Allen School News

An international team of researchers that includes UW CSE Ph.D. student Fahad Pervaiz, who works with professor Richard Anderson in the Information & Communications Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab, has come up with a way to predict outbreaks of dengue fever by analyzing calling activity by members of the public to a telephone hotline. In a paper published today in the journal Science Advances, Pervaiz and collaborators at New York University, the Punjab Information Technology Board and the Information Technology University in Pakistan present a system capable of predicting disease outbreaks at the level of a city block.

From the UW News release:

“Collecting disease surveillance data traditionally requires a huge infrastructure to gather and analyze disease incidence data from all healthcare facilities in a country or region. The primary appeal for this new system is its capability to closely monitor disease activity by merely analyzing citizen calls on a public-health hotline….

“The team used more than 300,000 calls to the health hotline, set up in the aftermath of the 2011 outbreaks, to forecast the number of dengue cases across the city and at a block-by-block level over a period of two years. The researchers then matched their predictions with the actual number of cases reported in public hospitals. The results showed a high level of accuracy for the model’s predictions: the system not only flagged an outbreak, but also made an accurate forecast of both the number of patients and their locations two to three weeks ahead of time.”

In 2011, more than 21,000 people in Pakistan were infected with dengue fever, and 350 of them died. There is no cure for the virus, so vector control and containment are essential.

“Developing worlds face challenges in tackling major outbreaks due to limited resources,” Pervaiz explained. “Our technique will equip public officials with tools to inform them about where to apply these resources in advance and hopefully save millions of lives.”

Read the full UW News release here and the NYU announcement here. Check out the GeekWire article here. Read more →

CSE professor Luis Ceze and research scientist Lee Organick in the Molecular Information Systems Lab (Credit: Tara Brown Photography)

Researchers in the Molecular Information Systems Lab housed at the University of Washington have achieved a new milestone in their quest to develop the next generation of data storage by encoding a world record-setting 200 megabytes of data in strands of DNA. A team that includes UW CSE professor Luis Ceze and Microsoft researcher (and UW CSE affiliate professor) Karin Strauss announced today that it has successfully stored and retrieved an impressive list of multimedia and literary works, including a high-definition music video by the band OK Go, the complete Universal Declaration of Human Rights in over 100 languages, the novel War and Peace, and more—all contained in a space smaller than the tip of a pencil.

The Microsoft Next blog has the full story. Here’s an excerpt:

“Demand for data storage is growing exponentially, and the capacity of existing storage media is not keeping pace.  That’s making it hard for organizations that need to store a lot of data – such as hospitals with vast databases of patient data or companies with lots of video footage – to keep up. And it means information is being lost, and the problem will only worsen without a new solution.

“DNA could be the answer.

“It has several advantages as a storage medium. It’s compact, durable – capable of lasting for a very long time if kept in good conditions (DNA from woolly mammoths was recovered several thousand years after they went extinct, for instance) – and will always be current, the researchers believe.

“‘As long as there is DNA-based life on the planet, we’ll be interested in reading it,’ said Karin Strauss, the principal Microsoft researcher on the project. ‘So it’s eternally relevant.'”

In a Q&A on UW Today, Ceze explained how the team combined concepts from molecular biology and computer science to achieve its latest milestone. He described how he and his colleagues use polymerase chain reactions—a technique commonly employed by microbiologists to amplify specific segments of DNA for research—to selectively access only the data they want to read. He also noted that, despite its reliability, “DNA writing and reading have errors, just like hard drives and electronic memories have errors, so we needed to develop error-correcting codes to reliably retrieve data.”

Read the Microsoft Next blog post here and the UW Today Q&A with Ceze here, and watch a pair of videos (short version here, extended version here) produced by Microsoft that feature MISL team members and Microsoft leaders talking about the opportunity presented by DNA data storage.

Check out the latest coverage of the team’s record-setting achievement in the Seattle Times, GeekWire, The Verge, Mashable, U.S. News & World Report, CIO Today, Business Insider, and MIT Technology Review.

Earlier this year, Ceze and Strauss co-authored a paper on their efforts to develop a DNA-based storage system with CSE Ph.D. student James Bornholt, Bioengineering Ph.D. student Randolph Lopez, Microsoft researcher and CSE affiliate professor Douglas Carmean, and CSE and Electrical Engineering professor Georg Seelig. For more on this groundbreaking project, read the April 2016 UW News release here. Read more →

Seattle:

• Median base salary: $113,242
• 7.1 percent above national average cost of living
• Real adjusted salary: $105,735
• Job openings: 4,205

Followed by San Jose, San Francisco, Madison WI (only 105 job openings …), Raleigh, Austin, Boston, …

Read about it in GeekWire here. Read more →

Every summer, UW CSE welcomes students from around Washington state to campus for our DawgBytes day camps. This year, 125 middle school and high school students will enjoy the opportunity to get hands-on with computer science at one of six co-ed camp sessions devoted to robotics, web design, or programming computer games in Quorum.

