A lovely New York Times article on the re-opening of Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry:
“The museum pays tribute, for example, to the many corporate giants that were born and thrived here, so startlingly out of proportion to the city’s modest population (now just over 600,000). There is a 1920s Model T reconfigured to look like an early truck from United Parcel Service, established as the American Messenger Company in Seattle in 1907. There are galleries devoted to Boeing and Microsoft, a tribute to Amazon, and displays about major breakthroughs in medical treatments that evolved here (including improved dialysis machines and cardiac defibrillators). Somehow the museum even has the hand-painted wooden sign that stood outside the first Starbucks in 1971 …
“But at the same time, the museum celebrates the dropout bohemianism of the Beat scene, the grunge rebellion of Seattle bands and decades of countercultural protest and environmental activism. The recent legalization of marijuana in Washington State is prefigured by other enthusiasms; 99 bottles of beer are mounted on one wall, each locally brewed …
“The spirit of the place is strong, its stance vigorous, its imagination fertile. It is Seattle in an alluring self-portrait.”
Article here. Slideshow here. MOHAI website here. Read more →
UW CSE undergraduates Eric Lei and Vaspol Ruamviboonsuk have been honored with Mary Gates Research Scholarships – competitive scholarships intended to enhance the educational experiences of undergraduate students at the University of Washington while they are engaged in research guided by faculty.
Congratulations to Eric and Vaspol. Learn more about the Mary Gates Research Scholarship program here.
Read more →
Each day during the holidays, Crosscut revisits two top stories from the last year. Today’s focus is social services. UW CSE’s Gaetano Borriello and his team are featured:
“Gaetano Borriello’s students in the University of Washington’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering are just a few of those good people. In the spring of 2011, several of Borriello’s undergraduates, working with other students in the department’s Human Centered Design program, designed prototypes for new mobile devices to help the G2L project meet one of its objectives: helping south King County residents find cheap, affordable interpreters.”
Read more here. Read more →
Each year, the University of Washington College of Engineering confers “Diamond Awards” on alumni in four categories: Distinguished Achievement in Industry, Distinguished Achievement in Academia, Entrepreneurial Excellence, and Distinguished Service.
The recipient of the 2013 Diamond Award for Distinguished Service – to be conferred at an award banquet on May 31 – is 1988 UW CSE bachelors alum Kevin Ross.
In 2002, while working as a senior design engineer at Microsoft, Kevin became concerned that enthusiasm seemed to be declining among entry-level engineers just out of college. While book-smart, they lacked passion. In response, Kevin founded Washington FIRST Robotics. Today, Washington FIRST Robotics works with over 7,500 students and 2000 volunteers each year in Washington State, matching student groups with mentors to provide high quality experiences. Their goal is to have a FIRST robotics team available for every student in the state of Washington. Kevin and Washington FIRST Robotics are changing lives across our state – inspiring the engineers of the future.
Congratulations to Kevin! Read more here. Learn about Washington FIRST Robotics here. Read more →
Last week, UW CSE was the site of a press conference at which Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn was joined by Gig.U Executive Director (and former author of the National Broadband Plan) Blair Levin, Gigabit Squared President and co-founder Mark Ansboury, and UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska, to announce a collaborative initiative – Gigabit Seattle – to develop and operate an ultra-high-speed fiber and wifi broadband network in Seattle.
Videos of the event have now been posted – Lazowska’s remarks here; others linked from that site.
KUOW (NPR) followup interview here. Read more →
Art Rosenfeld
Lee Hood
President Barack Obama today announced that Lee Hood, President of the Institute for Systems Biology and Affiliate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, will receive the National Medal of Science. Hood and his lab have invented five instruments that are central to the modern era of biotechnology, including the gene sequencer.
President Obama also announced that Art Rosenfeld, Distinguished Scientist Emeritus at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and father-in-law of UW CSE professor Dan Weld, will receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. A distinguished physicist, Rosenfeld is internationally renowned for his transformational work on energy efficiency.
Congratulations to Lee and Art! Read the White House press release here. Read more →
Mike Fridgen, CEO of UW CSE startup Decide.com, discusses dynamic pricing, and how consumers can turn it into a benefit.
“In today’s lackluster economy, dynamic pricing often works for the consumer, says Fridgen of Decide.com. ‘It’s never been a better time to be an online consumer,’ he says. ‘You literally have retailers changing their prices minute by minute competing with each other for your business.'”
Listen to the story here. Read more →
Are you no longer sufficiently challenged by the requirement of squeezing your research into a 10-page conference paper? Try Tiny ToCS – Tiny Transactions on Computer Science!
“Tiny Transactions on Computer Science seeks papers describing significant research contributions to the field of computer science. Tiny ToCS is the premier venue for computer science research of 140 characters or less.”
Remember … if it takes more than 140 characters to explain, it’s not a Big Idea!
(For better or worse, UW CSE students Gilbert Bernstein, Raymond Cheng, Dimitrios Gklezakos, Frazi Roesner, and Will Scott, and UW CSE alums Sunil Garg and Justine Sherry, are among those behind this absurdity.) Read more →
CSE professor Magda Balazinska celebrates her brand-spanking-new U.S. citizenship with fried chicken, apple pie, baked beans, okra, questions from the web-based citizenship test cram course, and the UW CSE data management and big data groups. Read more →
The Fall 2012 issue of Most Significant Bits – the UW CSE alumni magazine – is available!
- Industry Affiliates Meeting (including a new Startup Day)
- World Lab initiative
- Phenomenal faculty hires
- Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf & Hard of Hearing in Computing
- CSE 2012 Distinguished Lecture Series
- Google’s G-Give campaign
- Datagrams – news about you!
- A spellbinding letter from Hank
Read the Fall 2012 issue here. Complete archive here. Keep in touch here. Read more →
