Allen School News

The cover article in this month’s Communications of the ACM describes UW CSE’s “Moving Portraits” research by Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Eli Shechtman, Rahul Garg, and Steve Seitz:

“We present an approach for generating face animations from large image collections of the same person. Such collections, which we call photobios, are remarkable in that they summarize a person’s life in photos; the photos sample the appearance of a person over changes in age, pose, facial expression, hairstyle, and other variations … By optimizing the quantity and order in which photos are displayed and cross dissolving between them, we can render smooth transitions between face pose (e.g., from frowning to smiling), and create moving portraits from collections of still photos”

Read the article – which includes a terrific video – here.  (Direct link to the video here.)

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“Test of Time” awards – which are given in a number of fields of computer science – are highly valued because they recognize the research that, with a decade of hindsight, has had the greatest impact.

The UW CSE research paper “Measuring ISP Topologies with Rocketfuel” by Neil Spring, Ratul Mahajan, and David Wetherall has just been named co-recipient of the 2014 ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award.  The paper was presented at the 2002 ACM SIGCOMM conference; Neil, now a faculty member at the University of Maryland, was a UW CSE Ph.D. student at the time; Ratul, now a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, was also a UW CSE Ph.D. student; David was a UW CSE faculty member.

According to the citation: “Rocketfuel contributed methods to make efficient measurements for ascertaining Internet router-level topologies,  useful for the modeling and simulation of routing, transport protocols, and graph evolution, to name a few areas. In addition, this effort produced a dataset used by a number of subsequent efforts. One recent (2011) text describes this dataset as: ‘the most trustable existing dataset for Internet service provider (ISP) networks.'”

Congratulations to Neil, Ratul, and David! Read more →

Ed Lazowska subjects himself to the ice bucket challenge at the hands of Madrona Venture Group’s Jerry Grinstein, and challenges his witnesses, Congressman Derek Kilmer and Senator Maria Cantwell. Read more →

The NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative will transform certain aspects of oceanography from expedition-based to observatory-based.

The centerpiece of OOI is the regional cabled observatory – 1000 km of fiber optic cable deployed on the Juan de Fuca plate off the coast of Washington and Oregon, strung with  thousands of chemical, physical, biological, and image sensors.

Check out live and archived video from the VISIONS’ 14 Expedition – completing construction of the cabled observatory from UW’s R.V. Thompson – here. Read more →

UW News writes:

“It’s a daily routine for many transit riders in the Seattle area: Pull out your smartphone, check the OneBusAway app, then decide whether you need to sprint to the bus stop or can afford that last sip of coffee. The application, developed at the University of Washington, uses real-time data to track when your bus is actually going to arrive.

“But for many blind and low-vision riders, knowing when the bus will arrive isn’t always enough. Crucial information like where the stop is in relation to the intersection and whether there is a shelter or bench sometimes can make the difference between an independent commute and a frustrating experience.

“UW computer scientists have created a program called StopInfo that integrates with OneBusAway and provides specific information on location, safety features and stop closures for each bus stop in King County. In particular, it seeks to collect and share information that blind people have identified as important when they ride the bus. It relies on bus riders using the OneBusAway application to update and provide information about each stop.”

Read more here. Read more →

A brochure celebrating UW CSE’s 2014 faculty hires:

• Alvin Cheung, Data Management, Programming Languages and Systems
• Yejin Choi, Natural Language Processing
• Franzi Roesner, Security and Privacy
• Noah Smith, Natural Language Processing
• Emina Torlak, Programming Languages and Software Engineering
• Xi Wang, Systems, Programming Languages and Security

The world according to Hank:

Six new hires — on top of ten new hires in the preceding two years — reinforce UW Computer Science & Engineering’s position among the very best programs in the nation, and establish leadership positions in several key areas of the field.

Complementing our recent game-changing hires in Machine Learning, “Big Data,” Computer Vision, and other areas, this year’s hires build upon existing strength to create a world-class Natural Language Processing Group at UW, and to provide outstanding new talent across already strong core areas of Systems, Security, Data Management, Programming Languages, and Software Engineering. These hires create enormous collaboration opportunities among the new hires themselves, with existing faculty, in the greater university, and with our many close colleagues at organizations such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and the Institute for Systems Biology that make Seattle an amazing place for computing research.

Located in one of the world’s most vibrant high-tech regions, UW CSE is committed not only to leadership in core computer science, but also to leadership in research and education with direct impact on national and global challenges — challenges such as education, energy, biology, healthcare, transportation, scientific discovery, and the use of technology in developing regions. UW CSE has achieved great success and impact through activities that make technology better, and through activities motivated by how innovations are put to work.

Our recent growth, coupled with Seattle’s growth as a dynamic center of creativity and innovation, make it a particularly exciting time for Computer Science & Engineering at University of Washington. We fully expect that it will only get better!

Check it out here. Read more →

Seattle’s Holy Names Academy – the oldest continuously operating K-12 school in Washington – has sent a steady stream of outstanding students to UW CSE: Allie Rutherford and Krysta Yousoufian graduated from UW CSE in 2011; Jenny Abrahamson and Cristine Acuario in 2012; Ally Gale in 2013; Jennifer Apacible in 2014; Micaela Montstream, Karolina Pyszkiewicz, Abby Gray, and Madeline Wessels are currently in the program.

