Mohit Shridhar, a Ph.D. student working with Allen School professor Dieter Fox, has been named a 2022-2023 NVIDIA Graduate Fellow for his research in building generalizable systems for human-robot collaboration. Shridhar’s work is focused on connecting language to perception and action for vision-based robotics.
Shridhar aims to use deep learning to connect abstract concepts to concrete physical actions with long-term reasoning to develop robot butlers. The Fellowship will help him continue his work in building robots that learn through embodied interactions rather than from static datasets. Using his own creation CLIPort, a language-conditioned imitation-learning agent, will advance precise spatial reasoning and learning generalizable semantic representations for vision and language. Shridhar’s framework combines two-streams with semantic and spatial pathways, where the semantic stream uses an internet pre-trained vision language model to bootstrap learning. This end-to-end framework can solve a variety of language-specified tabletop tasks, from packing unseen objects to folding clothes with centimeter-level precision.
“Mohit’s CLIPort work is the first to show the power of combining general language and image understanding models with fine-grained robot manipulation capabilities,” said Fox, who leads the Allen School’s Robotics & State Estimation Lab and is senior director of robotics research at NVIDIA..
In order to communicate with the butlers, Shridhar developed the Action Learning From Realistic Environments and Directives dataset (ALFRED). This is a dataset for agents to learn mapping from natural language instructions and egocentric vision to sequences of actions for household tasks. ALFRED consists of 25,000 natural language directives, including high-level instructions like “rinse off a mug and place it in the coffee maker” and lower-level language directions like “walk to the coffee maker on the right.” Tasks given to ALFRED are more complex in terms of sequence length, action space and language than previous vision-and-language task datasets.
Taking the next step beyond communicating tasks to the robots, Shridhar wants the robots to think about long-term actions without directly dealing with the complexities of the physical world. An example he gives is telling an agent to make an appetizer with sliced apples. Without any physical interactions, ALFWorld, a simulator that enables agents to learn abstract, “textual” policies in an interactive TextWorld, will train the robot to check the fruit bowl for apples and look in the drawers for a knife to make the appetizer. Before ALFWorld, agents did not have the infrastructure necessary for both reasoning abstractly and executing concretely.
Shridhar intends to deploy ALFRED-trained models in household environments where a mobile manipulator can be commanded to perform tasks such as putting two plates on the dining table.
“I hope to build collaborative butler robots that aid and better human living,” Shridhar said.
Before coming to the Allen School, Shridhar received his Bachelor’s in Engineering from the National University of Singapore. He has interned at Microsoft Research, NVIDIA and an augmented reality startup.
Shridhar is only one of 10 students recognized by the Graduate Fellowship Program based on their innovative research in Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) computing. Previous Allen School recipients of the NVIDIA Fellowship include Anqi Li (2020) and Daniel Gordon (2019).
“You are what you eat,” as the saying goes. But not everyone has the same degree of choice in the matter. An estimated 19 million people in the United States live in so-called food deserts, where they have lower access to healthy and nutritious food. More than 32 million people live below the poverty line — limiting their options to the cheapest food regardless of proximity to potentially healthier options. Meanwhile, numerous studies have pointed to the role of diet in early mortality and the development of chronic diseases such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer.
Researchers are just beginning to understand how the complex interplay of individual and community characteristics influence diet and health. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Washington and Stanford University recently completed the largest nationwide study to date conducted in the U.S. on the relationship between food environment, demographics, and dietary health with the help of a popular smartphone-based food journaling app. The results of that five-year effort, published today in the journal Nature Communications, should give scientists, health care practitioners and policymakers plenty of food for thought.
“Our findings indicate that higher access to grocery stores, lower access to fast food, higher income and college education are independently associated with higher consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables, lower consumption of fast food and soda, and less likelihood of being classified as overweight or obese,” explained lead author Tim Althoff, professor and director of the Behavioral Data Science Group at the Allen School. “While these results probably come as no surprise, until now our ability to gauge the relationship between environment, socioeconomic factors and diet has been challenged by small sample sizes, single locations, and non-uniform design across studies. Different from traditional epidemiological studies, our quasi-experimental methodology enabled us to explore the impact on a nationwide scale and identify which factors matter the most.”
Tim Althoff (Dennis Wise/University of Washington)
Althoff ‘s involvement in the study dates from when he was a Ph.D. student at Stanford working with professor and senior author Jure Leskovec and fellow student and co-author Hamed Nilforoshan. Together with co-author Dr. Jenna Hua, a former postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine and founder and CEO of Million Marker Wellness, Inc., the team analyzed data from more than 1.1 million users of the MyFitnessPal app — spanning roughly 2.3 billion food entries and encompassing more than 9,800 U.S. zip codes — to gain insights into how factors such as access to grocery stores and fast food, family income level, and educational attainment contribute to people’s food consumption and overall dietary health.
The team measured the association of the aforementioned input variables with each of four dietary outcomes: fresh fruit and vegetable consumption, fast food consumption, soda consumption, and incidence of overweight or obese classified by body mass index (BMI). To understand how each variable corresponded positively or negatively with those outcomes, the researchers employed a matching-based approach wherein they divided the available zip codes into treatment and control groups, split along the median for each input. This enabled them to compare app user logs in zip codes that were statistically above the median — for example, those with more than 20.3% of the population living within half a mile of the nearest grocery store — with those below the median.
Among the four inputs the team examined, higher educational attainment than the median, defined as 29.8% or more of the population with a college degree, was the greatest positive predictor of a healthier diet and BMI. All four inputs were found to positively contribute to dietary outcomes, with one exception: high family income, defined as income at or above $70,241, was associated with a marginally higher percentage of people with a BMI qualifying as overweight or obese. But upon further investigation, these results only scratched the surface of what is a complex issue that varies from community to community.
The team analyzed data on food consumption logged by fitness app users across more than 9,800 U.S. zip codes along with the percentage of residents affected by overweight/obesity in those communities. They found significant variation in dietary health across zip codes.
