2005 UW Computer Engineering bachelors alumnus Brett Newlin will represent the United States in the Men’s Four at the Beijing Olympics. A four-time national team member and first-time Olympian, Brett was named USRowing’s Male Athlete of the Year in 2006.

Brett was one of six US Olympic Team members featured in an August 3 NY Times spread, Bodies of Work: “‘In high school, I was kind of a beanpole. Then in college I started rowing, and muscles started popping out from all over the place.’”

See Brett’s USRowing Olympic biography here. Beijing photos by fellow Husky oarsman Scott Gault here.

Read the article here.

“Lazowska’s department has 150-plus alumni working for Google – many based at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA, but an increasing number in Kirkland and Seattle. ‘We have dozens of undergraduate students doing summer internships at Google, many graduate students carrying out their research at Google, and two faculty members spending the year there on sabbatical [Gaetano Borriello and Steve Gribble],’ says Lazowska. And Brian Bershad, director of Google’s Seattle site, is a UW computer science professor on leave …

“While Google’s latest efforts are highly welcomed, it will probably take some time for the search company to become as deeply established in the community. ‘Despite all this, Microsoft is [still] the University of Washington’s #1 corporate partner,’ explains Lazowska.”

Read the article here.

“This year, researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Washington began recruiting computer gamers to an online competition, named Foldit, aimed at unraveling one of the knottiest problems of biology: how proteins fold.”

Read the article here.

Mikhail Manyak, 20, a University of Washington Computer Engineering student, died Sunday after suffering a massive allergic reaction to medications prescribed following oral surgery.

Read the article here.

CSE’s Ed Lazowska in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

CSE’s Yoky Matsuoka is profiled by PBS’s Nova science series. “A former tennis prodigy aims to create advanced prosthetic limbs controlled by human thought. Learn how a self-described ‘airhead’ came to embrace her inner scientist, and what she’s doing to encourage young women to pursue scientific careers.”

View the video at Nova.

“Blind people generally use computers with the help of screen-reader software, but those products can cost more than $1,000, so they’re not exactly common on public PCs at libraries or Internet cafes. Now a free new Web-based program for the blind aims to improve the situation. It’s called WebAnywhere, and it was developed by a computer science graduate student at the University of Washington.”

Read the article at The Washington Post.

Read the article here.

“Insert your key in the ignition of a luxury car and the seat and steering wheel will automatically adjust to preprogrammed body proportions … But open any computer program and you’re largely subject to a design team’s ideas about button sizes, fonts and layouts … A new approach to design, developed at the University of Washington, would put each person through a brief skills test and then generate a mathematically-based version of the user interface optimized for his or her vision and motor abilities.”

Supple project website here.

Read the article here.

PC Week describes the Adeona service, created by UW CSE undergraduate Gabriel Maganis.”Lose your laptop these days and you lose part of your life: You say good-bye to photos, music and personal documents that cannot be replaced, and if it’s a work computer, you may be the source of a very public data breach.

“But now, researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, have found a way to give you a shot at getting your life back …

“Here’s how it works: A user downloads the free client software onto a laptop. That software then starts anonymously sending encrypted notes about the computer’s whereabouts to servers on the Internet. If the laptop ever goes missing, the user downloads another program, enters a username and password, and then picks up this information from the servers …”

See Slashdot here
See SC Magazine here

Read the article here.

“WebAnywhere, an Internet-based service released last month, boasts an even better price tag: free. The program’s innovation isn’t so much about what it does — no more than existing Web readers that convert written text to digital speech — as it is about its availability on almost any computer.”