UW CSE Ph.D. students Lydia Chilton and Nicki Dell have been named as winners of 2013-14 Facebook Graduate Fellowships.
Lydia works with James Landay and Dan Weld on crowdsourcing. She spent the 2010-11 academic year at MSR-Asia in Beijing observing Landay trying to speak Chinese.
Nicki works with Gaetano Borriello and Linda Shapiro on computer vision, machine-learning and human-computer interaction, with a focus on designing and evaluating applications that improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions.
Lydia and Nicki were among 12 top students from the nation’s top programs who received Facebook Graduate Fellowships. UW CSE Ph.D. students Raymond Cheng and Paris Koutris were among 27 Finalists.
Congratulations to Lydia, Nicki, Raymond, and Paris! Read the Facebook announcement here. Read more →
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s General Counsel and Executive Vice President, addressed Washington’s Congressional delegation in Washington DC today on the dismal state of STEM education in our state. The Seattle Times reports:
“By one measure, Washington has the nation’s highest concentration of STEM jobs. But the state ranks near the bottom in the proportion of students enrolled in graduate programs in engineering and science, and the gap between the growth in jobs requiring STEM skills and people qualified to fill them is estimated to be growing faster than in any state except Delaware.
“‘As a state, we are not nearly doing what we need to do,’ said Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel …
“Smith reeled off statistics about the dearth of STEM learning, particularly among women and minorities. Of Washington’s 771 high schools, for instance, 35 offer advanced-placement computer science courses.
“And the University of Washington’s well-regarded computer-science department, Smith said, lacks capacity to expand enrollment despite being within 10 miles of thousands of computer-related jobs.
“Reversing that ‘is the single best and most important opportunity we have in Washington state to grow our economy,’ said Smith.”
Read the article here. Learn more about the dismal state of STEM education in Washington here. Read more →
UW CSE professor Anup Rao writes:
My undergraduate algorithms course has taught the students two things:
- How to handle stress with beer.
- How to design algorithms.
I guess I should be proud of at least one of them. Here is the post-final-exam discussion on the class message boards:
Larry Ruzzo adds:
We need to amend the catalog description: “Must be 21 with valid Washington ID by time of final.” Read more →
Founded by CSE alums Brandon Ballinger and Jason Tan, Sift Science has been bubbling along for many months and revealed itself to the public on March 19th. The company also announced $4 million in Series A Funding.
Sift Science started as part of the Y Combinator’s 2011 summer batch. It fights fraud with large-scale machine learning that automatically discovers new fraud patterns. The service is primarily targeting online marketplaces, payment networks, and e-commerce sites, where fraud is most prevalent. Businesses can integrate Sift Science’s technology by copying and pasting a small snippet of JavaScript code to their sites. The startup has over 1 million different fraud patterns in its database, but continually adds to that as its algorithm crunches more data and learns more patterns. Sites like Airbnb, Uber, and Listia already rely on Sift Science.
Learn more about Sift Science here. Coverage of Sift Science’s announcement: Wired, AllThingsD, Gigaom, TechCrunch, Venture Beat, The Next Web. And a particularly good one in The Wall Street Journal: “Sift Science Funded to ‘Fight Evil on the Internet’“ Read more →
Control-Alt-Hack is a tabletop card game about white-hat hacking, based on game mechanics by gaming powerhouse Steve Jackson Games. According to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, the game is “a delightful strategy card game about white-hat hacking.”
Read the full review here. Control-Alt-Hack site here. Learn more about the Security and Privacy Lab here. Read more →
Wired reports on Google’s acquisition of DNNresearch, Geoff Hinton’s University of Toronto spinoff, quoting UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska:
“‘Deep learning, pioneered by Hinton, has revolutionized language understanding and language translation,’ said Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington. In an email interview, he said that a pretty spectacular December 2012 live demonstration of instant English-to-Chinese voice recognition and translation by Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid was ‘one of many things made possible by Hinton’s work.'”
Read the Wired article here. It includes a video of Rashid’s amazing demo. Read more →
Various media report an announcement by Google on Tuesday that the company plans to double the size of its Kirkland engineering facility, one of two Google sites in Seattle. Xconomy quotes UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska:
“’20 years ago, the tech industry here could have been described as ‘Microsoft and the 499 dwarfs.’ Now we have a really robust tech ecosystem with companies of all sizes reinforcing each other – large numbers of great startups, great mid-size companies and great major companies. Some were born here. Some chose to locate here or move here. Some are major branches of companies headquartered elsewhere. Some have been acquired but still have a major Seattle presence. Together they’re creating an incredibly vibrant region.'”
Xconomy here. NY Times here. Seattle Times here. Read more →
Clerky, a Y Combinator-backed startup co-founded by UW CSE alum Darby Wong and Stanford alum Chris Field, is a web application that makes it easy for startups to get legal transactions done.
“When we cover a startup’s launch, we often focus on the market opportunity, funding and investors and how the company’s product is solving a particular problem. We rarely mention the initial set of challenges every entrepreneur must face when they actually turn an idea into a startup — incorporation, stock issuance documents and more. Most of the time, startups have to incur legal costs to do this. However, Clerky, a Y Combinator-backed startup launching today, is hoping to offer entrepreneurs a quality, cost-effective, automated way to handle incorporation documents and more.”
Read the full TechCrunch article here. Read more →
Batman’s Kitchen, an interdisciplinary team involving students from CSE, the iSchool, EE, and pre-engineering, won the Hawaiian “Big Splash” Cyber Defense Competition held 8-10 March 2013. The competition is designed to bring practitioners in industry and government together with students in a competition environment. Teams were given a scenario of critical infrastructure in a business setting to defend against attacks by hackers (the red team) while also completing injects (e.g., setup a database, block certain websites, database audits, etc.) throughout the three-day competition.
On Day 2 of the competition, the head of the red team initiated a full-on attack against the UW team – beyond the scope of the regular competition. The team successfully protected their network for several hours while under attack. By 5pm on the final day of the competition, it was announced that the UW team had won by hundreds of points over the military teams entered in the competition.
The trophy for the competition will be awarded in Seattle next week.
UW participants:
- Melody Kadenko (team advisor and competition judge), CSE
- Bryan Eastes, CSE
- Atanas Kirilov, CSE
- Karl Koscher, CSE
- David Mah, CSE
- Michael McKeirnan, pre-engineering
- Aasav Prakash, CSE
- Jordan Puryear, iSchool
- Ed Samson, CSE
- Omar Sandoval, CSE
- Ian Smith, CSE
- Andrew Sorensen, UW Tacoma
- Carlo Valentin, iSchool
- Tim Vega, CSE
- Rafael Vertido, CSE
- Cullen Walsh, CSE alum
- Thomas Winegarden, iSchool
- Tariq Yusuf, CSE
- Lars Zornes, CSE
Go team! Read more →
UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni and collaborators describe their work on Open Information Extraction in this excellent short video.
How can a computer accumulate a massive body of knowledge? What will Web search engines look like in ten years? To address these questions, UW CSE’s Open IE project has been developing a Web-scale information extraction system that reads arbitrary text from any domain on the Web, extracts meaningful information and stores in a unified knowledge base for efficient querying.
Watch the video here. Learn more about Open IE here. Read more →
