Allen School News

The Washington State Opportunity Scholarship (WSOS) was established by the legislature in 2011 to help students from low- and middle-income families pursue degrees in STEM and health care fields in the face of rapidly rising tuition. Microsoft and Boeing donated $25 million each to get the program off the ground in 2011. Yesterday, Steve and Connie Ballmer made an $11 million gift, and Microsoft added $10 million more. All private donations are matched 1:1 with state funds.

Xconomy writes:

“Microsoft earlier this year kicked off a fundraising campaign for a new computer science building at UW with a $10 million donation. It also committed $40 million to the Global Innovation Exchange, a joint effort of the UW and Tsinghua University to create a graduate-level educational institution in Bellevue focused on technology, design, and entrepreneurship. [Microsoft Executive Vice President Brad] Smith has been instrumental in guiding Microsoft’s local contributions.

“[UW CSE’s Ed] Lazowska calls him ‘a saint.’ ‘As an individual, as a representative of Microsoft, and through the company, he has done many, many things in recent years that will make our region far stronger, now and for decades to come,’ he said.”

Xconomy also notes the shortage of capacity in computer science:

“‘The challenge is capacity, particularly in high quality programs at the bachelors level,’ said Susannah Malarkey, executive director of the Technology Alliance. ‘There is far more demand – from top students – than there is available space.

“Her organization’s latest benchmarking report (PDF), which tracks Washington’s performance against peers in areas including research capacity, investment, and education, found that in 2013, Washington ranked 39th out of the 50 states in science and engineering bachelor’s degree production per capita. (This, in part, may be why Seattle is experiencing so much angst about its current growth spurt and influx of new residents. Local technology giants and startup companies are recruiting people trained in computer science from around the world. What if more of them came from around the block?)

“At the University of Washington, home of the state’s premiere computer science program – indeed, one of the best in the country – demand for the computer science and engineering major from incoming freshmen this fall is second only to business administration, and not by much.”

Read more here.

Thank you, Steve and Connie Ballmer and Microsoft! Read more →

You’re smart enough to know that one aspect of this matters far more than any of the others: increased capacity for Computer Science & Engineering. But please humor our colleagues by reading the whole thing, here. Read more →

A terrific article on this summer’s Data Science for Social Good program spearheaded by the UW eScience Institute, which is led by CSE’s Ed Lazowska and Bill Howe.

“In June, the Institute launched the Data Science for Social Good program, an initiative that paired data scientists with students and local nonprofit and government partners. These interdisciplinary teams worked on projects to reduce family homelessness, improve paratransit bus service, foster community well-being, and map better sidewalk routes for people with mobility challenges …

“Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering, said the initiative demonstrates the utility of data science in tackling a host of societal challenges that students are eager to work on.

“‘I think people are energized by the ability to work on something that is both technically challenging and makes the world a better place,’ he said. ‘That’s what Data Science for Social Good is about.'”

Read more here. Read more →

The 2015 UW Engineering Lecture Series – three evening public lectures sponsored by the UW Alumni Association – is all CSE this year!

• Wednesday October 7: Franzi Roesner, “The Invisible Trail: Pervasive Tracking in a Connected Age”
• Wednesday October 21: Dieter Fox, “Our Robotic Future: Building Smart Robots that See in 3D”
• Wednesday November 3: Yoshi Kohno (along with Batya Friedman from the Information School and Ryan Calo from the School of Law), “Responsible Innovation: A Cross Disciplinary Lens on Privacy and Security Challenges”

All lectures are at 7:30 p.m. in Kane Hall 130.

Learn more here.

Read more →

Joe Traub – Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, as well as an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute – passed away earlier this week.

Joe was a giant of the field, and an inspiration. After receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1959, he was hired by Bell Laboratories. He continued at Bell Labs until 1970, when he began his professorial career at the University of Washington. Soon after, in 1971, he was offered the position of Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, a role in which he served until 1979. He left to help Columbia University build a Computer Science Department, and became its Founding Chair. In 1986, he was invited to start what is now the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board for the National Academies, serving as chair from 1986-92, then again from 2006-09.

Steve Lohr wrote a lovely tribute in today’s New York Times. Read more →

For anyone wondering if hard-working UW CSE students have lives outside of their academic studies: check out the great Seattle Times story on our very own Cory Black, computer science major and “freestyle magician.” Cory is competing in the Super Ball World Open Championships this week in Liberec, Czech Republic.

From the article:

“After years playing soccer, Cory Black realized he enjoyed doing tricks with the ball more than the game itself.

