Allen School News

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday that David Thouless, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, will share the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics with two of his colleagues.

Thouless splits the prize with Professor F. Duncan M. Haldane of Princeton University and Professor J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter,” according to the prize announcement from the Academy. Half the prize goes to Thouless while Haldane and Kosterlitz divide the remaining half. Thouless is the UW’s seventh Nobel laureate, and second in physics after Hans Dehmelt in 1989.

Congratulations David! Read more here. Read more →

UW CSE recently welcomed Yuliang Wang as a research professor working with our Computational & Synthetic Biology group. Wang brings a wealth of computational expertise imbued with a deep knowledge of relevant biology that, as CSE professor Larry Ruzzo notes, is really rare in “computational” people.

Wang obtained his B.S. in Bioengineering from Tianjin University in China. He earned his M.S. in Applied Statistics and a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign—a top-10 program in its field. He was a student of Dr. Nathan Price, who is now at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and a CSE affiliate professor. As part of his Ph.D. thesis, Wang developed breakthrough computational tools for modeling metabolic networks. Before his arrival at UW CSE, Wang held a postdoctoral fellowship at Sage Bionetworks in Seattle and was a Senior Research Associate in the Computational Biology Program at Oregon Health & Science University.

Wang is spending approximately half of his time in CSE and the other half at the UW Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, a world-class research group in a cutting-edge area of biomedicine mostly located at the university’s South Lake Union campus. He will bring value-added to both groups—forwarding the efforts of stem cell biologists, while also bringing knowledge and skills that complement CSE’s computational biology group and building additional bridges to our artificial intelligence and machine learning groups. We have no doubt that he will help us to identify new and important problem areas where CSE can make a tangible difference—and advance computational methods that will benefit not only UW CSE research, but the field at large.

Welcome to UW CSE, Yuliang! Read more →

Reuters has once again ranked the world’s 100 most innovative universities. Starting from the top:

1. Stanford
2. MIT
3. Harvard
4. University of Texas
5. University of Washington

As with all rankings in which we do well, we flash the lights, we sound the horns, and we assume the methodology was sound.

Read the overall report here. Read the University of Washington section here. Read more →

Catapult team members Adrian Caulfield (UW CSE bachelors alum, UCSD Ph.D. advised by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Steve Swanson), Eric Chung (who has risen above his crummy Berkeley and CMU education), Doug Burger (UW CSE affiliate professor), and Andrew Putnam (UW CSE Ph.D. alum)

A really terrific article in Wired describes the evolution of Microsoft’s Project Catapult – FPGA acceleration for a broad range of cloud services.

The project, incubated in Peter Lee‘s MSR NeXT organization, was led by Doug Burger, a refugee from UT Austin who is a Distinguished Engineer in MSR NeXT and an Affiliate Professor in UW CSE. A key member of the Catapult team was UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Andrew Putnam, who joined MSR immediately after graduating in 2009.

From the Wired article:

“In December of 2010, Microsoft researcher Andrew Putnam had left Seattle for the holidays and returned home to Colorado Springs. Two days before Christmas, he still hadn’t started shopping. As he drove to the mall, his phone rang. It was Burger, his boss. Burger was going to meet with Bing execs right after the holiday, and he needed a design for hardware that could run Bing’s machine learning algorithms on FPGAs.

“Putnam pulled into the nearest Starbucks and drew up the plans. It took him about five hours, and he still had time for shopping …

“At that post-holiday meeting, Burger pitched Bing’s execs on FPGAs as a low-power way of accelerating searches. The execs were noncommittal. So over the next several months, Burger and team took Putnam’s Christmas sketch and built a prototype, showing that it could run Bing’s machine learning algorithms about 100 times faster. ‘That’s when they really got interested,’ says Jim Larus, another member of the team back then who’s now a dean at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne.”

It’s a great read – here. Read more →

UW CSE was center stage last night at Seattle Business magazine’s annual Tech Impact Awards gala honoring the people and companies driving innovation and economic prosperity in the Puget Sound region. Professor Ed Lazowska was honored as the 2016 Tech Impact Champion for his achievements and advocacy on behalf of the tech community, while Impinj and Turi—UW CSE spin-outs that recently celebrated a successful IPO and acquisition, respectively—were highlighted for their groundbreaking innovations.

Lazowska, who graces the cover of the magazine’s October issue, is lauded for his vision, enthusiasm, and just plain persistence in positioning UW CSE among the upper echelon of computer science programs—including his role in recruiting leading faculty to the region. The magazine also credits him with leading the charge to position the University of Washington and Seattle at the forefront of cloud computing and the data science revolution, and notes that he has earned the admiration of students, colleagues and collaborators across the board for his commitment to elevating not only Washington’s flagship public university and its technology sector, but its people.

