Allen School News

Allen School Ph.D. student Minjoon Seo has earned a 2019 Facebook Fellowship for his research in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Seo develops systems for end-to-end question answering, reasoning-based question answering, and scalable deep-learning architectures in collaboration with Hanna Hajishirzi and Ali Farhadi, professors at the Allen School and researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2).

“Minjoon is a rising star in NLP and has made substantial contributions to the field of question answering, one of the most important areas in AI and natural language processing,” said Hajishirzi. “He tends to work on high-impact projects and has already earned more than 600 citations for his research.”

One of those high-impact projects is BiDAF — short for Bi-Directional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension — which Seo worked on as a research intern at AI2 and is now widely used in academia and industry. With BiDAF, Seo and his collaborators have built a large-scale, end-to-end, deep neural question answering system that is capable of answering questions about both textual paragraphs and diagrams. The system is modular, enabling researchers and practitioners to extend it to multiple modalities and knowledge bases. Seo’s work has proven so popular, BiDAF ranked first on the leaderboard for three important new reading-comprehension datasets shortly after its release and is actively being used in many question answering systems in academia and industry.

Seo was lead author on the groundbreaking GeoS question answering system, the first end-to-end system for solving high school-level plane geometry problems developed by AI2 and Allen School researchers. GeoS demonstrated the ability to jointly understand textual and visual cues to answer SAT geometry questions as well as the average 11th-grade test-taker.

When GeoS was publicly announced, Farhadi noted in a press release that the biggest challenge for the team was to convert the SAT question into language a computer could understand. “One needs to go beyond standard pattern-matching approaches for problems like solving geometry questions that require in-depth understanding of text, diagram and reasoning,” he explained. Among Seo’s contributions to that effort was a new system for using visual cues in diagrams to improve understanding of the accompanying text. His work incorporated novel computer vision techniques for parsing diagrams and natural language processing algorithms for accurately parsing text, as well as a new algebraic solver that can solve the question based on a combination of textual and visual cues.

More recently, Seo has turned his attention to the design of algorithms for open-domain, scalable question-answering systems. For example, developed a tool called Skim-RNN that improves the scalability of recurrent neural networks using a technique inspired by the human approach to speed reading. Seo also worked on a new approach to question-answering during an internship with Google AI that requires a standalone representation of the question and the context. His method — known as Phrase-Indexed Question Answering, or PIQA — has the potential to significantly improve the scalability of question answering in addition to enabling more efficient retrieval.

Seo is among just 21 researchers recognized in Facebook’s 2019 Fellowship competition. The prestigious Facebook Fellowship Program recognizes and supports promising doctoral students at universities around the world who are engaged in innovative research spanning 15 areas of Computer Science and Computer Engineering. Past Allen School recipients include James Bornholt and Eunsol Choi (2018), Aditya Vashistha (2016), and Lydia Chilton and Nicola Dell (2013).

Learn more about the 2019 Facebook Fellows here.

Congratulations, Minjoon!

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Each year, the Computing Research Association (CRA) recognizes rising young research talent at colleges and universities across North America through its Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards. As part of its 2019 competition, the CRA honored four Allen School undergraduates — Nelson Liu, Kimberly Ruth, Pathirat Kosakanchit, and Rowan Phipps — for their contributions in natural language processing, security and privacy, and technology for development and for demonstrating the potential to have an even greater impact in their future careers.

Nelson Liu is one of two Allen School students who were named finalists in this year’s CRA awards. Liu is a senior majoring in Computer Science and Linguistics whose research focuses on machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). Working under the guidance of Allen School professor Noah Smith, Liu has explored the linguistic capabilities and limitations of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which form the backbone of state-of-the-art NLP systems. His work breaks into the “black box” of neural network NLP models to advance our understanding of their inner workings and abilities, a step toward his broader goals of improving the generalizability and interpretability of such models.

For one project, Liu and his collaborators at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and University of Colorado Boulder found that long short-term memory recurrent neural networks (LSTMs) trained on natural language data outperform those trained on non-language sequential data in solving memorization tasks, demonstrating that recurrent neural networks exploit the linguistic attributes of data even while performing inherently non-linguistic tasks. The results earned Liu and his team a Best Paper award at the Association for Computational Linguistics’ 2018 Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP 2018). Liu’s recent work has also examined the linguistic knowledge implicitly encoded within contextualized word vectors by assessing their ability to predict a broad range of linguistic features of input text, and investigated the ability of NLP models to adapt to adversarial datasets in order to gauge their effectiveness in evaluating model generalization. Papers about both of these projects were recently accepted for presentation at the upcoming annual conference of the North American chapter of the ACL (NAACL 2019).

Liu previously earned a prestigious Goldwater Scholarship, which recognizes undergraduates who intend to pursue a research career in the natural sciences, mathematics, or engineering, and Washington Research Foundation Fellowships in 2017-18 and 2018-19 as part of a program supporting undergraduates who engage in sophisticated research projects that involve creativity and advanced subject knowledge.

Kimberly Ruth was named a finalist in the 2019 CRA competition based on her work aimed at improving the security and privacy of augmented reality applications. Ruth, a senior in the Interdisciplinary Honors Program pursuing a double-major in Computer Engineering and Mathematics, has been working with Allen School professors Tadayoshi Kohno and Franziska Roesner in the Security and Privacy Research Laboratory since her freshman year.

