Allen School News

Artificial Intelligence, which commenced publication in 1970, is now the generally accepted premier international forum for the publication of results of current research in AI.

The journal has established two new awards for papers published in the journal:

• The AIJ Prominent Paper Award recognizes outstanding papers published not more than five years ago in the AI Journal that are exceptional in their significance and impact.
• The AIJ Classic Paper Award recognizes outstanding papers published at least 15 calendar years ago in the AI Journal that are exceptional in their significance and impact.

The inaugural AI Journal Prominent Paper Award has been given to the paper Learning and Inferring Transportation Routines by Lin Liao (UW CSE Ph.D. alum, now at Google), Donald Patterson (UW CSE Ph.D. alum, now on the faculty at UC Irvine), Dieter Fox (UW CSE professor), and Henry Kautz (former UW CSE professor, now at the University of Rochester), Volume 171, Issues 5-6, April 2007, Pages 311-331.

Congratulations to Lin, Donald, Dieter, and Henry! Read more →

The stodgy traditionalists at Slate lament the research of UW CSE Ph.D. student Jinna Lei:

“As a result, chefs are imagined not as autonomous virtuosi or gifted craftsmen but as enslaved robots who should never defy the commands of their operating systems.”

The good news for Jinna:  the article describes other, related research as “even more degrading.”

Read the article here.  Then … “Robot, bake me some brownies!” Read more →

UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska received the 2012 Reed College Vollum Award for Distinguished Accomplishment in Science and Technology at Reed’s convocation ceremony on August 22.

Each year since 1975, Reed has selected an awardee who demonstrates “the perseverance, fresh approach to problem-solving, and creative imagination that characterized Howard Vollum’s career.”

Vollum graduated from Reed in 1936 with a degree in physics.  For his senior project, he built an oscilloscope; he went on to co-found Tektronix, which revolutionized oscilloscope design and became a world leader in test, measurement, and monitoring technology, launching the electronics technology industry in the Pacific Northwest.

Previous University of Washington recipients of the Vollum Award include Stanley Fields, Lee Hood, Victor Klee, and Ed Krebs.  Previous computer science recipients of the award include Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Linus Torvalds.

Reed College press release here.  Lazowska’s convocation remarks here. Read more →

American Public Media writes:

“Any computer hooked up to the Internet is a potential victim of malicious hackers.

“Of course, it’s one thing to be hacked on a desktop PC, it’s quite another to be hacked in your car, traveling at 70 miles an hour, with a computer that controls your brakes and steering.

“Yoshi Kohno is part of a research team studying car computer security at the University of Washington.  He says don’t freak out.  Yet. ‘Right now, my grad students are the only people who are likely to hack your car.'”

Read more here. Read more →

“Amazon, Google und Microsoft reißen sich um die IT-Absolventen der University of Washington in Seattle. Die Hochschule gehört zu den besten öffentlichen Universitäten weltweit.”

(We have no idea what these people are saying about us, but you can read more here.) Read more →

Abie Flaxman, professor of Global Health at UW’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and adjunct professor of Computer Science & Engineering, is the latest in a long line of CSE-related researchers to be recognized as a member of Technology Review‘s TR35 – an annual listing of 35 top innovators under the age of 35.

Abie is the research lead for the Computational Algorithms research team at IHME.  He is the primary architect of a software tool known as DisMod III that IHME is using to estimate the Global Burden of Disease.  He and other researchers use the tool to fill in gaps in incomplete data on stroke, malaria, depression, and other diseases from government records and surveys and to correct for inconsistencies.

UW CSE – affiliated TR35 winners in the past 5 years include faculty members Jeff Heer, Yoshi Kohno, and Shwetak Patel; Ph.D. alums Jeff Bigham, Karen Liu, Tapan Parikh, Scott Saponas, Noah Snavely, and Adrien Treuille; and adjunct/affiliate faculty members Tanzeem Choudhury, Desney Tan, and Merrie Morris.

Congratulations Abie!

Read the TR35 citation here.  Abie’s IHME web page here.

Nice Seattle Times article here. Read more →

There are many urgent problems facing the planet:  a degrading environment, healthcare systems in crisis, and educational systems that are inadequately training innovative thinkers to solve the problems of tomorrow.  A balanced approach is required to solve these problems:  balanced between design and technology, between human-centered and technology-centered approaches, and between different world cultures and ways of thinking.

The World Lab is a new research and educational institution that is ideally suited to tackle these grand challenges.  The World Lab is sited jointly between two of the world’s leading computing and human-centered design institutions, the University of Washington in Seattle and Tsinghua University in Beijing.   Founded by Computer Science professors James Landay (UW) and Yuanchun Shi (Tsinghua), and Design professors Yingqing Xu and Zhiyong Fu (Tsinghua) and Tad Hirsch (UW), the World Lab kicked off its first program this Summer, The World Lab Summer Institute.

The World Lab Summer Institute at the University of Washington brings together students from technology, design, social science and business backgrounds, and challenges them to create prototypes for products and services that solve pressing social problems.  This inaugural year, the 7-week program brings together 11 Chinese graduate students from Tsinghua with 9 Seattle students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels to work together on cross-cultural, interdisciplinary teams.

This summer’s teams have created projects on concepts as diverse as a social network to encourage reuse of home-generated trash for art projects, a phone and tablet application to support elementary school education outside of the home, a web site for creating and viewing video montages of multiple perspectives on world events and history, a tablet-based drawing application to help young children express emotions, and a wearable sensor and display to encourage taking micro-exercise breaks.

The student teams will present their final projects to the public in presentations and a poster session on Friday, August 24^th from 10 AM –1 PM in The Gates Commons of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.  For more information on attending this event, please see http://worldlab.cs.washington.edu/invite.  The Seattle presentations will be followed by presentations in Beijing on September 14^th and 15^th. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. alum Mike Piatek (now at Google Seattle) and UW CSE postdoc Aruna Balasubramanian (who completed her Ph.D. at UMass-Amherst) have been named co-runners-up for the 2012 Doctoral Dissertation Award of SIGCOMM, the ACM Special Interest Group on communications and computer networks.  Their awards were presented on August 14 at the annual SIGCOMM conference in Helsinki.  Congratulations to Mike and Aruna! Read more →

An article in New Scientist describes the work of UW CSE Ph.D. student Jinna Lei:

“Celebrity chef apps, online how-to videos and recipe-sharing websites have all joined traditional cookbooks as guides for the amateur epicurean. But wouldn’t it be nice if your kitchen could help you prepare a meal? …

“Jinna Lei at the University of Washington has also installed cameras in the kitchen to watch over novice chefs.  Lei and colleagues used Kinect-like depth-sensing cameras capable of recording both the shape and appearance of kitchen objects, allowing them to track cooking actions, such as whether a particular ingredient has been added to a bowl.

“The system uses both object and action-recognition to keep track of what the cook is doing …

“Eventually, Lei hopes the system will be able to prompt chefs when they make a mistake.”

Read the article here. Read more →

A Computing Community Consortium blog post concerning as session at last month’s CRA Conference at Snowbird chaired by CSE’s Ed Lazowska and featuring CSE’s Shwetak Patel as well as Stanford’s Daphne Koller:

“Our field has exhibited an ever-changing balance of “technology push” and “demand pull” over the years. Many currently sense a movement of the pendulum in the “demand pull” direction. I’d like to argue that this is fantastic — it’s great news for our field, great news for society, and great news for the future.”

Read more here. Read more →