Allen School News

April 25 marked the annual UW CSE Scholarship and Fellowship Recognition Luncheon, where the donors of our endowed undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships meet the students they are supporting.  It’s always a happy event!

Undergraduate scholarships enable top students to obtain a UW CSE education, regardless of means – of ever-increasing importance in these days of relentlessly rising tuition.  Graduate fellowships enable CSE to compete successfully with the nation’s other premier programs for the top graduate students from across the nation and around the world.

Thanks to the many friends, alumni, and companies that support UW CSE’s extraordinary students!

Meet the donors and students here.  View photographs of the event here. Read more →

On Thursday April 25, members of the UW CSE community joined David Notkin’s family in decorating the trees on the plaza outside the Allen Center.  Photographs here. Read more →

UW CSE’s uTouch technology is featured in a number of recent tech posts.

“Researchers at the University of Washington’s aptly named Ubiquitous Computing Lab can turn any LCD monitor in your house into a touchscreen, with nothing more than a $5 sensor that plugs into the wall and some clever software.

“The technology, called uTouch, works by measuring the electromagnetic interference (EMI) caused by your hand when it moves near or touches an LCD monitor. This might sound a little bit crazy, but I’ll explain. Basically, the electricity running through the wires in your house has a unique electromagnetic signature. There is the “carrier wave,” provided by the power company and your nearby substation, and then every single kink and switch along the way modulates the EM signature until it is quite unique. What most people don’t realize, though, is that every device that is plugged into a wall outlet also changes your EM signature. Your TV doesn’t just suck power from your house — it’s a two-way street, with the electronic components in the TV producing interference that change your house’s EM signature.”

Read more here and here.

Lots of subsequent news coverage:  here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Read more →

J. Ray Bowen served as the University of Washington’s Dean of Engineering from 1981-1996.  Upon his retirement, the J. Ray Bowen Professorship for Innovation in Education was established “to recognize distinguished faculty in the College of Engineering who display dedication to educational innovation and curriculum development.”

Effective July 1, CSE’s Dan Grossman will assume the Bowen Professorship.  Dan earned this distinction for a wide range of contributions:  leading CSE through a major modernization of our undergraduate curriculum, leading our efforts to utilize the Coursera MOOC platform, superb classroom teaching, superb student mentoring, and a world-class research program.

Congratulations Dan! Read more →

“The Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing (NIAC) has landed supercomputing luminary Thom Dunning Jr., who will help lead the effort to tie together two of the region’s top centers of computing research …

“NIAC, situated in Sieg Hall on the UW campus in Seattle, is designed as a center for collaboration among researchers from both institutions—previously separated by a three-plus-hour drive—focusing on new technologies to advance computing, data-enabled discovery, and computational science …

“‘Most fields of discovery are transitioning from data-poor to data-rich,’ says [UW CSE professor] Lazowska, who leads the eScience Institute, which is the center of this work at UW. ‘The world is full of tiny but powerful sensors—in telescopes, in gene sequencers, in roads and bridges and buildings, in our environment, in the form of Twitter feeds and Web requests. The challenge today is converting all of this data into knowledge, and converting this knowledge into action.'”

Read more here. Read more →

Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large writes:

Computing mensch had special way with people

David Notkin, accomplished software engineer, helped diversify his field and showed others how to live a complete life.

David Notkin was a big deal in the world of computer science, but you wouldn’t know that being around him. He was a modest-living mensch with a gift for making other people feel special, like they were a big deal. And to him, they were.

Read this lovely tribute on the Seattle Times website here (pdf) (jpg).

  Read more →

UW CSE professor Susan Eggers has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, as a member of the Class of 2013.

The Academy was founded during the American Revolution by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other leaders who contributed prominently to the establishment of the new nation, its government, and its Constitution. Its purpose was to provide a forum for a select group of scholars, members of the learned professions, and government and business leaders to work together on behalf of the democratic interests of the republic.

Election to the Academy is of comparable prestige to NAS, NAE, and IoM, but the membership is more broad, including the humanities and arts, public affairs, and business as well as the mathematical, physical, biological, and social sciences.  Fifty six University of Washington faculty members are Fellows of the Academy, including CSE’s Ed Lazowska.

Others elected this year in the Computer Sciences section:  Anant Agarwal (MIT), David Dill (Stanford), Jitendra Malik (Berkeley), Peter Norvig (Google), Jen Rexford (Princeton), and Richard Tapia (Rice).

Also elected this year from the University of Washington:  Randy Moon (Pharmacology).

The full list of newly-elected Fellows of the Academy is available here. Read more →

Our dear friend and colleague David Notkin passed away at home at 3:30 a.m. on April 22 2013 following a long battle with cancer.  Our hearts go out to David’s wife Cathy, his children Emma and Akiva, his sister Debbie, and all who knew him and loved him.

Information may be found on David’s CaringBridge page here.

In February, hundreds of David’s friends honored him at Notkinfest – a tribute to his extraordinary personal and professional contributions – where we announced the establishment of the David Notkin Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Computer Science & Engineering to permanently recognize his dedication to graduate education.

David’s long list of professional accolades includes, most recently, the 2013 A. Nico Habermann Award from the Computing Research Association, and the 2013 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s special interest group on software engineering.  He received the University of Washington Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award in 2000.

A few of the many posts honoring David:

• Computing Community Consortium
• National Center for Women & Information Technology
• University of Washington
• Communications of the ACM
• Seattle Times: “Computing mensch had special way with people” (pdf) (jpg)
• Brown University (David’s undergraduate alma mater)
• By David’s sister, Debbie
• IEEE
• NCWIT establishes the David Notkin Mentorship Award
• ACM/CRA video tribute to David shown at 2013 ACM Awards Banquet
• Spring 2013 Most Significant Bits (UW CSE alumni magazine)
• IEEE Software

“Tie One On for David” – members of the UW CSE community join David’s family in decorating the trees on the plaza outside the Allen Center.  Photographs here. Read more →

The New York Times focuses the article “An Instant Path to an Online Army” on the work of UW CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Bigham, now on the faculty at the University of Rochester but about to join the faculty at Carnegie Mellon.

“Computer science researchers have been trying to build systems that summon online workers on demand and produce immediate results. Much initial work has focused on completing tasks for people with disabilities, because that is where the need is great. For example, a blind person may need to identify the contents of a can from a kitchen cupboard right now, not later. A deaf college student may want to follow the give-and-take of a seminar discussion as it unfolds in the classroom, and not wait to read a transcript the next day.

“VizWiz, a free iPhone app developed by Jeffrey P. Bigham of the University of Rochester and colleagues in its Human Computer Interaction program, gives real-time help to blind users.

“VizWiz users take a photograph as best as they can — it may take several tries before the desired object is properly framed — and then record one question about it (‘What is on the label of the can?’) …”

Read more here.  Check out VizWiz here. Read more →

With Coursera MOOCs on Programming Languages and Computer Networks under our belts, we’ve just launched two new MOOCS:

The Hardware/Software Interface, taught by CSE professors Gaetano Borriello and Luis Ceze, examines key computational abstraction levels below modern high-level languages:  number representation, assembly language, introduction to C, memory management, the operating-system process model, high-level machine architecture including the memory hierarchy, and how high-level languages are implemented.

Computational Neuroscience, taught by CSE professor Raj Rao and Physiology & Biophysics professor Adrienne Fairhall, introduces students to basic computational techniques for analyzing, modeling, and understanding the behavior of cells and circuits in the brain.

An additional course, Introduction to Data Science, taught by CSE professor Bill Howe, will begin in May. Read more →