Impinj, the Seattle-based RFID solutions company founded by UW CSE professor Chris Diorio and his legendary Caltech Ph.D. mentor Carver Mead, has filed for an IPO.
The RFID market took longer than the company expected to develop, but has taken off in the past few years.
RFID is “The Internet of Everything” (at a recent presentation, Diorio’s “prop” was a belt he had just purchased at Macy’s that sported an RFID tag), and Impinj has a leadership position.
Read more in GeekWire here. Read more →
“Are our Tesla’s going to band together in the Costco lot and attack us? Find out. In this episode Ed Lazowska (@lazowska), the eminent and long-time member of UW’s Computer Science faculty, joins Facebook’s Michael Cohen and me to discuss everything from big data, deep learning, to how Universities are responding to the massive demand for computer savvy graduates.”
Listen here. Read more →
More than 200 UW CSE faculty, staff, alums, and friends gathered at Paul Allen’s Living Computer Museum on Wednesday for a meetup.
If you haven’t been to the LCM … it’s phenomenal.
Bay Area alums and friends: See you at the Computer History Museum at the end of June! Read more →
Every year, we in Computer Science & Engineering invite our new majors to identify their most inspirational high school or community college teacher – the teacher (each of us had one!) who changed their perception of what they should aspire to. We host these teachers, their partners, and the students who nominated them for dinner in the Allen Center (plus a bit of propaganda designed to encourage the teachers to send us more great students!).
From early learning through graduate school, all educators are in the same business. Parents entrust us with their most precious asset – their children. We do our best to help these kids achieve their potential. When they excel – which is almost always, given the amazing raw material with which we are entrusted – we take pleasure in the fact that we’ve played at least some small role in that success.
Congratulations and thanks to UW CSE’s 2015-16 Inspirational Teachers – nominated by our students for the difference you’ve made in their lives. Read more →
Perfect weather on Friday for the UW CSE ACM Student Chapter spring picnic! (As usual, faculty pie-throwing was the highlight …)
Zorah Fung and Adam Blank – looks like a draw!
The latest update of the authoritative Washington State workforce gap analysis was released in April by the Washington Student Achievement Council, the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, and the Workforce Training and Education Coordinating Board.
The report – A Skilled and Educated Workforce: 2015 Update – examines supply and demand in roughly 500 occupations divided into a dozen major categories.
At the Bachelors level, four fields are identified as having significant gaps between annual completors entering the workforce and total annual job openings. Computer Science leads the way, with a gap nearly four times as large as the gap in the next field.
When Bachelors and Graduate degree levels are combined, seven fields are identified as having significant gaps. Computer Science again leads the way, with a gap nearly three times as great as the gap in the next field.
Of course, it’s not just Washington’s software industry that’s responsible for this. We recently reported on the dominance of computing professionals in our region’s aerospace industry.
And it’s not just a regional phenomenon. We recently reported on the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics decadal workforce projections. Read more →
UW CSE’s Irene Zhang flanked by VPs from HP and Qualcomm
At this week’s 2016 Summit of NCWIT – the National Center for Women & Information Technology – UW CSE Ph.D. student Irene Zhang was recognized as a Runner Up for the 2016 NCWIT Collegiate Award (honoring the outstanding technical accomplishments of collegiate women at all levels), and UW CSE professor Richard Ladner spoke on including people with disabilities.
UW CSE is an NCWIT Pacesetter School, and in 2015 received the inaugural NCWIT Award for Excellence in Promoting Women in Undergraduate Computing. UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska serves on the NCWIT Executive Advisory Council.
UW CSE’s Richard Ladner
Karin Strauss – Microsoft researcher and UW CSE affiliate professor – is featured in Fast Company‘s list of “100 Most Creative People in Business,” released today.
“In April 2016, Strauss and a group of computer scientists and molecular biologists unveiled an experimental DNA data storage system … Practical applications for the technology might include deep-storing video archives or recording genomic data, which requires vast amounts of memory.”
Read the Fast Company profile here. Learn more about the Microsoft/UW DNA storage project here. Read more →
Oren Etzioni – long-time UW CSE faculty member and CEO of Paul G. Allen’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, has become a GeekWire regular on all things AI.
Most recently, Oren on Georgia Tech’s surreptitious replacement of human teaching assistants with IBM’s Watson. (Can TA unionization be far behind at Georgia Tech?)
In April, Oren on the future of robots and humanity. (No sense in piddling around with small topics.)
A few days before that, Oren on the AI utopia he envisions. (Presumably it includes robot TAs …) Read more →
In a desperate attempt to rehabilitate the image of MIT engineers, the Division of Student Life has agreed to provide soap in dormitories.
In recent years, renegade MIT students on the leading edge of 18th century personal hygiene had installed their own soap dispensers in residence halls, but the Division of Student Life had removed them.
Honestly – you can’t make up stuff like this. Read more here.
(Will the Stata Center be next?) Read more →