“When we dug into the data further, we discovered that the population-level results masked significant differences in how the food environment and socioeconomic factors corresponded with dietary health across subpopulations,” noted Nilforoshan.
As an example, Nilforoshan pointed to the notably higher association between above-median grocery store access and increased fruit and vegetable consumption in zip codes with a majority of Black residents, at a 10.2% difference, and with a majority of Hispanic residents, at a 7.4% difference, compared to those with a majority of non-Hispanic white residents, where he and his colleagues found only a 1.7% difference. These and other findings indicate that factors such as proximity to grocery stores or higher income, on their own, are not sufficient for people to bypass the drive-thru or kick the (soda) can to the curb — and that future attempts to address dietary disparities need to take variations across zip codes into account.
Left to right: Hamed Nilforoshan, Jenna Hua and Jure Leskovec
“People assume that if we eliminate food deserts, that will automatically lead to healthier eating, and that a higher income and a higher degree lead to a higher quality diet. These assumptions are, indeed, borne out by the data at the whole population level,” explained Hua. “But if you segment the data out, you see the impacts can vary significantly depending on the community. Diet is a complex issue! While policies aimed at improving food access, economic opportunity and education can and do support healthy eating, our findings strongly suggest that we need to tailor interventions to communities rather than pursuing a one-size-fits-all approach.”
Althoff believes that both the team’s approach and its findings can guide future research on this complex topic that has implications for both individuals and entire communities.
“We hope that this study will impact public health and epidemiological research methods as well as policy research,” said Althoff. “Regarding the former, we demonstrated that the increasing volume and variety of consumer-reported health data being made available due to mobile devices and applications can be leveraged for public health research at unprecedented scale and granularity. For the latter, we see many opportunities for future research to investigate the mechanisms driving the disparate diet relationships across subpopulations in the U.S.”
As the world watched COVID-19 grow from a mysterious virus in far-off places to a planetary pandemic, news outlets worked hard to keep the world informed on how, where and why it was spreading. At the start of the outbreak, Matthew Conlen, a Ph.D. student in the Allen School’s Interactive Data Lab, was working as a graphic/multimedia editor for the New York Times helping with their elections forecasting application, also known as “The Needle.” He switched gears to contribute to the paper’s coverage of the novel coronavirus as it enveloped the globe — work that contributed to stories that earned the New York Times a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for, in part, filling “a data vacuum that helped local governments, healthcare providers, businesses and individuals to be better prepared and protected.”
Conlen’s forte is creating interactive data visualizations that do precisely that: help the public to comprehend what is happening in the country and throughout the world. In this particular case, he led a data collection effort on COVID-19 in nursing homes, and he also worked with epidemiologists and modelers to give readers an understanding of what could happen in different scenarios when schools reopened, as the vaccine rolled out and when the U.S. could reach herd immunity.
“Data journalism can provide a valuable perspective on our world, complementing traditional narrative reporting with additional context, more comprehensive accounts and increased audience engagement,” Conlen’s advisor and Allen School professor Jeffrey Heer said. “Interactive visualizations rank among the most visited and revisited pieces published by major news outlets. Though data visualization on the web has largely ‘come of age,’ a major remaining challenge is empowering more journalists — as well as educators and others — without an extensive technical background to author and collaborate on interactive articles.”
Conlen’s work, Heer said, leads on all of these fronts: publishing data-driven news at multiple major outlets and via Parametric Press, which Conlen co-founded, while simultaneously researching at the Allen School, which has resulted in new open-source languages and tools that make these articles easier to create.
“It’s a virtuous cycle of research and practice,” Heer said.
After earning dual bachelor’s degrees in computer science and applied mathematics, Conlen began working on a big data analytics platform at an advertising technology, or ad tech, company. Despite interesting technical challenges, he found more fulfilling work in journalism, using digital news tools at the Huffington Post, FiveThirtyEight, The New Yorker and NASA’s earth science communications team. He became interested in data visualization because it combines math and statistics with tough programming challenges and a creative design aspect. This combination of technical and creative elements is, he notes, hard to come by in other fields.
In the “The Beginner’s Guide to Dimensionality Reduction,” hovering over an image will display one of 800 works of art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click on the image to explore.
“I’m interested in computer science generally because I think computers can be tremendously empowering tools,” Conlen said. “I want to develop systems that enable people to do things that were otherwise out of reach. It’s like giving someone superpowers but all you have to do is write some code.”
He said he saw his pursuit of a Ph.D. as the next phase of a career oriented around data visualization and digital publishing.
“Within the world of academic research I can spend more time understanding how people learn from data visualizations and interactive graphics and what makes certain designs effective, and I can engage with rich fields like human-computer interaction, or HCI, to better understand how to build effective digital tools for journalists and others.”
Combining his journalism and research, Conlen could see that visual forms are effective for communicating complex data sets. As a journalist, he understands the real-world constraints that HCI needs to account for in order to be useful in practice. He and Heer created Idyll, a toolkit that reduces the amount of effort and custom code required to make it easier to author and publish interactive articles, based on the challenges Conlen observed in the newsrooms in which he worked. The interactive capabilities of Idyll are seen in Unraveling the JPEG by graphics programmer Omar Shehata. Conlen explained that by using the interactive capabilities of Idyll, Shehata constructed a narrative walkthrough of the JPEG compression algorithm that connected with a big audience online — an audience that might not be interested to learn about that topic if not for the graphics that he made.
“It wouldn’t have been possible to create this system without the practical knowledge that I gained as a journalist or without the space and time to think deeply and build ambitious research systems that the Allen School affords,” Conlen said.
Using Idyll, this graphic was created to show how the eye works. Users hover over a part of the eye to identify the part and learn what it does. Click on the image to try. Created by the Explorable Explanations Game Jam.
