CSE Undergrad News

Events – week of January 7, 2019

Please be sure to check the undergrad calendar for more information on upcoming events: https://www.cs.washington.edu/academics/ugrad/advising_calendar

Tuesday, January 8^th, 4:30 PM – ECE105

Recruiting 101

This is a great presentation to attend if you’re feeling a little lost on job hunting basics. Your career specialist, Kim Nguyen, will help you understand recruiting timelines, how to navigate the career fair and follow up with recruiters and give you some ideas on where to focus your time outside of class so you can put together a resume that you are proud of.

Thursday, January 10^th, 3 PM – 5 PM – CSE1 Atrium

Resume Workshop

This is one of our most popular events every quarter! Get your resume critiqued by recruiters and industry professionals from a variety of tech companies, big and small. You can go through the feedback process as many times as you’d like to get different perspectives. Bring plenty of copies of your resume!

Thursday, January 10^th, 6:00 p.m. – ECE105

NVIDIA tech talk

SIGN UP: bit.ly/nvtalkuw19

SPEAKER: Scott Ricketts

Manager of TensorRT Software

TITLE: High Performance Deep Learning Inference on GPUs w/ NVIDIA TensorRT

There will be a raffle as well as food and beverages.

Friday, January 11^th, 3:30 PM – ECE125

Recruiting 101

This is a great presentation to attend if you’re feeling a little lost on job hunting basics. Your career specialist, Kim Nguyen, will help you understand recruiting timelines, how to navigate the career fair and follow up with recruiters and give you some ideas on where to focus your time outside of class so you can put together a resume that you are proud of.

January 8, 2019

2019 Winter Career Events

Greetings Allen School Huskies!

We are so excited to welcome you back for Winter Quarter 2019! We hope you enjoyed a lot of rest and found some time to have a little fun during the break. Your Career Services team has been busy putting together some fantastic programming to get you ready for a successful quarter of job hunting and networking. We’re penning this blog post to draw your attention to career events happening in the next two weeks and to announce an important change to our Established Company Fair.

If you’ve had a chance to check out our Winter 2019 Student Info Page, you’ll notice that our Industry Affiliates Recruiting Fairs are right around the corner! The Established Company Fair is happening on Monday, January 14th from 11 AM – 5 PM @ the HUB Ballroom and The Startup and Smaller Company Fair is happening the next day on Tuesday, January 15th from 1 PM – 4:30 PM in the Atrium of CSE1.

We are happy to announce an important update to the Established Company Fair. In addition to serving the Allen school population, we are delighted to partner with departments across UW Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma to open up the Established Company Fair from 3 PM – 5 PM to students studying majors that are related to computer science.

The Allen School believes firmly in ensuring equitable access to opportunities. As our department becomes more competitive, our extraordinary bounty of employment opportunities becomes seemingly more exclusive. It is our duty to the UW community to share the plethora of opportunities when it makes sense. The job market is currently such that there are more software jobs available than there are computer science graduates. There are many ways to pick up the necessary programming skills needed for the software industry and we want to be supportive of our fellow Huskies that are pursuing this career field.

We understand that there may be concerns about crowding. To mitigate this, backpacks will not be allowed inside the career fairs. We will be hosting a backpack check for Allen School students at the Gates Common (6th floor) in CSE1. In addition, we will be making changes to the layout of our space to give more breathing room between companies and expand the amount of space available from the autumn career fair. As always, we recommend you arrive as early as possible for the most pleasant (and least claustrophobic) experience.

To help you shine your brightest, we are hosting a variety of career preparation events and talks throughout the month of January for Allen School students. You can find the most up-to-date information on the Undergrad Advising Calendar. We know it may feel like the recruiting fairs are coming up SOON, so we want to especially highlight the events we are hosting during the first week of the quarter.