“Fortunately for Black, 19, a Bellevue resident and former Newport High School soccer player, he wasn’t alone. A few years back, he discovered the fledgling sport of freestyle football, where competitors perform individualized, trick-laden routines with a soccer ball that never touches their hands or the ground….

” ‘No matter how many tricks you learn to do with a ball, you can’t really use all of it in games,’ Black said of transitioning to this offshoot of the sport, which he stumbled onto while seeking out new soccer-ball tricks on YouTube. ‘So, it made sense, given that this was what I was really good at.’ ”

Read the entire article and watch a video of Cory performing here. Good luck, Cory! Read more →

UW Electrical Engineering has just announced the hiring of data analysis expert Eli Shlizerman, joint with UW Applied Mathematics.

Shlizerman’s research focuses on analyzing complex dynamic networks, such as the nervous system. Typically, such networks are extremely challenging to study because of their complex structure and intricate time-dependent dynamics. To overcome these challenges, Shlizerman developed analysis methods that fuse data analysis with dynamical system theory, which uses various equations to determine the behavior of complex systems.

Congratulations to Eli, to UW EE, and to their chair Radha Poovendran for moving forward rapidly in key interdisciplinary areas! And thanks to the Washington Research Foundation, whose support of the UW eScience Institute contributed to this recruitment.

Read the UW EE announcement here. Read more →

Washington Monthly’s College Guide and Rankings ranks four-year colleges in America on “three measures that would make the whole system better, if only schools would compete on them.” The first is upward mobility: Are schools enrolling and graduating students of modest means and charging them a reasonable price? The second is research: Are they preparing undergraduates to earn PhDs, and creating the new technologies and ideas that will drive economic growth and advance human knowledge? The third is service: Are schools encouraging their students to give back to the country by joining the military or the Peace Corps, or at least letting them use their work-study money to do community service rather than making them on-campus office slaves?”

The University of Washington is ranked among the top ten institutions in the nation – a group that includes UCSD, Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, UCLA, and Georgia Tech, among others.

In a separate “Best Bang for the Buck” ranking – “the best value for your money based on ‘net’ (not sticker) price, how well they do graduating the students they admit, and whether those students go on to earn at least enough to pay off their loans” – Washington Monthly places UW first in the west.

Always remember: The rankings in which we do well are authoritative, and worth of coverage in this space. The others are methodologically flawed. Read more →

UW CSE friend and benefactor Paul G. Allen will receive a 2015 Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy.

The Carnegie Medal goes to those who use their private wealth to improve the greater public good. Paul was selected for his work to protect the oceans, fight Ebola, save endangered species, help expand educational opportunities for girls, research the human brain and support the arts, according to the Carnegie statement.

Plus, of course, there’s our building …

Congratulations Paul!

GeekWire post here. Read more →

“What did you do on your summer vacation?” is a common refrain as students and faculty return to campus. For the students who took part in the UW eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program, they can honestly say they spent their summer trying to make the world a better place – and they did it with data.

DSSG gave students from a range of disciplines the opportunity to work with data scientists and public stakeholders to apply the latest data analysis and visualization techniques to address challenges faced by urban communities. Ben Romano of Xconomy was on hand last week as the teams presented the results of their work. From his excellent article posted today:

“Earn a degree in the field of data science these days and your ticket is punched: Google, Amazon, Facebook, leading-edge academic research, a well-funded startup—they’re all clamoring for people proficient in the tools and techniques needed to sift through today’s endless streams of digital data in search of something valuable.

Family homelessness team (project sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Building Changes)

“Social service organizations and local governments are confronting the data deluge, too, often without the capacity to pay the salaries that profit-driven companies can offer these sought-after experts.

“Enter the University of Washington’s just-concluded Data Science for Social Good summer internship. The program set interdisciplinary student teams, guided by professional data scientists and subject-matter experts, to work on thorny, real-world urban problems including family homelessness, paratransit bus service, community well-being, and sidewalk mapping for accessible route planning.

“During their final presentations last week, four student teams showed off tools they built over the summer that should provide lasting value to the organizations whose data they worked with, and the community at large. In sharing their process, the teams also highlighted the challenges inherent in drawing insight from big data.”

The article highlights the enthusiastic response to DSSG when it was announced: more than 140 students applied to the summer program, of which 16 students drawn from 10 disciplines were selected to participate. One team developed tools to help identify the programs that are most helpful to families facing homelessness. Another, advised by Anat Caspi of UW CSE’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, sought to improve the reliability and cost-effectiveness of local paratransit services for people with disabilities.

Read the complete article here and learn more about the DSSG student projects here.

Congratulations and thanks to all of the DSSG participants – students, faculty and community representatives – who demonstrated the power of data science to serve the social good! Read more →