Allen School News

Washington Monthly ranks UW 7th among all U.S. “national universities.”  (The criteria are “social mobility,” “research,” and “service” – UW got killed in the latter category.)

Forbes ranks UW among the top 10 public colleges and universities in the nation for its undergraduate programs.  (The ranking includes both public and private colleges and universities … and it ranks Pomona above Princeton … so caveat emptor …)

Movoto ranks Seattle as America’s hardest working city.  (Doubtless due to the combination of coffee and precipitation …)

Forbes ranks Seattle among the world’s 15 most inventive cities.  (Suggesting that hard work isn’t everything …)

Affordable Colleges ranks UW #11 in the nation in terms of “bang for the buck.” Read more →

CS4HS participants learn about deadlock from Tom Cortina

Tom Cortina walks CS4HS participants through a sorting network

Seven years ago, three universities – the University of Washington (Ed Lazowska), Carnegie Mellon University (Jeannette Wing), and UCLA (Deborah Estrin) – approached Google about sponsoring a 3-day summer workshop on computer science for middle school and high school teachers of math and science.

Today the program – CS4HS – is sponsored by Google at 62 universities in the US and Canada, 20 in China, 15 in Australia and New Zealand, and 28 in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa – 125 universities in all!  (And although Jeannette and Deborah have pulled the ripcord, Ed still proudly teaches at the University of Washington!)

This week marks UW CSE’s 7th annual CS4HS.  More than 50 teachers from the Puget Sound region, elsewhere in Washington, and several other states have joined us for 3 days of exploring the magic of computer science. This also marks the 7th year in which Tom Cortina, Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education in CMU’s School of Computer Science, has traveled to Seattle to assist with our program.

Learn more about UW CSE’s CS4HS offering here.  Learn about the worldwide Google program here.  Learn about UW CSE’s many K-12 outreach programs here. Read more →

July 16-19 marked UW CSE’s 4-day summer co-ed day camp on “physical computing.”

More and more, computing is moving off desks and into pockets and devices spread across our world.  A great group of students got a chance to learn about physical computing from Brett Wortzman, a fantastic local high school teacher.

Microsoft donated 12 .NET Gadgeteer Kits for use by the students – carried across the Atlantic with two days to spare by Scarlet Schwiderski-Grosche from Microsoft Research in Cambridge UK, who was visiting Seattle for the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit.

July 8-12 marked the second session of this summer’s UW CSE summer day camps for high school girls.  A fantastic group of 21 students joined us for a week of computing fun!  Many thanks to Google for donating Android phones for project work.

CSE senior Sam Hopkins is the recipient of the 2013 UW Arts & Sciences Dean’s Medal for the Natural Sciences, awarded to the top graduating student in the Natural Sciences division of UW’s College of Arts & Sciences.  Sam – the son of long-time UW Chemistry chair Paul Hopkins – entered UW at age 15 through the Early Entrance Program, and will head to Ithaca in the fall as a computer science graduate student at Cornell.  Sam is the 11th CSE student since the year 2000 to receive a Dean’s Medal in Arts & Sciences or Engineering – an extraordinary record by CSE’s extraordinary students.

There’s a lovely profile of Sam in this month’s Arts & Sciences newsletter, Perspectives, here. Read more →

UW CSE professor (and UCSD Ph.D. alum) Yoshi Kohno, UCSD professor (and UW CSE Ph.D. alum) Stefan Savage, and their students spent two years exploring the security vulnerabilities of modern automobiles and working with vehicle manufacturers and Federal regulatory agencies to address them.

It took Fox News only 4 minutes and 34 seconds to sensationalize it beyond recognition.

Sigh … watch the result here.  Better, read about the research here. Read more →

You can’t make up stuff that’s this unlikely!

Recent Ph.D. alum Yaw Anokwa, co-developer of the widely-used Open Data Kit platform for data collection via mobile phones, and co-founder of the Seattle startup Nafundi focused on applications for challenging environments such as the developing world, is featured in an advertisement for Nordstrom’s new “Citizens of Humanity” jeans.

Watch the video!  It provides a superb overview of Yaw’s work.  (And he cleans up really well – good news in light of his July 27 wedding to UW CSE lecturer and K-12 outreach coordinator Hélène Martin.)

Says Yaw:  “Turns out a Ph.D. in computer science can be used to launch a modeling career …” Read more →

Monday and Tuesday marked the 14th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit.

The Seattle Times devoted much of its coverage to the “Lab of Things” platform created and demonstrated by UW CSE Ph.D. alum A.J. Brush:

“Lab of Things is a platform for research that uses connected devices in the home, allowing researchers who need to collect data from homes for their studies to more easily manage and collect and analyze data.

“Researchers, such as those working in health care or computer interaction, often conduct studies of people in their homes.

“But one of the most limiting factors is how often they are allowed into their subjects home — if, for instance, they must go every time sensor software needs updating, said Arjmand Samuel of Microsoft Research in Redmond.

“Lab of Things should make it easier for researchers to deploy studies in homes. All it requires is a wireless network, and for the researcher to bring in a home hub — a laptop or even a netbook running Windows 7 or 8 — that can talk to the sensors set up in the home.

“When a sensor detects an activity, for example, it can send an email to the researcher. Software updates can be deployed over the air without going into people’s homes.

“All the data collected goes into a cloud owned by the researcher, allowing her to analyze it more easily, said A.J. Brush of Microsoft Research in Redmond.

“Researchers also are able to see what is happening on their mobile devices.

“The beta version of Lab of Things is available for download, and some researchers are already using it, Brush said.”

Read the article here.  Learn about Lab of Things here.

(Ratul Mahajan, who architected the platform and co-leads the project, is also a UW CSE Ph.D. alum.) Read more →

Wednesday’s Future of Software Engineering symposium – FuSE 2013, held in Redmond WA following the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit – has been dedicated to UW CSE professor David Notkin, who passed away in April.  See the program here.  Watch videos here.  Learn more about David here. Read more →

In WrestleBrania, a sensor on your forearm measures electrical stimuli, driving an electromechanical arm wrestling robot (covered in pink fur).

The fact that this video is on the CSE News page rather than Tom’s Biology News page gives you a hint at the outcome …

Thanks to UW’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, which developed WrestleBrania and was demonstrating it for K-12 students (and the occasional faculty passers-by …).

Watch the video here. Read more →