Allen School News

Today, Google announced that UW Ph.D. student Tianqi Chen has been chosen as a 2016 Google Ph.D. Fellow in machine learning. Chen works with professor Carlos Guestrin in the UW MODE Lab (Machine Learning, Optimization, Distributed Systems and Statistics) and is the creator of XGBoost, an open-source, end-to-end tree boosting system that is designed to be efficient, flexible and portable.

Tree boosting is a highly effective and widely used machine learning method. Researchers have embraced XGBoost because it is capable of running 10 times faster on a single machine and of scaling beyond billions of examples while using fewer resources compared to existing systems. More than half of the teams who won Kaggle machine learning challenges last year used it, as did every top-10 winning team at the 2015 KDDCup. Learn more about Chen’s work on the XGBoost project page here.

Arvind Satyanarayan, a Ph.D. student who works with UW CSE professor Jeff Heer in the Interactive Data Lab, also won a Google Ph.D. Fellowship – his in human-computer interaction. While technically a student at Stanford University (Heer moved from Stanford to UW several years ago), Satyanarayan spends the bulk of his time here in UW CSE; he is currently co-instructor with Jeff of the graduate course in User Interface Software & Technology in the Masters of Human-Computer Interaction & Design program. Learn more about Satyanarayan’s work here.

Read the Google announcement here.

Google Ph.D. Fellows are considered to be among the most promising young academic researchers across the globe. The competition has been particularly kind to UW CSE students, including past winners Aaron Parks and Kyle Rector (2015), Robert Gens and Vincent Liu (2014), Adrian Sampson (2013), Tom Bergan (2011), and Roxana Geambasu and Michael Piatek (2009).

Congratulations, Tianqi and Arvind, and thanks to Google for supporting UW CSE students and their work! Read more →

Sergey Levine, who will join the UW CSE faculty this spring, has been recognized with a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research.

Sergey’s research focuses on the intersection between control and machine learning, with the aim of developing algorithms and techniques that can endow machines with the ability to autonomously acquire the skills for executing complex tasks. In particular, he is interested in how learning can be used to acquire complex behavioral skills, in order to endow machines with greater autonomy and intelligence.

Sergey received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2014. He is spending the current year as a post-doctoral researcher at UC Berkeley working with Pieter Abbeel, and as a research scientist at Google.

Congratulations Sergey! Read more →

Lars Crawford, Brian Mogen, Tyler Libey and Dimitrios Gklezakos

The finals of the inaugural Health Innovation Challenge, hosted by the UW Foster School of Business Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, took place yesterday on campus. Three finalists with a UW CSE connection—FitTraction, HLTH, and MultiModal Health—were among the 18 interdisciplinary teams (out of a competitive field of 34) invited to pitch their ideas to improve health with technology to a roomful of judges drawn from the local community.

MultiModal Health, which captured third place, developed an interactive platform for physical rehabilitation. The company’s vHAB product line gamifies therapy exercises to improve patient engagement and outcomes and provide real-time data to providers. The MultiModal Health team includes UW CSE student Dimitrios Gklezakos, bioengineering students Tyler Libey and Brian Mogen, and neurobiology alum Lars Crawford.

FitTraction is a mobile and web app that could revolutionize the fitness industry by providing a way for gym members and their trainers to share and track workouts. The goal of FitTraction is to improve motivation and accountability—which will lead to improved health. The FitTraction team includes UW CSE students Ian Turner and Justin Lee, and entrepreneurship and information systems student Christian Taylor.

The HLTH app is designed to empower underserved and low-income populations to follow medically recommended preventative health schedules. HLTH was created by UW CSE student Travis Chen, medical student Daniel Dudley, HCDE student Anastacia Jaime, and international marketing student Yamato Abe.

Read more about the winning teams here, and check out the terrific GeekWire article on the competition.

