Allen School News

A small portion of the UW CSE family in attendance at Donald Tsang’s memorial service: Ed Lazowska (faculty), Elizabeth Walkup (Ph.D. 1995), Sean Sandys (Ph.D. 2002), Lauren Bricker (Ph.D. 1998), Erik Selberg (Ph.D. 1999)

The many intersecting circles of Donald Tsang’s life celebrated that life today at UW’s Center for Urban Horticulture – including a large number of Donald’s UW CSE graduate student classmates from the early 1990s.

Donald – one of the earliest developers at Amazon.com after his time at UW – passed away unexpectedly on September 2 at age 47, leaving behind his wife Daisy, his two daughters Daniella and Constantina, a large extended family, and an enormous network of friends.

Learn more here. Read more →

“Can this most casual of women be a strong president of a major university? Lazowska, the computer-science professor, thinks she can.

“The day after she was named interim president, Cauce gave a town hall address to the faculty, one that had been scheduled months in advance. She was still speaking as the provost, but she was soon to wear the mantle of president.

“Here’s what Lazowska heard that day in February:

“‘Every bit of it was a president speaking. She flipped a switch. She was still genuine, she still spoke from experience, she still related to us, but, without being the least bit stuffy, she was 100 percent presidential.'”

Read more here. Read more →

1996 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Gail Murphy – Professor of  Computer Science and Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia, and co-founder and Chief Scientist at Tasktop Technologies Incorporated, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in the Class of 2015.

Gail’s research interests are in software engineering with a particular interest in improving the productivity of knowledge workers, including software developers. Her UW CSE Ph.D. advisor was the late David Notkin. She has received wide-ranging recognition, including the 2014 UW CSE Alumni Achievement Award (along with her fellow 1996 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Dean), the 2011 ACM SIGSOFT Retrospective Impact Paper Award, and the 2008 UW College of Engineering Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement.

As a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Gail joins fellow UW CSE Ph.D. alum and fellow UBC Computer Science faculty member Anne Condon.

Quoting from the Royal Society announcement: “Gail Murphy, une chercheuse en génie logiciel, a contribué à accroître la connaissance des aspects pratiques du développement du logiciel et a développé des approches novatrices pour améliorer l’efficacité du travail des ingénieurs logiciels. Ses travaux sur les systèmes de recommandation pour le génie logiciel ont un impact significatif à la fois sur la recherche et sur la pratique.”

Whatever … Congratulations Gail! Read more →

York University (near Toronto) plasters commuter trains with advertisements stating “THIS IS ENGINERING.”

Unfortunately, yes, it is … Read more →

Nick Wingfield writes in the New York Times:

“Shwetak N. Patel looked over the 2013 Mercedes C300 and saw not a sporty all-wheel-drive sedan, but a bundle of technology.

“There were the obvious features, like a roadside assistance service that communicates to a satellite. But Dr. Patel, a computer science professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, flipped up the hood to show the real brains of the operation: the engine control unit, a computer attached to the side of the motor that governs performance, fuel efficiency and emissions.

“To most car owners, this is an impregnable black box. But to Dr. Patel, it is the entry point for the modern car tinkerer — the gateway to the code.

“‘If you look at all the code in this car,’ Dr. Patel said, ‘it’s easily as much as a smartphone if not more.’

“New high-end cars are among the most sophisticated machines on the planet, containing 100 million or more lines of code. Compare that with about 60 million lines of code in all of Facebook or 50 million in the Large Hadron Collider.”

Read more here.

Research conducted 5+ years ago by a team lead by UW CSE’s Yoshi Kohno and UCSD’s Stefan Savage (a UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus) is widely credited with launching the field of automotive security; read more here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. student Sam Elliott was recently recognized by ScotlandIS, the trade association representing Scotland’s digital technologies industry, with the Lockheed Martin Software Engineering Project Award. Sam accepted the award last week at an event in Edinburgh celebrating the 26th annual Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards, which recognize the best undergraduate software projects nominated by universities across Scotland.

Sam received the award for his bachelor’s dissertation project, A Concurrency System for Idris and Erlang, during his undergraduate studies in computer science at the University of St Andrews.

From the award announcement:

“[T]he project developed by Archibald ‘Sam’ Elliot takes an important step towards addressing the problem of writing large scale software. It combines Idris, a new programming language developed at the University of St Andrews, with Erlang, a programming language designed for building robust distributed systems, creating a system for running programs in a robust, industrial strength, concurrent environment.”

Sam has joined UW CSE’s Programming Languages & Software Engineering group, working with professors Zach Tatlock and Xi Wang.

Read the ScotlandIS announcement here, and a University of St Andrews blog post on Sam’s big win here. Read Sam’s dissertation here.

Congratulations, Sam! Read more →

We’re thrilled to announce a new 6-course Machine Learning Specialization available on Coursera, taught by faculty from UW CSE and UW Statistics, and offered in conjunction with UW CSE startup Dato.

Course 1 – “Machine Learning Foundations: A Case Study Approach” – begins on September 22.