Ruth’s first foray into AR security focused on addressing the safety and security risks of unregulated application output, such as content that interferes with their ability to view important real-world information or distracts users from critical tasks such as driving. The research team developed, prototyped and evaluated Arya, an AR platform that enables developers to specify security policies that will prevent malicious or buggy output. Working with Arya collaborator Kiron Lebeck, a Ph.D. student in the Allen School, Ruth then turned her attention to multi-user scenarios such as AR-enabled collaborative tools and multi-player games. The team designed and conducted a user study to better understand the the privacy and security challenges of these increasingly popular applications using the Microsoft HoloLens platform. Based on her experience with both projects, Ruth became interested in how technical design solutions can be used to help developers build multi-user AR apps that protect against user-level threats. To that end, she developed a set of design principles and prototype for a multi-user AR module that would enable users to control access to sensitive information, filter inappropriate content, and engage in both co-located and remote content sharing.

Ruth was previously recognized with a 2018 Goldwater Scholarship, a Mary Gates Research Scholarship, and Washington Research Foundation Fellowships in 2017-18 and 2018-19. Last year, she was named a member of the Husky 100, which celebrates the contributions of University of Washington students who are making the most of their Husky experience. Ruth was also selected as a finalist in the CRA’s 2018 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher competition.

Pathirat “Pat” Kosakanchit, a junior majoring in Computer Engineering, earned an honorable mention from CRA for her research as a member of the Allen School’s Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab. Spurred by the internet’s ability to advance social, educational, and economic opportunity, Kosakanchit has spent the past year working on the Community LTE (CoLTE) project under the guidance of professor Kurtis Heimerl and postdoc Spencer Sevilla.

CoLTE is an open-source LTE software package that enables rural communities lacking retail internet access to establish and maintain their own network. Kosakanchit’s technical contributions to the project include testing and debugging the network stack, and building a Node.js application that enables users to check their data usage, top up their account, and transfer credit to fellow users. In recognition of the unique challenges of remote communities in a network outage, she also built an offline, locally-hosted version of OpenStreetMap (OSM) that provides residents with access to basic mapping services when they are unable to access the internet. To implement the offline version, Kosakanchit had to overcome several configuration issues relating to virtual machine and database setup. She also designed and implemented a set of map markers signaling fire, water, food, and medicine that users could pin to the offline version of OSM during emergencies. The team has launched a pilot CoLTE network in two locations: the small Indonesian village of Bokondini and the town of Santa Inés in Oaxaca, Mexico. Additional networks are planned to be deployed in Washington state, Argentina, and potentially in Kosakanchit’s native Thailand.

Kosakanchit has applied her mapping skills outside of the ICTD Lab as a member of WOOF3D, the UW’s 3D-printing club, where she contributed to the development of a simplified process for 3D printing topological maps. Kosakanchit also serves as a mentor for the International Student Mentorship Program, which helps international students adjust to life in the United States, and is an active member of the Thai Student Association at UW.

Rowan Phipps, a senior majoring in Computer Science who also works with Heimerl in the ICTD Lab, received an honorable mention for his work on mobile security as part of the Digital Financial Services Research Group, a collaboration between members of the ICTD Lab and Security and Privacy Research Lab. Phipps’ research focuses on the security implications of devices and services used for mobile banking in communities where people lack access to traditional financial services.

Phipps and his colleagues were particularly interested in the growing use of ThinSIMs, which are small, programmable add-ons to a mobile SIM card that make it easier to deploy additional applications. Many mobile banking services are Slim Toolkit (STK) applications, which run directly on a SIM card. STK apps adhere to the GSM standard and are compatible with every mobile phone, but they require installation by the SIM card manufacturer. New market entrants can use ThinSIMS to get around this hurdle and provide alternatives to the services offered by incumbent providers. The disadvantage to ThinSIMs, as Phipps and his colleagues discovered, is that they can be used to intercept and initiate communications over the SIM interface without the user’s knowledge or consent, redirecting their credentials, their calls — and potentially their money — to an attacker. The team discovered a similar vulnerability with another popular protocol for delivering mobile money services, known as unstructured supplementary service data or USSD, when paired with a ThinSIM. In a paper that appeared at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 1st annual Conference on Computing & Sustainable Societies (COMPASS 2018), the team revealed the vulnerabilities associated with ThinSIMs using attacks Phipps designed to exploit mPesa, a popular STK-based app, as well as a USSD-based service he created for the experiment. Phipps and his collaborators also recommended modifications to existing apps and the GSM standard to protect users against such attacks.

Phipps was a member of the UW student team that captured first place in last year’s Pacific Rim Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. He previously completed a technical internship at Qumulo and, before that, spent a summer as a teaching assistant for Girls Who Code.

Learn more about the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards here.

Congratulations to Nelson, Kimberly, Pat, and Rowan!

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Allen School professors Alvin Cheung and Shayan Oveis Gharan were named 2019 Sloan Research Fellows in Computer Science by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship Program recognizes early-career scientists and engineers who have already distinguished themselves through their research and exhibit the potential to make substantial contributions in their respective fields.

Alvin Cheung engages in cross-disciplinary research as a member of the Allen School’s Database and Programming Languages & Software Engineering groups. In his young career, Cheung has produced multiple, paradigm-shifting solutions spanning data management, data analysis, and end-user programming.

“From booking plane tickets to browsing social networking websites, we interact with large amounts of data everyday,” noted Cheung. “My group works on new techniques to help users process and manage data easily, with the goal to simplify software developers’ efforts to build databases and applications without compromising on performance, and enable the rapid development of database applications that provide efficient and reliable data access to all.”

One of Cheung’s key early-career contributions has been his pioneering work on verified lifting, a technique for automatically translating applications written in Java to domain-specific languages such as SQL, Spark, and Hadoop to optimize performance and reduce errors. For example, by consolidating application logic into compact SQL queries in which the SQL engine could identify optimization opportunities, Cheung’s approach increased the speed of applications up to 1,000 fold. The technique also has the effect of “future-proofing” applications driven by big-data systems that are subject to frequent updates.

