Allen School News

Here’s a terrific interactive map produced by NPR’s “Planet Money” based on US Bureau of Labor Statistics data. It shows the most common job in each state, biennially from 1978 through 2014.

As of 2014, in Washington, Utah, Colorado, and Virginia, it’s “Software Developer.” (In the majority of the states, it’s “Truck Driver.”

Check it out here! And think about what we need to do in order to sustain this advantage, and ensure that our own kids are the beneficiaries of Washington’s booming tech economy! Read more →

Last week, we shared a video of Brad Anderson, corporate vice president at Microsoft, conducting a lunchtime interview on the go with UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska. That was part one; today, we bring you part two, which covered topics ranging from preparing students to succeed in a technology-driven world, to changing the world through computer science (and many other topics in between).

Watch this week’s episode of Lunch Break here, and check out Brad’s blog post here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Michael Ernst and former postdoc Werner Dietl (now a professor at the University of Waterloo) killed it at Oracle’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco this week, delivering three well-received talks that drew upon UW CSE research: “Preventing Errors Before They Happen,” “Collaborative Verification of the Information Flow for a High-Assurance App Store” (about the SPARTA project), and “Using Type Annotations to Improve Your Code.”

The common theme of the three talks was lightweight software verification. Ernst, Dietl and colleagues at UW CSE have created widely-used tools for verifying Java programs. In the course of their work, they observed that the usual approaches to verification are powerful but impractical. While the main success of formal verification is type systems, the built-in type system of a language like Java permits too many incorrect programs.

To address this, the UW team devised new ways to strengthen type systems, such as making them flow-sensitive, while retaining their speed and ease of use. They also created a tool called the Checker Framework that makes it easy to create a type system for all of Java.

The Checker Framework ships with dozens of powerful type systems that are very effective at finding bugs. More importantly, these type systems give a guarantee: if a type system does not issue any warnings, then the program contains no bugs (of a certain variety). The type systems are used at companies from Wall Street to Silicon Valley (Google runs them on hundreds of projects every day). Oracle was so impressed with the Checker Framework that they added syntactic support for it to the Java 8 language, enabling 9 million programmers to improve their code. The type systems are also backward compatible with previous versions of Java.

If you want to improve your Java code, download the Checker Framework here. Read more →

The 17^th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2015) is taking place this week in Lisbon, Portugal, and UW CSE is in the thick of the action. First, Ph.D. student Aditya Vashistha captured the Best Student Paper award for “Social Media Platforms for Low-income Blind People in India.” The paper, which presents the first-ever analysis of how visually impaired users in rural and peri-urban India benefit from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp and investigates barriers to social media engagement among this group, was co-authored by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Nicola Dell, professor Richard Anderson, and Ed Cutrell of Microsoft Research India.

Another team with a UW CSE connection captured a second Best Paper award. Affiliate faculty member Merrie Ringel Morris of Microsoft Research, along with her colleague Andrew Begel and Ben Wiedermann of Harvey Mudd College, earned top honors for their study of neurodiverse workers in the software industry. The project aims to improve employers’ understanding of the experiences and needs of individuals with autism spectrum disorder and other cognitive differences to support a more inclusive workforce – a topic that has received very little attention before now.

Read Aditya’s paper here, and Merrie’s paper here.

Nice job, everyone! Read more →

UW CSE professor Luis Ceze, who earned his Ph.D. in 2007 from the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was recognized by his alma mater with its Distinguished Alumni Educator Award. The award, which is based on nominations by members of the UIUC computer science community, recognizes faculty and alumni “who have made outstanding contributions to computer science education and research, and…who excel at motivating computer science students.”

That certainly describes Luis, who has advised a dozen graduate students and received the 2010 ACM Undergraduate Teacher of the Year Award here at UW CSE.

Congratulations to Luis on this latest, well-deserved recognition!

Luis and his fellow award recipients were recognized at a banquet on Friday. Read more about it here. Read more →

The Seattle Times published an article yesterday examining how developers are using data to tame traffic and aid commuters in the region. One of the featured apps, OneBusAway, originated as a UW CSE research project to help public transit users plan their trip by providing real-time system information. Another, Access Map, was developed by a team of students advised by UW CSE professor Alan Borning and Anat Caspi, executive director of UW CSE’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, to enable people with limited mobility to identify accessible routes throughout the city. The app, which won first place at the City of Seattle’s Hack the Commute competition, was further refined as part of the UW eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program over the summer.

