An Xconomy post by UW CSE alum Jeremy Jaech, who has spent the past few months in CSE as an entrepreneurship coach.
“Together we can create a culture that values and informs the commercialization of ideas, always remembering that faculty members and outsiders are not often the miners of these gems. Students are.”
Read the post here. Read more →
UW Today reports on the research of UW CSE’s Josh Smith and his collaborators, on inductive methods for powering implantable medical electronics. Today, the power cord that protrudes through the patient’s belly is cumbersome and prone to infection over time. Infections occur in close to 40 percent of patients, are the leading cause of rehospitalization, and can be fatal.
Read more here. Read more →
Ph.D. alums Anthony “legs” LaMarca and Lauren Bricker, and CSE research staff member Stephen Spencer, are all decked out in their UW CSE Pastry Powered T(o)uring Machine jerseys midway through the 10,000-rider Seattle-To-Portland bicycle ride on Saturday. Shirtless faculty member Steve Gribble took the photo.
Overheard at one of the rest stops: “That’s the nerdiest jersey I’ve ever seen.”
Go team! Read more →
Jeff Huang, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington’s Information School, has tallied the total number of “Best Paper Awards” won by various research organizations in recent years at a number of leading conferences: AAAI (Artificial Intelligence), ACL (Natural Language Processing), CHI (Human-Computer Interaction), CIKM (Knowledge Management), FOCS (Theory), ICML (Machine Learning), IJCAI (Artificial Intelligence), KDD (Data Mining), OSDI (Operating Systems), SIGIR (Information Retrieval), SIGMOD (Databases), SOSP (Operating Systems), STOC (Theory), UIST (User Interface), VLDB (Databases), and WWW (World Wide Web).
We know: Beauty contests such as this are a complete crock. However, since we came out smelling like a rose this time, we wholeheartedly endorse this particular ranking as definitive, and we enthusiastically draw your attention to it.
Check it out here. Read more →
UW CSE professor Rajesh Rao spoke at the 2011 TED conference on his research concerning deciphering Indus script. A video of this spectacular talk has just been posted on the TED website here. Learn more about the research here. Read more →

Hank Levy & Ed Lazowska

Tony DeRose
More than 100 UW CSE alums in the Bay Area joined Brian Curless, Ed Lazowska, Hank Levy, Barbara Mones, and Matt O’Donnell at Pixar on June 30 for an alumni event hosted by Tony DeRose. Great time!!!!!
Alums: Be sure your current address is on file to ensure you’re notified of events in your area!!!!! Read more →
MIT Technology Review profiles the research of UW graduate student Gabe Cohn:
“Researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington demonstrated that the human body can be used as an antenna to direct electromagnetic ‘noise,’ or ambient radiation—in this case from wiring in a wall. The resulting signal could be used to control a gesture-based interface.”
A recent paper, “Your Noise is My Command: Sensing Gestures Using the Body as an Antenna,” received a Best Paper award at this spring’s CHI conference.
Read more →
UW Learning & Scholarly Technologies profiles UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska.
On the PCAST report
“During the summer of 2010, Lazowska co-chaired the Working Group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) that prepared a report titled Designing a Digital Future: Federally Funded Research and Development in Networking and Information Technology. According to Lazowska, the main messages of the report include:
- Advances in computer science have been a pivotal driver of economic prosperity over the last two decades.
- Current and ongoing technological and societal changes situate further advances in computing at the center of nearly every national priority: improved energy efficiency, education, transportation, health, etc.”
On workforce
“The PCAST report documents that computer science is by far the dominant factor in all U.S. science and technology employment. Job projections over the next eight years show 2/3 of all newly-created jobs in all fields of engineering and science (including the social sciences) will be computing jobs. Lazowska summarizes the situation bluntly, ‘The truth is there is no science and technology workforce gap; there is a computer science workforce gap.‘”
On “computational thinking”
“Lazowska argues that computational thinking, whether or not you’re computing, is becoming absolutely pervasive. … ‘No matter what they intend on studying or doing, students need to have a grounding in modern computational concepts.'”
Read the profile here. Read more →
Decide.com, a startup founded by UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni and four UW alums (including three CSE alums), was profiled on KING5 News.
“A Seattle startup hopes complex math formulas, rumor mining and $8.5 million in funding can completely change the way you shop for electronics. … Decide comprises about 20 PhDs and engineers at the base of Queen Anne Hill, and uses what the company calls ‘predictive technologies’ against a database of billions of historical price points to calculate, with varying degrees of confidence, what lies in the future of each product.”
Watch the KING5 video here. Read previous posts here. Read more →
Another lovely Bruce Hemingway photograph, showing 20 of our 22 2010-11 Ph.D. graduates. 1MB pdf here. 40MB pdf here. Read more →