Allen School News

An end-of-year, end-of-decade Xconomy article by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska.

“‘Exponentials R Us’ – Seven Computer Science Game-Changers from the 2000’s, and Seven More to Come

“Forty years ago, in 1969, Neil Armstrong left footprints on the surface of the moon. It was an extraordinary accomplishment.

“Also in 1969, with much less fanfare and at much less expense, Len Kleinrock’s programmer Charley Kline sent the first message over ARPANET. (The message was “lo” – the first two letters of “login.” Then the system crashed.)

“With forty years of hindsight, which of these events has had the greater impact? Unless you’re really big into Tang and Velcro, the answer is clear. From four computers in 1969, the Internet has grown to more than half a billion computers and more than a billion regular users, and is impacting every aspect of our lives.

“‘Exponentials R Us.’ That’s the magic of computer science. It’s what differentiates us from all other fields. (To the extent that other fields are experiencing exponentials, it’s because of computer science – for example, the sensor technology and computational power that are driving biotech.) ‘Exponentials R Us’ is the past, the present, and the future of computer science. If you think you can have greater impact doing something else, you’ve got your head wedged.”

Read the entire article — “Seven Computer Science Game-Changers from the 2000’s, and Seven More to Come” – here. Read more →

An adaptation by Crosscut of Ed Lazowska’s analysis of how the University of Washington fared in the 2009-11 biennial state budget.

“There can be room for honest debate about whether the decisions that were made by the legislature and the governor were smart in terms of the future of the state, but there shouldn’t be any confusion regarding the facts. As we enter another difficult budget session, it’s important to think about where those decisions put the university and what steps will best position our region and the kids who grow up here for the future …

“These are difficult economic times — for families, for businesses, and for governments. Those states and regions that emerge the strongest will be those that make smart choices that position them to compete successfully. Smart choices begin with a clear understanding of the decisions of the past, their impact on the present, and the opportunities of the future.”

Read the Crosscut article here.  Even better, read the original, with additional charts and tables, here. Read more →

A wonderful New York Times article on careers in computing profiles UW CSE alumna Kira Lehtomaki, and quotes UW CSE friends Jan Cuny and Alfred Spector.

“’We need to gain an understanding in the population that education in computer science is both extraordinarily important and extraordinarily interesting,’ said Alfred Spector, vice president for research and special initiatives at Google. ‘The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.’

“Kira Lehtomaki can attest to this. She came to computing by way of art and movies. Art projects, not computers, were her childhood passions. She loved watching videos of Disney movies like ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Dumbo,’ and wanted to grow up to be one of those artists who stirred life into characters using pencils and paper. She even took a summer job at Disneyland as a ‘cookie artist,’ painting designs and Mickey Mouse faces on baked goods, because she was allowed to spend a few days with Disney’s animators.

“Yet as a 19-year-old college student in 2001, Ms. Lehtomaki saw the Pixar film ‘Monsters, Inc.’ and was impressed by how good computer animation had become. At the University of Washington, she pursued computer graphics, graduating with a degree in computer science.

“Today Ms. Lehtomaki, 27, is an animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios, working on ‘Rapunzel,’ which is scheduled to be released next year. She does her drawing on a computer, using specialized graphics and modeling software. Her computer science education, she said, is an asset every day in her work, less for technical skills than for what she learned about analytic thinking.

“‘Computer science taught me how to think about things, how to break down and solve complex problems,’ Ms. Lehtomaki said.”

Read the complete article here. Read more →

UW CSE’s Dan Weld is quoted in this Technology Review article.

“Gradually, over the past decade, Google has compressed the gap between fresh indexing of the Web from months to mere minutes. On Monday the search giant upped the ante … saying that … it will offer search results … that are just seconds old.

“At the same press event, the company unveiled new search features for mobile devices. These include a prototype visual search technology, which allows snapshots of real objects, like signs and buildings, to be used as search ‘terms.’  It also tweaked its geographic search – your GPS-derived position now causes Google to offer different search results based on location.”

