Allen School News

Allen School professor emerita Susan Eggers has been honored with the 2018 Eckert-Mauchly Award in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the field of computer architecture. The award, which is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society, is the computer architecture community’s most prestigious honor. Eggers was cited in particular for her work on simultaneous multithreaded processor architectures and multiprocessor memory sharing and coherency.

After earning her bachelor’s degree in economics, Eggers worked in a variety of roles for more than a decade before turning her attention to computer engineering. She began her faculty career at the University of Washington in 1989 after completing her Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley at the age of 47. Although she may have arrived at computing as a career path later than some, Eggers would more than make up for lost time by producing some of the most significant and enduring contributions to the field of computer architecture over the past 30 years.

Most significant among these was Eggers’ role in the development and commercialization of simultaneous multithreading (SMT). While chip manufacturers were achieving rapid gains in memory and logic in the mid-1990s, those physical manifestations of Moore’s Law failed to generate the expected improvements in performance. To Eggers, the most promising approach to translate exponential growth in chip density into enhanced performance was to increase parallelism, or the ability of computers to run calculations concurrently.

Eggers was one of the leading proponents of SMT as a way to boost parallelism, and with it, performance. SMT combines hardware multithreading with superscalar processor technology to enable multiple independent threads to issue instructions to multiple functional units in a single cycle. Eggers and her collaborators demonstrated several substantial advantages that SMT offered over other architectures, including higher throughput, increased speed, and greater flexibility in hardware design. SMT faced considerable skepticism, but over the next eight years, Eggers and her collaborators in academia and industry would refine and validate SMT, which became an essential component in the processors produced by industry leaders such as Intel and IBM. Eggers co-authored roughly a dozen papers about SMT, two of which earned Test of Time Awards in 2010 and 2011, respectively, from the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA).

Eckert-Mauchly Award Committee chair Kunle Olukotun presents the award to Susan Eggers

Eggers also made significant, early-career contributions in cache coherency, a technique for maintaining consistent data across shared memory multiprocessors. These included the first data-driven study of multiprocessor data sharing — which was instrumental in advancing the field’s understanding of hardware and software coherency techniques — as well as novel cache coherency protocols.

Eggers’ interests in performance improvements extend beyond chip design. For example, she was a member of the team that built DyC, an easy-to-use system for dynamic compilation in C that was more expressive, flexible, and controllable than previous annotation-based approaches.

Eggers is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is being formally honored today by her peers in the computer architecture community at ISCA 2018 in Los Angeles, California. Eggers is the first Allen School faculty member — and the first woman — to receive the Eckert-Mauchly Award in its 39-year history.

Read the ACM press release here, and learn more about the Eckert-Mauchly Award here. Read a terrific interview with Eggers in IEEE Micro here.

Video of Eggers’ acceptance speech here.

Congratulations, Susan! And congratulations also to 2013 Allen School Ph.D. alum Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, who received the IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect award on the ISCA stage on the same morning!

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Part of the Allen School contingent at the 2018 “Celebration with the STARS” banquet: Adilene Pulgarin, Tevin Stanley, faculty member Lauren Bricker, Kieran Hess, Joshua Quichocho, Wen Liu, and Simplicio DeLeon.

The Washington STate Academic RedShirt (STARS) program supports engineering and computer science students from low-income backgrounds and underserved high schools in navigating the transition to college-level engineering courses.

Tonight marked the fifth annual “Celebration with the STARS” banquet, and the graduation from UW of the first cohort of STARS students. 30% of the graduates are Allen School students – and 39% of the newest (fifth) cohort are headed for the Allen School!

Congratulations, STARS! Read more →

On Thursday the Paul G. Allen School was honored to host UW’s annual reception thanking our state legislators for their investments in education.

In the case of the Allen School, recent investments include substantial support for the Bill & Melinda Gates Center – a second building that will double our space when it opens in January – and multiple years of funding for enrollment growth that have more than doubled our degree capacity. Learn more here.

In addition to state legislators and members of the Governor’s staff, attendees included UW’s Board of Regents and academic leadership, Allen School faculty and students, and representatives from Fenologica, Microsoft, Moz, Real, Tableau, Zillow, and the Washington Tech Industry Association who attended to demonstrate the importance to the region’s tech industry of investments in the Allen School. Read more →

The Allen School undergraduate advisers have earned the inaugural “team award” presented as part of the University of Washington College of Engineering Awards, an annual tradition acknowledging the extraordinary contributions of faculty, staff, and students to the college community. The team award recognizes a group of employees who together have made a significant impact within the College and demonstrated the values of innovation, collaboration, leadership, diversity, creativity, agility, and risk-taking.

