Allen School News

On Wednesday, CSE’s 60+ undergraduate TAs plus the faculty bid a fond farewell to Marty Stepp at a surprise party in the Bill & Melinda Gates Commons.  Marty – a truly phenomenal teacher – has decided to take his talents southward.  Stanford students, who already benefit from a superb lecturer corps, are in for a treat.

Marty, we’re sorry to lose you – thanks for all you contributed to UW CSE, best of success in the coming years, and remember … when you eventually recognize you made a mistake, there will always be a place for you at UW CSE!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Saturday June 15 marked the University of Washington’s 138th commencement exercises.

For CSE students, the day began at 9 a.m. with a departmental ceremony that filled Meany Hall, the largest auditorium on campus.  The program recognized 203 Bachelors degree recipients in Computer Science and Computer Engineering, 85 Masters degree recipients, and 23 Ph.D. degree recipients – 311 degree recipients in all!  The program also recognized the recipients of the ACM Student Chapter Teaching Award (to Magda Balazinska), the Undergraduate Service Award (to Steve Rutherford), the Outstanding Undergraduate Honors Thesis Award (Leeran Raphaely), the Outstanding Computer Science and Computer Engineering Senior Awards (to Stephen Jonany, Sam Hopkins, and Raymond Zhang), the Bob Bandes Memorial Excellence in Teaching Awards (to graduate students Elliott Brossard and Cody Schroeder, honorable mention to Caitlin Bonnar, and to undergraduate students Katlyn Edwards and Zorah Fung, with honorable mention to Michael Farrow), and the CSE Alumni Achievement Award (to Anne Dinning and Ed Felten).

Faculty, students, parents, and friends then joined a reception in the Microsoft Atrium of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

In the afternoon, hardy souls trooped down to Century Link Field along with 50,000 of their closest friends for the main University of Washington commencement ceremony.

Dozens of Bruce Hemingway photographs:

• Preliminaries
• Main program
• Masters processional
• Hooding of the Ph.D.s
• Reception in the Allen Center

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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At commencement each spring, UW CSE recognizes two alums with Alumni Achievement Awards.

This year’s recipients – who will join us for a celebratory dinner on Friday June 14 and again at our commencement on the morning of Saturday June 15th – are Anne Dinning and Ed Felten.

Anne received her Bachelors degree from UW CSE in 1984, where she did research with Professor Richard Ladner.  After working in Seattle for a year, she moved to New York and received her Ph.D. in computer science from the Courant Institute at NYU.  She turned down a number of attractive faculty positions to become an early employee of D. E. Shaw, the hedge fund established by Columbia University computer science professor David Shaw.  Today Anne is “first among equals” on the executive committee that oversees D. E. Shaw’s more than 1,000 employees, managing $26 billion in investment capital.

Ed, a Caltech physics undergraduate, worked for several years as an analyst with Caltech’s Concurrent Computing Project before earning his Ph.D. from UW CSE in 1993, where he worked with Ed Lazowska and John Zahorjan.  He then joined the computer science faculty at Princeton University, transitioned to computer security as a research area, and developed a strong interest in public policy related to information technology.  In addition to being a professor in Princeton’s Department of Computer Science, he is a Professor in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs, and the Director of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy; he recently spent two years in Washington DC on leave from Princeton as the first Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission.  Ed was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2011, and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2012.

We thank Anne and Ed for honoring us by joining us this spring to be recognized, and for being members of the ever-growing community of UW CSE alums who accomplish amazing things and make us look good!

Read more in msb here. Read more →

With two days to spare, the Spring 2013 issue of msb has hit the newsstands!  This issue pays tribute to David Notkin, celebrates CSE’s two newest winners of UW Dean’s Medals (Raymond Zhang and Sam Hopkins) and their 13 predecessors, honors Anne Dinning ’84 B.S. and Ed Felten ’93 Ph.D. as the recipients of our 2013 Alumni Achievement Awards, recognizes Kevin Ross ’88 B.S. for winning the 2013 College of Engineering Diamond Award for Public Service for his contributions to Washington’s FIRST Robotics effort, interviews the founders of Decide.com, welcomes new Dean of Engineering Mike Bragg, cheers Dan Grossman as the newly-named College of Engineering J. Ray Bowen Professor for Innovation in Engineering Education, and all sorts of other great stuff!

Read it here!

msb archives here. Read more →

Here’s a preliminary summary of the Washington State Algebra Challenge, co-sponsored by UW’s Center for Game Science and the Technology Alliance:

Top-level summary

4,192 K-12 students from across Washington participated in the Washington State Algebra Challenge during the first week of June, using an adaptive version of the game DragonBox.  Together, Washington’s students solved over 390,000 equations in a 5 day period!  The total amount of algebra work time during the week was 7 months 11 days and 13 hours!

School participation

80 individuals schools or out-of-school programs participated:

• 70 public schools
• 4 independent schools
•  1 after-school program
•  10 home school or home school organization.

Overall equations solved per student in the Challenge

Algebra Challenge participants solved an average of 93.21 equations (regardless of achieving Mastery), with four students solving more than 1000 equations each.

Achieving Mastery in the game

Of those students who played at least 1.5 hours, 92.9% achieved Mastery.  Of those students who played at least 1 hour, 83.8% achieved Mastery.  Of those who played at least 45 minutes, 73.4% achieved Mastery.

