Allen School News

The DARPA Robotics Challenge kicked off this week with the announcement of 18 teams – 8 from universities and 10 from industry – who will be funded by DARPA to participate in the DRC.  Over the next two years, these teams will compete to develop and put to the test hardware and software designed to enable robots to assist humans in emergency response when a disaster strikes.

A UW CSE team led by Emo Todorov and including Dieter Fox, Zoran Popovic, and Steve Seitz is among the competitors selected by DARPA.

Learn more about the work of UW’s Movement Control Laboratory here. Read more →

Brier Dudley reports on the UW CSE Industry Affiliates meeting, in the Seattle Times:

“A boost from the Legislature – plus grants from the likes of Amazon.com – is increasing the size the University of Washington’s computer science program by 25 percent this year …

“The school also has successfully recruited top-tier faculty, including world experts in machine learning, and more hires are in the works.

“‘We’ve had really the most remarkable year in our history,’ [UW CSE chair Hank] Levy said …

“A lunchtime lecture was given by Carlos Guestrin, a machine-learning professor that the UW lured from Carnegie Mellon University with a $1 million endowment from Amazon.com.  Guestrin provided an overview of the GraphLab distributed computation framework that’s being used to explore the capability of smaller computing systems to analyze enormous datasets.”

More here. Read more →

Last Saturday, 36 3-person teams competed in UW’s local runoff for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition to determine the 5 teams that will represent UW in the regional ICPC runoff on November 3.  The international ICPC finals will be held in St. Peterburg Russia from June 30 – July 4.  Unlike the World Series, the ICPC truly is an international competition – it’s been 15 years since a US team won!

Faculty members Stuart Reges and Marty Stepp organized the competition, along with student helpers Victoria Wagner, Janette Sui, Caitlin Harding, and Valerie Liang and Google staffers (and CSE alums) Queena Chen and Ethan Apter.  Google was our official sponsor and provided food, prizes, and swag.

Below is a list of the top six teams:

#1 TAUNT (TAUNT’s An UnNamed Team): Sam Hopkins, Steve Rutherford, Kevin Clark
#2 UW Psychokinesis: Vaspol Ruamviboonsuk, Siwakon Srisakaokul, Lee Lee Choo
#3 O(0): Melanie Jensenworth, Raymond Zhang, Noah Siegel
#4 Stone Code Killas: Galen Knapp, Cody Thomas, Tobias Kahan
#5 6189456: Benjamin Sidhom, Chris Clark, Michael Fain
#6 Honey Badgers: Tyler Rigsby, Melissa Winstanley, Jenny Abrahamson

The #1 team can’t make it to the November 3 regional contest, but the other five will all be representing us.

You can find more detailed results along with information about the problems at this url:

http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~reges/acm/results.html

Congratulations to all the participants, thanks to Google, and good luck to the five UW CSE teams in the regional contest! Read more →

UW CSE’s most successful Industry Affiliates meeting ever was followed by our most successful graduate student pumpkin carving TGIF ever, with 54 jack-o-lanterns produced, and countless pounds of guck on the floor of the atrium.  (Thanks to Kyle Rector for organizing the event … and the cleanup.) Read more →

Please join us for the second 2012-13 UW CSE Distinguished Lecture.

On Tuesday October 30 at 3:30, Brad Smith – Microsoft’s General Counsel and Executive Vice President for Legal and Corporate Affairs – will speak on “Creating an Environment for Innovation.”

Additional information here. Read more →

CSE Ph.D. students Shiri Azenkot and Kyle Rector, along with CSE professor Richard Ladner and iSchool (and CSE adjuct) professor Jake Wobbrock won the ASSETS 2012 Best Paper Award at the 14th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility for their paper “PassChords:  Secure multi-touch authentication for blind people.”

The paper presents a new non-visual technique, PassChords, for user authentication on a touch screen using mult-finger taps, rather than entering a traditional PIN on a virtual keypad.   In a study with 13 blind participants, PassChords was 3 times faster for entering a PIN than using a traditional PIN keypad with a screen reader.  The PIN strength, measured in empirical entropy, was about the same for both methods.

