Allen School News

Paul G. Allen, founder of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), aims to spur the development of artificial intelligence that can understand and answer general questions about the world. Today, AI2 CEO (and UW CSE professor) Oren Etzioni announced the creation of the Allen AI Science Challenge – inviting academic and industry researchers to demonstrate that their AI system can outperform all others on an 8th grade multiple choice science test.

“IBM has announced that Watson is ‘going to college’ and ‘diagnosing patients’…But before college and medical school — let’s make sure Watson can ace the 8 th grade science test. We challenge Watson, and all other interested parties — take the Allen AI Science Challenge,” Etzioni said in the press release announcing the competition.

The institute has partnered with Kaggle, an online community of data scientists that holds competitions to encourage the solution of complex data science problems, to administer the challenge. In addition to gaining serious cred in the computing community, competitors have a shot at a top prize of $50,000 for the AI system that answers the most questions correctly, with second and third prizes of $20,000 and $10,000, respectively. AI2 will announce the winners next February at the AAAI 2016 conference in Phoenix, Arizona.

Learn more and enter the competition here. Read the GeekWire article about the announcement here. Check out the recent breakthrough in AI research by AI2 and UW – which tested an AI system’s ability to solve SAT math questions – here. Read more →

A number of major technical conferences have introduced “Test of Time” awards recognizing research papers that have had the greatest impact with the benefit of (typically) ten or more years of hindsight.

The “ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame” is the “Test of Time” award for the operating systems community.

At this week’s ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, UW CSE professor Tom Anderson’s 1993 ACM SOSP paper “Efficient Software-Based Fault Isolation” – co-authored with Robert Wahbe, Steve Lucco, and Susan Graham when Tom was on the faculty at UC Berkeley – was inducted into the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame. The citation reads:

This paper demonstrated that compiler or code-rewriting techniques could isolate untrusted code modules, preventing them from writing or jumping to addresses outside their “fault domain,” without the overhead of crossing hardware-enforced address space boundaries, and without much increase in execution time of code within a domain. The paper inspired substantial subsequent research, and the basic techniques have been implemented in widely-deployed software, such as Web browsers.

(We also note with pride that two other papers inducted this week to the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame were co-authored by UW CSE Ph.D. alums: “The Google File System” from the 2003 SOSP, co-authored by Shun-Tak Leung, and “MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters” co-authored by Jeff Dean.)

UW CSE faculty and students have an extraordinary record of “Award Paper” and “Test of Time” recognition at the leading networking and operating systems conferences:

Award Papers

ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP): 1979, 1985, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2003

ACM Special Interest Group on Communications and Computer Networks Conference (SIGCOMM): 1993, 2002 (Student Paper), 2008, 2011, 2013, 2015 (Student Paper)

USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI): 2002 (Student Paper), 2004, 2014

USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI): 2007 (Student Paper), 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015

Test of Time Awards

ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame: 2009 (for a 1985 paper),2015 (for Tom’s 1993 paper)

ACM Special Interest Group on Communications and Computer Networks Conference (SIGCOMM) Test of Time Award: 2014 (for a 2002 paper) Read more →

UW CSE alumna A.J. Brush (Ph.D., ’02) is kicking off the CRA-W’s new series of virtual undergraduate town halls on Thursday, October 8th at 2:00 pm with a talk on inventing technology for homes and families.

The CRA-W virtual town hall series offers undergraduate students an opportunity to interact with leading women in the field of computing and get answers to their questions on topics ranging from how to get involved in undergraduate research, to professional development, to how to prepare for graduate school.

A.J., who focuses on human-computer interaction and co-leads the Lab of Things project at Microsoft Research, is a terrific role model for young women contemplating a career in computing. She serves as co-chair of CRA-W, a committee of the national Computing Research Association that works to increase the number of women engaged in computing research. In 2010, A.J. was recognized with the Borg Early Career Award for her positive contributions to the advancement of women in computing.

In a happy coincidence, A.J.’s town hall will be followed later in the day by a reception for women of the UW CSE community – an annual tradition in advance of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Learn more and register to participate in the virtual town hall here. Read more →

The 2015 UW CSE SOSP contingent: Adriana Szekeres, Ellis Michael, Niel Lebeck, Naveen Kr. Sharma, Pedro Fonseca, Dan R. K. Ports / Irene Zhang, Hank Levy, Tom Anderson

As always, UW CSE was well represented at the biennial ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. This was the 25th SOSP – the 50th anniversary of this premier operating systems conference.

Learn about UW CSE’s research in systems and networking here. Read more →

UW CSE alum and soon-to-be faculty member Kurtis Heimerl (UW CSE B.S. ’07, UC Berkeley Ph.D. ’13) co-founded startup company Endaga to help under-served communities in remote areas of the world to build small-scale, independent cellular networks that they own and run themselves. The company – which was spun out of UC Berkeley, where Kurtis completed his Master’s, Ph.D. and postdoc working with another UW CSE alum, Tapan Parikh (Ph.D., ’07) – epitomizes the potential for technology to meaningfully improve quality of life around the globe.

Now, thanks to Facebook, Kurtis and the Endaga team are starting a new chapter as they work to improve connectivity for people everywhere.

