Allen School News

Women historically have played a significant role in computer science. While the field has gone backward in recent decades when it comes to gender diversity, UW CSE has made a concerted effort to buck that trend and attracted national attention as a result.

Seattle online journal Crosscut recently caught up with UW CSE B.S./M.S. student Sonja Khan and Ph.D. student Irene Zhang to find out what makes this program so special. Their experiences reinforce the notion that, when it comes to increasing diversity in computing, a welcoming and supportive culture is key.

From the article:

“Women’s role in the computer revolution is often glazed over. There’s Ada Lovelace, the mathematician sometimes called the ‘world’s first computer programmer’, who sketched out the possibilities of computers way back in the 1800s. In 1945, one of the world’s first electronic general-purpose computers was built, with six female mathematicians creating its programs. By the early ‘80s, personal digital computers were taking off, and computer science was a major in universities. The number of women earning bachelor’s degrees in computing hovered around 40 percent.

“But around 1985, the number plummeted. Today, only about 18 percent of computer science bachelor’s degrees are earned by women. Women once held a prominent role in shaping the field’s future. In large part, that’s no longer the case….

“What can reverse the trend, and bring more women into the field again? It’s a question that companies and universities across the U.S. are asking. And the University of Washington’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering (UW CSE) may have found a method that works.”

The article charts Khan’s path from undecided freshman to computer science major, inspired by her positive experience in UW CSE’s introductory programming course. Zhang emphasizes the collegial atmosphere and opportunities for younger students to interact with female researchers as vital factors in explaining UW CSE’s success. Professor Ed Lazowska also explains why the entire field should follow UW CSE’s example in promoting diversity to produce the best products and services for users.

Read the full article here.

Photo credit: Dennis Wise Read more →

The 2016 NSF Science & Engineering Indicators have recently been released, including data on the numbers of degrees granted in various fields of science and engineering.

Similarly, the 2016 US Bureau of Labor Statistics job projections have recently been released, covering the decade 2014-2024.

The Tale of the Tape: A chart of “annualized jobs available” (from BLS) vs. “annual degrees granted” (from NSF) for various fields.

The story in Washington State is the same. Three state educational agencies looked across all fields (not just STEM fields) for those with any appreciable gap between “degrees granted” and “jobs available.” They found only four at the bachelors or graduate level. Computer science was #1, with a gap 2.5X as great as the second-place field – which was all fields of engineering added together (electrical, mechanical, civil, aeronautical, materials, etc.). (Of course, not all of those computer science jobs are in Washington’s vibrant software industry. For example, Washington’s aerospace industry employs roughly 3X as many computer scientists as aeronautical engineers!)

Wowsers! Read more →

Mesosphere, a “data center operating system” company derived from a course project by UW CSE bachelors alum Ben Hindman when he was a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, has raised $73.5 million in Series C funding.

Ben will receive the University of Washington College of Engineering Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement in May.

Check it out in TechCrunch here. Read more →

Google announced today a plan to lease more than 600,000 square feet of space in South Lake Union, dramatically expanding their presence in Seattle. (The Kirkland WA site – across Lake Washington from Seattle – was expanded last year. Expansion space for the current Seattle engineering office in the Fremont neighborhood at the north end of Lake Union was constrained.)

In addition to home-grown companies of all sizes – from Amazon and Microsoft to startups – Seattle is home to more than 70 engineering centers of companies headquartered elsewhere.

Excellent GeekWire coverage here. Read more →

“There’s no one way to be a woman in technology.”

That’s one of the takeaways from a terrific article published today by GeekWire that explores the experiences of eight UW CSE alumnae since they earned their degrees 20 years ago—and how the industry has progressed over the past two decades when it comes to welcoming and advancing women. Reporter Lisa Stiffler talked with the women about their trials and triumphs as they carved out careers in a male-dominated industry.