Levels played to achieve Mastery in the game

This analysis shows the effectiveness of adaptation – adapting the game to the individual student’s performance – on the overall mastery rate.  Almost everyone required some form of adaptation/remediation (as measured by extra levels from the basic progression), while some 7th graders in extreme cases needed up to 5 times more levels than the basic 60 level progression.  Kindergardeners needed almost 10 times more levels, but as we know from our other studies, young kids are extremely persistent.

Of those students who achieved Mastery, it took students on average 101.87 levels to achieve Mastery in the game.  While it took some students fewer levels to achieve Mastery, it took one persistent student 507 levels before achieving Mastery, which highlights the game’s ability to adapt to each student’s learning needs and support each student to achieve Mastery. For specific grade level averages and range (minimums and maximums) see chart below.

Time required to achieve Mastery in the game

Of those students who acheived Mastery, it took students on average 41 minutes 44 seconds to achieve Mastery. However it is important to note that it took some students less time, while it took one very persistent student 2 hours 43 minutes and 10 seconds to achieve Mastery. Read more →

“After more than a decade of online shopping, it’s still difficult to comparison shop without doing a lot of detective work. People read consumer-product reviews, troll the Web for prices, ask friends for input and create spreadsheets compiling all of these factors.

“This week, I put my feet up and let an algorithm do the work for me by using Decide.com.

“This website has two main features that help it tell you whether or not you should buy something. First, it gives products a Decide Score out of 100 points based on user reviews, as well as expert reviews from sources like Consumer Reports. Second, it uses a price-predicting technology to tell you whether or not the price is likely to go up or down in the next two weeks, so you don’t have to go through the frustration of buying something only to see the price drop right after.

“Tuesday, Decide.com launched a new category of products that are particularly challenging to buy: Baby & Kids. This category is a significant addition to the site that triples its number of products. Decide.com now covers 135 categories and 2.9 million products. By the end of this year, the company plans to cover 100 million products in every major category found on Amazon.com.”

Read more:  All Things Digital … Wall Street Journal. Read more →

Google has announced the 39 winners of their 2013 Global Ph.D. Fellowships:  2 from Australia, 4 from China, 13 from Europe, 5 from India, and 15 from the United States and Canada.  UW CSE’s Adrian Sampson is among the 15 winners from the United States and Canada.  UW CSE Ph.D. alumna Roxana Geambasu, now on the faculty at Columbia University, is highlighted in the Google press release as a previous winner of the award.

Congratulations to Adrian and Roxana! Read more →

Even in binary it’s not a notable birthday, but if you put too many UW CSE Ph.D. alums in one place (UCSD CSE in this case), you get mayhem.  No faculty office is complete without a disco ball … Happy birthday Stefan!

(Also today:  CSE Ph.D. student Franzi Roesner turned 27, a perfect cube.  And CSE Ph.D. alum and postdoc Dan Halperin turned 29, a prime.  But no disco balls for them.  There’s no justice in this world.) Read more →

“UW CSE’s Raj Rao and UW collaborators Jeff Ojemann, a professor of neurological surgery, and Jeremiah Wander, a doctoral student in bioengineering, published their results online June 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“In this study, seven people with severe epilepsy were hospitalized for a monitoring procedure that tries to identify where in the brain seizures originate. Physicians cut through the scalp, drilled into the skull and placed a thin sheet of electrodes directly on top of the brain. While they were watching for seizure signals, the researchers also conducted this study.

“The patients were asked to move a mouse cursor on a computer screen by using only their thoughts to control the cursor’s movement. Electrodes on their brains picked up the signals directing the cursor to move, sending them to an amplifier and then a laptop to be analyzed. Within 40 milliseconds, the computer calculated the intentions transmitted through the signal and updated the movement of the cursor on the screen.

“Researchers found that when patients started the task, a lot of brain activity was centered in the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with learning a new skill. But after often as little as 10 minutes, frontal brain activity lessened, and the brain signals transitioned to patterns similar to those seen during more automatic actions.

“‘Now we have a brain marker that shows a patient has actually learned a task,’ Ojemann said. ‘Once the signal has turned off, you can assume the person has learned it.'”

Anyone who would like to have his or her skull drilled for science is invited to contact Rao via email.

Read more here. Read more →

It’s a national trend – demand for Computer Science is skyrocketing as students recognize that the field is chock full of intellectual challenges, has “change the world” potential like no other, and is central to pretty much any 21st century career.  Plus, there’s only so much creativity you can exercise with asphalt.

The graphic displayed here shows the desired major of freshman applicants to the various Engineering majors at the University of Washington for Fall 2013.  (We recognize that other premier Computer Science programs have even greater numbers of applicants, but still …)

Other graphics:  Intended major of freshman matriculants to the University of Washington College of Engineering for Fall 2013.  (Note that UW CSE’s capacity is only 200 new students per year – tragic.)  Annual enrollment in UW CSE’s two-quarter introductory sequence.

Our terribly constrained situation is not of our own design.  To UW and the citizens of the state, we say “Show me the money!”  Will UW CSE continue to be an engine of opportunity for Washington’s students? Read more →