Allen School News

Emily Fox, Amazon Professor of Machine Learning, has been selected to receive a 2017 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government upon scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers.

Fox is among 102 scientists and engineers (only 19 via the National Science Foundation) who are being recognized by the White House for advancing the frontiers of science and technology and serving the community through scientific leadership, public education, and community outreach.

“I congratulate these outstanding scientists and engineers on their impactful work,” said President Barack Obama in a press release announcing the winners. “These innovators are working to help keep the United States on the cutting edge, showing that Federal investments in science lead to advancements that expand our knowledge of the world around us and contribute to our economy.”

PECASE winners are chosen from among nominees submitted by a dozen federal agencies and the intelligence community for making significant contributions to America’s continuing leadership in science and technology. Fox was nominated for the award by the National Science Foundation for her “groundbreaking work in large-scale Bayesian modeling and computational approaches to time series and longitudinal data analysis, and for outstanding outreach and mentoring of women in computer science and statistics.”

In addition to her Amazon Professorship (with appointments in Statistics and CSE), Fox is a Data Science Fellow in UW’s eScience Institute and co-created the UW’s Coursera specialization in machine learning in collaboration with UW CSE professor Carlos Guestrin. The PECASE is the latest in a long list of honors for Fox, who is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, ONR Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award and the MIT EECS Jin-Au Kong Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize, among many others. Fox’s research has been applied in a wide range of domains, including neuroscience, finance and econometrics, social networking, and more.

Fox is one of two UW recipients of the PECASE this year. She is joined by Catherine Karr, professor of pediatrics in the School of Medicine and environmental and occupational health sciences in the School of Public Health, who was nominated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Past PECASE recipients include UW CSE and Electrical Engineering professor Shwetak Patel and UW CSE professors Tom Anderson, Carlos Guestrin, and Luke Zettlemoyer.

Read the White House press release here and the UW release here.

Congratulations, Emily! Read more →

Zillow Group has pledged $5 million to support the construction of a second computer science building on the UW’s Seattle campus. The gift is the first-ever corporate donation made by the company and will provide the space needed for UW CSE to double annual degree production in response to growing student and employer demand. Zillow Group COO Amy Bohutinsky highlighted UW CSE’s vital role in the region’s technology ecosystem and its leadership in education and diversity in announcing the gift.

“Having founded our company in Seattle, we have long benefited from this wealth of talent and are proud to be able to support the expansion of such an extraordinary program,” Bohutinsky said in a press release. “As Zillow Group’s first corporate donation, our hope is that this gift will help expand the education opportunities in our state and ensure more young people have access to high quality STEM education.”

In recognition of Zillow Group’s generous support, UW CSE will name the 3,000-square-foot event space in the new building the “Zillow Commons.” The Zillow Commons, which will be located on the fourth floor and have sweeping views of Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains, will provide a flexible venue for hosting workshops, research demo days, career fairs, and a variety of other community-focused events.

UW CSE has now received commitments totaling more than $90 million toward the $110 million project.

Read the media release announcing Zillow Group’s gift, and check out coverage by GeekWire, the Seattle Times, Xconomy, the Puget Sound Business Journal, KIRO 7 News, KING 5 News, and Inside Philanthropy. Learn more about the campaign for CSE2 here.

Many thanks to Zillow Group for its generous support and ongoing partnership with UW CSE! Read more →

Armon Dadgar (left) and Mitchell Hashimoto

UW CSE alums Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar feature prominently in the 2017 edition of Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30—which recognizes change-makers and innovators spanning 20 different industries. The pair are recognized for their contributions to enterprise tech through their company, San Francisco-based HashiCorp.

Hashimoto and Dadgar earned their bachelor’s degrees in computer science from UW CSE in 2011. They co-founded HashiCorp a year after graduation with the aim of revolutionizing data center management, including application development, delivery, and maintenance.

Five years on, the company employs 60 people, has raised nearly $35 million in venture funding, and counts heavy-hitters such as Cisco, Disney, Mozilla, PayPal, and Elon Musk’s OpenAI among its customers.

As Hashimoto, who serves as the company’s co-CTO with Dadgar, told Forbes, “Every company is realizing the traditional way of doing IT isn’t going to scale. Tractor companies or insurance companies want to focus on their business, not on building the delivery mechanism for their software.”

In their quest to build robust tools for managing IT infrastructure, the founders kept their end users in mind.

“I think what makes us unique is the human aspect of our software — our users generally describe our software as enjoyable to use, and that’s not something you usually hear with IT software,” Hashimoto said. “A lot of IT software is made for computers, and we like to think that our software’s made for people.”

Check out the full article and a video featuring Hashimoto here, and the complete class of 30 Under 30 honorees here.

