Each year, CSE’s graduating students recognize a faculty member for exemplary teaching. This year’s winner of the UW CSE ACM Teaching Award, announced at this morning’s UW CSE commencement ceremony, is Hal Perkins.
Congratulations, Hal, and thanks for all you do to help CSE’s students succeed!
(Past winners of the award include Stuart Reges, Luis Ceze, Marty Stepp, Dan Grossman, Ed Lazowska, Steve Gribble, Brian Curless, Carl Ebeling, Ben Dugan, Steve Wolfman, and Martin Tompa.) Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. student Alexei Czeskis was interviewed on American Public Media’s “Marketplace” concerning a program in San Antonio to track students within their high schools using RFID.
“Alexei Czeskis studies RFID privacy issues at the University of Washington’s Security and Privacy Research Lab. He says it’s hard to predict the consequences of collecting all this data on our children.
“‘We don’t know what it could be used for in the future,’ he says, ‘and that could be something good or it could be something really bad. For example, maybe it’s foreseeable that when these students apply to college for admission, colleges might be able to request this type of data. Those kinds of things could have implications for students further on in their lives.'”
Listen to the story here. Read more →
Congratulations to UW CSE professor Paul Beame, who has just been elected Chair of SIGACT, the ACM special interest group on the theory of computing.
UW CSE has a long history of ACM SIG leadership – including Jean-Loup Baer as Chair of SIGARCH (computer architecture), Ed Lazowska as Chair of SIGMETRICS (computer system performance evaluation), Hank Levy as Chair of SIGOPS (operating systems), and David Notkin as Chair of SIGSOFT (software engineering). Read more →
Ben Taskar, currently the Magerman Term Associate Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at University of Pennsylvania, will be joining the UW CSE faculty in early 2013.
Ben is an outstanding researcher in machine learning, particularly in its applications to natural language processing and computer vision. He received his Ph.D. in 2005 from Stanford and is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, an ONR Young Investigator Award, and an NSF CAREER Award.
The addition of Ben, along with Carlos Guestrin and Emily Fox (Emily is appointed in Statistics and adjunct in CSE), will move us into the very top group of programs nationally in AI and machine learning. The addition of Jeff Heer adds complementary expertise in data visualization.
We are incredibly excited to welcome Ben – and also Carlos, Emily, and Jeff – to the CSE and UW communities! Read more →
A really wonderful GeekWire profile of 21 graduating UW CSE students:
“It’s a good time to have a degree in computer science. And it’s not just because Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft are paying big bucks to hire the best-and-brightest software developers and engineers.
“Computer science is transforming the world, radically changing industries as diverse as health, transportation, media and communications.
“With that in mind (and with the University of Washington commencement set for this weekend), we decided to check in with the UW’s computer science and engineering class of 2012 …
“So, without further ado, meet some of the class of 2012. We think you’ll be quite impressed.”
Read these terrific profiles here. (Many thanks to GeekWire‘s John Cook for having the idea and pushing it forward.) Read more →
Condolences to our friend Paul Allen and his sister Jody, whose mother Faye passed away yesterday at the age of 90. Faye Allen taught fourth grade at Seattle’s Ravenna School. Her husband, Kenneth, was the longtime associate director of the University of Washington library system. Further information here and here. Read more →