CSE Undergrad News

Sign-Up for Allen School Study Groups!

Hello Allen School students and happy spring!

This is a reminder that the Allen School offers study groups for the 143X and 300-level courses!

Logistics:

Students who sign-up for a study group will meet one hour per week with 1-4 other undergraduates and an undergraduate study group leader who has already taken the course. Study groups will be assigned by next Tuesday (3/3).

Why sign-up for study groups?

Joining a study group can be a great way to establish effective study habits and meet new people from the Allen School community!

You and your group are expected to come prepared with questions for your study group leader. Leaders will lead your group through conceptual questions, solve practice problems with you, and help you establish effective study habits.

What’s the difference between my TA and a study group leader?

Study group leaders are not a replacement for a course TA who will best know what is expected of students in the class. Instead, participating in a study group provides you with an additional resource to help you be successful! 🙂

Sign me up!

If you would like to sign-up for a study group this quarter, please read the Study Group Guidelines for Students before submitting the request form on that page. The form is due on Friday, March 30th at 8:00PM.

***Do not fill-out this form if you would like to request to be a study group leader this quarter. A separate e-mail will go out with information on how to volunteer to lead a study group.

Questions? Please e-mail Lacey at lacmas17@cs.washington.edu.

March 26, 2018

Volunteer to lead a Study Group for the 14X and 300-level courses this spring!

Hello Allen School Students and happy spring!

We are looking for volunteers to lead study groups for the 14X series and 300-level courses this spring!

Why lead a study group?

Leading a study group is a great way to work on your communication skills, support your fellow undergrads, and get experience on your resume. Additionally, it is a low commitment way to determine if a teaching assistant position in the future is a good fit for you or to keep up with your current tutoring skills. This is a volunteer position but study group leaders who meet with their group every week during the quarter will get CSE swag!

Study Group Details:

You will meet once/week working with a group of 1-4 undergrads, covering CS concepts from a course of your choice. No prior tutoring experience necessary (this is an opportunity for students in the course to get extra help in addition to resources offered by the instructor and teaching assistants).The commitment is one hour/week for one quarter plus a mandatory one hour training for all study group leaders = a total commitment of 10 – 15 hours total.

Requirements:

Your knowledge of the material (you must have completed and received a 3.5+ in the course you would like to lead a study group for) and your willingness to help!

To volunteer, please review these guidelines before submitting the volunteer form on that page. The form is due on Friday, March 30th at 8:00PM.

***Do not fill-out this form if you would like to request to be in a study group this quarter. A separate e-mail will go out with information on how to request to participate in a study group.

Questions? E-mail Lacey (lacmas17@cs.washington.edu). Thank you for considering!

March 26, 2018

Week of 3/26 Events

Hi all,

To kick off spring quarter, we are hosting a TGIF event Friday evening from 5:30-7:30pm in the ACM lounge! There will be drinks (hot chocolate), treats (cream puffs, brownies, marshmallows), and games (cards, board games, Xbox).

Hope to see you there!

ACM

March 26, 2018

Revised Advising Resources for spring quarter, please read: online appt scheduling, dropins now called Quick Questions, more peer adviser hours, etc

Short version if you’re in a hurry or in denial about spring quarter starting tomorrow:

*Redesigned advising page

*New tool for scheduling appointments

*More peer advising hours

*Dropins renamed Quick Questions

*Online appointments

Longer version if you like knowing the background and “why” behind our actions:

First, thank you to the 100 or so students who filled out our survey on CSE advising services.

The general consensus from the survey respondents regarding adviser contact was that you would prefer a mix of appointments and dropin advising times. We have decided to pilot a few new programs this spring to increase the accessibility of the CSE advising staff. We appreciate your patience as we try out various methods of scaling our services up to the increasing demand:

*We have redesigned our advising page to give you comprehensive information on what you can gain from advising and how to contact us.
https://www.cs.washington.edu/academics/ugrad/advising

*We have a new online scheduling tool so you can now book an appointment up to 3 weeks out.

*The ‘Dropin’ format will be the same style, but we’re re-naming it ‘quick questions’. Quick questions are only meant to be 5-10 minute advising appointments. If you think it might take longer than that, you should schedule an appointment. You can now schedule 15 minute appointments or 25 minute appointments. EX: “Easy” graduation appointments where you know you have everything in place can be a quick question, detailed planning or any complications that you foresee should be a scheduled appointment.

*Peer advisers will be staffing the front desk between 10 and 3 *most* days so you can come to ask them quick questions when you see the sign at the right of the front desk showing they are in.

*There will be online advising appointments available for those who have trouble coming into campus or if you just prefer that method of interaction. We’ll be using gmail hangouts/chat for these appointments. If you’re away on an internship, this might be easier than a detailed email conversation.

