Allen School News

UW CSE graduate student Kira Goldner has been named a 2017 Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellow. She is one of only 10 young researchers in North America to be recognized as the “best and brightest” in computer science and related fields in this year’s fellowship competition.

Goldner is a third-year Ph.D. student who works with professor Anna Karlin in UW CSE’s Theory group on algorithmic mechanism design and approximation algorithms. Most of Goldner’s work so far has been focused on the design and analysis of revenue maximizing mechanisms; more recently, she has turned her attention to the design of mechanisms for “social good” in domains such as health care and income inequality.

Goldner has been on a roll when it comes to earning accolades for her research. Last month, she was an invited speaker at the Young Researcher Workshop on Economics and Computation (YoungEC ’17) in Tel Aviv, Israel, where she delivered a talk on the FedEx Problem, and was recognized with the 2017 Evening with Industry Outstanding Female Award from the UW Society of Women Engineers. She also was named a finalist for the 2017 Facebook Ph.D. Fellowship, a competition that attracted more than 800 applications from Ph.D. students around the globe. Last summer, Goldner won a Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship and, prior to that, earned honorable mentions in the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship competition in 2015 and 2016. She also was selected as an alternate in the U.S. Department of Defense’s National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellowship competition.

As a Microsoft Research fellowship winner, Goldner will receive financial support and enjoy an opportunity to work alongside leading computer scientists at MSR as part of a 12-week paid research internship. Past winners at UW CSE of this prestigious award include Lillian de Greef and Irene Zhang (2015), Yoav Artzi and Mayank Goel (2014), and Gabe Cohn and Franzi Roesner (2012).

Learn more about the 2017 Ph.D. fellows here.

Congratulations, Kira! And thanks to Microsoft Research for supporting future leaders in computer science! Read more →

Jeeva Wireless, a UW spinoff created by faculty and students in CSE and Electrical Engineering, has raised $1.2 million to commercialize a line of research based on backscatter — a groundbreaking approach that harvests ambient wireless signals to enable devices to communicate without draining battery power. Relevant projects include Passive Wi-Fi, a system that is capable of generating Wi-Fi transmissions using 10,000 times less power than conventional methods, and Interscatter, which enables implanted medical devices to communicate using Wi-Fi. This work — which represents a major leap forward in realizing the potential of the Internet of Things — was named one of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2016 by MIT Technology Review and earned Best Paper Awards at NSDI 2016 and SIGCOMM 2016.

Jeeva Wireless was co-founded by CSE postdoc and EE Ph.D. alum Vamsi Talla (who recently won the WAGS/UMI Outstanding Innovation in Technology Award based on his contributions to this work); EE Ph.D. students Bryce Kellogg and Aaron Parks; CSE professor Shyam Gollakota of the Networks & Mobile Systems Lab, and CSE and EE professor Joshua Smith of the Sensor Systems Lab.

Read more about the team’s latest milestone in a GeekWire article here.

  Read more →

This week, UW CSE catches up with computer science major Mitali Palekar for the latest installment of our Undergrad Spotlight. Palekar is a sophomore from Cupertino, California who spent a portion of her childhood in Mumbai, India and is trained in Bharatanatyam, an Indian classical dance form.

Palekar serves as an undergraduate research assistant in the Security & Privacy Research Lab. Last summer, she completed an internship at NASA working on a project for the HoloLens. She has wholeheartedly embraced and amplified CSE’s commitment to diversity in her role as vice president of community outreach for the UW Society of Women Engineers and her work with UW Girls Who Code.

We asked Palekar to share her journey to CSE, her passion for the technical as well as social aspects of computing, and why she aims to be a role model for other young women who would follow in her footsteps.

CSE: Why did you choose to study computer science?

MP: Having taken a few programming courses in high school, I came to UW with a fair idea that I wanted to pursue computer science. The theoretical aspects tied to algorithmic and logical thinking as well as programming really excited me and I knew that CSE would provide the perfect blend of both. Though my interests remain the same, broadly speaking, my time at UW has definitely expanded my definition of computer science and its potential applications. CSE has exposed me to a variety of concepts, including combinatorial game theory, programming bots, and computer vision-based game solver techniques — the breadth and power of these applications is what makes CSE so appealing.

