OneBusAway, a suite of tools to make using public transit easier for King County riders, has won the Washington Technology Industry Association’s 2010 Industry Achievement Award in the category “Best Use of Technology in the Government, Non-Profit, or Education Sector.”
OneBusAway is the passion of UW CSE graduate student Brian Ferris.
Congratulations to Brian and the OneBusAway team! Try it! Read more →
Microsoft ITPAC
Steve Ballmer
CSE Atrium
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, will discuss what’s ahead for computing, with a particular focus on how cloud computing will change the way people and businesses use technology. The event will take place on Thursday March 4 at 10 a.m. in the Microsoft Atrium of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Plentiful open seating and standing room will be available. Please join us for what’s sure to be an interesting talk about the world of tech.
A portable Microsoft datacenter, housed in a cargo container, will be available for tours all day long. Microsoft’s IT Pre-Assembled-Component (ITPAC) is one example of the company’s strategy to modularize the entire datacenter. During the tour, learn about the design decisions and functionality that will power the next generation of technology.
See Microsoft information on the talk, plus webcast information, here. Dan Reed blog post here. Microsoft “Azure cloud science” TechFest web page, including a UW oceanography collaboration, here. TechFlash post here. Xconomy post here.
Maps and directions here. UW webcast information here. Web-archived videos of the event will be linked here and from the Microsoft site.
Following the event: TechFlash post here. Xconomy post here. Seattle Times article here. Seattle PI article here. c|net here. eCommerce Times here. Photographs by Bruce Hemingway here. Photographs by Microsoft here. Read more →
Trinh Huynh
Brandon Lucia
Congratulations to UW CSE’s Brandon Lucia and Trinh Huynh, who have just received IBM Graduate Fellowships! Brandon works on computer architecture with Luis Ceze, and Trinh works with Paul Beame on theoretical computer science. Read more →
The UW Daily reports on UW CSE’s participation in the Amazon.com Kindle educational pilot project.
“The Kindle went through a pilot test at seven universities across the nation to see how students would react to the product as a tool for school. The CSE Department handed out 42 Kindles this year to the department’s graduate students as part of the trial program … Overall, the responses of CSE graduate students highlighted just how often students take for granted the layout and effectiveness of regular, physical textbooks.”
Read the article here. Read more →
Annually, IEEE Micro re-prints a small number of “Top Picks” from the preceding year’s research publications in computer architecture. One of this year’s “Top Picks” was the paper “DMP: Deterministic Shared-Memory Multiprocessing” by UW CSE’s Joseph Devietti, Brandon Lucia, Luis Ceze, and Mark Oskin.
Special issue table of contents here. DMP paper here.
Congratulations to Joseph, Brandon, Luis, and Mark! Read more →
The New York Times features several projects from UW CSE’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, but in cyberspace it might be. Computer science researchers at the University of Washington and Cornell University are deploying a system that will blend teamwork and collaboration with powerful graphics algorithms to create three-dimensional renderings of buildings, neighborhoods and potentially even entire cities …
“The PhotoCity game is already being played by teams of students at the University of Washington and Cornell, and the researchers plan to open it to the public in an effort to collect three-dimensional renderings in cities like New York and San Francisco. Contestants will be able to use either an iPhone application that uses the phone’s camera, or upload collections of digital images.
“In adopting what is known as a social computing or collective intelligence model, they are extending an earlier University of Washington research effort that combined computing and human skills to create a video game about protein folding.
“The game, Foldit, was released in May 2008, allowing users to augment computing algorithms, solving visual problems where humans could find better solutions than computers. The game quickly gained a loyal following of amateur protein folders who became addicted to the challenges that bore a similarity to solving a Rubik’s Cube puzzle.”
Read the article here. Play PhotoCity here. Play Foldit here. See all the great work from UW CSE’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory here. Read more →
Network World profiles “10 hot computer science schools,” including the University of Washington.
“Enrollment in the top U.S. computer science programs as well as applications for next year are up significantly, as more college students discover that their job prospects are better — and their starting salaries higher — if they have a computer-related degree. Here are the latest enrollment figures from 10 of the hottest computer science schools in the nation.”
The article starts here. The UW profile is here. Read more →
Dr. Arun Majumdar became the first Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), the country’s only agency devoted to transformational energy research and development, in October 2009.
His visit to UW CSE includes one-on-one meetings and a roundtable with scientists and engineers, a roundtable with entrepreneurs and investors, a public lecture “ARPA-E: Addressing the Sputniks of our Generation,” a meeting with United States Senator Maria Cantwell, and a meeting with the Washington Clean Energy Leadership Council.
Majumdar’s visit to UW CSE closely follows visits by Peter Lee, Director of the DARPA Transformational Convergence Technology Office, and Dan Kaufman, Director of the DARPA Information Processing Techniques Office.
Further information here. UW energy-related research here. TechFlash post reporting on the event here. Xconomy post here.
Web archive of talk here. Read more →
Luis Ceze
Li Zhang
Karen Liu
The 2010 class of Sloan Research Fellowship recipients has been announced. Once again, the UW CSE family is well represented!
UW CSE faculty member Luis Ceze, a computer architect, was recognized — the seventeenth (17!) UW CSE faculty member to have received this honor.
Additionally, UW CSE Ph.D. alums Karen Liu (a faculty member at Georgia Tech) and Li Zhang (a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, following a postdoc at Columbia University) were recognized. Both did their doctoral work in UW CSE’s outstanding Graphics and Imaging Laboratory (GRAIL).
Congratulations to Luis, Karen, and Li!
See the Sloan Foundation announcement here. University Week article here. Read more →
As noted in a previous post, Mattel has been running a web-based contest to choose Barbie’s next career.
The results are in! “You voted! We listened!!” (Even if “you” is a bot …) The winner of the popular vote is … Computer Engineer Barbie!
The New York Times reports: “Barbie has come a long way since 1992, when the blond bombshell of a doll was programmed to say, ‘Math class is tough.’ Barbie, whose various careers have taken her from aerobics instructor to supermodel to business executive, will next be a computer engineer, a career chosen by half a million Barbie fans.” Read the full article here. Read more →