We hope that these improvements will help us serve the CSE student community better moving forward. Wait times will hopefully improve with the new ‘quick question’ format and the increased availability of individual appointments.

As always, if there are no appointment times that work for you and you can’t come to quick questions, you can always reach out to us on ugrad-advisor@cs.washington.edu. Our new email ticketing system seems to be improving email response time overall.

Thank you everyone and we’ll see you soon!

~CSE Advising

March 25, 2018

A few more spring registration reminders/updates

To All CSE students:

We have a few registration updates for everyone:

*CSE 484, 421, and 351 will likely not be able to add any more room. You are still welcome to attend the first week if you are trying to enroll (and you should attend if you want to enroll). We have opened all possible space so we will not be giving out any overloads, but, if someone drops and you get the space, you need to have been attending and keeping up with assignments.

*CSE 473: We hope to open around 15 more spaces tomorrow or Monday – so be watching for those

*CSE 452: We will accommodate everyone who wants to take the course. We’ll be opening a new section to balance the sections a bit more and will likely add a few more spaces as well.

*We added a LOT of space to CSE 455, there is still room for those interested.

*CSE 351 will be taught this summer and 484 will very likely be taught in fall, so you should consider those two options as back ups if you can’t get in this spring.

*If you do not have an internship and wish to take summer courses, we strongly encourage you to consider that option. We plan to offer: 142, 143, 331, 332 (maybe), 333, 344, and 351

*People will be dropping courses and space will be opening in several courses as next week starts, so stay tuned for that as the quarter gets rolling.

*If you are going to be graduating in fall or winter, you should apply for graduation sometime after the first two weeks of the quarter and before May 2nd so you can get graduating senior priority and register first for your last two quarters. Everyone who had GSP status was able to get the courses they needed to graduate.

*If you’re hoping to graduate in spring and have not filed for graduation (you can check your MyCSE portal to see if you have filed) then you need to file by the 3rd Friday of Spring break.

*If you were unable to get *any* CSE course or need a course to graduate this spring, you should reach out to the advising office at ugrad-advisor@cs.washington.edu We don’t want anyone being forced to delay graduation due to availability of courses.

~We will continue to update you all as we have more information

March 22, 2018

Mentor Request for spring 2018

Yes, we know it’s spring break, but if you would be so kind as to consider signing up to be a CSE mentor this spring we would really appreciate it. This Monday we welcome the new majors to the Allen School. Our new major welcome event will be this Monday, March 26th from 430-6pm. Mentors will meet in the atrium at 430pm for a quick intro, then the new students will come meet you around 450pm. You’ll break up into smaller groups to tour the building and enjoy a burrito on the house. We need about 35 students. Please sign up this week so we can get mentors assigned quickly. Thank you!!

If you want to mentor but can not attend, fill out the survey and we’ll match you to mentees who also cannot attend.

Please fill out the survey to volunteer! Thank you!

March 21, 2018

One more UW Registration reminder

Just a reminder that when registering for courses you are only allowed to add/drop courses you intend to take. Any other use of the UW registration system, including ‘saving’ space for friends, trading sections, etc, is considered abuse of the system.

If you have registration questions, please contact the CSE advising office directly. While we are not overloading courses, we can often help switch sections for students who have a legitimate reason for needing to switch.

Here is a link to the UW Registration Policies and Restrictions site: https://registrar.washington.edu/course-registration/registration-policies/tampering-and-abuse/

Sincerely,

CSE Advising

March 21, 2018

Seattle Tracking ML hackathon tomorrow, still open for registration

Seattle Tracking ML hackathon

Particle track reconstruction in dense environments such as the detectors of the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) is a challenging pattern recognition problem. Silicon-based, high-granularity tracking sensors detect ionization charge deposited by particles as they propagate through the detector in a magnetic field. Pattern recognition tracking algorithms and subsequent estimation methods use this information to measure the curvature of particle trajectories and thus deduce the particles’ charge and momentum. Traditional algorithms are inherently sequential and scale poorly with the expected increases in detector occupancy in the HL-LHC conditions. Machine learning algorithms bring a lot of potential to this problem!

The challenge: A special « Seattle » simulation dataset similar to TrackML dataset is prepared, yielding 5000 points to be connected into 500 tracks. Seattle hackathon participants will be more than welcome to participate to TrackML challenge in kaggle platform as soon as it is online.

Two starting kit algorithms will be provided, one using sk-learn DBscan, one using Hough transform. Participants are invited to beat the baselines from the starting-kit, either by improvement of the starting kits algorithms or by brand new algorithms.Honorary prizes will be granted based on the best scores, but also for promising original algorithms, or tools which can help with the development of algorithms, for example : a matplotlib tool allowing the visualisation of tracks in a notebook, or a function (not using the ground truth) yielding a score which tends maximal for a well reconstructed track, from its compatibility with the accepted trajectory.