Course 2 – “Regression” – starts in November.

Course 3 – “Classification” – starts in December.

Course 4 – “Clustering & Retrieval” – starts in February.

Course 5 – “Recommender Systems & Dimensionality Reduction” – starts in March.

Course 6 – “Machine Learning Capstone: An Intelligent Application with Deep Learning” – starts in April.

Learn more here.

And while you’re at it, don’t miss our 4-course Data Science at Scale Specialization available on Coursera – an effort led by Bill Howe from CSE and the UW eScience Institute:

Course 1 – “Data Manipulation at Scale: Systems and Algorithms” – begins on September 28.

Course 2 – “Practical Predictive Analytics: Models and Methods” – starts in October.

Course 3 – “Communicating Results: Visualization, Ethics, Reproducibility” – starts in November.

Course 4 – “Data Science at Scale – Capstone Project” – starts in December.

Learn more here.

Want to get your feet wet? Try our single course Introduction to Data Science – a one-course version of the Data Science at Scale Specialization.

Learn more here.

The University of Washington: A global leader in data science. Read more →

UW CSE continues its phenomenal record in hiring!

The addition of Ras Bodik – formerly a full professor at UC Berkeley – builds on other recent hires to give UW what is arguably the top programming languages group in the world.

Sham Kakade – formerly at Microsoft Research New England – augments other faculty in machine learning in CSE and other departments to make UW a true powerhouse in this critically important field.

Kurtis Heimerl, a UW CSE bachelors alum and UC Berkeley Ph.D. alum, will join us after concluding activity at his startup, focused on technology for the developing world.

Sergey Levine sits at the interface between machine learning and robotics; he’s finishing a postdoc at Berkeley, following receipt of his Ph.D. from Stanford.

Dan Ports, a superb MIT computer systems Ph.D., joined our faculty following a postdoc at UW.

Katharina Reinecke joins us this fall from an assistant professorship at the University of Michigan. Her research concerns the culturally appropriate presentation of information – a novel and important twist on HCI.  She is an experimentalist who builds systems that allow approaches to be investigated “in the wild.”

Thomas Rothvoss, arguably one of the top two young theoretical computer scientists (the other one is already on our faculty), moved part of his appointment to CSE from the Mathematics departments.

Last but not least, Zorah Fung, a CSE bachelors alum, has joined our teaching-track faculty, splitting her time between CSE and Bay Area CSE alumni startup Sift Science.

Read more about all of these terrific folks here. Read more →

Sample geometry problem

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) today announced a significant breakthrough in AI research in the form of GeoS, a new AI system that is capable of solving SAT geometry problems as well as the average American 11th grade student through a combination of visual processing and textual analysis.  The creation of GeoS was led by AI2, in collaboration with UW faculty and students with expertise in artificial intelligence, natural language processing and computer vision at the University of Washington. AI2 – established by investor, philanthropist, and technologist Paul G. Allen in 2004 to advance artificial intelligence research for the public good – is led by former UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni.

Oren Etzioni

From the press release:

“[GeoS] uses a combination of computer vision to interpret diagrams, natural language processing to read and understand text and a geometric solver to achieve a 49 percent accuracy on official SAT test questions. If these results were extrapolated to the entire Math SAT test, the computer roughly achieved an SAT score of 500 (out of 800), the average test score for 2015….

“‘Unlike the Turing Test, standardized tests such as the SAT provide us today with a way to measure a machine’s ability to reason and to compare its abilities with that of a human,’ said Oren Etzioni, CEO of AI2. ‘Much of what we understand from text and graphics is not explicitly stated, and requires far more knowledge than we appreciate. Creating a system to be able to successfully take these tests is challenging, and we are proud to achieve these unprecedented results.'”

Ali Farhadi

“Said Ali Farhadi, senior research manager for Vision at AI2 and UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering, ‘We are excited about GeoS’s performance on real-world tasks. Our biggest challenge was converting the question to a computer-understandable language. One needs to go beyond standard pattern-matching approaches for problems like solving geometry questions that require in-depth understanding of text, diagram and reasoning.'”

In addition to Etzioni and Farhadi, the research team included UW CSE Ph.D. student Minjoon Seo, who contributed to the project as part of an internship at AI2; UW EE professor (and UW CSE adjunct professor) Hanna Hajishirzi; and UW B.S. alum Clint Malcolm. The team presented its technical paper at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) in Lisbon, Portugal.

Read the press release here and the research paper here. Check out John Markoff’s New York Times article on how the GeoS breakthrough fits into the broader landscape of AI research, with additional quotes from Oren and Ali, here. The Washington Post also published a nice piece on its “Speaking of Science” blog here.

Congratulations to Paul, Oren, Ali, Hanna, Minjoon, and Clint on this phenomenal achievement! Read more →

DawgBytes (“A Taste of CSE”), UW CSE’s vibrant K-12 outreach program, has just concluded a summer of daycamps for elementary, middle school, and high school students, and the 9th year of our CS4HS teacher workshop. The academic year will be just as exciting. Check it out here! Read more →