Allen School News

Xconomy interviews UW CSE Ph.D. alum Stefan Savage, Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at UC San Diego, as “Xconomist of the Week”:

“Last year, a team led by Savage and UW’s Tadayoshi Kohno showed that a hacker with physical access to an automotive electronic control unit could alter software to stop the engine, disable the brakes, and carry out other nefarious tasks. In follow-up research published earlier this year, Savage and company said they had succeeded in performing similar tasks remotely—using the cellular phone in a car to insert malicious software that enabled them to override various vehicle controls. (Their findings can be found at the website of the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security, a UW-UCSD collaboration.)

“Savage also has helped lead wide-ranging studies of Internet spam, outlining the global ‘ecosystem’ that supports compromised accounts, spam mailers, credit cards, e-mail lists, and other tools of the trade. This work led to a comprehensive study of just how much revenue spam advertising can generate, even when most of the spam is blocked.”

Read the rest of the interview here.

  Read more →

On Saturday December 10th, the Atrium of the Allen Center was the scene of delightful bedlam as more than 150 students from 43 teams representing 15 high schools competed in a day-long programming contest sponsored by UW CSE as the regional finale to the national Computer Science Education Week.

Results and photos can be found on the Puget Sound Computer Science Teachers Association (PSCSTA) website here.  Additional photos on the Garfield High School Computer Science website here and here, and in Helene Martin’s Picasa album here.

Congratulations to all 150 participants, and particularly to the winners:

• Novice – 1st Place – Lakeside School – Alex Tong, Nat Mayer, Hannah Ruggiero
• Novice – 2nd Place – Garfield High School – Caitlin Rochlin, William Zhou, Lucy Spain
• Novice – 3rd Place – Lakeside School – Nikhil Khanna, Aran Khanna

• Advanced – 1st Place – Garfield High School – Lane Aasen, Eamon Gaffney, Dylan Swiggett
• Advanced – 2nd Place – Garfield High School – Jenny Lin, Grant Bronsdon, Isabel Suhr
• Advanced – 3rd Place – Issaquah High School – Jason Walker, Patrick Violette

Also, thanks to the many volunteers who made the contest a success, and to the phenomenal high school computer science teachers in the Puget Sound region.  (We can’t resist noting that our alum Lauren Bricker is the computer science teacher at Lakeside School, and that our alum Helene Martin was the computer science teacher at Garfield High School for the past two years (Helene has now returned to UW CSE to teach and participate in K-12 outreach)!) Read more →

The December 2011 edition of UW 360 – a UW TV magazine-style show profiling the fascinating people, programs and community connections that define the University of Washington – features UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel.  The segment shows how he combines computer science and engineering to solve health and energy problems.

“‘You can’t really come up with new solutions unless you try to attack the problem from a different angle.'”

Watch the video here.  Learn more about his research here. Read more →

On Friday, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat visited the final session of Stuart Reges‘s CSE 143.  His report:

“There may be no place where the gap between politics and reality is wider right now than the UW’s computer science department.

“Politics these days is all about shrinking. How can we retrench, reduce or reset.

“But even the lecture halls aren’t big enough to contain what’s actually going on in high-tech education.

“An intro to computer programming section was so jammed one recent morning that some students sat on the floor. The class was whooping and fist-pumping as their final project — a virtual smackdown between packs of coded, simulated “critters” — played out on the hall’s screen …

“This year, record numbers have swamped the UW’s beginning computer classes — nearly 2,000 students — eclipsing even the dot-com boom in the ’90s. Yet the department has trimmed faculty and has not expanded the number of degrees it awards, due to state budget cuts …

“The result is about the biggest lost opportunity you could imagine. The UW now turns aside roughly 500 of its own students every year who want to major in computer science (most major in something else, though some do transfer) …

“Last week, an 80-member group of business leaders formed to try to raise $1 billion for a new sports arena, to woo back the NBA. We’ll do that for sports. Couldn’t we do it for school?”

