Allen School News

The Washington State Algebra Challenge, organized by UW CSE’s Center for Game Science, kicks off next Monday, and Governor Jay Inslee is helping us spread the word to classrooms around the state.

We are challenging Washington’s K-12 students to solve 250,000 story problems using Riddle Books, the fun (and free!) math game developed by the center. In a letter sent to educators, Governor Inslee notes that, in addition to the game, educators will have access to resources such as the Teacher Copilot, a portal that enables educators to view their students’ progress in real time and to adapt games for different students.

Read the Governor’s letter to educators here.

Visit the Washington State Algebra Challenge on Facebook here.

Sign up to participate in the challenge by April 26th here. Read more →

It’s that time of year again – time for the GeekWire Awards!

Vote for Carlos Guestrin for CEO of the Year here.

And while you’re at it, vote for Paul Allen as Geek of the Year here. Read more →

UW CSE professor James Lee has won a Best Paper Award at the 2015 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) for his recent breakthrough research with David Steurer of Cornell and UW CSE Ph.D. alum Prasad Raghavendra of Berkeley. Their paper shows that one of the most powerful techniques currently available for designing polynomial-time algorithms will not work for fundamental NP-complete problems such as the Traveling Salesman Problem, the Maximum Independent Set problem, and a number of other combinatorial problems.

In the award paper, James and his colleagues study the efficacy of convex programming relaxations, specifically those expressed as semidefinite programs (SDPs). SDPs can be seen as combining the rich expressiveness of linear programs with the global geometric power of spectral methods. For many problems, SDP-based algorithms are widely viewed as the strongest tool in the algorithm designer’s arsenal. This new result is a rare example where computer scientists can show formally that a powerful computational model cannot efficiently solve NP-complete problems. The paper draws on techniques and intuitions from many areas, including proof complexity, machine learning, and quantum information theory.

These results fit into a long line of James’ research exploring the rich interplay between computation and geometry, probability, and physics. Those connections are not limited to impossibility results. For instance, James’ work on spectral algorithms has the potential for impact in a variety of other areas including machine learning, data mining, scientific computing, and computer vision. See his web page for more details.

Congratulations James! Read more →

UW CSE professor Jeff Heer opened the third annual OpenVis Conf, a two-day gathering devoted to best practices and the latest technology tools for data visualization on the Open Web, earlier this month.

While many visualization tools require steep tradeoffs between ease of use and expressiveness, Jeff and his team in the Interactive Data Lab focus on creating tools that enable more efficient visualizations and richer data exploration by a broad base of users. Jeff’s presentation at OpenVis Conf, “Raising the Bar (Chart): The Next Generation of Visualization Tools,” highlighted several projects at UW CSE aimed at making data visualization more useful – and more user-friendly.

Watch the video of Jeff’s keynote here.

View Jeff’s slides in PDF here. Read more →

James Fogarty

UW CSE professor James Fogarty, PhD students Felicia Cordeiro and Daniel Epstein, and Dub group researcher Elizabeth Bales co-authored a paper with researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology examining mobile food journaling.

The paper, Barriers and Negative Nudges: Exploring Challenges in Food Journaling, identifies various pitfalls that prevent users from persisting with their food journals and considers how technology can more effectively help people meet their goals when it comes to developing healthy eating habits. The team’s findings, which were based on a survey of 141 current and past food journalers and an analysis of more than 5,500 posts in community forums, will be presented at the ACM’s CHI 2015 conference in Seoul, South Korea later this month.

From the UW press release:

“Food journals are an important method for tracking food consumption and can support a variety of goals, including weight loss, healthier food choices, detecting deficiencies, identifying allergies and determining foods that trigger other symptoms,” said co-author James Fogarty, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering.

“Instead of attempting to capture the elusive ‘everything,’ the results suggest creating a diversity of journal designs to support specific goals,” Fogarty said.

Based on their findings, the team at UW is exploring how photo-based journaling might reduce barriers to journaling by augmenting or eliminating altogether the need to focus on detailed nutritional input, while the Georgia Tech team is testing the use of a mobile device’s microphone to recognize eating sounds and nudge users to log their food.

Read the full press release here. Read more →

A lovely tribute to UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello appears in the April-June 2015 issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing:

Gaetano Borriello was a mentor to many of us, spending much of his time helping others in our community. In doing so, he touched many lives, from his students and colleagues at UW to mothers and children in Tanzania. His legacy will live on through the efforts he began and through the impact and influence he has had in this community and around the world. He will be missed by all who had the privilege to work with him.