“I’m regularly impressed by the resilience of my students,” Heer, who leads the Interactive Data Lab said. “Matt’s ability to bridge the worlds of professional journalism and academic research is a standout example, animated by Matt’s commitment to a more just and better-informed society.”
“Think Microsoft Word but you can create documents that are dynamically driven by databases and include interactive visualizations and graphics,” Conlen said.
Conlen defended his dissertation last week and is currently working on a short-term contract with the New York Times. In early 2022 he will continue his work on the Idyll ecosystem — the open source project received a donation from venture capitalist Albert Wegner that will allow Conlen to put more time into improving the core project and refining Idyll Studio. He will continue doing data journalism and building tools to support that work.
To view more of Conlen’s work combining journalism and data visualization, check out his collection of published articles on his website.
Earlier this month, the Allen School held a virtual celebration showcasing efforts to increase diversity in computing and honoring members of our community who have demonstrated their commitment to diversity, excellence and leadership. An annual tradition, the event this year also offered Allen School leaders an opportunity to share highlights from its five-year strategic plan to increase diversity, equity, inclusion and access (DEIA), spanning curriculum and programs, professional development, policies and procedures, internal community engagement, external outreach and budget. Allen School professor and director Magdalena Balazinksa had the happy task of introducing two undergraduate scholarship winners: senior Nayha Auradkar, recipient of the Allen AI Outstanding Engineer Scholarship for Women and Underrepresented Minorities from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), and senior Caiwei Tian, recipient of the Lisa Simonyi Prize.
Auradkar, who is enrolled in the Allen School’s B.S./M.S. program, exemplifies the goal of the AI2 scholarship to encourage students from underrepresented groups to excel in computer science and engineering and become leaders and role models in their fields. Finding a passion for machine learning and human computer interaction, Auradkar used it to conduct accessibility research in the Make4All lab with Allen School professor Jennifer Mankoff. As an undergraduate she published two papers, one aimed at analyzing the features of personal protective equipment in response to the pandemic and the other focused on automating the process of creating complex textured knitting objects to make it easier for people with mobility-related disabilities to knit. Auradkar said that as someone with a disability, accessibility research has deep personal value to her and enables her to use her skills to help other people with disabilities.
Auradkar isn’t focused solely on academics, though; she’s determined to make a difference on campus through leadership, too. She is the chair of the ACM-W, founded and leads the Allen School affinity group Ability, founded and leads Huskies Who Stutter and served as the outreach director for the Society of Women Engineers. In these roles she teaches middle school girls introductory engineering, cultivates a strong community of women in tech, promotes disability community and accessibility awareness and supports other UW students who stutter.
“This scholarship will enable me to learn from and collaborate with top research scientists, which will allow me to grow my research skills as I transition in my graduate degree,” Auradkar said. “It will also provide me with extra support in my DEIA work.”
The Lisa Simonyi Prize was established by longtime Allen School supporters Lisa and Charles Simonyi. The couple created the scholarship to recognize and support students who exemplify excellence, leadership, and diversity. This year’s recipient, Tian, is a double major in computer science and applied and computational mathematical sciences. She added the former after a data structure and algorithm course inspired a newfound interest in using programming as a tool to turn complex ideas into practice and discussing algorithms and the tradeoff between runtime and memories. Tian works in the Allen School’s UbiComp Lab with professor Shwetak Patel on developing a generalized deep learning model that uses video signals from smartphones to measure blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) levels, a crucial test in modern medicine. This work focuses on building a unified platform-agnostic model that works on all major smartphone systems.
Tian also has worked as a software development engineering intern at Amazon, a research assistant in the Make4All Lab and a research assistant at Fred Hutch. Tian co-founded a Chinese student choir group, MotE, a 50-member group that performs at festivals. She also assisted underprivileged students and provided academic support and encouragement as a math and science tutor for students at Licton Spring K-8 Public School.
“I’m really excited and honored to get this scholarship,” Tian said. “Knowing nothing about computer science before coming to UW and now graduating with this award, I think it is an evidence of my hard-work and my growth at the Allen School. It also encourages me to go further and keep learning.”
Thanks to AI2 and the Simonyis for supporting diversity and excellence, and thanks to everyone who logged on to celebrate the people who are making our school and our field a more welcoming destination for all. And congratulations to Nayha and Caiwei!
For more about the Allen School’s efforts to advance diversity in computing, please visit our website.
Researchers affiliated with the Allen School took home all three Best Paper Awards at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 28th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). Current Ph.D. student Jacob Van Geffen, recent alumnus James Bornholt (Ph.D.,’19), former postdoc and incoming professor Simon Peter and affiliate professor Daniel Berger contributed to the winning papers that presented new advances in debugging, distributed computing and caching.
Focused on building automated mechanisms to help engineers ensure the correctness of every change they make, ShardStore was developed to employ techniques like property-based testing and model checking with far lower overhead than traditional provable correctness. According to the team, this lightweight formal method prevented a number of issues like crash consistency and concurrency problems, before reaching production. The team plans to continue improving their techniques for cloud-based data storage.
Peter Simon
Peter, who is currently a professor at the University of Texas, Austin and will join the Allen School faculty in January, co-authored “LineFS: Efficient SmartNIC Offload of a Distributed File System with Pipeline Parallelism,” about fitting the high demands of a distributed file system (DFS) onto smart network interface cards (SmartNICs). In the paper, the team presents LineFS, a SmartNIC-offloaded, high-performance DFS with support for client-local persistent memory. LineFS moves CPU-intensive tasks to a SmartNIC, improving latency in LevelDB — a fast, key-value store — up to 80%. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology researchers Jongyul Kim, Insu Jang, Jaeseong Im and Youngjin Kwon, along with Waleed Reda and Dejan Kostic from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Emmett Witchel also at UT Austin, contributed to the paper.
