Allen School News

This weekend Zillow and UW CSE – with participation from Socrata, the White House, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development – present Hack Housing, a weekend hackathon to develop products and create solutions to aid home buyers and renters with particular needs.

Deep housing data is more accessible than ever thanks to companies like Zillow and federal open data efforts. But this wealth of information remains fragmented across a number of dense .gov websites and can be confusing even for the experts. During this weekend-long hackathon, teams are asked to come up with creative solutions to make it easier for first-time homebuyers, low-income renters and senior citizens to find a home that meets their needs.

As part of the event, participants will have access to newly released government datasets on topics like federal housing programs, apartment buildings with accessory dwelling units and transit information. In addition, Zillow will make available its data on home values and rents.

The event was kicked off on Friday evening by Ed Lazowska (UW CSE), Rich Barton (Zillow co-founder), Stan Humphries (Zillow Chief Economist), and Nick Sinai (Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and the former U.S. Deputy CTO at the White House). Judging is Sunday afternoon.

400 people registered for the event. To our astonishment, most of them showed up! Eeeek!

Read a comprehensive GeekWire report on the event here.

Read a US Department of Housing and Urban Development blog post here. Read more →

Get a sneak peek at this Sunday’s 60 Minutes episode in which UW CSE researchers hack into a car driven by Leslie Stahl, part of a segment examining cybersecurity threats and the Internet of Things. (See photos of the set-up taken by UW CSE’s Yoshi Kohno at right.)

During the segment featured in the CBS preview, the head of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, Dan Kaufman, DARPA Program Manager Kathleen Fisher, and UW Ph.D. alum Karl Koscher demonstrate how hackers can control various functions of a motor vehicle. The demo is based on research conducted by a team from UW CSE (Yoshi Kohno, Alexei Czeskis, Karl Koscher and Franzi Roesner) and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego.

Get a sneak peek at the 60 Minutes episode in the CBS preview here – the preview is all UW CSE, all the time!

Read more about the automotive security collaboration between UW CSE and UCSD here.

Tune into your local CBS affiliate Sunday, February 8th at 7:00 pm to catch the full segment! Read more →

We would never dream of taking a political position on these pages. We can point you, though, to a terrific GeekWire post in which Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi states his reasons for supporting HB 1813, “Expanding Computer Science Education,” a bipartisan measure introduced by State Reps. Drew Hansen, Chad Magendanz, and others.

“The bill … provides a comprehensive package to help schools add computer science to the curriculum,” Partovi says.

Read more here. Read more →

Congratulations to UW CSE affiliate professor Rick Szeliski, Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft, on his election to the National Academy of Engineering.

Rick was one of six new members of NAE Section 5 (Computer Science & Engineering). The NAE “Class of 2015” was announced today.

Rick has had extensive engagement with UW CSE faculty and students over the years; as one example, along with CSE professor Steve Seitz and CSE Ph.D. student Noah Snavely (now a professor at Cornell) he created the image synthesis component of Photosynth, Microsoft’s amazing 3D photo viewing application. Read more →

Today we received another remarkable testimonial to Gaetano Borriello’s impact, this one from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, headquartered in Panama:

“We have received with great sadness the news of the unexpected passing away of Professor Gaetano Borriello …

“Since the Haiti Earthquake in 2010, the International Federation of the Red Cross has exponentially used ODK for our relief and recovery programmes, changing the way we work in support of communities affected by disasters around the globe. This is Gaetano’s legacy.”

Read the full letter here. Read more →

Aaron Bauer, a PhD student at UW CSE’s Center for Game Science, will participate in Meet an Engineer Night on February 26th. The event is part of a month-long program of activities organized by the Seattle Public Library and Pacific Science Center as an extended celebration of National Engineers Week.

Meet an Engineer Night aims to introduce teens to engineering as a career. While the target audience is age 12 and above, everyone is welcome to attend and learn about the exciting field of engineering at Seattle Public Library’s northeast branch from 6:30 to 7:30 pm.

Learn more about this and other events organized as part of Engineer Month, which begins this Saturday, here. Read more →

Today we received a remarkable testimonial to Gaetano Borriello’s impact from Jane Goodall:

“It was with great sadness that we learned of Professor Borriello’s passing. Please accept our deepest condolences for your loss.

“The Institute was first introduced to Prof. Borriello and his students in 2009. Since then, the use of Open Data Kit (ODK) has transformed our approach to conservation in Africa and enabled us to greatly advance our mission of creating a world where people, animals and the environment can live in harmony.

“With ODK we have been able to empower and give voice to hundreds of village forest monitors and protected area rangers in Tanzania, Uganda, Congo and Eastern DRC so they can help conserve their forests and ecosystems for the benefit of present and future generations. More recently, Prof. Borriello and his students were instrumental in helping the Institute improve our process of collecting data in our long-term chimpanzee behavior research in Gombe, Tanzania, where I started my work in 1960.

“My colleagues who met and worked with Prof. Borriello recall his kindness, thoughtfulness and desire to be of service, as well as his humble nature and the unassuming way in which he was developing the next generation of computer scientists and engineers so they too can use their knowledge to improve the lives of others. What a great loss indeed he is to our world.”

Read the full letter here.

You might also enjoy the closing keynote that Gaetano gave at UbiComp 2014. He began by saying his remarks would not be technical but a story, a timeline about one project, ODK (Open Data Kit). If you want to know what Gaetano and some of his work was all about, this is the speech to listen to. It’s funny and fascinating. All of us are immensely proud of the reach that the work of Gaetano and his students is having around the world.

