Allen School News

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 →

The accolades keep rolling in for UW CSE’s Shyam Gollakota.

In August, he captured one of MIT Technology Review’s coveted TR35 Awards recognizing 35 innovators under the age of 35 for the originality and impact of their work. Today, he joins the Forbes list of 30-Under-30 in energy for his work on ambient backscatter, which uses existing wireless signals to power battery-free communications.

Forbes characterizes Shyam as a “standout” among the list of young inventors and entrepreneurs who are creating technology and founding companies with the objective of “saving or conserving energy, rather than creating it.”

We couldn’t agree more, which is why we featured Shyam’s research in the latest issue of CSE’s own newsletter, Most Significant Bits.

Shyam made the cut for the Forbes list with just six months to spare. But hey, there are still the “under 40” awards to look forward to.

Congratulations on yet another well-deserved recognition, Shyam!

Read the Forbes profile here. Read more →

Huffington Post Science cites the brain-to-brain communication achieved by UW CSE’s Rajesh Rao and collaborators as one of “5 Amazing Advances In Brain Research In 2014.”

“The idea of telepathy may not be as far-fetched as it seems. This year, scientists achieved direct brain-to-brain communication between humans.

“Building upon early research started in 2013, this fall, researchers from the University of Washington were able to repeatedly transmit signals from one person’s brain via the Internet, and used these signals to control the hand motions of another person in less than a split second.” Read more →

As we’ve said twice before recently (here and here), you can’t just make up stuff this good!

2015 is off to a great start! Read more →

Put down whatever you’re reading and turn your attention to the hot-off-the-digital-presses Winter 2014/15 issue of Most Significant Bits, the UW CSE alumni newsletter! In this issue:

• Low-power computing
• Hank’s view of the world: a new building for CSE … Stuart “Cookie Monster” Reges … new faculty hires
• The Taskar Center for Accessible Technology
• Pedro Domingos wins KDD 2014 Innovation Award
• Profiles of six super new faculty
• Alum Kuang Chen and his startup Captricity
• Age progression software from the UW CSE Graphics and Imaging Lab
• Brain-to-brain communication over the web
• Dieter Fox named IEEE Fellow
• TR35 Awards to Shyam Gollakota, Kuang Chen, and Kurtis Heimerl
• Zillions of Datagrams
• Tom Anderson wins USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award and Software Tools Award

Read it in pdf or html! Read more →

William P. Gerberding, the University of Washington’s longest-serving President (1979-1995), passed away on Saturday at age 85.

Bill was a superb leader of UW, a true friend of Computer Science & Engineering, an extraordinary human being, and, along with his wife Ruth, delightful company. Our thoughts are with Ruth and the rest of the Gerberding family.

Two particularly nice tributes appeared in the Puget Sound Business Journal authored by Patti Payne, here, and in Crosscut authored by Ted Van Dyk here. A University of Washington tribute may be found here.

But, better, read an extraordinary January 1965 Life Magazine profile of Bill as a 35-year-old UCLA assistant professor of political science here. It reveals the scholar, the person, the husband, the father. Read more →

Today’s arrival in the mail of the University of Washington’s 2013-14 Report to Contributors triggers this end-of-year message of deep gratitude to the thousands of UW CSE alumni and friends who support us in so many ways, including contributing time, financial support, and political support.

UW CSE is public in spirit – UW is, after all, The University of Washington, and we in CSE embrace this role and all that it entails. But private support is essential to fulfilling our mission. (For example, state support comprises somewhere between 4% and 7% of UW’s operating budget, depending on what you count.)

The Report to Contributors notes that CSE’s Innovation Endowment is among the top ten “operating and research endowments” at UW, generating more than $500,000 per year to support new initiatives. (Let’s try to blow past Ivar in 2015!) And several weeks ago, 150 donors and 7 sponsors added $189,334 to UW CSE’s Google Endowed Scholarship during G-Give 2014, bringing the total of this endowment to more than $1 million – CSE’s largest undergraduate scholarship endowment, essential to allowing top Washington State students obtain a UW CSE education regardless of means.

These are but two examples. Our thanks to all of you as we launch into 2015! Read more →

CACM features exciting work by Hadi Esmaeilzadeh (UW CSE Ph.D. alum now on the faculty at Georgia Tech), Adrian Sampson (UW CSE graduating Ph.D. student), Luis Ceze (UW CSE faculty), and Doug Burger (Microsoft Research and UW CSE affiliate faculty).

CMOS scaling is no longer providing gains in efficiency commensurate with increases in transistor density. Today, we can choose any two of performance, energy efficiency, and generality at the expense of the third. One approach to gaining performance and energy efficiency at the expense of generality is the use of GPGPUs and FPGAs. This paper explores another approach: approximate computation, or trading off accuracy in order to gain performance and energy efficiency. The core idea is to learn how a region of approximable code behaves and automatically replace the original code with an efficient computation of the learned model.

Read the paper here. Read more →

As the new year approaches, we salute some of those recognized by Seattle Magazine as among “Seattle’s Most Influential People of 2014” – individuals who have particularly impacted UW Computer Science & Engineering through their words and deeds:

• Nick Hanauer, “Person of the Year,” a Seattle-raised entrepreneur and venture capitalist, the first non-family investor in Amazon.com, and a prime mover behind many forward-looking regional and national civic initiatives.
• Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, transforming Seattle and the world.
• Ed Murray, Seattle Mayor: a tremendous first-year record, and steadfast support for UW, UW CSE, and a wide variety of social issues.
• Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, focused on making Microsoft – UW CSE’s strongest partner – a “learning organization.”
• Brad Smith, Microsoft General Counsel, a person of tremendous principle who seems to be on the enlightened side of every issue.

Thanks to all, for what you do for UW CSE, for Seattle, and for the world. Read more →

You can’t actually expect much work to get done on December 24 …