Allen School News

Vaughn Iverson is a UW CSE Masters alum, now a Ph.D. student working in Ginger Armbrust‘s lab in UW Oceanography.  The New York Times writes:

“By filtering through 25 gallons of seawater from Puget Sound, a computer scientist in Washington State has managed to tease out and sequence the DNA of a tiny microbe that has eluded scientists for years.

“The creature is Euryarchaeota, one of the archaea, a class of micro-organisms that were once thought to be bacteria but are actually quite distinct.  ‘Nobody’s been able to grow it in a laboratory despite trying,’ said Vaughn Iverson, the computer scientist and doctoral student in oceanography at the University of Washington whose software sequenced the genome.”

UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska is on Vaughn’s thesis committee; UW CSE’s Bill Howe and the UW eScience Institute work extensively with Ginger’s lab.

Read the New York Times article here. Read more →

UW CSE alum Adrien Treuille, a computer science faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, was a featured speaker at the recent Google Solve for X conference.

For three days, fifty scientists, entrepreneurs and innovators from around the world came together to discuss and debate radical solutions to some really big problems.

Adrien spoke on “collaborative science,” the subject of his UW CSE Ph.D. thesis, which yielded the hugely successful protein folding game Foldit.

See Adrien’s superb Solve for X talk here.   Learn more about Solve for X here. Read more →

WibiData, the big data management startup co-founded by Cloudera founder and UW CSE alum Christophe Bisciglia and Cloudera early employee and never-to-be-seen-again CSE Ph.D. student Aaron Kimball, is announcing $5 million in new funding from NEA and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.  Past investors in the company include Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, and SV Angel.

Read all about it here!  Congratulations to Christophe and Aaron! Read more →

Says Brett Helsel, EMC Isilon Senior Vice President of Engineering:  “Wowee.  A couple of UW CSE  interns (Conrad Meyer and Allison Obourn) and a couple of UW CSE alums (Jeff Hughes and Darrick Lew) for a couple of months in the summer and look at all the noise you can make.”

Read the EMC Isilon press release here.

And the winner (in the “Interactive Games” category):  UW CSE’s Foldit, as usual – the massively multi-player web-based game that, a few months ago, cracked an AIDS-related protein structure problem that had eluded scientists for a decade.

NSF news post here.  More information on UW CSE’s Center for Game Science here. Read more →

Julia Schwarz

Gabe Cohn

Franzi Roesner

Gabe Cohn, Franzi Roesner, and Julia Schwarz are three of the twelve winners (from 198 nominees) of this year’s Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowships.

Gabe is a UW EE Ph.D. student working with Shwetak Patel on embedded systems and VLSI in ubiquitous computing applications.  He was an undergraduate at Caltech.

Franzi is a UW  CSE Ph.D. student working with Yoshi Kohno in the areas of security, privacy, and systems.  She was an undergraduate at UT Austin.

Julia, a UW CSE bachelors alum who is now a Ph.D. student in the CMU HCI Institute, also was selected.

Congratulations to Gabe, Franzi, and Julia – and many thanks to Microsoft! Read more →

Yes, that’s our Jeff Dean, and we taught him everything he knows.  (If you believe even 1/2 of 1% of that, we’ve got a Space Needle to sell you.)

Business Insider writes:

“Forget Larry and Sergey:  At the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, the real celebrity engineer is Jeff Dean …

“Dean is such a star because Googlers widely credit his code for the blazing speed of Google search.

“How deep does this adoration go?  You know those Chuck Norris jokes called ‘Chuck Norris Facts’?  Like: ‘Chuck Norris doesn’t wash dishes, they wet themselves out of fear’?

“Well, over on Quora, there’s a bunch of ‘Jeff Dean Facts,’ written by Googlers and ex-Googlers who love their hero.”

Facts like, “Compilers don’t warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers.”

(As the article goes on to say, “They’re pretty funny – if you understand software engineers and their sense of humor.”

Read the article (and the facts and non-geek translations) here.

Jeff adds:  “Unfortunately, they don’t have my favorite ‘fact’:  ‘When Jeff Dean fires up the profiler, loops unroll themselves in fear.'” Read more →

UW CSE Affiliates winter recruiting fair.  See the companies here.  See a gaggle of Bruce Hemingway photos here. Read more →

“Our new Geek of the Week, Oren Etzioni, is a computer scientist and serial entrepreneur who has a knack for building businesses based on complex algorithms that help people make decisions. If you’ve used the price prediction engine in Microsoft Bing Travel, you’re familiar with his work. Etzioni was the founder of Farecast, which Microsoft acquired to form the basis for that service.

“The University of Washington computer science professor and Madrona Venture Group venture partner is currently the co-founder and CTO of Decide, which applies similar principles to consumer electronics prices. It’s latest in a long list of technology startups and computer science projects in which he has played a pivotal role over the years.”

Read the rest here.

Previous UW CSE “Geeks of the Week” include Lauren Bricker, Yaw Anokwa, Wendy Chisholm, and Marty Stepp.  UW CSE GeekWire “Newsmakers of 2011” include Steve Yegge, Yoky Matsuoka, Shwetak Patel, and Daniil Kulchenko.  Featured in the GeekWire 2012 calendar as “Geeks Who Give Back” are Helene Martin and Kevin Ross.  Gotta love those GeekWire guys! Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. student Dan Halperin is quoted in a New York Times article on work at Microsoft Research, led by Victor Bahl and involving Dan and UW CSE professor David Wetherall, “experimenting with wireless links, mounted atop server racks, to supply extra bandwidth for moving data along at crunch times.”

“The Microsoft team forged ahead with the project, building and testing a system with tiny directional antennas at the top of each rack to send and receive data. A central controller monitors traffic patterns, finds network bottlenecks, configures the antennas and turns on the wireless links when more bandwidth is required, says Daniel Halperin, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, who worked on the project as an intern at Microsoft. Signals go out on a horizontal plane and are steered right or left. The design sped up traffic by at least 45 percent in 95 percent of the cases tested, Mr. Halperin says.”

Read the New York Times article here.  Read the joint UW/MSR research paper, “Augmenting Data Center Networks with Multi-Gigabit Wireless Links,” here.  See the slides from Dan’s SIGCOMM 2011 presentation on the work here. Read more →