Allen School News

For one, they’re all friends of UW CSE. But the real answer is that they’re among the Puget Sound Business Journal‘s “15 in 15: Here’s who to watch in 2015.”

“He may not be a household name, but Etzioni is a force to be reckoned with. Years ago, he developed and sold the technology Bing Travel uses to find fares, and then went on to found Decide.com, which was acquired in 2013 by eBay. In fact, Etzioni has co-founded six startups, all of which have been acquired. He’s currently the CEO of Paul Allen’s artificial intelligence research group, a professor at the University of Washington and a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group.”

Read more here. Read more →

On Thursday, the UW Board of Regents approved the hiring of Seattle’s LMN Architects to carry out pre-design for a new facility for UW CSE – a second building to complement the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering (which LMN also designed) and accommodate growth.

We’re firmly committed to responding to the ever-increasing demand for computer science education by students and by employers. This is the first step in a process to develop the physical capacity that will enable us to address many of the challenges we face in growing and evolving UW CSE.

UW has made this building its top capital project priority. The governor’s proposed budget includes $40M for the project. And, although private fundraising has not yet commenced (we anticipate the total cost will be roughly $100M), we received our first major gift at the end of the year.

We recently held a set of focus group sessions with CEOs and CTOs of leading employers in the region – Jeremy Jaech (SNUPI) and Brad Smith (Microsoft) were the convenors. We received extremely useful guidance from these sessions. The “high order bits” were that we need to grow (because computer science is of ever-increasing importance, and because public universities have a responsibility to the students and companies of their region), and we need to maintain the quality of our graduates (many CEOs and CTOs who participated in the focus groups said something along the lines of “When I hire a UW CSE graduate, I know I’m getting someone outstanding; maintaining this needs to be a top priority”).

We’re excited about the opportunities that lie ahead!

GeekWire post here. Xconomy post here. Two-pager on the status and direction of UW CSE here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Magda Balazinska has a child at Sand Point Elementary School. Last year, Magda encouraged the school to try out Scratch on the 5th grade class; CSE’s Allison Obourn provided some mini-lectures. This year Sand Point expanded Scratch to the 4th grade, and during CS Ed Week, the 2nd through 5th grades participated in the Hour of Code.

Comments from teachers:

About the Hour of Code: “The kids loved the coding activities with Frozen and Angry Birds.  I’m starting in on very beginning Scratch today. Thanks for your support and encouragement. I would not have pursued this without your guidance.”

About Scratch: “All kinds of cool organic things are happening. Yesterday a 4th grader showed his class how he made a game on Scratch and everyone tried to make their own. Very fun!”

Three cheers for Sand Point teacher Julia Schumacher for her instrumental role in all of this! Read more →

WalletHub reports that Seattle is the best city in the U.S. in which to find a job.

The next six are Des Moines IA, Gilbert AZ, Sioux Falls SD, Fremont CA, Chandler AZ, and Omaha NE … which either says something about where you should head, or about the study’s methodology …

Remember … we highlight the studies where we look good, and categorically reject and bury the others … Read this highly authoritative study here. Read more →

ACM’s most prestigious member grade recognizes the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology. ACM has just recognized 47 of its members as new ACM Fellows for their contributions to computing that are driving innovations across multiple domains and disciplines.

Among the new class of ACM Fellows:

• UW CSE professor Michael Ernst “For contributions to software analysis, testing, and verification”
• UW CSE Ph.D. alum (and Princeton professor) Adam Finkelstein “For contributions to non-photorealistic rendering, multi-resolution representations, and computer graphics”
• UW CSE affiliate professor (and Distinguished Scientist & Managing Director of Microsoft Research) Eric Horvitz “For contributions to artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction”

Ernst’s research aims to make software more reliable, more secure, and easier (and more fun!) to produce. His primary technical interests are in software engineering, programming languages, type theory, security, program analysis, bug prediction, testing, and verification. Ernst’s research combines strong theoretical foundations with realistic experimentation, with an eye to changing the way that software developers work. Ernst’s other awards include the inaugural John Backus Award (2009) and the NSF CAREER Award (2002). His research has received an ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award (2013), 8 ACM Distinguished Paper Awards (FSE 2014, ISSTA 2014, ESEC/FSE 2011, ISSTA 2009, ESEC/FSE 2007, ICSE 2007, ICSE 2004, ESEC/FSE 2003), an ECOOP 2011 Best Paper Award, honorable mention in the 2000 ACM doctoral dissertation competition, and other honors. In 2013, Microsoft Academic Search ranked Ernst #2 in the world, in software engineering research contributions over the past 10 years.

Congratulations to Mike, Adam, and Eric. (Mike is the 10th current UW CSE faculty member, and 19th overall, to be named an ACM Fellow.) Read more →

GeekWire writes:

“There are big changes afoot at GraphLab, the Seattle-based startup that aims to make it easier for small and medium businesses to make sense of mounds of data. First off, the company has rebranded to Dato, a move that it hopes will better encompass the breadth of its machine learning product.