Read Danny’s terrific article here.  Learn about the sorry state of STEM education in Washington here. Read more →

Each year the University of Washington College of Engineering recognizes five alums with Diamond Awards – the highest honor conferred by the College.

We are thrilled to announce that UW CSE alums have received two of the 2012 Diamond Awards – to be conferred at a ceremony on May 18.

UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Greg Badros, an Engineering Director at Facebook responsible for advertising, search, data science and data infrastructure, will receive the UW College of Engineering Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement.

UW CSE Ph.D. alumna Anne Condon, Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and a world-renowned researcher in theoretical computer science and computational biology, will receive the UW College of Engineering Diamond Award for Distinguished Achievement in Academia.

Read more about Greg, Anne, and the other UW College of Engineering Diamond Award honorees here.

Congratulations to Greg and Anne! Read more →

“Shwetak Patel, a UW assistant professor in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering for the past three years, has been honored as one of this year’s MacArthur Fellows.  Patel is the 15th UW faculty member to receive the prestigious ‘genius grant,’ which comes with a no-strings-attached award of $500,000 …

“Besides his time teaching at the UW, Patel, 29, already founded and sold a start-up company, Zensi, Inc., a demand-side, energy-monitoring solutions provider; he has been named a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow; has been honored by The New York Times for developing the top technology of the year; was awarded MIT’s Technology Review TR-35 award for innovators under age 35; and completed his doctorate at the Georgia Institute of Technology before coming to UW in 2008.”

Read the article here. Read more →

Michael Nielsen, Dave Bacon, Scott Aaronson, Steve Flammia, and Aram Harrow relax in the Allen Center atrium following Michael’s UW CSE Distinguished Lecture on “open science.”

Photos of Michael’s UW CSE Distinguished Lecture, by Bruce Hemingway, here. Read more →

G-GIVE is an initiative by Google Seattle/Kirkland to encourage employee philanthropy.  During the first two weeks of December, gifts to nine different causes were matched not only by Google, but by a generous Googler.  Google Seattle/Kirkland already leads all Google sites in employee participation in the Google philanthropic matching program; the goal of G-GIVE is to drive participation even higher.

On the kickoff day – Tuesday December 6 – 100 Seattle/Kirkland Googlers made gifts to the UW CSE Google Endowed Scholarship, totaling more than $100,000 when matched!

G-GIVE is the brainchild of UW CSE alums Krista Davis and Jessan Hutchison-Quillian, shown here with UW CSE alum Jeff Prouty (in the middle) who served as the liaison for the UW CSE day.  Thanks to them, to the 100 Googlers who supported the UW CSE Google Endowed Scholarship, and to the many others who supported other causes during G-GIVE! Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. alum Greg Badros has emerged as one of five technical team leaders reporting to Facebook Founder, President, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a re-organization announced by Facebook today.  Read more here.

Congratulations Greg! Read more →

The New York Times profiles UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni and his most recent company, Decide.com:

“Perhaps the biggest consumer weapon arrived this year in the form of Decide.com.  It is a Web site, and more recently an app for mobile devices, that collects and mines billions of transactions to determine what the best price is and whether there will be an even better price soon …

“For example, Decide.com said last week with 81 percent confidence that the Panasonic Viera 50-inch plasma TV (model TC-P50S30), a popular model, would drop within the next two weeks.  It also predicted, with 62 percent confidence, that a new model would come along within three months.

“Scoff if you will, but a week before Thanksgiving, Decide.com was advising shoppers to hold off buying a 16-gigabyte iPad because it predicted a price drop.  Apple did lower the price of that model by $41 on Black Friday, the big shopping day that follows Thanksgiving …

“Decide is run by many of the same people who built Farecast, a site that gave consumers a fighting chance against the airlines, which are constantly changing prices to match demand.

“‘Consumers have no access to big data,’ said Mr. Etzioni, who also founded Farecast …

“‘What we really see, and I am very excited by this, is the increased transparency,’ Mr. Etzioni said. ‘The inexorable trend is towards transparency.'”

Read the rest here. Read more →