The Mark Weiser Award was created in 2001 by the computer systems research community, to be given annually to an individual who has demonstrated creativity and innovation in computer systems research. The recipient must have begun his or her career no earlier than 20 years prior to nomination. The award is named in honor of Mark Weiser, a computing visionary recognized for his research accomplishments during his career at Xerox PARC.
This week, the 2012 SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award was presented jointly to UW CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Dean and MIT CSAIL Ph.D. alum Sanjay Ghemawat. Quoting from the nomination:
“Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat were among the first 20 employees at Google. Together, they led the conception, design, and implementation of much of Google’s revolutionary software infrastructure. This software infrastructure has transformed our understanding of how to compute at enormous scale; has allowed Google to grow gracefully over many orders of magnitude in the number of documents searched, number of queries handled per second, and frequency of updates to the system; and has led to the advent of “cloud computing.” Dean and Ghemawat played particularly central roles in the creation of MapReduce (a system for simplifying the development of large-scale data processing applications) and BigTable (a large-scale semi-structured storage system used underneath a number of Google products). … Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are brilliant and visionary engineers who truly have changed the world.”
Jeff is the third UW CSE Ph.D. alum to receive the Weiser Award in its 12-year history: Brian Bershad (now with Google in Moscow) was recognized in 2004, and Tom Anderson (now a UW CSE faculty member) was recognized in 2005.
Congratulations Jeff! Read more →
A resume workshop for CSE majors is one of the events that precedes the annual UW CSE Industry Affiliates meeting, which includes a recruiting day for startups on October 23, a research interaction day on October 24, and a recruiting day for established companies on October 25.
Tuesday’s resume workshop was bursting at the seams. More than 150 CSE students were coached by 16 volunteers from the local tech industry, who conducted 280 total resume reviews. Many thanks to:
- Pariveda: Scott Myhre and Kevin Greenan
- Microsoft: Becky Tucker, Raquel Garcia, and Valerie Bays
- Whitepages: Jenny Kohr Chynoweth
- EMC|Isilon: Alex Brynza
- Opscode: Christopher Brown
- Tableau: Dave Aydelott
- Google: Eric Orth, Fred Gylys-Colwell, Gene Morgan, and Sonny Skinner
- Amazon.com: Mike Materasso, Lindsay Grant, and Katie Foley
Read more →
Alexei Czeskis, a Ph.D. student in UW CSE’s Security and Privacy Research Lab, is interviewed by The Voice of Russia – American Edition.
“After news surfaced over the weekend that a U.S. government computer network was breached by hackers, computer security experts have weighed on the situation, calling it ‘a game between defenders and attackers.’ …
“Host Jessica Jordan spoke with Alexei Czeskis, a Ph.D. candidate in the Security and Privacy Research Lab at the University of Washington, to learn more about the hacking and computer security.”
Listen to the interview here. Read more →
In today’s Gates Notes, Bill highlights four projects presented at Social Venture Partners’ recent “Social Innovation Fast Pitch,” including Living Voters Guide, a joint project of UW CSE and Seattle’s City Club:
“As government in the U.S. becomes more polarized, debate among politicians has migrated to simplistic views about what government should do or not, with no middle ground for compromise. In contrast, SIFP finalist City Club finds that voters are open to nuanced debate: 41% listen to both sides, 34% listen to people they disagree with, and 46% are open to changing sides based on what they hear. Their new Living Voters Guide is a website that surfaces the pros and cons of each side, and provides business intelligence and analytics about the nuance of voter’s viewpoints to politicians, with the hope of driving a richer political debate open to middle-ground solutions.”
Read the Gates Notes post here. Check out Living Voters Guide here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Magda Balazinska‘s “Lightning Talk” at September’s 6th Extremely Large Databases Conference has been voted one of the top two “Lightning Talks.” The prize? An invitation to talk longer at next year’s XLDB!
The topic of Magda’s talk was “Big Data Analytics Usability.” Learn more about her CQMS project here. Read more →
The Wall Street Journal partners with UW CSE startup Decide.com to explore pricing trends for gifts during the holiday shopping season:
“The fast rise of online shopping has presented a wealth of data for researchers looking to uncover retailers’ strategies and pinpoint when prices are lowest. Decide aims to use that data to tell its member consumers whether to buy any of a number of products now or wait until later. The company is run by veterans of Farecast, a service that tried to predict whether airfares on specific routes were about to go up or down and was bought by Microsoft Corp. for a reported $115 million in 2008.
“At the request of The Wall Street Journal, Decide tracked the prices of products ranging from flat-screen televisions to Barbie dolls each day for at least two years across a number of retailers and e-commerce websites. The results included the prices at more than 50 retailers, including Amazon.com, Wal-Mart Stores, and Macy’s.”
It’s a really interesting article – read it here. Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. student Shulin (Lynn) Yang has won a “best paper” award for her paper “Skull Retrieval for Craniosynostosis Using Sparse Logistic Regression Models” (Shulin Yang, Linda Shapiro, Michael Cunningham, Matthew Speltz, Craig Birgfeld, Indriyati Atmosukarto, and Su-In Lee) at the MICCAI Workshop on Medical Content-Based Retrieval for Clinical Decision Support.
Lynn is advised by Linda Shapiro and Su-In Lee. The paper was presented (in Nice, France!) by co-author (and CSE/Shapiro Ph.D. alum) Indri Atmosukarto, who is now a research scientist at ADSC in Singapore. The other authors are doctors at Seattle Childrens.
Congratulations one and all! Read more →
Trifacta, a San Francisco big data company co-founded by incoming University of Washington computer science professor Jeffrey Heer and University of California-Berkeley computer scientist Joe Hellerstein, emerged from stealth mode today with $4.3 million in funding from Accel Partners.
Read more here. Read more →
Sift Science, a Bay Area startup involving UW CSE alums Brandon Ballinger, Jason Tan, and Grace Kim, is featured in GigaOm:
“The problem of online fraud, fake reviews and sock puppetry is only going to get worse, according to recent research. But there are ways to identify likely perpetrators and that’s what Sift Science aims to do.
“The 8-person San Francisco startup uses machine learning to analyze user interaction with web sites and create a digital profile of who will likely perpetrate online fraud, said company co-founder Brandon Ballinger, an ex-Google software engineer.”
Read more here. Read more →
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn recognizes Evergreen Apps Challenge winners
Announced in May, the Evergreen Apps Challenge encouraged geeks around Washington State to build apps that could benefit those living here by using government data from data.seattle.gov, data.wa.gov, and datakc.org.
This week, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, King County Executive Dow Constantine, and Washington Governor Chris Gregoire recognized the winners.
Taking the first-place was Living Voters Guide, a non-partisan resource developed by UW CSE students and faculty with a host of collaborators – that fosters civil discussion and provides descriptions of current ballot measures.
Read about it here and here. Check out Living Voters Guide here. Read more →