The Allen School’s undergraduate advising team, left to right: Pim Lustig, Crystal Eney, Lacey Schmidt, Raven Avery, Chloe Dolese, Maggie Ryan, Jenifer Hiigli. Credit: Ramona Hickey

The undergraduate advisers tick all of those boxes and more. These dedicated individuals provide personalized guidance and support to more than 1,100 undergraduate majors — and to countless students, parents, and K-12 teachers outside of the school through various outreach initiatives. This small but mighty team, which is the heart and soul of the school’s efforts to provide an exceptional student experience, includes:

• Crystal Eney, Director of Student Services
• Raven Avery, Assistant Director for Diversity & Outreach
• Jenifer Hiigli, Academic Adviser–Senior
• Maggie Ryan, Academic Adviser
• Chloe Dolese, Academic Adviser
• Lacey Schmidt, Academic Adviser
• Pim Lustig, Course Coordinator

As the school has grown in size and stature, the advising team has successfully adapted and scaled its activities. During the past year, the advisers managed nearly 3,600 student meetings — a 30% increase over the previous year — and instituted a number of internal process improvements to meet student needs with efficiency and empathy. As part of their ongoing efforts to improve the student experience, the advisers worked with faculty, staff, and students to form the Allen School’s diversity committee and also developed and led seminars for new transfer students and women in computing.

In addition to providing academic guidance and championing the interests of current and prospective students, this group assists the Allen School faculty with curriculum and course management; oversees a variety of K-12, community and technical college, and cross-campus outreach activities; and mentors student leaders of programs such as the UW chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Allen School Student Advisory Council. Members of the advising team also oversee the peer advisers, who offer student-to-student advice on a variety of academic and non-academic issues, and administer the teaching assistant (TA) program — including roughly 150 undergraduates assist faculty in delivering an unparalleled educational experience to students enrolled in Allen School courses.

“The Allen School advisers have grit, empathy, and great passion for their work,” said Rajneil Rana, who serves as an Allen School peer adviser. “They guide countless students along the path to success, and they exceed expectations without expecting recognition — which is precisely why they deserve to be recognized!”

The College community will formally recognize the team’s contributions at a reception for faculty, staff, and students this afternoon. At the same event, the College also will honor Dean’s Medalist Kaitlyn Zhou, a senior in computer science and human centered design and engineering. As the founding chair of the Allen School’s Student Advisory Council, Zhou has witnessed firsthand the advising team’s dedication and willingness to work with students to enhance the student experience and build a stronger community.

“I had met Crystal a few times in advising but did not know her personally. At an event, I casually brought up this idea of starting some sort of advisory council for students within CSE and she was immediately interested,” recalled Zhou. “I think we stood in the back of this event for 30 minutes, talking about what an advisory council could look like and what it could mean for the school. I sent her a written proposal that night, and within a week, I had met with Jenifer, Maggie, and Chloe about next steps.

“Crystal’s receptiveness to new ideas and student opinion was critical in the creation of our student group,” she continued. “She and Maggie have been our champions since the start and we wouldn’t be here without them.”

Zhou’s praise for the advisers is echoed by the faculty and school leadership who work with them. “They are an amazing group of professionals — caring people who are totally committed to improving the lives of our students,” said Allen School Director Hank Levy. “Their work is crucial to the student experience and the success of our program.”

Congratulations and way to go, team!

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Every year, we in the Paul G. Allen School invite our new majors to identify their most inspirational high school or community college teacher – the teacher (each of us had one!) who changed their perception of what they should aspire to. We host these teachers, their partners, and the students who nominated them for dinner in the Allen Center (plus a bit of propaganda designed to encourage the teachers to send us more great students!).

Congratulations and thanks to the Paul G. Allen School’s 2017-18 Inspirational Teachers – nominated by our students for the difference you’ve made in their lives. The wordcloud from the nomination statements submitted by our students says it all: inspirational, approachable, passionate, supportive, encouraging, helpful, empowering …

And special congratulations to Sam Procopio, the inaugural recipient of the Paul G. Allen School’s Award for Broadening Participation in Computing. Sam – regularly recognized as an Inspirational Teacher – sent 34 young women to our program during his 9 years of teaching computer science (and coaching soccer) at Holy Names Academy. This year he began a new phase of his career as Principal at Bishop Blanchet High School, from which he graduated in the previous century.

From early learning through graduate school, all educators are in the same business. Parents entrust us with their most precious asset – their children. We do our best to help these young people achieve their potential. When they excel – which is almost always, given the amazing raw material with which we are entrusted – we take pleasure in the fact that we’ve played at least some small role in that success.

