Allen School News

UW Computer Science & Engineering is pleased to announce the establishment of the Gaetano Borriello Endowed Fellowship for Change, honoring Gaetano Borriello, UW’s Jerre D. Noe Professor of Computer Science & Engineering. The Borriello Fellowship will support University of Washington students whose work is focused on exploring how technology can improve the lives of underserved populations.

Gaetano joined the UW CSE faculty in 1988, following receipt of his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He had previously received an M.S. in EE from Stanford University, and served as a member of the research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for eight years. From 2001-2003, on leave from UW, he founded Intel Research Seattle, which quickly became one of the premier research labs for work in ubiquitous computing.

Gaetano’s career began in the areas of integrated circuits, circuit synthesis, reconfigurable hardware, and embedded system development tools. He transitioned into ubiquitous computing, and as director of Intel Research Seattle he launched projects in elder care and in location-aware computing. More recently his focus has been applying mobile technologies to the problems of public health and development in low-resource settings. His group’s open-source mobile data collection tools, Open Data Kit, are in use on six continents in programs ranging across public health, documentation of human rights violations, and environmental monitoring.

Gaetano is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, a Fulbright Scholar, and a recipient of the UW CSE Undergraduate Teaching Award, the UW Distinguished Teaching Award, and the UW Marsha L. Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award.

Gaetano exemplifies why we are here:  to provide an extraordinary educational experience for our students, in which they discover, pursue, and achieve their potential; to conduct leading-edge research, but in the context of education rather than purely for its own sake; ultimately, to make the world a better place through the impact of our teaching, research, and mentoring.  He is an inspiration to all of us.

Learn more about Change, the vibrant campus-wide community of students and faculty exploring how technology can improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions, here.

Should you wish to support the Gaetano Borriello Endowed Fellowship for Change, you may do so here. Read more →

Drew Hansen

State Reps. Drew Hansen, D-Bainbridge Island, and Chad Magendanz, R-Issaquah today announced HB 1813, a bipartisan proposal to expand computer science education in the state.

HB 1813 creates the Computer Science and Education Grant program, which funds grants to help educators who want to pursue professional development in computer science, outreach to students to inspire their interest in computer science, and assistance for school districts to pay for technology to teach computer science courses.  The bill also adopts high-quality statewide computer science teaching standards and directs the creation of a computer science endorsement for educators interested in teaching computer science.

A subsequent bill being prepared by Reps. Hansen and Magendanz will address the expansion of higher education opportunities in computer science.

Chad Magendanz

Reps. Hansen and Magendanz have devoted a huge amount of effort over the past year to understanding Washington State’s workforce gaps and exploring means to address them. Hopefully their proposals – which are visionary, intelligent, data-driven, and hard-nosed – will largely survive the sausage-making process that lies ahead.

Read more here. Read more →

When the son of one of our faculty members was asked to show a picture of a building he likes to his pre-school class, he chose the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

The photo he shared is of the Allen Center’s façade, but his dad told us that the elevators are really his favorite part of the building, and asked us to ensure that the new CSE-II building, currently in the pre-design phase, has cool elevators too.

Architects, please take note! Read more →

UW CSE is partnering with online real estate marketplace Zillow to stage a weekend hackathon February 6-8, with participation from the White House, U.S. Department of Commerce and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

“Hack Housing: Empowering Smarter Decisions” will encourage the development of creative solutions that harness the power of big data to better meet the needs of first-time homebuyers, senior citizens, and low-income renters. Participants in the hackathon will have access to newly-released government data sets on federal housing programs, the location of accessible apartments, and transit information. In addition, Zillow will make available its data on home values and rents.

Zillow co-founder and serial entrepreneur Rich Barton will open the event by sharing his experiences of using technology to bring power to the people across a variety of industries. After a day and a half of hard work, participants will present their solutions to a judging panel of local tech leaders, entrepreneurs and federal government officials. The winning team will receive a $10,000 prize.

