Allen School News

Recent UW CSE Ph.D. alum Yaw Anokwa is profiled in Viewpoint, a publication of the UW Alumni Association.  The article showcases several people and programs that are in the forefront of extending education beyond the classroom.

“Yaw Anokwa had just wrapped up his master’s degree in computer science in June 2007 when he felt like something was missing.  ‘I got to a stage in my life where I wasn’t working on meaningful problems,’ he says.

“Anokwa found that meaning in Rwanda, where he spent six months in late 2007 as a volunteer with Partners in Health, a global-health advocacy organization …

“The Ghana native and self-described ‘wandering do-gooder’ soon discovered an opportunity to make an even bigger difference …

“Anokwa returned in 2008 to the University of Washington where he pursued a doctorate degree in computer science and helped launch a project called the Open Data Kit … a free set of tech tools to help organizations generate and manage data collection through smartphones and tablets.”

Read the article here.  Learn about Open Data Kit here.  Learn about the ODK-related startup Nafundi, co-founded by Yaw and fellow UW CSE Ph.D. alum Carl Hartung, here. Read more →

Yoshi Kohno, Ryan Calo, and Batya Friedman

The UW Tech Policy Lab is a unique, interdisciplinary collaboration that aims to enhance technology policy through research, education, and thought leadership.  The new venture – enabled by a founding gift of $1.7 million from Microsoft – brings together experts from the University’s School of Law, Information School, and Computer Science & Engineering.

The Tech Policy Lab was launched Thursday evening at an event keynoted by University of Washington President Michael Young, Microsoft Executive Vice President and General  Counsel Brad Smith, and Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Head of Microsoft Research Peter Lee, plus the three UW co-directors of the Lab: Ryan Calo from the School of Law, Batya Friedman from the Information School, and Yoshi Kohno from Computer Science & Engineering.

Learn more about the Tech Policy Lab here.  See photographs of the launch event here.  Read a Seattle Times article here. Read more →

“Two researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle did something amazing: One influenced the movements of the other simply by willing it. They were separated by an entire college campus, connected only through electrical caps on their heads and the Internet. Host Scott Simon talks with Rajesh Rao, one of the researchers.”

Listen to the interview here! Read more →

Google just did a blog post on Josh Smith’s WARP project – a sensor with E-Ink display powered by ambient RF.  The post was based on work presented at a conference held at Google way back in June.  It highlights the fact that the work was funded by a Google Faculty Research award.

Read the Google blog post (including video) here.  Learn more about WARP here. Read more →

An exciting event, with a great representation of UW CSE faculty, former faculty, and Ph.D. alums:  Ed Felten, Yoky Matsuoka, Zoran Popovic, Stefan Savage.  Information here. Read more →

UW CSE startup Decide has been acquired by eBay.

Co-founded by UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni and four students, Decide uses machine learning and text mining algorithms on billions of price points across millions of products, blog posts, and articles on the web to enable shoppers to make the best buying decisions possible.

Decide had raised $17M in venture capital from Madrona Venture Group, Maveron, Vulcan Capital, and angel investors.

Read the Decide announcement here.  GeekWire here.  Seattle Times here. Read more →

Oren Etzioni

Oren Etzioni – UW’s Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in Computer Science & Engineering – has been selected to lead Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen’s new Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2).

“I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to launch a major AI research institute in Seattle,” said Oren.  “Our goal is to revolutionize the field, and with Paul’s vision and support, the sky’s the limit.”

Oren joined the UW CSE faculty in 1991, after receiving his Bachelors degree from Harvard and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon. A recognized leader in AI, he is a AAAI Fellow, recipient of the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award, and founder and director of the University of Washington’s Turing Center. He also is an active entrepreneur – the founder of four companies (most recently Decide.com) and a Venture Partner at Madrona Venture Group.  His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Science, The Economist, Business Week, Newsweek, Discover, Forbes, Wired, the NBC Nightly News, and even Pravda.

Paul has broad interests in scientific discovery. With his SpaceShipOne effort, private enterprise crossed the threshold into human spaceflight, previously the domain of government programs.  SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for repeated flights in a privately developed reusable spacecraft, the Collier Trophy for greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in 2004, and the National Air and Space Museum Trophy for Current Achievement.  His Allen Institute for Brain Science, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, takes on large-scale initiatives designed to push brain research forward, enabling the global scientific community to more efficiently make discoveries that bring real-world utility.  Paul has a long-standing interest in AI; for many years he has supported Project Halo, whose vision is the creation of a “Digital Aristotle” – a computer that contains large amount of knowledge in machine-computable form and can answer questions, explain those answers, and discuss those answers with users.

Paul G. Allen

The creation of AI2 and the selection of Oren to lead it is fantastic news for UW CSE, for Seattle, and for the field of AI.  Paul has been considering the general idea of some sort of AI institute for a number of years, but it wasn’t a “given” that AI2 would happen at all … or that it would happen in Seattle … or that tight connections to the University of Washington would be assured because the person leading AI2 has spent 20 years on the UW CSE faculty.  All of these things are happening, though – it’s a dream come true.  AI2 has the potential to transform Seattle into a world center of AI research in the same way that the Allen Institute for Brain Science has transformed Seattle into a world center of brain research.

