CSE Undergrad News

It will be rescheduled during the winter quarter.

Overview:
11/5: Google Office Hours
11/6: Opscode Tech Talk
11/7: Microsoft Office Hours
11/7: Groupon Tech Talk
11/8: Zynga Office Hours
11/8: Redfin Tech Talk

Google Office Hours
11/5; 12:00pm – 1:30pm; Atrium

Opscode Tech Talk: Building Real-World Teams & Real Distributed Systems
11/6; 6:00pm – 7:00pm; EEB 125
Christopher Brown, CTO at Opscode, a local Seattle-based startup, will talk about his experiences hiring for, designing, and implementing large-scale services like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Opscode Chef. He’ll cover both the technical design aspects of fault-tolerant, scalable distributed systems, and the human aspects of building teams and working in small, fast-paced operations-focused environments. This will be highly interactive, with questions welcome at any time.

Opscode will be providing a taco/taco salad bar from Taco Del Mar, with both meat and vegetarian options.

Microsoft Office Hours
11/7; 1:00pm – 3:00pm; Atrium

Groupon Tech Talk: Computational Marketing with Vinayak Hedge
11/7; 6:00pm – 7:30pm; EEB 125
Groupon’s VP of Engineering in Seattle, Vinayak Hedge, to talk about Groupon and one of it’s newest ventures – computational marketing!

Zynga Office Hours
11/8; 12:00pm – 3:00pm; Atrium

Redfin Tech Talk
11/8; 6:00pm – 7:30pm; EEB 125

Overview:
10/29: Mock Technical Interviews
10/30: Amazon Tech Talk
10/31: Google UW Halloween 2.0
10/31: Microsoft Office Hours
11/1: Amazon Office Hours
11/1: Facebook Tech Talk

Mock Technical Interviews
10/29; 6:00pm – 8:15pm; Atrium
All CSE majors who will be looking for a full-time job this year should consider participating in our CSE Mock Technical Interviews. At this event representatives from local high-tech companies will run CSE students through a single half-hour simulated technical interview. The sessions will place students one-on-one with a hiring manager or engineer who regularly conducts technical interviews. Interview questions will include puzzles, logic, data structures, coding and more with a ten minute feedback session following.

Amazon Tech Talk
10/30; 6:00pm – 7:00pm; EEB 125
Morgan Akers, Software Development Manager will discuss “How to build a scalable, extensible configuration store for distributed systems.”

Bring your friends and come grab a free Amazon t-shirt and food!

Google UW Halloween 2.0
10/31; 12:25pm – 1:25pm; Atrium
Dress up, get lunch and Google swag -> 😉
3 winning costumes each get a Galaxy Nexus -> 😀

[Categories for Costumes Judging]
Most Creative
Nerdiest
Best Home Made

Microsoft Office Hours
10/31; 1:00pm – 3:00pm; Atrium

Amazon Office Hours
11/1; 12:00pm – 1:30pm; Atrium

Facebook Tech Talk
11/1; 6:15pm – 7:15pm; EEB 125
Interested in seeing what it takes to build social features into a mobile application? Facebook recently published an extensive open source codebase to make Facebook integration for iOS as simple to build and robust as possible. This is a hands-on discussion (yes, there will be code!) that will leave you with a sense of the opportunity around social and mobile, as viewed through the lens of building Facebook applications for iPhone and iPad devices. Jason Clark (speaker) is one of the engineers responsible for Facebook’s mobile developer platform; watch him build a social iOS application from scratch – syntax errors and all. Then go add social features to all your apps! Dinner and Facebook giveaways will be provided to attendees.

Please RSVP to this event page to reserve your spot: www.facebook.com/uwfalltechtalk – all of the logistical/location details are included in this link so make sure to read it carefully!

Overview:
10/22: Google Office Hours
10/22: “Startups…Seattle…You?”
10/23: Tech Talk: Working in a Startup Environment
10/23: Startup Recruiting Fair
10/25: Industry Affiliates Recruiting Fair
10/25: Intel Talk: College Grad Careers at Intel

Google Office Hours
10/22; 12:00pm – 3:00pm; Atrium

Startups…Seattle…You?
10/22; 6:00pm – 7:30pm; EEB 125
Ever consider working for startup? Find out what it’s like. Come for the food and drink. Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask. Hear first hand from successful leaders of the startup world. Questions? Contact yamamoto@cs.washington.edu

Tech Talk: Working in a Startup Environment
10/23; 2:30pm – 3:30pm; Commons

Startup Recruiting Fair
10/23; 3:30pm – 6:00pm; Atrium
Bring your resume! Come talk to companies! A list of recruiting companies may be viewed here: http://www.cs.washington.edu/industrial_affiliates/meetings/2012/recruiting_co/startups/

