Positions in Computer Science & Engineering

Our Most Recent Hires

2010:

• Joshua R. Smith, Associate Professor, joins the CSE and EE departments in February 2011. He has been with nearby Intel Labs Seattle, collaborating with many UW students and faculty, from 2004-2010. He holds PhD and S.M. degrees from MIT, an M.A. in Physics from Cambridge University, and B.A. degrees in Computer Science and Philosophy from Williams College. Smith is interested in all aspects of sensor systems, including creating novel sensor systems, powering them wirelessly, and using them in applications such as robotics, ubiquitous computing, and human-computer interaction. Previously, he co-invented an electric field sensing system for suppressing unsafe airbag firing that is included in every Honda car. At Intel, he has led research projects in the areas of wireless power and robotics.

Recent Hires (PDF)

2009:

• Su-In Lee joined the Department of Computer Science & Engineering and the Department of Genome Sciences in January 2010. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in January 2009 and was a visiting assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Lee's research focuses on devising machine learning techniques for understanding the genetic basis for complex traits. Humans differ in many "phenotypes" such as weight, hair color and more importantly disease susceptibility. These phenotypes are largely determined by each individual's specific "genotype," stored in the 3.2 billion bases of his or her DNA sequence. Lee's goal is to develop machine learning algorithms that can (1) translate sophisticated biological processes into robust statistical models; (2) infer their underlying mechanisms from high-dimensional, sparsely sampled data; and (3) learn such models from data efficiently. These approaches can enable more comprehensive understanding of disease genetics, potentially leading to the realization of personalized medicine.


• Anup Rao joined Computer Science & Engineering in January 2010. He has just finished two and a half years as a postdoc, first at the Institute for Advanced Study and most recently at Princeton University. He completed his graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin. Rao's research aims to to understand some of the foundational questions of computer science. His interests include finding mathematical explanations for why some computational problems are fundamentally harder than others and discovering the limitations of efficient computational processes. These kinds of questions can sometimes lead to strange and unexpected revelations— for example, a recent sequence of work that he was involved with led to the discovery of the most economical shape for soap bubbles.


• Luke Zettlemoyer joins Computer Science & Engineering in July 2010, following a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh. He received his Ph.D. from MIT. Zettlemoyer's research focus is in artificial intelligence. He has worked on problems in natural language processing, machine learning, and decision making under uncertainty. One goal of this work is to build automated systems that can have natural conversations with human users. He has worked on a number of aspects of this problem, including (1) grammar induction techniques for learning to automatically convert sentences to logical representations of their underlying meaning; (2) methods for efficiently reasoning about nested beliefs ("I think that you think that I think..."); and (3) algorithms for model learning and decision making in large, structured environments. Zettlemoyer is generally interested in building systems that recover and make use of representations of the meaning of natural language text.

Recent Hires (PDF)

2008:

• Michael Ernst, Associate Professor, joined the CSE faculty in January 2009. Previously, he was a tenured professor at MIT. He received his Ph.D. from UW, so his return is a welcome homecoming. Ernst's research aims to make software more reliable, more secure, and easier (and more fun!) to produce. His primary research interests are in software engineering and related areas, including programming languages, type theory, security, program analysis, bug prediction, testing, and verification. Ernst's research combines strong theoretical foundations with realistic experimentation, with an eye to changing the way that software developers work.


• Shwetak N. Patel, Assistant Professor, joined the CSE and EE faculty in September 2008. He is part of the UW Experimental Computer Engineering Lab (ExCEL) and the Human-Computer Interaction and Design Group (DUB). Patel received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was a member of the Ubiquitous Computing Research group, served as the assistant director of the Aware Home Research Initiative, and was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His research is in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing with a particular emphasis on developing and applying new low-cost, easy-to-use hardware and software solutions to enable novel activity sensing applications. His past work on camera detection and neutralization received the designation of a Top Technology Idea of the Year from New York Times Magazine in 2005. Shwetak's research has also been the basis of various commercialization efforts.


