The Washington Research Foundation interviewed leading faculty in Astronomy, Biology, Oceanography, and Computer Science & Engineering to explore the impact of data science on discovery. Check out the video! (Many thanks to our friends at WRF!)
ACM regional programming contest 2013 results
Five teams from UW CSE participated in the Pacific Northwest Regionals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, held last Saturday November 2nd. UW competes in a region that stretches from California up to Canada and over to Hawaii. The contest is held at several different sites simultaneously. Allison Obourn traveled with our five teams to the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma to compete.
We placed 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th among the 15 teams competing at the UPS site. In the overall region – which included 117 teams – we placed three teams in the top ten (more than any other school), but were beaten by the usual powerhouses like Stanford, Berkeley, and UBC. Our five teams were:
- Lightning (1st at site, 7th at region): Sun Zehao, Hu Jingcheng, Cui Wenbo
- UW Sonic (1st at site, 8th at region): Stephen Jonany, Siwakorn Srisakaokul, Tom Guo
- Amgems (3rd at site, 10th at region): Zachary Iqbal, Jeremy Teo, Sherman Pay’
- aHBvb3CwBLMBieGyBM2A (4th at site, 22nd at region): David Mah, John Mackinnon, Omar Sandoval
- Bit Vector Zero (5th at site, 25th at region): Evan Whitfield, Nicholas Shahan, David Swanson
To earn a spot in the top 10 is a great accomplishment, especially since many of the other schools train for the contest year-round (and we don’t). It is also noteworthy that UW’s top-placing team is composed of three freshmen who are taking the accelerated CSE143X class.
The complete set of results from the Regionals are available here.
UW’s five competing teams were picked at an in-school competition that was held on Saturday October 5. A total of 34 teams competed locally. Many thanks go to our official sponsor Google. Google bought pizza for over 100 people for the in-school contest and provided prizes for the top three teams and swag for everyone, including Nexus 7 tablets for the members of the number one team. Our thanks go to Marion Daly, our campus Google representative. Thanks also go to Allison Obourn who helped run the contest along with our student helper Cody Gibb. Below are the names of the teams that solved three or more problems in the in-school competition:
| Place | Team name | Members | Problems solved | Total time |
| 1 | UW Sonic | Stephen Jonany, Siwakorn Srisakaokul, Tom Guo | 10 | 1216 |
| 2 | aHBvb3CwBLMBieGyBM2A | David Mah, John Mackinnon, Omar Sandoval | 8 | 1285 |
| 3 | Lightning | Sun Zehao, Hu Jingcheng, Cui Wenbo | 8 | 1298 |
| 4 | Bit Vector Zero | Evan Whitfield, Nicholas Shahan, David Swanson | 6 | 924 |
| 5 | Amgems | Zachary Iqbal, Jeremy Teo, Sherman Pay | 6 | 1058 |
| 6 | Wombat Combat | Ben Eggers, Noah Lindner | 6 | 1192 |
| 7 | U1dVRwo= | Sunjay Cauligi, Vimala Jampala, Lars Zornes | 6 | 1307 |
| 8 | elgoog | Yuxuan Zhang, Shuo Wang, Zhiting Zhu | 5 | 969 |
| 9 | PINE Is Nearly Elm | Ryan Drapeau, Simone Schaffer, Tanner Coval | 5 | 996 |
| 10 | SigmaPhiNull | Benjamin Blumberg, David Foulds | 5 | 1012 |
| 11 | Muffin Racoons | Brandon Edgren, Erik Chou, Eli Elefson | 5 | 1024 |
| 12 | ☃ | Brett Boston, Max Sherman, Jack Fancher | 5 | 1068 |
| 13 | Undefined | Mallika Mathur, Danny Vance, Grant Timmerman | 4 | 656 |
| 14 | HMB and David | Brian Griffith, Karthik Palaniappan, David Tran | 4 | 817 |
| 15 | Midgard | Michael Wiktorek, Colby Schimelfenig, Simon Baumgardt-Wellander | 3 | 298 |
| 16 | Soy Sauce | Kuangjie Sima, Shiying Xu, Zhongyue Zhang | 3 | 366 |
| 17 | Memory Leek | Nadav Ashkenazi, Roee Avnon, Hunter Zahn | 3 | 383 |
| 18 | The Freshmen | Stan Hu, Jiaying Jiang | 3 | 389 |
| 19 | Outlaw Mafia Clique | Daniel Gorrie, Aaron Nech, Andy Butler | 3 | 423 |
| 20 | justforfun | Christopher Tjong, Errol Limenta, Danny Christanto | 3 | 513 |
