Allen School News Archive

The IEEE Milestones in Electrical Engineering and Computing program honors significant technical achievements in all areas associated with IEEE.  It is a program of the IEEE History Committee, administered through the IEEE History Center.

IEEE has formally approved a Milestone recognizing UW CSE alumnus Gary Kildall for the creation of CP/M.  The Milestone plaque will be installed in the sidewalk at 801 Lighthouse Avenue in Pacific Grove CA, home of Gary’s Digital Research office, in a ceremony on April 25 2014.  The plaque will read:

Birth of the PC Operating System, 1974

Dr. Gary A. Kildall demonstrated the first working prototype of CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) in Pacific Grove in 1974. Together with his invention of the BIOS (Basic Input Output System), Kildall’s operating system allowed a microprocessor-based computer to communicate with a disk drive storage unit and provided the software foundation for the personal computer revolution.

As a student at the University of Washington, Gary received three degrees: a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics in 1967, a Master’s degree in Computer Science in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1972. He was hired as an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, and later joined Intel Corporation to write programming tools for the Intel 4004 microprocessor.

A pioneer in the computer revolution, Gary developed CP/M, which became the dominant microcomputer operating system of the 1970s. He was one of the first people to recognize that even the early, simple microprocessors could support a complete minicomputer-style operating system, and he created an editor, assembler, linker, and loader, along with the first file system to use floppy disks as a general-purpose storage medium. As personal computers began to be used, he saw that their true potential would be in connectivity, so he developed extensions to CP/M that let computers share files and peripheral devices over a network.

Gary’s company, Digital Research, Inc., introduced operating systems with windowing capability, preemptive multitasking, and menu-driven user interfaces years before Apple and Microsoft. He also created the first practical open-system architecture, which allowed operating systems and application programs to be independent of the specific machines on which they ran. A firm believer that life and work should be fun, Gary also developed an early computer-based arcade game as well as precursors to current interactive multimedia.

Gary passed away in 1994, at the age of 52.  Recognition of his extraordinary accomplishments has increased with his inclusion in the wonderful 2004 book and PBS television series They Made America – brief excerpt from the detailed Kildall chapter here. Previous tributes here, here, and here. Recent Facebook tribute page, “Legacy of Gary Kildall,” here.

(Interesting bit of history:  Tim Paterson, whose QDOS was purchased by Microsoft as the foundation for MS-DOS when IBM came knocking, also is a UW CSE alumnus – B.S. ’78. So whichever OS IBM chose, it was going to be an OS written by a UW CSE alumnus.) Read more →

The paper “Characterizing Processor Architectures for Programmable Network Interfaces,” which appeared in the International Conference on Supercomputing in 2000, is one of 35 papers selected for inclusion in the retrospective volume 25 Years of the International Conference on Supercomputing.

The selection committee considered the 100 most cited papers out of approximately 1,800 papers published in the ICS proceedings between 1987 and 2011, selecting the 35 most influential.

Congratulations to authors Patrick Crowley (then a UW CSE Ph.D. student, now a professor at Washington University), Marc Fiuczynski (then a UW CSE Ph.D. student, now Principal Architect at Akamai Technologies), Jean-Loup Baer (then a UW CSE faculty member, now emeritus), and Brian Bershad (then a UW CSE faculty member, now with Google). Read more →

Tracy’s the one in green, next to President Young

We’ve been wondering what Allen Center building manager Tracy Erbeck was doing down in the Allen Center loading dock area at lunchtime every day.  And those klunky things sitting on her desk didn’t look quite like curling stones.

Now we know.

Tracy joined University of Washington President Michael Young, his wife Marti Young, and more than 1,000 of their closest friends today in an attempt to set a Guinness record for the World’s Largest Kettlebell Workout – part of UW’s “Whole U” employee engagement initiative.

(If it was Kettlecorn, we’d be there with her …) Read more →

“Earlier this month, as Google was snatching up the smart-thermostat maker Nest for $3.2 billion, a lesser known home sensor company made its own announcement. SNUPI Technologies, a Seattle startup, said it had garnered $7.5 million in funding. That might be pocket change compared to the Nest deal, but it was a significant endorsement just ahead of SNUPI’s first product launch: a low-power wireless sensor network called WallyHome that tracks humidity, water leaks, and temperature throughout a building.”

SNUPI’s “parents” are UW CSE+EE faculty members Shwetak Patel and Matt Reynolds, UW EE graduating Ph.D. student Gabe Cohn, and UW CSE alum Jeremy Jaech.

Read more in MIT Technology Review here.  Learn more about SNUPI here. Read more →

Seattle is the site of Twitter’s first organically grown engineering office away from the mother ship (the company’s Boston and New York City outposts resulted from acquisitions).

Chris Fry, Twitter’s Senior VP of Engineering, and Raffi Krikorian, VP of Platform Engineering, flew up to Seattle this week to check out the new digs.

Krikorian tells GeekWire that Twitter has always hired people from the Seattle area, so it was only natural to open up a permanent office here. “A lot of people come from the major technology companies here, and we also love University of Washington grads.”

Fry says “Seattle has all the right ingredients: Major tech companies, great universities and a startup scene that does a ton of innovation.”

Read more in GeekWire here. Read more →

T4A (Tech for America) is a non-partisan organization that is creating a network of entrepreneurs committed to redefining the public/private sector relationship. At T4A’s TechTables, current and former elected officials and tech industry thought leaders engage in substantive dialogue in safe, off-the-record, non-partisan settings.

UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska, a member of the Seattle Convening Board of T4A, is profiled in an interview this week:

“T4A: Just about everyone (regardless of political affiliation) sees a large gap between our politics (Washington DC as well as state capitals) and the reality on the issues we face as a country. Why do you think that is? I know it’s a tough question, but what do you think can be done to close that gap?

“EL: The word ‘reality’ is critically important. Partisanship has caused us to lose our grip on reality. Not long ago, residents of the 34 OECD nations were surveyed to learn their response to the statement, ‘Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.’ Rounding to the nearest 5%, the statement was believed to be true by three quarters of those surveyed in Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, France, Japan, the UK, Norway, Belgium, Spain, and Germany. Among respondents in the US, only 40% believed the statement to be true! 40% believed it to be flat-out false, and 20% were not sure. The US was next to last among the 34 OECD nations in the proportion who believed the statement to be true – ahead of only Turkey. This sort of skepticism/ignorance is not restricted to evolution, of course – another example is global warming and climate change. I’m going to say something that sounds really partisan: the aspect of the Bush presidency that will have the longest-lasting negative impact is the manipulation of science and the exploitation of science skepticism/ignorance for political ends. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan had been fond of saying, ‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts.’

“T4A: Are political parties becoming less relevant today, particularly for young adults? Whatever your answer, why do you think that is?

“EL: Of course. Political redistricting has led to extremism. (I happen not to believe that this extremism is equally distributed across the political spectrum, but let’s not get into that.) That’s why T4A.org – off-the-record conversations about issues that really should not be partisan – is so important. At one of our TechTables, the guest said that there are easily 70 Senators who could agree on sane immigration revisions and sane tax/budget revisions if they could do so behind closed doors. Somehow we need to create ‘safe places for people to stand’ if we’re to make progress. At the same time, we need to put a stop to the sort of ‘fair and balanced’ approach that gives equal weight to conflicting positions even when one of them is clearly based on a distortion of the evidence.”

Read more here. Read more →

“Catch and Release,” the 2011 animated short produced by students in the digital animation capstone course sequence directed by UW CSE’s Barbara Mones, will be shown at Children’s Film Festival Seattle on the evening of Saturday February 1.

Learn more about “Catch and Release” and other UW Animation Research Labs shorts here.  Purchase tickets to the CFFS showing here. Read more →

UW CSE robotics faculty (Maya Cakmak, Dieter Fox, Raj Rao, Josh Smith (joint with EE), and Emo Todorov (joint with Applied Mathematics)) and their students have 14(!) papers accepted at this year’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the major conference in robotics. The research cover a large variety of areas in robotics, including biologically inspired microrobots, optimal control, computer vision, human robot interaction, machine learning, hardware design, and manipulation.  The papers:

• A Wirelessly Powered, Biologically Inspired Ambulatory Microrobot. M. Karpelson, B. Waters, B. Goldberg, B. Mahoney, O. Ozcan, A. Baisch, P.-M. Meyitang, J.R. Smith, R. Wood.
• Accelerating Imitation Learning through Crowdsourcing. M. Chung, M. Forbes, Maya Cakmak, R.P.N. Rao.
• Analytically-Invertible Dynamics with Contacts and Constraints: Theory and Implementation in MuJoCo. E. Todorov.
• Control-Limited Differential Dynamic Programming. Y. Tassa, N. Mansard, E. Todorov.
• Real-Rime Behavior Synthesis for Dynamic Hand Manipulation. V. Kumar, Y. Tassa, T. Erez, E. Todorov.
• Design, Optimization, Calibration and a Case Study of a 3D-Printed, Low-Cost Fingertip Sensor for Robotic Manipulation. Z. Xu, S. Kolev, E. Todorov.
• Learning Predictive Models of a Depth Camera and Manipulator from Raw Execution Traces. B. Boots, A. Byravan, D. Fox.
•  Space-Time Functional Gradient Optimization for Motion Planning. A. Byravan, B. Boots, S. Srinivasa, D. Fox.
• Multi-Task Policy Search for Robotics. M. Deisenroth, P. Englert, J. Peters, D. Fox.
• Toward Online 3D Object Segmentation and Mapping. E. Herbst, P. Henry, D. Fox.
• Unsupervised Feature Learning for 3D Scene Labeling. K. Lai, L. Bo, D. Fox.
• ST-HMP: Unsupervised Spatio-Temporal Feature Learning for Tactile Data. M. Madry, L. Bo, D. Kragic, D. Fox.
• Hierarchical Sparse Coded Surface Models. M. Ruhnke, L. Bo, D. Fox, W. Burgard.
• Learning to Identify New Objects. Y. Sun, L. Bo, D. Fox.

Go team! Read more →

UW’s AccessComputing – the Alliance for Access to Computing Careers – has worked with code.org to make their inspirational videos accessible to blind students by adding audio description. Audio description provides additional audio to the video to describe what is visually happening.  The added audio is in a different voice to distinguish it from the voices in the original video.

AccessComputing, a joint effort by CSE and DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology) at the University of Washington,  is an NSF-funded alliance with the goal of increasing the participation of students with disabilities, nation-wide, in computing fields. Read more →

And in late-breaking news (“nobody ever tells me anything”), UW CSE Ph.D. student Yoav Artzi has also been named a recipient of a 2014 Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship.

Yoav, who is advised by Luke Zettlemoyer, works at the intersection of natural language processing, machine learning, and learning through interaction. Read more →