Allen School News

On Monday April 12, the Washington State Senate took a few minutes away from cutting the University of Washington’s budget to honor UW CSE and mathematics senior Will Johnson for his extraordinary performance in this year’s William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.

Congratulations, once again, to Will, to the other UW Putnam competitors, and to the team coaches, UW Mathematics professors Ioana Dumitriu and Julia Pevtsova.

And many thanks to Senators Rosemary McAuliffe, Ed Murray, Jeanne Kohl-Welles, Margarita Prentice, Joe McDermott, Adam Kline, Randy Gordon, Tracey Eide, Karen Keiser, Dale Brandland, Bob Morton, Randi Becker, and Ken Jacobsen for sponsoring Senate Resolution 8725 honoring Will.

Read the resolution here.

(Will has been recognized many times recently, both for his Putnam achievement and for being named the University of Washington Junior Medalist.  All have been chronicled on these pages, using the same photo.  Will’s mom probably wishes he’d worn a fancier t-shirt for his mug shot when he became a Computer Science major …) Read more →

This weekend’s lead editorial in the Seattle Times celebrates UW CSE and Mathematics senior Will Johnson’s remarkable accomplishment in being named a Putnam Fellow, for finishing among the top 5 of 4,036 competitors in this year’s William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.

“William Johnson, a University of Washington mathematics and computer science major, is the pride of the university, his hometown Kenmore, and Inglemoor High School.  He is the absolute, undisguised envy of a lot of very smart people around the globe.

“Johnson will be known forever and all time as a Putnam Fellow, a winner of The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, hosted every December by The Mathematical Association of America.

“This is an extraordinary achievement with the capacity to delight the rest of us …”

Once again, hearty congratulations to Will!

Read the editorial here.  Read about the amazing accomplishments of Will and many other UW CSE students here.  Learn why you should major in computer science or computer engineering here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. student Yaw Anokwa today received the 2010 Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest for his work on Open Data Kit.

“This year’s Pizzigati Prize winner, Yaw Anokwa, will be accepting the award on behalf of a team of University of Washington doctoral students who have crafted, in Open Data Kit, an open source application that unleashes the mobile phone’s social change potential.

“The 28-year-old Anokwa and his fellow developers Carl Hartung and Waylon Brunette began their work on Open Data Kit in 2008. Released last spring, the software turns cell phones into tools for collecting data ‘in the field’ and moving that data, with just a few finger swipes, to central Web-based servers or local computers.

“With Open Data Kit, grassroots activists can capture and export text, photos, video, audio, barcodes — even location. This imaginative software, observes one of this year’s Pizzigati Prize judges, ’empowers anyone with a little technical acumen, anywhere in the world, to collect data in regions where it’s hard to assess needs or document injustices.'”

Congratulations to Yaw and the entire ODK team, led by UW CSE faculty member Gaetano Borriello.  The ODK project was incubated at Google Seattle – a hugely successful and high-impact collaboration, and a great demonstration “the power of the right platform.”

Read the announcement here.  Learn more about Open Data Kit here. Read more →

Eric Arendt

Franzi Roesner

UW CSE celebrated the donors and recipients of 27 endowed undergraduate scholarships and 17 endowed graduate fellowships at a luncheon on April 7.  In the photos at right, graduate student Franzi Roesner and undergraduate student Eric Arendt address the throng.

See more photographs of the event here.  Commemorative brochure here. Read more →

Carnegie Mellon Today, the CMU alumni magazine, has run a wonderful profile on UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Adrien Treuille, now a faculty member in CMU’s School of Computer Science.

“Steam evaporating. A shirt creasing. Hair mussed up. Wind blowing. Crowds moving. These are physical minutiae of the human experience that go largely unnoticed in our daily lives. Yet, what if you are trying to recreate those experiences on a computer so the virtual world you construct seems absolutely faithful to our perception of everyday reality? In that case, getting these small, deceivingly complex details right takes on huge importance.

“There’s a whole lot of math, physics, and computer theory inherent in that challenge. For Treuille, there’s poetry, and maybe even some magic involved, too. ‘It’s totally enchanting to look out your window and see all of these things happening—snow falling, plants bending in the wind—and to ask yourself not only how does it work, but how would I build these things?’ says Treuille, who joined the faculty of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon one year ago as an assistant professor in the computer graphics group.”

Read the full article here. Read more →

The Seattle Times wakes up to Will Johnson’s Putnam Fellowship.

“The University of Washington has its first Putnam Fellow since the elite college-math competition began some 72 years ago.

“Will Johnson, 21, was one of five students from more than 4,000 who competed this year to win a fellowship. The other students came from MIT (which had two winners), Harvard and Yale.”

Read the complete article here.  Read our post from two weeks ago on the superb performance of Will and other CSE and UW students here. Read more →

CSE graduate students Chloe Kiddon, Franzi Roesner, and Todd Schiller have won prestigious NSF Graduate Fellowships, along with CSE research staff member Justin Samuel.

Morgan Dixon, Sunil Garg, Peter Hornyack, Yun-En Liu, and Nell O’Rourke received Honorable Mention.

Congratulations! Read more →

Each year, roughly 1,000 3-person undergraduate teams from across the nation compete in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling.  This year, a UW team including CSE’s Mark Bun was named “Outstanding Winner.”  Additionally, two UW teams, one including CSE’s Dan Gnanapragasam and one including CSE’s Milda Zizyte, were declared “Meritorious.”

Congratulations to Mark, Dan, Milda, their UW teammates, and long-time team coach and professor of Mathematics Jim Morrow. Read more →

April Fools Day in CSE dawned to a stuffed Husky trapped inside the museum-piece VAX-11/780 that graces our atrium.

(Computer Engineer Barbie also joined the rogues’ gallery of former CSE chairs.) Read more →

Mark Bun, Will Johnson

Hank Levy, Dave Bacon, Mark Bun, Will Johnson, Richard Ladner

Each year the University of Washington recognizes the top student (of roughly 7,000) in the previous year’s Freshman, Sophomore, and Junior classes as class Medalists.

In January, in a double-header, CSE’s Mark Bun was named the University of Washington Sophomore Medalist, and CSE’s Will Johnson was named the University of Washington Junior Medalist.

Will and Mark were honored on Wednesday March 31 at the home of University of Washington President Mark Emmert.  CSE faculty members Dave Bacon, Richard Ladner, and Hank Levy attended as their guests.

In the past decade, 12 CSE students have been recognized as University of Washington Medalists — an extraordinary record.  Johnson was recently in the news for being named a Putnam Fellow for finishing among the top five students in the nation — from among 4,036 competitors — in this year’s William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. Read more →