A TechFlash article on the overlapping businesses of Microsoft and Amazon.com
“‘I don’t view this as ‘competition vs. cooperation.’ There is plenty of business out there,’ said Ed Lazowska, computer science professor at the University of Washington. ‘Users — customers — are going to prefer different approaches. What’s great for us, for our future as a tech region, is that Amazon.com has emerged as one of the nation’s great technology companies, and that two of the three big players in ‘cloud infrastructure services’ are headquartered here. The third, Google, also has a major presence in the region.”
Read the full article here. Read more →
UW CSE will host a half-day Xconomy forum on March 29th. Titled “What’s Your Breakthrough Idea?,” the event will feature Lee Hood, Nathan Myhrvold, and UW CSE’s Steve Seitz and Dan Weld, among others. Read all about it here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Dave Bacon has the cover article in this month’s Communications of the ACM.
“It is impossible to imagine today’s technological world without algorithms: sorting, searching, calculating, and simulating are being used everywhere to make our everyday lives better. But what are the benefits of the more philosophical endeavor of studying the notion of an algorithm through the perspective of the physical laws of the universe? This simple idea, that we desire an understanding of the algorithm based upon physics seems, upon first reflection, to be nothing more than mere plumbing in the basement of computer science. That is, until one realizes that the pipes of the universe do not seem to behave like the standard components out of which we build a computer, but instead obey the counterintuitive laws of quantum theory. And, even more astoundingly, when one puts these quantum parts together, one gets a notion of the algorithm—the quantum algorithm—whose computational power appears to be fundamentally more efficient at carrying out certain tasks than algorithms written for today’s, nonquantum, computers. Could this possibly be true: that there is a more fundamental notion of algorithmic efficiency for computers built from quantum components? And, if this is true, what exactly is the power of these quantum algorithms?”
Read the full article here. Read Dave’s Quantum Pontiff blog here. Read more →
Five months ago, Peter Lee took a leave of absence as Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University to begin a stint at DARPA as the Director of the new Transformational Convergence Technology Office (DARPA/TCTO). TCTO is re-establishing basic research programs in a broad range of rapidly emerging computing-enabled technology areas such as social media, synthetic biology, high-performance computing, and networking, as well as employing a diverse range of innovation strategies including broad community programs, competitions/challenges, and crowd sourcing.
Peter spoke on DARPA and TCTO at the University of Washington on February 2. The talk is inspiring and informative. Watch the streaming video here. Read more →
A New York Times article describes a new initiative by Microsoft and the National Science Foundation to assist scientists in utilizing cloud services to manage and analyze the tsunami of data that characterizes modern sensor-based science.
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska is quoted in the article: “Simplicity of use is one Microsoft goal. So far, programming modern cloud systems for full efficiency has been difficult. The company is trying to overcome this difficulty in creating a variety of software tools for scientists, said Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer scientist who works closely with the Microsoft researchers. Dr. Lazowska said the explosion of data being collected by scientists had transformed the needs of the typical scientific research program …”
New York Times article here. NSF announcement here. Blog post by Microsoft’s Dan Reed here. UW eScience Institute here. Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. student Jon Froehlich was one of five students profiled in the University of Washington’s “Report to Contributors.” Jon, who works with UW CSE professors James Landay and Shwetak Patel on HCI problems related to environmental concerns, is the recipient of a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship.
Read Jon’s profile here. The full “Report to Contributors” is here. Read more →
Today Google announced a new program of “Focused Research Awards” in four key areas of computer science.
Among the awards was a $1.5 million commitment to UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello for his work involving the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring.
In a separate initiative, Google has committed $1 million to support computer vision and computer graphics research in the UW CSE Graphics and Imaging Laboratory, led by Professors Steve Seitz, Brian Curless, and Zoran Popovic.
Borriello spent a sabbatical year at Google’s Seattle office with three of his graduate students developing Open Data Kit (ODK), an open-source modular data collection toolkit targeting the advanced features of Android phones. ODK has already been deployed on four continents and is proving to be a versatile tool for community health workers and forest services. Jane Goodall is an ODK advocate — see “Speaking for the Forests” here.
UW CSE’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory focuses on very large scale 3D modeling and rendering from photos, interactive simulations and games, and realistic computer animation.
Many top technology companies provide research support to UW CSE. In the past three years, for example, Microsoft has provided more than $5 million in research support to the University of Washington, the majority to CSE. Intel Labs Seattle is another extremely strong research partner. These partnerships are essential to our success as a top program in the field.
See a New York Times blog post on the Google Focused Research Awards initiative here. See an Xconomy post here. See a Seattle Times article here. See a TechFlash post here. Read more →
