Allen School News

Seattle’s LMN Architects – the designers of UW CSE’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering, and of our second building (now halfway through design), as well as of UW’s PACCAR Hall, Seattle’s Benaroya Hall and McCaw Hall, and major projects across the nation – has been selected by the American Institute of Architects to receive its 2016 Architecture Firm Award.

AIA writes: “The 120-person firm blends ​ the multidisciplinary backgrounds of its principals into an approach that serves people first, building communities around its civic projects … ‘LMN provides an altogether different vision of a fully sustainable and civic-minded future that embraces urban life,’ Stephen Kieran, FAIA, of 2008 AIA Architecture Firm Award recipient KieranTimberlake, wrote in a recommendation letter supporting LMN Architects’ nomination for the award.”

Congratulations LMN! Read more here. Read more →

UW CSE Professor Steve Seitz’s team of virtual reality researchers at Google released a new app today called Cardboard Camera, the next step in the company’s effort to bring virtual reality to the masses. The app, which is free, allows anyone with an Android smartphone to create 360-degree three-dimensional photos that can be viewed using the Google Cardboard virtual reality viewer.

From the Wired article:

“Anyone who’s taken a panoramic shot using their smartphone already knows how to use this app: You hold your phone in a vertical position, tap the camera button, and move in a circle. The only difference is that, unlike regular panoramic pictures, you make a full 360-degree turn. A snippet of sound also gets recorded as you’re capturing the photo.

“The result is pretty striking: a three-dimensional panorama where near things look near, far things look far, and you can look in front of you, to your sides, or crane your neck all the way behind you to see the entire captured scene….”

The app uses computational photography and computer vision to calculate 3-D, negating the need for a special camera.

Read the full article here, and additional coverage by TechCrunch here and Engadget here. Check out our previous blog post about Seitz’s team’s work on Google’s Jump here. Read more →

You don’t need a telescope to see the entrepreneurial impact of the University of Washington thanks to the new Seattle Tech Universe Map. The map, which was developed by our friends at the Washington Technology Industry Association and Madrona Venture Group, illustrates the evolution of our local tech ecosystem and the extent to which companies and organizations large and small have contributed to its growth.

UW shines brightly as an engine of innovation and local company creation in large part due to the entrepreneurial faculty and students of UW CSE. Our stellar contributions include machine learning startup Dato; adaptive education provider Enlearn; and Impinj, a leader in RFID technology – to name only a few. Also lighting up our economy: the entrepreneurial spirit of employees from companies such as Microsoft and Amazon – including countless alumni of UW CSE! All told, more than 600 information technology companies, and the connections between them, are represented on the map.

View the Seattle Tech Universe Map on the WTIA website here. Learn more about the project from the WTIA blog post here and the Madrona Venture Group post here. Also, check out some nice coverage of the map’s release by the Seattle Times, Re/code, GeekWire and Xconomy. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. alum Wen-Hann Wang completed his 24-year tenure at Intel today. To mark the occasion, Intel named him its first-ever Senior Fellow Emeritus – a tremendous honor that recognizes Wen-Hann’s many outstanding contributions during nearly a quarter of a century with the company.

Wen-Hann earned his Ph.D. from UW CSE in 1989 working with professor Jean-Loup Baer. He joined Intel in 1991 as an Intel® Pentium® Pro platform architect, working on the highly successful P6 product family. His platform architecture and analysis work was instrumental in the creation of the Intel® Xeon® processor product line.

Wen-Hann went on to serve in a variety of roles, including platform infrastructure research manager in the company’s then-new Microprocessor Research Lab and director of the Emerging Platforms Lab. He spent nine years in various management roles as part of Intel’s Software and Services Group (SSG), for which he was instrumental in establishing a presence in the People’s Republic of China. Later, he oversaw Intel Labs’ circuits and systems research, and in 2013, he was appointed Corporate Vice President and Managing Director of Intel Labs – positions he held until his retirement today.

Wen-Hann is a fellow of the IEEE, holds 15 patents and has received numerous technical awards, including the inaugural ACM/IEEE ISCA Influential Paper Award in 2003 and an ACM SIGMETRICS best paper award in 1990. UW CSE recognized him with our Alumni Achievement Award in 2012.

Read our profile of Wen-Hann from the autumn 2011 issue of our newsletter, Most Significant Bits, here and a 2012 article about his Alumni Achievement Award here.

Congratulations to Wen-Hann, from all of your friends at UW CSE! Read more →

In 2011, two UW CSE alums at Google, Jessan Hutchison-Quillan ’07 and Krista Davis ’05, created G-Give, a concept and a software platform through which Googlers’ gifts to select non-profits are matched twice: once by the company, and once by Googlers who serve as sponsors for the non-profits.

