Allen School News

This excellent (if depressing) article in the Seattle Times exposes the gaps in Washington’s education system:

“We think of ourselves as a well-educated state, and in many respects we are. More than half of Seattle adults 25 and older hold a bachelor’s degree, making it one of the most well-schooled cities in the nation.

“So it may come as a surprise that only about one in four public-school students from Washington’s high-school class of 2009 will finish college by 2015, according to a Seattle Times analysis of recent trends.

“While the percentage of high-school graduates who went to college jumped by nine points in the United States over the past two decades, the percentage of college-going high-schoolers in Washington fell.

“We were once well above the national average for the percentage of high-school students who go on to a two- or four-year college. But today, by some measures, we are one of the lowest states in the country …

“As University of Washington computer science professor Ed Lazowska says: ‘We are creating great jobs, and they’re going to other people’s children.'”

Read the article here.  Learn additional facts about STEM education in Washington State here.  (See a post on a related opinion piece here.) Read more →

Captricity, a service that wants to make the paper-to-digital conversion faster and cheaper, was co-founded by UW CSE bachelors alum Kuang Chen.  (Kuang recently received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley advised by Joe Hellerstein and UW CSE Ph.D. alum Tapan Parikh.)  Writes PandoDaily:

“The service is a result of cofounder Kuang Chen’s trip to Tanzania, where he worked at an HIV treatment center. After being tasked with finding patients that had started on anti-retrovirals, but for one reason or another had stopped taking them, Chen had to work his way through scattered papers and attempt to gather as much data as possible from them. He decided that it was time to bring digitization that would be powerful enough for enterprise customers but cheap enough for third-world organizations, and Captricity was born.”

Read the post here. Read more →

“Is there anything a smartphone app can’t do?  Researchers at the University of Washington, UW Medicine and Seattle Children’s hospital have figured out how to let people measure their own lung health by breathing in the direction of the standard microphone on a smartphone, without any specialized attachments.

“Here’s the cool part:  The results from the app are within 5 percent of those from commercial spirometers that run into the thousands of dollars.  That level of accuracy means the app is already meeting medical standards.

“The app, called SpiroSmart, analyzes the sound waves from a strong exhale to judge the health of the person’s lungs.”

Read the post here.  Read a UW News release here.  Read the SpiroSmart research paper here.

Related articles:  KOMO TV News video here.  C|net here.  New York Daily News here. Read more →

Tenacity Sports co-founders Don Le and Jon Tam

Tenacity Sports – a Seattle-based startup co-founded by UW CSE alum Don Le and his friend Jon Tam – is developing a new website called Gametiime, an online service that will help people discover, compare, and share running activities around the local area.

Our friends at GeekWire profiled Tenacity Sports today.  Read the article here. Read more →

Elhanan Borenstein, assistant professor of Genome Sciences and adjunct assistant professor in CSE, has been recognized in the NIH “High Risk High Rewards” program.

According to NIH Director Francis Collins, the High Risk High Reward program “provides opportunities for innovative investigators in any area of health research to take risks when the potential impact in biomedical and behavioral sciences is high.”

Borenstein researches the human microbiome – the complex ensemble of microorganisms that populate the human body.  Borenstein and his team are building a comprehensive computational toolkit for designing microbiome manipulations and for discovering possible routes for microbiome-based therapy.

Read a UW News article here.  Learn more about Borenstein’s work here. Read more →

This New York Times article on modern robotics – largely focused on Rodney Brooks’s company Rethink Robotics – also discusses innovations by UW CSE’s Emo Todorov:

“In contrast to the fixed repetitive tasks performed by today’s robot arms and hands, scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Washington have built several prototype hands with pliable fingers that can move as quickly as humans’ …

“‘Despite decades of automation, there are relatively few types of tasks that have been automated,’ said Emanuel Todorov, a cognitive scientist at Washington.

“This is now changing rapidly as a new wave of manufacturing robots appears, driven by the collapsing cost of computing and the rapid emergence of inexpensive sensors that give robots new powers of vision and touch.”

Read more here.  Learn about Emo’s research here. Read more →

“A recent survey of 1000 adults found a majority thought cloud computing actually referred to a “fluffy white thing.” Fifty-one percent also believed storms could interfere with it, according to the survey sponsored by Citrix.

“Those statistics are evidence that many computer users do not fully understand this new, important technology …

“‘Seattle is really ground zero for cloud computing with the presence of Amazon, founded here, Microsoft here and Google having a substantial presence here as well,’ said Bill Howe, a [UW CSE] professor.

