November 4 2011 marks the 150th anniversary of the University of Washington (not to mention the 62nd birthday of UW President Michael Young). Our friends at Bing have chosen a photograph of the Graduate Reading Room of Suzzallo Library to commemorate the day. Thanks Bing! And congratulations UW!
Bing celebrates UW’s 150th anniversary
TechFlash “Startup of the Week” – Decide.com
“Should you buy that new camera now, or wait and see if the price drops a little more? That’s the decision Seattle startup Decide.com wants to help you answer…
“The startup was co-founded by Oren Etzioni, founder of Farecast and a computer science professor at the University of Washington, and two sets of [UW alumni] brothers, Brian and Ian Ma, and Hsu Han and Hsu Ken Ooi.”
Read more here. Read more →
TechCrunch on UW CSE alum Christophe Bisciglia’s startup Odiago
“Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia is debuting his new startup today, called Odiago. Odiago develops a product called WibiData, which leverages Apache Hadoop to manage and analyze large amounts of data. And the company is launching with a number of major backers including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, and SV Angel.”
Christophe received his Bachelors degree from UW CSE in 2003 and joined Google. In 2007, he returned to UW on his Google 20% time to create the nation’s first “Google-scale programming” course, which landed him on the cover of Business Week and stimulated Google and IBM to invest in an Academic Datacenter Initiative to spread the curriculum – an effort later joined by the National Science Foundation.
In 2008, with the support of Eric Schmidt, Christophe left Google to found Cloudera, now the leading provider of Apache Hadoop-based software and services. (Hadoop had been co-developed by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Mike Cafarella, now a faculty member at the University of Michigan, and Doug Cutting, now at Cloudera.) Christophe lured Aaron Kimball, a UW CSE graduate student who had worked with him on the course, to take a leave of absence and join Cloudera.
In 2010, Christophe and Aaron left Cloudera to found Odiago. UW CSE alum Garrett Wu is also on the Odiago team.
Read the TechCrunch post here. A more technical description of Odiago’s WibiData offering appears in DBMS2 here. Read more →
“Why Northeastern University chose Seattle, and what the UW’s Ed Lazowska thinks about it”
Following up on a Seattle Times article announcing that Northeastern University is contemplating opening a campus in Seattle to offer master’s degrees in information assurance, health informatics and computer science, GeekWire interviews Northeastern’s senior strategist and market development officer, Sean Gallagher, and UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska.
Gallagher: “The Seattle metro area has been a leader in job creation and the growth of its knowledge economy … There has been rapid and sustained growth in Seattle and in the state in jobs preferring or requiring a master’s degree, and given state budget cuts and other dynamics, the demand for educated professionals exceeds supply.”
Lazowska … tells GeekWire that he welcomes additional educational opportunities. He points out that there is lots of demand from students and employers.
Lazowska: “We have one of the nation’s top undergraduate programs, one of the nation’s top graduate programs, and one of the nation’s top professional masters degree programs. Students who want to work at Microsoft or Amazon.com or Google or startups, or who are currently working there and want to gain additional education, are not going to choose Northeastern over UW, even independent of the significant tuition differential. The tragedy is that there isn’t more of us to go around. This leaves highly qualified individuals who live here with insufficient options.”
Read the GeekWire post here. Read more →