A wonderful AP article featuring UW CSE Professional Masters Program alum Ian King:
“For tourists with an interest in Seattle’s role as a high-tech hub, there hasn’t been much here to see, other than driving over to Microsoft headquarters in suburban Redmond to take pictures of a bunch of boring buildings.
“But Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has just opened the Living Computer Museum, with displays of old machines — all in working order — along with a geeky wish list of items he’d like to add, just in case anybody out there has an old tape drive or super-computer sitting around.”
The Living Computer Museum’s #2 geek – Paul certainly deserves the #1 ranking – is UW CSE Professional Masters Program alum Ian King, whose title is “Senior Vintage Systems Engineer.”
Read this super-interesting article, and see lots of great photos, here.
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Renowned economist Susan Athey will deliver the third CSE Distinguished Lecture of the year on Tuesday November 13 at 3:30 in the Atrium of the Allen Center. The title of her talk is “Machine Learning meets Economics: Using Theory, Data, and Experiments to Design Markets.”
Athey is a professor of economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford in 1995 and taught at MIT for six years, at Stanford for five years, and at Harvard for six years, before returning to Stanford this fall. Her current research focuses on the economics of the Internet, online advertising and media markets, auctions, and marketplace design. She is the first female recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the American economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. In 2012 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Further information here. Please join us! Read more →
This past summer, UW CSE hosted three week-long summer daycamps for secondary school girls under the umbrella of our DawgBytes (“a taste of UW CSE”) outreach initiative.
On Saturday, the girls re-connected at the Seattle Facebook office, where engineers Peter Brook, Cullen Walsh and Denise Noyes showed them around the office, taught them how to incorporate the Facebook API in their Processing programs, and participated in a panel where the girls asked phenomenal questions.
Thanks to Peter, Cullen, and Denise for a wonderful event! Photographs here. Read more →
Shwetak Patel – UW professor of CSE and EE, and Georgia Tech alumnus – was honored this week with an “Impact Award” commemorating the 20th Anniversary of Georgia Tech’s Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center.
“Shwetak Patel … has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington since 2008, where he … holds a dual appointment in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science & Engineering, and he studies everything from low-power sensors to novel interaction techniques. In 2011, Patel was recognized for is work by the MacArthur Foundation – the so-called ‘genius grant.'”
Read the full citation here.
Congratulations Shwetak! Read more →
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s General Counsel and Executive Vice President for Legal and Corporate Affairs, delivered the second UW CSE Distinguished Lecture of the 2012-13 academic year today – “Creating an Environment for Innovation.”
And Christmas came early – Brad surprised the first two students to ask post-talk questions with the gift of a Microsoft Surface!
The next CSE Distinguished Lecture will be on November 13 – renowned economist Susan Athey on “Machine Learning meets Economics: Using Theory, Data, and Experiments to Design Markets.”
Please join us!
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Vision Systems Design reports on a recent paper by Ankit Gupta and Brian Curless (UW CSE) and Robert T. Held and Maneesh Agrawala (UC Berkeley), “3D Puppetry: A Kinect-based Interface for 3D Animation.”
“Researchers at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA, USA) and the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA, USA) have created a system that can enable even inexperienced puppeteers to produce 3-D animations.
“To use the system, a puppeteer physically manipulates objects in front of a Kinect depth sensor. The system then uses a combination of image-feature matching and 3-D shape matching to identify and track the objects. It then renders the corresponding 3-D models into a virtual set.
“The system operates in real time so that a puppeteer can immediately see the resulting animation and make adjustments on the fly. It also provides 6-D virtual camera and lighting controls, which the puppeteer can adjust before, during, or after a performance. Layered animations can be used to help puppeteers produce animations in which several characters move at the same time.”
Read the post here. Read the technical paper here. Watch the cool video here. Read more →
The DARPA Robotics Challenge kicked off this week with the announcement of 18 teams – 8 from universities and 10 from industry – who will be funded by DARPA to participate in the DRC. Over the next two years, these teams will compete to develop and put to the test hardware and software designed to enable robots to assist humans in emergency response when a disaster strikes.
A UW CSE team led by Emo Todorov and including Dieter Fox, Zoran Popovic, and Steve Seitz is among the competitors selected by DARPA.
Learn more about the work of UW’s Movement Control Laboratory here. Read more →
Brier Dudley reports on the UW CSE Industry Affiliates meeting, in the Seattle Times:
“A boost from the Legislature – plus grants from the likes of Amazon.com – is increasing the size the University of Washington’s computer science program by 25 percent this year …
“The school also has successfully recruited top-tier faculty, including world experts in machine learning, and more hires are in the works.
“‘We’ve had really the most remarkable year in our history,’ [UW CSE chair Hank] Levy said …
“A lunchtime lecture was given by Carlos Guestrin, a machine-learning professor that the UW lured from Carnegie Mellon University with a $1 million endowment from Amazon.com. Guestrin provided an overview of the GraphLab distributed computation framework that’s being used to explore the capability of smaller computing systems to analyze enormous datasets.”
More here. Read more →
