Allen School News

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 →

Researchers from UW CSE and EE announced in June that they had developed Power Over WiFi, “PoWiFi” for short, to harvest energy from Wi-Fi routers to wirelessly power devices. The technology, which has appeared in MIT Technology Review, Wired, BBC News, and several other media outlets, was chosen this week as one of Popular Science’s “Best of What’s New 2015” – a list of the top 100 innovations that the magazine believes will shape the future and change the world.

From the UW media release:

“The technology made headlines earlier this year when researchers published an online paper showing how they harvested energy from Wi-Fi signals to power a simple temperature sensor, a low-resolution grayscale camera and a charger for a Jawbone activity tracking bracelet….

“Although initial experiments harvested relatively small amounts of power, the UW team believes there’s opportunity to make the PoWiFi system more efficient and robust.

“‘In the future, PoWiFi could leverage technology power scaling to further improve the efficiency of the system to enable operation at larger distances and power numerous more sensors and applications,’ said co-author Shyam Gollakota, assistant professor of computer science and engineering.”

In addition to Gollakota, the research team includes CSE and EE professor Josh Smith, EE graduate students Vamsi Talla, Bryce Kellogg, and Saman Naderiparizi, and former CSE postdoc Ben Ransford. They will present their final paper on PoWiFi at the ACM’s CoNEXT 2015 conference in Heidelberg, Germany this December.

Read the Popular Science article here, and the UW media release here. Check out our previous blog coverage of the project here and here.

Congratulations to the entire PoWiFi team! Read more →

UW CSE professor Alvin Cheung was honored by his alma mater this week with the George M. Sprowls Award, which recognizes the most outstanding Ph.D. theses in computer science submitted to MIT each year.

Cheung received the award for his dissertation titled “Rethinking the Application-Database Interface,” in which he puts forward a novel approach for optimizing the performance of applications that interact with database management systems (DBMSs). Cheung showed that real-world applications are sped up by multiple orders of magnitude when both the programming system and the DBMS are considered in tandem, using a combination of declarative database optimization and modern program analysis and synthesis techniques.

See the MIT announcement here. Or, hey, test your mettle by reading Alvin’s winning dissertation here.

Congratulations, Alvin! Read more →

Can Washington State lead the nation in Hour of Code participation in 2015?

A message to the state’s students, parents, teachers, and superintendents from the Governor’s STEM Education Innovation Alliance, on which UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska serves, reads:

I’m contacting you with an exciting opportunity for Washington’s students – to lead the nation in Hour of Code participation. Students are guaranteed to have FUN while learning the building blocks of computer science.

WHY: Every time we check a text on our smartphone, play Minecraft or swipe our credit card at a store, we’re engaging with a product of computer science. In Washington State we’re going to have almost 50,000 unfilled jobs that require science, technology, education, and math skills by 2017, yet less than 10% of our schools currently offer computer science classes.  In addition, computer science reinforces computational thinking, logical reasoning and creative problem solving – all 21st Century skillsets that set our kids up for opportunity and success.

HOW: We want to engage kids with computer science so they see themselves in these careers and learn exciting 21st Century skills. The Hour of Code makes that easy, engaging and fun.

HOW YOU CAN HELP: We’d like every student in Washington State to participate in the Hour of Code. Please help us reach that goal by encouraging your school, District, or community organization to spend one hour on the Hour of Code during Computer Science Education Week, December 7-13. Schools can register their participation here.

Join the hundreds of schools in Washington are already taking part! Join districts like Highline, Everett, Pasco, Bremerton, Spokane, South Kitsap and Pasco and many more that are promoting the Hour of Code across Washington state.

You don’t need any preparation or computer science experience to host an Hour of Code event. Students from kindergarten to high school learn from the Hour of Code. This year, the Hour of Code is partnering with Microsoft to feature a Minecraft lesson. The Hour of Code also features a fun lesson from Star Wars characters Princess Leia, Rey, R2D2, C3PO, and BB8.

Let’s make Washington State the leader in the Hour of Code in 2015. Get started here!

Let’s do it! And while you’re at it, kick off Computer Science Education Week at UW CSE’s Open House for K-12 students, 1:00-5:00 on Saturday December 5. Read more →