE blog here. Read more →
The new method for creating time-lapse videos developed by UW CSE’s GRAIL Group and Google was featured on a recent segment of the PBS NewsHour. As part of “NewsHour Shares,” its series of eye-catching stories from around the Web, PBS highlighted the videos created by graduate student Ricardo Martin Brualla, professor Steve Seitz and Google’s David Gallup of famous locations such as the Vatican and the Las Vegas strip – all from photos posted online.
As PBS anchor Judy Woodruff noted, “Where it once took months or years to create these videos, they can now do it almost instantly in an effort to help document our ever-changing world.”
Watch the video and read the transcript here.
Read our earlier blog post and media coverage featuring the time-lapse video project here. Read more →
We love being used to make a point! The University of Maryland’s Mike Hicks writes in “The Programming Languages Enthusiast” blog:
“If you are in the world of programming languages research, the announcement that UW had hired Ras Bodik away from Berkeley was big news. Quoting UW’s announcement:
“Ras’s arrival creates a truly world-class programming languages group in UW CSE that crosses into systems, databases, security, architecture, and other areas. Ras joins recent hires Emina Torlak, Alvin Cheung, Xi Wang, and Zach Tatlock, and senior faculty members Dan Grossman and Mike Ernst.
“And there’s also Luis Ceze, a regular publisher at PLDI, who ought to be considered as part of this group. With him, UW CSE has 8 out of 54 faculty with strong ties to PL. Hiring five PL-oriented faculty in three years, thus making PL a significant fraction of the faculty’s expertise, is (highly) atypical. What motivated UW CSE in its decision-making? I don’t know for sure, but I suspect they see that PL-oriented researchers are making huge inroads on important problems, bringing a useful perspective to unlock new results.”
Read more here! Read more →
KIRO Radio did a terrific 8-minute segment on UW CSE’s gender diversity initiatives and our recognition by the National Center for Women & Information Technology with NCWIT’s inaugural Excellence in Promoting Women in Undergraduate Computing Award.
“There’s also a very diverse pool of teacher’s assistants. Nearly 50 percent are female. That’s part of what made a difference to student Siena Dumas-Ang, who didn’t intend on being a Computer Science anything during her time at the university. She now plans to get her PhD in the field.
“‘I found women who were like me. I think there was also a stereotype of the type of women who did computer science on top of the male-saturated environment. I found women who were incredibly intelligent and driven and also like me. I didn’t realize it was a social environment,’ Dumas-Ang said …
“‘I think the diversity programs that work the best are the programs that help everybody. It may help some people differentially but the goal is to help everybody succeed and make everybody feel like they belong. Nobody can complain about that,’ [UW CSE professor Ed] Lazowska said.
“You can’t say that’s just feel-good lip service because now 30 percent of college students graduating with a major in Computer Science at the UW are women, which is double the national statistic.”
Listen here. (There are two glitches in this otherwise-excellent story: the headline (which implies that we are where we need to be), and the attribution of UW CSE’s success – a total team effort – to Lazowska. Ignore those please! It’s a terrific piece!) And see coverage in the New York Times, the Seattle Times, Xconomy, GeekWire, and UW Today. Read more →
We’re thrilled to have been recognized by the National Center for Women & Information Technology with NCWIT’s inaugural Excellence in Promoting Women in Undergraduate Computing Award, and with the coverage this received in the New York Times, the Seattle Times, Xconomy, GeekWire, UW Today, and KIRO Radio.
Two bits of followup:
First, here’s an article from a couple of years ago describing “the why and the how” of our focus on gender diversity.
Second, the attached graphic shows the results of this focus. It compares the % of Bachelors degrees in Computer Science that UW CSE grants to women, with the % granted by all CS programs (the data reported by the National Science Foundation) and the % granted by those programs that also grant the Ph.D. (the data reported by the Computing Research Association).
The bad news: We all have a long way to go.
The good news: Programs that focus on it (CMU, Harvey Mudd, MIT, UW, many others) are making progress.
The best email we received in response to the award: “The recognition is a great tribute to you and your colleagues in UW Computer Science & Engineering for doing the hard work necessary to deliver results. Everyone talks about it; it’s terrific when the UW can demonstrate it has done something about it.” Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum and Google Senior Fellow Jeff Dean made the cover of May’s WIRED Magazine as first among twenty “unsung geniuses who are about to reshape the business world.”
Jeff, who with his MIT Ph.D. alum Google colleague Sanjay Ghemawat is responsible for much of Google’s game-changing scalable infrastructure, is now focused on deep learning as a way to truly make computer systems “smart.”
Read the Wired article here. Read more →
