Ten years ago – on October 9th 2003 – we dedicated the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.
Designed by LMN Architects, the Allen Center – still widely regarded as the finest computer science facility in the nation – has had a dramatic impact on UW CSE’s competitiveness, allowing us to move forward into the 21st century as one of the nation’s leading computer science and computer engineering programs:
- State-of-the-art laboratory space has changed the nature of our research. Annual research expenditures have tripled – from $7 million in the year prior to occupancy, to more than $20 million today. (Faculty increased by only 24% during this period – from 38 to 47.) The number of technical staff supporting research has more than doubled – from 23 to 58. We had only 2 postdoctoral research fellows in 2003 – we have 27 today. Interdisciplinary collaborations have flourished, reflecting the broad impact of the field in the modern university and the modern world.
Enrollments have increased, providing greater opportunity for Washington State students and driving the state’s technology industry. The pace has been slower than we would have liked – state support is required to increase enrollment, since tuition falls far short of covering costs. But in the past decade, undergraduate majors have increased from 430 to 650 (+50%); full-time graduate program majors from 142 to 222 (+55%); part-time professional masters program majors from 120 to 160 (+33%); and annual enrollment in our two introductory courses from 2,000 to 3,600 (+80%). Additional growth has recently been funded.
More than 200 friends and alumni donated a total in excess of $40 million to make the Allen Center a reality. We are grateful to Paul G. Allen, our lead donor; to Tom Alberg and Jeremy Jaech, the co-chairs of our development committee; to Bill & Melinda Gates and to Microsoft for gifts in excess of $5 million; and, indeed, to each and every donor, because each and every gift was essential. As we said at the time, we didn’t know 40 people who could provide $1 million each, and we didn’t know 40,000 people who could provide $1,000 each!
This extraordinary generosity continued after the completion of the Allen Center. In 2003, our departmental endowment (which supports faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, and innovation across-the-board) totaled less than $6 million; today it is in excess of $40 million! Most recently, Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com provided two $1 million Amazon Professorships in Machine Learning to assist us in recruiting machine learning stars Emily Fox and Carlos Guestrin.
Today, the Allen Center is overflowing, and we are launching a new project to expand our space. Leadership in computer science is increasingly essential to the University of Washington’s broad-based competitiveness, to the vitality of our region, and to our nation’s ability to address its challenges and seize its opportunities. UW CSE remains committed to excellence and impact. “If it was just hot air, we’d still be in Sieg Hall.”
Further reading:
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Just to be clear, here’s the actual exchange:
Nick Wingfield to Ed Lazowska:
I’m doing a story for early next week about Gates and his role at Microsoft. I thought you might have a thoughtful perspective on whether Gates will continue to be a figure of influence at Microsoft in the near future and why.
Ed Lazowska to Nick Wingfield:
I don’t have any special insight regarding BillG. My guess (and it’s only that):
Microsoft and Bill Gates are synonymous. Bill spent 33 years in a day-to-day role at the company – from 1975 to 2008. It’s impossible to walk away from something that you have shaped and led to that extent, and with which you are so personally identified. I think there’s zero chance that he disengages – if anything, I bet he engages more.
At the same time, I feel terribly badly for Steve Ballmer. Yes, it was time for a change. But he is getting blamed for many problems that are due to others – and those others are getting a free pass. Additionally, he is not getting credit for his many accomplishments.
Read the article here. Read more →
IEEE Spectrum features CSE research on a language for “approximate computing” – work by Adrian Sampson, Luis Ceze, and Dan Grossman.
The work is part of a larger effort of rethinking the computing stack to embrace energy efficiency as a major concern, recognizing the fact that many modern applications do not require perfect accuracy. Other CSE/Microsoft Research work related to this effort, Neural Processing Units, has recently appeared in IEEE Micro “Top Picks” and was selected as a CACM Research Highlight (to appear soon).
Read the IEEE Spectrum article here.
Learn all about the UW CSE research – the SAMPA project – here. Read more →
Our exceptionally modest and exceptionally accomplished 1989 Ph.D. alum Wen-Hann Wang has been named Vice President and Managing Director of Intel Labs, succeeding Justin Ratner, who has retired from Intel.
Here’s a profile of Wen-Hann from the Autumn 2011 issue of Most Significant Bits, the UW CSE alumni publication. And another profile from Wen-Hann’s receipt of UW CSE’s 2012 Alumni Achievement Award.