“Thanks to the cloud, new companies no longer need to fill rooms with massive computer servers to store their data.

“‘We’re able to innovate in a way we’d never be able to innovate without using these cloud services,’ said Shauna Causey of Decide.com, a [UW CSE] Seattle startup.”

Watch the interview here. Read more →

Google’s corporate-wide “Interns Making an Impact” feature today highlights UW CSE Ph.D. student Tim Blakely, working at Google Seattle.  Tim is the lead developer on BigBrain, a large-scale computational neuroscience tool built on the cloud. The project began as an exploratory venture between Google and the Allen Institute for Brain Science (AIBS) to investigate whether the cloud could provide a platform for doing massively parallel, large-scale neural simulations.

Read more here. Read more →

A New York Times article describing Rick Smolan’s forthcoming book The Human Face of Big Data features two of our favorite computer scientists:  UW CSE professor Shwetak Patel, and MIT EECS professor John Guttag:

“Mr. Smolan visited recently to offer a glimpse of what will be in The Human Face of Big Data and the imaginative photo composition involved in bringing technical subjects to life. One photograph shows Shwetak Patel, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, who has developed technology that measures energy and water use in homes; with wireless sensors and clever software to determine what appliances and gadgets in a home use the most electricity and water, the software suggests ways to conserve — information delivered graphically on an iPad. The photo shows young Mr. Patel in the backyard of his cousin’s house in Hayward, Calif., with his cousin’s family, surrounded by what looks to be every single appliance, digital device, faucet and toilet in the household.

“Another photo illustrates software technology that captures previously discarded data from heart-monitoring electrocardiogram machines. The software program sifts the data, looking for subtle heart abnormalities that identify patients that are at high risk of suffering a second heart attack within a year. The photo shows two M.I.T. scientists, John Guttag and Collin Stultz, who developed the technology, standing in a small mountain of paper, which is 10 hours of printout data from an E.K.G. machine.”

Read the New York Times article here.  Visit the web page for the book here.

Additional related articles:  Enterprise here; Huffington Post here. Read more →

Today is UW CSE Ph.D. alum Geoff Voelker‘s birthday.  His UCSD CSE colleague (and fellow UW CSE Ph.D. alum) Stefan Savage writes:

Dear all,

Untold years ago today, our own Geoff Voelker was born.  Unfortunately, those of us who seek to communicate birthday wishes in the contemporary vernacular – a wry combination of “Happy Birthday” posts on the recipient’s Facebook “wall” and the “liking” of other such posts – are unable to do so in this case.  You see, Geoff is a practicing neo-luddite.  In particular, he shamelessly refuses to use any technology popularized after 1996.  Thus, he does not text, he does not tweet, he does not blog, pin, digg or tumbl.  He carries no portable electronics, his only phone plugs into the wall, he watches television via a broadcast cable and buys pre-recorded audio physically encoded on quaint pressed discs of aluminum and poly-carbonate. Webmail?  No way, this guy still reads direct from /var/spool/mail/  And… germane to this particular conversation… Geoff Voelker has no Facebook page and hence no wall.   

How then to wish Geoff “Happy Birthday”?  My first thought was to just create a Facebook account in Geoff’s name, thereby simplifying life for all of us.  Unfortunately, Geoff knows me too well and long ago extracted a solemn promise from me that I would not create, cause to be created or “allow to be created through inaction,” any account or page on the Facebook online social network.  Sealed in blood under a full moon, this is one of the few oaths that I’ve felt obligated to keep.   I needed another way.

Working tirelessly with a crack team of specialists, entrepreneurs, astrologers, lawyers, academics, and wild-eyed dreamers, we eventually found the loophole we needed.  Using arcane quantum mechanisms we arranged to shift the raw potentiality of Geoff’s Facebook page from the virtual online world, into an _actual_ Facebook page located in our physical plane of existence.  Through this solipsistic sleight of hand, Geoff now has a Facebook wall, appropriately located… on his wall.

Particular thanks go to alumnus Chris Kanich in our Great Lakes office for creating the page to exacting specifications, Neha Chachra for printing it, Dave Wargo for mounting it under glass and Kirill “the most interesting computer scientist in the world” Levchenko for his inestimable management skills.  

With that, I’d like to invite all of you who know and care for Geoff, to write your birthday wishes on his new Facebook wall in its physical location outside room 3108. Read more →