Allen School News

According to GeekWire, Uber is the 51st company to open an engineering center in Seattle. (See GeekWire‘s interactive map of Seattle engineering centers here.)

At the Uber Seattle Engineering Center launch party last night, speakers included Uber’s new Head of Seattle Software Engineering Tim Prouty (a 2006 UW CSE alum), Tim’s Bay Area boss, Uber’s Director of Infrastructure Engineering Paul Mikesell (a 1996 UW CSE alum), and UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska. Uber Senior Software Engineer Sunil Garg, a 2010 UW CSE alum, came up from the Bay Area for the event.

(Since this was partly a recruiting event, we will refrain from mentioning the other UW CSE alums in the audience …)

  Read more →

Today, UW announced the results of a new study examining gender bias in online image search results associated with various occupations. The study, which will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CHI 2015 Conference later this month, raises interesting questions about how information systems influence behavior and whether search algorithms should be adjusted to counter occupational stereotypes when it comes to gender.

Co-authors Matt Kay (a UW CSE Ph.D. student), Cynthia Matuszek (a UW CSE Ph.D. alum and University of Maryland faculty member), and Sean Munson (a UW Human-Centered Design & Engineering faculty member) analyzed how well search results match reality when it comes to the gender ratio by comparing Google image search results to employment data for 45 occupations from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The researchers also explored how the genders are qualitatively represented in search results, and how those results influence people’s perceptions of gender in different fields.

Read the UW press release here.

Read the paper here.

Read coverage of the study’s findings by The Atlantic, The Verge, PC World, GeekWire and Business Insider. Read more →

Ras Bodik, an expert in programming languages and computer architecture, will join the UW CSE faculty this coming fall. Ras is currently Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ras is widely known for groundbreaking work in programming languages, and for applying programming language ideas to a broad range of fields, such as biology, human-computer interaction, and computer architecture. His current research involves making it easier for both programmers and non-programmers to write computer programs using program synthesis, a technique for computer-aided construction of software. Ras developed the idea of algorithmic synthesis using sketches (partial programs) and constraint solving. At the application level, he has used this idea to develop novel compilers for low-power computing, parallel layout engines for Web browsers, and tools for generating explanatory hypotheses from biological experiments.

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.

Welcome to UW CSE, Ras! Read more →

Beginning today, K-12 classrooms across Washington State are invited to sign up for the 2015 Washington State Algebra Challenge. Participants will have access to Riddle Books, the new mathematics learning game from UW CSE’s Center for Game Science, as they attempt to solve 250,000 word problems during the school week of April 27-May 1.

Participation in the Algebra Challenge is free and only requires access to a PC, Mac or Chromebook. Encourage classrooms in your local school to sign up for the challenge here. Together, we can achieve it! Read more →

UW CSE’s Center for Game Science creates interactive games for scientific discovery and for learning.

Foldit – a revolutionary game for protein design and protein structure prediction – has received widespread acclaim. Gamers playing Foldit solved an AIDS-related protein structure problem that had baffled the scientific community for more than a decade!

The team’s next scientific discovery game – Nanocrafter – is on the same trajectory. Nanocrafter is a synthetic biology game in which players use pieces of DNA to build everything from computer circuits to nanoscale machines.

The first academic paper analyzing the design and outcomes of Nanocrafter has just been accepted by the Foundations of Digital Games Conference. The paper, “Nanocrafter: Design and Evaluation of a DNA Nanotechnology Game,” will be presented during the 2015 conference that will take place June 22-25 in Pacific Grove, California.

Nanocrafter aims to accelerate synthetic biology research by challenging players to construct and simulate nanoscale devices using DNA strand displacement. The game functions as a “citizen science platform,” tapping into players’ competitive natures to crowdsource scientific discovery – a strategy that has been shown to be effective by the center’s popular protein-folding game, Foldit.

The conference paper discusses Nanocrafter’s design in terms of visualizations, interactions, introductory levels and scoring, and evaluates preliminary results based on an analysis of players’ creations. The Foundations of Digital Games Conference focuses on the scientific underpinnings of digital game design and the technologies used to develop them. Learn more here.

Nanocrafter previously won the award for “Best Serious Game, Special Emphasis Category, Use of Social Media” at the Serious Games Showcase and Challenge in December.

Build your own nanoscale devices using Nanocrafter here. Read more →

UW CSE is thrilled to announce that we will once again offer elementary school students the opportunity to learn about computer science in a fun and inclusive environment as part of our DawgBytes summer camp lineup.

Scratch Adventures is a day camp open to students entering grades 3, 4 or 5 who have no previous experience using the visual programming language Scratch. During the sessions, which will take place June 29-July 2 on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus, participants will learn how to design and program their own interactive stories, games and art projects while practicing critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration skills. Campers will share their creations with friends and family on the final day of camp.

The priority registration period for Scratch Adventures opens Thursday, April 9^th. Learn more about this and our other DawgBytes summer camp offerings for middle and high school students here. And learn about our broad K-12 outreach program DawgBytes (“A Taste of CSE”) here. Read more →

Whitman College is a top liberal arts college in eastern Washington. They have raised $8M from Microsoft and other friends to launch a computer science program – not because anyone would go to Whitman for vocational reasons, but rather:

“As we see how computation has literally pervaded every aspect of our lives over last 20, 30 years, it seems reasonable that computational thinking and computer science in particular should be a part of a person’s liberal education.”

We’re delighted that our 2006 Ph.D. alum Janet Davis has been recruited by Whitman to lead this new program!

Read more in GeekWire here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Richard Ladner penned the cover article for the March/April 2015 issue of Interactions Magazine, the flagship publication of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI). In the article, “Design for User Empowerment,” he advocates that users of technology who have disabilities should be empowered to solve their own accessibility problems, drawing on nearly 10 years of experience at the helm of the National Science Foundation-supported AccessComputing alliance.

Richard explains how, with self-determination and technical expertise, people with disabilities can analyze, design, build and test technologies that suit their specific needs. He promotes the concept of universal design, in which interactive systems can be easily configured to be usable by people with varying abilities without having to rely on third-party assistive technologies.

“A person who is disabled and has the right technical expertise has the power to solve their own accessibility problems,” Richard writes. “The key to technical expertise is access to education, the cornerstone of innovation and progress.”

Read the full article here. Read more →

Today marked the debut of the new zipline in the Microsoft Atrium of UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. A good time was had by all! Read more →

The 2015 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships – the most prestigious graduate fellowships in science and engineering – were announced today. To our delight, UW has the second largest number of fellowship recipients in the “Computer and Information Science and Engineering” category of any institution in the country!

Yvonne

NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding student researchers who have demonstrated their potential for significant achievements in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Congratulations to the UW students who were recognized today:

Fellowship awards

Cynthia Bennett (HCDE): Human Computer Interaction

Carlo

Yvonne Chen (CSE): Human Computer Interaction

Carlo del Mundo (CSE): Computer Architecture

Alex Mariakakis (CSE): Human Computer Interaction

Laurel Orr (CSE): Databases

Pavel Panchekha (CSE): Formal Methods, Verification, and Programming Languages

Alex

Hannah Rashkin (CSE): Natural Language Processing

John Robinson (HCDE): Human Computer Interaction

Anna Kornfeld Simpson (CSE): Computer Security and Privacy

Doug Woos (CSE): Formal Methods, Verification, and Programming Languages

Honorable mentions

Laurel

Kira Goldner (CSE): Algorithms and Theoretical Foundations

Daniel Gordon (CSE): Robotics and Computer Vision

Jacob Schreiber (CSE): Machine Learning

Go Team!

Doug

Anna

Hannah

Pavel