GeekWire reports on a new startup incubator launched by Paul G. Allen’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), where UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni is the CEO:
“‘We are quickly building an element of the Seattle tech ecosystem, and we’ve identified cutting-edge folks who are startup minded,’ said Oren Etzioni, the former University of Washington computer science professor who now leads the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. ‘Once we identify super-talented folks … we give them a lot of freedom to pursue their instincts and initiatives.’ …
“‘Our incubator focuses on the very best technical talent in AI whose work dovetails with the research at AI2,’ said Etzioni, adding that there’s ‘excellent potential for synergy with the technologies’ being developed at AI2.”
Read more here. Read more →
The White House today announced that Ed Felten – UW CSE Ph.D. alum and Princeton faculty member – will join the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer.
Ed received his Ph.D. from UW CSE in 1993, working with Ed Lazowska and John Zahorjan. He joined the Princeton faculty at that time, where he is currently the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and of Public Affairs, and Director of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.
Ed is a national and international leader in computer security and privacy. On a previous leave of absence from Princeton, he served as the first Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission for eighteen months spanning 2011-12.
Ed is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He received the UW CSE Alumni Achievement Award in 2013, and the UW College of Engineering Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement in 2007.
Read the White House announcement here. Ed’s Princeton web page here. Read more →
The 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was held Wednesday through Friday October 8‐10. Two sessions during GHC created a great deal of controversy: a Male Allies Plenary Panel on Wednesday evening featuring Alan Eustace (Google), Blake Irving (GoDaddy), Mike Schroepfer (Facebook), and Tayloe Stansbury (Intuit), and an interview of Microsoft
CEO Satya Nadella by Harvey Mudd College President (and Microsoft Board of Directors
member) Maria Klawe on Thursday morning.
On the evening of Monday October 13, UW CSE faculty and students (including a number of GHC attendees) met for 2+ hours, using the GHC controversies as a departure point for discussing how to make CSE a more welcoming and supportive environment for members of all under-represented groups.
One recommendation was to convene a local version of the Hopper Conference – highlighting the achievements of our own female computer scientists and computer engineers. Hence, the First Annual UW CSE Women’s Day, held today in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.
Agenda here. Read more →
The Stranger, Seattle’s authoritative source for tech news and views, reports on an experiment in which our EE colleagues deploy a surgical robot rife with software vulnerabilities, then demonstrate that it can be hacked.
The work of CSE professor Yoshi Kohno and his colleagues also is cited:
“This isn’t the first time the University of Washington has conducted such an experiment. The computer science department – particularly the work of Tadayoshi Kohno – has unearthed flaws in embedded medical devices, electronic voting machines, and smart cars. (Check out his PBS profile here.) The school has ‘a long history of showing that interesting, cutting-edge hardware is vulnerable in some sense,’ Ryan Calo, a co-author on one of the robotics papers, said.”
Read more here. Read more →
The announcement read:
This Friday, 5/8 at 4:30 in the Atrium, we will be holding the 3rd annual Notkinfest TGIF to celebrate the life of former CSE chair David Notkin! Come, eat, drink, and enjoy exciting beard-related activities, which in past years have included “Make your own Notkin beard” and “Pin the beard on the Notkin.” There will be prizes in benson store credit** for “Best Beard” and “Most Creative Beard.”
Check out pictures from Notkinfest 2014 and from the 0th annual Notkinfest (on David’s retirement as chair).
**$43 will be split between the winners to honor the impressively low number of times David wore a tie as CSE chair. He wore a tie only 43/1672 days as chair, for an average of 38 no-tie days for every day wearing a tie. Check out his
complete list of tie occasions.
We were particularly pleased that David’s wife Cathy and daughter Emma were able to join this year’s activities!
We miss you, David! Read more →
We missed April’s announcement of “Best Papers” at the 2015 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2015). Three had UW CSE ties:
Sangeet Swara: A Community-Moderated Voice Forum in Rural India, by UW CSE Ph.D. student Aditya Vashistha, MSR India researcher Ed Cutrell, the late UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello, and MSR India researcher Bill Thies.
From User-Centered to Adoption-Centered Design: A Case Study of an HCI Research Innovation Becoming a Product, by University of Waterloo Management Sciences faculty member (and UW iSchool Ph.D. alum) Parmit Chilana, and UW iSchool faculty members (and UW CSE Adjunct faculty members) Andy Ko and Jake Wobbrock.
Unequal Representation and Gender Stereotypes in Image Search Results for Occupation, by UW CSE Ph.D. student Matthew Kay, UW CSE Ph.D. alum (and UMBC faculty member) Cynthia Matuszek, and UW HCDE faculty member (and UW CSE Adjunct faculty member) Sean Munson.
Congratulations! Read more →
Noah Smith has not yet arrived in Seattle as a member of the UW CSE faculty, but we’ll over-reach and claim partial credit for his “Best Paper” Award at the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics – Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2015).
The paper – Retrofitting Word Vectors to Semantic Lexicons – describes “retrofitting,” a new way to improve any vector encodings of words in English (or any language) using existing semantic lexicons that link words with similar or related meanings.
Noah’s co-authors include UW CSE undergrad alum (and CMU Ph.D. student and soon-to-be UW CSE visiting Ph.D. student) Jesse Dodge, and CMU co-authors Manaal Faruqui, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Chris Dyer, and Eduard Hovy. Read more →
Did your son make you a Mother’s Day hat and ask you to wear it at work? CSE Facilities Manager Tracy Erbeck’s son did! Read more →
Computer Engineering junior undergraduate Mattie Carlson speaks to attendees at UW CSE’s 2015 Donor/Scholar Recognition Luncheon
UW CSE is fortunate to have 28 endowed undergraduate scholarships and 18 endowed graduate fellowships available as departmental awards. Each spring we host a luncheon to recognize the donors of our scholarships and fellowships, and the outstanding students who are the beneficiaries of this generosity. It’s one of our favorite events of the year!
At the undergraduate level, scholarships allow Washington’s top students to get a UW CSE education, regardless of family circumstances. At the graduate level, fellowships allow us to attract to UW CSE the very best students from across the nation and around the world.
Undergraduate student Mattie Carlson (holder of the John Wisniewski Endowed Scholarship) and graduate student Carlo del Mundo (holder of the Dora Zee Ling Endowed Fellowship) represented their fellow students in describing to the donors what these awards mean to them.
Many thanks to our generous donors, and hearty congratulations to our outstanding undergraduate and graduate students!
Check out the luncheon brochure, describing our scholarships, fellowships, donors, and recipients, here. Read more →
UW CSE has scored a 2014-15 academic year hat trick: “Best Paper” Awards at all three of the “DI” conferences:
Go team! Read more →
