Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering

This building, named after Microsoft’s co-founder, is the region’s nerve center for computer science education, sending graduates to Microsoft, Google, Amazon and many others. Here’s the rundown from UW engineering writer Hannah Hickey:

The Allen Center opened in 2003 and has already seen some firsts. The 2nd-floor Charles Simonyi Computer Graphics and Imaging Laboratory is where graduate student Noah Snavely first began experimenting to see what he could do with massive online community photo collections, such as Flickr — his virtual-reality photo stitching formed the basis for Microsoft’s Photosynth. Room 580 is the office of professor Oren Etzioni, a data-mining expert whose airfare prediction tool was first known as Hamlet, then Farecast, and, finally Bing Travel. The fourth floor is where the first academic course in cloud computing was taught by professor Ed Lazowska and former student Christophe Bisciglia, now a senior engineer at Google. Their “Google 101″ class expanded into a national academic-industry consortium on cloud computing.

The building features artwork curated by department chair Hank Levy. Look up to the ceiling and you might stop an RFID reader; more than 200 are installed in the building for a research project. The ReBoot espresso bar in the Microsoft Atrium (pictured below) offers some of the best coffee and pastries on campus. The student labs have windows that open onto the atrium, so you can sip a latte and watch the students at work.

The Allen Center replaced the crumbling Sieg Hall, which had housed computer science since 1975; the department would give prospective grad students a piece of the building to try to entice them to study there. Sieg Hall still houses the stairwell mural and a timeline of highs and lows in the department’s history.

Details: University of Washington campus map. More information: www.cs.washington.edu

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