Industry Affiliates Recruiting Fair
10/25; 11:00am – 4:00pm; Atrium and Commons
Bring your resume and chat with recruiters from lots of companies! A list of recruiting companies may be viewed here: http://www.cs.washington.edu/industrial_affiliates/meetings/2012/recruiting_co/

Intel Talk: College Grad Careers at Intel
10/25; 5:30pm – 6:30pm; EEB 125
Representatives from the following groups will be on hand to share opportunities and experiences with you: Early SW Intern Program; Mobile Communications Group; Software and Services Group; Intel Architecture Development Group; Intel Custom Foundry; Corporate Services; Logic Technology Development; Assembly Test Manufacturing.

Please bring your resume! Raffles and food provided!! For more info on opportunities to join our Intel team, visit: intel.com/jobs or @MikeAtIntel

Overview:
10/15: Technical Interview Coaching
10/16: Qualcomm Office Hours
10/16: Microsoft Tech talk
10/17: Microsoft Office Hours
10/17: Zynga Office Hours
10/17: Qualcomm Tech Talk
10/18: Amazon Office Hours
10/18: eBay Info Session
10/18: Yelp Tech Talk
10/19-10/20: Google: 24 Hours of Good

Technical Interview Coaching:
10/15; 3:30pm – 5:30pm; Atrium
This event is a must for CSE undergrads who will be interviewing for a full-time or internship position over the next year and would benefit from a preview of the technical interview questions they will face (this should include almost all CSE ugrads!)

At this event technical interviewers from the largest local high-tech firms will meet with groups of 2-4 students. The interviewers will describe their technical interview process, give students a few sample questions, and coach students on what they look for in answers. The sessions will include sample programming questions, logic questions and puzzles. Our experts will also provide examples of what they ask in actual technical interviews and how to successfully answer to land the job.

Students will attend three individual sessions of 15 minutes each with three different company volunteers.

Qualcomm Office Hours:
10/16; 10:00am – 4:00pm; CSE 021

Microsoft Tech Talk:
10/16; 6:00pm – 7:30pm; EEB 125
Come learn how you can be what’s next! Food will be provided. Bring your resume for a chance to win an Xbox/Kinect!

Questions? Want to apply online? www.microsoft.com/university

Microsoft Office Hours:
10/17; 10:00am – 12:00pm; Atrium

Zynga Office Hours:
10/17; 12:30pm – 3:30pm; Atrium

Qualcomm Tech Talk
10/17; 5:30pm – 7:00pm; EEB 125
Join us for a Tech Talk on 10/17 from 5:30pm-7:00pm in EE125. Director of Engineering, Marcello Lioy will be presenting to us on AllJoyn. Bring your resume, there will be lots of food and giveaways.

www.qualcomm.com/careers

Amazn Office Hours
10/18; 12:00pm – 1:30pm; Atrium

eBay Info Session:
10/18; 4:00pm – 5:00pm; HUB 145
We are actively hiring for full-time positions — come listen, watch and learn what eBay Inc. has to offer.

Max Stepin, Senior Director of Engineering at eBay Max manages the eBay Development team working on shipping features. These features include delivery times estimates, and cross-border shipping.

Before eBay, Max worked for 11 years at Microsoft in operating systems and online services. Peggy MacDonald, Product Manager with eBay Peggy has been working on eBay mobile apps since 2008 when the iPhone app first launched.

Yelp Tech Talk:
10/18; 6:00 – 7:00pm; EEB 125
Yelp is holding a tech talk about our latest search projects, and you’re invited! Join our fb group, invite your friends, and bring your resume for our iPad raffle!

Come hear Jim, Yelp Software Engineer extraordinaire, talk about Data Visualization here at Yelp! We’re catering free dinner from Taste of India; rated 4 stars on yelp.com FMI: http://www.facebook.com/events/420812351311668/

Google: 24 Hours of Good
10/19 – 10/20; 5:00pm – 5:00pm (24 hours); Google Fremont Office
Sign up has closed. This is a reminder for anyone who has signed up for the 24 Hours of Good hackathon!

Welcome to Autumn quarter! Please check out all of the events for this coming week.

Overview:
10/1: VMWare Tea Time
10/1: VMWare Tech Talk: The Software-Defined Datacenter
10/2: Microsoft Office Hours
10/2: Tableau Software Tech Talk: Data Analysis for Humans
10/3: Employer Panel
10/4: Amazon Office Hours
10/4: Palantir + Linux Puzzlehunt

ACM-W VMWare Tea Time:
Oct 1; 3:00pm – 4:30pm; CSE 403
Come drink tea, eat snacks, and chat with VMWare at ACM-W’s first Tea Time of the Year! Tea Times are casual, so come when you are available and stay for as long as you like.