Featured UW CSE alumnae were Gail Alverson (Ph.D., ’90), Denise Draper (Ph.D., ’95), Gail Murphy (Ph.D., ’96), Bojana Ostojic (B.S., ’95), Cathy Palmer (Ph.D., ’94), Amy Raby (B.S., ’95), Radhika Thekkath (Ph.D., ’95) and Elizabeth Walkup (Ph.D., ’95).

From the article:

“Challenges for women and minorities in tech have persisted in recent years, despite widespread efforts to increase diversity and inclusion. The spotlight on the problem has intensified in recent weeks, with tech groups holding a series of events on the topic during Women’s History Month, and shareholders pressuring tech giants to close the gender gap in employee compensation.

“To better understand these issues, GeekWire interviewed eight University of Washington alumnae who earned computer science or engineering degrees in the mid-1990s. By looking back 20 years, our goal was to see the tech world through their eyes—understanding the progress they’ve made individually, and the impediments still in the way as the industry evolves and wrestles with its diversity crisis.

“As a group, they are remarkable. Of the eight women who participated in this project, seven are still in technology. Six have children. Five worked at Microsoft at some point in their careers, and three are current employees of the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant. Two have their own tech businesses.

“All of them still love technology and believe in its power to solve problems and create world-changing products.”

The article is accompanied by profiles of each of the women that chart their individual career trajectories and offer insights into how the industry has evolved when it comes to providing greater opportunities for underrepresented groups.

Both are must-reads! Find the full article here, and the alumnae profiles here. Read more →

The New York Times published an excellent article this week about CrowdSignals, a new initiative spearheaded by UW CSE alum Evan Welbourne (Ph.D., ’10) that seeks to build the largest set of rich, longitudinal mobile and sensor data through crowdsourcing. The community data set, which will include user interactions, geo-location and sensor data from a demographically diverse pool of users, would be available to academic and corporate researchers across a variety of disciplines to advance research, teaching and product development.

From the article:

“Words and pictures, culled from across the web, have been the digital grist for remarkable gains in computing tasks like image recognition and speech translation. But another huge data resource — sensor data from smartphones — lags behind as a fuel source for major research advances.

“CrowdSignals, a new initiative to collect, label and pay for mobile sensor data, seeks to overcome that shortfall. The organization’s approach relies less on innovation in technology than on economics and creating a marketplace for sensor data….

“‘We haven’t even begun to tap the potential of smartphone data,’ said Evan Welbourne, a computer scientist who heads the CrowdSignals project.

“The promising future of mobile data, experts agree, is that it can point the way to new insights in health care, transportation, urban planning and the social sciences.”

CrowdSignals launched an IndieGogo campaign to fund its data collection efforts, exchanging access to the data and a hand in shaping future phases of the project for a modest financial contribution. The funding will be used to pay individuals who contribute their bulk data and labeling to the project.

Read the full article here. To learn more about the initiative, visit the CrowdSignals website here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Noah Smith, an expert in natural language processing, has received a 2016 Innovation Award from the University of Washington’s Office of Research to create a large-scale visualization of people’s perspectives on current events and issues based on digital text.

By developing tools to map the “perspectives landscape” from the vast amounts of text data available online, Smith will be able to reveal differences in framing that can affect public attitudes. His research will advance the state of the art in natural language processing while enabling researchers, policy makers and citizens to gain a better understanding of the public discourse. Although Smith’s analysis will initially focus on perspectives related to the American news media, his approach could be expanded to the international news media, social networks and other domains.

Smith’s project is one of five proposals that were chosen for funding in this latest round of the UW Innovation Awards program, which was created in 2014 to support faculty engaged in potentially transformational research in areas for which other funding sources may be limited. Last year, a multi-disciplinary team that included UW CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel, CSE professor James Fogarty, and CSE adjunct faculty members Julie Kientz and Sean Munson received a UW Innovation Award to support the development of mobile tools for improving people’s health.

Congratulations, Noah!

