Allen School News

The June 2010 newsletter of The Family Center on Technology and Disability is devoted to a comprehensive overview of the access technology (assistive technology) work of UW CSE professor Richard Ladner and his students.

“‘Much of the consumer technology that surrounds us can be adapted for classroom and non-classroom educational use for children with disabilities in the K-12 range and beyond,’ Dr. Ladner insists. ‘As less expensive consumer technology takes on universal use,’ he adds, ‘parents and teachers will eventually come to see that the academic horizons of many children with disabilities need not be limited to the K-12 timeframe.’ In fact, Dr. Ladner, who has worked closely with deaf and blind students for many years, sees the advent – and acceleration – of consumer apps use by students with disabilities ultimately resulting in a dramatic increase in the number of deaf and blind students achieving Ph.D. status in the years ahead. Rather than simply being consumers he envisions that students with disabilities will become computer professionals who will be creators of apps that make life easier for themselves and others like them.”

Read this terrific article here. Read more →

“In a lab at the University of Washington, Morphy, a pint-size robot, catches the eye of an infant girl and turns to look at a toy.

“No luck; the girl does not follow its gaze, as she would a human’s.

“In a video the researchers made of the experiment, the girl next sees the robot “waving” to an adult. Now she’s interested; the sight of the machine interacting registers it as a social being in the young brain. She begins to track what the robot is looking at, to the right, the left, down. The machine has elicited what scientists call gaze-following, an essential first step of social exchange.

“‘Before they have language, infants pay attention to what I call informational hotspots,’ where their mother or father is looking, said Andrew N. Meltzoff, a psychologist who is co-director of university’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. This, he said, is how learning begins …

“‘It turns out that making a robot more closely resemble a human doesn’t get you better social interactions,’ said Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at University of California, San Diego. The more humanlike machines look, the more creepy they can seem.

“The machine’s behavior is what matters, Dr. Sejnowski said. And very subtle elements can make a big difference.”

Read the full article here.  Research web page here. Read more →

As a prelude to its annual “Brainstorm Tech” conference in Aspen (July 22–24), Fortune magazine has anointed “The 50 smartest people in tech” — five people in each of ten categories “whose collective intelligence propels us into a future that looks nothing like the present.”

The winner in the “Engineer” category — the “Smartest Engineer”?  UW CSE bachelors alumnus, former Googler and founder of Cloudera Christophe Bisciglia!

“What kinds of problems could we solve if everyone had access to the computing heft that powers Google? Christophe Bisciglia joined the search giant as a software engineer when he was just out of college and quickly realized that if he shifted his digital workload from an individual computer to a cluster of networked computers, he could crunch data faster. Problem was, most scientists didn’t have access to the kind of web-based, or “cloud,” computing power of Google.

“After teaching a class called Google 101, which taught software engineers at the University of Washington to program on a cloud-size scale, Bisciglia, 29, became obsessed with the possibilities emerging from an open-source project called Hadoop. Hadoop lets engineers take advantage of the massive computing efficiencies that come from networking hundreds of computers. He left Google in 2008 to help start Cloudera, which makes it easier for customers to turn their data into insights using Hadoop. Bisciglia resigned from Cloudera in June but tells Fortune he remains committed to harnessing the massive power of the cloud in new ways. Brains and brawn are definitely a potent combination.” Read more →

UW CSE faculty, alumni, and spouses at the ACM Awards Banquet at the Westin St. Francis on June 26th.

L-R:  Gaetano Borriello (new ACM Fellow) and Melissa Westbrook; Lyndsay Downs and Ed Lazowska (ACM Distinguished Service Award winner); Jeff Dean (new ACM Fellow) and Heidi Hopper; Noah Snavely (ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award runner-up) and Beth Xie; John Davis and Jessica Davis; Radhika Thekkath and Chandu Thekkath (new ACM Fellow).  At the banquet but missing from the photo:  Thomas Kwan. Read more →

UW CSE professor Magda Balazinska has been selected to participate in the prestigious HP Labs Innovation Research Program.  The program is designed to provide colleges, universities and research institutes around the world with opportunities to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP.

HP reviewed more than 375 proposals from 202 universities across 36 countries, choosing 52 to receive 2010 Innovation Research awards.

Congratulations Magda! Read more →

Seventeen top graduate students from ten universities were invited to participate in a “Future Ideas Symposium” organized by the Information Science And Technology working group of the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency.

UW CSE was represented by Michael Piatek (working with Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy on building Internet-scale services) and Hoifung Poon (working with Pedro Domingos on statistical relational learning).

Congratulations to Michael and Hoifung! Read more →

UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska has been named by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to co-chair a Congressionally-mandated review of the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program on behalf of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

Under the NITRD program, 14 federal agencies coordinate their investments in order to maintain America’s leadership in information technology.

Lazowska’s co-chair is PCAST member David Shaw of D.E. Shaw Research.  The members of their working group are Francine Berman (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Stephen Brobst (Teradata Corporation), Randal Bryant (Carnegie Mellon University), Mark Dean (IBM Research), Deborah Estrin (UCLA), Ed Felten (Princeton University), Susan Graham (UC Berkeley), Bill Gropp (University of Illinois), Anita Jones (University of Virginia), Michael Kearns (University of Pennsylvania), Paul Kurtz (Good Harbor Consulting), and Bob Sproull (Sun Labs). Read more →

Seattle Business magazine discusses workforce gaps in Washington State.

“According to a 2009 report by the HECB, state universities are producing less than half the number of computer science majors needed to meet projected demand in 2011.  However, state universities are not able to produce these graduates.  Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, says his program turns away between 50 and 80 percent of qualified applicants each year. These are freshman who have already been admitted to the UW and have completed all the prerequisites for the computer science and engineering program, but cannot be accepted due to a chronic shortage of student places in the programs.

“Would-be college students in Washington state who hope to graduate and find jobs in high-demand industries are not getting the training they need.  As a result, these industries end up with vacant positions, which they must fill by recruiting out-of-state or from overseas.  The state of Washington ranks first in the nation for the number of college degree holders from out-of-state as a proportion of the total population.

“’The question is, does every kid who grows up here and has the interest and the capability have the opportunity to compete for these jobs?’ Lazowska says. ‘And the answer is no’ …

“The reason for the low capacity in education is a lack of funding … Last year, the UW faced a 27 percent budget cut, which led to a 10 percent cut in the computer science and engineering department.”

Read the entire article here. Read more →

Ed Lazowska accepts the ACM Distinguished Service Award (other photos to follow)

UW CSE was well represented at the annual ACM Awards Banquet, held this year at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco on the evening of Saturday June 26th.

UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska received the ACM Distinguished Service Award “for more than two decades of wide-ranging and tireless service to the computing community, especially in advocacy at the national level.”

UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello and UW CSE Ph.D. alumni Jeff Dean (now a Google Fellow) and Chandu Thekkath (now a Director and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley) were inducted as ACM Fellows, a distinction awarded to roughly 1% of ACM’s members.

UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Noah Snavely (now on the computer science faculty at Cornell University) was recognized with an Honorable Mention in the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award competition.

UW CSE bachelors alumni John Davis (now a Researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley) and Thomas Kwan (now Director of Research Operations at Yahoo! Research) also were in attendance. Read more →

Corensic (formerly PetraVM) is a UW CSE startup that provides tools for eliminating concurrency bugs from multicore software — launched by faculty members Luis Ceze and Mark Oskin, and backed by our friends at Madrona Ventures, the Washington Research Foundation, and Perkins Coie.

Today Corensic launched Windows and Linux versions of Jinx, its first tool.  Read about it here. Read more →