“University of Washington computer science professor Ed Lazowska is known as a straight talking rabble-rouser who doesn’t pull many punches. And he certainly lived up to that reputation today at the OVP Venture Partners Technology Summit …
“Lazowska – who appeared on stage with the equally opinionated Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service – reserved his toughest comments for a Lake Wobegon mentality in the state where everything appears to be above average.
“‘It seems to me that the issue with this state is that we are one big happy family in which everybody is doing extremely well. Everyone’s college program is above average. And everyone’s company is above average. And everyone’s venture fund is above average. And if you go a little bit more above average than the next guy, then they get all Dirty Harry and whack you down. It’s the State of Whac-a-Mole … I worry that those who excel, and excel honestly, aren’t celebrated in this state'”
Read the full TechFlash article here. Read more →
UW’s Foldit protein folding game received nice coverage in a Computerworld article on human computation (and more generally the importance of human-computer symbiosis).
“You can play a video game called Foldit on the Web while making important contributions to science. Understanding how 3-D proteins ‘fold’ into their optimum structures is critical to understanding disease, but it’s difficult computationally because there are an astronomical number of possible folds for most proteins.
“The thousands of people who play Foldit use their pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving skills to predict protein structures in a way computers can’t easily duplicate. ‘Teenaged gamers are beating the pants off Ph.D. biochemists,’ says Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, where Foldit was created.”
See the full Computerworld article here. Read more →
TechFlash has published its inaugural list of of top women in the Seattle technology industry. Among those listed is UW CSE’s Emer Dooley. The list includes many other women who have close ties to UW CSE:
- Connie Bourassa-Shaw, who runs the UW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
- Amanda Camp from Google Seattle, who has participated in many of our outreach and educational activities.
- Suzan DelBene, who had been the CEO of UW CSE startup Nimble Technologies.
- Maria Klawe, our close friend from Harvey Mudd College who recently joined the Microsoft board.
- Janis Machala and Linden Rhoads from UW Tech Transfer.
- Susannah Malarkey from the Technology Alliance (on whose Executive Committee Ed Lazowska has served for many years).
Read the complete list here. Read more →
Congratulations to Kathy Wei! Kathy, a dual major in CSE and BioE, was selected as the 2009 College of Engineering Dean’s Medalist from a very competitive pool of applicants.
The Dean’s Medal is awarded to a graduating student in recognition of outstanding academic achievement, research activities, and campus and extra-curricular involvement. The medal is scheduled to be presented at the Community of Innovators Awards ceremony on June 4, 2009, 3:30-5:00 p.m., in the Don James Center. Read more →
UW CSE’s Jeff Bigham‘s team is one of five teams awarded the 2009 NCTI Technology in the Works award. His team was selected to examine web browsing made accessible for blind students— Enabling More Effective Use of the Web Anywhere with WebAnywhere and TrailBlazer.
The National Center for Technology Innovation (NCTI) assists researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs in creating innovative learning tools for all students, with special focus on students with disabilities. NCTI sponsors this annual competition to inform the development of learning and assistive technologies that can improve educational results for all students, particularly those with disabilities. Five exceptional teams of researchers and vendors have been selected to examine the impact of innovative assistive technologies for students with special needs.
Findings will be presented at the 2009 Technology Innovators Conference in Washington, D.C., November 16-17. Read more →
UW CSE adjunct assistant professor Julie Kientz has built a high-tech tool that takes photos and video, creates an online diary and family newsletters, and at the same time tracks a child’s developmental milestones. The multimedia system is called Baby Steps. Her research indicates that parents who used Baby Steps had more useful information to present during visits to pediatricians and were more confident about their record keeping.
Read the post in the Technology Review blog here.
Read the UW News article here.
Read The New York Times Freakonomics post here. Read more →
A conversation between UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska and Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie keynoted the annual State of Technology luncheon hosted by the Technology Alliance.
More than 700 attendees heard Ozzie discuss topics such as collaborative software, cloud computing, the leadership team at Microsoft, cultural differences between large and small companies, special-purpose vs. general-purpose digital devices, intellectual property in a Web world, and the differences between Boston and Seattle as innovative regions.
Xconomy article here. TechFlash article and videos here. Seattle Times article here. CIO article here. Forbes article here. Webwereld (The Netherlands) article here. Read more →
UW CSE PhD candidate Saleema Amershi has been awarded a 2009 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, awarded each year to female computer science students selected on the basis of academic excellence and leadership. The scholarships, which carry an award of $10,000, celebrate the life’s work of the late Anita Borg. Saleema works in the areas of HCI and machine learning.
UW CSE PhD candidate Kristi Morton and undergraduate Julia Schwarz were finalists, each earning an award of $1000.
Read about the 2009 US winners and finalists in this post on the Google Student Blog. Read about our two 2008 awardees here. Read more →
