Allen School News

In the article “Engineering improvements for the world,” the Washington Post notes:

“It may be true that engineers are producing sometimes-myopic inventions. But something else is happening that is getting little attention.

“In labs around the world, a new generation of engineers is emerging. They are men and women concerned by the gulf between rich and poor and by environmental changes and resource depletion. They are what we call ‘development engineers’ – engineers (and often economics, business and social science majors, as well) who are dedicated to using engineering and technology to improve the lot of the world’s poorest people …

“The Open Data Kit, designed by engineers at the University of Washington [in collaboration with Google, by a team of students led by UW CSE faculty member Gaetano Borriello] is allowing hundreds of international development organizations to use mobile devices to collect critical data.

“This year, six of the 35 technology innovators recognized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s prestigious 35 under 35 list were development engineers [including UW CSE Bachelors alums Kuang Chen and Kurtis Heimerl, who were advised in their UC Berkeley Ph.D. studies by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Tapan Parikh, a previous TR35 winner for his groundbreaking UW Ph.D. work on development engineering].”

Read more here. Read more →

This evening, UW CSE hosted a “sendoff reception” for several dozen undergraduate and graduate students who will be attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing later in the week. The reception was attended by these students, CSE’s ever-growing cadre of woman faculty members, and several dozen woman alums from the region.  Many thanks to Madrona Venture Group’s Julie Sandler for providing inspiring remarks as part of the program!

Want to learn about CSE’s efforts to increase the representation of women and other groups?  We describe them here. Read more →

Congratulations to Simon Peter, Jialin Li, Irene Zhang, Dan R.K. Ports, Doug Woos, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson, and Timothy Roscoe – authors of Arrakis: The Operating System is the Control Plane, just named one of three Best Papers of this week’s 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI).

“In Arrakis, we ask the question whether we can remove the OS kernel entirely from normal application execution. The kernel only sets up the execution environment and interacts with an application in rare cases where resources need to be reallocated or name conflicts need to be resolved. The application gets the full power of the unmediated hardware, through an application-specific library linked into the application address space. This allows for unprecedented OS customizability, reliability and performance. Interesting research questions arise in this scenario.”

More information on Arrakis here. Read more →

A wonderful NPR report on the women who launched the world of software. It was stimulated by Walter Isaacson’s new book The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, in which he tells many of these stories.

“Decades ago, it was women who pioneered computer programming …”

Read/listen here. Read more →

“Reports over the weekend that Tesla could be the latest carmaker to add autonomous features to its products is being greeted with excitement, but experts remain concerned that the new industry technology could be susceptible to sinister cybercriminal activity …

“Analysts are keen to point out an academic paper dating from back in 2011 when researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California-San Diego were able to wirelessly hack into cars. This led to the auto industry ‘waking up’ to the security threat, according to Juliussen, who adds that auto manufacturers and their suppliers are now doing research and acquiring expertise.

“‘It will take several years until the results show up in the cars,’ he said.”

Be afraid!  Be very afraid!  Read more here.  Learn about the research here. Read more →

“Sound Startups” – A phenomenal KIRO 7 30-minute profile of the Puget Sound region’s startup ecosystem:

• Bill Mitchell / PicoBrew
• Dan Shapiro / Robot Turtles
• Shwetak Patel (CSE faculty) / SNUPI Technologies + Wally
• A stroll through Fremont
• Elissa Fink / Tableau
• Mike Young (UW President) / UW’s Startup Hall
• Amy Ko and Jake Wobbrock (CSE adjunct faculty, iSchool faculty) / AnswerDash
• Jeremy Jaech (CSE alum, UW Regent) / serial entrepreneurship (and some wonderful comments on the role of UW and UW CSE)
• Rich Barton / serial entrepreneurship, plus Zillow
• Julie Sandler / Madrona Venture Group (funder of more than a dozen CSE startups)
• Ed Lazowska (CSE faculty) / periodic commentary

Must watch – here!

[Update: GeekWire writes “There’s a lot of cool stuff percolating in Seattle’s startup scene, stories that we cover each day here at GeekWire. But every so often it’s cool to step outside and see how the traditional media perceives this growing part of the economy … University of Washington computer science professor Ed Lazowska appears in the video, noting that there are more software engineers in Seattle than Silicon Valley. He also notes the collaborative nature of the community in the Pacific Northwest tech industry, which has spawned companies such as fast-growing Tableau. The report also features the UW’s effort to spark more innovation in the University District via ‘Startup Hall'” – here.] Read more →

“SeaFlow, a research instrument developed in the lab of UW School of Oceanography director Ginger Armbrust, analyzes 15,000 marine microorganisms per second, generating up to 15 gigabytes of data every single day of a typical multi-week-long oceanographic research cruise.

“UW professor of astronomy Andy Connolly is preparing for the unveiling of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will map the entire night sky every three days and produce about 100 petabytes of raw data about our universe over the course of 10 years. (One petabyte of music in MP3 format would take 2,000 years to play.)

“What scientists like Armbrust and Connolly have is popularly known as “big data,” and as rich and exciting as it can be, big data can also be a big problem.

“‘Every field of discovery is transitioning from data-poor to data-rich, and the people doing the research don’t have the wherewithal to cope with this data deluge,’ says Ed Lazowska, director of the UW’s eScience Institute …

“And now, the eScience team – the core team includes faculty from 12 departments representing five schools and colleges – is poised to scale way up. Last year, the UW won a five-year, $37.8 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that will be shared with New York University and the University of California, Berkeley, to foster a data science culture at the three universities …

“‘We don’t want this to be a magic trick that only computer scientists know how to do,’ [eScience Institute Associate Director Bill] Howe says. ‘It should be something that everybody can do.'”

Read more in html or pdf. Read more →

Here’s a wonderful new booklet from the National Academy of Engineering, celebrating its 50th anniversary by highlighting the past, present, and future of engineering.  Wonderful stories, photographs, and ideas – many with computer science center-stage.  Check it out here. Read more →

Many thanks to David Dawson (CSE ’06; StashRewards), Will Pittman (CSE ’08; DocuSign), Claire Suver (CSE ’09; Amazon); Becky Tucker (our Microsoft recruiter), and Tony Vigil (CSE ’06, Disney Interactive) for a fantastic “employer panel.”

Next event: resume review workshop, October 6 in the Atrium! Read more →

“Sound Startups,” a new 30-minute special airing this Saturday, October 4th at 7:30pm, on KIRO 7 Eyewitness News, showcases Seattle and Puget Sound as a leading region for innovation. Our startup community is hot – and growing fast. This Saturday, KIRO will talk to some of the most innovative minds in Seattle and learn about new businesses thriving in the Puget Sound region.

“Sound Startups” airs Saturday, October 4 at 7:30pm (PST) and Saturday, October 11 at 8:30pm (PST) on KIRO 7 Eyewitness News.

UW, UW CSE, and UW CSE startups are featured prominently!

Here’s the original promo for the series.

Here’s the most recent announcement.

(The show will be live-streamed and web-archived, in addition to broadcast.) Read more →