Sam Procopio flanked by Holy Names alums Erin Ripple, Claire Beard, Laura DeBoldt, and Mallory Johnson

OK, so it wasn’t exactly balmy spring weather, and there was the usual 45-minute line for burgers, but a good time was had by all at the 2018 Allen School ACM Spring BBQ! Read more →

On Wednesday, ten of Shwetak Patel’s students – undergraduate and graduate, from the Paul G. Allen School and the Department of Electrical Engineering – demonstrated smartphone apps for health screening/diagnosis as part of the Microsoft CEO Summit partner’s program.

Slides from presentations by Ed Lazowska and Shwetak Patel – on the general theme of “Tech to Serve” – here. Read more →

A team of University of Washington researchers has achieved liftoff of the world’s lightest wireless flying robotic insect, RoboFly. Developed by members of the Allen School’s Networks & Mobile Systems Lab and the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s Autonomous Insect Robotics Lab, RoboFly represents a milestone in autonomous flight that could launch a new wave of innovation in aerial robotics.

Insect-scale robots tend to rely on wire tethers for power and control, as existing systems for supplying the energy required for flight exceed their tiny load capacity. The wired approach may keep the load light, but it limits the robots’ range and mobility. In order to cut the cord, UW researchers would have to devise a system that could power their robot insect without weighing it down.

In order to find a solution, the interdisciplinary team led by Allen School professor Shyam Gollakota and Mechanical Engineering professor Sawyer Fuller took its inspiration from nature. RoboFly’s biologically inspired design features dual flapping wings driven by a pair of piezoelectric actuators. A lightweight microcontroller directs the wings’ action by issuing a series of pulses mimicking that of a biological fly’s wings.

“The microcontroller acts like a real fly’s brain telling wing muscles when to fire,” explained Vikram Iyer, a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering who works with Gollakota.

To power their novel system in the absence of cords or clunky batteries, Iyer and his colleagues direct a laser beam at a tiny photovoltaic cell mounted onto RoboFly. The cell converts the beam’s light into electricity that can be used by the onboard components. Those components include the first sub-100 milligram boost converter and piezo driver, which the researchers integrated into their flight control system to amplify the voltage generated by the cell from seven to more than 200 volts — the amount of energy required to power the flapping of RoboFly’s wings during takeoff.

“It was the most efficient way to quickly transmit a lot of power to RoboFly without adding much weight,” said Gollakota, who believes future designs could potentially rely on power harvested from ambient radiofrequency signals or even miniature batteries to augment lasers.

The UW team that gave RoboFly its wings. Front row: Vikram Iyer (left) and Johannes James; back row (from left): Yogesh Chukewad, Sawyer Fuller, and Shyam Gollakota.

When fully assembled, RoboFly is slightly larger than an actual fly and weighs in at just 190 mg — making it the lightest aerial robot to have achieved wireless flight. Currently, RoboFly can take off and land but cannot venture further afield without losing the required line of sight with its laser power source. However, with additional research and refinement, the team envisions a day when RoboFly and its ilk will put their small and nimble form factor to work for a variety of applications — from detecting environmental hazards, to aiding search and rescue, to surveying agricultural crops.

“Before now, the concept of wireless insect-sized flying robots was science fiction,” said Fuller, who contributed to the design of the wired RoboBee. “Our new wireless RoboFly shows they’re much closer to real life.”

The team — which also includes ME Ph.D. student and lead author Johannes James, and ME Ph.D. student Yogesh Chukewad — will present its findings at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2018) in Brisbane, Australia next week.

Read the UW News release here, and the research paper here. Check out coverage in WIRED, The Economist, IEEE Spectrum, MIT Tech Review, TechCrunch, Discover Magazine, GeekWire, Popular Mechanics, Engadget, CNET, Digital Trends, Siliconrepublic, SlashGear, and Seattle Met.

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Allen School alumna Cynthia Matuszek has been named one of “AI’s 10 to Watch,” a list of rising stars in artificial intelligence published by IEEE Intelligent Systems. Matuszek, who earned her Ph.D. in 2014 working with Allen School professors Dieter Fox of the Robotics and State Estimation Lab and Luke Zettlemoyer of the Natural Language Processing group, is a professor in the Interactive Robotics and Language Lab at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

“AI’s 10 to Watch” celebrates early-career researchers who have demonstrated outstanding achievements in the field within five years of earning their Ph.D. The publishers singled out Matuszek for her work at the intersection of robotics, natural language processing, and machine learning to address a long-standing problem for AI researchers: how to get robots to understand human needs and human communication.

The goal of Matuszek’s research is to enable robots to interact naturally and intuitively with humans in a variety of settings, from hospitals to people’s homes. To that end, she and her team focus on grounded language acquisition — an approach that is designed to help robots gain an understanding of language related to objects and tasks while simultaneously learning about the world around them through their interactions with users. By uniting the different fields of AI research, Matuszek aims to enable robots to learn, adapt, and follow instructions in such a way that they can integrate seamlessly into dynamic, unpredictable environments.