Congratulations to Dimitrios and his teammates, and well-done to everyone from UW CSE and across the campus who participated! Read more →

UW faculty members David Baker (Biochemistry; Director of UW’s Institute for Protein Design), Tom Daniel (Biology; Co-Director of the Institute of Neuroengineering), Ed Lazowska (CSE; Director of the eScience Institute) and Dan Schwartz (Chemical Engineering; Director of the Clean Energy Institute) discuss the role of institutes at universities:

“University research institutes such as ours eliminate sclerotic silos and bureaucratic boundaries by deftly blending teams of super-smart students, faculty, and research scientists from interconnected subject areas. As a result, these institutions stand the best chance of identifying and solving the toughest scientific and technological challenges of our age – they are confronting tomorrow today….

“These institutes stand in stark contrast to the traditional university structures of schools, colleges, and departments, which take years to create and decades — if not centuries — to eliminate. Success in the 21st Century depends upon agility. When an opportunity presents itself, bring together the optimal set of individuals to respond. When another opportunity succeeds it, restructure.”

Read more here. Read more →

Joe Heitzeberg (left) and Ethan Lowry (Kurt Schlosser/GeekWire)

Crowd Cow, a new company launched by UW CSE alum Joe Heitzeberg (B.S., ’05) and fellow startup veteran Ethan Lowry, offers a different kind of meat market—one in which Northwest steak lovers become “steak holders” by crowdsourcing their evening meal.

Unlike typical cattle-sharing arrangements that require a significant investment in freezer space, Crowd Cow enables customers to purchase only the quantity and cuts that they want online, from sources that are committed to sustainable and humane practices. By tapping into the crowdsourcing trend and uniting quality with convenience, the company hopes to transform the way people shop for meat.

From a recent article on GeekWire:

“Crowd Cow removes the mystery by working directly with select Washington ranches that are producing the best possible meat from start to finish. It also brings a high-tech sensibility to the age-old practice of processing and buying meat, taking the crowdsourced funding techniques popular among tech products and non-profit initiatives and applying them to the pasture, instead….

“The first cow, or ‘event’ as they call it, was launched with an email to 100 friends. Six hundred people ended up coming to the site, and Lowry and Heitzeberg knew they were on to something.

“‘We knew the mechanics of crowdfunding as a way to engage an audience and essentially pre-sell something….We’re the only online retailer, that I can find, where you can buy meat and know exactly where it came from, from a variety of ranchers, of the exact cuts and quantity you want,’ Heitzeberg said.”

Read the full GeekWire article here, and check out the KOMO 4 News story here. Read more →

Photo by UW CSE professor and hands-free driver Mark Oskin

We in UW CSE have been pretty laid back about the migration of Californians to Seattle. Sure, they drive up our housing prices, crowd our roads, and take our jobs, but what’s not to like?

What’s not to like is this license plate! We send many of our best Ph.D. alums to UCSD to build a world class computer science department, and they respond with propaganda like this?

We’re with Donald! It’s time to close the borders!

(OK, maybe it’s payback for the paver we purchased in front of UCSD CSE’s new building 9 years ago …) Read more →

Better late than never, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its workforce projections for the decade 2014-2024.

We focus here on STEM jobs – jobs in computer science, engineering, the life sciences, the physical sciences, the social sciences, and the mathematical sciences.

BLS projects both job growth (newly-created jobs) and job openings (all available jobs, whether newly-created or available due to retirements).

BLS projects that 73% of all job growth in STEM between 2014 and 2024 will be in computer occupations. (This is up from 71% in the 2012-2022 projections. Engineering fields are down to 10% from 15%.)

BLS projects that 55% of all available jobs in STEM between 2014 and 2024, whether newly-created or available due to retirements, will be in computer occupations – 1,083,800 jobs during the decade, more than 100,000 per year. (We’re a younger field – fewer retirements.)

Whoaboy!

(BLS data from Table 1.2 here.) Read more →

Our friends at Georgia Tech’s GVU Center prepared an interactive graphic showing the number of papers and authors by organization at the upcoming ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2016). UW tops the list, with 15 papers at the conference representing contributions from 46 distinct authors—ahead of such heavyweights as Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, MIT and Georgia Tech itself. The variety of submissions involving UW authors illustrates the strength of our collaboration across multiple departments and with outside research organizations, and teams with UW authors earned a total of three Best Paper Awards and three Honorable Mentions.