Recruiting 101 on Tuesday, January 8th at 4:30 PM (ECE 105) – This is a great presentation to attend if you’re feeling a little lost on job hunting basics. Your career specialist, Kim Nguyen, will help you understand recruiting timelines, how to navigate the career fair and follow up with recruiters and give you some ideas on where to focus your time outside of class so you can put together a resume that you are proud of.

Resume Workshop on Thursday, January 10th from 3 PM – 5 PM (CSE1 Atrium) – This is one of our most popular events every quarter! Get your resume critiqued by recruiters and industry professionals from a variety of tech companies, big and small. You can go through the feedback process as many times as you’d like to get different perspectives. Bring plenty of copies of your resume!

Recruiting 101 on Friday, January 11th at 3:30 PM (ECE 125) – Same as above.

Be sure to keep an eye on the undergrad calendar to see what else we have coming up!

We can’t wait to see you shine in 2019!

January 6, 2019

The 2019 Washington State Opportunity Scholarship is now open!

The Washington State Opportunity Scholarship (WSOS) prepares and launches Washington students into the careers that fuel our state’s economy. We provide students with up to $22,500 in scholarship funding for up to five years and connect them with peer and professional mentors to help them achieve success from the first day on campus to their first day on the job.
If you or someone you know is pursuing or intending to pursue a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) or health care major we encourage you to learn more and apply!
The scholarship application is due by February 28, 2019 at 11:59 p.m.

Getting Started
Here’s what applicants need to complete their application:
Create an account using the Scholarship Application Portal. Complete all sections of the application. The portal allows you to save your work and return to complete at a later time.Respond to two essay questions.Send the required official transcript or score report to WSOS (1414 31st Ave. S., Suite 302, Seattle, WA 98144) no later than two business days after the application deadline.Submit the FAFSA or WASFA for the upcoming academic year, no later than March 4, 2019

Eligibility Criteria
Earned a high school diploma or GED from a Washington state high school or institution by June 2019 and have a cumulative GPA of 2.75.Currently pursuing or intend to pursue a STEM or health care bachelor’s degree (see list of eligible majors).Reside in Washington state, and plan to attend a Washington state college or university in the fall of 2010 (see list of eligible colleges or universities).Have a household income that does not exceed 125% of Washington state median family income.
Please visit our website for additional questions and to see the full list of eligibilityrequirements.

Register for the 2019 Scholarship Application Train the Trainer Webinar
We will be hosting our first Scholarship Application Train the Trainer Webinar on January 16, 2019 at 11 a.m. We encourage anyone who works directly with eligible students and is interested in learning about the scholarship to join. In this session, we will provide overview of the scholarship and introduce the application toolkit. Additionally, participants will learn how to navigate the scholarship application portal and the promotional toolkit so that they can support students in successfully completing an application. Register today!

Questions? We’re here to help! Please contact awards@waopportunityscholarship.org.

Click here for the application

Washington State Opportunity Scholarship
awards@waopportunityscholarship.org
Visit our website

January 4, 2019

Bruins-In-Genomics (B.I.G.) Summer Research Program

We are recruiting exceptionally talented undergraduate scholars to our Bruins-In-Genomics (B.I.G.) Summer Research Program held at UCLA. B.I.G. Summer is an 8-week full-time immersion program for undergraduates interested in learning about Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Genomics — and developing some of the skill-sets that are critical for 21st century Biological and Biomedical Research, and Precision Medicine.

We are now accepting applications to the fifth annual B.I.G. Summer Research Program, to be held June 24 to August 16, 2019, at UCLA. Next summer’s program offers introductory workshops in bioinformatic methods for genomics and computational biology followed by in depth, hands-on training in one of UCLA’s many participating laboratories. Areas of research include:

• Biomedical Genetics and Genomics

• Neurogenetics

• Cancer genetics

• Population Genetics

• Microbiome analysis

• Immunology

• Host pathogen interactions

• Ecosystem modeling

In addition, B.I.G. Summer offers career development workshops, graduate school preparations, and networking opportunities for undergraduates interested in quantitative and computational biology.

