UW CSE’s Shayan Oveis Gharan has received an NSF CAREER Award – the 29th UW CSE faculty member to have been recognized through this program and its predecessors.
The NSF CAREER Program “offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.”
Shayan is one of the most recent additions to UW CSE’s Theoretical Computer Science Group. His research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms. With his coauthors, he gave the first asymptotic improvement in the approximation ratio for the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) in over 30 years, for which he won the best paper award at SODA 2010. He followed this up by doing the same for the standard TSP problem on graphs, improving Christofides’ famous 3/2 bound from 1976; for that, he won the best paper award at FOCS 2011. Most recently, by proving a generalization of the famous Kadison-Singer Conjecture, Shayan and Nima Amari have given an improved bound on the integrality gap of the classical Held-Karp relaxation for Asymmetric TSP. In addition to his work in approximation algorithms, Shayan is well-known for fundamental contributions in algorithmic spectral graph theory.
Congratulations Shayan! Read more →
This morning President Obama announced Computer Science For All, a $4 billion initiative to empower all American students from Kindergarten through high school to learn computer science and computational thinking.
Congratulations to Jan Cuny (NSF), Hadi Partovi (Code.org), Megan Smith (US CTO), and the many others who have worked so hard over so many years to get us to this point.
Now the question is: Will Washington State up its game?
Learn more here. Read more →
At Davos, Microsoft President Brad Smith points to the UW “solar system” in the Seattle Tech Universe map
At a Davos event hosted by his alma mater Princeton University, Microsoft President Brad Smith used the Seattle Tech Universe map to illustrate “the connection between leading universities and innovation ecosystems, using the University of Washington as an example.”
GeekWire article here. More information on the Seattle Tech Universe map here. Read more →
“We ranked the economies of all the states and DC on seven measures: Unemployment rates; GDP per capital; average weekly wages; recent growth rates for nonfarm payroll jobs; GDP; house prices; and wages,” Business Insider explained.
In ranking Washington state #1, Business Insider said:
“Washington state scored extremely well on most of our metrics. Its Q2 annualized Gross Domestic Product growth was a stunning 8.0 percent, by far the highest among the states and D.C. The November 2015, average weekly wage of $1,073 was the second highest in the country, and was 5.6 percent higher than the weekly wage in November of 2014.”
Read the full report here. Washington slide here. Read more →
Brown University computer science professor Jeff Huang maintains a list of “Best Paper” awards at the major computer science conferences, going back to 1996. The list displays the award papers at each conference for each year, and the total number of award papers from each institution (with appropriate treatment of papers with co-authors from multiple institutions).
The 2015 update has just been posted.
UW has always ranked well … but we are now the #1 academic institution – bested only by Microsoft Research (which has roughly 20X as many Ph.D. researchers as UW CSE). It’s another sign of our ever-increasing impact.
Check it out here. Read more →
We remember Doug Walker, a long-time friend of UW CSE and co-founder in 1981 of WRQ, a top-20 software company in its day. Doug went missing Thursday afternoon while snowshoeing with friends on Granite Mountain in the Cascades, and was found dead on Friday by a search and rescue team.
It’s impossible to convey what Doug (always along with his wife Maggie) has meant to the Seattle community. Obviously WRQ. Philanthropy – to the University of Washington, the Seattle Parks Foundation, the Hutch, MOHAI, and many other causes – including the co-founding of Social Venture Partners and the Seattle Parks Foundation. Conservation. Mountaineering. Cycling.
A truly wonderful human being, who died doing what he loved.
NBC News here. Seattle Times here, here, and here. GeekWire here. Seattle PI here. KING5 TV here. New York Times here. Wall Street Journal here. Excellent biography here. Read more →
There are many reasons why the University of Washington’s School of Nursing has consistently been ranked among the very best in the nation. One of them is Kathryn Barnard, who passed away on June 27 at the age of 77.
Kathryn was one of 29 individuals profiled in today’s New York Times Magazine, in the annual “The Lives They Lived” issue that marks the end of the year. She was an internationally recognized pioneer in the field of infant mental health, which studies the social and emotional development of children during the first five years of life. She was a renowned researcher, teacher and innovator.
Read the New York Times Magazine profile here. Read more →
Monday marked UW CSE’s annual holiday luncheon for our friends from UW Facilities Services – the men and women who keep the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering looking great and working great. 110 Facilities Services professionals joined us.
Thanks for all you do! 
Read more →
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska and UW Chemistry’s Paul Hopkins in a Sunday Seattle Times op-ed regarding the effort by the Service Employees International Union to represent UW faculty:
“Unionization is like throwing sand in the gears of what is, by any measure, an institution that performs at an extraordinarily high level.”
Read the op-ed here. Visit the UW Excellence website here.
(This op-ed represents the personal opinion of Lazowska and Hopkins.) Read more →
UW CSE PLSE faculty Alvin Cheung, Emina Torlak, Mike Ernst, Zach Tatlock, Ras Bodik, Dan Grossman, and Alan Borning
The UW CSE PLSE (Programming Languages and Software Engineering) faculty – following their domination of the faculty skit at the UW CSE holiday party (Ras Bodik as Linus, Alvin Cheung as Schroeder, Zach Tatlock as Charlie Brown, and Emina Torlak as Little Red-Haired Girl) – salute 2015 on its way out the door by making a fashion statement in their new Zach Tatlock lookalike outfits! Read more →