VMWare Tech Talk: The Software-Defined Datacenter
Oct 1; 5:45pm – 7:20pm; EEB 125
At VMware, we are pursuing a vision of the Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC) where the infrastructure, including compute, storage, and networking, has been virtualized and fully automated by software. The promise of the SDDC is to enable IT organizations to deliver services with greater agility, lower cost, and increased reliability. This talk will cover the concepts behind the SDDC, and explore some of the technologies we are developing (e.g., storage and high availability) that underpin this vision.

Microsoft Office Hours
Oct 2; 1:00pm – 3:00pm; Atrium

Tableau Software Tech Talk: Data Analysis for Humans
Oct 2; 6:00pm – 7:30pm; EEB 125
At Tableau, our mission is to help people “see and understand data”. This talk will cover the challenges of making data useful, from building a new analytical engine from the ground up to creating a new language for data analysis to building world-class user experiences that let a wide variety of people ask and answer questions of their data.

Employer Panel
Oct 3; 5:30pm – 6:30pm; EEB 105
All CSE undergraduates who plan on pursuing an internship or full-time employment in 2012-13 should attend our CSE sponsored Employer Panel. The Employer Panel will be the first in a series of highly recommended CSE career events designed to prepare our CSE undergraduates for the recruiting process.

The Employer Panel event will feature a panel of HR reps and recent CSE graduates from local software companies who will provide details on what to expect from employers in the coming months so you can take the steps to land the job of your dreams. Attendee questions are very much encouraged. You should leave this event with a better understanding of the timing and direction of your upcoming job search.

Amazon Office Hours
Oct 4; 12:00pm – 1:30pm; Atrium

Palantir + Linux Puzzlehunt
Oct 4; 6:00pm – 9:00pm; EEB 125
Bring your laptop! Food: Chutney’s Bistro provided.
1st place: Nexus 7 Tablet; 2nd place: $50 Amazon gift card
Questions? Email: linux-puzzle@palantir.com

Reminder—
Malcolm MacIver from Northwestern will be giving the robotics
colloquium tomorrow (Friday).  He does very interesting work on
electrolocation in fish and robots.

Title:
Robotic Electrolocation

Malcolm MacIver, Northwestern University
2:30 pm
May 25
Paul Allen Center, CSE 305

Abstract:
Electrolocation is used by the weakly electric fish of South America
and Africa to navigate and hunt in murky water where vision is
ineffective. These fish generate an AC electric field that is
perturbed by objects nearby that differ in impedance from the water.
Electroreceptors covering the body of the fish report the amplitude
and phase of the local field. The animal decodes electric field
perturbations into information about its surroundings. Electrolocation
is fundamentally divergent from optical vision (and other imaging
methods) that create projective images of 3D space. Current
electrolocation methods are also quite different from electrical
impedance tomography. We will describe current electrolocation
technology, and progress on development of a propulsion system
inspired by electric fish to provide the precise movement capabilities
that this short-range sensing approach requires.

Bio:
Malcolm MacIver is Associate Professor at Northwestern University with
joint appointments in the Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical
Engineering departments. He is interested in the neural and mechanical
basis of animal behavior, evolution, and the implications of the close
coupling of movement with gathering information for our understanding
of intelligence and consciousness. He also develops immersive art
installations that have been exhibited internationally.

—
Joshua R. Smith
Associate Professor, Depts. of CSE & EE, University of Washington
Box 352350 [Express mail: add “185 Stevens Way”]
Seattle, WA 98195-2350, USA
Office: CSE 556; Lab: EE 359
Email: jrs@cs.washington.edu Phone: 206 685 2094, Fax: 206 543 2969

Please RSVP (the the address at the end of this message)  if you’d like to join us at this student project fair

HCI Project Fair – Student Presentations

Each fall, students in UW CSE’s Human-Computer Interaction courses organize into teams and spend a quarter designing, prototyping, and most importantly evaluating a user interface. CSE 441 is our second quarter, advanced HCI course, which allows the top teams to continue to iterate and improve on their designs.

Come join us on Thursday, June 7th, from 10:30 AM – 1:00 PM to see what the students created this quarter. Lunch is on us. It is a great chance to meet top graduating students in computer science, informatics, design, & digital arts who have an interest in user interfaces. This select group of students includes the designers, programmers, and evaluation specialists of the future.