Fellowships are available that cover stipends of $400 to $5000, on-campus housing, and travel to and from Los Angeles.

Please spread the word among colleagues and undergraduate students! If you know an undergraduate who is thinking about a career in computational biology, please encourage them to apply by forwarding this email and the attached PDF. In addition, we would be grateful if your department could post a printed copy of the flyer in an area where undergraduate programs are displayed.

JUNE 24 TO AUGUST 16, 2019
APPLICATION DEADLINE: February 4, 2019 at 5:00PM PST

For more information on upcoming and past B.I.G. Summer programs, please visit our webpage:
https://qcb.ucla.edu/big-summer/

December 31, 2018

FIG Leader & Orientation Leader Student Positions!

First Year Programs is currently recruiting for our First-year Interest Group (FIG) Leader and Orientation Leader (OL) student positions!

The FIG program is looking for students from all departments who are UW-Seattle undergraduates with strong organizational skills and a genuine interest in working with freshmen as they face the challenges and opportunities presented to them as new students.

Orientation Leaders play a vital role in the orientation process, working closely with new students and their families on a wide variety of topics including academics, student involvement, housing options, and more. Orientation Leaders work during summer quarter and are paid 30-40/hrs per week.

Leadership in FYP Workshops: (All workshops will be held in MGH 120)

Tuesday 1/8 at 3:30 pm
Thursday 1/10 at 2:30 pm
Monday 1/14 at 5:00 pm
Wednesday 1/16 12:30 pm
Wednesday 1/23 9:30 am
Friday 1/25 4:00 pm

The application deadline is due Sunday, January 27^th!

Applications are available online at fyp.washington.edu/apply and any questions can be directed to fypadmin@uw.edu.

Best,

The First Year Programs Team

First Year Programs
Undergraduate Academic Affairs / University of Washington

Box 352825
120 Mary Gates Hall, Seattle, WA 98198-2825
206.543.4905 / fypadmin@uw.edu / fyp.washington.edu

December 19, 2018

Research Project Opportunities Available

Dear Undergrads,

My lab has a number of projects available in computational biology and machine learning that may be of interest. These projects are available immediately, and can be carried out for research credit or for pay. Interested students should send a cover letter, transcript, and resume to Dr. Ritambhara Singh <rsingh7@uw.edu>. Descriptions of the projects are below:

Hi-C Projects

Data Description: Studying the three-dimensional (3D) organization of the human genome is vital for understanding cellular functions. The spatial organization of the genome can directly or indirectly affect the regulation of genes that, in turn, can decide the fate of the cell. Various high-throughput experimental techniques, such as Hi-C, are used to study higher-order chromatin structure at different scales. The Hi-C assay uses high-throughput sequencing to measure 3D genome structure, where each read pair corresponds to an observed 3D contact between two genomic loci. Data from a Hi-C assay is typically coalesced into a matrix in which rows and columns correspond to fixed-width windows (“bins”) tiled along the genomic axis, and values in the matrix are counts of read pairs that fall into the corresponding bins.

Project #1: Automatic Resolution Selection for Hi-C Data

Project Description: Typical Hi-C analysis is done using bin sizes of 40 kb or 100 kb, which might not be the optimal bin size to gain useful biological insights from the data. The goal of this project is to produce a lightweight Python package that automatically selects an appropriate fixed-width bin size for a given set of Hi-C reads. The current implementation splits the Hi-C reads from a dataset into “train” and “test” sets and then varies the train set bin size, using the test set to evaluate how similar the two sets are. The bin size that gives the highest similarity score is recommended as the optimal resolution for that dataset. The project requires this implementation to be converted into an easy-to-use, fast and efficient package, with proper documentation, that will be widely used by the research community.

Recommended reading :

[1] Cameron, Christopher JF, Josee Dostie, and Mathieu Blanchette. “Estimating DNA-DNA interaction frequency from Hi-C data at restriction-fragment resolution.” bioRxiv (2018): 377523.