For another project, Cheung and his collaborators developed methods in theorem proving and model checking to produce Cosette, an automated prover for checking complex SQL queries that can identify bugs contained in hundreds of manually written rules within seconds. Cheung has also contributed to dramatic leaps in end-user programming; for example, he helped develop Scythe to synthesize SQL queries based on input-output examples posted on Stack Overflow by users seeking expert help with writing SQL queries. Their algorithm can answer around 70% of the most SQL-related questions on the platform faster than the human experts can, making it the best SQL synthesizer ever developed.

“Alvin stands out for his interdisciplinary approach and keen intuition regarding how systems are likely to perform, which has enabled him to crack problems that appear impossible to solve,” said Allen School Director Hank Levy. “His breakthrough work on verified lifting and other projects will have a tremendous impact on the functions that future systems will be able to deliver.”

Shayan Oveis Gharan is a member of the Allen School’s Theory of Computation group who focuses on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for solving fundamental NP-hard counting and optimization problems at the heart of the theory and practice of computing. These problems have implications for a wide range of fields, from logistics and marketing, to planning and policy-making, that cry out for new and better computational tools for managing and exploiting the vast quantities of data available.

“I encode a discrete phenomenon in a complex multivariate polynomial, and I understand it via the interplay of the coefficients, zeros, and function values of this polynomial,” explained Oveis Gharan. “Although these polynomials are so large that they cannot be stored in all computers in the world combined, I use their analytical properties to design efficient optimization algorithms for the underlying discrete phenomenon.”

Among Oveis Gharan’s most notable contributions to date are his works on the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and its asymmetric variant — one of the most studied problems in optimization — and his very recent work on counting problems related to matroids. Oveis Gharan and his collaborators studied TSP using analytical techniques, proposing a new class of algorithms for variants of TSP and introducing novel analysis of classical algorithms for this problem dating back 50 years. The team’s efforts produced the first improvement on existing approximation algorithms which broke barriers that had withstood for three decades despite substantial previous attempts within the theoretical computer science community.

Oveis Gharan’s most recent work on counting bases of matroids has profound applications in many areas, such as network reliability. To illustrate, he cited the road network of Seattle, which became heavily blocked due to a recent snowstorm. If each street x in the city will be blocked with probability px, what is the probability that the whole city will be disconnected — that there is no available route from home to work for some residents — and how should the city position its snow plows to minimize the probability of such an event? Oveis Gharan and his group devised efficient algorithms to answer such questions.

“Shayan’s contributions in combinatorial optimization, such as his work on the Traveling Salesman Problem, have had a profound impact on the theoretical computer science community,” observed Levy. “His creative and driven approach has enabled him to break through long-standing barriers and expand our understanding of fundamental theoretical problems that underpin our field.”

Joining Cheung and Oveis Gharan in the class of 2019 Fellows is professor Kelley Harris of the UW Department of Genome Sciences, who was recognized in the computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology category for her research into the evolutionary history of humans and other species based on large datasets of genetic variation. Each year, the Sloan Foundation selects a total of 126 Fellows from higher education institutions across North America who are making contributions in Chemistry, Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology, Computer Science, Economics, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Ocean Sciences, Physics, or a related field.

“Sloan Research Fellows are the best young scientists working today,” said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in a press release. “Sloan Fellows stand out for their creativity, for their hard work, for the importance of the issues they tackle, and the energy and innovation with which they tackle them. To be a Sloan Fellow is to be in the vanguard of 21st century science.”

Recent Sloan Fellowship recipients at the Allen School include Maya Cakmak, who was recognized last year for her work in robotics; Ali Farhadi and Jon Froehlich, who were included among the class of 2017 Fellows for their work in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, respectively; and Emina Torlak for her contributions to computer-aided verification and synthesis. A total of 35 current or former Allen School faculty members have been recognized through the fellowship program.

Read the Sloan Foundation announcement here, the complete list of 2019 Fellows here, and a related UW News story here.

Congratulations to Alvin, Shayan, and Kelley!

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Yesterday, nearly 300 friends of the Paul G. Allen School gathered to celebrate the dedication of the new Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering on the UW Seattle campus. UW and Allen School leadership were joined onstage by special guests Bill Gates, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, and Microsoft President & Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith in thanking the more than 500 individual donors, local technology companies, and state taxpayers for their support of the project.

The day marked not only the opening of a new building, but also the prospect of a new era of computer science education and impact. “The Gates Center isn’t just a building, it’s a statement about our vision of the future,” said Allen School Director Hank Levy. “We have created a world-class computer science program here, in part because of our focus on technology that helps to solve the world’s biggest challenges. This building enables us to grow those efforts and tackle even bigger challenges.”

One of the ways in which the new building will enable the school to grow its impact is by providing the physical capacity to serve more students. “It’s first and foremost a vehicle for increasing opportunity for Washington’s students,” said UW President Ana Mari Cauce. “Because that’s what we do here, in this outstanding building and all across our campuses. It’s what drives the talented faculty who teach our students and advance discovery. It’s why so many students are eager to come here to learn — both to the University and to this program.”

Cauce highlighted the care and thought that went into the design of the building, which is focused on increasing student capacity and enriching the student experience. The building’s entire first floor is dedicated to the needs of Allen School majors, including a student services center, an undergraduate commons, meeting and collaboration spaces, computer labs and support, and capstone project rooms. The Gates Center also provides much-needed instructional space, in the form of several large classrooms and seminar rooms along with a 240-seat auditorium, and numerous collaboration and community spaces — including a cafe open to the campus and the public, and a 3,000-square-foot events center for hosting workshops, research demos, career fairs, and other community-oriented events.

