Allen School News

UW alums and Decide.com co-founders Brian Ma, Hsu Han Ooi, Ian Ma and Hsu Ken Ooi spell out “UW” in their West Mercer Street headquarters. Photo by Joshua Bessex.

A wonderful profile of the four students who worked with UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni to create Decide.com:

“Brian and Ian Ma, along with Han Hsu and Ken Hsu, all UW alumni, started Decide.com after dreaming up an idea several years ago in between their day jobs at Google, Zillow, Microsoft, and Zaaz, respectively.

“‘I noticed my girlfriend went back dozens of times a day to check prices on websites,’ Brian Ma said. ‘I thought that was such a waste, so why not build something that could help the consumer out?’

“With that kernel of an idea, the four went to Oren Etzioni, professor of computer science at the UW and noted Internet entrepreneur … Etzioni’s enthusiasm and the shaping of a plan for a startup resulted in all four quitting their jobs.

“‘I called up my parents and told them I had good news,’ Ken Hsu said. ‘And when we met, I told them I had quit my job; my parents were like, ‘Well your brother still has a good job.’ And I told them, ‘Well, he has some good news too.’ …

“Both Brian Ma and Ken Hsu cited the computer science department at the UW as a major factor in their success. Decide has more than 10 UW alumni on its staff.

“‘The CS department is simply amazing,’ Brian Ma said. ‘Oren [Etzioni] is the smartest, most intelligent guy.'”

Read more here.  Try Decide.com here. Read more →

Yanping Huang, a UW CSE Ph.D. student, is one of 50 recipients of International Predoctoral Fellowships from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

HHMI launched the International Student Research Fellowships Program last year to support international students during their third to fifth years of graduate school in the United States.  “We are pleased to be able to support some of the world’s most outstanding graduate students in the biomedical sciences” says William R. Galey, program director for HHMI’s graduate and medical education programs.

Congratulations Yanping!  Information the program here.  List of recipients here. Read more →

An excellent article by Steve Lohr in Sunday’s New York Times.

“This has been the crossover year for Big Data …

“Big Data is a shorthand label that typically means applying the tools of artificial intelligence, like machine learning, to vast new troves of data beyond that captured in standard databases.  The new data sources include Web-browsing data trails, social network communications, sensor data and surveillance data …

“‘The term itself is vague, but it is getting at something that is real,’ says Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University.  ‘Big Data is a tagline for a process that has the potential to transform everything.’ …

“In late 2008, Big Data was embraced by a group of the nation’s leading computer science researchers, the Computing Community Consortium, a collaboration of the government’s National Science Foundation and the Computing Research Association, which represents academic and corporate researchers.  The computing consortium published an influential white paper, ‘Big-Data Computing: Creating Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Commerce, Science and Society.‘  Its authors were three prominent computer scientists, Randal E. Bryant of Carnegie Mellon University, Randy H. Katz of the University of California, Berkeley, and Edward D. Lazowska of the University of Washington.  Their endorsement lent intellectual credibility to Big Data.”

Read the article here.  Read more CCC white papers on Big Data and Data Analytics here.  Learn about the University of Washington eScience Institute here. Read more →

This week, nearly 100 middle school and upper school teachers and counselors joined UW CSE for CS4HS – a Google-sponsored program to expose them to computer science and computational thinking.

CS4HS was launched 6 years ago by UW, UCLA, and Carnegie Mellon.  Today, CS4HS programs are held at dozens of colleges and universities across the country.  Participant feedback is hugely positive.

Many thanks to Google (both “central” and Seattle) for its sponsorship of our program.  And many thanks to Tom Cortina from Carnegie Mellon for joining us for a sixth summer to help make the UW offering a success.

CS4HS materials here.  Photosynth panorama of participants here. Read more →

Google’s Computing and Programming Experience (CAPE) is a multi-week summer program, held at several Google engineering facilities, designed to inspire excitement about computer science for incoming 9th grade (graduating 8th grade) students.

Melissa Winstanley represented UW CSE at several sessions this summer designed to expose students to the nation’s top computer science programs.  Thanks, Melissa!  And, thanks Google – both for hosting CAPE, and for including UW CSE.

Information on CAPE here.  Photographs here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. alum and Google Fellow Jeff Dean is profiled in the current issue of Wired:

“Inside Google, Jeff Dean is regarded with awe. Outside the company, few even know his name. But they should. Dean is part of a small group of Google engineers who designed the fundamental software and hardware that underpinned the company’s rise to the web’s most dominant force, and these creations are now mimicked by the rest of the net’s biggest names — not to mention countless others looking to bring the Google way to businesses beyond the web.”

It’s a terrific profile – read it here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. student Franzi Roesner and UW CSE Ph.D. alum Stefan Savage (now on the faculty at UCSD) are extensively quoted in this ComputerWorld article:

“It’s not time for full-on panic, but researchers have already successfully applied brakes remotely, listened into conversations and more.”

Read more here. Read more →

Jon Froehlich – a 2011 UW CSE Ph.D. alum now on the Computer Science faculty at the University of Maryland – has been named the recipient of the 2012 University of Washington Distinguished Dissertation Award.

Froehlich’s dissertation, Sensing and Feedback of Everyday Activities to Promote Environmental Behaviors, was advised by James Landay and Shwetak Patel.   It focuses on creating new types of sensors to monitor and infer everyday human activity such as driving to work or taking a shower and then taking this sensed information and feeding it back to the user in novel, engaging, and informative ways with the goal of increasing awareness and promoting environmentally responsible behavior.  UbiGreen and HydroSense were two key contributions.

Congratulations Jon! Read more →

“Decide.com already tells consumers when they should buy cameras, phones, refrigerators and other gadgets and appliances, analyzing price drops and increases. Now, the Seattle startup and brainchild of University of Washington computer scientist Oren Etzioni and others is getting into the recommendation business, assigning a score of 1 to 100 on more than 22,000 products that it tracks.”

Read more here. Read more →

2005 UW CSE alum Brett Newlin stroked the USA men’s eight into the Olympic finals with a convincing victory over Australia, Poland, and the Ukraine in a tough qualifying heat on Saturday.

Read about it, and watch a video of the heat, here.

The final will be Wednesday at 12:30 p.m. BST, 4:30 a.m. PDT. Read more →