Congratulations, Mitchell and Armon! Read more →

What do UW CSE professor Shyam Gollakota, basketball player LeBron James, and singer Taylor Swift have in common?

They all were named among Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” All-Star Alumni — a who’s-who of luminaries in technology, sport, the arts, and more who are “leading the millennial revolution of game changers.”

Gollakota was previously recognized by Forbes on its list of “30 Under 30” in energy for his work on ambient backscatter, which turns existing wireless signals into a source of power and means of communication for battery-free devices.

Check out Gollakota’s Forbes profile here, and see the full list of all-stars here.

Great start to the new year, Shyam! Read more →

The Seattle Times reports:

“Washington State University Cougar fans are going to want to spend a bit of time staring at their feet this morning.

“Bartell Drugs issued a recall this week for an $18 Christmas pair of Strideline WSU College ‘Cougar Socks.’ The red-and-white socks have a not-so-Cougarish slogan printed on the inside cuff. It reads, ‘Go Dawgs’ …

“Using the rival University of Washington’s ‘Go Dawgs’ slogan for WSU socks was a quality-control error, co-founder Jake Director said …

“‘It’s pretty unfortunate,’ he said, though he admitted he can see why some might find it funny.”

Almost as funny as back in August 2014 when WSU’s “Academic Planner” featured a photo of UW on the cover! As we said back then, “We can’t make up stuff that’s this great!”

Read the Seattle Times article here. Read more →

Irene Zhang is UW CSE’s Geek of the Year, but we’ll settle for GeekWire’s Geek of the Week:

“I’m really a Midwestern girl at heart.” (Give me a break!)

“I do research in distributed programming platforms for mobile/cloud applications. Application programmers today are writing code that runs on mobile device and cloud servers, so they are really tackling a lot of hard distributed systems problems. Companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google have figured out how to build these kinds of applications, but those lessons have not really made it into general-purpose systems that help the average application programmer. So, my research is on how to eliminate the need for programmers to tackle these tough distributed systems problems. I want to make it possible to build the next generation Facebook-scale application in a few hours, not a few years.” (We can get behind that!)

“I’m also inspired by Barbara Liskov, my undergraduate advisor at MIT. She was the first woman to get a Ph.D. in computer science and now has a Turing award, but she has some amazing stories from being a woman so early in the field.” (A giant of the field!)

“We’re just scratching the surface of what computer science can accomplish, so it’s a pretty great time to be a geek!” (Amen!)

Previous UW CSE “Geeks of the Week”: Karan Goel, Carlos Guestrin, Julie Kientz, Melissa Winstanley, Oren Etzioni (also 2012’s “Geek of the Year”), Lauren Bricker, Yaw Anokwa, Wendy Chisholm, and Marty Stepp. We got geek!

Read more here. Read more →

To mark the end of finals week, the next installment of our Undergrad Spotlight features a member of the UW CSE community who devotes his spare time to helping other students to succeed. Meet Johan Michalove, a senior from Bellevue, Washington who has spent the past three years tutoring students and currently serves as chair of the UW ACM, the campus chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Michalove is double-majoring in Computer Science and Philosophy. As ACM chair, he strives to make the CSE community vibrant and inclusive by coordinating a variety of events and programming. As a high school tutor, he inspires students to do more than succeed on a test — he helps them to develop a lifelong love of learning.

CSE: Why did you choose to study computer science?

JM: I first got excited about computer science through taking the intro series during my freshman year. I chose CSE because the concepts fascinated me, and also for how quickly you can go from an idea to a real, tangible object that people can play with or benefit from.

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

JM: Our undergraduate community, definitely. The variety of my classmates’ interests continues to surprise me. I’m always hearing about new obscure subjects, side projects, and interesting experiences.

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

JM: I’ve enjoyed mentorship from faculty who are advancing CS and laying the groundwork of CS education. It’s inspiring and humbling to witness the formative years of a relatively young subject. Adam Blank‘s approach to designing and structuring meaningful, yet highly scalable learning experiences has given me many new insights how technology can improve education.

CSE: What made you decide to tutor high school students?

JM: At the outset, I was just excited to teach and have a platform to gain mentorship and experience in the craft of teaching. As a college freshman I didn’t know what I constantly see today: many intelligent students near the end of high school lacking a strong foundation in basic reading, writing or math skills. Within the public school system, it’s particularly easy for students to slip through the cracks, only to arrive to college and realize they’ve never learned how to study or take on truly difficult academic endeavors. I also didn’t realize the number of high school students who have acute learning disabilities and test anxiety. I’ve had students break into nervous sweats when a math test is placed before them. I’ve stayed on to explore how I can help these students and hone my abilities as a teacher and mentor.

CSE: How are you helping your students to overcome those challenges?