Emphasizing that even more important than the new building is what goes on inside, Brad Smith — who led the fundraising campaign for the building — saluted the assembled guests who helped make the vision of the Bill & Melinda Gates Center a reality. “It is extraordinary to just look across this room and see the faces of all of the people who contributed so much,” Smith said. “You didn’t hang up when the phone rang. We rolled up our sleeves together. More than 500 people donated their personal funds to this building.” Among them, he noted, were the Friends of Bill & Melinda Gates, a group of more than a dozen couples, led by Charles and Lisa Simonyi, who joined Microsoft in providing a gift to name the building in the Gateses’ honor.

Smith also acknowledged local companies such as Amazon and Zillow that joined Microsoft in supporting the project. “It was a wonderful journey that gave many of us an opportunity to partner together — even competitors,” he noted. “Other companies in Seattle really stepped up.”

In addition to enabling the Allen School to serve more students, those efforts will also help the school and the UW to stay at the forefront of the computing field. Laboratories in the Gates Center include a wet lab to support the school’s work at the intersection of information technology and molecular engineering; the UW Reality Lab, which focuses on advancing the state of the art in augmented and virtual reality education and research; the Center for Neurotechnology, which aims to use technology to revolutionize the treatment of debilitating neurological conditions; and a 3,000-square-foot robotics laboratory.

Governor Jay Inslee — a proud Husky — noted that the impact of the new building and its inhabitants would extend far beyond their core focus. “This is so much beyond the world of computing,” Inslee said, “because the world of computing feeds every single thing that we’re growing our economy and our society on now.”

Of the 500 donors Smith mentioned, roughly 300 are Allen School alumni. That means nearly 200 people without an alumni connection to the school recognized the potential impact and threw their support behind the project. “From the bottom of my heart, thanks to all of you for what you’ve done to make this amazing building a reality,” said Allen School professor Ed Lazowska.

Before the program began, Lazowska and Levy had taken Bill Gates, Cauce and Smith on a tour of the new building, visiting several labs and stopping to talk with students along the way. “It was fantastic to take the tour and not only see that it’s an incredible building, but to see some of the great work going on here,” Gates said to the assembled crowd later. Saying that he and Melinda are honored to have a building named after them that will increase the capacity of the school associated with Paul G. Allen, Gates also paid tribute to his late friend and collaborator who passed away last October.

“It would’ve been great if Paul could have been here,” he said. “He deserves so much credit for what happened at Microsoft and always believing in innovation and believing in the University of Washington. So hopefully he somewhere can appreciate the great development that is taking place here.”

Read the UW News release here, GeekWire articles on the building opening here and the dedication here, and a related Seattle Times editorial here.

View more photos of the day’s events below.

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The Allen School family mourns the passing of professor emeritus Ted Kehl, one of the original group of seven faculty members who founded the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington in the 1960s, and someone who was instrumental in introducing Seattle to a hardware revolution in the form of very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuit design — a development that transformed computing and modern society.

Kehl earned his Ph.D. at University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1961 and joined the UW faculty six years later. As a professor in both Computer Science & Engineering and the School of Medicine, Kehl was known for his interdisciplinary approach to research long before it became fashionable. In addition to teaching physiology, biophysics and computer science, Kehl ran a hardware lab focused on the development of efficient computer hardware for biomedical research.

He took a keen interest in VLSI research and worked with Carver Mead of CalTech — who co-wrote the book on VLSI design along with Lynn Conway — to bring a new VLSI course to Seattle, jointly sponsored by UW and Boeing. That effort led to the establishment of the University of Washington/Northwest VLSI Consortium, a major initiative funded by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and led by Kehl in partnership with five regional companies. The course helped spawn the MicroVAX-I processor, which was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation under the leadership of Dave Cutler, then-head of the DECwest Engineering team. Kehl subsequently launched an undergraduate seminar in VLSI design in which teams of students had the opportunity to work with professional mentors drawn from the semiconductor industry on their designs.

In 1983, Kehl co-founded a startup company called IC Designs with his former Ph.D. student John Torode. IC Designs started out providing software and fabrication services for application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) before its focus evolved into the design of ASICs for use in personal computers. The company grew to over $30 million in annual sales before its acquisition by industry leader Cypress Semiconductor Corp. in 1993.

Kehl retired from UW in 1997.

Our thoughts are with Ted’s family, friends, and the many students and collaborators whose lives he touched during his long and influential career.

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On Friday, March 1st, the Paul G. Allen School will open the doors of the new Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering to the community. Friends, alumni, and campus and regional partners are invited to join us for an afternoon of building tours, demos, and interactive media that will showcase how the Bill & Melinda Gates Center will enable us to educate more of Washington’s students for high-impact careers, advance scientific discovery and innovation, and make meaningful contributions to society — here at home, and around the globe.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Center Open House will take place from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm. During that time, the Allen School is opening up access to the entire building and inviting visitors to explore the variety of community spaces, instructional facilities, research labs, and people-centric features of this exciting new facility. Both organized tours and self-guided tours will be available. Among the highlights:

Atrium & Tribute Wall

The expansive three-story Gates Center atrium provides an inviting welcome for students and visitors and functions as the building’s “living room.” One of the main features of interest to visitors is our Tribute Wall, an interactive media display developed by the firm Belle & Wissell and situated outside of the new Silverberg Family Student Services Center that enables visitors to explore the history of the Allen School, the growth of technology in the Puget Sound region, the many contributions of Paul G. Allen and of Bill and Melinda Gates, and the importance of broadening participation in the field.

Just off the main entrance, visitors can enjoy the view of Stevens Way and the Allen Center from the Microsoft Cafe, or climb the open-air Sujal & Meera Patel Innovation Stairway that connects the atrium with the second and third floors.

