2011 UW CSE Bachelors alumnus Chris Raastad will spend the 2011-12 academic year in Estonia through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program.
The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Since its establishment in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Fulbright Program has given approximately 300,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists, and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.
Congratulations to Chris! Read the Fulbright press release here. Read more →
The work of UW CSE Ph.D. alum Adrien Treuille, now on the computer science faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, is described in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“A Web-based game that uses the brainpower of biology novices to understand molecules key to life and disease is producing working designs of those molecules …”
The game, EteRNA, is a derivative of Adrien’s UW Ph.D. work on Foldit, a Web-based game for protein folding and protein structure calculation, which originated this sort of “crowd-sourced science” and revealed the perhaps surprising fact that teenage gamers can beat the pants off of trained biochemists.
Read the article here. Read more →
“Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen wants an IBM 7094. The elusive data-processing system was taken off the market in 1969 after just seven years and hasn’t been widely used since.
“It’s Ian King’s job to find it.
“Often clad in a kilt, and sporting a Grizzly Adams-like coiffure, Mr. King is traveling the globe in search of the 7094 and other obscure, often huge, old computer gear. The machines will stock Mr. Allen’s appointment-only Living Computer Museum.
“‘I’m like a kid in a candy store,’ says Mr. King, who holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Washington …”
Read the Wall Street Journal article here. See photographs here. Learn more about Paul Allen’s Living Computer Museum here. Read more →
Seattle Business profiles UW CSE professor Zoran Popovic and his Center for Game Science.
“Housed in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, the Center for Game Science is where scientists and scholars apply gaming principles to projects as diverse as biology, education and nanotechnology.”
Read the article here. Read more →
Each year Technology Review honors 35 innovators under the age of 35 “whose work promises to change the world. Candidates from across the globe are chosen for tackling important problems in transformative ways.”
This year’s TR35 includes UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Noah Snavely, now a faculty member at Cornell.
“In 2006, as part of his PhD studies at the University of Washington, Snavely created a system that could assemble such models using an unstructured assortment of images from different cameras and viewpoints… In 2008 his work was commercialized as Microsoft’s Photosynth service, which allows users to upload photo collections and view them in a 3-D reconstruction of the space where they were taken… Snavely, now an assistant professor at Cornell, is trying to assemble a ‘distributed camera’ composed of all the individual cameras whose pictures are shared online. He hopes to use those photos to construct a street-level digital model of much of the globe.”
Read about Noah and the rest of this year’s TR35 here. Read more →
Rob Friedman
The Cake
Orlando Baiocchi
The Institute of Technology at UW Tacoma today thanked Orlando Baiocchi for five years of service as Director, and welcomed Rob Friedman, his successor.
Some editorializing by Ed Lazowska:
I worked closely with former UW Tacoma Chancellor Vicky Carwein to obtain legislative support for establishing the Institute of Technology. One of Vicky’s many wonderful qualities was that she clearly understood the mission of UW Tacoma and of the Institute: to serve as a powerful engine of revitalization for the South Sound region. Working with Vicky, Larry Crum, and the faculty to launch the Institute was one of the most rewarding things I’ve been involved with at the University of Washington.
Orlando was not so fortunate as to have Vicky as his boss: Vicky had left the University of Washington, and had been replaced by a Chancellor who simply didn’t understand the Institute (among many other things). Orlando has fought the good fight, and we owe him a real debt of gratitude for doing a fine job in difficult circumstances.
Hopefully, under new Chancellor Debra Friedman, Rob and Orlando and the faculty can get back to serving their mission and having fun doing it.
Thanks, Orlando! Read more →
More than 60 K-12 teachers from the Pacific Northwest joined UW CSE this week for the fifth annual edition of CS4HS, a summer workshop in computer science for teachers of math and science. Sponsored by Google, CS4HS began as a joint initiative of UW, CMU, and UCLA, and has grown over the years to include dozens of campuses.
Special thanks to Google, and also to Tom Cortina from CMU who has joined us every year to contribute to the success of this terrific program! (In one of the photos to the right, Tom executes a bad algorithm for making a PB&J sandwich.)
All materials from the workshop can be found here. Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Stephen Mann, a computer graphics faculty member at the University of Waterloo, is celebrated for making ice cream for his students in the Waterloo computer graphics lab.
Brian, Zoran, and Steve: Is there something you could learn from him?
Read the article here. Read more →
In order to look their best at Defcon and Usenix Security, members of the UW CSE Security and Privacy Research Lab equipped themselves with t-shirts displaying the text of the waiver they were required to sign before testing their hacked automobile on the runway at Blaine Airport.
We can confirm that no damage was done by the car at Blaine Airport. We are not so sure about the impact of these t-shirts at Defcon and Usenix Security. Read more →
This Seattle Times article offers a sad commentary on the job prospects of displaced workers, and on Washington State’s shameful level of investment in Bachelors-level higher education. It should be “must reading” for policymakers:
“An International Monetary Fund (IMF) study estimated that between 2007 and 2010, the skill level of Washington’s work force (measured mainly by years of education) got more out of whack with the available jobs than in any other state except Delaware.
“That mismatch helps explain why thousands of jobs in Washington can go unfilled at the same time more than 322,000 state residents are out of work …
“In June, more than 7,500 openings for advanced computer-related jobs in King, Snohomish, Pierce and Kitsap counties were listed on the state’s WorkSource database — more than a quarter of all 27,000-plus metro-area openings.
“But those jobs require years of training and, ideally, more years of experience.”
Read this excellent and sobering article here.
A direct link to the graphic that appears to the left: here. (Four the top 10 job openings in the Puget Sound region are for computer scientists, totaling nearly 60% of the available jobs.)
Read more →