Smith is recruiting a postdoc to work with him on this project. Interested individuals can view the application materials here. Read more →

A full house at the Pacific Northwest PLSE meeting

The Pacific Northwest is known to be a hotbed of programming language and software engineering (PLSE) innovation. Now, the brightest local minds in PLSE research have a forum in which to share their latest work and discuss emerging topics in the field with their colleagues from throughout the region, thanks to the efforts of professors Ras Bodik and Alvin Cheung of UW CSE’s world-class PLSE group and Rishabh Singh of the RiSE (Research in Software Engineering) group at Microsoft Research. Bodik, Cheung and Singh organized the inaugural Pacific Northwest PLSE Meeting held at the UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering last week—assembling a program that was chock full of new and noteworthy developments in PLSE research.

The agenda included sessions on tools and synthesis, chaired by Rishabh Singh; new languages, chaired by UW CSE professor Emina Torlak; and analysis and formal methods, chaired by Ben Zorn of Microsoft Research. UW CSE professor Zach Tatlock chaired the final session of the day, which was devoted to a series of lightning talks that illustrated PLSE’s expanding impact on fields outside of core computer science.

Zach Tatlock (left) and Alvin Cheung

In his presentation to conclude the program, Ben Zorn highlighted how PLSE research is becoming more relevant to people’s everyday existence. Given the proliferation of computers in our homes, in our cars and on our bodies—and the increasingly sophisticated software required for their operation—he noted that people’s lives depend upon the work of the PLSE research community.

“The software in these objects will be written in the next five years, but will have implications for the next 50 years,” Zorn said, issuing a call to action to his colleagues to focus on developing the languages, tools and processes to ensure their safety.

Other highlights of the day included technical talks by UW CSE Ph.D. student Calvin Loncaric and professors Alvin Cheung, Michael Ernst and Xi Wang; a presentation by Kartik Chandra, a high school student who has been working with Ras Bodik, on the use of symbolic execution to verify typecheckers; and a demonstration by Microsoft Research’s Rob DeLine of a new programming language for data scientists engaged in real-time data analysis.

Xi Wang talks about his research

In all, more than 60 people participated in the meeting, including representatives of Amazon, Cray, Facebook, Google, NVIDIA, Oregon State University, Portland State University, Seattle University, Tableau, the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria.

View the complete lineup of speakers, talk abstracts and slide decks on the 2016 PNW PLSE Meeting page here.

Thanks to everyone who helped make our inaugural event a great success! Read more →

UW CSE professor Shyam Gollakota was selected by CNN Money as one of five innovators who are changing the world for a recent segment called Visionaries 2020. The segment highlighted Gollakota’s works on ambient backscatter, a groundbreaking technology that leverages existing TV and wireless signals to provide battery-free power and connectivity to enable the Internet of Things.

Watch the CNN Money video here.

Congratulations yet again, Shyam!! Read more →

Left to right: Josh Smith, Shyam Gollakota, Vamsi Talla and Bryce Kellogg. (Photo credit: Daniel Berman)

A team of UW CSE and EE researchers captured the Best Paper Award at the 13th USENIX Sympoxium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ’16) for Passive Wi-Fi: Bringing Low Power to Wi-Fi Transmissions. The Passive Wi-Fi project was developed in CSE’s Networks & Mobile Systems Lab by EE graduate students Bryce Kellogg and Vamsi Talla, CSE professor Shyam Gollakota, and CSE and EE professor Josh Smith.

Passive Wi-Fi is capable of generating Wi-Fi transmissions using 10,000 times less power than conventional methods. MIT Technology Review recently named Passive Wi-Fi among its 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2016.

This is the second year in a row that UW CSE has taken home the big prize from NSDI, and our sixth NSDI Best Paper Award since 2007. UW ranks #1 among academic research institutions (and second only to Microsoft Research among all computing research organizations) in Best Paper Awards at major conferences in the field.

Read more about Passive Wi-Fi in our previous blog post here.

Congratulations Bryce, Vamsi, Shyam and Josh! Read more →