| 21 | 420codeit | Sujit Packiaraj, Noah Siegel, John Stephenson | 3 | 538 |
| 22 | Elephant Ears | Jasmine Singh, Dalton Black, Mason Remy | 3 | 606 |
| 23 | The Blue Screens | Vinod Rathnam, Amit Burstein, William McNamara | 3 | 661 |
Congratulations to all the participants! Read more →
Business Insider: “Oren Etzioni: Six startups in a row, all acquired”
Business Insider cites UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni among “14 Of The Most Successful People In Tech You’ve Probably Never Heard Of”:
“In September, Decide.com announced that it was being acquired by eBay. The site predicted when prices on electronics would drop.
“It was the sixth-in-a-row successful exit for co founder and CTO Oren Etzioni. His first was four years before Google was born, one of the web’s first search engines, MetaCrawler, bought by Infospace in 1999.
“He’s probably best known for FareCast. It sold to Microsoft in 2008 for $110 million and is now a part of Bing.”
Read it here. Read more →
Shwetak receives tenure!
Photo of Shwetak that appeared in The Economist
T-shirt closeup
Shwetak’s fan club
Turing Award winner Silvio Micali (MIT) delivers the CSE Distinguished Lecture in his Shwetak t-shirt
What better way to celebrate the formal receipt of tenure by UW CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel than by surprising him with a simultaneous parody of his fashion sense and his MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award?
(Thanks to Shwetak’s graduate students for organizing this nice prank!)
Levytown: Only 12 11 gifts away from fully funded!
The exponential crowdsourced funding effort for Levytown, revitalized by Brier Dudley’s recent article in the Seattle Times, continues to flourish!
Alums Jeff and Carolyn (Holmes) Hughes have put us only 12 gifts away from fully funding Levytown!
Jeff wrote: “My wife and I recently saw the update to the ‘Levytown’ fundraising and it got us thinking. As both of us are UW CSE alums … we’re interested in giving back to the department. Without a doubt, the department set us up for success in our careers just over 7 years ago … we really want to be part of this story. Sign us up!”
WE LOVE OUR ALUMS!
Update, November 7! Stimulated by Jeff and Carolyn’s generosity (and the realization that things were rapidly getting out of reach), and led by Carlos Guestrin, the CSE faculty has claimed the next level!
Only 11 more gifts to fully fund Levytown! Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Roxana Geambasu is runner-up for inaugural SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award
Roxana Geambasu and Stefan Savage
The Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award was created by the computer systems research community in 2013 to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied, providing a reminder of Ritchie’s legacy and what a difference one person can make in the field of software systems research.
At the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles today, UW CSE Ph.D. alumna Roxana Geambasu, a professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, was recognized as runner-up in the inaugural Ritchie Award competition. The winner was Mona Attariyan, a University of Michigan Ph.D. alumna now at Google Seattle.
We congratulate Roxana, and we note that Dennis Ritchie, like Roxana’s UW CSE Ph.D. advisor Hank Levy, never received a Ph.D. Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Stefan Savage wins 2013 SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award
The Mark Weiser Award was created in 2001 by the computer systems research community, to be given annually to an individual who has demonstrated creativity and innovation in computer systems research. The recipient must have begun his or her career no earlier than 20 years prior to nomination. The award is named in honor of Mark Weiser, a computing visionary recognized for his research accomplishments during his career at Xerox PARC.