The students had an especially challenging design charge the past two quarters. They were asked to create a mobile computing application that addressed one of the following design briefs: change (transform your or your family’s behavior), crowd sourced mobile AI (e.g., use Mechanical Turk to give perfect vision, speech recognition, etc.), creativity (help people be more creative in their everyday lives). The resulting projects have interesting mobile interfaces and usage models.

The HCI Project Fair will take place on the UW campus, in the Gates Commons (691 Paul Allen Center), University of Washington, Seattle campus. Details on the project fair activities, this quarter’s projects, and how to get there follow.

Activities:

I will use the first 15 minutes to give an overview of what was taught in the HCI course this quarter and how the student projects were structured. Then, the three student teams will each give 25 minute presentations, showing you the design and evolution of their interfaces over the two quarters.

Following the formal presentation from around noon until 1 PM we will have food, drinks, and a demo/poster session to give you a chance to meet the students and see their projects up close.

This is your opportunity to find out more about the current state of the art of human-computer interaction education, to learn its role in a university curriculum, and to see some novel ideas presented by some of the top graduating seniors in the country.

Projects:

The three innovative group projects look at applications and services on mobile platforms (e.g., Android and Augmented Reality).

RSVP & Directions:

The project fair will be held in the Gates Commons, room 691 of the Paul Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering.

Please RSVP to Nikki Lee (nikki+HCIFair@nicoleblee.com) and let us know if you need a parking permit.

Hey everyone,

Research Night is a great opportunity for you to get involved in undergrad research. If you’re still looking for something to do this summer, why not come check out the cool research projects you could be working on here at the university? If you’re looking to start doing research in the fall, here’s your chance to find out what’s going down.

We’re going to be holding research night tomorrow, May 22, from 4pm – 6:30pm.

The event will start in EEB125 with a talk given by a faculty speaker at 4pm and then an undergrad research panel at 4:30pm.

This will be followed by a poster session in the CSE Atrium at 5pm.

Hope to see you there!

ChronoZoom is a really neat system built by Microsoft Research:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/chronozoom/

http://www.chronozoomproject.org/

There will be a presentation and demo on May 18 at 10 a.m. in the Simpson Center for the Humanities, Communications 202.

Among other things, MSR is hoping that some UW CSE students might be interested in contributing to further development of ChronoZoom.  Their development partners thus far have been Berkeley (for content) and a university in Russia (for technology).

Here’s a description of the May 18 talk, followed by a description of partnership opportunities.

=====

Title: ChronoZoom: Bridging the Gap Between the Humanities and Sciences

Abstract: Imagine a world where scientists, researchers, students, and teachers collaborate to share historical information through images, videos, documents, charts interactive tours, and more. Imagine a world where leading academics publish their findings to the world in a manner that can easily be accessed and compared. ChronoZoom is an open-source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything and supporting the emerging field of Big History. Big History is the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity. ChronoZoom seeks to bridge the gap between the humanities and sciences by enabling all kinds of information to be visually presented and organized.  In this session, learn about what challenges we have in taxonomy and content and how humanistic researchers and ischools can help. Understand what ChronoZoom hopes to  accomplish with the research community and how computer scientist can better work with scientists and humanists.  We will then provide a behind the scenes look at bringing ChronoZoom to life through HTML5 and Windows Azure. We will address the various visualization challenges, data management issues and user interface questions solved in this project and the complex algorithms created.  We’ll discuss what we hope to accomplish in the next phases of ChronoZoom development and how other computer science PIs can work with the team.

=====

ChronoZoom Project:

Background: Big History is the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity. Envisioned as a new discipline launched 25 years ago by Dr. David Christian at Macquarie University, Australia.

Big History invites scholars of the humanities and scientists from fields like geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, astronomy, and cosmology to work together in developing the broadest possible view of the past. However, incorporating everything we know about the past into Big History greatly increases the amount of data to be dealt with.  A serious problem in teaching Big History courses is conveying the vast stretches of time from the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, to the present, and clarifying the immensely distinct time scales of cosmic history, Earth and life history, human prehistory, and human history. A traditional linear timeline is ill equipped to convey the vast differences in time scales. Furthermore, incorporating the plethora of data from so many fields and disciplines into a single, comprehensive view has proven difficult. To present Big History properly, a completely new kind of tool had to be developed.

ChronoZoom, developed in collaboration between Microsoft Research and Roland Saekow and Walter Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley, overcomes the challenges of visualizing Big History. “By letting us move effortlessly through this enormous wilderness of time, getting used to the differences in scale, ChronoZoom helps to break down the time-scale barriers to communication between scholars,” says Professor Alvarez.  One goal is to have educators and students use ChronoZoom to deepen their study of history. At the university level, our goal is for ChronoZoom to allow scholars and scientists to bring together graphically a wide range of data sets from various disciplines and to search for connections and causal relationships that better explain the universe and our world.

