Corensic, a software quality tool company founded by UW CSE faculty Mark Oskin and Luis Ceze, this week announced the availability of Jinx 1.2 R2, a software quality tool for Linux and Windows. Jinx exposes hard-to-find concurrency bugs in software, a task that ordinarily requires numerous manual steps and a great deal of luck.
Intel is blogging about Corensic and Jinx! As James Reinders states in his Intel blog, “I was a little ‘slow’ in figuring out what all the fuss was about when I first met them more than a year ago. They like to play up their product as ‘testing’ your code by making it ‘unlucky.’ Makes for cool marketing and a funny product name.
“A light bulb went off in my head when I realized they were doing what hardware folks call ‘shake rattle and roll tests’ where you literally take hardware (computer, car, refrigeration, you name it!) and shake it to see if anything comes loose or malfunctions. Brutal!”
Read the PRWeb article here; the Intel blog post here. Learn more about Corensic here. Read more →
UW Interim President Phyllis Wise today announced 8 inaugural University of Washington Entrepreneurial Faculty Fellows. Included in this inaugural class are UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni and Yoky Matsuoka.
The Fellows are being honored as the University’s most entrepreneurial faculty researchers, having achieved success in translating their research into products and therapies or started groundbreaking programs for translation or collaboration with industry.
“‘The University of Washington is dedicated to maximizing our contribution to the Washington state economy, and the impact of our research. We’re immensely proud of the achievements of those chosen as UW Presidential EFFs,’ said interim UW President Dr. Phyllis Wise. ‘UW researchers will conduct more than a billion-and-a-half-dollars in federally funded research this year.’”
Congratulations to Oren and Yoky!
Read the UW press release here. GeekWire article here. Read more →
CSE’s Mark Bun, a junior who entered the UW through the early entrance program, has been awarded a 2011 Goldwater Scholarship. Goldwater Scholarships are the premier award for undergraduates majoring in engineering and the sciences.
Mark is the sixth CSE undergraduate to be honored with a Goldwater Scholarship. See past award winners here.
Congratulations to Mark!
Read the UW announcement here. Read more →
Xconomy writes:
“Another month gone by in Seattle, another Silicon Valley company has moved in to establish a beachhead for recruiting tech workers. … But all of those companies often wind up chasing the same pool of experienced workers – a pool that Washington state isn’t adding to fast enough by cranking out computer science graduates of its own.
“It’s a situation that can’t be sustained if the region is to maintain its prominence in the tech world. …
“Ed Lazowska, the University of Washington’s Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering, says the last sustainable increase in state spending for higher education enrollments was around 1999. …
“‘It kind of sucks that the children of Washington parents can’t get into the University of Washington and pursue a STEM degree because there’s not enough slots,’ says entrepreneur Jeremy Jaech, chairman of the Technology Alliance. ‘But it’s not likely to change any time soon.'”
Read the article here. Read more →
Check out Ed Lazowska’s talk to a University of Washington “Math Day” audience — high school students interested in the mathematical sciences. It’s a quick, fun overview of the field.
Slides are linked here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska is one of eight columnists featured in a New York Times “Room for Debate” essay series on education. Lazowska says:
“There are a few facts about education, employability and economic growth that we should keep in mind.
“A balanced education serves you best …
“The further out you are from college graduation, the less your success is attributable to the field in which you majored, and the more your success is attributable to a set of abilities imparted by any top-tier bachelor’s-level education …
“But let us not fool ourselves about what fields offer job opportunities, create jobs for others, and drive the economy …
“So what should today’s college students study in order to stay competitive? My take: A computer science degree is a great preparation for just about any field.”
Read Lazowska’s post, and others, here.
Update: Email received from a senior faculty member in Obstetrics and Gynecology at a top east coast university: “Indeed! I majored in computer science undergrad and then worked at Microsoft for four years (1998-2002) while living in Seattle. Then I moved into epidemiology: computer science is EXCELLENT preparation for (some aspects of) epidemiology. Both the specific skills and the way of thinking through problems that I learned in computer science are broadly applicable.”
Update: See UW CSE alum Sierra Michels Slettvet’s related blog post here. And an interesting comment in ITBusinessEdge here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Anna Karlin and her Stanford grad school classmate Evan Cohn stalled 23 years before getting married. But it finally happened tonight! Read more →
UW CSE alum and winner of a 2006 UW College of Engineering Diamond Award and 2011 UW CSE Alumni Achievement Award Jere
my Jaech has stepped down as CEO of Verdiem.
“… Considered one of the most accomplished entrepreneurs in the city, it will be interesting to see where he lands,” writes John Cook in GeekWire.
Why the change? “I wanted to get back to the early-stage stuff,” he tells GeekWire. Jaech has been spending time at UW CSE, working with Shwetak Patel and others.
Seattle Business called Jaech “a serial entrepreneur with a magic touch” in the list of the Top 25 Innovators & Entrepreneurs in 2009. (See #24.)
Jaech currently serves as chair of the Technology Alliance, a technology industry group based in Seattle, advocating that an innovation economy is essential to Washington’s ability to thrive in a competitive world.
Xconomy article here. GeekWire articles here and here. Read more →
“Using CSS3 transforms and HTML5 canvas, the Katamari Hack for Google Chrome (and other compatible browsers) allows you to turn any website into a game of Katamari Damacy! The script was created by Alex Leone, [UW CSE undergrad] David Nufer, and [UW CSE undergrad] David Truong, and won the 2011 Yahoo HackU contest at University of Washington.”
The Yahoo! HackU contest give 3-person undergraduate teams 24 hours to come up with interesting web applications. “Katamari Hack” turns any web page into a game reminiscent of the video game Katamari Damacy. It allows the user to roll a ball around the page, picking up words, images, and other content off of the page and sticking it to the ball. Everything rolls around on the ball in full 3-D. It’s amazing that Alex, David and David were able to do this, especially in just 24 hours; they had to compute all of the 3-D graphical transformations themselves from scratch. You’ve gotta try this thing. It can be found at: http://kathack.com/.
This is the third year running that members of this team have taken the prize. Congratulations to the team!
Katamari Hack site here. Slashdot post here. The Stranger reports on its test here. Woot! blogs about it here. Engadget here. Digg here. Gossipgamers here. IngieGames here. More information on Yahoo! HackU here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Center for Game Science is featured in the March 2011 issue of Columns, the University of Washington alumni magazine.
“‘We’re focusing not just on scientific discovery games but, in general, games as a primary medium for solving really hard problems that our entire society cares about,’ says Zoran Popović, associate professor at the UW’s Department of Computer Science & Engineering and director of the Center for Game Science. ‘Specifically, problems that people alone or computers alone cannot solve. But together they might be able to.'”
Read the article here. Check out some games: Foldit, Refraction. Visit the Center for Game Science here. Read more →