“Our job,” he tells the magazine, “is to provide socioeconomic mobility for bright kids in this region.”

Since Lazowska arrived in Seattle 39 years ago—when the local tech sector consisted largely of airplanes, medical devices, and test instruments, and Microsoft was 12 people in Albuquerque—the Emerald City has come into its own as a region with tremendous capacity for innovation in a range of industries. As Seattle Business put it, “With his trademark enthusiasm for the UW and the local tech sector, this celebrated educator, researcher, adviser and booster has played an important role in that transformation.”

Impinj, started by then-UW CSE professor Chris Diorio, was honored in the Emerging Technology/Productivity category for its RAIN RFID technology. Since its founding in 2000, Impinj has grown to more than 200 employees and its product was used on more than five billion items last year. Diorio tells Seattle Business that Impinj is “giving digital life to everything in your everyday world, extending the reach of the internet by a factor of 100.” With a successful IPO, a market cap of around $350 million, and 95 percent of the apparel market yet to be tapped, Impinj’s future growth is something else worth tracking.

Machine learning startup Turi, led by UW CSE professor Carlos Guestrin, collected the award for the Intelligent Applications category. The company, which was recently acquired by Apple, developed the GraphLab platform to enable data scientists to create their own intelligent applications for recommendation engines, fraud detection and customer management. As competition judge Matt McIlwain of Madrona Venture Group commented, “Carlos Guestrin is a unique talent in both his deep understanding of machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

A unique talent, fittingly enough, who was recruited to the region thanks in part to the advocacy efforts of fellow honoree Lazowska.

Read more about this year’s Tech Impact Award honorees at Seattle Business magazine here. Congratulations, Ed, Chris and Carlos!

Photo credits: John Vicory/Seattle Business Read more →

UW CSE professor Shayan Oveis Gharan was named one of 10 Scientists to Watch by Science News this week. The list celebrates early- and mid-career scientists under the age of 40 who are well on their way to transforming their respective fields. Oveis Gharan, a member of UW CSE’s Theory group, was featured for his contributions to solving the infamous traveling salesman problem.

From the article:

“It’s a problem that sounds simple, but the best minds in mathematics have puzzled over it for generations: A salesman wants to hawk his wares in several cities and return home when he’s done. If he’s only visiting a handful of places, it’s easy for him to schedule his visits to create the shortest round-trip route. But the task rapidly becomes unwieldy as the number of destinations increases, ballooning the number of possible routes.

“Theoretical computer scientist Shayan Oveis Gharan…has made record-breaking advances on this puzzle, known as the traveling salesman problem. The problem is famous in mathematical circles for being deceptively easy to describe but difficult to solve. But Oveis Gharan has persisted. ‘He is relentless,’ says Amin Saberi of Stanford University, Oveis Gharan’s former Ph.D. adviser. ‘He just doesn’t give up.'”

Science News points to Oveis Gharan’s ability to take inspiration and techniques from other areas of computer science and mathematics to advance research in his own field. In one example, he and colleague Nima Anari (then of UC Berkeley) were able to draw a connection between the traveling salesman problem and what, to that point, appeared to be an unrelated problem in mathematics and quantum mechanics known as the Kadison-Singer problem.

As Oveis Gharan says, “Once someone is exposed to many different ideas and ways of thinking on a problem, that will help a lot to increase the breadth of problem-attacking directions.”

Read Science News’ full profile of Oveis Gharan here, and the full list of Scientists to Watch here.

Congratulations, Shayan! Read more →

“Context is everything,” or so the saying goes, which may be why artificial intelligence has a long way to go to in order to match, let alone replace, human intelligence. While computer vision researchers have made impressive advances in image recognition, the ability to not only identify objects but recognize situations and predict what will happen next is still the preserve of humans.

Researchers at UW CSE and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) are trying to help computers make that leap from content to context with the development of the ImSitu situation recognition tool. The New York Times published an article today examining the present limitations of computer vision in application such as self-driving cars — and took ImSitu out for a spin.

From the article:

“Today, computerized sight can quickly and accurately recognize millions of individual faces, identify the makes and models of thousands of cars, and distinguish cats and dogs of every breed in a way no human being could.

“Yet the recent advances, while impressive, have been mainly in image recognition. The next frontier, researchers agree, is general visual knowledge — the development of algorithms that can understand not just objects, but also actions and behaviors….

