Allen School News

“Big data can be a nightmare. Sure, it’s powerful stuff, but as anyone who’s worked with large sets of raw data knows, they can be an epic bitch to wrangle. Cleaning things up into a consistent, usable format winds up burning an extraordinary amount of time – precious hours that could be going into something far more productive. But that may be about to change.

“The issue is known among data scientists and statisticians as data transformation. And by Jeff Heer’s estimate, it can eat up anywhere between 50% and 80% of a data wrangler’s time. The University of Washington professor and longtime data visualization specialist is now the cofounder of a startup called Trifacta, which offers a web-based platform for easily transforming data sets.

“‘We’ve been trying to address this by changing the coding exercise into a sort of visual exploration,’ says Heer about Trifacta, which runs in the browser and uses behind-the-scenes algorithms to smartly reshape data without needing to code.”

Read more in Fast Company here.  Learn about Jeff’s research here. Read more →

This is the first week of UW CSE’s extensive set of summer daycamps in computing for K-12 students. This summer’s camps include:

• Two introductory sessions (including this week’s) using Processing for girls entering grades 7, 8, or 9
• Two introductory sessions using Processing for girls entering grades 10, 11, or 12
• A co-ed session in Physical Computing for students entering grades 10, 11, 12, or new college freshmen
• A co-ed session in Game Programming for students entering grades 7, 8, or 9
• Co-ed advanced offerings in Web Programming for students entering grades 7, 8, or 9, and for students entering grades 10, 11, or 12
• Co-ed Scratch Adventures for students entering grades 3 and 4, and for students entering grades 5 and 6.

Learn more here!  We’re full-up for this summer, but get on the mailing list for next summer’s camps here!

And learn more about DawgBytes, UW CSE’s diverse program of K-12 outreach activities, here. Read more →

UW News reports on work by CSE faculty members Maya Cakmak and Raj Rao and their students.

“University of Washington computer scientists have shown that crowdsourcing can be a quick and effective way to teach a robot how to complete tasks …

“The team designed a study that taps into the online crowdsourcing community to teach a robot a model-building task. To begin, study participants built a simple model – a car, tree, turtle and snake, among others – out of colored Lego blocks. Then, they asked the robot to build a similar object. But based on the few examples provided by the participants, the robot was unable to build complete models.

“To gather more input about building the objects, the robots turned to the crowd. They hired people on Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing site, to build similar models of a car, tree, turtle, snake and others. From more than 100 crowd-generated models of each shape, the robot searched for the best models to build based on difficulty to construct, similarity to the original and the online community’s ratings of the models.

“The robot then built the best models of each participant’s shape …

“The UW team is now looking at using crowdsourcing and community-sourcing to teach robots more complex tasks such as finding and fetching items in a multi-floor building. The researchers envision a future in which our personal robots will engage increasingly with humans online, learning new skills and tasks to better assist us in everyday life.”

Read more (and watch videos) here.

Science 2.0‘s version of the story, “Crowdsourcing Will Teach Robots To Become Our Future Overlords Faster,” here. Read more →

KOMO TV reports on LEVAN – “Learn Everything about Anything” – a collaboration between UW CSE professor Ali Farhadi and Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence researcher Santosh Divvala.

LEVAN is a cloud-based computer program that can teach itself everything there is to know about a visual concept, and make the results searchable for anyone to access. LEVAN operates differently than traditional search engines, because it’s designed to learn to understand the concepts behind a specific image.

Give LEVAN a try here.  Read/watch the KOMO TV report here.

KUOW FM also reported on LEVAN recently – read/listen here. Read more →

2011 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Roxana Geambasu, now on the faculty at Columbia University, is one of 14 faculty members worldwide named 2014 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows.

Roxana’s research concerns computer systems in a broad sense, including distributed systems, the Web, security and privacy, operating systems, and databases. More specifically, her current research focuses on the challenges and opportunities created by today’s emerging technologies, such as the Web, cloud computing, and powerful mobile devices.

Roxana joins a long line of UW CSE faculty members and alums who have been honored with Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowships: Ph.D. alum Emma Brunskill (faculty at Carnegie Mellon) in 2012; faculty member Shwetak Patel and Ph.D. alum Noah Snavely (faculty at Cornell) in 2011; faculty member Luis Ceze in 2009; faculty member Magda Balazinska in 2007; and postdoc alum Aaron Hertzmann in 2006.