Instructional Spaces

As the signature education space in the Gates Center, the 240-seat Amazon Auditorium on the ground floor will host large classes, special lectures, and other events open to the campus community. The adjoining Amazon Gallery is a gathering space for students that also connects the auditorium with nearby instructional spaces such as the 100-seat Brad & Kathy Smith and David & Cathy Habib Classrooms.

The ground floor can be reached via the Anita Borg Grand Stairway, which features views of a revitalized Snohomish Lane and is named for computer engineer Anita Borg, a former UW student and tireless advocate for diversity in computing (including co-founding the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing). Seminar rooms and capstone project rooms are located throughout the building.

Community Spaces

The Gates Center is designed to foster a sense of belonging and community, and to support the serendipitous meetings and collaborations that are at the heart of Allen School innovation.

Areas of the building that epitomize these values include the Charles & Lisa Simonyi Undergraduate Commons, a space occupying the east end of the first floor that is set aside especially for Allen School majors and features seating areas, meeting rooms, computer support, and a kitchen; and the Research Commons, a bright, two-story space for faculty, staff, graduate students and guests to congregate and share ideas. Smaller breakout spaces, meeting rooms, and collaboration spaces are to be found throughout the building.

Event Center

Occupying the entire fourth floor of the building, the event center comprises three distinctive spaces offering sweeping views of the UW campus, Lake Washington, and Mount Rainier.

The signature event space is the Zillow Commons, a flexible venue for workshops, conferences and community-focused events. From the Zillow Commons, visitors can take in the view from the Wilma Bradley Terrace, featuring an outdoor seating area, or admire an installation by sculptor and UW alumnus George Rodriguez (MFA, ‘09) in the Steve & Heather Singh Event Gallery.

Research Labs

In addition to its many student-focused and community spaces, the Bill & Melinda Gates Center is home to a number of laboratory spaces that support Allen School research, including the Center for Neurotechnology, which develops innovative devices for individuals with debilitating neurological conditions; the Center for Game Science, pioneering games for scientific discovery and for education; the UW Reality Lab, a leading center for advancing the state of the art in virtual and augmented reality; the Molecular Information Systems Lab, which explores the intersection of information technology and biology; the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, which develops, translates and deploys open source universally accessible technologies with a focus on benefiting populations with motor limitations or speech impairment; and a 3,000-square-foot Robotics Laboratory complete with a functioning kitchen to support the development of robots that assist humans with everyday tasks.

Hundreds of Allen School alumni and friends, the local technology community, the University, and the State of Washington came together to support the Bill & Melinda Gates Center, in a campaign led by Microsoft President Brad Smith. And, while Bill and Melinda Gates supported the project generously, the building was named in their honor as a gesture of admiration and gratitude by Microsoft and 13 couples who are long-time friends of the Gateses – exemplifying the wonderful community in which we live.

Join us in celebrating this incredible milestone and what it means for our program, our campus, our region, and the world!

Photo credits: Raphael Gaultier/University of Washington Read more →

Three University of Washington faculty who are recognized leaders in human-computer interaction (HCI) research — Allen School professor Jennifer Mankoff and Information School professors (and Allen School adjunct professors) Batya Friedman and Jacob Wobbrock — have been honored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) with election to the CHI Academy. The CHI Academy is composed of individuals who have made substantial, cumulative contributions to the field of HCI through the development of new research directions and innovations and have influenced the work of their peers. Mankoff, Friedman and Wobbrock are three of only eight new CHI Academy members elected this year!

Jennifer Mankoff, who holds the Richard E. Ladner Endowed Professorship at the Allen School, is a leading researcher in human-computer interaction who has devoted her career to promoting a digital future defined by inclusion and accessibility for all. As director of the Make4All Group and a member of the interdisciplinary DUB (Design, Use, Build) group, one of the ways in which she has sought to advance that goal is by revolutionizing and democratizing the production of assistive technologies using 3D printing and other advanced fabrication techniques.

In one of her recent projects, Mankoff worked with Allen School colleague Shyam Gollakota and members of the Networks & Mobile Systems Lab to develop the first 3D-printed objects capable of tracking and storing data about their use, with potential applications ranging from smart prescription pill bottles to customized prosthetic devices. She also led the development of a paradigm-shifting technology for screen readers — Spatial Region Interaction Techniques, or SPRITEs — in collaboration with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was a faculty member before joining the Allen School. SPRITEs leverages a standard keyboard to make interactive web content more accessible for people who are blind or low-vision. In addition to her focus on accessibility, Mankoff has been a pioneer in applying computation to address societal challenges around sustainability, such as leveraging Internet-scale technologies to reduce energy consumption.

Mankoff’s work previously has been recognized with an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, an IBM Faculty Fellowship, a GVU Impact Award from her alma mater, Georgia Tech, and Best Paper awards at the ASSETS, CHI, and Mobile HCI conferences.

“It’s an honor to be included in the CHI Academy, and one I hope to live up to in my future research as much as in my past research,” Mankoff said. “I am passionate about creating accessible, inclusive systems and the engineering to make them feasible and deployable, and grateful for all the students and collaborators who have helped me to create them and to be recognized for this work.”

Joining Mankoff in the 2019 class of CHI Academy inductees are fellow DUB members Batya Friedman and Jacob Wobbrock, professors in the iSchool and adjunct professors in the Allen School.

Friedman is a pioneer of value sensitive design, an approach to developing technology that accounts for human values. Her work has influenced multiple fields beyond HCI, including computer security, architecture, civil engineering, law, transportation, and many others.

