Xconomy Boston reports on the Seattle-area innovation ecosystem, noting UW CSE, Impinj, Madrona Venture Group, etc.
“The other component in the ‘entrepreneurial ecosystem’ is the University of Washington … the Computer Science & Engineering program is one of the top ten in the country …”
Read it here. Read more →
Intel has launched the first of a new breed of Intel Science and Technology Centers (ISTCs).
ISTCs are Intel-funded, jointly-led research collaborations between Intel and the U.S. academic community. Each ISTC will be centered at a leading U.S. university and will focus on a specific technology area or discipline, bringing together a community of top researchers from across academia.
The ISTC in Visual Computing is centered at Stanford and brings together thought leaders from Stanford, the University of Washington, UC Berkeley, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, UC Davis, UC Irvine and Intel to collaboratively advance the state-of-the-art in visual computing.
Read about the ISTC-VC here. Read about the ISTC concept here. Read more →
Each year, the University of Washington recognizes a Freshman, Sophomore, and Junior Medalist – essentially, the most accomplished student in the previous year’s freshman, sophomore, and junior classes.
This year’s UW Junior Medalist is our very own Krysta Yousoufian.
CSE has a considerable string of UW Medalists, going back more than 20 years. This is testimony to the extraordinary abilities of CSE students. To be in a major this challenging and emerge at the top of the 5000-7000 students in your class is a mind-blowing accomplishment.
Congratulations to Krysta!
Read the UW announcement here. Read more →
Members of UW’s winning iGEM team. CSE's Sean Wu is second from right in the front row.
We missed the news, back in November, that a team of UW undergraduates including CSE student Sean Wu took home the top prize in the Health and Medicine category at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) synthetic biology competition.
The team’s winning creation is a bacterium that has been modified to seek out and destroy anthrax. It is now being tested in Maryland by the U.S. Army’s Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases.
Read about it here. Congratulations to Sean, his teammates, and the team advisors! Read more →
"Former UW professor Brian Bershad, front center, has hired dozens of former students for Google, his new employer. He says he'd hire many more if the university could keep producing enough, but the state budget crisis may prevent that."
The Seattle Times reports on the loss of opportunity represented by University of Washington budget cuts.
“Consider the situation faced by Brian Bershad, a former UW computer science professor who is now the engineering site director for Google Seattle/Kirkland. He’d like to hire more UW computer scientists and computer engineers — a lot more.
“‘If the UW could produce 1,000 amazing engineers every year,’ Bershad said, ‘we’d find a way to hire them.’
“But the university’s computer science program already turns away hundreds of smart kids who apply annually. Future budget cutbacks could mean turning away still more …
“Bershad and others say the reductions have another, hidden cost: They erase opportunities for Washington students, meaning local kids won’t receive the training they need to land a job at Google — or with a local startup that one day could become the Next Big Thing.”
Read this excellent article here.
The Stranger has a similar, although less polite, take on the subject, here.
And UW asks “What is a College Education Worth … for the Citizens, Community, Employers, State and Students” here. Read more →
ScienceNews profiles the research of UW CSE professor Raj Rao.
“Boldly going where most computer scientists fear to tread, Rajesh Rao watches intently as 1-year-olds lock eyes with their mothers in a developmental psychology lab at the University of Washington in Seattle. Time after time, tiny upturned heads tilt in whatever direction the caretakers look. Naturally, Rao thinks of robots.”
Read the article here. Learn more about Rao and his research here. Read more →
Computing Research News discusses the recent assessment of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program, carried out by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska co-chaired the Working Group that advised PCAST on the report.
“Backed by strong support from the White House, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a biennial report about the status and direction of the nation’s 14-agency, $4.3 billion Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program last month. The report emphasized the critical role of advances in networking and information technology (NIT) to U.S. economic competitiveness, and called on the nation to ‘continue to innovate more rapidly and creatively than other countries in important areas of NIT’ in order to sustain and improve overall quality of life.”
Read the CRN article here. Learn about the report here. Read more →
UW CSE startup Corensic – founded by professors Luis Ceze and Mark Oskin – was featured in today’s Wall Street Journal.
“Software built in the era of multi-core processors is getting more difficult to test. For the last five or six years processor companies like Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., running up against the limits on their ability to shrink chip sizes, have been boosting performance by adding multiple processor cores to each chip.
“To get the most out of these improvements, software developers have to build code that can run simultaneously on different cores. That means timing is now an issue in testing for bugs, compounding the number of possible errors and extending the time needed to test new software and the time the software can operate before those errors reveal themselves, said Peter Godman, Corensic’s chief executive.”
Read the article here. Read more →
The New York Times reports on EteRNA, an online game that allows non-biologists to design complex new ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules, as well as to receive quick feedback on the biological function of their designs. EteRNA is in the spirit of Foldit, the widely admired and pioneering protein folding game created by UW researchers.
EteRNA was designed by UW CSE (and Foldit) alum Adrien Treuille, now a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, along with colleagues at CMU and Stanford.
It’s a superb article. Read it here. Play EteRNA here. Play Foldit here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Raj Rao will speak at TED2011 on Friday March 4. On the other hand, David Brooks is speaking too, showing that the selection criteria are not uniformly excellent. See the program here. Read more →