Allen School News

Columns, the University of Washington alumni magazine, captures new UW President Michael Young in what we hope will become his natural habitat – the Microsoft Atrium of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering! Read more →

Dan Fernandez

UW attendees

John Davis

Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360 has taken the gaming world by storm.  On Thursday, Microsoft Research rolled a Kinect SDK, making full-functionality Kinect programming available for any non-commercial use.  On Friday, Microsoft ran a Kinect programming boot camp for 40 UW CSE students, staff, and faculty, helping to bootstrap the UW CSE Kinect developer community.

Thanks to Stewart Tansley (Microsoft Research, and organizer of the event – who had gone 40+ hours without sleep but clearly had drunk plenty of coffee), Dan Fernandez (Microsoft Channel 9), John Davis (Microsoft Xbox), and Kent Foster (Microsoft Studios), for a great event.  (And thanks also for leaving some Kinects behind!)

Useful links:

• Video of today’s presentations
• Kinect SDK download
• Kinect programming walkthroughs
• Coding4Fun Kinect toolkit
• Kinect SDK quickstarts

Now, let’s see some apps! Read more →

UW CSE’s Brian Ferris – creator of OneBusAway and recently praised by Seattlest as “oh mighty one … the God of Metro” – was brought to the White House last week as one of “a motley group of 16 ‘open data geeks'” honored as part of the “Champions of Change” program, which celebrates the fact that “Every day in communities across the country, ordinary individuals are doing extraordinary things to improve the lives of others and strengthen their communities.”

Read a Government Technology post on the event here.

Assuming he can fit it into his busy schedule, Brian will defend his Ph.D. thesis – “OneBusAway: Improving the Usability of Public Transit” – on Thursday, June 23 at 2:30 p.m. in room 503 of UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Read more →

Daniil Kulchenko

Paul Kulchenko

GeekWire reports:

“Some entrepreneurs wait a lifetime to experience the thrill of selling their startup companies. Daniil Kulchenko, a Seattle area high school student, accomplished that milestone at the age of 15. Kulchenko today announced that he’s sold his startup, a cloud-based computing company known as Phenona, to Vancouver, B.C.-based ActiveState in a deal of undisclosed size.”

Daniil is the son of UW CSE graduate student Paul Kulchenko, known for the development of SOAP::Lite and for a robot that juggles ping pong balls.

Read the GeekWire post – a great article – here.  Daniil also is featured in the GeekWire podcast, here – and a transcript re-post here. Read more →

“The market remains red-hot for talented software developers and engineers.  Brian Bershad, the Google site director in Seattle, told computer science faculty at a meeting on the University of Washington campus last week … ‘We are not limited the in the number of positions that we have. We are limited in the number of people that we can find that are very, very good …  If you were graduating 1,500 (computer science students) per year … we’d probably be hiring in the order of 200 to 300 people.'”

Read the GeekWire post here. Read more →

Following up on an excellent article this past Saturday about rising enrollments in computer science, The New York Times has just published a fabulous “Room for Debate” essay series titled “Computer Science’s ‘Sputnik Moment’?”:

“Computer science is a hot major again. It had been in the doldrums after the dot-com bust a decade ago, but with the social media gold rush and the success of ‘The Social Network,’ computer science departments are transforming themselves to meet the demand.”

The series features eight short opinions (they’re quick reads!) including pieces by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska and CMU’s Jeannette Wing, as well as a sociologist, entrepreneur, lawyer, and tech editor.

Under the heading “Software as Self-Expression,” Wing writes:

“Today’s students have grown-up tech savvy. They live in a world of exploring the Web and of personalizing their devices. Cyberspace is the anytime, anywhere laboratory where you can design and run your own experiments by writing just a little software. It’s affordable by anyone with access to the Internet. And each piece of software is an individual’s expression of creativity, much like poetry or music. Computer science can be fun and empowering …

“When people talk about the smart grid, smart vehicles, and smart buildings — what makes them ‘smart’? Computer science. When people talk about personalized medicine and personalized learning, how do you think personalization is possible? Computer science. We’re not there yet, but the next generation of computer scientists can help us realize these visions — with immeasurable benefits to society and the economy.”

Under the heading “A Key to Critical Thinking,” Lazowska writes:

“As more fields become information fields… “computational thinking” is necessary for success in just about any endeavor …

“Computer science is a superb preparation for just about anything. And within technology industries, there are plentiful jobs. Those who choose to work in the computing field find it characterized by highly interactive teams that are focused on solving real life problems. The Dilbert stereotype is surely dead …

“For students who want to change the world, there is no field with greater impact or leverage than computer science. Just take a look at the 2010 report by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, which characterized computer science as ‘arguably unique among all fields of science and engineering in the breadth of its impact’ …

“Despite all of this good news, we need a national re-commitment to education, innovation, science and engineering. All the facts suggest that we are losing our edge.”

Read all the essays here. Read more →

The research of UW professor Shwetak Patel is prominently featured in the cover story of the July issue of Wired magazine.

The focus of the story is feedback loops that modify human behavior.  Shwetak’s work on clever, cost-effective monitoring of the home environment (electricity, gas, water) and feeding this information back to residents to influence their behavior is the prime example (beginning halfway through the attached article.

Read the article here.  Learn more about Shwetak and his work here.  UW sustainability sensing effort is described here. Read more →

Recently the Computing Community Consortium announced a call for short videos describing exciting research and results in computer science — with the goal of communicating to undergraduates what computing research is all about.   Today the first of these videos hit the CCC web – “Exploring Photobios” from UW CSE’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory.

Read the CCC post and watch the video here.  Learn more about the research here. Read more →

Seattlest pays homage to OneBusAway and its creator, UW CSE Ph.D. student Brian Ferris.

“OneBusAway, the magical app of our bus riding dreams, has done wonders for the Seattle Metro experience.  OneBusAway gives reliable, up-to-the-minute information about the buses in Seattle:  where they are, where they are going, and how long until they get there. It’s a freaking Godsend, and has saved the butts of every single bus riding person who uses it at least a hundred times.

“The good people of KUOW are saying that OneBusAway may go offline soon.  Apparently only one man has been saving our bus lives this whole time.  Brian Ferris, the God of Metro, is a grad student at the University of Washington.  He is graduating soon and has been recruited to work for Google Transit in Zurich …

“Brian Ferris, oh mighty one, please don’t leave us adrift in a sea of never coming transfers and missed buses.  Who is this ‘Google’ you are leaving us for and how could they possibly be better than a 15 minute layover at Third & Pike?  We love you, we need you.

“Please don’t go.”

Read the rest here.  Visit OneBusAway here.  Contribute to the “Keep Brian Ferris in Seattle” fund here.

Update: Brian assures us that OneBusAway will live on!  Seattlest update post here.  Seattle Times article here. Read more →

Welcome to the Spring 2011 edition of Most Significant Bits, the UW Computer Science & Engineering newsletter.  It’s available in pdf or html format. Read more →