Time: March 20 (Tuesday) 4PM to March 21 (Wed) 11:59pm.

Orientation: A local orientation session is scheduled on Tuesday 4pm-7:15pm in the e-Science studio. Prizes will be announced Thursday morning.

Hackathon Registration: https://indico.cern.ch/event/658267/registrations/38756/ (individual registration even if you intend to participate as a team).

Prerequisite: The Seattle hackathon will run on Codalab (http://codalab.org), which will run the scoring on display the leaderboard. Participants are invited to install before the hackathon anaconda ( python 3 ) on their laptop from https://www.anaconda.com/download, or have access to a remote platform with similar software (or team up with a friend who has). The starting kit will use jupyter notebook, matplotlib, sk-learn, as available from anaconda.

More Info: https://indico.cern.ch/event/658267/page/13191-seattle-tracking-hackathon

Questions! Contact Prof. Shih-Chieh Hsu <schsu@uw.edu>

Sponsors: Connecting The Dots workshop, UW Physics Department, eScience Institute

March 19, 2018

Husky Tech: Mentoring Opportunity in April/May for Mentees

Husky Tech is a great new RSO on campus aimed at accelerating students’ tech careers. If you are interested in getting connected with a mentor who is currently working in industry and can commit to meeting with them a few times in April and May, please check out the opportunity below!

Program Overview
Husky Tech’s mission is to accelerate students’ tech careers. Our Mentorship Program will connect students with industry leaders and help them make the transition from University to Industry life. Mentors are immensely important to guide students especially at a time when students begin their professional careers. We provide an unique platform for industry professionals to contribute in accelerating students’ careers in tech. Our Industry professionals include Software Engineers, Product Managers, Product Designers and Entrepreneurs from top companies.

Key Dates
Each mentorship session will last for 2 hours from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM.
The mentorship program is scheduled to meet for 3 evenings at the UW: April 9th, April 30th, and May 21st

Mentee Benefits
Personal Growth: Learn from the past experiences of mentors, gain knowledge
about the mentors field of expertise and skill set.
Leadership & Coaching Skills: Apply mentor’s advice into practice in the
classroom and learn about the steps to accelerate your tech career.
Networking: Connect to various industry professionals and develop long-lasting
professional relationships with your mentor and other students.

Apply
Be the first cohort of Mentees to experience the impact!
Visit our website to submit your application as a mentee.
mentorship.uwhuskytech.com

March 19, 2018

April 3rd application deadline: 10-WEEK RESEARCH EXPERIENCE FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

=== THE 2018 AMALTHEA REU PROGRAM ===

Subject: 2018 AMALTHEA REU: Apply by April 3

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR A 10-WEEK RESEARCH EXPERIENCE FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS is available in the area of Machine Learning. The program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and is offered by the Information Characterization & Exploitation (ICE) Laboratory at Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) in Melbourne, Florida.

Machine Learning (ML) gradually evolved as a branch of Artificial Intelligence with its theory and applications positioned at the juncture of Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics and, even, Physics. Nowadays, ML’s role in successfully addressing hard, real-world technological challenges has become ever more current and central. Moreover, its presence and importance now permeates several aspects not only of cutting-edge technology such as computer vision, stock market prediction and big data analytics, but also our daily life through voice-driven searches on our smart phones or movie recommendations on video streaming services to name only a few.

The program currently accepts applications in order to form a very diverse, multi-disciplinary cohort of nascent researchers for this summer. Minorities, women and people with disabilities are especially encouraged to apply.

ELIGIBILITY

Without exceptions, applicants must be:

=> Majoring in an Engineering or Science discipline

=> US citizens or permanent residents

=> Undergraduates in good academic standing

BENEFITS

=> Exposure to the exciting world of Machine Learning and its applications

=> Participate in a one-week crash course to familiarize yourself with Machine Learning

=> Work with experienced student mentors and experts in the field

=> Participate and contribute to cutting-edge Machine Learning research

=> Take part in visits to our local industry

=> Paid travel and accommodation expenses

=> Receive a competitive stipend for per diem expenses

=> Visit Central Florida venues such as Disney attractions and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center

=> Meet new people

=> Make new friends

Application Deadline: April 3, 2018

Apply online: http://www.amalthea-reu.org

For more information, visit our Web site at www.amalthea-reu.org or contact:

Dr. Anthony O Smith

Director, The AMALTHEA REU Program

Assistant Professor, ECE Dept.

Florida Institute of Technology

Melbourne, Florida

Email: anthonysmith@fit.edu

URL: http://web2.fit.edu/faculty/profiles/profile.php?tracks=anthonysmith

Phone 321-674-8425 | Fax 321-674-8192

March 15, 2018