Allen School News

Many thanks to the alums who joined us this evening to view a collection of undergraduate research projects. And congratulations to the students behind the project judged first among many outstanding projects: Camille Birch, Nicole Riley, Melissa Medsker, and Molly Bucklin for their project “An Interactive Viewer for Analyzing Folded Protein Structures,” advised by professor Larry Ruzzo. Read more →

2013 Allen School Ph.D. alum Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, an Associate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at UCSD (where he recently moved from Georgia Tech), today received the Young Computer Architect award from the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture.

The award, which is open to any individual who has completed his/her Ph.D. degree within the last 6 years, recognizes outstanding early-career research contributions in the field of Computer Architecture.

Hadi began his graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, advised Doug Burger. When Doug moved to Microsoft Research, Hadi transferred to the University of Washington, where he was co-advised by Doug and Luis Ceze. In the year of his graduation, he received the William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award for the top dissertation in the Allen School.

Hadi’s research has been recognized by four Communications of the ACM Research Highlights, four IEEE Micro Top Picks, and a Distinguished Paper Award in HPCA 2016. He has received the Air Force Young Investigator Award (2017), the Georgia Tech College of Computing Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award (2017), two Qualcomm Research Awards (2017 and 2016), two Google Research Faculty Award (2016 and 2014), two Microsoft Research Awards (2017 and 2016), and the Lockheed Inspirational Young Faculty Award (2016).

It was a great day for the Allen School at ISCA: in addition to Hadi’s recognition, Susan Eggers received the IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, the computer architecture community’s most prestigious honor. Read more →

The Allen School announced today that it will expand Direct to Major admission to its Computer Science bachelors program for incoming University of Washington freshmen beginning with the fall 2019 incoming class. Once the change takes effect, Direct to Major admission will be the primary pathway into the Computer Science major.

The Allen School historically has accepted only a small percentage of Computer Science majors straight from high school through its direct admission process; the majority of students enroll at UW as “pre-majors” and then apply to the Computer Science major after satisfying prerequisites. Despite recent growth in the number of students the Allen School is able to serve thanks to increased state investment, student interest in computer science continues to exceed capacity — requiring the Allen School to turn away a number of qualified students.

“The Allen School’s expansion of Direct to Major as part of the UW freshman admissions process will provide more assurance to students and their families as they plan for the future,” explained professor Dan Grossman, Deputy Director of the Allen School, in a UW News release. “It also will allow the Allen School to fully engage undergraduates in an immersive computer science experience from their first day on campus.”

While Direct to Major will become the main entry point into Computer Science for the majority of students, the Allen School will continue to offer a pathway for enrolled students who discover the field after their arrival at UW. It will also continue to offer a robust selection of courses designed for non-majors who wish to explore computer science as part of a well-rounded program of study. Direct to Major will have no impact on the admission process for students seeking to transfer into the Allen School’s Computer Science program from community and technical colleges. Nor will it apply to the Allen School’s Computer Engineering major, which will continue to fall under the College of Engineering’s Direct to College admission process announced last year.

The expanded Direct to Major pathway will be open to prospective UW freshmen beginning with the cohort applying this summer and fall, for enrollment in fall 2019. Students who indicate Computer Science as their intended major on their application will automatically be considered.

“The uncertainty faced by entering freshmen led to high levels of stress and frustration for students and parents alike,” said Crystal Eney, Director of Student Services at the Allen School. “This new system will provide them with more clarity at the start of their educational journey and enable us to provide a better experience to students who decide to pursue computer science at the UW.”

Students, parents, and interested members of the public can learn more about the change by visiting the Allen School’s online guide to Direct to Major admission here and the UW News release here. Read more →

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 →