The award-winning paper Boundary Negotiating Artifacts in Personal Informatics: Patient-Provider Collaboration with Patient-Generated Data is  the product of a collaboration between UW CSE professor James Fogarty, HCDE professors and CSE adjuncts Julie Kientz and Sean Munson, HCDE Ph.D. students Chia-Fang Chung and Kristin Dew, Family Medicine professor Allison Cole and physician Jasmine Zia. The paper examines how patients and providers collaborate in the age of patient-generated data enabled by wearable sensors and smartphone apps, and makes recommendations for the future development of personal informatics systems and practices to address privacy concerns and remove barriers to more effective patient-provider collaboration.

Another Best Paper winner, You Get Who You Pay for: The Impact of Incentives on Participation Bias, was co-authored by HCDE professor (and CSE adjunct) Gary Hsieh and HCDE Ph.D. student Rafal Kocielnik. That paper examines how incentives influence who participates in crowdsourced tasks, and how participant self-selection results in different outcomes.

Other CSCW contributors with a UW CSE connection include UW CSE professors Oren Etzioni, Jeffrey Heer and Dan Weld; Ph.D. students Jonathan Bragg and Shih-Wen Huang; and HCDE professors and CSE adjuncts Cecilia Aragon, Daniela Rosner and Kate Starbird (whose papers earned Honorable Mentions) and iSchool professor and CSE adjunct Jacob Wobbrock.

Check out the GVU Center graphic here and explore the complete list of CSCW papers here.

Way to go, everyone! Read more →

Washington state – and particularly King County Washington, Seattle’s home – is a leader in aerospace and in information technology. There’s no news there.

What is news comes from an ongoing study of King County’s aerospace industry talent pipeline by Community Attributes Inc. working with the Workforce Development Council of Seattle – King County:

• What field has the largest total number of current employees in King County’s aerospace industry? COMPUTER SCIENCE

• What field has the greatest predicted number of new employees needed by King County’s aerospace industry from 2013-2023? COMPUTER SCIENCE

• What field has the greatest predicted compound annual growth rate for King County’s aerospace industry from 2013-2023? COMPUTER SCIENCE

• What field has the greatest predicted annual gap between supply and demand for King County’s aerospace industry from 2013-2023 (where “supply” is not “degrees granted” but rather the industry’s current ability to hire)? COMPUTER SCIENCE

The bottom line: the importance of computer science extends far beyond Washington’s world-leading software industry – for example, it powers Washington’s world-leading aerospace industry. Every field is becoming an information field. Computer science is increasingly central to everything – great preparation for any career.

Check it out here. And check out an excellent related GeekWire post here.

(In this context, it’s also worth noting that more people are employed in Washington state’s software industry than in our aerospace industry.) Read more →

Last night the new documentary The Human Face of Big Data premiered on PBS. UW CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel contributed his expertise and insights to the film, which examines how the vast amounts of data collected in our increasingly connected world is changing the way we live and shaping our future. As big data’s big night approached, Patel and executive producer Rick Smolan joined Jeremy Hobson, host of NPR’s “Here & Now,” to talk about the anticipated benefits and potential pitfalls associated with the age of big data.

One of the benefits Patel highlighted was health care. In contrast to the traditional visit to a doctor’s office, where a patient’s vitals are taken and perhaps more tests are ordered to come up with a diagnosis, “Think about what you could do if you could collect physiological information throughout the day, and in non-invasive ways,” he suggested, “and then using artificial intelligence and machine learning to gain some interesting insights about what may happen in the future…to diagnose and predict disease before it’s too late.”

Another topic discussed by the trio was the need for transparency around what data is being collected and how it is being used. Patel agreed that it is a conversation we need to have, and that technology could help broker that. “One of the issues is that people really don’t know what’s possible with the data and what’s actually happening behind the scenes,” he said.

Although on the one hand, many people may react negatively to the concept of big data, Patel noted that they are “voting with their feet” by using the apps and services. “At the end of the day, it’s really the data analytics that’s enabled this whole technology revolution and this new paradigm,” he said.

Listen to the full interview on the NPR website, and watch clips from the documentary online courtesy of PBS. Also check out related coverage on GeekWire and the original book on which the film is based. Read more →