From the article:

“Commuters have turned to a variety of apps for relief — from Waze to OneBusAway. And behind the scenes, governments, private companies and garage hobbyists are tinkering with a mixture of public and private data that feeds those apps. They believe better information could help make stressed infrastructure more efficient.

“‘It’s expensive to run additional bus service and really expensive to build rail systems and increase road capacity,’ said Alan Borning, a University of Washington computer science professor and a OneBusAway board member.

“‘Better information is cheaper.’”

Read the full article, which also quotes UW CSE Ph.D. alum (and creator of OneBusAway) Brian Ferris, here. Check out a sampling of our previous coverage of OneBusAway here and here, and of Access Map here and here. Read more →

UW CSE’s Center for Game Science has invited players of its popular protein folding game, Foldit, to engage in a little friendly competition with students at the University of Michigan.

After crystallographers in Michigan’s Bardwell Lab solved the structure of a protein, they put off publishing the results in order to give a class of undergraduate biochemistry students a chance to do the same. Knowing the Foldit community loves a good challenge, the Bardwell Lab invited our players to try their hand at the puzzle, as well.

Foldit players and the Michigan students have until November 19th to solve the Electron Density Challenge and earn bragging rights. Who knows – they could outperform the crystallographers themselves!

Learn more here, and check out the puzzle here. Happy folding! Read more →

DataBlade, a cloud-based data analytics company co-founded by UW CSE alumni Jeremy Brudvik (B.S., ’08) and Allen Chen (B.S., ’07), was recently profiled by GeekWire as part of its “Startup Spotlight” series. DataBlade, which bills itself as “data insights without the overhead,” is one of 11 emerging companies that make up local incubator Techstars’ class of 2015.

Chen, who is DataBlade’s CEO, identified the company’s secret sauce as, “The strength of our team and the depth of our combined experiences in making really incredible products.” When hiring, Chen said he and Brudvik, who serves as DataBlade’s CTO, look for people who are passionate about the company’s mission and share their core values of “ownership, empathy, experimentation, growth, and wellness.”

This is not Chen’s first foray into the startup world with his fellow UW CSE alumni. He previously co-founded CloudPress, which was acquired last year by News Corp., along with Mohamed El-Zohairy (B.S., ’07) and Bobby Mathews (B.S., ’08).

Read GeekWire’s profile of DataBlade here.

Congratulations to Jeremy and Allen on the launch! Read more →

Seattle Times reporter Rachel Lerman stopped by the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering on Wednesday to witness firsthand the magic and the mayhem that is established company recruiting day for UW CSE students.

As she notes in her article, “It was nearly impossible to walk unimpeded through the huge atrium of the University of Washington’s computer science building Wednesday. The space had been taken over by dozens of booths run by companies hungry for engineering talent, and hundreds of students were there to meet with recruiters.”

As CSE’s external relations director, Kay Beck-Benton, pointed out for the article, the event has expanded to the point that the atrium is full to overflowing — with another dozen companies recruiting in another room on the 6th floor — and still we have a waiting list.

Read the full article here, and see our previous coverage of this year’s recruiting fairs here and here. Read more →

An Associated Press story that is being picked up by hundreds of outlets nationwide highlights the efforts of UW CSE and others to recruit and retain more women in the computing field. The article features UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska and students Megan Hopp, Meredith Lampe, Aishwarya Mandyam and Karishma Mandyam sharing their perspectives on what works when it comes to encouraging women to consider a career in computer science.

From the article:

“Last June, 31 percent of UW’s computer science undergraduate degrees were awarded to women, more than twice the national average. Nationwide, just 14 percent of computer-science college graduates were women in 2014, according to a Computing Research Association survey.

“‘There’s no silver bullet. You have to do lots of little things all the time,’ said Ed Lazowska, UW professor of computer science and engineering. UW has introduced K-12 students and teachers to computer science through summer camps. A seminar explores the role of women in computer science, and about 40 percent of the school’s teaching assistants are women.

Megan Hopp, a UW senior, said it was inspiring to see so many female teaching assistants when she took the intro courses. She’s now a teaching assistant for an upper level course and makes a point to reach out to other female students to tell them to consider the field.

She had not considered computer science because she thought it was too nerdy, but her older brother pestered her to take the introductory course.

“‘I had that epiphany moment and realized how much I love it,’ she said.”

Read the full article here, and check out past coverage of UW CSE’s efforts on gender diversity here and here. Read more →