Jeff Bezos spent several hours in UW CSE labs on December 16 – discussing ubiquitous computing and sensing with Shwetak Patel and students; the future of search with Oren Etzioni; and the security of computer-controlled personal devices (such as automobiles) with Yoshi Kohno and students; as well as discussing future directions for the computer science field with Ed Lazowska and Hank Levy.
Photos from the Ubicomp lab here.
Our friends at GeekWire picked it up, here. Read more →
From The New York Times:
“The Internet likes you, really likes you. It offers you so much, just a mouse click or finger tap away. Go Christmas shopping, find restaurants, locate partying friends, tell the world what you’re up to. Some of the finest minds in computer science, working at start-ups and big companies, are obsessed with tracking your online habits to offer targeted ads and coupons, just for you …
“But now — nothing personal, mind you — the Internet is growing up and lifting its gaze to the wider world … the protean Internet technologies of computing and communications are rapidly spreading beyond the lucrative consumer bailiwick. Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution. The consumer Internet can be seen as the warm-up act for these technologies
“The concept has been around for years, sometimes called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Yet it takes time for the economics and engineering to catch up with the predictions. And that moment is upon us.
“‘We’re going to put the digital ‘smarts’ into everything,’ said Edward D. Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. These abundant smart devices, Dr. Lazowska added, will ‘interact intelligently with people and with the physical world.’
“The role of sensors — once costly and clunky, now inexpensive and tiny — was described this month in an essay in The New York Times by Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology; he said the ultimate goal was ‘the sensor-aware planetary computer.’ That may sound like blue-sky futurism, but evidence shows that the vision is beginning to be realized on the ground, in recent investments, products and services, coming from large industrial and technology corporations and some ambitious start-ups.
“One of the hot new ventures in Silicon Valley is Nest Labs … Its product, introduced in late October, is a digital thermostat, combining sensors, machine learning and Web technology. It senses not just air temperature, but the movements of people in a house, their comings and goings, and adjusts room temperatures accordingly to save energy.
“At the Nest offices in Palo Alto, Calif., there is a lot of talk of helping the planet, as well as the thrill of creating cool technology. [UW CSE’s] Yoky Matsuoka, a former Google computer scientist and winner of a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, said, ‘This is the next wave for me.'”
Excellent article! Read it here. Read more →
“At 34 years old, Chris Kemp has a resume that many would call a career — Silicon Graphics systems engineer, Classmates.com chief architect, founder of online grocery technology company Netran and online travel company Escapia, CIO at NASA’s Ames Research Center and most recently the space agency’s first CTO for information technology …
“Now Kemp is back in the private sector, taking more risks and applying the lessons he’s learned along the way … Kemp is the CEO and co-founder of Nebula, a company developing an IT appliance that aims to make it easier and cheaper for companies to run ‘private clouds’ … The company is based in Palo Alto, with funding from some of the major players in the Silicon Valley investment community …
“Nebula also has a sizable presence in Seattle … ‘The tech community is phenomenal. There are a lot of really smart engineers here … the University of Washington is a little like Stanford. They’ve got a fantastic CS program.'”
Read the full interview here. Read more →
Xconomy interviews UW CSE Ph.D. alum Stefan Savage, Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at UC San Diego, as “Xconomist of the Week”:
“Last year, a team led by Savage and UW’s Tadayoshi Kohno showed that a hacker with physical access to an automotive electronic control unit could alter software to stop the engine, disable the brakes, and carry out other nefarious tasks. In follow-up research published earlier this year, Savage and company said they had succeeded in performing similar tasks remotely—using the cellular phone in a car to insert malicious software that enabled them to override various vehicle controls. (Their findings can be found at the website of the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security, a UW-UCSD collaboration.)
“Savage also has helped lead wide-ranging studies of Internet spam, outlining the global ‘ecosystem’ that supports compromised accounts, spam mailers, credit cards, e-mail lists, and other tools of the trade. This work led to a comprehensive study of just how much revenue spam advertising can generate, even when most of the spam is blocked.”
Read the rest of the interview here.