JM: My primary role is preparing students for the standardized tests they take to enter college. Many of our students have learning disabilities and special accommodations, so we work to understand where they’re falling behind and exactly how they can improve their performance. Although the teaching is ostensibly about tests, my goal is to help students find an engaged, positive attitude towards learning even when the subject-matter seems dry — we are talking about standardized tests! — so they can take that with them to whatever pursuits they follow. This often involves helping them overcome a particular fears or anxieties and providing mentorship, supplemented by content knowledge.

In the most severe cases, I’ve taught high school juniors multiplication and division. More frequently they come in without understanding basic geometry and algebra. Many of my math students are baffled by the reading passages. Teaching effectively from the 1st to the 99th percentile is difficult. Three years later, I’m still finding new ways to sharpen my approach.

CSE: What kind of impact are you making in this role?

JM: My work directly helps students whose needs were not fulfilled by the regular educational system. Although the number of students I teach is a blip compared to UW classes or the scale reached by MOOCs, the goal is for students who’re seldom at ease in the classroom to have genuine, positive learning experiences. I would like to think that through the tests, we’re teaching students how to learn (and often for the first time). It’s exciting to be involved in the formative stages of these individuals, and it’s not uncommon for students to come back and say that preparing for the tests was the first time they ever enjoyed learning.

CSE: What is your favorite memory/project so far?

JM: Those lightbulb moments when you know something just “clicked” perfectly for a student. Their eyes light up and they let out an excited “Ohhhhhhhhhh.” You know it’s a concept they’re never going to forget.

CSE: How does this position relate to your long term goals?

JM: Shhh, they’re still under wraps. Though you can probably guess they involve education and computer science.

Thank you, Johan, for your leadership and service! And happy end of finals to all of our undergrads — see you next quarter! Read more →

“So what distinguishes the UW from other Washington schools? Aside from its obvious geographical advantage of being smack dab in the center of a global tech hub, the University has made use of several strategies to routinely get its grads into top-notch jobs. ‘The University has been tuning its computer science curriculum to the needs of software development companies for decades now,’ says [Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) CEO Michael] Schutzler.

“The challenging curriculum and internship program also play a big role. ‘Most students do summer internships at leading-edge companies – and they can do this without relocating,’ Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair of UW’s Computer Science & Engineering Department, wrote in an email. ‘This, plus the capstone design courses at the end of their senior year, makes them industry-ready.’

“The UW also makes use of what’s called the Industry Affiliates Program, that gives students a sneak peek at the industry while allowing companies to start recruiting top talent early. More than 100 companies, including the likes of Google and Facebook, are part of the program, which offers resume workshops and practice interviews to help prepare students for future careers.”

Read more here. Read more →

Carrying on UW CSE’s tradition of excellence in undergraduate research, three students — Christopher Mackie, Nathaniel Yazdani, and Sarah Yu — have been recognized by the Computing Research Association as part of its 2017 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards. Since the year 2000, 55 UW CSE undergraduates have earned accolades from CRA for excellence in research — more than any other institution in North America.

Mackie and Yazdani are members of CSE’s Programming Languages & Software Engineering (PLSE) group. Mackie, who is studying Computer Science and Physics, has been working with professor Michael Ernst on the Signedness Checker, a new verification tool for preventing signedness errors in numerical computations in Java that is part of UW CSE’s Checker Framework. He recently earned third place in the student research competition at FSE 2016.

Yazdani is collaborating with professor Ras Bodik on the development of a synthesis engine to enable the high-performance layout of large-scale data visualizations. He is working toward degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics, after which he plans to pursue a Ph.D. and an academic research career. Yazdani was profiled as an undergraduate research leader by the UW’s Undergraduate Research Program.

Yu, who is studying Computer Science, International Studies, and Economics, is a research assistant in the Information & Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab led by professor Richard Anderson. She has been working alongside Ph.D. students Sam Castle and Fahad Pervaiz in the lab’s Digital Financial Services Research Group to address security and usability challenges for digital banking in the developing world, including a study of mobile money markets in Ghana. Last spring, Yu was named a member of the inaugural class of the Husky 100.

All three students earned Honorable Mentions in the competition, which is designed to highlight exceptional potential among the rising generation of computer scientists. UW CSE students’ success over the years in the CRA awards is evidence of our commitment to providing our undergrads with a first-rate educational experience, including opportunities to participate in hands-on research alongside our faculty, Ph.D. students, and postdocs.

Congratulations to Chris, Nate and Sarah — we’re proud of you! (And great job supporting undergraduate research, PLSE and ICTD teams!) Read more →

The annual UW CSE holiday party is always a fun event for students, staff, and faculty. And then there’s the faculty skit … “rehearsal” shots below …

Read more →