Allen School News

Several years ago, we established the tradition of honoring two outstanding UW Computer Science & Engineering alumni each year as part of our graduation ceremony.

In doing this, we have three objectives:

• First, of course, we want to honor some of our most distinguished alumni by recognizing their extraordinary achievements.
• Second, we want to ensure that today’s graduates know that they are part of a long tradition of excellence and accomplishment.
• Finally, we hope to inspire today’s graduates – we know that future winners of this award are likely here today as members of the UW CSE graduating class.

Today, we were proud to confer the UW CSE 2012 Alumni Achievement Awards upon John K. Bennett and Wen-Hann Wang.

Bennett, an expert in the design, implementation, and evaluation of distributed systems, holds an endowed professorship in computer science and in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he directs the ATLAS Institute, the Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society – a campus-wide entrepreneurial catalyst and incubator for innovative interdisciplinary research, education, and creative work.

Wang, a computer architect, is vice president of Intel Labs in Hillsboro, Oregon, and director of circuits and systems research.  During more than 20 years at Intel, Wang’s assignments have included two postings to Shanghai and dozens of trips abroad to Russia, the Middle East, and Latin America.  Closer to home travels include spring and fall visits to Seattle as Intel’s liaison to the UW.

Read more about Bennett and Wang in the Spring 2012 issue of our newsletter, Most Significant Bits, here.  See scads of wonderful Bruce Hemingway photographs of CSE’s 2012 graduation ceremony here. Read more →

Each year, CSE’s graduating students recognize a faculty member for exemplary teaching.  This year’s winner of the UW CSE ACM Teaching Award, announced at this morning’s UW CSE commencement ceremony, is Hal Perkins.

Congratulations, Hal, and thanks for all you do to help CSE’s students succeed!

(Past winners of the award include Stuart Reges, Luis Ceze, Marty Stepp, Dan Grossman, Ed Lazowska, Steve Gribble, Brian Curless, Carl Ebeling, Ben Dugan, Steve Wolfman, and Martin Tompa.) Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. student Alexei Czeskis was interviewed on American Public Media’s “Marketplace” concerning a program in San Antonio to track students within their high schools using RFID.

“Alexei Czeskis studies RFID privacy issues at the University of Washington’s Security and Privacy Research Lab.  He says it’s hard to predict the consequences of collecting all this data on our children.

“‘We don’t know what it could be used for in the future,’ he says, ‘and that could be something good or it could be something really bad.  For example, maybe it’s foreseeable that when these students apply to college for admission, colleges might be able to request this type of data.  Those kinds of things could have implications for students further on in their lives.'”

Listen to the story here. Read more →

Congratulations to UW CSE professor Paul Beame, who has just been elected Chair of SIGACT, the ACM special interest group on the theory of computing.

UW CSE has a long history of ACM SIG leadership – including Jean-Loup Baer as Chair of SIGARCH (computer architecture), Ed Lazowska as Chair of SIGMETRICS (computer system performance evaluation), Hank Levy as Chair of SIGOPS (operating systems), and David Notkin as Chair of SIGSOFT (software engineering). Read more →

Ben Taskar, currently the Magerman Term Associate Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at University of Pennsylvania, will be joining the UW CSE faculty in early 2013.

Ben is an outstanding researcher in machine learning, particularly in its applications to natural language processing and computer vision.   He received his Ph.D. in 2005 from Stanford and is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, an ONR Young Investigator Award, and an NSF CAREER Award.

The addition of Ben, along with Carlos Guestrin and Emily Fox (Emily is appointed in Statistics and adjunct in CSE), will move us into the very top group of programs nationally in AI and machine learning.  The addition of Jeff Heer adds complementary expertise in data visualization.

We are incredibly excited to welcome Ben – and also Carlos, Emily, and Jeff – to the CSE and UW communities! Read more →

A really wonderful GeekWire profile of 21 graduating UW CSE students:

“It’s a good time to have a degree in computer science.  And it’s not just because Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft are paying big bucks to hire the best-and-brightest software developers and engineers.

“Computer science is transforming the world, radically changing industries as diverse as health, transportation, media and communications.

“With that in mind (and with the University of Washington commencement set for this weekend), we decided to check in with the UW’s computer science and engineering class of 2012 …

“So, without further ado, meet some of the class of 2012. We think you’ll be quite impressed.”

Read these terrific profiles here.  (Many thanks to GeekWire‘s John Cook for having the idea and pushing it forward.) Read more →

Condolences to our friend Paul Allen and his sister Jody, whose mother Faye passed away yesterday at the age of 90.  Faye Allen taught fourth grade at Seattle’s Ravenna School.  Her husband, Kenneth, was the longtime associate director of the University of Washington library system.  Further information here and here. Read more →

University of Washington recruiters from Amazon.com, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft shared information on the majors of the students they hired from UW in 2011-12 for both internship and permanent positions.  This includes all students (every degree level, every major, every UW campus), and all positions (from developer to accountant).

The results are amazing, even to us – see the attached charts.  (Capsule summary:  85% are from CSE!)

The University of Washington has many outstanding degree programs.  (There are more than 175 undergraduate majors!)  They fill a wide variety of student needs, and a wide variety of employer needs.  All of them equip students for success.

But if you’re a top technology company such as Amazon.com, Facebook, Google, or Microsoft – a company that can choose the best students from UW and the nation – who ya gonna hire?  The answer is clear and overwhelming:  CSE!

Here’s another amazing statistic.  Each year, UW awards 4 “high scholarship” medals – to the top student in the freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior classes.  Since 2000, 52 of these medals have been awarded.  Seventeen of these medals have gone to CSE students – fully 1/3 of the medals awarded.  (CSE accounts for about 2.5% of UW’s undergraduates – our “fair share” of these 52 medals is a bit more than 1.)  See the winners here.

These are among the reasons why expanding CSE’s capacity is so important – to students, and to the region.  (An excellent NPR piece on that subject here.) Read more →

The Intel Science & Technology Center in Big Data has launched!

ISTC-Big Data is the sixth Intel Science & Technology Center.  The concept was formulated by faculty from across the nation who are participating in the SciDB project focused on open source data management and analytics software for scientific research.  It is led by MIT, and includes faculty from 5 other universities, including Magda Balazinska, Carlos Guestrin, and Jeff Heer from UW CSE.

In addition to our involvement in the new ISTC-Big Data, UW CSE leads the Intel Science & Technology Center for Pervasive Computing, and is a substantial participant in the Intel Science & Technology Center for Visual Computing.

  Read more →

A terrific piece by NPR reporter Wendy Kaufman on the market for computer science graduates in the Seattle area, intense student interest, and UW’s recent efforts to respond.

UW President Michael Young states:  “If you actually look at what’s happened in the world, we have an enormous amount of information available to us, and dealing with this big data is incredibly important.  Computer science is the absolute epicenter of this.  So we have to have more compute scientists.”

Listen to the report here. Read more →