“Intuitively, learning language is easier in the physical context of the world it describes,” the article notes. “And robots are more useful and helpful if people can talk naturally to them and teach them about the world.”

“Cynthia’s research is at the forefront of making robots understand verbal human commands,” said Fox. “What has always impressed me is her ability to work on both conceptual AI problems and real robotic tasks.”

IEEE Intelligent Systems accepts nominations for “AI’s 10 to Watch” from around the globe. Members of the publication’s editorial and advisory boards evaluate nominees based on reputation, impact, expert endorsement, and diversity. The list is published on a biennial basis; previous honorees include Allen School professor Yejin Choi, who was recognized in 2016 for her work in natural language processing.

Read more about Matuszek and her fellow honorees in the 2018 “AI’s 10 to Watch” here.

Congratulations, Cynthia!

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Kaitlyn Zhou, a senior who will graduate from the University of Washington this spring with bachelor’s degrees in computer science and human centered design and engineering, has been awarded the College of Engineering’s Dean’s Medal for Academic Excellence. Each year, the college selects two students to receive this award recognition of their academic achievement, leadership, and engagement in research and extra-curricular activities. During her time at UW, Zhou has ticked all of these boxes and then some.

“Kaitlyn is an outstanding student, researcher, and leader,” said Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the Allen School. “She has contagious energy. She cares deeply about her community, and about all aspects of diversity. She is enormously effective. And she is a joy to be around.”

As an undergraduate, Zhou has pursued a demanding program of study that spans data science, data visualization, machine learning, algorithms, and software design while earning a place on the Dean’s List for 10 academic quarters. She supplemented this ambitious course load by studying abroad at the Aquincum Institute of Technology in Budapest, Hungary — where she maintained a perfect 4.0 grade point average — and completing a software engineering internship at Bloomberg.

While her commitment to academic rigor is impressive, Zhou has earned the appreciation of her professors and peers in particular for her active and insightful contributions to in-class discussions, online forums, and group projects. As a student in the Allen School’s first-ever undergraduate data visualization course, CSE 442, last spring, Zhou teamed up with classmates to produce “On the Other Side of the Canal,” an interactive article that guides readers through Seattle’s historical struggle with race and inequity through the lens of housing discrimination and school segregation. The result was, in professor Jeffrey Heer’s words, “a tour-de-force, exhibiting technical proficiency, effective design, scholarly depth, and social consciousness.” Zhou would go on to serve as a teaching assistant for CSE 442 the following fall, and for the Allen School’s Foundations of Computing II course this past winter.

Zhou carried over her commitment to excellence into the research lab, where she worked with Allen School professor Linda Shapiro on expression recognition for character animation using deep learning and with Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering professor Kate Starbird on research into the spread of online rumors during crisis events. For the latter, Zhou co-authored two papers that appeared at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI): Could This Be True? I Think So! Expressed Uncertainty in Online Rumoring (CHI 2016), and Centralized, Parallel, and Distributed Information Processing during Collective Sensemaking (CHI 2017).

Outside of her studies, Zhou has demonstrated her leadership abilities through a variety of extracurricular activities in service to her fellow students. She is the founding chair of the Allen School’s Student Advisory Council (SAC), which was established to better understand students’ needs and concerns, facilitate discussion, and produce educational — and impactful — programming geared toward undergraduates, including forums on issues such as accessibility and diversity in engineering. From June 2016 to June 2017, Zhou served as the Director of University Affairs for the Associated Students of the University of Washington (ASUW), representing the student body in discussions with faculty and administrative leaders on decisions related to academics, admissions, and tuition. In this role, she oversaw an organization with 60 employees, hundreds of volunteers, and an operating budget in excess of $1 million. She also was co-curator of the TEDxUofW conference that same year — an event that attracted eight speakers, $10,000 in sponsorships, and more than 700 attendees.

According to Allen School Director Hank Levy, Zhou is sure to make significant contributions, regardless of what career path she chooses.

“Kaitlyn is an exceptional scholar and an enthusiastic mentor to other students,” observed Levy, who also holds the Wissner-Slivka Chair in Computer Science & Engineering. “We expect to see remarkable achievements from her in the future.”

Heer, who got to know Zhou as both a student and a teaching assistant in his data visualization course, described her as “an example of the best that UW has to offer.” Fortunately for all of us here at UW, she plans to stick around campus a little while longer as a student in the Allen School’s fifth-year master’s program.

Learn more about the Dean’s Medal here, and check out HCDE’s article recognizing Zhou here.

Congratulations, Kaitlyn, and thank you for your many contributions to the Allen School, the College of Engineering, and the entire UW community!

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