CSE: What is your favorite thing about being a UW CSE student?

MP: That’s a hard question, but I think as everyone within CSE will agree, the opportunities that are presented to us as UW CSE students are truly “boundless” and that’s absolutely been my favorite part of CSE over the past quarter. UW CSE exposes us to a diverse set of opportunities: interdisciplinary and sub-field specific classes, research, community building and outreach. What really makes my time so memorable and enjoyable is the collective learning, discovery and discourse with a diverse and committed group of peers. I’ve only been a part of this amazing community for a quarter and a half and I’m sure that I’ve only scratched the surface. CSE is a very close-knit community within the larger UW community, and I cannot wait to further engage in this community over the next few years!

CSE: How did your earlier educational experiences inspire you to pursue computer science?

MP: Eight years ago, I moved to Mumbai. In India, I was exposed to a diverse demographic with a unique set of issues. I was also immersed in a very stringent educational set-up which laid emphasis on grades and rote learning. This challenging environment instilled self-discipline and motivation to take advantage of the opportunities later presented to me at the UW. It also gave me a greater cultural awareness and connection with my ethnic origins, as well as a greater sense of self-awareness in terms of my own interests. I want to channel these personal experiences into a positive learning experience for my community and also use them as a vehicle for promoting gender equality in STEM fields.

CSE: Who or what in UW CSE has inspired you the most?

MP: As a collective, my CSE professors, research mentors and advisers. I love how passionate the faculty are, be it about education, large-scale issues such as gender equality in STEM, or technical projects. More importantly, they are passionate about sharing this with their students. My CSE professors have always been open to discussing how course content fits into a large domain of industry and academia, my lab mentors have guided me in the process of determining where my interests lie within CSE, and my adviser has helped me piece together different experiences into creating a coherent goal for myself. I’m so happy to have discovered this group of people, because they definitely push and inspire me every day!

CSE: One of these experiences is an undergraduate research position in CSE’s Security & Privacy Research Lab. What led you to seek out that opportunity?

MP: Over the past year and a half, I have sought to intentionally step outside of my comfort zone and actively pursue new avenues that would lead to both academic and personal growth. I was looking for an opportunity to apply the skills that I had developed in backend development, data structures and algorithms to a real-world scenario. Working in the Security & Privacy Research Lab seemed the perfect avenue to apply my academic knowledge to a project that has the ability to be affect thousands of users — and I’m so happy that I did.

CSE: What are you working on?

MP: I am working to develop and maintain Confidante, an encrypted email client that makes sending PGP encrypted emails easy by using Keybase for automatic key management. The main goal of Confidante is to make email encryption a more user-friendly, quick and accessible service, which will benefit users for whom information security is of prime importance. I’ve contributed to the development of several features, such as making private key signing optional, changing the front-end to allow for interaction with past email threads while composing new messages, and adding the drafts feature for the email client. The opportunity to independently implement features has enabled me to hone my technical skills and develop a greater understanding of security research. As a college sophomore, I find it gratifying that I am able to contribute to CSE research that has the potential to benefit thousands of users.

CSE: What has been your favorite aspect of your lab experience?

MP: Definitely my interactions with professor Franzi Roesner and my lab mentors, Ada Lerner and Eric Zeng. They have made my research experience an enjoyable and fulfilling one. They have been approachable and supportive, and they have also pushed me to identify how my activities contribute towards my larger goals and interests. It’s not easy entering a completely unknown field where everyone around you seems to be an expert and you need to learn a new language and new concepts. I hope I can use this positive mentorship experience to inspire and encourage other young women to pursue computer science and other STEM fields.

CSE: How does the effort to increase diversity in CSE align with your own academic and career goals?

MP: In the short-term, I want to focus my energies on broadening my technical knowledge through research, personal projects and internships. I have a strong desire to address large-scale issues such as gender inequality in STEM from a technical perspective and inspire other women through my work on technical projects. Having personally experienced a lack of mentorship in high school, I also want to fill that gap by creating a supportive and collaborative environment for young women entering CSE and other STEM fields so that they are able to pursue their dreams independently and fearlessly. I believe that diversity is invaluable in promoting a more balanced and inclusive thought process and perspective. In the long term, I hope that my technical knowledge will allow me to create impactful and meaningful products that, directly or indirectly, promote gender equality in STEM fields, foster a more comfortable and inclusive environment for minorities, and advance the positive impact of technology on society.