Watch the speech here. Read more →

GeekWire interviews Matt McIlwain (Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group), Chris DeVore (Managing Director of Techstars Seattle, operating inside UW’s Startup Hall), Connie Bourassa-Shaw (director of UW’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship), and Ed Lazowska (UW CSE) regarding the departure of UW President Michael Young, who has been a champion for innovation and entrepreneurship.

McIlwain: “My hope is that the Regents continue to emphasize the importance of how the UW intersects with the commercial and non-profit world in their selection of an interim and then new President.”

DeVore: “Calling it Young’s legacy is probably not giving the institution enough credit.”

Bourassa-Shaw: “Entrepreneurship and innovation have been flourishing across the University of Washington for more than a decade.”

Lazowska: “I hope the tech community will support us through this transition, as it has always supported us in the past.”

Read the article here.

Lazowska’s full remarks to GeekWire:

“I don’t want to minimize the role of the President or the impact that Mike Young has had.

“But UW is one of the nation’s and the world’s top universities. And it is a huge operation: 55,000 students, 4,300 teaching faculty, 16 schools and colleges (plus 2 branch campuses), and an annual budget of $6.3 billion (only $250 million of which comes from the state).

“One person does not run an enterprise of this scale. Ana Mari Cauce, our superb Provost, has been Mike Young’s partner since he arrived. She, like I, has devoted her entire career to UW – she’s not going anywhere. Paul Jenny, our superb Vice Provost for Planning & Budgeting, is not going anywhere. Mary Lidstrom, our superb Vice Provost for Research, is not going anywhere. Entrepreneurship and innovation is firmly in the hands of Vikram Jandhyala, our superb Vice Provost for Innovation, who’s not going anywhere. The 16 Deans and 2 Branch Campus Chancellors are not going anywhere. And all of these people would quickly agree that the Administration Building is not where the work of the University gets done – it’s in the trenches, where the faculty, students, and staff carry out the discovery, teaching, and outreach that’s our mission.

“I’ve been at UW through 6 Presidents and 2 Acting Presidents. Some were extraordinary (such as Bill Gerberding, who passed away last month). Some were downright goofy (such as Dick McCormick, who walked the plank in 2003). The trajectory of UW, and in particular the trajectory of Computer Science & Engineering, has always been upwards. That’s not going to change. I hope the tech community will support us through this transition, as it has always supported us in the past.” Read more →

A familiar face was back on campus today: UW CSE bachelor’s alum Brandon Ballinger (’06), former Google engineer and co-founder of fraud detection software company Sift Science (alongside fellow UW CSE alum Jason Tan) – and most recently, one of a small team of developers recruited to help fix the federal government’s online health insurance marketplace, Healthcare.gov.

Brandon graciously agreed to talk about his experience with around 35 undergrads as part of our Leadership Seminar Series, in which CSE alumni and friends share with current students what it takes to be effective in a startup, small company, large company, or less common environment.

What Brandon found upon arrival in the other Washington was not so much a big, hairy technical problem, but a people problem. The government had engaged 55 companies as contractors to work on different parts of the site, many of whom didn’t communicate well with each other and, and things went downhill, sometimes focused less on solutions and more on avoiding blame. Enter Brandon and his colleagues. They brought not only technical expertise but also lessons they had learned working in high-functioning teams in the private sector. By helping the people behind Healthcare.gov to work better together – emphasizing solutions to problems rather than who caused them, prioritizing expertise over rank, and teaching them to triage – they were able to build Healthcare.gov into a more reliable, user-friendly site.

Brandon also talked to the students about his experience working on the Android operating system when it was still in its infancy (as opposed to the market leader it is now). He pointed out that his work on Android speech recognition spanned things he had learned across the UW CSE curriculum: “The latest framework will change; CS fundamentals will last your whole career.” (See the 3 slides linked from the image to the right.). Students also learned what it’s like to discover your startup co-founder has bailed on you – via email – the night before your big interview with Y Combinator, and what areas of computer engineering he wished he had known more about when choosing a career path. (Shout out to the site reliability engineers!)

Read a fascinating Wired article about how Brandon and his team helped turn around Healthcare.gov here.

Our thanks to Brandon for delivering a fascinating (and eye-opening) talk! Read more →

With enormous sadness, we announce that our dear friend, colleague, and teacher Gaetano Borriello, the Jerre D. Noe Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, passed away this morning at his home, following a long fight with cancer.

Gaetano was dedicated to UW CSE and our students, and we were dedicated to him. Graduating from Berkeley in 1988, Gaetano applied to only a single academic department as an indication of how much he wanted to be here. Over the last six years, he fought the disease with courage, grace, optimism, and humor, continuing to teach, advise, mentor, and lead throughout. Through his work on technology for global development, Gaetano showed how research can  impact the lives of people around the world.

Our hearts go out to Gaetano’s wife Melissa, his sons Christopher and Nicholas, his mother Rosa, his brother Frank, and the rest of their family.  There will be no public service at this time, as the family wishes to grieve in private.

In his honor and memory, the department has established the Gaetano Borriello Fellowship for Change. The Borriello Fellowship will support students whose work is focused on exploring how technology can improve the lives of under-served populations.  More information on the fellowship here. Read more →