Allen School News

At this month’s IEEE RFID conference, 3 out of the 5 best paper award candidates have UW CSE & EE affiliation:

• “Hybrid Analog-Digital Backscatter: A New Approach for Battery-Free Sensing,” by Vamsi Talla and Joshua R. Smith
• “Sensor Enabled Wearable RFID Technology for Mitigating the Risk of Falls Near Beds,” by Roberto Luis Shinmoto Torres, Qinfen Shi, Alanson Sample, and Damith C. Ranasinghe
• “Minimum Energy Source Coding for Asymmetric Modulation with Application to RFID,” by Farzad Hessar, and Sumit Roy

The Bellingham Herald opines:

“To put the problem in a sentence, Washington creates more STEM-related jobs than any other state in the U.S., including California, but ranks in the bottom five states that produce STEM-degree graduates.

“The immediate choke point resides at our two- and four-year higher education institutions. The University of Washington has room to accept only 25 percent of students who apply for its computer science program. It takes only half of those who apply for engineering.”

UW CSE 1993 Ph.D. alum Ed Felten, Professor of Computer Science and of Public Policy at Princeton and for the past two years the first Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission, is interviewed extensively in Wired:

“For more than a decade now, Felten has promoted an important idea that has sometimes put him at odds with the music industry and big technology companies: the notion that consumers should be able to take apart and learn about the software and hardware on devices that they own.

“He calls this principle the freedom to tinker, and over the years, Felten and his team of Princeton University researchers have tinkered with some pretty interesting things. They’ve uncovered bugs in voting machines and CD copy-control systems. They ripped apart Sony’s notorious computer-crippling rootkit. In 2008, they showed how it’s possible to read data from a computer’s memory, even after it’s been shut down …

“But Felten’s latest project may be his most ambitious yet. He’s investigating what he calls ‘accountable algorithms.’ Felten and his Princeton team are trying to develop ways to test that the computerized algorithms that loom so large over our daily lives. Take, for example, the algorithm the TSA uses to select travelers for extra security checks. Felten wants to develop a way to check that these algorithms are fair.”

Read more of this great interview here.

(This spring, Felten and 1984 bachelors alum Anne Dinning will return to UW to receive our 2013 Alumni Achievement Awards.) Read more →

The New York Times explores the future of search – influenced by mobile experience, and by focused search such as shopping.  UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni – a leading proponent and inventor of new approaches to search – is quoted:

“No longer do consumers want to search the Web like the index of a book — finding links at which a particular keyword appears. They expect new kinds of customized search, like that on topical sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor or Amazon, which are chipping away at Google’s hold …

“‘What people want is, ‘You ask a very simple question and you get a very simple answer,” said Oren Etzioni, a professor at the University of Washington who has co-founded companies for shopping and flight search. ‘We don’t want the 10 blue links on that small screen. We want to know the closest sushi place, make a reservation and be on our way.'”

Read the article here.  Learn about Etzioni’s research here. Read more →

A wonderful New York Times essay on Digital Green – information and communications technology to aid development in rural India – quotes UW CSE professor Richard Anderson, a pioneer in the field:

“What’s intriguing about Digital Green is how it uses videos to start public conversations and elicit leadership within communities. What’s unexpected is that it has been able to produce locally made videos in India’s regional languages at scale, something Gandhi notes is cheaper and faster than using professional filmmakers. ‘Digital Green’s approach is kind of the MOOC model turned upside down,’ observes Richard Anderson, a professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, who is working with PATH to adapt its model to public health. ‘With a MOOC you have one centralized video reaching hundreds of thousands. With Digital Green, it’s very localized videos reaching locals within the region.'”

Read the article here.  Learn about Anderson’s research here. Read more →

NSDI – the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation – is one of the two top conferences in computer systems.  In 2013, 170 research papers were submitted.  38 were accepted.  2 were designated “Award Papers.”  One of these is the paper “A Fault-Tolerant Engineered Network” by UW CSE graduate students Vincent Liu and Dan Halperin and faculty members Arvind Krishnamurthy and Tom Anderson.

This marks the 4th time that a UW CSE paper has received the NSDI “Best Paper” award in the 10 years of the conference.

Congratulations to Vincent, Dan, Arvind, and Tom.  See the NSDI announcement here.  Read the paper here. Read more →

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat writes:

“It’s not often that talk gets exposed for being empty as swiftly as it was last week.

“On Wednesday, the state’s business community issued a clarion call to not only stop slashing our college system, but to expand it dramatically …

“But then the very next day, Gov. Jay Inslee proposed ending some tax exemptions to, among other things, boost science and health-care enrollment in the state college system. Yet here’s how the Association of Washington Business, a group that had joined in Wednesday’s clarion call, responded to that:

“‘While we understand and support Gov. Inslee’s desire to increase funding for education, we do not support raising taxes …’

“I don’t know that I’ve seen a case of cognitive dissonance as acute as what’s going on with business leaders and our higher education system.

“Unlike in the K-12 system, where there’s a major debate about reform, nobody is suggesting the computer science or engineering programs at the UW need big overhauls. Yet last year computer science turned away an astonishing 75 percent of UW students who wanted to major in it. The reason? Not enough funding for more slots. End of story …

“The national State Higher Education Executive Officers, which looked at how states financially support their public colleges, reports we ranked 49th out of 50 last year. By two dollars per student we barely beat Florida for dead last. Bow down to Washington!

“With the economy recovering, if we can’t find some real money — not study money — for these schools, then maybe we should stop talking about how we value them so much.”

Go Danny!  Read more here. Read more →

Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation are among the most prestigious awards available to graduate students in the sciences and engineering.

Three UW CSE graduate students and four UW CSE undergraduates have just been announced as winners of 2013 NSF GRF’s:  graduate students Lilian de Greef, Ben Hixon, and Irene Zhang, undergraduate seniors Sam Hopkins and David Colmenares, and former CSE undergraduates Gabriel Pratt (currently a graduate student in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at UC San Diego) and Ada Zhang (currently a graduate student in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon).

Congratulations! Read more →

On March 27th, NPR’s Morning Edition of all tech considered featured a story on the growing trend of combining business and smartphone apps for social good.  Highlighted is the work done by Nafundi, a startup led by UW CSE alums Yaw Anokwa and Carl Hartung.  Nafundi develops software for challenging environments and grew from the work done by Yaw and Carl on the Open Data Kit project.

“For those willing to really invest the time,” Anokwa says, “there are more opportunities these days to make a living doing social good with technology.”

NPR story here.  Learn more about Nafundi here. More information on Open Data Kit here. Read more →

John Torode and the Sigma 5

1972 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Gary Sager recently discovered this 42-year-old photo of 1972 Ph.D. alum John Torode ministering to CSE’s then-state-of-the-art SDS Sigma 5 computer, whose computational power is undoubtedly dwarfed by your wristwatch. Read more →