We are inspired by Mitali’s contributions in the short time she has been at CSE and her dedication to serving as a role model for other young women in the STEM fields! Read more →

And as usual, our established company fair has been packed all afternoon with eager recruiters and students! We saw a similar scene yesterday for our startup recruiting fair.

It was great to catch up with the UW CSE alumni who were back on campus, talking with current students about internship and employment opportunities with their companies (and handing out some pretty awesome schwag).

Many thanks to the nearly 80 companies from our Industry Affiliates who participated over the past two days. See you again in the fall! Read more →

UW CSE postdoc and Electrical Engineering Ph.D. alum Vamsi Talla has been recognized with the 2016 WAGS/UMI Outstanding Innovation in Technology Award. The award, which is sponsored by the Western Association of Graduate Schools (WAGS) and University Microfilms International (UMI), recognizes a graduate thesis or dissertation that presents an innovative technology which offers a creative solution to a significant problem. Talla earned the award for his 2016 doctoral dissertation, “Power, Communication and Sensing Solutions for Energy Constrained Platforms,” in which he describes a variety of new energy harvesting, communication, and sensing techniques that will enable a true Internet of Things.

Talla completed his dissertation under the guidance of his Ph.D. adviser, CSE and EE professor Josh Smith of the Sensor Systems Lab, and CSE professor Shyam Gollakota of the Networks & Mobile Systems Lab. He continues to work with Smith and Gollakota on projects such as interscatter, which enables medical implants and other devices to communicate using Wi-Fi and earned Best Paper at SIGCOMM 2016, and Passive Wi-Fi, a system capable of generating Wi-Fi transmissions using 10,000 times less power than conventional methods. Passive Wi-Fi was named one of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2016 by MIT Technology Review and also captured Best Paper at NSDI 2016. Talla and his colleagues co-founded a startup company, Jeeva Wireless, to commercialize their research.

Talla will be honored at an awards lunch on March 21^st in Seattle.

Congratulations, Vamsi! Read more →

The latest edition of the Association for Computing Machinery’s “People of ACM” features a great conversation with UW CSE alum Brandon Lucia (Ph.D., ’13), now a member of the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. “People of ACM” is a regular feature that highlights members whose personal and professional stories serve as an inspiration to the broader computing community and whose work is helping to advance computing as a science and as a profession.

As a Ph.D. student, Lucia worked with UW CSE professor Luis Ceze on research that spanned computer architecture, systems, and programming languages. For his dissertation, he developed new concurrency debugging techniques for concurrent and parallel software. The ACM profile focused on Lucia’s work on intermittent energy-harvesting computer systems and a related programming language, Chain, that his group will field-test on a tiny satellite circling in low Earth orbit sometime this year — and Lucia can hardly wait.

“Beyond the fact that sending things to space is cool, we are excited to see the scientific results of our deployment,” Lucia told the ACM. “Our satellite will send back invaluable reliability and energy profiles that uniquely characterize our Chain application in its actual orbital environment.”

When asked to predict what other areas would see major advances, Lucia predicted we would see new, dense, non-volatile memory technologies integrated with heterogeneous computing components using 3-D stacked fabrication, which he characterized as a disruption that could yield order of magnitude improvement in power and performance. Longer term, Lucia anticipates major advances in alternative computing technology.

“Biological computing and data storage are coming into their own, but with only the most basic programming interfaces and execution models with which to reason about a system’s behavior,” Lucia noted. “The behavior of a biological embedding — in DNA or protein networks — of today’s most sophisticated deep neural learning models yields a level of complexity that is beyond our current ability to reason.”

“One compelling future research problem is to define the programming and behavioral abstractions, system architectures, and behavioral specification techniques that enable future biological programmers to direct such stochastic, biological systems to carry out such complex computations,” he said.

Read the full article here.

Nice work, Brandon! Read more →

This afternoon, UW will celebrate the Frontiers of Science & Engineering at a symposium presented by UW CSE, ACM-W and the Society of Women Engineers. The symposium will feature members of the UW faculty who have made significant contributions through research and mentorship of other women in the fields of computing, biology, aeronautics and astronautics, electrical engineering, physics, and more.