The hackathon will take place at Zillow’s headquarters in downtown Seattle. Find more details, including official rules, and register to participate here. Read more →

The University of Washington’s eScience Institute and GitHub are co-hosting an Academia Town Hall next Monday, February 2nd, to explore the role of software in academic institutions and how they can adapt to better support the use of important software tools.

Panelists include UW CSE alum Dan Halperin, director of research in scalable data analytics at the eScience Institute; Marina Meila, associate professor of statistics at UW; researchers Katy Huff and Fernando Perez of the University of California, Berkeley; Dan Katz, program director at the National Science Foundation; and Jamie Kinney, manager of scientific computing at Amazon Web Services. The discussion will be moderated by Arfon Smith of GitHub.

The town hall is 6:00-9:00 pm in the Physics/Astronomy Auditorium (PAA 102) on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. The formal program will be followed by a cocktail reception in the WRF Data Science Studio.

Interested undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, faculty, UW technology staff, and interested members of the broader community are encouraged to attend this free event. Learn more and register here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Richard Ladner has been honored with the 2015 Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) Community Award “in recognition of excellence and leadership in increasing access to computing for students with disabilities.”

Richard accepted the award at the STEM-CP: Computing Education for the 21^st Century (CE21) PI Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, where he delivered a keynote address titled “Accessibility Is Not Enough.” The purpose of the CE21 meeting is to build community around the efforts of the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) to broaden participation in computing and strengthen computer science education.

Richard has devoted more than a decade to accessibility research and has been a strong advocate for broadening participation in computing and using technology to enrich the lives of people with disabilities. Read more about his work in this excellent GeekWire article.

Congratulations to Richard on this well-deserved recognition!

  Read more →

Lilian de Greef

UW CSE’s Lilian de Greef and Irene Zhang have been named 2015 Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellows. Only 12 recipients were selected from among 169 nominees received by the company for this highly competitive fellowship, which provides financial support as well as the opportunity to work alongside leading computer scientists as part of a 12-week paid internship at Microsoft Research.

Lilian works with Shwetak Patel in the UbiComp Lab. Her interests include computer vision, embedded systems, machine learning and human-computer interaction. Lilian and her UbiComp colleagues developed BiliCam, a smartphone-based system for monitoring newborn jaundice.

Irene Zhang

Irene works with Hank Levy and Arvind Krishnamurthy in the Computer Systems Lab. Her research focuses on systems for large-scale, distributed applications, including the design of new operating system abstractions for mobile/cloud applications as part of the Sapphire project.

Past winners of this prestigious award at UW CSE include Yoav Artzi and Mayank Goel (2014); Gabe Cohn and Franzi Roesner (2012); and Morgan Dixon (2011).

Congratulations to Lilian and Irene, and thanks to Microsoft Research for recognizing and supporting these rising stars in computer science! Read more →

From the smallest start-up to industry leaders operating on a global scale, companies from around the region descended on the Allen Center this week to pitch job opportunities to UW CSE students.

Company and student turnout for the two-day event has been terrific. Yesterday, recruiters representing around 40 local start-ups pitched an entrepreneurial career path to hundreds of our undergraduate and graduate students. Today, established companies get their chance, with representatives from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and many more taking over the atrium.

Once again, we hit maximum capacity for our established company recruiting day – meaning some employers unfortunately wound up on a waiting list.

Thanks to all of our Industry Affiliates and students who turned out for the event – and good luck with those interviews! Read more →

Refraction 2, the award-winning game from UW CSE’s Center for Game Science in which players use fractions to save lost animals in space, is now available as a free download for the iPad.

Refraction won the grand prize in the Disney Learning Challenge at SIGGRAPH 2010. The game challenges players to expand their knowledge of fractions as they bend, split and redirect lasers to free animals trapped in spaceships. Originally developed for children nine to 11 years old, Refraction 2 is educational fun for all ages.

iPad users can begin their fraction-fueled animal rescue adventure here.

A version for Android users is coming soon. And be sure to keep an eye out for other great titles from the Center for Game Science! Read more →

The Seahawks banner has returned to the exterior of UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

Back in New England, the truck delivering a Patriots banner to the Stata Center backed into the building and dented it.  More dents to come … Read more →