Daniel Berger
In “Kangaroo: Caching Billions of Tiny Objects on Flash,” Berger, a researcher at Microsoft and UW, and his co-authors present a new flash cache that enables more efficient caching of tiny objects — often in social media and IoT services — called Kangaroo. Kangaroo overcomes challenges in existing flash cache designs such as minimizing main memory usage, which is expensive and energy hungry, and reduces load on back-end storage systems. Additionally, Kangaroo reduces flash memory wear out, extending flash cache lifetimes by multiple years. This also helps cost and sustainability. The paper was written with Carnegie Mellon University researchers Sara McAllister, Benjamin Berg, Julian Tutuncu-Macias, Juncheng Yang, Nathan Beckman and Gregory Ganger and Facebook researchers Sathya Gunasekar and Jimmy Lu.
Professor Joshua R. Smith, who holds a joint appointment in the Allen School and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, was elected into the 2021 class of Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors for his impactful creations in the fields of wireless power, communication, sensing and robotics. Smith, who leads the Sensor Systems Lab, is one of only five University of Washington faculty members to have received this prestigious award that highlights the prolific spirit of innovation in academic inventors. The NAI Fellows program was created to recognize inventors and their contributions to society, which stimulate the economy, improve and save lives, and make the world a better place. It is the highest professional distinction given solely to academic inventors.
The NAI Fellow selection process considers inventions that have been licensed or commercialized. Smith holds 48 U.S. patents and 16 international patents, 44 of which are licensed by companies. His inventions have led to hundreds of millions of dollars in product revenues, bolstering the economy and the creation of approximately 70 full-time jobs, according to Suzie Pun, a professor in the Department of Bioengineering and another UW faculty member who is an NAI Fellow.
Smith as a graduate student showing an early mobile phone with mutual capacitance sensing.
Smith’s first six patents, developed while he was a graduate student at MIT, pioneered mutual capacitance sensing and led to the creation of a smart airbag system that was included in every Honda car between 2000 and 2015. Before his arrival at UW, Smith spent five years at Intel Research Seattle, creating new capabilities in wireless power, wireless sensing and robotics. He led the creation of the Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP), the first fully programmable platform for wireless, battery-free sensing and computation powered by radio waves.
Soon after, he developed Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WREL), which uses magnetically coupled resonators to efficiently transfer wireless power even as range, orientation and load vary. With the help of a heart surgeon from Yale, Smith was able to power a ventricular assist device designed for implantation in the human body without requiring a cable through the patient’s chest, called the Free-range Resonant Electrical Energy Delivery System (FREED). This wireless power work at UW is commercialized by WiBotic, a company Smith co-founded with ECE alumnus Benjamin Waters (Ph.D., ‘15). The UW patents are also licensed for implanted heart pumps by Corisma.
Ambient backscatter devices harvest radio signals to wirelessly power communication
“Among the many outstandingly inventive engineers at Intel Research Seattle, we were especially excited that Josh joined our faculty, he is extraordinary in every imaginable respect,” said Ed Lazowska, professor and Bill & Melinda Gates Chair Emeritus at the Allen School. “He is an academic inventor and entrepreneur of the highest caliber and in the finest tradition.”
In 2013, Smith, together with Allen School professor Shyam Gollakota and a team of graduate students, developed Ambient Backscatter using existing wireless signals to provide power and communication for low-power sensing and computing devices. This next led to the creation of Passive-Wi-Fi, bringing low-power Wi-Fi to transmissions. They also invented Interscatter, using wireless transmissions over the air from one technology to another for internet-connected implanted devices. Smith also co-led the UW team behind the world’s first battery‐free phone, as well as a series of ultra-low-power battery-free wireless cameras that communicate via backscatter.
The team’s research is being commercialized by Jeeva Wireless, a UW spinout co-founded by Smith, Gollakota, and ECE alumni Vamsi Talla (Ph.D., ‘16) and Aaron Parks (Ph.D., ‘17).
Prototype of a battery-free cellphone
“Josh has a consistent record of impactful inventions,” said Pun. “I have gotten to know him through a research collaboration to develop touchscreen-based sensors for detection of pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2. Josh devised a creative method to improve detection sensitivity for the virus; he is in the process of testing this idea in his laboratory. If successful, his design could be applied for next generation biosensing devices.”
Smith also co-founded Proprio, which provides surgical visualization and navigation, together with UW neurosurgeon Sam Browd, Allen School graduate student Jim Youngquist, UW Foundation board member Ken Denman, and Michael G. Foster School of Business alumnus Gabe Jones (MBA, ‘14). Smith served on advisory councils and task forces for the United States Postal Service and the Smithsonian Institution and is an IEEE Fellow. His work has earned multiple Best Paper Awards, and he is known for his dedicated mentorship of student researchers.
A robot using non-contact pre-touch sensing to solve the Rubik’s Cube
“I feel so privileged to collaborate with my outstanding UW faculty and student co-inventors,” said Smith, who holds the Milton and Delia Zeutschel Professorship in Entrepreneurial Excellence in ECE. “And invention is just one part of a long process to bring new things into the world.
“I am very grateful to the many people who have worked so hard to take these inventions from the lab to the world, including UW CoMotion, many patent attorneys, and most of all the co-founders and employees at the companies making these technologies real.”
There are many options for mapping and route planning on a smartphone, but one thing they all have in common is their car-centric nature. Those apps that do support pedestrian navigation tend to make assumptions about a user that are at best inaccurate, and at worst dangerous.
For residents and visitors in three western Washington cities, that changes today with the release of the AccessMap mobile app. The app, which was developed by the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology housed at the Paul G. Allen Center of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and is based off of the web-based tool of the same name, enables users of Android and iOS in the cities of Seattle, Bellingham and Mount Vernon to generate customized walking directions on the go based on their own mobility needs and preferences. The app’s release coincides with the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, an annual observance initiated by the United Nations to promote the rights and well-being of persons with disabilities in all spheres of society, including political, social, economic and cultural life.
