Allen School News

UW CSE was honored to host a very special gathering this morning to celebrate the contributions of Bill Gates Sr. to our university, the community, the world, and countless lives on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

Bill is a UW double-alum (Bachelors and Law School), a giant in the legal profession and in the community, and long-time co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Throughout his life, Bill has been hands-on in his support for education, reproductive and child health, the arts, the United Way, and many other civic causes. He has been a longtime supporter of his alma mater, serving as a UW Regent from 1997 to 2012 and leading the UW’s Creating Futures campaign. In 2013, UW bestowed upon Bill its highest alumni honor, designating him Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus.

To honor Bill’s amazing legacy, nearly 100 individuals who have been touched by Bill’s generosity of spirit assembled stories of lessons they had learned from him into a book: Thanks for Showing Up in My Life: Lessons We Learned from Bill Gates Sr. The project was spearheaded by Marty Smith (a long-time legal colleague of Bill’s, and former Chair of the Technology Alliance, a civic organization Bill founded in the mid-90’s), Susannah Malarkey (Executive Director of the Technology Alliance since its inception), Ed Lazowska (UW CSE professor and long-time Technology Alliance board member), and Dan Evans (former Governor and U.S. Senator, and a dear friend of Bill’s for more than 50 years). Contributors included UW President Ana Mari Cauce, PATH President & CEO Steve Davis, Starbucks Chairman & CEO Howard Schultz, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, and others from Bill’s past and present.

From the book’s foreword:

“As we go about our daily lives, our actions send out ripples – just like the ripples emanating from a single pebble dropped into a shallow pond. And like the ripples from that pebble, the ripples we send out interact with and affect those around us in ways we may never fully understand. If you could somehow capture just a portion of the ripples a single person has sent out over the course of that one lifetime, you would have a wonderful and amazing view into who that person is, how that life has been lived, and the impact that person has had on others.

“This book is an attempt to do just that for a very special person, Bill Gates Sr. Each of the storytellers has had the great fortune of being one of the many people impacted by the ‘ripples’ Bill Sr. has sent out over his 90 years of ‘showing up’ and living life to the fullest.”

Few people have created so many ripples and touched so many people’s lives through their leadership, philanthropy and just plain human decency as Bill Gates Sr. The University of Washington – not to mention the world! – is a better place thanks to him.

Happy birthday and thank you, Bill, from all of us here at UW CSE!

(In addition to the photos below, many more here and here.)

UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska pays tribute to Bill as his longtime friend Llew Pritchard looks on

Governor Dan Evans shares one of many stories on friendship and compassion from the “book of Bill”

UW President Ana Mari Cauce offers a toast and leads the singing of “Happy Birthday”

Bill looks over the book with Ruth Gerberding, widow of former UW President Bill Gerberding

Bill with Marty Smith, his former colleague from Preston Gates & Ellis, and UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska

Bill thanks everyone for joining in the celebration

We’re so good we’re competing against ourselves! Not only is Ph.D. student Ricardo Martin nominated in the Video category for time-lapse mining from internet photos, but Nanocrafter, the game developed by UW CSE’s Center for Game Science to advance synthetic biology research, is nominated in the Interactive category.

While theoretically only one can win the “People’s Choice” award, we are hoping there will be a tie and both UW CSE projects will be able to share bragging rights (in addition to winning their respective categories, of course). Vote for Nanocrafter here, and for Ricardo Martin here – you can cast one vote in each category.

You know how the saying goes…vote early and vote often! Read more →

MIT Technology Review recently published a nice article about robotics research led by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Igor Mordatch, who worked with UW CSE professor Emo Todorov in the Movement Control Laboratory before taking up a postdoc position with Pieter Abbeel at UC Berkeley. Igor is the lead researcher on a project in which Darwin, a humanoid robot with simulated neural networks, learns how to move by “imagining” how to do it, and to adjust its movements based on real-world conditions.

From the article:

“Like many toddlers, Darwin sometimes looks a bit unsteady on its feet. But with each clumsy motion, the humanoid robot is demonstrating an important new way for androids to deal with challenging or unfamiliar environments. The robot learns to perform a new task by using a process somewhat similar to the neurological processes that underpin childhood learning….

“‘It practices in simulation for about an hour,’ says Igor Mordatch, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley who carried out the study. ‘Then at runtime it’s learning on the fly how not to slip.'”

The article also quotes UW CSE professor Dieter Fox, who is enthusiastic about the potential for neural network learning in robotics.

“‘I’m very excited about this whole research direction,’ Fox says. ‘The problem is always if you want to act in the real world. Models are imperfect. Where machine learning, and especially deep learning comes in, is learning from the real-world interactions of the system.'”

Read the full article and watch a video featuring Darwin here. Read more →

UW CSE is a recognized powerhouse in software engineering research. Our strength was once again on display at ASE 2015, the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, where postdoc René Just captured the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for the paper, “Do Automatically Generated Unit Tests Find Real Faults? An Empirical Study of Effectiveness and Challenges.”

Just and colleagues at the University of Sheffield and University of Luxembourg analyzed the effectiveness of three automated unit test generation tools, which are used by software developers in place of more burdensome manual testing to identify faults in their code. The researchers evaluated each tool on 357 real-world faults. They found that while the automatically generated test suites detected more than half of the faults overall, only 19.9 percent of the individual test suites detected a fault, and 15.2 percent were flaky. The team’s insights will support the development of more reliable automated unit test generators that achieve a higher fault detection rate.