While this means that we have to wait a little longer for his official homecoming, we are excited to see what comes out of this new partnership. We are also delighted to report that Kurtis intends to spend a couple of days a month at UW CSE engaging with our faculty and students between now and when he takes up his faculty position next September.

Read more about the new partnership on the Endaga blog here.

Congratulations to Kurtis and his colleagues – we will enjoy watching their progress and look forward to the day Kurtis brings his considerable talents full-time to UW CSE! Read more →

Classes started this week on the beautiful UW campus – and in K-12 schools across the region. To mark the occasion, UW CSE professor James Fogarty and his son posed for the traditional back-to-school photo.

As James said, “Excited for the first day of classes. Awesome staff, awesome students. Let’s make stuff!”

Welcome back, everyone – we hope you had a great first week! Read more →

Well, it was actually more of a drifting match, but a good time was had by all!

Spencer Rascoff, Michael and Cari Schutzler, Rob Short, Brad Smith, and John and Patti Torode join Tom Alberg, Ed Lazowska, Hank Levy, and Judy Mahoney aboard Tom’s 77′ sloop Cascadia for a lovely evening on Puget Sound!

Read more →

Michael Ernst

A UW CSE research paper on proactive conflict detection, part of the speculative analysis project led by professors Michael Ernst and David Notkin, was rated the most practically relevant software engineering research of the last five years in a recent industrial relevance study.

The study, which was conducted by Microsoft Research and Singapore Management University, asked more than 500 software developers to rate the relevance of 571 research papers in order to determine how relevant software engineering research is to practitioners in the field. The greatest number of respondents rated the UW CSE project, which helps developers to collaborate more effectively and prevents potentially costly conflicts, as “essential” to software development practice.

When developers on a team work in parallel, they may make changes that are independently good but which, when combined, break the software. The UW CSE research team developed a tool, Crystal, that helps developers to identify, manage and prevent such conflicts by continuously merging people’s changes, before the software developers do so and without interfering with the developers. If the changes are in conflict, developers learn about them and can address them immediately, before wasting time on code that will later have to be reworked or discarded. If the changes are not in conflict, then developers can proceed with confidence, without having to worry about potentially negative consequences. In both cases, developers can spend less time coordinating with their teammates and more time getting their work done.

The project was conducted by Yuriy Brun (then a postdoc at UW CSE, now a professor at University of Massachusetts) and Reid Holmes (previously a postdoc at UW CSE, now a professor at University of British Columbia) alongside Michael Ernst and the late David Notkin of UW CSE’s Programming Languages & Software Engineering group.

To learn more about proactive conflict detection, watch this video and read the research paper here. Read the complete results of the industrial relevance study, which was published at the ESEC/FSE conference last month, here.

Michael Ernst’s name keeps cropping up in the search for excellence in software engineering: in 2013, Microsoft Academic Search ranked him 2nd among software engineering researchers worldwide, based on his work over the previous 10 years.

We have known for some time, of course, that our PLSE group is among the best. But it’s always nice to have external validation! Read more →

A phenomenal Washington Post article on Paul Allen’s attempt to understand the human mind, working from two directions: the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (led by UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni).

“Paul Allen has been waiting for the emergence of intelligent machines for a very long time. As a young boy, Allen spent much of his time in the library reading science-fiction novels in which robots manage our homes, perform surgery and fly around saving lives like superheroes. In his imagination, these beings would live among us, serving as our advisers, companions and friends.

“Now 62 and worth an estimated $17.7 billion, the Microsoft co-founder is using his wealth to back two separate philanthropic research efforts at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence that he hopes will hasten that future.

“The first project is to build an artificial brain from scratch that can pass a high school science test. It sounds simple enough, but trying to teach a machine not only to respond but also to reason is one of the hardest software-engineering endeavors attempted — far more complex than building his former company’s breakthrough Windows operating system, said to have 50 million lines of code.

“The second project aims to understand intelligence by coming at it from the opposite direction — by starting with nature and deconstructing and analyzing the pieces. It’s an attempt to reverse-engineer the human brain by slicing it up — literally — modeling it and running simulations.”

Tons of insights in this article! Read it here. Read more →

When it comes to Schnapsen – the national card game of Austria – UW CSE professor Martin Tompa’s got game. And now the rest of us can, too, with the help of his new book, Winning Schnapsen. Like the title suggests, it is the definitive guide to mastering the 300+ year-old game that enjoys a popular following in continental Europe.

Schnapsen is a two-person card game that has some similarities with another well-known game, Bridge. It is the perfect pastime for computer scientists, and Martin’s winning strategies employ a number of concepts that will sound familiar, such as expected value and other aspects of probability theory. In fact, Martin uses Schnapsen in his CSE 312 course on the foundations of computing – which inspired a group of students who took the course to establish a UW Schnapsen club.

Martin’s interest in Schnapsen was rekindled in 2012, when he worked with two former UW CSE Ph.D. students, Dick Garner and Jeff Scofield, to create an iPhone app against which users could play the game.

“The fact that their app beat me pretty consistently is what got me interested in figuring out how to play as well as it does,” Martin explained.

Now, thanks to Martin, everyone can win at Schnapsen. Learn more here. Read more →