“Many apps offer some semblance of pedestrian directions, but those directions assume a user profile that ignores the lived experience of a vast number of people,” explained Anat Caspi, director of the Taskar Center. “They make assumptions about the steepness of hills you can take, how speedy you will be, and what constitutes a safe walking or rolling environment. Some apps don’t even provide basic information like whether or not there is a sidewalk. Rather than this one-size-fits-all approach, AccessMap empowers people by giving them the ability to tailor a route that suits them as individuals.
“This is significant not only because of the departure from the mass-produced apps,” she continued. “Even apps that are ‘accessibility-minded’ tend to lump together specific device use, like putting all manual wheelchair users or power wheelchair users in one category. Our research shows dramatic variability even within the same device user group, and this is also addressed by AccessMap.”
The ability to personalize their navigation options tied to real-world constraints, informed by a series of user studies during the development phase, will open up new avenues of accessibility for people with and without mobility impairments. For example, a user can request a route that takes them through intersections with “curb cuts,” which make it easier for people with strollers as well as wheelchairs to cross the street. Users can also specify a path that will enable them to avoid steep hills. The app — which is screen-reader accessible for people who are blind or low-vision — comes pre-loaded with three pedestrian profiles tailored to users who rely on a manual wheelchair, power wheelchair, or cane, along with the option to customize settings like maximum incline according to personal preference. Like other popular navigation apps, AccessMap includes color-coded maps that enable users to see at a glance which streets would be most favorable for travel; unlike those other apps, the emphasis here is on sidewalk traversability rather than automobile traffic.
Another aspect of AccessMap that sets it apart from other navigation tools: the sensitive nature of users sharing details of their personal mobility needs. For this reason, each user’s profile and preferences — for example, requests for wheelchair-accessible routes or maximum incline settings — is stored locally on their phone.
AccessMap enables users to select from among three preset pedestrian profiles or customize their own to obtain directions following an accessible route between Point A and Point B. The different colors shown on the map allow users to determine accessible sidewalk routes at a glance. Users’ personal mobility profiles are stored on their phone to preserve their privacy.
The process of turning the original web-based tool into a mobile app began in earnest in the summer of 2020 and further ramped up this past summer, when Caspi and Allen School postdoctoral researcher Nick Bolten assembled a team of undergraduate students to take on the task of translating the existing AccessMap into a user-friendly — and accessible — mobile interface. In addition to being a technical achievement, the project represented a unique learning opportunity for student researchers Xianxian Cheng, Jay Lin, and Eric Yeh.
For Yeh, AccessMap was an opportunity to combine his desire to have a positive impact on the community with the prospect of doing something he had never done before: build a mobile app from scratch.
“The main roadblock for me was having no development experience other than coursework at the time. Although I ran into a lot of bugs and issues along the way, those struggles helped me to understand how mobile apps are built and compiled,” recalled Yeh, a senior computer science major in the Allen School who is also pursuing a minor in neural engineering. “I had the opportunity to implement a large range of features such as the map, accessibility settings, and user feedback. I did not expect my very first project to expand to the scale that it is now, and it’s amazing to see how it has evolved from a barebones map to a fully functional application.”
Lin became interested in mobile app accessibility after taking the Allen School’s Interaction Programming course and making the connection between accessibility issues associated with commonly used apps and other disciplines.
“After taking classes in the Disability Studies department, I realized that there’s quite a lot of overlap between issues in technology and with legal/social justice,” explained Lin, a fourth-year student who splits their time between UW Bothell’s computer science program and the aforementioned disability studies at UW Seattle. “What’s common in these two topics is that disability rights and accessibility are often treated as an afterthought, yet this impacts a large part of your audience or user base.”
Support from the U.S. Department of Transportation paved the way for AccessMap’s move to mobile through a multi-year grant awarded to the Taskar Center and its partners in the Transportation Data Equity Initiative. Today’s release represents a step toward one of USDOT’s primary goals for that grant: to promote multimodal accessibility that includes transportation options such as bus and rail.
“Multimodal accessibility is key to providing a more useful pedestrian trip planner, as strictly pedestrian travel is usually just a subset of an overall trip,” noted Bolten, who co-led development of the original AccessMap while earning his Ph.D. from the UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. “Other trip segments may involve boarding a bus, boarding a train, or driving a car, all of which must then interface with the pedestrian network. For example, choosing the right bus stop will surely depend on the accessibility of the surrounding pedestrian network, so picking the best bus and pedestrian routes aren’t independent things: they should be co-planned.
The team, clockwise from top left: Anat Caspi, Nick Bolten, Xianxian Cheng and Eric Yeh (not pictured: Jay Lin)
“In addition, every pedestrian trip planning question can also be thought of as an analysis of the network itself: how accessible is a city, a neighborhood, or all paths to a grocery store?” he continued. “A multimodal network will also ‘upgrade’ those questions and enable data-based conversations about public transportation and infrastructure.”
The three cities currently covered by the app are just the beginning. Caspi and her team have plans to extend coverage to the eastern side of Lake Washington, along the Bellevue-Redmond corridor, as well as to the city of Austin, Texas. The group is also collaborating with municipalities, transit agencies and advocacy groups to collect data for new cities, including Los Angeles, California and four Latin American cities as part of a partnership with international nonprofit G3ict and Microsoft’s AI4Accessibility initiative, to extend the app’s coverage even further — plans that align with the Taskar Center’s mission of designing for the fullness of the human experience, which will enable people to fully participate in civic life.
That goal is one that AccessMap’s student developers will carry with them into their future work.
“Working on AccessMap has helped me to see how people see, hear, feel, touch, and perceive the world in their own ways. There are some experiences we may take for granted, but we should always remember there may be constraints that are invisible to our eyes which might harm others who have different ways of interacting with the world on a daily basis,” said Cheng, a senior studying informatics and user experience designer for the AccessMap app. “I feel honored that I could be a part of this digital translation that leverages accessible user experience.”