Professor Magda Balazinska, a member of UW CSE’s Database group and one of the event’s organizers, will kick off a series of talks that includes professor Anna Karlin of UW CSE’s Theory group, who will introduce the audience to algorithmic game theory, and CSE and Genome Sciences professor Su-In Lee, who will talk about her work on machine learning algorithms for precision treatment of cancer. The event was organized by Balazinska, CSE professor Ed Lazowska, CSE and Electrical Engineering professor Josh Smith, and Human Centered Design & Engineering professor and CSE adjunct Julie Kientz.

All are welcome to attend the symposium, which will begin with a reception at 2:30 pm followed by the program at 3:00 pm, in Room 260 of Savery Hall on UW’s Seattle campus.

View the complete list of speakers here. Read CSE’s inclusiveness statement and learn about our efforts to promote diversity in computing here.

Please join us! Read more →

Professor Dieter Fox of UW CSE’s Robotics and State Estimation Lab has been recognized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence with the 2017 AAAI Classic Paper Award. Fox shares the award for the 1999 paper “Monte Carlo Localization: Efficient Position Estimation for Mobile Robots” with co-authors Wolfram Burgard, Frank Dellaert and Sebastian Thrun.

The AAAI Classic Paper Award honors authors of the conference paper deemed to have been the most influential within the field of artificial intelligence from a chosen year. This is the second year in a row that Fox has earned the award, having been recognized in 2016 for “The Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot” originally presented at AAAI-98.

The latest winning paper, co-authored by Fox when he was a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University, introduced a new, sample-based algorithm for mobile robot localization called Monte Carlo Localization (MCL). MCL uses randomized samples to represent a robot’s belief about its location in an environment and is notable for its accuracy, efficiency, and ease of use compared to previous approaches. MCL was the first application of sample-based estimation in robotics, where it is now used across a wide range of applications.

In their paper, Fox and his colleagues thoroughly tested MCL with multiple robots equipped with different kinds of sensors, including Minerva, a robot operating as a tour guide in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. These experiments revealed MCL to have several advantages over what were then considered the best localization techniques. For example, MCL’s adaptive sampling yielded far more efficient and accurate results than grid-based Markov localization — at the time presumed to be the state of the art localization technique — and in some cases succeeded in reliably localizing a robot where grid-based localization failed. It was also easier to implement than past techniques: instead of having to reason about entire probability distributions, MCL randomly guesses possible positions in a way that favors likely positions over unlikely ones, and adjusts the number of samples in proportion to the amount of surprise in the sensor data.

Fox and his co-authors will be formally recognized at the AAAI-17 conference in San Francisco, California next month.

Congratulations, Dieter! Read more →

Thanks to our friends from Amazon, GE Digital, Indeed, Karat, Microsoft, PayScale, RealSelf, and Whitepages who provided technical interview coaching to nearly 100 CSE students on Wednesday afternoon! Read more →

Sidd Srinivasa

UW CSE is preparing to welcome two game-changing senior hires, robotic manipulation expert Siddhartha “Sidd” Srinivasa and influential computer engineering researcher Michael Taylor, this fall. Srinivasa, who is widely regarded as one of the leading minds in robotic manipulation and human-robot interaction, will advance UW CSE as one of a few truly world-class centers of robotics research. Taylor, who has accepted a joint appointment in CSE and Electrical Engineering, brings expertise in leading-edge hardware design — further building UW’s reputation as one the most dynamic and desirable places in which to pursue computer engineering research.

Sidd Srinivasa will join UW as the Boeing Endowed Professor in Computer Science & Engineering from his alma mater, The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is currently the Finmeccanica Associate Professor in Computer Science, founder and director of the Personal Robotics Lab, and co-director of the Manipulation Lab.

Srinivasa’s research focuses on advancing the ability of robots to perform complex tasks with and around people and under conditions of uncertainty and clutter. He aims to move robots beyond simple pick-and-place to more robust models of interaction and collaboration, concentrating on two overlapping lines of research: physics-based manipulation, focusing on the design of actions, algorithms and hands for dexterous manipulation; and the mathematics of human-computer interaction, formalizing interaction principles using a combination of machine learning, motion planning, and function gradient algorithms.

