Allen School News Archive

At today’s Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, UW CSE Ph.D. alum Roxana Geambasu – now a faculty member at Columbia University – was recognized along with the other recipients of 2014 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowships.

Congratulations Roxana!

  Read more →

In July 17 testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Google’s Vint Cerf states:

• Basic and applied research go hand-in-hand, informing and stimulating each other in a never-ending Yin and Yang of partnership.
• Research takes time.
• It’s risky – there are no guarantees.
• Failure is the handmaiden of wisdom in the scientific world: when we make predictions or build systems based on our theoretical models, we must be prepared for and learn from our failures.
• Computers, computation, networking and information sharing have become essential parts of the research landscape.
• Computer science should be treated on a par with biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics in K-12 and undergraduate curricula.
• Vannever Bush got it exactly right in his landmark report: Science, The Endless Frontier. Science is an endless frontier. The more we learn, the more we know we don’t know, and the more we must dedicate ourselves to learning and knowing more.

Read Vint’s full testimony here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Pedro Domingos has just been named as the recipient of the KDD 2014 Innovation Award, the highest award for technical excellence in the field of data mining and data science.

Pedro was recognized “for his foundational research in data stream analysis, cost-sensitive classification, adversarial learning, and Markov logic networks.”

Pedro carried out some of the earliest research on mining data streams – his VFML toolkit is one of the best open-source resources for stream mining.  Another key contribution was the MetaCost algorithm, perhaps the most widely used algorithm for cost-sensitive classification.  He was a pioneer in social network mining, where he defined the influence maximization problem and proposed the first algorithms for it.  Another area that he pioneered is adversarial learning – important in areas such as spam filtering, fraud detection and counter-terrorism, where the people being modeled by the learning system modify their behavior adversarially in response to the system.  He also pioneered the use of machine learning methods in information integration.  Most recently Pedro has led the field of statistical multi-relational learning, which is essential for a mature science of knowledge discovery; he proposed Markov logic networks as a means to unify first-order logic and probabilistic graphical models, a formalism that forms the basis of research by many different groups, and of the open-source Alchemy system.

Congratulations Pedro!

Read the KDD press release here. Read more →

Many thanks to Tony DeRose for hosting 250 UW CSE alums and friends – plus faculty members Ali Farhadi, Dan Grossman, Ed Lazowska, Hank Levy, and Barbara Mones, and staff members Casey Amundson, Kay Beck-Benton, Anne Fitzmaurice-Adams, Lara Littlefield, and Sergey Smirnov – at Pixar on the evening of Thursday July 10.

It was a phenomenal evening, and a great chance to reconnect!

Looking forward to next year! Read more →

NerdWallet ranking

GeekWire reports on NerdWallet’s new ranking of best places for tech jobs – San Jose and Seattle are head-and-shoulders above the rest.

Seattle or San Jose? You make the call!

See the GeekWire post here.

  Read more →

UW News describes research by CSE’s James Fogarty and his collaborators Daniel Epstein, Felicia Cordeiro, Elizabeth Bales, and Sean Munson:

“Smartphone apps can track where we eat our meals, when we commute to and from work and how many minutes we exercise each day. Ten thousand steps today? Check.

“More people are opting to use their phones as “life-logging” devices, but is the data they collect actually useful? Massive amounts of information showing your life patterns over a week, month or year are going untapped because these applications don’t have a way to interpret the data over the long term.

“University of Washington researchers have developed visual tools to help self-trackers understand their daily activity patterns over a longer period and in more detail than current life-logging programs can offer. Their study found that people generally had an easier time meeting personal fitness and activity goals when they could see their data presented in a broader, more visual way.”

Read the article here.  Read the research paper here. Read more →

The under-representation of women in computer science is well known. UW CSE is a leader among major departments in addressing this. The chart to the right shows the proportion of Computer Science bachelors degrees granted to women by UW CSE, compared to the national average for all departments (reported by NSF), and for those departments that, like UW CSE, grant the Ph.D. (reported by the Computing Research Association).

We have a long way still to go, but focus pays off.

To learn more, read an article from Computer here. Read more →

“Feed the Future has been piloting cutting-edge software, called the Open Data Kit (ODK), to improve its survey data collection methods, and in the process, has generated a number of lessons learned that are being integrated back into the open-source system for the benefit of future users. ODK provides a set of tools used to author, field, and manage mobile data collection. Using this new system for conducting population-based surveys (PBS) on Android 7″ tablets, the project was able to scale its scope of collection significantly. The data collection forms with ODK used almost 3300 variables, spread across 19 modules, with well over 1000 built-in edit checks.

“The project’s work with ODK is just one example of USAID’s public commitment to develop and scale innovation through strategic partnerships with the private sector. Within USAID Forward, smarter data use is placed center stage in the Agency’s efforts to increase transparency, collaboration, and impact.”

Read more here.  Learn more about ODK here.  Find out about ODK-related UW CSE startup Nafundi here. Read more →

A superb commentary in the Seattle Times:

“Remaining globally competitive will require all of us to work together. We can begin by asking ourselves some challenging questions:

“Why can’t we transform our education system to prepare all kids for the global economy?

“Why can’t our region lead the country in math, science and engineering degrees?

“Why can’t the Puget Sound find new ways to stimulate research and innovation?

“Other regions are answering these questions with smart investments and innovative programs.

“Why not us?”

Read more here. Read more →

UW CSE @ Pixar, Thursday July 10 at 6 p.m.

Bay Area alums and friends of UW CSE – please join us!  Registration required – register here.

• 6:00 – mix and mingle
• 6:45 – program in the Steve Jobs Theater, including a showing of “Party Central,” Pixar’s newest short
• 7:30 – tours every 15 minutes

Food, drink, and good fellowship with CSE faculty, staff, and fellow Bay Area alums and friends!

Please register and join us!

  Read more →