Wobbrock’s research aims to develop a scientific understanding of how people interact with technology and information. His work seeks to improve the quality of those interactions, particularly for people with disabilities, using human performance measurement and modeling, input and interaction techniques, accessible computing, and more.

“Jen, Batya, and Jake have helped build UW’s reputation as a center of excellence in HCI research and innovation,” said Hank Levy, director of the Allen School. “All three have made lasting contributions not just in HCI and computing, but also in many other fields in their quest to use technology to solve some of society’s greatest challenges. Their induction into the CHI Academy is a testament to their technical leadership and enduring impact by putting people first.”

Current CHI Academy member and iSchool dean Anind Dey concurred. “Combining this with three members of the 2019 CHI Academy class being from the UW really solidifies the UW as a global leader in HCI,” he said in a related announcement. “The level of impact all three have had for such a sustained period of time is admirable, and makes them very deserving of recognition by the CHI Academy.”

The new inductees will be formally recognized at the CHI 2019 conference to be held in Glasgow, Scotland in May. Learn more about the 2019 SIGCHI Awards here, and read the related iSchool article here.

Congratulations to Jen, Batya, and Jake!

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In yet another sign of the Puget Sound region’s emergence as a center of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence research, NVIDIA last week marked the official opening of its new AI Robotics Research Lab just blocks away from the Allen School and University of Washington’s Seattle campus. Led by Allen School professor Dieter Fox, NVIDIA’s new lab in the UW CoMotion building will bring together multidisciplinary teams to focus on the development of next-generation robots that can work safely and effectively alongside humans.

Many UW faculty and students were on hand to toast the new lab, including Allen School director Hank Levy. “I’d just like to say how excited we are to have NVIDIA here in Seattle,” Levy said in remarks welcoming the assembled guests to the lab for the first time. “At this moment, AI is changing the world, and NVIDIA’s hardware is a driving force in that movement.”

The new lab represents a couple of firsts for NVIDIA — not only is it the company’s first research outpost in Seattle, but it is also the very first NVIDIA research lab focused on robotics. Among the highlights of the 13,000 square-foot space is a working kitchen, complete with drawers, cabinets and appliances, in which the team hopes to whip up new capabilities in human-robot collaboration. “We want to ultimately get a robot that can cook a meal with you,” Fox said, “or that you can just talk to it and tell the robot what you want to do.”

To get there, Fox and his colleagues will need to make progress in a variety of areas, spanning artificial intelligence, robotic manipulation, machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and more. Noting that the new lab intends to publish its research so that it can be built upon by others — “we aren’t keeping it to ourselves” — Fox emphasized that its work will be a collaborative endeavor through which researchers from NVIDIA, UW, and other leading universities would push the field of robotics forward.

That sentiment was echoed by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who emphasized that the culture of collaboration that underpins UW research was also “the perfect culture for creating a robotics platform” in a city that he regards as “one of the greatest hubs of computer science in the world,” thanks to the presence of UW, Microsoft, Amazon, and many others.

“Robotics is going to change the world,” Levy said, “and having an NVIDIA lab this close to UW, started by Allen School professor Dieter Fox, gives us an incredible opportunity to work together to advance the state of the art. We are looking forward to long-term and successful collaborations between this lab, our faculty and students, and other members of the Seattle tech community.”

To learn more, read NVIDIA’s blog post and check out coverage by The Daily, GeekWire, MIT Tech Review, IEEE Spectrum, Robotics & Automation News, The Robot Report, Engadget, Hot Hardware, eTeknix, Neowin, SD Times, and the Puget Sound Business Journal (subscription required).

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Someone in the United States dies from an opioid overdose every 12 and a half minutes, according to data from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the rise in fatalities stemming from illicit opioid use is widely recognized as a public health epidemic. Many of these deaths could be prevented by rapid detection and intervention, including the administration of naloxone to reverse the effects of an overdose. Now, thanks to researchers in the Allen School’s Networks & Mobile Systems Lab and UW Medicine’s Department of Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine, a solution for preventing opioid-related deaths may be at hand. In a paper published today in Science Translational Medicine, the team describes a new contactless smartphone app capable of detecting signs of opioid overdose. Called Second Chance, the app converts the phone’s speaker and microphone into an active sonar system to unobtrusively monitor a person’s breathing and movements from distances of up to three feet, looking for patterns that indicate that they may be in danger.

According to one of those researchers, Allen School professor Shyam Gollakota, the ultimate goal in developing the app is not only to monitor a person’s condition, but eventually be able to connect users immediately with potentially life-saving treatment. “The idea is that people can use the app during opioid use so that if they overdose, the phone can potentially connect them to a friend or emergency services to provide naloxone,” Gollakota explained in a UW News release.

But first, the team had to develop a reliable algorithm that would work in real-world settings. Gollakota and his collaborators — Allen School Ph.D. student Rajalakshmi Nandakumar and Dr. Jacob Sunshine, a physician scientist at UW Medicine — looked northward to Insite, the first legal supervised injection site in North America. Located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Insite hosts approximately 500 supervised injections per day. There, Nandakumar and her colleagues were able to gather data on individuals’ breathing patterns before and after opioid injection in a safe setting — gaining valuable insights into how Second Chance might function in actual situations where opioids are being used.

“The participants prepares their drugs like they normally would, but then we monitored them for a minute pre-injection so the algorithm could get a baseline value for their breathing rate,” Nandakumar explained. “After we got a baseline, we continued monitoring during the injection and then for five minutes afterward, because that’s the window when overdose symptoms occur.”