Read the full article here. Read more →

This lovely article in Pacific Magazine describes the relationship between UW CSE alum Damon Danieli and Sara Denis, a stranger who donated her kidney to him.

“Sara Denis, a 35-year-old medical-office scheduler, shared something even more rare than a neurologist — her ‘extra’ kidney.

“She knows it sounds crazy. Her husband thought so, too. So did most of her friends. ‘They were like, ‘Oooh, no! What are you thinking???!!’ ‘ …

“At matchingdonors.com, where people who need kidneys pay for listings, she found a local patient. And a picture.

“It was a husband, like hers. With children, like her child. And a mom, ‘like me,’ Denis recalled.

“It was Damon Danieli, a software developer, husband and father. Over months, the two e-mailed and eventually met. On Aug. 19, 2008, Denis gave Danieli her right kidney.”

Read the full article here. Read more →

The Seattle Times reports on privacy concerns related to the ORCA card.

“The ORCA network offers the convenience of using a single card to pay for rides on buses, trains, boats, streetcars and vans … But what thousands of commuters might not realize is that their movements also could be checked by their bosses.”

UW CSE has for several years raised concerns about this technology, at the University of Washington and statewide, in the context of the RFID Ecosystem Project, a large-scale research investigation of how to preserve privacy in an RFID-equipped universe.

UW CSE graduate student Karl Koscher, a member of the RFID Ecosystem Project, is quoted in the Seattle Times article.  Read it here. Read more →

The New York Times on eScience:

“In a speech given just a few weeks before he was lost at sea off the California coast in January 2007, Jim Gray, a database software pioneer and a Microsoft researcher, sketched out an argument that computing was fundamentally transforming the practice of science …

“In computing circles, Dr. Gray’s crusade was described as, ‘It’s the data, stupid.’  It was a point of view that caused him to break ranks with the supercomputing nobility, who for decades focused on building machines that calculated at picosecond intervals …

“’The advent of inexpensive high-bandwidth sensors is transforming every field from data-poor to data-rich,’ Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist and director of the University of Washington eScience Institute, said in an e-mail message.  The resulting transformation is occurring in the social sciences, too.

“’As recently as five years ago,’ Dr. Lazowska said, ‘if you were a social scientist interested in how social groups form, evolve and dissipate, you would hire 30 college freshmen for $10 an hour and interview them in a focus group.’

“’Today,’ he added, ‘you have real-time access to the social structuring and restructuring of 100 million Facebook users.’”

Read the complete article here. Read more →

Confused about how the University of Washington fared in the 2009-11 biennial budget?  There can be room for honest debate about whether the decisions that were made were smart in terms of the future of the state.  But there should not be any confusion concerning the facts.   Here they are! Read more →

While it will be long time before “one laptop per child” is true everywhere in the world, UW CSE undergraduates have developed a system that lets up to four students share a single computer to do interactive math problems.

UW undergraduate students Clint Tseng, Heather Underwood, and Sunil Garg, who participated in Joyojeet Pal‘s computer science project course, decided to try building a system for a numeric keypad similar to Microsoft MultiPoint platform, which connects multiple mice to one computer.  Their system, developed over the past year, connects four numeric keypads, each of which costs about $4, to a standard computer running Windows software.  The screen is split into four columns.  Each student looks at one column, where he or she is given math problems based on performance on previous answers.  Early qualitative tests of the system in India, which were presented earlier this year in Qatar at the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, showed positive results.

Read the full U Week article here.  Read more about MultiLearn here. Read more →

Even though James Cameron’s movie Avatar is still a few weeks away from opening, there already exist real-life systems for controlling another body remotely. UW CSE’s Raj Rao has developed an elegant mind-controlled robot that takes care of the boring, low-level stuff so the controller can concentrate on more interesting, higher level goals.  The little humanoid bot is controlled by the human brain. By measuring electric signals through the surface of the skull (no surgery required), you can command the robot to perform a simple task.

Read the Wired UK post here.  Read the Singularity Hub post here. Read more →