A common thread running throughout Srinivasa’s work is his approach to building mathematical models of physical behavior: he seeks to understand and then formalize the “how” and the “why” of our interactions with the physical world. He then uses those models to transfer behavior from human to robot, and from robot to robot. Over the course of his career, Srinivasa has made a number of fundamental contributions to the field of robotics, including advances in motion planning, state estimation, information gathering, shared autonomy, and more.

In addition to his primary research, Srinivasa also has a keen interest in building end-to-end systems — including the Home Exploring Robot Butler (HERB), the Assistive Dexterous Arm (ADA), the humanoid HRP3, CHIMP, Andy, and others — that integrate perception, planning, and control in the real world. By understanding the interplay between system components, he has contributed state-of-the-art algorithms for manipulation, including the MOPED system for object recognition and pose estimation, and CHISEL, a system for real-time, house-scale, dense 3D modeling that has been incorporated into Google’s Project Tango. A strong believer in robots’ potential to help people, Srinivasa also established the Center for Assistive Robots for Everyday living (CARE), an interdisciplinary center in CMU’s School of Computer Science focused on building a software framework for assistive robotic devices.

With Srinivasa’s arrival, UW CSE adds creativity and expertise in one of the most exciting areas of the field of robotics today — and cements our place among the top robotics research groups in the country. But Srinivasa is keen to aim even higher.

“My goal,” Srinivasa said, “is to make UW the best in the world in robotics.”

Michael Taylor

UW will make a similar leap forward in computer engineering with the arrival of Michael Taylor, who is currently Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego and Director of the UCSD Center for Dark Silicon. Taylor brings deep expertise in the design of specialized custom chips — for example, for crypto-currency mining — and the development of novel approaches to hardware design and prototyping. His work has been particularly influential within the computer architecture community and has also generated a significant amount of press coverage and publications.

Performance and efficiency are consistent themes in Taylor’s research. He is a leading expert on extreme hardware specialization to deal with dark silicon — the portion of a chip that is switched off at any given time due to power constraints. One of his ongoing projects is GreenDroid, an energy-efficient chip for Android phones that is 10 times more efficient than industrial mobile application processors in use today. Taylor is known for actively pushing new ideas, methods, and open source designs that reduce the effort required to build silicon and hardware prototypes. For example, he created the open-source framework Basejump to support more efficient ASIC prototyping, from base designs, to packaging, to boards.

Taylor produced the first academic paper on bitcoin mining chips, which attracted nationwide attention and established Taylor as an authority on mining hardware innovation. His team recently published the first paper on ASIC Clouds, which are purpose-built datacenters comprised of large arrays of ASIC accelerators. Their purpose is to optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) of large, high-volume chronic computations that are emerging in datacenters today. Taylor also has turned his attention to developing architectures and benchmarks for machine learning applications, with a focus on computer vision. He contributed to the creation of the first comprehensive computer vision benchmark suite, SD-VBS, used by over 1,000 institutions and companies. He later developed CortexSuite, an extension of SD-VBS to include machine learning and artificial intelligence — the largest, most comprehensive such benchmark suite to have been created.

Early in his career, Taylor developed a working implementation of one of the first multicore chips: the Raw tiled multicore processor architecture. The project, which was the basis of Taylor’s Ph.D. thesis at MIT, was an experiment in exposing unusually low levels of the hardware — such as pins, wires, and gates — to software, enabling the latter to take advantage of the physical properties of the chip.

As a true applications-to-circuits researcher capable of prototyping both hardware and software, Taylor will bring an exciting new dimension to UW’s existing strength in computer engineering research.

“UW and the broader Seattle area (e.g. Microsoft and Amazon) has become the world’s foremost playground for creative computer architects,” said Taylor. “I am excited to be a part of it.”

Srinivasa and Taylor will arrive at UW in September. They are the latest in an impressive line of senior hires who have chosen UW CSE in recent years, including Ras Bodik (programming languages); Carlos Guestrin and Sham Kakade (machine learning); Noah Smith (natural language processing); Jeff Heer (data visualization); and Matt Reynolds (computer engineering, joint with EE).

Welcome, Sidd and Michael!

Stay tuned for more updates as faculty recruiting season continues. Read more →