Those symptoms might include cessation of breathing for 10 seconds or more — known as post-injection central apnea — and opioid induced respiratory depression, in which a person’s respiratory rate slows significantly to seven or fewer breaths per minute. In addition to measuring a person’s breathing, the app is capable of detecting changes in a person’s posture, such as a slumping of the head, which could indicate that they are in danger. In cases where someone is alone with no one to witness symptoms such as these, an app like Second Chance could be their only means of getting help. For this reason, the researchers couldn’t leave the effectiveness of their algorithm to chance; they had to be confident that the app would do what it was designed to in the wild. To that end, they looked for a way to test the app on symptoms consistent with an overdose without putting anyone at risk.

Overdose events at facilities like Insite are rare by design. But Sunshine, an anesthesiologist, knew of another type of facility where many of the same symptoms can be safely simulated: the operating room. “When patients undergo anesthesia, they experience much of the same physiology that people experience when they’re having an overdose,” he explained. “Nothing happens when people experience this event in the operating room because they’re receiving oxygen and they are under the care of an anesthesiology team.”

The team worked with Sunshine’s colleagues in UW Medicine to test the algorithm in what amounted to a real-world simulation of an overdose, with the help of healthy patients undergoing elective surgery who offered their informed consent. During their regularly scheduled procedures, the participants were administered standard anesthetic medications that prompted 30 seconds of slowing or stopped breathing while being monitored by Second Chance. In 19 out of 20 cases, the app correctly detected the symptoms that correlate to an overdose; in the one example that it didn’t, the breathing rate was just above the threshold of what would be considered a sign of overdose.

Having validated their approach, the researchers aim to commercialize Second Chance through Sound Life Sciences, Inc., a digital therapeutics company spun out of the University of Washington, and seek approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). While the app is technically capable of measuring symptoms consistent with an overdose of any form of opioid, including prescription opioids taken by mouth, the researchers are quick to point out that so far, they have only tested it in scenarios involving use of illicit injectable opioids — the most common source of death by overdose. As Sunshine points out, it’s a human toll that is completely preventable with timely intervention, which as the name of the app suggests, would offer people the proverbial second chance.

“The goal of this project is to try to connect people who are often experiencing overdoses alone to known therapies that can save their lives,” he said. “We hope that by keeping people safer, they can eventually access long-term treatment.”

Learn more about Second Chance in the Science Translational Medicine paper here, the UW News release here, and a related UW Medicine story here. Check out coverage by Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, Science News, CNBC, Mother Jones, U.S. News & World Report, Axios, Futurism, CNET, Fast Company, Engadget, New Atlas, The Verge, Smithsonian, KOMO News, UPI, Tech Times, TechSpot, the Associated Press, and MD Magazine. Listen to Nandakumar discussing the Second Chance app on NPR’s Science Friday here, and watch a related Reuters video here.

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Three members of the Allen School family were recently named Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in recognition of their professional achievements. Professor Rastislav (Ras) Bodik of the Allen School’s Programming Languages & Software Engineering (PLSE) group, former postdoc Aaron Hertzmann of Adobe Research, and alumnus Alec Wolman (Ph.D., ‘02) of Microsoft Research were among the 56 ACM members worldwide to be recognized in the 2018 class of Fellows for their outstanding technical contributions in computing and information technology and their service to the computing community.

“In society, when we identify our tech leaders, we often think of men and women in industry who have made technologies pervasive while building major corporations,” said ACM President Cherri M. Pancake in a press release. “At the same time, the dedication, collaborative spirit and creativity of the computing professionals who initially conceived and developed these technologies goes unsung. The ACM Fellows program publicly recognizes the people who made key contributions to the technologies we enjoy.”

Ras Bodik

In Ras Bodik’s case, those contributions center on his work in algorithmic program synthesis, a field that he helped start in the mid-2000’s. Program synthesis — sometimes referred to as automatic programming — simplifies the process of writing computer programs by asking the computer to search for a program that accomplishes user’s goals. Over the last 15 years, Bodik and his collaborators demonstrated practical applications of program synthesis by developing efficient algorithms and making them available to programmers by combining language design with new programmer interaction models.

“One of the benefits of program synthesis is that it makes computing more accessible, even as our systems increase in scale and complexity,” said Bodik. “By making it possible to start from an incomplete specification, such as user demonstrations, program synthesis opens up programming to novice users while it eases the process for those of us who write programs for a living.”

Bodik has shown program synthesis to be a versatile technique that can benefit experts and non-experts alike and attack problems with real-world impact. Bodik’s interest in program synthesis started at the University of Wisconsin, where he worked on mining program specifications from software corpuses. When he was a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, he and then-Ph.D. student Armando Solar-Lezama, now a member of the faculty at MIT, laid the groundwork for modern program synthesis through so-called program sketches and by reducing the search problem to SAT constraint solving. To help programmers create new synthesizers, he collaborated on Rosette, a solver-aided programming framework that was developed by Allen School professor Emina Torlak. Rosette demonstrated how program synthesis can make up for the absence of compilers in certain domains and avoid error-prone, low-level code by enabling programmers to produce domain-specific tools for verification, synthesis, and debugging.

An attractive feature of program synthesis is that it can be applied outside the realm of computer science to solve problems in cases where the solution can be modeled as a program — a feature that Bodik has been keen to exploit to generate practical solutions for scientists working in other domains. For example, he and his team have enabled the use of program synthesis by biologists to infer cellular models from mutation experiments, and by data scientists to simplify the layout of data visualizations.

As Bodik and his colleagues have expanded program synthesis into a broadening array of applications, they have taken an interdisciplinary approach to research that has led to advancements in multiple computing domains, including more efficient algorithms to enable synthesis of large SQL queries and the extension of programming by demonstration to the web browser. The Helena project, for example, enabled many teams of social scientists collect web datasets which they use to help city governments design new policies.