Thanks to Maria Ebling of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center for celebrating Gaetano’s remarkable contributions so beautifully in this article.

Read it here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. students Irene Zhang and Nell O’Rourke have received 2015 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships.

Irene works with professors Hank Levy and Arvind Krishnamurthy in the Computer Systems Lab.

Nell works with professor Zoran Popovic in the Center for Game Science.

The scholarship supports women in computing and encourages them to follow in Dr. Anita Borg’s footsteps by serving as leaders and role models in the field. In addition to collecting a financial award, Irene and her fellow scholars will have the opportunity to participate in a retreat at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California in June.

Learn more about the scholarship and Dr. Borg’s extraordinary contributions to computer science here.

Past scholarship winners at UW CSE include Jenny Abrahamson and Nicki Dell in 2012, Janara Christensen and Katie Kuksenok in 2011, Lydia Chilton and Kristi Morton in 2010, Saleema Amershi in 2009, and Julie Letchner and Kate Everitt in 2008.

Congratulations, Irene and Nell! Read more →

Carlo del Mundo

Each year, Qualcomm provides Innovation Fellowships to a select handful of students nationwide to enable them to pursue their innovative research ideas. This year, UW CSE students Carlo del Mundo and Vincent Lee were one of eight winning teams selected from a highly competitive field for their proposal titled “Systems and Architecture Support for Large-scale Video Search.”

Carlo and Vincent, who were recommended by professors Luis Ceze and Mark Oskin, were one of 35 teams selected as finalists from among 146 initial proposals. Along with their fellow finalists, they were invited to visit Qualcomm in March for a two-day event in which they presented their ideas to a panel of judges and interacted with company researchers.

Vincent Lee

In its message to the winners, Qualcomm noted, “We recorded the highest number of proposals submitted this year with an acceptance rate lower than most prestigious conferences and journals. We think that this is a great testament to the quality and pedigree of the QInF program and of the continuing interest from faculty and students in the 7th year of the program!”

Each winner in this prestigious competition receives a $100,000 fellowship from the company along with mentorship from Qualcomm engineers. Read more about the 2015 QInF here.

UW CSE has made a strong showing in this competition in recent years: CSE’s Vincent Liu and EE’s Vamsi Talla won a 2014 QInF award, and CSE’s Adrian Sampson and Thierry Moreau won in 2013.

Congratulations, Carlo and Vincent! Read more →

Brad Smith’s entire interview with GeekWire‘s Todd Bishop and John Cook is outstanding. But we particularly like this part:

“One of the things ppeole often don’t appreciate is that the Univeristy of Washington Computer Science & Engineering Department is one of the foremost computer science departments in the world. But it’s not big enough. It’s turning students away because it doesn’t have the room to offer them the ability to major in that discipline …

“We need the money to build a second building at the University of Washington, we need the appropriations so that then the enrollment is expanded – you need a building but you need enrollment capacity as well. And we want to see other new steps taken by the University of Washington as well – there are some exciting things that we think are on the drawing board for the future.”

Listen to the entire interview here. Or go directly to our favorite part here.

Thanks Brad! Read more →

“It’s a branch of the city that’s become an urban jungle filled with a particular type of bird.

“‘Five yellow cranes right in the middle, four of them you can see from here,’ said Hellmut Golde, peering out a window at the Mirabella Retirement Community off of Denny Way.

“‘There’s development on every block, from Denny Way to Valley,’ said John Pehrson, who, along with Golde, has lived at Mirabella for the past six years. The men, aged 88 and 85 respectively, say they’ve been fascinated at the growth. But when they saw the plans for a new complex across the street, they weren’t smiling.

“‘There is very little green space,’ said Pehrson, as he pointed down to the small pocket park on Fairview. ‘It seems like a travesty to take down trees that are 70 years old in the middle of this development.’

“Those trees are part of a small private park near The Seattle Times old headquarters. A Canadian developer Onni had submitted plans to bulldoze the trees as part of a massive mixed use development. Pehrson, Golde and a group of Mirabella residents cried foul.

“‘It gives shelter to the birds and it’s important for ecological reasons,’ said Hellmut.

“The group has put together a photo book on the history of the park and the benefits to their neighborhood. They also vowed to take extreme measures, even for a pair of octogenarians.”

Read more and watch the KING 5 News video here. Read more →