• Georg Seelig, Assistant Professor, joined the CSE and EE faculty in Spring 2009. He is part of the Experimental Computer Engineering Lab (ExCEL), which facilitates broad collaboration between the departments along the computer engineering boundary. Seelig received his Diploma in Physics from the University of Basel in 1999 and his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Geneva in 2003. For the last few years he has been a postdoc at Caltech working with Erik Winfree and Michael Elowitz. In 2007 he received a Career Award at the Scientific Interface from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Georg is interested in understanding how biological organisms process information using complex biochemical networks and how such networks can be engineered to program cellular behavior. The focus of his research is the identification of systematic design rules for the de novo construction of biological control circuits with DNA and RNA components. His approach integrates the design of molecular circuitry in the test tube and in the cell with the investigation of existing biological pathways like the microRNA pathway. Engineered circuits and circuit elements are being applied to problems in disease diagnostics and therapy.


• Emanuel Todorov, Associate Professor, joined us in 2009 in both Computer Science & Engineering and Applied Mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT in 1998. Previously, he was a tenured faculty member at UCSD in the Department of Cognitive Science. Todorov’s research concerns the real-time control of a complex biomechanical system, such as the human body, which require the generation of thousands of control signals per second. The human ability to accomplish difficult tasks in the face of noise, delays, uncertainty, and constantly changing circumstances suggests that these control signals are chosen rather intelligently and to a large sense online.

2007:

• Luis Ceze, Assistant Professor, graduated in October 2007 from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His main research area is computer architecture. He also investigates programming models and compiler support for new architectures. His thesis work focused on designs to improve the programmability of parallel machines and reduce their hardware complexity. Two years of his graduate studies were supported by an IBM PhD Fellowship.


• Mausam, Research Assistant Professor. His research interests are on probabilistic methods in automatic planning. This melds probabilistic and logic-based methods to address the difficult problem of making decisions under uncertainty. He is working in the Turing Center.

2006:

• Yoky Matsuoka, Associate Professor, moved here from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University after getting her PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998. Her research area is neurobotics, a new field that lies at the intersection of robotics and computational neuroscience. Her primary goal is to understand, assist, rehabilitate, and enhance the human neuromuscular systems of both healthy and motor-impaired people. She is a 2007 MacArthur Foundation Fellow.


• Dave Bacon, Research Assistant Professor. His research interests lie broadly across the field of quantum information science. He focuses on two of the most important challenges facing this field: "how" to build a quantum computer and "what" to do with a quantum computer once it is built.


• James Fogarty, Assistant Professor, joined CSE from Carnegie Mellon University. He is broadly interested in human-computer interaction, user interface software and technology, and ubiquitous computing. More specifically his interests are in human-centered approaches to developing, deploying, and evaluating sensor-based interfaces in everyday life.


• Tadayoshi (Yoshi) Kohno, Assistant Professor, joined the department in July 2006 from the University of California San Diego. His research interests are in computer security, including applied cryptography, network security, software security, and electronic voting.


• Marty Stepp, Lecturer, received his MS in Computer Science at the University of Arizona in 2003. He worked at Microsoft from 2003-04. He taught at the UW Tacoma Institute of Technology from 2004-06. He is co-author of the textbook Building Java Programs, published in February 2007 with CSE Sr. Lecturer Stuart Reges.

2005:

• Magdalena Balazinska, Assistant Professor, joined the department in January 2006 and completed her PhD in May 2006. Previously, she received her B.E and M.S. degrees from Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in 2000. Magda's research is broadly in the fields of databases and systems. Her thesis work addressed the problems of fault-tolerant, distributed stream processing, and load-management in federated systems. During her last two years in grad school, Magda was supported by a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship.


• Arvind Krishnamurthy, Research Associate Professor (hired as a Research Assistant Professor), received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999 and was on the faculty at Yale from then until 2005 when he joined the UW faculty. His research interests are primarily at the boundary between the theory and practice of distributed systems including: managing overlay networks and distributed hash tables, distributed storage systems that integrate the numerous ad hoc devices around the home, and technologies for the third world.


• James R. Lee, Assistant Professor, is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley (2005) and is interested in combinatorics, geometry, and analysis, with applications to algorithms and complexity theory. He joined the department in September 2006 after a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.