Wen-Hann gives great credit to his UW CSE Ph.D. advisor, Jean-Loup Baer, for influencing his career. Interestingly (but not surprisingly), at his UW CSE Distinguished Lecture ten days ago, Berkeley’s Dave Patterson credited Jean-Loup for pointing him towards computer science graduate school when Dave was an intellectually wandering undergraduate at UCLA and Jean-Loup – then a UCLA Computer Science Ph.D. student – befriended him.
Hearty congratulations to Wen-Hann on this latest of many achievements! Read more →
A good time was had by all! Read more →
UW CSE’s networking research group has swept the Best Paper Awards at the three top venues this year: NSDI, SIGCOMM, and now Mobicom. (Not to mention Shyam Gollakota’s receipt of the SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award and the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award!)
Go team! Read more →
TechFlash interviews HCDE professor (and CSE adjunct professor) Julie Kientz:
“Julie Kientz wants to make technology more human. Not by creating human-like robots or apps that talk like people, but by taking existing technology and finding ways to use it to better people’s lives.”
Read more here. Read more →
Seemingly minor bits of information collected by the National Security Agency, such as the phone numbers that citizens dial, can reveal far more personal information than is commonly believed, Princeton University professor and UW CSE Ph.D. alum Ed Felten told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Oct. 1.
Felten said that searching for patterns in large collections of metadata “can now reveal startling insights about the behavior of individuals or groups.”
“It is no longer safe to assume that this ‘summary’ or ‘non-content’ information is less revealing or less sensitive than the contents it describes,” Felten said. “Just by using new technologies such as smart phones and social media, we leave rich and revealing trails of metadata as we move through daily life. Many details of our lives can be gleaned by examining those trails.”
Felten told the committee members that it was critical for legislators who make the laws and judges who review them to have a firm grasp of the technical implications of their decisions. He urged them to take advantage of the nation’s technological experts when grappling with the policy implications of advancing technology.
Felten – Professor of Computer Science and of Public Affairs at Princeton, Director of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, and first Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission from 2001-12 – received the UW CSE Alumni Achievement Award in 2013. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Read more here.
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UW CSE attendees at the 13th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is a series of conferences, dating back to 1994, designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. This year’s conference – the 13th – was held in Minneapolis, MN, with an estimated 4,000 attendees.
UW’s strong commitment to diversity is reflected in our perennial position among the best-represented schools at the Hopper conference, regardless of location. This year was no exception. UW participants were a mix of graduate students, undergraduate students, faculty, and staff members – the vast majority from CSE, but also with participation from EE and HCDE. HCDE professor (and CSE adjunct professor) Cecelia Aragon participated in a panel discussion about building leadership skills. CSE presenters include graduate students Shiri Azenkot and Kyle Rector, undergraduate alum Kristine Delossantos (now at WhitePages), and graduate student Nicki Dell, who led a project for Saturday’s Open Source Day. In the “friends and family” department, Fiona Condon – daughter of UW CSE Ph.D. alum (and UBC department head) Anne Condon and UW CSE technical staff member (and CSE Masters alum) Scott Rose – chaired a panel; Fiona is a Brown alum now crafting code at Etsy.
Why choose CSE? Check it out here! Read more →
The paper “Whole-Home Gesture Recognition Using Wireless Signals” by CSE’s Qifan Pu, Sidhant Gupta, Shyam Gollakota, and Shwetak Patel has received the Best Paper Award from Mobicom 2013.
The paper describes WiSee, a novel interaction interface that leverages ongoing wireless transmissions in the environment (e.g., WiFi) to enable whole-home sensing and recognition of human gestures. In a nutshell, your motion distorts the ambient signal in ways that can be detected, interpreted, and used to control devices.
Read the paper here. Learn about WiSee here. Read more →
Ten years ago – on October 9th 2003 – we dedicated the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.
This extraordinary generosity continued after the completion of the Allen Center. In 2003, our departmental endowment (which supports faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, and innovation across-the-board) totaled less than $6 million; today it is in excess of $40 million! Most recently, Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com provided two $1 million Amazon Professorships in Machine Learning to assist us in recruiting machine learning stars Emily Fox and Carlos Guestrin.
Further reading:
