Pavan Vaswani
At a February 23rd reception at the home of University of Washington President Mark Emmert, CSE’s Pavan Vaswani will be recognized as the University of Washington Junior Medalist — the top student in last year’s junior class (of 7,000+ students). Pavan knows the drill — last year he was UW’s Sophomore Medalist. Congratulations Pavan! (University Week article here.) Read more →
KOMO News reports on One Bus Away in this February 12 broadcast television story, Where’s that bus?!? Sweat no more. One Bus Away is a web site and a collection of bus-locating services created and run by UW CSE grad student Brian Ferris. It allows transit users in King County to track the buses they are interested in five different ways, most available from a cellphone (voice, text, or web). You can view the broadcast video segment on demand at the site.
We previously covered One Bus Away here.
[One Bus Away was also the subject of a February 11 radio news story by Tom Tangney on KIRO-FM, Riding the bus just got easier. You can listen to the audio on demand at the site. On the same day, Fox Television affiliate Q13 looked at One Bus Away in Real-time bus schedules– on your cell phone!] Read more →
UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska is organizing a public symposium on “Contemporary Topics in the Energy Field,” to be held on March 17th as part of a Regional Meeting of the National Academy of Engineering. A number of the talks — for example one on the Smart Grid — should be of interest to CSE students, faculty, and friends. Further information is available at http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/nae2009/. Read more →
Stimulated by a request from our friends at Google, I plotted enrollment in UW CSE’s introductory course (“CS-1” — called “CSE-142” at UW) over the past 4.5 years. We offer this course every quarter (that is, four times a year); I plotted a 4-quarter rolling sum of course enrollment to smooth the data. (In other words, each point on the graph shows total enrollment during the most recent four academic quarters.)
The results show a dramatic growth in total enrollment, and an even more dramatic growth in the enrollment of women — both of which are important for the health of the field.
Want to know what computer science is like? See the terrific videos and other information here! Read more →
Brian Bershad at the Paul Allen Center
TechFlash reporter John Cook writes about the Seattle Startup Weekend held at Google‘s Fremont engineering office last weekend, and quotes UW CSE professor and graduate (PhD ’90) Brian Bershad, currently on leave to serve as site manager at the Fremont facility.
We are trying to be good neighbors. We don’t want to stomp on people. We don’t want to go raiding people of their employees. We want people to feel like they can come to us and talk openly about what they are doing and feel safe.
Cook says that Microsoft— which co-sponsored the event– has been working to rehabilitate their image with the start-up community after mis-steps led to a poor image in the ’80s and ’90s.
Read the full article here. Read more →
Six months after Linden Rhoads took the reins as Vice Provost at UW Tech Transfer, Xconomy Seattle reporter Luke Timmerman has done a two-part interview with her to find out what’s been accomplished so far and what lies on the road ahead.
UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska had this to say about the Rhoads era at Tech Transfer:
There’s been a dramatic change since Linden’s arrival. The tech transfer officers are crawling all over our building working with students and faculty. An Entrepreneur-in-Residence program has been started. Janis Machala, an incredibly experienced and well-connected startup “coach” who many of our previous startups have worked with, has been brought on-staff. It’s like night and day.
Read part 1 and part 2 of the full article. Read more →
An op-ed by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska and Sun Microsystems’ Bob Sproull appears today on the website of Scientists and Engineers for America. They write:
“Congress is now debating the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Included in this package is over 10 billion dollars for science facilities, research, and instrumentation.
“The reason for this inclusion is simple: today’s research is tomorrow’s infrastructure.
“When our nation faces immediate challenges, the feasible solutions depend upon the ideas, resources, and designs that are “on the shelf,” ready to deploy …
“Increasingly, information technology is the cornerstone of America’s infrastructure. Today’s information technology research is a cornerstone of tomorrow’s infrastructure.”
Read the full editorial here. A set of white papers describing the role of computing research in meeting the challenges of the 21st century is available here. Read more →
Jeff Dean, 1996 UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering — one of the highest honors accorded to engineers. Jeff was one of 65 individuals — 12 in the Computer Science & Engineering section — elected to membership in the 2009 class, announced on February 6.
Jeff began his career at DEC WRL, and moved to Google in 1999. At Google, Jeff and MIT EECS Ph.D. alumnus Sanjay Ghemawat — also elected to NAE this year — led the conception, design, and implementation of much of Google’s revolutionary computing infrastructure. Jeff was elected to NAE “for contributions to the science and engineering of large-scale distributed computer systems.”
Also elected in the NAE class of 2009 — both in the Bioengineering section — were UW Dean of Engineering Matt O’Donnell, and former UW Electrical Engineering professor and current UW Bioengineering affiliate professor David Auth. Read more →
Former UW whizzes Brian Ma, 22, a graduate of Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering, and Hsu Ken Ooi, 25, a graduate of Mathematics and Statistics, are launching Eggsprout with the help of CSE’s Oren Etzioni. The Bellevue startup is planning to transform the way people find jobs online.
Read more →Read the TechFlash article here.
Read the Techvibes entry here.
Read the Cheezhead article here.
UW TechTransfer, the unit that facilitates the commercialization of UW research, has hired Todd Alberstone as director of intellectual property management and Ed Cummings as a licensing officer focused on computing technologies. Both have experience in the local high-tech industry.
“We’re excited to have somebody with Ed’s skills and experience at UW TechTransfer,” said Hank Levy, professor and chair of CSE. “He will play a major role in helping us to move technologies quickly out of the university to where they can have impact in the community.”
Read the full University Week article here. Read more →