Overall, UW authors had five papers accepted to ASE, and another six papers at the conference were authored by previous advisees or postdocs of UW CSE professor Michael Ernst – a strong but not unexpected showing from members past and present of our world-class PLSE group!

Read the award-winning paper here. Congratulations to René and to the entire PLSE team! Read more →

A video illustrating UW CSE Ph.D. student Ricardo Martin’s AMAZING research on “Time-Lapse Mining from Internet Photos” has been nominated for a Vizzie award from the National Science Foundation.

Vote for the Ricardo of your choice, but vote!  HERE! Read more →

The Wall Street Journal/Getty Images

UW CSE professor Pedro Domingos recently penned a column for The Wall Street Journal envisioning a not-too-distant future in which machine learning will enable us to build and control a digital model of ourselves, transforming how we approach everything from shopping, to job-hunting, to finding a mate.

From the column:

“Entrusting your money to a bank once seemed strange and risky. Similarly, entrusting all of your data to a company and letting its algorithms build a detailed model of you from it might seem to be an odd or even dangerous idea, but we’ll all soon take it for granted.

“A decade from now, your personal model will be more indispensable than your smartphone, and the company that provides it may well be the world’s first trillion-dollar business. So it is time to start getting acquainted with our digital alter egos—and what they’ll mean for our lives.”

Domingos points out that today’s digital models, such as those Google builds from our web searches or that Amazon bases on what we buy, fall short for two reasons: they are driven by the companies’ own profit motive, and they are built using incomplete data. He suggests a new approach, one in which we intentionally construct a complete digital model of ourselves and deploy it online for our own benefit.

“Today’s models don’t yet interact with us: You can’t tell them they’re wrong or ask them questions. Machine-learning algorithms are black boxes that only computer scientists can open up. But that will change as more of us realize how important machine learning is and demand a say in how it occurs,” Domingos writes.

Read the full column here. Check out our past coverage of Domingos and his new book, The Master Algorithm, here and here. Read more →

Many thanks to Nathan Myhrvold for providing a deeply substantive rebuttal to a nonsensical Wall Street Journal piece by Matt Ridley. Nathan writes, in email:

Matt Ridley wrote a recent piece in the WSJ (to promote a new book) arguing that basic science has nothing to do with technology and that the government should stop funding it. It’s natural for writers to want to come out with a contrarian piece that reverses all conventional wisdom, but it tends to work out better if the evidence one quotes is factually true. Alas Ridley’s evidence isn’t – his examples are all, so far as I can tell, either completely wrong or at best, selectively quoted. I also think his logic is wrong and to be honest, I don’t think much of the ideology that drives his argument either. …

A lot of wrong things aren’t worth correcting (there are so many!), but this one is. The idea that we should cut science funding will be too tempting for politicians to let stand. While the current system could certainly be improved, Ridley’s piece, and the ideology behind it, isn’t constructive. It will only play into the hands of people who are anti-science or anti-technology.

Read Nathan’s superb rebuttal here. Read more →

UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska responds to an article in GeekWire by Jeff Meyerson of Software Engineering Daily, titled “Coding bootcamps question the need for computer science degrees.”

“One of the many great things about the tech industry is that it creates all kinds of jobs for all kinds of people with all kinds of preparation.

“But students, their parents, and adults seeking to re-direct their careers shouldn’t kid themselves about what sort of preparation is most likely to lead to a career as a software engineer at a leading-edge tech company – whether the smallest startup, or one of the giants like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. …

“Marijuana is making a comeback in Washington, and with it, books of matches. Keep an eye out for the 21^st century version of the advertisement to the right – with women included, and an additional zero on the salary.”

Read Ed’s complete post here. Read more →

In September, our friends at GeekWire reported an amazing feat by Seattle Country Day School students Kimberly and Rebecca Yeung (ages 8 and 10, respectively): launching a weather balloon filled with helium and equipped with a flight computer, two GoPro cameras, and a picture of their cat next to a Lego R2-D2 (the “Loki Lego Launcher”) to a height of 78,000 feet, and recovering it next to a cow pie in Stratford, WA. Read the terrific GeekWire article here.

Today, Kimberly and Rebecca, along with their friend Ava Barnhart (age 10), participated in a less thrilling but hopefully equally educational expedition: to UW CSE. And there were no cow pies at the landing site!

Kids like Kimberly, Rebecca and Ava are our future! Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. candidate Nell O’Rourke will be a featured speaker at the annual Rising Stars career-building workshop for women in computer science and electrical engineering. More than 60 promising graduate students and postdocs from around the world will gather at MIT next week for a series of research talks, career advice and networking aimed at supporting young female scholars interested in pursuing careers in academia.

Nell, who works with professor Zoran Popović in UW CSE’s Center for Game Science, is one of only a dozen computer science participants selected to address the group. Her talk, “Educational Systems for Maximizing Learning Online and in the Classroom,” describes the design and evaluation of novel systems to support motivation, personalization and formative assessment in educational environments.

From the abstract:

“My findings provide new insights into how students learn and how computing systems can support the learning process. The ultimate goal of my research is to build personalized data-driven systems that transform how we teach, assess, communicate, and collaborate in learning environments.”

Learn more about the Rising Stars program, which MIT launched in 2012, here.

Read our previous coverage of Nell, who is also a 2015 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholar, here.

Congratulations, Nell, and thanks for representing UW CSE! (And, good luck on the job market this year!) Read more →