On Saturday December 10th, the Atrium of the Allen Center was the scene of delightful bedlam as more than 150 students from 43 teams representing 15 high schools competed in a day-long programming contest sponsored by UW CSE as the regional finale to the national Computer Science Education Week.
Results and photos can be found on the Puget Sound Computer Science Teachers Association (PSCSTA) website here. Additional photos on the Garfield High School Computer Science website here and here, and in Helene Martin’s Picasa album here.
Congratulations to all 150 participants, and particularly to the winners:
Also, thanks to the many volunteers who made the contest a success, and to the phenomenal high school computer science teachers in the Puget Sound region. (We can’t resist noting that our alum Lauren Bricker is the computer science teacher at Lakeside School, and that our alum Helene Martin was the computer science teacher at Garfield High School for the past two years (Helene has now returned to UW CSE to teach and participate in K-12 outreach)!) Read more →
The December 2011 edition of UW 360 – a UW TV magazine-style show profiling the fascinating people, programs and community connections that define the University of Washington – features UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel. The segment shows how he combines computer science and engineering to solve health and energy problems.
“‘You can’t really come up with new solutions unless you try to attack the problem from a different angle.'”
Watch the video here. Learn more about his research here. Read more →
On Friday, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat visited the final session of Stuart Reges‘s CSE 143. His report:
“There may be no place where the gap between politics and reality is wider right now than the UW’s computer science department.
“Politics these days is all about shrinking. How can we retrench, reduce or reset.
“But even the lecture halls aren’t big enough to contain what’s actually going on in high-tech education.
“An intro to computer programming section was so jammed one recent morning that some students sat on the floor. The class was whooping and fist-pumping as their final project — a virtual smackdown between packs of coded, simulated “critters” — played out on the hall’s screen …
“This year, record numbers have swamped the UW’s beginning computer classes — nearly 2,000 students — eclipsing even the dot-com boom in the ’90s. Yet the department has trimmed faculty and has not expanded the number of degrees it awards, due to state budget cuts …
“The result is about the biggest lost opportunity you could imagine. The UW now turns aside roughly 500 of its own students every year who want to major in computer science (most major in something else, though some do transfer) …
“Last week, an 80-member group of business leaders formed to try to raise $1 billion for a new sports arena, to woo back the NBA. We’ll do that for sports. Couldn’t we do it for school?”
Read Danny’s terrific article here. Learn about the sorry state of STEM education in Washington here. Read more →
Each year the University of Washington College of Engineering recognizes five alums with Diamond Awards – the highest honor conferred by the College.
We are thrilled to announce that UW CSE alums have received two of the 2012 Diamond Awards – to be conferred at a ceremony on May 18.
UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Greg Badros, an Engineering Director at Facebook responsible for advertising, search, data science and data infrastructure, will receive the UW College of Engineering Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement.
UW CSE Ph.D. alumna Anne Condon, Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and a world-renowned researcher in theoretical computer science and computational biology, will receive the UW College of Engineering Diamond Award for Distinguished Achievement in Academia.
Read more about Greg, Anne, and the other UW College of Engineering Diamond Award honorees here.
Congratulations to Greg and Anne! Read more →
“Shwetak Patel, a UW assistant professor in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering for the past three years, has been honored as one of this year’s MacArthur Fellows. Patel is the 15th UW faculty member to receive the prestigious ‘genius grant,’ which comes with a no-strings-attached award of $500,000 …
“Besides his time teaching at the UW, Patel, 29, already founded and sold a start-up company, Zensi, Inc., a demand-side, energy-monitoring solutions provider; he has been named a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow; has been honored by The New York Times for developing the top technology of the year; was awarded MIT’s Technology Review TR-35 award for innovators under age 35; and completed his doctorate at the Georgia Institute of Technology before coming to UW in 2008.”
Read the article here. Read more →
Michael Nielsen, Dave Bacon, Scott Aaronson, Steve Flammia, and Aram Harrow relax in the Allen Center atrium following Michael’s UW CSE Distinguished Lecture on “open science.”
Photos of Michael’s UW CSE Distinguished Lecture, by Bruce Hemingway, here. Read more →