Bodik is also credited with spurring the rapid advancement of the synthesis community to where it has achieved parity with human programmers on at least a dozen tasks that typically require months of training. Half of those milestones are based on work produced by Bodik and his collaborators.

“We have reached the point where novice programmers can generate programs that function as well or better than those created by experts,” Bodik observed. “Program synthesis, especially when combined with other technologies for human-computer interaction, can be a great leveler.”

Aaron Hertzmann

Aaron Hertzmann, a former postdoc in the Allen School’s Graphics & Imaging Laboratory (GRAIL) from 2001 to 2002 and an affiliate faculty member since 2005, was recognized for his contributions spanning computer graphics, non-photo realistic rendering, computer animation, and machine learning. After leaving the Allen School, Hertzmann spent 10 years as a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto before joining Adobe Research, where he is a principal scientist focused on computer vision and computer graphics.

Hertzmann is known for his work on new methods for extracting meaning from images and modeling the human visual system, as well as the creation of robust software tools for creating expressive, artistic imagery and animation in the style of human painting and drawing. Early in his career, as a member of New York University’s Media Research Laboratory, Hertzmann contributed new techniques for non-photorealistic rendering that combined the expressivity of those natural media with the flexibility of computer graphics. For example, he developed a method for painterly rendering to create images that appear hand-painted from photographs using multiple brush sizes and long, curved brush strokes. He extended the concept to video with new methods for “painting over” successive frames of animation to produce a novel visual style — work that he later built upon to produce AniPaint, an interactive system for generating painterly animation from video sequences that granted users more direct control over stroke synthesis. Among Hertzmann’s many other contributions to computing for art and design are new algorithms for generating line-art illustrations of smooth surfaces, a new method for computing the visible contours of a smooth 3D surface for stylization, and tools for automatically creating graphic design layouts and generating interactive layout suggestions.

Hertzmann has also worked on a number of projects for building computational models of human motion and for perceiving the 3D structure of people and objects in video that gained traction in the broader graphics and special effects communities. For example, Hertzmann contributed to the development of the style machine, a statistical model that can generate new motion sequences based on learned motion patterns from a series of motion capture sequences — the first system for “animation by example” that has since gained popularity. Other contributions include an inverse kinematics system that produces real-time human poses based on a set of constraints that subsequently was deployed in the gaming industry, and Nonlinear Inverse Optimization, a novel approach for generating realistic character motion based on a dynamical model derived from biomechanics.

More recently, Hertzmann has turned his attention to virtual reality (VR). One of his projects that has gained prominence is Vremiere, a system for enabling direct editing of spherical video in immersive environments. This work formed the basis of Adobe’s Project Clover in-VR video editing interface announced at its MAX Creative Conference in 2016 and earned the team a Best Paper Honorable Mention at last year’s ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI 2017). Hertzmann worked with the same group of collaborators to produce CollaVR, a system that enables collaborative review and feedback in immersive environments for multiple users.

“My post-doctoral experience at UW, and the long-term collaborations that arose from it, were some of the richest of my career,” Hertzmann said about his time with GRAIL. “They broadened my experience into several research areas that were new to me.”

Alec Wolman

Alec Wolman earned his Ph.D. from the Allen School working with professors Hank Levy and Anna Karlin. He is a principal researcher in Microsoft’s Mobility and Networking Research Group, where he manages a small team of researchers and developers. His research interests span mobile systems, distributed systems, operating systems, internet technologies, security, and wireless networks. In naming him a 2018 Fellow, ACM highlighted his many contributions in the area of trusted mobile systems and services.

One of those contributions was fTPM — short for “firmware Trusted Platform Module” — which was implemented in millions of Windows smartphones and tablets and represented the first implementation of the TPM 2.0 specification. fTPM enables Windows on ARM SoC platforms to offer TPM-based security features including BitLocker, DirectAccess, and Virtual Smart Cards. fTPM leverages ARM TrustZone to implement these secure services on mobile devices and offers security guarantees similar to a discrete TPM chip — one of the most popular forms of trusted hardware in the industry. Wolman was also one of the researchers behind Trusted Language Runtime (TLR), a system that made it easy for smartphone app developers to build and run trusted applications while offering compatibility with legacy software and operating systems. In addition, he contributed to software abstractions for trusted sensors used in mobile applications; the cTPM system to extend trusted computing abstractions across multiple mobile devices; and Sentry, which protects sensitive data on mobile devices from low-cost physical memory attacks.

Wolman’s contributions in distributed systems and cloud services has had a significant impact on Microsoft’s products, serving many millions of users. Recently, he helped design and develop Microsoft Embedded Social (ES), a scalable Azure service that enables application developers to incorporate social engagement features within their apps in a fully customizable manner. ES has been incorporated in nearly a dozen applications and has served roughly 20 million users to date. Previously, Wolman co-developed the partitioning and recovery service (PRS) as a component of the Live Mesh file synchronization product. PRS, which enables data distribution across a set of servers with strong consistency as a reusable component, was later incorporated into the cloud service infrastructure for Windows Messenger and Xbox Live.

Wolman’s work on offloading computations — including Mobile Assistance Using Infrastructure (MAUI) and Kahawai — demonstrated how mobile devices can leverage both the cloud and edge computing infrastructure and are considered seminal pieces of research that influenced thousands of follow-on papers. Wolman and his team also collaborated with Allen School researchers on the development of MCDNN, a framework for mobile devices using deep neural networks without overtaxing resources such as battery life, memory, and data usage.

The Fellows Program is the ACM’s most prestigious member level and represents just one percent of the organization’s global membership. The ACM will formally honor the 2018 Fellows at its annual awards banquet to be held in San Francisco, California in June.

Learn more about the 2018 class of ACM Fellows here.

Congratulations to Ras, Aaron, and Alec!

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