Project #2: Improving Hi-C Resolution using Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs)

Project Description: Due to the high sequencing costs, Hi-C experiments can result in low read coverage and high data sparsity. To analyze such datasets, researchers use large (100kb) fixed-width bin sizes to reduce noise in the data. While this approach may give insights into the global interactions within and among chromosomes, it is hard to locate finer interactions among regulatory elements of the DNA. In order to improve the Hi-C resolution for better downstream analysis, this project proposes the use of deep neural networks to predict high-resolution Hi-C maps from low-resolution ones. Specifically, we will use graph convolution networks (GCNs), in which we treat the Hi-C map as an undirected graph G, with nodes V being the different genomic loci and the number of contacts between them representing as weighted edges E. Thus, the Hi-C resolution improvement task can be viewed as link prediction for missing links (or edges) in the graph G. The project requires implementation of novel model architectures involving GCNs and extensive hyperparameter tuning to achieve state-of-the-art performance on this prediction task.

Recommended reading:

[1] Zhang, Yan, et al. “Enhancing Hi-C data resolution with deep convolutional neural network HiCPlus.” Nature Communications 9.1 (2018): 750.

[2] Kipf, Thomas N., and Max Welling. “Semi-supervised classification with graph convolutional networks.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.02907 (2016).

Manifold Alignment Project

Project #3: Learning Manifold Alignment for Two Distinct Datasets

Project Description: This project involves learning correspondences across datasets from different domains. For example, for a given population of cells, one can obtain two different sets of measurements from different experiments. If these experiments are performed on disjoint but similar subsets of cells, then it may be necessary to embed the two populations into a latent space in such a way that the two populations are distributed similarly. Recently, a Gromov-Wasserstein distance-based framework has been shown to successfully learn the cross-domain correspondence among languages, and the goal of this project is to use this framework in the biological setting described above. Therefore, the project requires an efficient implementation of Gromov-Wasserstein distance-based framework that learns correspondence between features from different biological experiments and aligns them in a common latent space.

Recommended reading :

[1] Alvarez-Melis, David, and Tommi S. Jaakkola. “Gromov-Wasserstein Alignment of Word Embedding Spaces.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.00013 (2018).

Bill Noble

Professor, Genome Sciences

Adjunct Professor, Computer Science

http://noble.gs.washington.edu

December 18, 2018

Robotics Institute Summer Scholars (RISS) Program

Why Robotics & RISS?
Robotics-related technologies are becoming ubiquitous and are dominating national headlines due to innovations such as driverless cars, service robots, surgical robots, and aerial vehicles. Robots and the knowledge required to create, operate, and interact with them will become increasingly important to society.

The Robotics Institute Summer Scholars (RISS) program is designed to immerse students in the world of robotics. Through RISS, students perform research under the mentorship of top scientists in robotics and intelligent systems at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. RISS has access to over 50 research mentors representing a broad range of robotics research (e.g. field robotics, computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence, autonomy, machine learning, graphics, human-robot interaction, and space robotics).

The RISS-guided research experience is coupled with powerful professional development and hands-on robotics experiences with industry leaders in a nurturing global community and culminates in August with an annual research poster session and the publication of the RISS Working Papers Journal. Many students continue to collaborate with RISS mentors, labs, and cohort members.

Applications are OPEN:
· Applications will be accepted through January 15 at riss.ri.cmu.edu.
· Program dates are June 1 to August 15.
· Funding and support is available for both U.S. and international students.

More information about the program, including 2018 research posters and papers (2018 the RISS Working Papers Journal) can be found here riss.ri.cmu.edu/research.

Carnegie Mellon University
The Robotics Institute
Questions? Contact Riss-info@andrew.cmu.edu

December 17, 2018

Reminder – please fill out this survey – free swag raffle if you do

So far we have 110 out of 1300+ugrads who have responded to this survey, please try to take a few minutes to help us out.

