Allen School News

Today marked the 2012 edition of the annual UW CSE Scholarship and Fellowship Recognition Luncheon, celebrating the donors and recipients of UW CSE endowed scholarships and fellowships.

Graduate fellowship recipient Ray Cheng and undergraduate scholarship recipient Mariana Zanella addressed the attendees, representing dozens of CSE students whose education is made possible through the generosity of UW CSE alumni and friends.

Many photographs here.  And, see the booklet from the event here. Read more →

An outstanding interview on KCTS TV with UW CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel.

“About the Episode:  University of Washington assistant professor Shwetak Patel talks about being named a 2011 MacArthur Genius Award recipient which includes $500,000—no strings attached. Patel has figured out novel ways of using home electrical systems. We talk with Patel about his work and what the MacArthur Award means to him.

“About Shwetak Patel:  Shwetak Patel is a computer scientist and entrepreneur, best known for his work on developing novel sensing solutions and ubiquitous computing. He joined the University of Washington in 2008 as an assistant professor in both Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering. In 2011, he was named a MacArthur Fellow, at the age of 29. His technology start-up company on energy sensing, Zensi, was acquired by Belkin International, Inc. in 2010.”

Watch the interview here. Read more →

On March 27, a dozen friends of UW CSE joined us for an evening of conversation with Shwetak Patel and his students.  Shwetak – UW CSE’s most recent MacArthur “genius” Award winner – described his sustainability sensing research to guests including Jim Allchin, Emer Dooley, Bob Fries, Ron Howell, Jeremy & Jacqueline Jaech, Matt & Cathy O’Donnell, Sujal Patel, Rob Short, and Charles Simonyi. Read more →

CSE undergraduate Raymond Zhang is one of 282 top undergraduates from across the nation to have been awarded Goldwater Scholarships for the 2012-13 academic year.  The Goldwater Scholars were selected on the basis of academic merit from a field of 1,123 mathematics, science, and engineering students who were nominated by the faculties of colleges and universities nationwide.

Raymond is the 8th recent CSE student to be recognized with a Goldwater Scholarship.

Congratulations Raymond! Read more →

Milda Zizyte

Colin Scott

Dustin Richmond

Leilani Battle

Congratulations to UW CSE undergraduates Leilani Battle, Dustin Richmond, Colin Scott, and Milda Zizyte, who were announced today as winners of 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, providing three years of support for graduate study.

Leilani is a graduate student at MIT.  Dustin is finishing his Bachelors degree currently.  Colin is a graduate student at UC Berkeley.  Milda, like Dustin, is completing her Bachelors degree currently. Read more →

Apache Point telescope, Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Steve Lohr writes in The New York Times:

“The federal government is beginning a major research initiative in big data computing.  The effort, which will be announced on Thursday, involves several government agencies and departments, and commitments for the programs total $200 million.

“Administration officials compare the initiative to past government research support for high-speed networking and supercomputing centers, which have had an impact in areas like climate science and Web browsing software.

“‘This has that level of importance,’ said Tom Kalil, deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. ‘The future of computing is not just big iron. It’s big data.’ …

“‘There is recognition by a broad range of federal agencies that further advances in big data management and analysis are critical to achieving their missions,’ said Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. ‘It doesn’t matter whether the mission is national defense, energy efficiency, evidence-based health care, education, or scientific discovery.'”

Read the article here.  c|net version here.  Read about the University of Washington eScience Institute here. Read more →

Front row: Amelia Phillips (Dean at host Highline CC), Melody Kadenko (CSE - team advisor), Barbara Endicott-Popovsky (UW iSchool), Joel Ware (Boeing). Middle row: Mick Ayzenberg (CSE team), Henry Baba-Weiss (CSE team), Jake Appelbaum (CSE team coach), Miles Sackler (CSE team captain), Miro Enev (CSE team). Back row: Billy Kozma (SPAWAR), Drew Kesselring (Boeing), Ian Finder (CSE team), Karl Koscher (CSE team), Landon Meernik (CSE team), Lars Zornes (CSE team), Cullen Walsh (CSE team).

Last year, UW surprised itself by winning the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.  It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that the UW team – composed entirely of CSE students – rocked at this weekend’s Fifth Annual Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, winning a return ticket to the nationals.  UW’s score exceeded the combined scores of the second, third, and fourth place teams.

Congratulations to team members Mick Ayzenberg, Henry Baba-Weiss, Ian Finder, Karl Koscher, Landon Meernik, Cullen Walsh, Lars Zornes, Miro Enev (grad alternate), Max Sherman (undergrad alternate), Miles Sackler (Team Captain), Melody Kadenko (Team Advisor), and Jake Appelbaum (Team Co-Advisor).

Team Advisor Melody Kadenko says:  “I am SO PROUD of them!!!  Further, it proves that it’s not necessarily our team training and practice that can account for so many wins (since we don’t do much of that).  It’s the CSE curriculum that teaches our students how to analyze, find solutions, think abstractly.  The only thing left to teach during training/practice is how to not have a meltdown when something goes horribly wrong, and how to keep the profanity to a minimum when judges are present.”

Go team! Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. alum Neva Cherniavsky isn’t exactly mentioned, but she’s front-and-center in the photograph accompanying an article about devising analytic techniques that can be applied to the vast electronic archive of books, journals and scholarly literature stored on the Web.  “At Harvard, Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, who jointly lead a group there called the Cultural Observatory, will soon inaugurate a browser that searches for such language changes in a large online repository of scientific papers known as arXiv.”  (Neva works in Aiden’s group.)  Read the article here. Read more →

Work by UW CSE’s Sidhant Gupta is featured on Hack A Day:

“What if you could add gesture recognition to your computer without making any hardware changes? This research project seeks to use computer microphone and speakers to recognize hand gestures. Audio is played over the speakers, with the input from the microphone processed to detect Doppler shift. In this way it can detect your hand movements (or movement of any object that reflects sound).”

Read the post and watch the amazing video here. Read more →

On March 17th, twenty high school women from Western Washington were honored at UW CSE with Awards for Aspirations in Computing from NCWIT, the National Center for Women & Information Technology.  Lucy Sanders, CEO and Co-founder of NCWIT, joined in the ceremony.

The NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing honors young women at the high school level for their computing-related achievements and interests.  Awardees are selected for their computing and IT aptitude, leadership ability, academic history, and plans for post-secondary education.

Congratulations to the award recipients, their parents, and their teachers.  We hope to see you as UW CSE students soon! Read more →