Change is a group of faculty, students, and staff at the University of Washington who are exploring the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in improving the lives of under-served populations, especially in the developing world. Change was started to better frame ICT for Development research in CSE, but is now being extended to bring together everyone at UW who cares about technology in developing regions.
The group hosted a poster session on February 26th in the Atrium. This event brought together ICTD researchers from the CIS, iSchool, HCDE and CSE to share their work and highlighted research on 16 current projects. This kick-off event also launched the group’s new website at http://change.washington.edu/ and its weekly seminar series. Join the mailing list at https://mailman.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change to find out more!
[Update 4 March: Flickr photostream of the event is here. Follow uwchange on twitter here. -SMR] Read more →
Metro bus service could be cut by as much as 20 percent. With this prospect looming, Seattle NPR affiliate KUOW‘s program The Conversation recently spoke with CSE grad student Brian Ferris about his bus-tracking tool, OneBusAway. The segment appears around minute 40.
Earlier coverage on OneBusAway may be viewed here. Read more →
Current popular peer-to-peer networks suffer from a lack of privacy. OneSwarm is a new file-sharing application that improves privacy in peer-to-peer networks. It was developed by UW computer scientists Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy and PhD students Michael Piatek and Tomas Isdal.
Read the Slashdot post here.
Read earlier coverage of BitTorrent here. Read more →
The January/February 2009 issue of IEEE Micro is a Special Issue containing the sixth annual “Top Picks from Computer Architecture Conferences.” Quoting from the Guest Editors’ Introduction, “This issue has become an important tradition in the computer architecture community, and one of the most important forms of recognition of research excellence.”
Two of the 12 papers selected for this prestigious recognition were authored by UW CSE’s Luis Ceze: “Atom-Aid: Detecting and Surviving Atomicity Violations” and “SoftSig: Software-Exposed Hardware Signatures for Code Analysis and Optimization.” UW CSE second-year graduate students Brandon Lucia and Joseph Devietti and UW CSE affiliate professor Karin Strauss were among Ceze’s co-authors. Read more →
On the evening of Wednesday February 25, more than 50 UW CSE undergraduates participated in a Technical Interview Coaching event held in the atrium of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Students spent 20 minutes with each of 3 company representatives in “mock interview” sessions, learning what companies look for in interviews. Our thanks to engineers from Amazon.com, Eggsprout, Google, and Microsoft for participating in this event! Read more →
“What is the most exciting company in Seattle?” Gregory Huang of Xconomy recently asked this question of Patrick Ennis, head of technology for Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures, and was surprised at the answer: Impinj. Impinj, founded in 2000 by UW CSE’s own Chris Diorio, is well-known for its focus on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies. Diorio, a student of microelectronics pioneer Carver Mead at Caltech (and current CSE affiliate faculty), serves as Impinj’s chairman and chief technology officer. ‘“He’s a fantastic professor and entrepreneur,” Ennis says. “Usually, professors just want to be professors. When you find an entrepreneur professor, it is heaven.”‘
Read the full article here. Read more →
University Week reports on the fabulous Puget Sound Tech Universe map recently published by a collaboration of Seattle University, the Washington Technology Industry Association, and Virginia Tech. The map shows the geneology of over 700 local technology companies, institutions, and organizations represented as astronomical bodies. Most orbit one of six “suns,” of which the University of Washington is one. (Interactive version of the map is available online here.)
Read the full article here.
We previously covered the Puget Sound Tech Universe project here. Read more →
CSE’s Oren Etzioni recently sat down with Rachel Tompa for Xconomy to talk about his philosophies on technology, startups, and investing in the current economy. He also talked about his most recent projects, two new software technologies that search the web in innovative ways.
PanImages, an image search tool, mines Google Images and Flickr for pictures and is a step towards an Internet that is not limited by language barriers. With PanImages, you can find pictures on Web pages that are written in hundreds of languages. Simply type in a word in your own language, and PanImages will find a list of translations into multiple languages at once.
TextRunner searches 500 million web pages for relationships between words. You can type in a question like “What kills bacteria?” and it finds everything in these 500 million pages that has the relationship “kill” to bacteria, returning answers ranked by the number of hits.
Read the full article here. Read more →
UW Director of News and Information Bob Roseth writes in University Week about a large-scale study of the computing needs of the UW research community. One hundred and twenty-five researchers were interviewed in what CSE professor and University of Washington eScience Institute director Ed Lazowska calls the most comprehensive study of its kind yet conducted. “No other university has conducted such a balanced study of top researchers’ information technology needs. What we have found is a rich texture of IT needs, because these researchers are using computing in increasingly sophisticated ways.”
Results of the study will be presented at a Catalyst Spark session on Friday, February 20 at 1:00PM in 220 Odegaard on the UW Seattle campus.
The full article is available here.
Read more →
James Lee
UW CSE faculty member James Lee has received a 2009 Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most prestigious awards available to younger faculty in the sciences. James is UW CSE’s 16th Sloan Research Fellowship recipient.
[Coverage in University Week is here. -SMR] Read more →
