Allen School News

The Seattle Times reports on UW’s plans for an expanded facility for CSE, discussed at last week’s UW CSE Industry Affiliates meeting:

“Ten years after it opened, the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering still has that new-building smell.

“It’s a glorious home for the University of Washington’s esteemed computer science program, with polished wood and metal interiors that look more like Microsoft headquarters than a public school …

“More important, graduates have found jobs at pretty much all the world’s leading tech companies. The school is also an important center for research into emerging fields such as ‘big data’ analytics, machine learning and computer vision.

“The program is so successful and important that lawmakers shuffled the state’s scant education funding over the past two years to increase enrollment …

“There’s just one problem. The building is now full, and the program keeps growing.

“‘We have no more space – that’s going to be an issue for us in the future,’ Hank Levy, the department’s chairman, said last week during an annual meeting with tech companies that support the program and recruit its graduates.

“Levy then disclosed plans to build an entirely new computer science building across the street …

“The new center would house multidisciplinary programs, which are proliferating as computer science becomes integral to other fields of research.

“It could also accommodate surging demand for programming courses that’s coming from students across the university. During the past school year, 2,500 took the introductory course.

“‘More and more students are realizing they’ve got to be really well-versed in computational thinking, no matter what they’ll be doing,’ said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering.”

Read more here.  Learn more about our recent Industry Affiliates meeting here.  Learn about our home, the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering, here; learn about the Allen Center’s collection of art by UW-affiliated artists here.  Most importantly, learn about the crowd-sourced exponential funding effort for Levytown – our new building – here.  (This is a well-traveled path; see here.) Read more →

Research into the privacy and security of implantable medical electronics by UW CSE’s Yoshi Kohno and his collaborators continues to receive press attention following former Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent revelation that the wireless capabilities of his pacemaker/defibrillator had been disabled for security reasons:

“Many of the doctors hung up on him, Dr. [Kevin] Fu [of the University of Michigan] said, adding, ‘They thought I was crazy to worry about the security of a device in the chest.’

“Finally, he got together with a colleague, Tadayoshi Kohno, a computer security researcher at the University of Washington. The two investigators and their colleagues set to work seeing if they could breach the security of a defibrillator that had been removed from a patient’s chest.

“The defibrillator and the device used to program it communicated in their own language from a distance no greater than a few inches, Dr. Kohno said. The group figured out the language by turning various therapy commands on and off.

“‘We would intercept the communications,’ Dr. Kohno said. ‘Aha – this is the command that means ‘turn on,’ this is the command that means ‘turn off.’’ After they learned the communication language, ‘we could generate the commands ourselves.’

“At that time, ‘security was not on the radar yet for the medical device community,’ Dr. Fu said. ‘But there was a rapid trend toward wireless communication and Internet connectivity. We definitely raised awareness.'”

Read more here. Read more →

UW CSE chair Hank Levy joins UW Provost Ana Mari Cauce on the Husky Stadium field prior to the UW/Cal game. Read more →

Read more →

We admit it – there were more people eating and drinking than there were carving.

The real question is who’s going to be the first to encounter our cleaning staff on Monday morning … Read more →

UW CSE alum Ankur Jain is co-tech-lead of the team at Google that builds and operates YouTube’s content distribution network.  In awarding Google YouTube a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences said:

“Since YouTube’s founding in 2005, the world is surprised on a daily basis by the creativity, inspiration and passion that the planet’s most creative people bring to the YouTube platform. Each month, a billion people watch more than 6 billion hours of video. Each minute, creators upload 100 more hours for the world to watch. To meet this fundamental engineering challenge, the YouTube team has created new, innovative ways to upload, store, manage and deliver all kinds of video programming to viewers the instant they want to watch it …

“Together, these achievements have fundamentally changed the way an entire generation thinks of and experiences television.”

Congratulations, Ankur.  Don’t drop it!  (Read more here.) Read more →

UW CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel is one of a number of Seattle-area innovators featured in displays at the Bezos Center for Innovation at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry.

In connection with the dedication event for the Bezos Center for Innovation several weeks ago, Shwetak participated in an “Hour of Power” during which he posed provocative questions to Seattleites of all ages.

The newly-relocated and expanded MOHAI is spectacular – you should visit if you haven’t.  And in its Bezos Center for Innovation, you’ll see numerous references to Shwetak, Daniela Witten, and other extraordinary UW faculty members. Read more →

In the wake of the cleanup from UW CSE’s Industry Affiliates meeting, we ask you:  Tracy or Tina?  Who has the huge iridescent blueberry shoes, and who has the petite iridescent watermelon shoes?

Leave your ballot with Rebecca at the front desk! Read more →

Fifty six companies and many hundreds of UW CSE students (plus more than a few interlopers) packed the Microsoft Atrium and the Bill & Melinda Gates Commons today for our “established company” recruiting day.  (Startup recruiting day was Tuesday; Industry Affiliates research day was Wednesday.)  It was bedlam!

A list of the companies who were recruiting his here – we wish we had the space to accommodate more!

We host recruiting days twice each year – in October and in January.  It’s a unique opportunity for CSE students to interact with companies specifically interested in recruiting elite software engineers. Read more →

Hank Levy with Madrona Prize recipients and Madrona’s Tim Porter

The Madrona Prize (for the research project presented at the UW CSE Industry Affiliates Meeting that was deemed to have the greatest potential for commercialization) went to Ambient Back Scatter: Battery Free Communication; Aaron Parks, Vincent Liu, and Vamsi Talla.

Runners-up were:

• Personalized SLAs in the Cloud; Jennifer Ortiz and Victor Texeira de Almeida
• iHome 3D:  Capturing Indoor Scenes with Smartphone; Aditya Senkar
• WiSee:  Whole Home Gesture Recognition Using WiFi; Ruth Ravichandran, Sidhant Gupta, and Qi Fan Pu
  

  Ed Lazowska with People’s Choice Award recipient Vikash Kumar

The People’s Choice Award – chosen by balloting among attendees at the Open House poster session – went to Complex behavior synthesis using minimum instructions; Vikash Kumar. Read more →