CSE’s Ed Lazowska spoke to the Holy Names teachers this morning on “Why Computer Science? Why UW CSE?” Slides here. Read more →

Annually, MIT Technology Review recognizes 35 technology innovators under the age of 35 with TR35 Awards. Hundreds of nominees are reduced to fewer than 100 finalists by the MIT Technology Review editors. A panel of judges rates the finalists on the originality and impact of their work. Finally, the editors take the judges’ scores into account to select the final group of TR35 Award winners.

The TR35 Award competition has always been very good to UW CSE faculty and alums, but even in that context, 2014 is special. This year’s awardees include:

• UW CSE professor Shyam Gollakota
• UW CSE bachelors alums Kuang Chen and Kurtis Heimerl. Kuang received his UW CSE bachelors degree in 2003, Kurtis in 2007. Both entered UC Berkeley’s Ph.D. program, where they worked with Berkeley professor and 2007 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Tapan Parikh, who himself received a TR35 Award in 2007, as well as being named the TR35 Humanitarian of the Year. (Tapan, Kuang, and Kurtis all work in the area of information technology for developing regions.)  Got that?  Two 2007 UW CSE bachelors alums win 2014 TR35 Awards, working with a 2007 UW CSE Ph.D. alum who won a TR35 Award and the TR35 “Humanitarian of the Year” Award in 2007.

Read the TR-35 writeups on these amazing members of the UW CSE famiily:

Shyam: “An expert on wireless technology figures out how to power devices without batteries.” (UW News article on Shyam’s selection here.)

Kuang: “A novel way to get data off paper records and into the digital age.”

Kurtis: “Inexpensive boxes could help bring mobile coverage to the billion people who lack it.”

Members of the UW CSE family previously recognized in recent years with TR35 Awards include:

• 2013: UW CSE adjunct professor Julie Kientz
• 2012: UW CSE adjunct professor Abie Flaxman
• 2011: UW CSE Ph.D. alum Noah Snavely
• 2010: UW CSE Ph.D. alum Scott Saponas
• 2009: UW CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Bigham, UW CSE professor Jeff Heer, UW CSE professor Shwetak Patel, and UW CSE Ph.D. alum Adrien Treuille
• 2008: UW CSE affiliate professor Meredith Ringel Morris
• 2007: UW CSE professor Yoshi Kohno, UW CSE Ph.D. alum Karen Liu, UW CSE Ph.D. alum and affiliate professor Tapan Parikh (also named “Humanitarian of the Year”), and UW CSE affiliate professor Desney Tan

Congratulations to Shyam, Kuang, and Kurtis! (All 35 2014 winners listed here.) Read more →

We live in a data-driven world. Many of the Web services, mobile apps, and third parties we interact with daily are collecting immense amounts of information about us – every location, click, search, email, document, and site that we visit. And they are using all of this information for various purposes. Some uses of these uses might be beneficial for us (e.g., recommendations for new videos or songs to see); other uses may not be as beneficial. The problem is that we have limited visibility into how our data is being used, and hence we are vulnerable to potential abuses.

For example, did you know that credit companies might be adjusting loan offers based on your Facebook data? Or that certain travel companies used to discriminate prices based on user profile and location? Or that some companies target ads on illness-related emails, and if you click on them, you can leak sensitive information to them?

Steve Lohr writes in the New York Times:

“The web today is a big black box,’ said Roxana Geambasu, an assistant professor of computer science at Columbia University [and a 2011 UW CSE Ph.D. alumna]. ‘What’s needed is transparency.’

“Ms. Geambasu; another assistant professor at Columbia, Augustin Chaintreau, and a team of graduate students, led by Mathias Lecuyer, have come up with a tool that addresses the data transparency challenge. It is called XRay, and they will present a paper and explain their early research results on Wednesday at the Usenix Security Symposium in San Diego …

“XRay is essentially a reverse-engineering machine that models the correlations made by web services. The group’s three initial efforts have tried to determine the kinds of ads shown to Gmail users based on the text in their email messages; the product recommendations Amazon shows users based on their wish lists and other data; and the video recommendations made by YouTube determined by the videos users have previously viewed.”

Read more here. See a video of Roxana discussing the system in a Columbia University press release here. Visit the project web page here. Read more →

Steve Lohr writes in the New York Times:

“Technology revolutions come in measured, sometimes foot-dragging steps. The lab science and marketing enthusiasm tend to underestimate the bottlenecks to progress that must be overcome with hard work and practical engineering.

“The field known as ‘big data’ offers a contemporary case study. The catchphrase stands for the modern abundance of digital data from many sources … Its promise is smarter, data-driven decision-making in every field. That is why data scientist is the economy’s hot new job …

“Yet far too much handcrafted work … is still required …

“Several start-ups are trying to break through these big data bottlenecks by developing software to automate the gathering, cleaning and organizing of disparate data …

“‘It’s an absolute myth that you can send an algorithm over raw data and have insights pop up,’ said Jeffrey Heer, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington and a co-founder of Trifacta, a start-up based in San Francisco …

“Data formats are one challenge, but so is the ambiguity of human language. Iodine, a new health start-up, gives consumers information on drug side effects and interactions. Its lists, graphics and text descriptions are the result of combining the data from clinical research, government reports and online surveys of people’s experience with specific drugs …

“Data experts try to automate as many steps in the process as possible. ‘But practically, because of the diversity of data, you spend a lot of your time being a data janitor, before you can get to the cool, sexy things that got you into the field in the first place,’ said Matt Mohebbi, a data scientist and co-founder of Iodine [and a 2004 UW CSE alum].”

Read more here.

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