Congratulations to Shiri, Kyle, Richard, and Jake! Read more →

A terrific GeekWire article, with a huge number of great photos, on the UW CSE Open House held on Wednesday evening:

“We all remember school science fairs – lots of posters, people and presentations packed into a large area.  Consider Wednesday evening at University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering something similar, but instead a souped-up version hosted by computer science buffs.

“As part of UW CSE’s Industry Affiliates Annual Meeting, 89 research groups made up of over 150 grad students set up shop in rooms within the UW’s high-tech Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering to show off their latest work in a poster and demo session.  Industry representatives, regional alumni and friends of the department were on hand to see everything from animated learning games to candid portrait selection derived from video.”

Read more, and see lots of terrific photos, here. Read more →

Today’s the day – 50 top companies recruiting UW CSE students.  It’s a zoo!

Pity poor Google:  Somehow they had to top last year’s stunt of Yin Lu running around in a Cookie Monster costume handing out chocolate chip cookies.  The brainstorm:  Gummy Sushi.  (They had to go all the way to Mill Creek to find a bakery that was willing to fabricate the little beauties …)

Tuesday was recruiting day for 50 startup companies.   Wednesday was the Affiliates research interaction day, plus open house.  Tomorrow we sleep in!

Many Bruce Hemingway photographs here.

Read more →

Matt McIlwain (center) congratulates Madrona Prize winners Eric Larson and Mayank Goel

The research day of the UW CSE Industry Affiliates Meeting concludes with an open house (reception, posters, lab tours) for Affiliates attendees and regional alumni and friends.

For the 7th year, Madrona Venture Group awarded the Madrona Prize to the students whose research had the greatest commercial potential.  In addition, the People’s Choice Awards were given to the most popular research poster or demo in each lab.

Congratulations to all the winners – and to all the participants (89 posters/demos involving more than 150 students).  And thanks to Madrona for their long-standing encouragement of our entrepreneurial activities.

(Students are denoted by * in the list below)

Madrona Prize

Winner

SpiroSmart: Using a Microphone to Measure Lung Function on a Mobile Phone, by * Eric C. Larson, * Mayank Goel, Gaetano Borriello, Sonya Heltshe (Children’s Hospital), Margaret Rosenfeld (Children’s Hospital), Shwetak N. Patel.

Runners up

FreeDOM: a New Baseline for the Web, by * Raymond Cheng, * Will Scott.

Wireless Power for Left Ventricular Assist Device, by * Ben Waters, * Scott Wisdom, * Brody Mahoney, * Chen Shi, Joshua Smith.

Hank Levy with People’s Choice Award winners

People’s Choice Awards

Candid Portrait Selection from Video, by * Juliet Fiss, Aseem Agarwala, Brian Curless.

Serving Massive Earth Simulations over the Internet, by * Scott Moe, Bill Howe.

RGB-D Mapping: Using Kinect-style Depth Cameras for Dense 3D Modeling of Indoor Environments, by * Peter Henry, * Michael Krainin, * Evan Herbst, * Xiaofeng Ren, Dieter Fox.

Rethinking Storage for Non-Volatile Memory, by * Peter Hornyack, * Katelin Bailey, Luis Ceze, Steve Gribble, Hank Levy.

ODK Sensors: A Sensor Integration Framework for Android at the Application-Level, by * Waylon Brunette, * Rohit Chaudhri, * Mayank Goel, Gaetano Borriello.

Extremer Extraction: Interactive Learning of Relation Extractors with Weak Supervision, by * Raphael Hoffmann.

Fine-Grained Entity Recognition, by * Xiao Ling, Dan Weld.

Gesture Coder: Programming Multi-Touch Gestures by Demonstration, by * Hao Lü, Yang Li (Google).

Origin-Bound Certificates: A Fresh Approach to Strong Client Authentication for the Web, by * Alexei Czeskis.

Prefab: Modifying an Graphical Interface, by * Morgan Dixon, James Fogarty.

User Interface Toolkit Mechanisms for Securing Interface Elements, by * Franziska Roesner, James Fogarty, Tadayoshi Kohno. Read more →

Carlos Guestrin – UW CSE’s Amazon Professor of Machine Learning – delivered a luncheon keynote on his GraphLab machine learning system at the 2012 UW CSE Industry Affiliates Meeting.

Learn more about Carlos and his research here. Read more →