Today, the 2013 SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award was presented to UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus (and UCSD professor) Stefan Savage. Quoting from the nomination materials:
“In the last decade, as we have grown increasingly dependent on the Internet, the Internet has become a vehicle for large-scale attacks – worms, viruses, botnets, massive flooding attacks, etc.
“Stefan Savage is, by far, the most creative person working in the hugely important fields of network security, privacy, and reliability. He has an uncanny ability to ask exactly the right question, propose exactly the right solution, and see that solution through to impact.
“Stefan’s work has not been a single contribution, but rather a collection of individually high-impact contributions that point in a single critically important direction: analyzing Internet attacks and attackers as elements of an integrated technological, societal, and economic system, and recognizing that no one-dimensional intervention has a prayer of succeeding. Our inability to select a single ‘greatest hit’ does not make The Beatles a lesser band; rather, we recognize that any one of their better songs would have been sufficient to catapult a lesser band into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame …
“Stefan stands in the very top echelon of the extraordinary group of previous Weiser Award recipients.”
Savage is the fourth UW CSE Ph.D. alum to receive the Weiser Award in its 13-year history – an incredible affirmation of UW’s track record in preparing leaders in computer systems. Brian Bershad (now with Google in Moscow) was recognized in 2004. Tom Anderson (now a UW CSE faculty member) was recognized in 2005. Jeff Dean (Google) was recognized in 2012.
Congratulations Stefan! Thanks for making us look good!
Qazzow scores $500,000 seed investment
Qazzow – a UW spinout founded by iSchool professors (and CSE Adjunct Professors) Amy Ko and Jake Wobbrock and their Ph.D. alum (and University of Waterloo professor) Parmit Chilana – has announced a $500,000 seed investment from UW’s W Fund.
Qazzow is a Q&A SaaS offering that websites use to increase sales conversions by answering customer questions. The system is being tested by Ben Bridge Jeweler, Game House, Big Fish Games, PetHub, Yapta, and PlayOn.
Congratulations, team! Read the GeekWire post here. Read more →
“Coding for Success”
Seattle’s Lakeside School profiles UW CSE Ph.D. alumna Lauren Bricker, who has transformed the school’s computer science programs since arriving in 2007.
“In junior high, Lauren Bricker insisted on being allowed to take shop instead of home ec – and ran away with the top prize. In high school, introduced to programming in math class, she spent every lunch hour seeing what she could make old Apple IIGs and TRS-80s do. In college, she sped through a theoretical math major in three years. In industry, she advanced as a self-taught software engineer before returning for a Ph.D. in computer science …
“As a teacher at Lakeside, she enlists that same fierce determination on behalf of her students.”
The article is an element of a Lakeside fundraising appeal, and we need the money more than they do, but still, it’s great! Read it here. Learn about UW CSE’s vibrant K-12 outreach initiative, DawgBytes, here and here. Read more →
SNUPI announces Wally
UW CSE startup SNUPI has announced Wally. Our friends at GeekWire write:
“Worried about toxic mold or pesky water leaks in your home?
“Never fear, Wally is here.
“That’s the new consumer brand from SNUPI Technologies, the latest startup effort from Seattle serial entrepreneur [and UW CSE alumnus] Jeremy Jaech …
“WallyHome – which works in conjunction with an always-on Internet connection – is designed to detect environmental hazards around the home by monitoring moisture, temperature and humidity changes. The wild thing is that the company says no batteries are needed, with the system set to work continuously for 10 years. It does this by bypassing traditional Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections, instead using the copper wiring in the walls of a home as an antenna. (More on the technology behind the system here.)
“Jaech has partnered with some of the top minds at the University of Washington on SNUPI, including [CSE and EE] professors Shwetak Patel and Matt Reynolds, as well as doctoral student Gabe Cohn.”
Read more here. Check out the Wally webpage here. Read more →