Allen School News

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 →

Today our friend and neighbor Amazon announced Amazon Catalyst, a grant program to inspire grassroots innovation at the University of Washington.

The program is open to all members of the UW community – all people, all fields.

It’s a partnership with huge potential!  Thank you Amazon!

Learn more here.

GeekWire here. Seattle Times here. Read more →

UW CSE professors Yoshi Kohno and Franzi Roesner and Ph.D. alum Tamara Denning (now on the faculty at the University of Utah) are among the lead authors of a new white paper that examines policy issues associated with emerging augmented reality technologies. The paper is the first of its kind published by the UW’s Tech Policy Lab, which brings together faculty and students from UW CSE, the School of Law, the iSchool and other units on campus to explore the potential implications of emerging technologies in a way that is useful for policy makers.

From the UW media release:

“Though still in its relative infancy, augmented reality promises systems that can aid people with mobility or other limitations, providing real-time information about their immediate environment as well as hands-free obstacle avoidance, language translation, instruction and much more. From enhanced eyewear like Google Glass to Microsoft’s wearable HoloLens system, tech, gaming and advertisement industries are already investing in and deploying augmented reality devices and systems.

“But augmented reality will also bring challenges for law, public policy and privacy, especially pertaining to how information is collected and displayed. Issues regarding surveillance and privacy, free speech, safety, intellectual property and distraction — as well as potential discrimination — are bound to follow.”

The report was co-authored by School of Law professor Ryan Calo, iSchool professor Batya Friedman, Tech Policy Lab associate director Emily McReynolds, iSchool alum Bryce Newell, iSchool student Lassana Magassa and School of Law alum Jesse Woo.

Read the full release here, and read the white paper, “Augmented Reality: A Technology and Policy Primer,” here.

Kohno will be joined by his Tech Policy Lab co-directors, Calo and Friedman, for a panel discussion tonight on “responsible innovation” and the impact of new technologies on security and privacy. Learn more about the event, which is the final installment of the UW Alumni Association’s 2015 Engineering Lecture Series, here. Read more →

The Seattle Times reports opinions pro and con on the effort by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to unionize UW’s faculty. The article quotes CSE’s Ed Lazowska, and references a website created by Lazowska and Chemistry professor Paul Hopkins. Read the article here.

CampusReform.org focuses on the con, again quoting Lazowska. Read the article here.

A complex issue. While individual UW CSE faculty members have opinions and voice them, UW CSE itself is careful to express no opinion. Read more →

UW CSE alum Brandon Lucia (Ph.D., ’13), now on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon, collected a Distinguished Paper Award and a Distinguished Artifact Award at OOPSLA 2015 last week for the paper, “Valor: Efficient, Software-Only Region Conflict Exceptions.”

Valor is a novel, software-only region conflict detection analysis that achieves high performance by eliminating the costly analysis on each read operation required by previous approaches. Existing techniques either modify hardware or slow programs dramatically, precluding always-on use. As the first region conflict detector to provide strong semantic guarantees for racy program executions with less than 2X slowdown, Valor represents the state of the art in always-on support for strong behavioral guarantees for data races. With Valor, Brandon and his fellow researchers address a fundamental barrier to providing well-defined programming language specifications and to writing correct shared-memory, multithreaded programs.

Read the winning paper, which was co-authored by Swarnendu Biswas, Minjia Zhang and Michael Bond of Ohio State University, here.

Congratulations to Brandon and his colleagues on the double win! Read more →

“‘It always comes back to what you are passionate about,’ said Mr. Allen, 62. Through philanthropy, he said, ‘you are transmitting your hopes, and keeping them going in the future.'”

Oren Etzioni – UW CSE professor and CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence – is quoted.

Terrific article – read it here. Read more →

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that the University of Washington – a recognized leader in data management and visualization and data-intensive discovery – will co-lead the new Big Data Regional Innovation Hub for the western United States. Members of the UW’s eScience Institute and UW CSE faculty will partner with colleagues at the University of California, San Diego and UC Berkeley on the new initiative, which is one of four university-led hubs established by NSF to catalyze big data solutions to real-world problems.

From the UW media release:

“The ability to access, analyze and draw insights from massive amounts of data is already driving innovation in fields from medicine and manufacturing to the way cities are managed. To accelerate this emerging field, the NSF is establishing four ‘Big Data brain trusts’ to catalyze new collaborations among university researchers, tech companies, national labs, local and state government and non-profits.

“‘Our selection to help lead the West’s Big Data Hub affirms our position as a leader in data science and our track record in building successful partnerships,’ said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering and director of the UW eScience Institute. ‘The Puget Sound region in particular is an excellent laboratory for this.'”

Lazowska is joined by Bill Howe, associate director and senior data science fellow at the eScience Institute; data scientist Ariel Rokem; and program director Sarah Stone on the UW’s hub leadership team. The western hub will focus on promoting collaborations and advancing solutions in five areas: big data technologies, managing natural resources and hazards, precision medicine, metro data science, and data-enabled scientific discovery and learning.

Read the full UW announcement here, and the NSF announcement here.

Check out the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s blog post on the new initiative here, and the Seattle Times article here. Read more →

The November issue of Seattle Magazine contains its annual list of “Seattle’s Most Influential People” – a list that was particularly kind to UW CSE friends and family this year. Among those recognized:

• “Nurturing Knowledge” – Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer of Microsoft
• “Game Changer” – Ana Mari Cauce, President of the University of Washington
• “Leading the Causes” – Paul G. Allen, Benefactor
• “Package Deal” – Amazon
• “The Trailblazer” – David Brewster, Civic Activist
• “Sick Leave” – Chris Murray, Director, UW Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
• “The Tracker” – Brian Ferris, OneBusAway Creator and Google Transit Engineer
• “Cracking the Code” – Hadi and Ali Partovi, Founders, Code.org
• “Leaning In” – Jonathan Sposato, Angel Investor and Seattle Entrepreneur
• “Reinventing Real Estate” – Redfin’s Glenn Kelman and Zillow’s Spencer Raskoff

Read about these, and more, here. Read more →