Says Oren:  “AI2 is an opportunity to take AI – worldwide and here in the Puget Sound region – to the next level by launching ambitious research projects, attracting the best and brightest to the region, and offering both permanent positions and internships to UW CSE students.”

A gigantic win – another step in making Seattle a center of the tech universe!

See a terrific GeekWire article here.  Seattle Times here.  Xconomy here. Read more →

Recently UW Vice President for University Advancement Connie Kravas received an email from a colleague in the UC Berkeley advancement office, forwarding an email he had received from a Berkeley donor, which had been sent to draw his attention a video that her husband, a UW CSE donor, had received from UW CSE. (Apologies – you may need to diagram this in order to comprehend the cast of characters …)

The Berkeley donor wrote: “Check out the great video UW sent back to us – I loved it! I got to see how my $ were used, it was not time intensive, and I got a real feel for the program and its impact. Might be an interesting way to both ‘scale’ and ‘personalize’ donor thank you’s.”

The Berkeley donor’s husband is Alan Eustace, Google’s Senior Vice President, Knowledge. Alan had been a sponsor of the 2012 G-Give program for UW CSE. Alan himself, in follow-up email to UW, said: “The video was a fantastic idea. It really personalized the gift. It wasn’t just a check to a nameless bureaucracy. There was a student on the other side that really appreciated it, and that made all the difference! Congratulations!”

G-Give itself is a wonderful story of the power of UW students. The goal of G-Give is to activate first-time donors – recent Google employees who are not yet using their Google corporate match for gifts. For a 1-week period each December, G-Give features one or two non-profits each day. Gifts to those non-profits made via G-Give are matched twice – once by Google, and once by one or more Googlers who agree to match gifts (up to some limit). (That’s the role that Alan played last year for UW CSE, which is a major supplier of talent to Google. Matching funds were also provided by UW CSE alums Jeff Dean, Brad Fitzpatrick, Ruben Ortega, Charlie Reis, and Bill Brougher.)

G-Give was created in 2011 by UW CSE alums Jessan Hutchison-Quillan and Krista Davis, with help from UW CSE alum Jeff Prouty, all of whom work in Google’s Seattle office. They did it as a “20% project” – Googlers are allowed to spend 20% of their time on projects of their own devising. In 2011, through G-Give, UW CSE’s Google Scholarship endowment – created several years earlier by alums at Google’s Mountain View CA office – was increased by $127,000 through gifts from 100 friends and alumni at Google. In 2012, UW CSE’s Google Scholarship was again featured, and an additional $157,000 was raised from 159 Googlers. G-Give has now become the Google-wide employee giving platform, and Jessan’s full-time assignment.

It all goes to show what can happen when a few UW alums have a great idea and apply the skills they’ve learned to execute a solution!

Take a few minutes to watch the video! Read more →

Last week UW CSE concluded this year’s summer programs for middle and high school students.  Under the DawgBytes (“a taste of UW CSE” – our overall K-12 outreach effort) umbrella, we introduced more than 160 kids from across the state to computer science, which they now associate with fun, creativity and making friends!

This summer we hosted 4 week-long introductory day camps for girls, 3 co-ed day camps on mobile development, and 1 co-ed day camp on physical computing.

Infinite thanks to Hélène Martin (whose passion and dedication makes all of this happen), Allison Obourn (who taught the mobile development camps), Brett Wortzman (a teacher at Issaquah High School who taught the physical computing camp), our camp counselors (Stefan Dieraf from UW, Megan Fu from Holy Names, Claire Illich from Holy Names -> Northeastern, Genevieve Payzer from Lakeside, and Karolina Pyszkiewicz from Holy Names -> UW), Jeremy Munroe (our DawgBytes assistant), Google (for the donation of Android phones), Microsoft Research (for the donation of .NET Gadgeteer kits), and CSE’s wonderful support staff.

See photos from all of this summer’s camps on the DawgBytes Facebook page.

Learn about our many other K-12 outreach activities on the DawgBytes web page.

If you have kids in your life who might be interested in our future opportunities or if you might be willing to participate in our outreach activities, join the DawgBytes mailing list. Read more →

A new brochure highlights UW CSE’s 2013 faculty hires:

• Maya Cakmak, a robotics Ph.D. from Georgia Tech via Willow Garage.
• Shayan Oveis Gharan, an optimization algorithms Ph.D. from Stanford who will spend a year as a Miller Fellow at Berkeley before joining us.
• Matt Reynolds, a Duke ECE faculty member in ultra-low power sensing and computation with an MIT Ph.D., who will have appointments in UW CSE and EE.
• Zach Tatlock, a software reliability and security Ph.D. from UCSD.

In addition, Jeff Heer, the last of 2012’s amazing “big data” hires – currently a faculty member at Stanford – will also arrive this fall.

Exciting times!  Check out the brochure here. Read more →