We kicked off the summer with the first of three sessions on robotics, in which campers work in teams to build and program robots using LEGO Mindstorms. At the end of the five-day session, participants showed off their creations while competing in some friendly robot games.

Check it out:

Looks like fun, doesn’t it?

Since 2012, over 600 K-12 students—more than half of them girls—have had the opportunity to explore the wonderful world of computer science at one of our day camps. Thanks to the generous support of our donors, scholarships are made available to eligible students to cover the bulk of their camp fees. Learn more about DawgBytes camps here, and visit the DawgBytes Facebook page here. Read more →

Maaz Ahmad

UW CSE Ph.D. student Maaz Bin Safeer Ahmad, who works with professor Alvin Cheung of UW CSE’s Programming Languages & Software Engineering (PLSE) and Database groups, has captured the inaugural Best Student Paper Award at SYNT 2016 for Leveraging Parallel Data Processing Frameworks with Verified Lifting.

In the winning paper, Ahmad and Cheung demonstrate that verified lifting—which previously has been applied to database applications and stencil computations—also can be used to convert sequential data processing code in order to leverage high-performance parallel data processing frameworks. They present CASPER, a novel compiler that identifies and converts fragments of sequential Java code to MapReduce tasks implemented with Apache Hadoop.

The pair’s work represents a significant step forward in addressing one of the most pressing computational challenges of our time: the efficient processing and analysis of increasingly massive data sets. By enabling automatic rewriting of code written in general purpose languages into a high-performance framework such as Hadoop, the authors have devised a way for users to leverage the performance improvements offered by domain specific languages without having to expend time and resources on manually rewriting programs—and avoiding the risk of introducing new bugs. Evaluating their prototype using a set of standard MapReduce benchmarks, Ahmad and Cheung demonstrated that programs that have been optimized using CASPER run up to 6.4x faster.

Read the winning paper here, and check out the CASPER web page here.

Ph.D. students Sarah Chasins of UC Berkeley and Julie Newcomb of UW CSE earned second place for “Using SyGuS to Synthesize Reactive Motion Plans.” In their paper, Chasins and Newcomb—who work with professor Ras Bodik of UW CSE’s PLSE group—present the first use of the Syntax-Guided Synthesis (SyGuS) formalism to solve robot motion planning problems.

The SYNT Workshop on Synthesis is co-located with the International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2016) taking place July 17-23 in Toronto, Canada.

Way to go, team! Read more →

UW CSE took over the Computer History Museum in Mountain View for our annual Bay Area alumni meet-up yesterday. Nearly 200 alumni and guests joined us at one of our favorite events of the year, where we enjoy connecting with old friends and new—and the chance to geek out over the museum’s fantastic exhibits. UW CSE faculty members Luis Ceze, Zorah Fung, Dan Grossman, Yoshi Kohno, Ed Lazowska, Hank Levy and Franzi Roesner met up with a couple of new colleagues currently in the Bay Area: UW CSE alum Kurtis Heimerl, who is joining our ICTD Lab faculty in the fall, and Justin Hsia, who also will arrive in the fall after finishing up a postdoc at UC Berkeley.

During our visit, we took time out for a spin (not really!) in one of Google’s self-driving cars on display. We also celebrated CSE affiliate professor Dave Cutler’s selection as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum, in recognition of his “fundamental contributions to computer architecture, compilers, operating systems and software engineering.” Last but not least, we experienced a blast from the past when we found an exhibit highlighting the ERMA project. ERMA was the first electronic banking system and was developed by a team led by UW CSE’s founding chair, Jerre Noe, back when he was at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the 1950s.

Many thanks to the museum for being such a great host and to all of our wonderful alumni and friends who joined us at the event. You make UW CSE proud! See you next year!

  Read more →

The results are in: CSE is now the first choice major of more of the University of Washington’s confirmed incoming freshmen than any other field.

We need to grow in order to be able to accommodate more of these students! And we’re trying!

Our friends at GeekWire picked this up:

“‘At UW and across the nation, student interest in computer science is booming,’ said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates chair in the UW department of Computer Science & Engineering, in an email to GeekWire this morning. ‘It’s visible in 3 ways: enrollment in introductory courses, interest in upper-division courses by students majoring in other fields, and demand for the major.’ …

“‘Inevitably there are cycles in demand,’ he concluded. ‘But the long-term trend is clear — due to the long-term role of computer science in the world. And our region is at the center of much of this.'”