Congratulations Roxana! Read more →

GeekWire reports:

“Linden Rhoads, who helped boost the number of startups coming out of the University of Washington over the past six years, is stepping down as vice provost of commercialization to return to private industry …

“In a related move, the UW announced that electrical engineering professor Vikram Jandhyala will assume the new role of Vice Provost of Innovation …

“Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, said that Rhoads helped usher in a new era at the University.

“‘She has done many hugely innovative things – particularly notable because she inherited an office in complete disarray due to terrible leadership by her predecessor,’ said Lazowska.

“He added that Jandhyala is a ‘gem.’  ‘The tragedy is that he has stepped down as chair of UW’s Electrical Engineering department, where he was doing a phenomenal job,’ said Lazowska. ‘The good news is that, once he made the decision to step down from EE, the Provost recruited him for this new role.'”

Read more here. Read more →

Writes Geoff Voelker‘s fellow UW CSE Ph.D. alum and fellow UC San Diego Computer Science and Engineering faculty member Stefan Savage: “I apologize that I was unable to get the photo from the award ceremony … semi-formal … in which Geoff was surrounded by all the sorority members honoring him.”

Congratulations, Geoff! Read more →

The USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award (“The Flame”) recognizes and celebrates singular contributions to the operating systems, distributed systems, and networking communities of both intellectual achievement and service.

This year’s USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award has been presented to UW CSE professor (and UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus) Tom Anderson for multiple contributions, including the Nachos operating system course project, the PlanetLab global distributed system research platform, extraordinary student mentoring, and co-founding NSDI, the USENIX Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation.

The citation reads: “The 2014 USENIX Flame Award goes to Tom Anderson. Tom has worked tirelessly to build a thriving research and USENIX community around systems building and experimental research. Tom is the embodiment of USENIX values and has carried the community forward as much as anyone. Tom receives the USENIX Flame Award for his work on mentoring students and colleagues, constructing educational tools, building research infrastructure, creating new research communities, and communicating his substantial understanding through a comprehensive textbook.”

Congratulations Tom! (Read about it on the USENIX website here.) Read more →

The USENIX Software Tools Award recognizes significant contributions to the community that reflect the spirit and character demonstrated by those who came together in the Software Tools User Group. Recipients of the award conspicuously exhibit a contribution to the reusable code-base available to all and/or the provision of a significant enabling technology to users in a widely available form.

This year’s USENIX Software Tools Award has been presented to UW CSE professor (and UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus) Tom Anderson and his colleagues Mic Bowman, David Culler, Larry Peterson, and Mothy Roscoe for the creation of PlanetLab.

The citation reads: “The 2014 STUG Award goes to Tom Anderson, Mic Bowman, David Culler, Larry Peterson, and Timothy Roscoe for PlanetLab. PlanetLab enables multiple distributed services to run over a shared, wide-area infrastructure. The PlanetLab software system introduced distributed virtualization (aka “slicing”), unbundled management (where management services run within their own slices), and chain of responsibility (mediating between slice users and infrastructure owners). The PlanetLab experimental platform consists of 1186 machines at 582 sites that run this software to enable researchers to evaluate ideas in a realistic environment and offer long-running services (e.g., content distribution networks) for real users. The PlanetLab software package has been adopted, and extended, by numerous other projects (e.g., OneLab, CoreLab, G-Lab, VINI, M-Lab, VICCI, and OpenCloud).”

Congratulations Tom (and Mic, David, Larry, and Mothy)! (Read about it on the USENIX website here.) Read more →

Google has just announced the winners of its 2014 Google Ph.D. Fellowships.

Among the 14 winners of North American fellowships are two UW CSE Ph.D. students, Vincent Liu and Robert Gens.

Vincent works with CSE faculty member Tom Anderson (and many others) in the broad area of distributed systems and networking. His projects have touched on fault-tolerance, security, data centers, wireless networks, clean-slate Internet architecture, routing/addressing, and the economic aspects of the Internet. (His undergraduate research, at the University of Texas, was in the area of compilers and parallel systems, but he saw the light.)

Rob works with CSE faculty member Pedro Domingos.  He studies deep learning (multi-layer neural networks), seeking architectural principles that will allow computers to understand the megapixels of our visual world as rapidly as we do.

Congratulations to Vincent and Rob, and thanks to Google!  (Google has been very generous in supporting UW CSE’s extraordinary students through this highly competitive program. Adrian Sampson was a 2013 winner. Tom Bergan was a 2011 winner. Roxana Geambasu and Mike Piatek were 2009 winners.)

See the Google announcement here. Read more →