The AccessMap mobile app is available now from Apple’s App Store (iOS) and Google Play (Android). Government agencies, municipalities, institutions and community organizations interested in having their city included in the next release of AccessMap may submit their request to the team via email at opensidewalks@gmail.com. Read more →
The Allen School is pleased to announce the 2021-22 Distinguished Lecture Series, which kicks off today. Join us over the coming season to hear from experts in microarchitecture, theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence sustainability, low-and no-power devices and a new paradigm for truly extending computer science education to all.
All lectures will take place at 3:30 p.m. in the Amazon Auditorium in the Gates Center and will be live streamed on the school’s YouTube channel.
Gabriel H. Loh will deliver a talk on Thursday, Dec. 2 about “The Motivation for Chiplets and their Adoption in AMD Processors.” Under Moore’s Law, computer systems that once took up an entire warehouse can now fit on an integrated circuit. But the rate of advancements in silicone processes has slowed recently, while manufacturing costs have risen. To address this problem, AMD has opted to break down systems on chips into smaller “chiplets.” Loh will discuss the technical challenges that spurred the company to focus on chiplets as a solution and how they were able to extend their use beyond individual processors.
At AMD Research, Loh focuses on cutting-edge technologies for CPU and GPU microarchitecture, high-speed interconnections, memory systems and component integration. He also oversees patent generation activities. Loh earned the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on Computer Architecture for his contributions to the field.
Wu’s research at Facebook focuses on high-performance and energy-efficient architecture through hardware heterogeneity, energy harvesting techniques for emerging computing devices, and temperature and energy management for portable electronics. She recently veered into designing systems for machine learning execution at scale as part of her drive to tackle system challenges to enable more efficient, responsible AI.
Carole-Jean Wu will give a lecture on Dec. 9 called “Scaling AI Sustainably: Environmental Implications, Challenges and Opportunities.” Wu’s talk will explore the increasing carbon footprint of AI computing and how hardware and software design and at-scale optimization can reduce the overall impact. She will also discuss new research directions that can help ensure the field of AI advances in an environmentally responsible way.
Jan. 20: Josiah Hester, Breed Chair of Design, Segal Faculty Fellow, and professor of computer engineering at Northwestern University
Josiah Hester will deliver a talk on Jan. 20 called “Batteries Not Included: Reimagining Computing for the Next Trillion Devices.” Powering computer systems in the future needs to rely less on batteries and wall outlets and more on less expensive, sustainable means. Hester will discuss a rethinking of hardware, software, design and tool creation that isn’t dependent on current power systems and what research in that field will look like in the next 10 years.
From soil-powered sensors to smart face masks, Hester’s research at Northwestern focuses on a more sustainable future for computing, inspired by his Native Hawaiian (Kanaka maoli) heritage. To that end, he focuses on the development of battery-free smart devices and systems for intermittent computing that support a range of applications, including health care, conservation, and infrastructure monitoring.
Jan. 27: Mark Guzdial, professor of computer science & engineering at the University of Michigan
Mark Guzdial will give a lecture on Jan. 27 on “Changing Computing To Make It ‘For All.’” Returning to the original concept that computer science should be taught to everyone just like math, reading and the natural sciences, Guzdial will examine how we need to change our approach to teaching computing to ensure it isn’t just a privileged class that understands it. He will review the history of computer science and its early purpose, the barriers to reaching universal computational literacy, and what new kinds of languages and the tools will be needed to extend this knowledge to everyone.
With a focus on computer education research, learning sciences, education public policy and task-specific programming languages, Guzdial studies how people come to understand computing and how to make that process more effective. He co-founded the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Computing Education Research Conference and helped to lead the National Science Foundation-fundedExpanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance to improve computing education in the United States.
Feb. 17: Shafi Goldwasser, director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and C. Lester Hogan Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley
Shafi Goldwasser’s research interests span cryptography, computational number theory, complexity theory, fault tolerant distributed computing, probabilistic proof systems and approximation algorithms. She is the co-leader of the Cryptography and Information Security (CIS) Group and a member of the Complexity Theory Group within the Theory of Computation Group and the Laboratory for Computer Science. She received the ACM Turing Award — computing’s highest honor, otherwise known as the “Nobel Prize of computing” — in 2012, and the Gödel Prize in 1993 for “The Knowledge of Interactive Proof Systems” and again in 2001 “Interactive Proofs and the Hardness of Approximating Cliques.”
Allen School professor Jennifer Mankoff received the 2021 Impact Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing (SIGACCESS) for her work on “Disability studies as a source of critical inquiry for the field of assistive technology” at the 23rd International Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS). The paper, which was published in 2010, was the first to describe approaches for bridging the gap between the fields of assistive technology research and critical disability studies. Since then, disability studies have received growing attention at ASSETS as a critical component of research aimed at improving the experiences of people with disabilities and the paper has become an important reading in accessibility courses.
Mankoff, who holds the Richard E. Ladner Professorship in the Allen School and co-leads the Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE), co-authored the paper while she was a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University. Gillian R. Hayes, provost, dean and professor at the University of California, Irvine and Devva Kasnitz, City of New York adjunct professor and emeritus director of the Society for Disability Studies, co-authored the paper.
Studying the individual, cultural, societal and theoretical foundations of the design of disability-related technology, Mankoff and her collaborators looked at two of their own research studies with this new lens. In the first, they considered autism and technology. Initially they focused on designing assistive technology to help care providers, such as helping with early diagnosis. Using the disability studies literature, the team transitioned their focus on designing technology that empowers individual students in the classroom. In their second case study, the researchers looked at computer accessibility. Oftentimes computer simulations are created to give the designer an idea of how their technology might be used by people with disabilities. However, these simulations may not be accurate and still lack the thoughts and feelings of the user with disabilities. The researchers offer alternatives to simulation: involve a small number of people with disabilities much more deeply in the design process or gather data that can be used to test hypotheses rather than create a simulation. Ultimately, the research team recommends using technology “to support empowerment and understanding” of people with disabilities.