Much more detail in the GeekWire post here.

And check out the job demand data, here – “It’s all computer science!” Read more →

The Puget Sound Business Journal posted an article this week in which Microsoft President Brad Smith, a vocal proponent of expanding access to computer science education, reiterated his call for a significant expansion of UW CSE as the leading generator of computing talent in the state.

From the article:

“As Microsoft expands outside the country to mitigate the lack of engineering talent in the Puget Sound region, local technology industry leaders renew a call for investments in the next generation of local computer science graduates.

“‘It’s important for Puget Sound to continue to strengthen our own ability to develop more talent,’…Smith recently told the Puget Sound Business Journal. ‘We need to get more computer science into schools here in Washington state, including the University of Washington, which is a world leader. It’s so important to build a second UW computer science building.'”

The article points out that local technology companies are “talent-starved” due to a lack of qualified graduates and quotes UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska on the need to expand capacity to meet the explosive demand from employers and students.

“This will consolidate us as one of the preeminent programs in the country,” Lazowska said. “The tragedy is, most applicants don’t get in. These are terrific kids from Washington state who could graduate here, stay here and power our economy.”

Read the full article here. Learn more about the Campaign for UW CSE here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. student Kira Goldner has been named a 2016 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholar. Goldner, who works with professor Anna Karlin in UW CSE’s Theory group on algorithmic game theory and approximation algorithms, is one of only 20 student researchers from across the United States selected by Google to receive this award.

Google established the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in honor of Borg’s tireless dedication to advancing women and other underrepresented groups in the field of computing. The program celebrates recipients’ academic excellence and their potential to become active role models and leaders in the field. The scholarship includes an invitation to participate in the Google Scholars’ Retreat at the company’s Mountain View, California headquarters.

The scholarship includes an invitation to participate in the Google Scholars’ Retreat at the company’s Mountain View, California headquarters. Goldner is the latest in a distinguished line of UW CSE students who have received the award, including Nell O’Rourke and Irene Zhang (2015), Jenny Abrahamson and Nicki Dell (2012), Janara Christensen and Katie Kuksenok (2011), Lydia Chilton and Kristi Morton (2010), Saleema Amershi (2009), and Julie Letchner and Kate Everitt (2008).

Way to go, Kira! Read more →

Just how accurate are facial recognition algorithms—which may have been trained and tested on fewer than 15,000 photos—when put to the test on a larger scale? Researchers in UW CSE’s Graphics and Imaging Lab (GRAIL) aimed to find out by launching the MegaFace Challenge, a new competition in which teams from all over the world were invited to put their algorithms through their paces using the MegaFace dataset of one million images.

The results showed that, when it comes to the size of datasets used for training and testing these algorithms, bigger tends to be better.

From the UW News release:

“‘We need to test facial recognition on a planetary scale to enable practical applications—testing on a larger scale lets you discover the flaws and successes of recognition algorithms,’ said Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, a UW assistant professor of computer science and the project’s principal investigator. ‘We can’t just test it on a very small scale and say it works perfectly.’

“The UW team first developed a dataset with one million Flickr images from around the world that are publicly available under a Creative Commons license, representing 690,572 unique individuals. Then they challenged facial recognition teams to download the database and see how their algorithms performed when they had to distinguish between a million possible matches.

“Google’s FaceNet showed the strongest performance on one test, dropping from near-perfect accuracy when confronted with a smaller number of images to 75 percent on the million person test. A team from Russia’s N-Tech.Lab came out on top on another test set, dropping to 73 percent.”

Testing against the larger dataset revealed differences in performance across facial recognition algorithms that were masked when tested against a much smaller dataset, with accuracy rates of some other algorithms that had previously performed well on a small scale—some surpassing 95%—falling to as low as 33% when using the larger dataset. Algorithms that were trained on larger datasets to begin with tended to outperform those that were trained on smaller datasets when tested on the MegaFace collection.

The team, which also includes UW CSE professor Steve Seitz, Master’s student Aaron Nech, undergraduate student Evan Brossard, and former student Daniel Miller, will present its results at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2016) in Las Vegas next week.

In addition to the challenge—which is ongoing—researchers are building a large-scale training dataset that will incorporate multiple photos of half a million identities. This new dataset will benefit researchers who previously had to rely on smaller sample sizes to train their algorithms. The project could help enable new applications for facial recognition technology, such as face-based security features for mobile devices and the ability for enforcement to quickly and accurately identify individuals captured on video surveillance footage for public safety purposes.

Read the full news release here and the research paper here. Visit the MegaFace website here, and check out articles in TechCrunch, The Atlantic, IEEE Spectrum, and Silicon Republic. Read more →