G-Give 2015 takes place this week – November 30 through December 4. We’re honored that UW CSE’s Google Endowed Scholarship will be included for the 5th consecutive year. Thanks to the generosity of friends and alumni at Google, our many G-Give sponsors over the years, and Google’s generous employee gift matching program, our Google Endowed Scholarship now is valued at more than $1 million – UW CSE’s largest undergraduate scholarship fund by far.

It’s the role of America’s great public universities to provide socioeconomic upward mobility, through superb education, to smart, motivated students from their regions. To continue to fulfill this role – to remain accessible in the face of decreasing state support – UW must increasingly rely on scholarship endowments. UW CSE’s students are blessed by the loyalty and generosity of our many alumni and friends at Google and elsewhere.

Googlers: Download UW CSE’s G-Give 2015 poster here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. alums Scott Hauck and Calton Pu have been named to the 2016 class of Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Scott – the Gaetano Borriello Professor for Educational Excellence in the University of Washington’s Department of Electrical Engineering, an Adjunct Professor in CSE, and a 1995 UW CSE Ph.D. alum – was recognized “for contributions to Field-Programmable Gate Array based systems.”

Calton – the John P. Imlay, Jr., Chair in Software in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing, and a 1986 UW CSE Ph.D. alum – was recognized “for contributions to system software specialization, information security, and services computing.”

Congratulations to Scott and Calton! Read more →

This year’s World Technology Summit & Awards Ceremony took place on November 19th-20th in New York City. Bringing together the most innovative people and organizations in science and technology from around the world, the Summit explored what is imminent, possible, and important in and around emerging technologies.

The culmination of the Summit was the 2015 World Technology Awards Gala. In the Communications Technology category, 39 nominees were culled to 6 finalists. And the winner, announced at the Gala, was UW CSE professor Shyam Gollakota.

This is the latest in a long string of honors for Shyam; others include an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, selection as one of Forbes “30 under 30,” selection as one of MIT Technology Review’s “TR35” (35 top innovators under the age of 35), and the 2012 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Learn about Shyam’s amazing – and amazingly diverse – research here.

Congratulations Shyam! Read more →

A new City of Seattle video highlights a “Smart Cities” urban data science partnership between the city and the University of Washington. UW CSE’s Anat Caspi, Bill Howe, and Ed Lazowska are featured in the video, as well as a host of researchers from the UW eScience Institute, which is spearheading the initiative on the UW end.

Watch the video here. Read more →

Each year, UW CSE throws open the doors of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering to middle and high school students and their families as part of Computer Science Education Week. This year, students and parents are invited to join us on Saturday, December 5th from 1:00 to 5:00 pm at our computing open house, which features interactive demonstrations and hands-on activities that celebrate the wonderful world of computing.

Try your hand at games for learning and scientific discovery developed by UW CSE’s Center for Game Science; learn about encryption with members of the Security & Privacy Lab; meet Rosie the Robot; and much more!

Don’t miss the chance to interact with our faculty, students and industry partners, and to learn more about the exciting new technologies being developed here at UW CSE!

Learn more and RSVP here. And don’t forget to participate in the Hour of Code – learn more about that here. Read more →

Team Orz (from left): Jingchen Hu, WenBo Cui and Forrest Sun

Five teams of UW CSE students competed at the Pacific Northwest regional for the ACM’s annual International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) last weekend. Once again, our students made a strong showing, sweeping the top five spots at the Puget Sound competition site and holding their own against some formidable opponents from other top institutions in the broader regional contest. Twelve CSE undergraduates and three graduate students participated.

Puget Sound was one of six sites that determined which teams from the Northwest region – which includes Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, northern and central California, western Nevada and Hawaii – will move on to compete in the world finals next May.

The regional competition is fierce, including teams from UW CSE, Stanford, UC Berkeley and a number of other schools. Two teams of CSE undergradate students – Orz and Eternal Flame – placed in the top 10 overall, and all five teams placed in the top 20. (A total of seventy teams competed in UW CSE’s division.) Everyone made their coach, UW CSE Ph.D. student Daniel Epstein, proud:

Orz: WenBo Cui, Jingchen Hu, Forrest Sun (Puget Sound site champions, 7th in the region)

Eternal Flame: Victor Chen, Jasper Hungunin, Vladimir Korukov (10th in the region)

Voila: Hessam Bagherinezhad, Kiana Ehsani, Xin Yang (12th in the region)

Last1: Ziyu Wang, Qian Yan, Yuhao Zhu (13th in the region)

Java the Hutt: Zach Frohardt, Gunnar Onarheim, Calob Symonds (19th in the region, and honorable mention by UW CSE News for the best team name)

Way to go, everyone! Read more →