Allen School News

Jeff Heer delivered a terrific luncheon keynote at today’s UW CSE Industry Affiliates meeting.  Representatives from more than 100 member companies have joined us for a day of technical discussions, followed by an evening open house that adds regional alums to the mix.  The meeting also includes a recruiting day for startups, and a recruiting day for established companies.  See the complete agenda here.

Jeff was one of four phenomenal hires in data science in Spring 2012; he and his wife – Daniela Rosner, a faculty member in UW’s Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering – arrived this fall. Read more →

Long-time CSE staff member Melody Kadenko celebrated an unspecified birthday today.

Among other duties, Melody serves as advisor to Team Hilarious, which won the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in 2011 and 2012.  Team members presented her with the cake in the photo, but were mum when asked about its significance. Read more →

uProxy is a new Web-browser extension that uses peer-to-peer technology to let people around the world provide one another with a trusted Internet connection. uProxy is designed to protect the Internet connection of users in, say, Iran, from state surveillance or filtering.

Google Ideas is providing funding and technical assistance for uProxy, which was developed by UW CSE graduate students Ray Cheng and Will Scott, undergraduate student Paul Ellenbogen, and faculty members Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy in UW CSE’s Systems and Networking research group, assisted by Brave New Software.

uProxy received a great deal of attention at the Google Ideas Summit in NYC this week:

• Time magazine here.
• Mashable here
• Engadget here.
• Business Spectator here.

On and on …

• Google blog here.
• uProxy web page here.

Today is UW CSE’s fall recruiting day for startup companies – held in conjunction with UW CSE’s annual Industry Affiliates meeting. Hundreds of UW CSE undergraduate and graduate students are mingling with representatives of 50 startups (our space limit, unfortunately). It’s a wonderful madhouse!

Wednesday is devoted to research interactions, a luncheon keynote by newly-arrived faculty member Jeff Heer, and an evening open house (posters, demos, food, drink) for Industry participants and regional alumni, capped by the presentation of the Madrona Prize (thank you Madrona Venture Group!) for the student research with the greatest potential for commercialization.

Thursday is our fall recruiting day for established companies.

• See the startup companies recruiting today here.
• See the established companies recruiting on Thursday here.
• See an agenda for the 3-day meeting, with links to breakout session topics, here.

Many thanks to our Industry Affiliates for your phenomenal support of UW CSE and our students! Read more →

D3.js (Data-Driven Documents), a framework for web-based data visualization, has received the 2013 Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism, from the Online News Association (ONA).

CNN includes a discussion of Yoshi Kohno’s research on the privacy and security of implantable pacemaker/defibrillators in an article about former Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent interview with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, in which Cheney revealed that when he needed his implanted defibrillator replaced in 2007, his cardiologist ordered the manufacturer to disable the wireless feature, thus preventing anyone from hacking the device.

Kohno and his collaborators began working on just this topic in 2006. The TV show Homeland – referenced in the CNN article – got the idea of compromising medical devices from the New York Times article that first reported Kohno’s work. Read more →

The  October 21 story in New York Times “Tech Wealth and Ideas Are Heading Into News” includes Jeff Bezos among “Silicon Valley and its various power brokers.”

News flash:  Amazon.com is not located in Silicon Valley.

Nor is the company that pioneered PC software (Microsoft).

Nor the company that invented desktop publishing (Aldus, now part of Adobe).

Nor the company that pioneered streaming media (RealNetworks).

Nor the companies that drove the revolution in electronic retailing in areas such as travel (Expedia), real estate (Zillow, Redfin), imagery (Getty Images, Corbis), personal care items (Drugstore.com), baby/mom goods (Zulily), etc.

Nor many key gaming industry players (Bungie, Valve, etc., not to mention Nintendo of America, Sony Online Entertainment, Microsoft Studios (and of course Xbox)).

Nor Tableau Software, a thriving Stanford startup whose CEO Christian Chabot recently remarked at a GeekWire event that “Moving the company from Silicon Valley to Seattle [when it was only 3 people] turned out to be one of the best decisions we ever made. We are really grateful to be in the Seattle technology ecosystem, and we hope to be there for many years to come.”

Nor, we should add – hoping to forestall a future article – many of the nation’s most distinctive and admired traditional retailers such as Nordstrom, REI, Costco, and of course Starbucks – companies with which Amazon shares its relentless focus on customers, quality, and culture.

Then, of course, there are the biomedical innovations such as ultrasound imaging, automated external defibrillators, bone marrow transplantation, renal dialysis, Embrel and Rituxan, Medic One – even your Sonicare toothbrush. And the organizations that launched global health initiatives 30 years ago such as PATH and Seattle BioMed. These didn’t come from Silicon Valley. The Gates Foundation, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence also turn out not to be in Silicon Valley.

And where would we be without Macklemore and Nirvana?

Get a map, guys!

[Thanks to GeekWire for picking up this post!] Read more →

People who are blind or low vision may have a harder time participating in exercise classes due to inaccessibility, travel difficulties, or lack of experience. Exergames can encourage exercise at home and help lower the barrier to trying new activities, but there are often accessibility issues since they rely on visual feedback to help align body positions. To address this, a team led by UW CSE Ph.D. student Kyle Rector created Eyes-Free Yoga, an exergame using the Microsoft Kinect that acts as a yoga instructor, teaches six yoga poses, and has customized auditory-only feedback based on skeletal tracking.

Read a UW News post here.  Learn more about the project here.  Kyle’s home page here. Read more →

Nearly 300 researchers from Microsoft and across the University of Washington participated in today’s UW/MSR Machine Learning Day, co-organized by Ofer Dekel (MSR), Emily Fox (UW Statistics), and Ben Taskar (UW Computer Science & Engineering).

An overview and the program are linked here.

On October 11th, 60 middle school and high school counselors joined UW CSE to learn about computing as part of the National Center for Women & Information Technology’s Counselors for Computing program. Counselors heard from faculty and industry professionals, participated in hands-on activities, and mingled with their university counterparts.

See event program and pictures.

The organizers were Jane Krauss from NCWIT, Hélène Martin from UW CSE, and Chris Kelly from WSCA.

Resources

• General C4C slides: pdf | pptx
• Ed Lazowska‘s “Why Computer Science?” slides: pdf | pptx
• Panelists: Molly Brown from Microsoft, Steph Dietzel from Tableau and Janette Siu from Google.
• Kristi’s slides on her path to computing: pdf | pptx
• The binary dots activity came from CS Unplugged

K-12 counselors and teachers: Computer Science is a phenomenal field!  Send us your best students! Read more →