About the Project:  ChronoZoom 2.0 is focused on providing a dynamic, interactive cloud based data visualization tool for Big History. When completed, this project will be online and freely available to anyone interested in using it as an educator, a student and/or a researcher.  ChronoZoom is already a solution provided to the Outer Curve Foundation and is available on codeplex for computer scientist around the world to modify and use the code, add to the code and work on the project. The vision is to enable innovative ways of teaching Big History and empower interdisciplinary research. ChronoZoom is truly a community based project with development being done by Moscow State University and Content leadership by UC Berkeley.  ChronoZoom is a highly curated, peer reviewed historic timeline full of audio, video, images, documents, etc.  that can help explain the interplay between sciences and humanities.  This is a partnership with the International Big History Association, Gates Big History Project, UC Berkeley and Microsoft Research Connections.  Visit: http://research.microsoft.com/chronozoom for more details, visit http://www.chronozoomproject.org to see the tool.

What is the Opportunity:  ISCHOOLS:  In growing ChronoZoom it is critical to bring the best researchers data and stories inside ChronoZoom.  We need library scientist who understand content, taxonomy, data organization, etc.  We would like to get a PI and graduate student interested in leading the content community and strategy for ChronoZoom.  This would mean looking at the data structure and ensure it is correct and will be easier to search, flag and organize all the data that will come into ChronoZoom.  When we look at each regime how to determine what are the most important events should be in each regime, where to get the content, what are the best repositories and digital libraries, who are the best researchers to contact.  Who are possible experts to help support, what are great organizations to partner with like (CERN, UNESCO, Smithsonian, etc.) how do we build a plan on organizations we work one on one to hand hold versus wait till there is a tool for them to create a timeline/tour on their own?

HUMANISTIC & SCIENTIFIC PROFESSORS, RESEARCHERS, STUDENTS:  Work with us to build ChronoZoom to be the platform to help digital humanities.  Have your research, lectures, content come alive in ChronoZoom and be shared with students, educators and researchers around the world.  Give feedback and help shape the features and capabilities needed for ChronoZoom to be a good teaching and learning tool.

COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCHERS & STUDENTS:  Help us build the features and capabilities required in the tool.  80% of ChronoZoom was built by graduate and undergraduate students at Moscow State University.  We need a technical lead computer science department to lead the project and organize the community with Microsoft research and later lead.  We are also looking to have computer science departments to help us solve the current difficult computer science challenges in this project:

• Visualization: How do you visually portray different interpretations of events/research/data?  How do we deal with debates in dates (+/- standard deviation)?  How do we compare multiple timelines and datasets?  How can you populate a visible canvas with only relevant timelines? As CZ grows the number of timelines will also grow, how do you provide a meaningful view of the areas that interest you? How do you allow this without destroying the opportunity to discover new relationships?  Given that exhibits are curated displays of content items (up to 15 per exhibit) centered around a specific topic, can an algorithmic method of creating these exhibits be developed? Can we move from human curators to automation? This also suggests that we can algorithmically analyze the highly diverse content and yield useful combinations that reveal new insights and organization of events (topics).
• Data management: How do you create a sustainable model for localization, taxonomy for multimedia data sources, manage data from multiple repositories, creating a third party authoring tool connected to proper database and data structure to enable curated timeline/tour and crowdsource/social rated timelines/tours. How do you organize (nest) timelines so that vast amounts of data can be easily explored? “ And as a corollary, How do you provide a meaningful experience without directing the user? What would tools look like that would encourage exploration in the ChronoZoom paradigm.
• Machine Learning: How can visitor behavior be used to provide an “intuitive” progression of information presentation. How can overall visitor experience be used to predict what an individual is trying to find.  Since ChronoZoom will contain many millions of content items, and only a very small percentage will be visible on the canvas in exhibits, how do we expose the underlying content in a way that facilitates visitors discovering what they want?
• Data Views includes Visualization, Data Management and Machine Learning: Given that one organizational taxonomy can’t satisfy every visitor, what is the set of views needed to permit timeline creation and organization to satisfy a wide range of interests; for example, a topical organization for some, geographical for others? What other taxonomies should be considered? Can we use machine learning to discover entirely new ways of looking at this data?

Thank you,

Rane Johnson-Stempson

Education & Scholarly Communications Principal Research Director | Microsoft Research Connections | Cell +1.425.457.3665 | Office  +1.425.421-3447