__________________________________________________________

Dear all CSE Majors!

We have a favor to ask all of you. (And there is possibly some swag involved)

The Computing Research Association (CRA) is interested in career development
among students in computing fields. To that end, I encourage you to complete their
survey, which will take about 20 minutes to complete. (something to do while sitting taking a break from finals)

Your contribution to this research helps us understand factors related to academic
retention and persistence.

In exchange for your time, you will be given the opportunity to enter a raffle for
some swanky Allen School SWAG!

If you are interested in completing the survey, please follow the link below:
https://cerp.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dm0rvqb8dwyTast

Note that if you completed a survey for CRA in the past, you may have been contacted
directly by CRA this month. If you have already completed this survey, please disregard
this message.

Thank you!

CSE Advising

December 12, 2018

Health and Wellness – please take care of yourself and others

Hello CSE ugrads,

As we head into finals week, your CSE advising staff just wanted to remind you of some of the resources available to you all.

We have a listing of places to get help on our internal site with links to the UW counseling center and the Hall Health Mental Health providers.
If you need help after business hours, you can always call the Crisis Clinic at (206) 461-3222 or toll-free at 1-866-427-4747, or 911 if it’s a life threatening emergency.
You can text the word HOME to 741741 if you’re experiencing any sort of crisis and need help. https://www.crisistextline.org/texting-in/

We also want to remind you that the satisfactory progress policy here in CSE is meant to help students succeed, not to terrify you. One bad grade isn’t going to get you removed from the program. The more proactive you can be the better. Reach out to instructors and TA’s or reach out to advising via ugrad-advisor@cs or through our appt. scheduling. If you get a grade below a 2.0, just send us a quick email, let us know what is happening before we reach out to you, or make sure to respond when/if we do reach out so we can work together moving forward.

Life happens, sometimes you struggle, one quarter of grades does not define you as a person.

Please take care of yourselves this week and watch out for your friends too. This is often a challenging week and we want you all to know that we care about you.

Hope you can get some rest in the coming weeks,

Sincerely,

CSE advising: Crystal, Raven, Jenifer, Maggie, Chloe, Leslie, Kim and Pim.

December 10, 2018

CSE 590 E – Computer Science Education Seminar

———- Forwarded message ———
From: Ruth Anderson <rea@cs.washington.edu>
Date: Sat, Dec 8, 2018 at 3:27 PM
Subject: [cs-ugrads] CSE 590 E – Computer Science Education Seminar
To: <researchers@cs.washington.edu>, <cs-ugrads@cs.washington.edu>, <cs-vgrads@cs.washington.edu>, <cs-grads@cs.washington.edu>

Are you interested in discussing different approaches to teaching Computer Science? Are you wondering what kind of research people do in CS education? Are you thinking about a career that involves a lot of CS teaching?

This quarter we are again offering a seminar for people interested in discussing topics related to Computer Science education. The format for this quarter will be a weekly discussion of readings from a variety of sources such as CS education conferences (e.g. SIGCSE, ITiCSE, ICER), journal articles on teaching approaches, or excerpts from books on teaching. Participants will be expected to do the readings, participate in weekly discussions, and lead or co-lead one of the discussions.

We will be meeting 10:30-11:20 am on Thursdays in CSE 403. Our first meeting will be Thursday (1/10), where we will discuss the schedule for the quarter in more detail.

The plan is to continue this seminar in future quarters, so if you cannot join us in 19wi please check back in 19sp!

Grad students should sign up for CSE 590 E (1 credit, ungraded). Undergraduate students are also very welcome, but will need to fill out this form to receive an add code: https://tinyurl.com/cs-ed-19wi

Additionally, if you are interested in future CS education-related announcements, please subscribe to cs-ed@cs here:
https://mailman.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/cs-ed

Ruth

December 10, 2018