Allen School News

SNUPI (Sensor Network Utilizing Powerline Infrastructure) Technologies announced Tuesday that it has received $1.5 million in funding from venture capital firms Madrona Venture Group and Radar Partners, as well as several of the company’s founders.

The company’s key technology is a wireless sensor that can go decades before it needs a battery changed.  The sensor can detect environmental hazards, such as mold, carbon monoxide and radon.  It could also be used to monitor humidity or mechanical motion.  It was developed by UW CSE professor Shwetak Patel, UW CSE graduate student Gabe Cohn, and Georgia Institute of Technology professor and Matt Reynolds.  These three, along with UW CSE alumnus Jeremy Jaech (co-founder of Aldus and Visio), are the founders of the company; Jaech will serve as CEO.

Read about it in GeekWire, the Seattle Times, Puget Sound Business Journal, msn MONEY, … Read more →

We reported recently on the fact that the University of California has changed its logo from an institutional seal, which had served it well for more than a century, to a pull-tab.

Not to be left in the dust, Stanford has decided to modernize its wordmark, changing the font from “appropriate” to “bleh.”

The California Department of Health has launched an investigation in an attempt to learn what the hell is in the water they’re drinking in the Bay Area.

In an attempt to be helpful, we offer a compromise – a wordmark that preserves the original font but better reflects modern times.

In related news, the Daily Californian – Berkeley’s student newspaper – has picked up our post regarding the University of California logo update. Read more →

The National Science Foundation celebrates Computer Science Education Week with a video profiling six high-impact computer scientists, including UW faculty member Shwetak Patel and UW Ph.D. alumna Fran Berman.

Read about it in NSF’s CS Bits & Bytes here.

Watch the video here.

  Read more →

We trumpet the studies whose results we like, and bury the others.  This one we like!  The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, led by Rob Atkinson, has released the 2012 edition of their State New Economy Index.

The 2012 State New Economy Index builds on prior State New Economy Indexes published in 1999, 2002, 2007, 2008 and 2010.  The report uses 26 indicators, divided into five areas that capture what is new about the New Economy:  knowledge jobs, globalization, economic dynamism, the digital economy, and innovation capacity.

Washington was ranked third, behind Massachusetts and (somewhat inexplicably) Delaware, and followed by, in order, California, Maryland, Virginia, Colorado, Utah, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York:

“Washington state, in third place, scores high due not only to its strength in software and aviation, but also because of the entrepreneurial hotbed of activity that has developed in the Puget Sound region, and heavy use of digital technologies in all its sectors.”

(Last week, in a study that we liked even more, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute ranked Washington first among the states in technology job concentration.)

Read more here. Read more →

This week marks the 2012 edition of G-Give, an innovative giving campaign at Google’s Seattle and Kirkland offices launched last year by Googler alums Jessan Hutchison-Quillan and Krista Davis, assisted by Googler alum Jeff Prouty and others.

During a one-week period, gifts by Googlers to a set of non-profits are tripled – they’re matched by Google, and also by Googler sponsor(s) for each non-profit.

It’s a great way to encourage philanthropy by Googlers to a wide range of good causes.

UW CSE is honored to once again be included in G-Give.  Last year, including matches, more than $100,000 was raised for the Google Endowed Scholarship in Computer Science & Engineering – helping to keep a UW CSE education accessible.

Learn more here. Read more →

UW CSE kicked off CSEdWeek (Computer Science Education Week) on Saturday.  750 K-12 students and parents filled the Allen Center for an Open House featuring demonstrations by many dozens of UW CSE undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and staff.  A huge success!  Many thanks to Hélène Martin for conceiving and organizing the event, to all of the CSE participants, and to the sponsors of the event:  Amazon.com, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

UW CSE will close CSEdWeek next Saturday by hosting the UW/TEALS Programming Competition, organized by the Puget Sound Computer Science Teachers Association and sponsored by Microsoft.

Many terrific Bruce Hemingway photographs here.  Learn more about DawgBytes, UW CSE’s outreach program, here – and “like” the DawgBytes Facebook page here! Read more →

During the previous century, under memorable President Dick McCormick, the University of Washington hired a bunch of consultants who modernized its athletic logo from a husky to a ferret.

The University of California – ever a laggard, but never by too much – is now keeping pace, changing the UC seal to a pull-tab.

We commend UC leadership, and congratulate our colleagues at Berkeley, San Diego, and the other UC campuses, on this important modernization.

Read more here.

(Update: In related news, Stanford changes its wordmark to Comic Sans …) Read more →

Cloudera – co-founded by UW CSE alum Christophe Bisciglia along with Jeff Hammerbacher and Amr Awadallah, and with Mike Olson as CEO – has closed a massive round of funding at a valuation of $700 million!

“The biggest and best known company in the Hadoop world is Cloudera. Started in 2008 by a trio of engineers from Facebook, Google and Yahoo … it has in four years gone from the start-up that few really understood to the company you have to talk to if you want to stand a chance wrestling your data challenges to the ground.”

Read more in All Things D here. Read more →

According to a study released this week by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, Washington State has the greatest concentration of technology jobs in the U.S. A whopping 11.4 percent of jobs in Washington state are tied to the tech economy, more than double the national average.

Go team!

Read a GeekWire post (with a link to the study) here. Read more →

The New York Times describes the difficulty of learning science in a language that does not include many scientific terms – sign language:

“Gallaudet has tried to take a democratic approach to the problem: it collaborates on the ASL-STEM Forum, a wiki-style Web site dedicated to ‘enabling American Sign Language to grow in science, technology, engineering and mathematics’ that was set up in 2009 by researchers at the University of Washington.  Anyone can submit, critique and vote for science signs, which are demonstrated in short videos. The idea is to let those who are hearing-impaired and learning science decide which new signs should become standard.”

The ASL-STEM Forum is a project of UW CSE professor Richard Ladner and collaborators; Ladner has a long-standing interest in increasing participation in computer science and other scientific fields by the deaf and hard-of-hearing.

Read the New York Times article here.

A related NPR interview with Ladner’s Gallaudet collaborator Caroline Solomon here.

UW News article here. Read more →