Allen School News

“No one would argue with Boeing’s importance to our state economy.  However, it’s time for a similar economic development strategy focused on meeting the needs of Washington’s information technology, biotechnology and other innovation sector employers, which currently generate approximately 28 percent of all the jobs in the state …

“The attached summary outlines the key elements that must be included in this economic development strategy, including:

• Prioritizing state resources to expand higher education capacity and access and create more graduates, especially in the STEM disciplines.  Boeing has made a compelling argument regarding the importance of workforce training programs at the community and technical colleges.  Our industries have this same need at the baccalaureate level.  Washington must attack baccalaureate STEM funding with the same focus and intensity that lawmakers directed toward major upgrades to community and technical college programs that support Boeing and its suppliers.”

Read more here. Read more →

UW CSE graduate students and faculty celebrate the second annual Notkinfest, honoring UW CSE professor David Notkin.  Participants in the ratty beard contest pictured to the right.  Additional photographs here.

David, we miss you! Read more →

In 2010, Anthony Wu, a 2005 UW CSE alumnus, sent a moving personal email to UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska. With a bit of distance, Anthony has now elected to publish the letter, along with an explanatory preamble. It’s must reading. Quoting from the preamble:

“This story is about a teenager who just badly wants to study computer science at an university that cannot afford to teach computer science to every interested student.

“This story is also about politics, opportunity, upward socioeconomic mobility, funding for education and one first-generation immigrant’s attempt to realize the American Dream.

“Unfortunately, it is also a cautionary tale of how a simple goal might have easily slipped away from the individual chasing it.”

Anthony’s post provides extraordinary insight into why we do what we do, and why America’s great public universities are so important. Read it here. Read more →

On Wednesday, 15 volunteers from UW CSE industry affiliate companies put 45 CSE undergraduates through the wringer in mock technical interviews, preparing them for the real thing in coming weeks.  Our thanks to:

• Dan Leventhal, Tableau Software
• Akhil Patel, Pariveda
• Eddie Carlson and Robert Noble, Whitepages
• Jordan Hoyt, Jordan Kalilich, and Bingo Ngo, Amazon.com
• Alexis Cheng, Jess Gray, Travis Hobrla, Vasantha Polipelli, and Fabio Yeon, Google
• John-Gabriel D’Angelo, Samantha Luber, and Jason Thorsness, Microsoft

From GeekWire:

Skytap, a Seattle startup that allows companies to test development environments in the cloud, has raised an additional $6.45 million in series C financing from existing investors OpenView Venture Partners, Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and WRF Capital.

Skytap was co-founded by UW CSE professors Brian Bershad, Steve Gribble, and Hank Levy, and CSE Ph.D. student Dave Richardson.

Read more here. Read more →

Roughly 40 Seattle-area alums joined UW CSE faculty members Maya Cakmak, Shyam Gollakota, Dan Grossman, Ed Lazowska, and James Lee on Tuesday evening for a happy hour (or three) at Von Trapp’s on Capitol Hill.

UW CSE hosts a variety of alumni events each year in Seattle and in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Want to be in the loop?  Update your address and email (we use regional address pulls to generate email advisories of events; you can configure to receive communications from CSE but not from Mother UW) and follow us on Facebook! Read more →

University of Washington leaders will celebrate a pair of recent grants to support interdisciplinary data science research and collaboration at an all-campus event 2-5 p.m. Friday, Feb. 7, in Mary Gates Hall. Faculty and students from all disciplines who are interested in using big data in their research are invited.

Read more here. Read more →

UW CSE alumnus Jeremy Jaech, co-founder and CEO of SNUPI Technologies

UW’s student newspaper, The Daily, wakes up and reports on CSE and EE startup SNUPI Technologies, whose first product will launch in ten days.

We would have posted this earlier but The Daily‘s website was down …

Read the article here. Learn more about Wally, SNUPI Technologies’ first product, here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Shyam Gollakota in the New York Times

The New York Times reports on power harvesting technologies, including UW’s “Ambient Backscatter“:

“The next breakthrough smartphone, or maybe the one after that, might not have a traditional battery as its sole source of power. Instead, it could pull energy from the air or power itself through television, cellular or Wi-Fi signals …

“‘Hoping and betting on new battery technology to me is a fool’s errand,’ said [Tony] Fadell, who is now the chief executive of Nest, which makes household technology and was bought by Google last month. ‘Don’t wait for the battery technology to get there, because it’s incredibly slow to move’ …

“Researchers at the University of Washington have also been working on a method for wireless devices to communicate without using any battery power. The technique involves harvesting energy from TV, cellular and Wi-Fi signals that are already in the air, said Shyamnath Gollakota, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering who is working on the project.

“‘The idea is basically you have signals around you,’ Mr. Gollakota said. ‘So why do you have to generate new signals to communicate?’

“In a commercial smartphone, a battery would still be necessary for powering the screen and other functions, but the signal-harvesting method would allow phone calls or text messages to be placed without using any power, he said.”

Read the New York Times article here.  Learn more about Ambient Backscatter here.  (The Ambient Backscatter team includes faculty members Shyam Gollakota, Josh Smith, and David Wetherall, and graduate students Vincent Liu, Aaron Parks, and Vamsi Talla.) Read more →

Gotta love it!

Ed Lazowska and Greg Gottesman model ExtraHop‘s UW CSE recruiting fair swag. Read more →