“In addition, Dato announced today that it raised an $18.5 million Series B investment round. The round saw participation from NEA and Madrona Venture Group, two firms that have previously invested in Dato, along with investments from Vulcan Capital and Opus Capital Ventures. To date, the company has raised a total of $25.25 million.

“Dato’s product lets developers build apps with machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities that automatically scale and tune so that a software maker can seamlessly take their product from a proof of concept to a fully functioning app.

“‘Our company was founded on a mission to create a more intelligent world,’ Dato CEO (and UW CSE’s Amazon Professor of Machine Learning) Carlos Guestrin said in a press release. ‘The investments made in Dato will help us empower many more data scientists, software developers and engineers to revolutionize industries and enhance our lives in ways we can’t imagine.'”

Read the GeekWire article here. Read the Data press release here. Read more →

E4C (Engineering for Change) writes:

“These are our picks for 10 promising technologies for global development that made headlines in 2014 …

“BiliCam is a smartphone application that diagnoses jaundice in newborns. It is still in development and available now only for clinicians, but in the future it could be a low-cost, powerful tool for parents and rural clinics in developing countries and anywhere in the world.”

BiliCam is the work of UbiComp lab members Lilian de Greef, Mayank Goel, Eric Larson, and Shwetak Patel.

Read the “Top Ten” article here. Read a more detailed October E4C profile of BiliCam here. Check out the BiliCam project web page here. Read more →

CSE 142, our first introductory course, had 995 students during Autumn Quarter, and has 1,011 students this quarter. In the past year, 2,892 students have taken the course – 35% of them women.

CSE 143, our second introductory course, has 807 students this quarter; in the past year, 1,802 students have taken the course.

That’s a total of 4,694 student enrollments in these courses in the past year!

(During fall quarter, CSE’s remarkable Stuart Reges taught both 142 and 143; he and his amazing team of 63 undergraduate teaching assistants – more than 40% of whom were women – generated roughly 2% of UW total student credit hours that quarter!)

Want to see what’s going on nationally, and understand why? Check out this data-filled presentation. Read more →

The University of Washington College of Engineering Diamond Awards honor outstanding alumni and friends who have made significant contributions to the field of engineering. This year’s Diamond Awards will be presented at a dinner gala on May 8. Two of the four recipients are CSE alums!

The recipient of the 2015 Diamond Award for Distinguished Service is 2012 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Yaw Anokwa. In places where there is no clean water or reliable power, one will often find mobile phones and Internet access. Yaw’s work explores how to use the availability of that technology to improve the lives of the underserved. Yaw has established an international reputation in the field of ICTD (Information and Communication Technology for Development), led the creation of the ICTD research community at UW (involving students and faculty from several department in the College and beyond), played a central role in the development of Open Data Kit, ODK Clinic, and OpenMRS (widely used mobile computing tools that are improving the lives of people around the world), and now propels the use of ODK through the startup Nafundi. Read the Diamond Award web page describing Yaw’s achievements here.

The recipient of the 2015 Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement is 2003 UW CSE Bachelors alum Christophe Bisciglia. In the decade since his UW graduation, Christophe has had a successful career as a Google engineer, brought Google-scale Google-style computing to universities around the globe, and co-founded two of Silicon Valley’s game-changing “big data” companies, Cloudera and WibiData (where he serves as CEO). He has been on the cover of Business Week as “Google’s master of ‘cloud’  computing,” and been profiled by Fortune as one of “10 Fascinating Googlers” and as the “Smartest Engineer” in a “Smartest People in Tech” feature. Read the Diamond Award web page describing Christophe’s achievements here.

Past honorees – including CSE alums Brad Fitzpatrick, Kevin Ross, Anne Condon, Greg Badros, Loren Carpenter, Tapan Parikh, Rob Short, Gail Murphy, Ed Felten, Jeremy Jaech, and Jeff Dean – can be viewed here.

Congratulations to Yaw, Christophe, and all of our alums – and thanks for making UW CSE look good! You are, in every way, the reason we’re here. Read more →

2014 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Sidhant Gupta – now at Microsoft Research – has been honored with this year’s Innovation in Technology Award from the Western Association of Graduate Schools / University Microfilms International.

Sidhant invents new sensing techniques and builds innovative hardware and software systems to address hard challenges in sustainability sensing and human computer interaction. His research often requires identifying and exploiting physical phenomena around us in unique ways to continually redefine what, and how, signals can be sensed. In addition to computer science, his research incorporates a deep understanding of applied physics, embedded systems, design-for-manufacturability, machine learning, software-defined radios and cyber-physical security.

His Ph.D. work focused on developing novel sensing technologies and supporting software for the home that use minimal sensors, are low cost and easy to deploy. He was advised, quoting his LinkedIn page, “by the awesome Shwetak N. Patel.” His thesis work – ElectriSense: Single-Point Sensing Using EMI for Electrical Event Detection and Classification in the Home” – was the basis of the startup Zensi, acquired by Belkin.

Congratulations Sidhant!

(UW CSE Ph.D. alum Tapan Parikh – now a faculty member at UC Berkeley – received the WAGS/UMI Innovation in Technology Award in 2009.) Read more →