“Disability studies theory has changed both my research and my approach to living and working as a disabled person, academic, parent and caregiver,” said Mankoff. “Its lens has helped guide my advocacy and identify moments worthy of constructive change. I am incredibly lucky to have had the chance to work with, and learn from, my collaborators on this paper.”
A follow up paper, “Living Disability Theory: Reflections on Access, Research, and Design” won a Best Student Paper Award at ASSETS 2020, 10 years later. It explores the lived experience of four academics with disabilities, including Mankoff and Kasnitz, and was led by graduate student Megan Hofmann and post doctorate Cynthia Bennett, both at Carnegie Mellon University. The paper focuses on moments when disability was misunderstood and derives three related themes: ableism in research, oversimplification of disability, and human relationships around disability. From these themes, the authors suggest paths toward even more strongly integrating disability studies perspectives and disabled people into accessibility research.
Since the paper’s initial publication, Mankoff joined the Allen School faculty, earned election to the SIGCHI Academy by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction and won an AccessComputing Capacity Building Award. She previously was named a Sloan Research Fellow and has earned several faculty fellowships and Best Paper Awards for her work on accessible technology.
A new endowed professorship fund named for professor Ed Lazowska honors his many technical, leadership and service contributions. Dennis Wise/University of Washington
That maxim once graced the top of Allen School professor Ed Lazowska’s homepage before he evidently decided to tone things down upon reaching his 70s. Anyone who knows Lazowska can’t imagine him actually toning anything down; as a motto, those words perfectly encapsulate the fervor with which he has approached all things related to the Allen School, the University of Washington, and the local technology community over a career spanning more than four decades. During that time, he has been one of the Puget Sound region’s most vocal champions — and among Washington students’ staunchest advocates — when it comes to expanding economic opportunity through the growth of computing education, research, entrepreneurship, and business activity in the state.
Last year, a group of technology leaders who have worked alongside Lazowska to boost the UW and greater Seattle as innovation hotspots came together to recognize his outsized impact. Peter Lee, corporate vice president of research and incubations at Microsoft, and Allen School alumnus Jeffrey Dean (Ph.D., ‘96), a Google Senior Fellow and senior vice president of Google Research and Google Health, hatched a plan to cement their friend and colleague’s legendary status to mark his 70th birthday. They teamed up with Brad Smith, president and vice chair of Microsoft, and Harry Shum, emeritus researcher at Microsoft, to make a combined $1 million gift to the UW. The purpose of their gift was to establish the Endowed Professorship in Computer Science & Engineering in Honor of Edward D. Lazowska to support the recruitment and retention of faculty who will advance the Allen School’s leadership in the field — and serve as a lasting tribute to how Lazowska has uplifted students, colleagues, and the entire computing community.
“In increasing order of importance to my life and career, Ed has been an academic colleague, teacher, mentor, and friend. And I am far from alone,” said Lee, who was a faculty member and chair at Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science Department and a DARPA Office Director before he joined Microsoft. “His direct positive influence on so many bright and ambitious minds, especially in their formative years, has had an impact on the world that will last for decades to come.”
Peter Lee (Courtesy of Microsoft)
At first, Lee and his co-conspirators kept the plan hush-hush in the hopes of being able to celebrate their gift with Lazowska in person. When the ongoing pandemic scuppered those plans, they decided instead to surprise him on his birthday with a virtual reveal. In the summer of 2020, Lee reached out to Lazowska to set up an online meeting. The latter assumed it would be a work-related discussion.
“Peter requested that we Zoom on the Saturday before my 70th birthday. When I logged on, Jeff, Brad and Harry were there, as well,” Lazowska recalled. “They told me what they had done, and what they planned to do, and I was literally in tears by the end. I can’t overstate what their friendship and support has meant to me and to the school over the years. They’ve always stepped up whenever I’ve asked for help. But this just blew my mind.”
The trajectory of UW Computer Science & Engineering itself has been mind-blowing since Lazowska’s arrival. He joined the faculty of what was then known as the Department of Computer Science — the “& Engineering” would come later — in 1977, the same year he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. His early research focused on the development of effective performance evaluation techniques to gain insights into computer system design issues. He was part of the UW team that secured the first five year, $5 million award in the National Science Foundation’s Coordinated Experimental Research Program in the early 1980s, which established the department as a leader in academic research focused on computer systems and contributed to UW’s ranking among the top 10 research-doctorate programs by the National Academies.
Later, Lazowska turned his attention to the design and implementation of distributed and parallel computer systems, for which he and his students and faculty collaborators produced a number of widely-embraced approaches to kernel and system design, including thread management, high-performance local and remote communication, load sharing, cluster computing, and the effective use of the underlying architecture by the operating system. His contributions would yield a series of firsts for the Allen School: the first faculty member to be named a Member of the National Academy of Engineering; the first Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; and the first holder of an endowed chair, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering, which he held from 2000 to 2020.
Jeff Dean (Courtesy of Google)
Lazowska’s tenure as department chair from 1993 to 2001 was characterized by a strong commitment to service and advocacy. K-12 education was a cause he felt particularly strongly about; in a partnership with Seattle Public Schools, Lazowska spearheaded the development of district-wide technology standards and assisted with raising the funds required to install school-based networks. These and other contributions at the local, state and national level would earn him the 1998 UW Outstanding Public Service Award — one of many university-based accolades Lazowska has earned during his tenure.
With the local tech scene rising in prominence, Lazowska harbored grand ambitions for UW CSE that went beyond technical excellence. When he first joined the department, the faculty numbered a grand total of 13 members — all of them men. Once freed of the day-to-day administrative burden of running an academic unit, Lazowska would direct even more of his famous energy to initiatives that would diversify the field of computing at all levels while continuing to build up the UW program in both size and stature.
