Allen School News Archive

“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 →

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation joined last year with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in a process that ultimately selected the University of Washington, UC Berkeley, and New York University as partners in a 5-year, $38.7 million collaborative effort to advance data-intensive discovery.

The Moore Foundation has just announced the results of a subsequent competition to identify leading individual researchers as “Data-Driven Discovery Investigators,” funded at $1.5 million each. From an original field of more than 1,000 pre-proposals, roughly 100 researchers were invited to submit full proposals. 28 of these were invited to participate in a workshop, after which 14 were selected as recipients of $1.5 million Moore Foundation Data-Driven Discovery Investigator Awards – including UW CSE professor Jeff Heer.

Jeff is a data visualization expert – his research group investigates the perceptual, cognitive, and social factors involved in making sense of large data collections, and develops novel interactive systems for visual analysis and communication.

Congratulations to Jeff, and also to UW CSE Ph.D. alum and Stanford (boo!) faculty member Chris Re, also selected as a Moore Foundation DDDI award recipient.

Learn more about Jeff and his research here. Read the Moore Foundation announcement here. Profiles of all 14 DDDI award recipients are here.  Read the UW press release here. Read more →

“New RFID technology helps robots find household objects” is the actual headline of this University of Washington and Georgia Institute of Technology press release describing the work of UW CSE and EE faculty member Matt Reynolds.

If a PR2 takes as long to find car keys as it does to fold laundry, we have three words for you: “Take the bus.”

Actually, we have three additional words for you: “Read more here.”

Addendum: The research paper describing this work – “Finding and Navigating to Household Objects with UHF RFID Tags by Optimizing RF Signal Strength” by Travis Deyle, Matt Reynolds, and Charlie Kemp – was one of 3 Finalists (out of over 1,600 papers submitted) for the IROS 2014 Robocup Best Paper Award! Read more →

Including … “The University of Washington has invested deeply in its computer science program and recently spent $1.5 million to remodel their Startup Hall.”

Read more here. Read more →

Beautiful Sieg Hall – home of UW Computer Science & Engineering from 1975-2003 – has been the subject of postcards, the backdrop for Vietnam war protests, the victim of crumbling concrete, the site of an invasion by vines, and, most recently, home to a hornet’s nest. What’s next? Stay tuned! Read more →

GraphLab VP Marketing Johnnie Konstantas, Chief Architect Yucheng Low, VP Engineering Sethu Raman, and Co-Founder and CEO (and UW CSE Amazon Professor of Machine Learning) Carlos Guestrin

CSE startup GraphLab inaugurated its new office space in Fremont last week. The Seattle Times writes:

“Big-data analytics startup GraphLab may need to use its number-crunching software to manage its seating chart.

“After outgrowing a series of incubation spaces at the University of Washington, the company is now filling up a standalone space down the canal in Fremont …

“GraphLab makes software that companies can use to build predictive applications – the kind that analyze huge data collections to figure out what people are likely to shop for, where crime may occur or what kind of music people may like to hear next. Early users include Zillow, Zynga, Adobe and Exxon.”

Read more here.  Learn about the company here. Read more →

UW News writes:

“With almost all of the U.S. population armed with cellphones – and close to 80 percent carrying a smartphone – mobile phones have become second-nature for most people.

“What’s coming next, say University of Washington researchers, is the ability to interact with our devices not just with touchscreens, but through gestures in the space around the phone. Some smartphones are starting to incorporate 3-D gesture sensing based on cameras, for example, but cameras consume significant battery power and require a clear view of the user’s hands.

“UW engineers have developed a new form of low-power wireless sensing technology that could soon contribute to this growing field by letting users ‘train’ their smartphones to recognize and respond to specific hand gestures near the phone.

“The technology – developed in the labs of Matt Reynolds and Shwetak Patel, UW associate professors of electrical engineering and of computer science and engineering – uses the phone’s wireless transmissions to sense nearby gestures, so it works when a device is out of sight in a pocket or bag and could easily be built into future smartphones and tablets.”

Read more here.  Learn more about the project here.  (In addition to Matt and Shwetak, project members are graduate students Chen Zhao, Ke-Yu Chen, and Md Tanvir Islam Aumi.) Read more →