“At the major annual computer vision conference this summer, there was a flurry of research representing encouraging steps, but not breakthroughs. For example, Ali Farhadi, a computer scientist at the University of Washington and a researcher at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, showed off ImSitu.org, a database of images identified in context, or situation recognition. As he explains, image recognition provides the nouns of visual intelligence, while situation recognition represents the verbs. Search ‘What do babies do?’ The site retrieves pictures of babies engaged in actions including ‘sucking,’ ‘crawling,’ ‘crying’ and ‘giggling’ — visual verbs.

“Recognizing situations enriches computer vision, but the ImSitu project still depends on human-labeled data to train its machine learning algorithms. ‘And we’re still very, very far from visual intelligence, understanding scenes and actions the way humans do,’ Dr. Farhadi said.”

UW CSE Ph.D. student Mark Yatskar and professor Luke Zettlemoyer worked with Farhadi on ImSitu, which the team presented at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference (CVPR 2016) in June.

Read the full article here, and check out the Times’ results using ImSitu here.

Try ImSitu for yourself here, and read the research paper here. Read more →

Never heard of Gazette Review? Neither have we! But adhering to our long tradition of amplifying the rankings in which we do well and burying the others, we draw your attention to this one:

“Located near Seattle and Redmond- the home city of Microsoft – this university is at the crossroads of technology and the natural sciences. Of all the programs at the University of Washington, Computer Science and Medicine are among the most renowned …”

Check it out here! Read more →

Best Paper Award winners Eric Whitmire (left) and Edward Wang (right), with UW CSE Ph.D. alum Mayank Goel

Members of UW CSE’s UbiComp Lab led by CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel are celebrating not one but two Best Paper wins this week: “HemaApp: Noninvasive blood screening of hemoglobin using smartphone cameras” earned a Best Paper Award at the International Joint Conference on Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2016) in Heidelberg, Germany, while “EyeContact: Scleral coil eye tracking for virtual reality” took home the Best Paper prize from the co-located International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC 2016). And once again – for the third year in a row – the late CSE professor Gaetano Borriello was recognized with UbiComp’s 10-Year Impact Award for work submitted a decade ago that, looking back, has had the greatest impact on the field.

HemaApp, which measures blood hemoglobin to screen patients with anemia and other blood disorders, is the latest in an impressive line of mobile health projects from the UW that will benefit communities around the world. The paper—which was co-authored by EE Ph.D. student and lead author Edward Wang, undergraduate EE student William Li, Doug Hawkins of Seattle Children’s Hospital, Terry Gernsheimer and Colette Norby-Slycord of UW Medicine, and Patel—captured one of five Best Paper Awards bestowed upon the top 1% of submissions to UbiComp this year. Check out the recent UW News release on HemaApp here and a related blog post here.

EyeContact, which earned the sole Best Paper Award at ISWC, is a magnetic eye tracking system using scleral search coils for virtual and augmented reality applications. Unlike existing systems that rely on large generator coils—too large for a person to walk around—the EyeContact headset enables high-speed, high-accuracy mobile eye tracking without limiting the user’s movement or requiring instrumentation of the environment. UW CSE Ph.D. student and lead author Eric Whitmire and Patel co-authored the winning paper with researchers Laura Trutoiu, Robert Cavin, David Perek and Brian Scally of Oculus and Facebook, and James Phillips of UW Medicine.

The late UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello

Gaetano Borriello and his fellow researchers were recognized with a 10-Year Impact Award for the 2006 conference paper, “A Practical Approach to Recognizing Physical Activities.” The paper was co-authored by then-UW EE Ph.D. student and lead author Jonathan Lester, and Borriello’s Intel Seattle colleague at the time, Tanzeem Choudhury. This is the third year in a row that one of Borriello’s papers has been recognized with a UbiComp 10 Year Impact Award—yet more evidence of his lasting contributions to the field of ubiquitous computing.

Way to go, team! (We miss you, Gaetano.) Read more →

The article included lots of photos of CMU, but not this one …

The Washington Post writes:

“Women are making major gains in enrollment in engineering and computer science at some of the nation’s most prominent colleges and universities, a breakthrough that shows that gender parity is possible in technology fields long dominated by men. …

“The University of Washington, near Microsoft’s Seattle-area home, had the largest share of women in computer science among the nation’s public flagships and some of the largest five-year gains. Thirty-two percent of its graduates in that major were women in 2015, up 11 points in five years.

“Ed Lazowska, a computer science and engineering professor at the university, said it is crucial to ensure that introductory courses are engaging for all students, especially those who might struggle at first because they are new to the subject. ‘If your intro course tries to weed people out, then the people you’re going to weed out are precisely those that are underrepresented in the first place,’ Lazowska said.”

Read the entire article – excellent – here! Read more →