By 2015, the Allen School had increased the percentage of undergraduate computer science degrees awarded to women to more than twice the national average among peer institutions. This milestone would lead the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) to recognize the school with its inaugural NEXT Award. That was a good start, but Lazowska knew the school could — and should — do more. Around that time, Dean and his wife, Heidi Hopper, reached out to Lazowska looking to support initiatives focused on broadening participation. Through their foundation, the couple bolstered the school’s efforts to intensify its outreach to underserved communities and build out an infrastructure for supporting students from diverse backgrounds once they arrive on campus. Lazowska was also a leading proponent of the Allen School’s participation in the LEAP Alliance — short for DIversifying LEAdership in the Professoriate — working with the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT and other leading computer science programs to recruit and mentor Ph.D. students from underrepresented groups to prepare them for faculty careers.
“Ed is an inspirational computer scientist and leader,” said Dean. “I have deep respect for him as an educator from our multi-year partnership working to improve computer science education and broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in computing. He has been talking about this issue for decades — and one of the many things I like about Ed is that he translates talk into action that gets results.”
From left: Ed Lazowska, Brad Smith, UW President Ana Mari Cauce and Paul G. Allen toast the creation of the Allen School in 2017. Kevin Lisota
Perhaps the most visible result of Lazowska’s action-oriented approach is a pair of state-of-the-art buildings sitting across from one another at the heart of the UW Seattle campus. The Paul G. Allen Center, which opened in 2003, offered what was then still known as the Department of Computer Science & Engineering its first state-of-the-art home, while the Bill & Melinda Gates Center, which opened in 2019, doubled the school’s space while emphasizing the undergraduate student experience. Lazowska was the driving force behind the fundraising for both, in partnership with tech community leaders. In between, he was instrumental in orchestrating the elevation of the department to a school through an endowment from Paul Allen and Microsoft.
The buildings were not a luxury but a necessity; in addition to fierce competition for faculty and research dollars, there was also the matter of where to put an increasing number of students clamoring for admission to the program. Lazowska, for his part, did whatever he could to expand the school’s capacity to serve more students. He was an early evangelist for linking the growth of the technology sector in Washington with creating career paths for Washington’s students. Armed with slide after slide projecting the dramatic growth of computing jobs in the state and nationally — and the corresponding shortage of in-state graduates to fill those jobs — Lazowska would make the case to anyone willing to listen that the future of Washington’s tech industry and of its young people depended on investing in computer science education. He was a frequent visitor to the state capitol in Olympia, where he joined forces with Smith and other local technology leaders to drive the point home.
Their message found a receptive audience. In 2012, the legislature initiated the first enrollment increase in Computer Science & Engineering at the state’s flagship university in a dozen years. That appropriation turned out to be a down payment on roughly a decade of transformational growth. As fast as the legislature could fund additional student slots, the program expanded. By 2021, the Allen School had more than doubled its degree production to more than 630 graduates per year; the school is now on track to approach 700 degrees annually within the next few years, thanks to the legislature’s support.
“Ed has always been the most effective advocate for the cause of science and technology research and education,” said Lee, “and the secret to his effectiveness is that his focus has always been on helping people to realize their dreams.”
Harry Shum (left) and Ed Lazowska at the Allen School’s 2018 graduation event, where Shum was the featured speaker. Karen Orders Photography
After Lee, Dean, Smith and Shum revealed their gift to Lazowska in the summer of 2020, they embarked on a quiet campaign to encourage a small number of others to contribute at a significant level so that the fund would be able to award multiple professorships. Since then, the school has issued a broader appeal to alumni and friends who may also wish to contribute. Lazowska has largely been kept in the dark throughout, other than being aware that the fundraising is ongoing and that members of the extended Allen School community have been invited to participate. While the school will continue to welcome contributions to the endowment in the future, the official fundraising campaign will conclude at the end of this year and the full complement of donors will be revealed. The Allen School plans to host a celebratory event in the spring.
While the initial donors hope the endowment will continue to grow, their support has already enabled the Allen School to select the recipient of the first Lazowska Professorship: Luis Ceze, a faculty member since 2007. Ceze, who began his career in computer architecture, has since expanded into software/hardware co-design, full-stack optimization of machine learning applications, and new capabilities at the intersection of computing and biology like digital data storage in synthetic DNA in partnership with researchers at Microsoft. Ceze is also co-founder and CEO of OctoML, an Allen School spinout that helps companies to accelerate deployment of machine learning applications across a range of hardware platforms and which has raised more than $130 million in venture funding to date.
“Ed is a force of nature, and he cares deeply about our students and the community,” said Magdalena Balazinska, professor and director of the Allen School. “He also always has one eye on the future, whether it be his vision in setting up the UW eScience Institute in response to the growing importance of data-intensive discovery, or his early recognition of how important cloud computing would become, or his various service roles aimed at making our discipline more welcoming and inclusive.
“Luis is similarly forward-looking, propelling our school and our field in new directions and exemplifying that spirit of collaboration, innovation, and inclusiveness which we want to amplify with this new professorship,” Balazinska continued. “I’m grateful to Peter, Jeff, Brad, and Harry for their friendship and support over the years. Their latest gift is a wonderful way to pay tribute to Ed for everything he has done for our school and for our field.”
Luis Ceze, holder of the first Endowed Professorship in Computer Science & Engineering in Honor of Edward D. Lazowska. Tara Brown Photography
As specified in the endowment agreement, the professorship will be renamed the Edward D. Lazowska Endowed Professorship in Computer Science & Engineering once its namesake retires from the UW. In the meantime, the founding donors hope that still more friends and alumni will join them in contributing to the endowment.
“It’s all totally amazing, and really moving. And in addition to being an incredible honor for me, it will be powerful in helping the Allen School to recruit and retain great faculty,” Lazowska said. “I’m deeply grateful to those who have honored me, and I’m thrilled that Luis has been awarded the first professorship. He’s emblematic of the future of the Allen School: he’s smart, he’s creative, he’s both broad and deep, he’s a wonderful colleague and collaborator, and he’s a good human being.”
As another famous maxim goes, “It takes one to know one.”
