Allen School News Archive

Read the article here.

“Today’s event will also include the announcement of the Jim Gray Chair, which drew contributions from up and down the West Coast.

“Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, and Marc Benioff, CEO of Microsoft rival Salesforce.com, each donated $250,000 within a few hours of being asked, according to Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer science professor who helped with the fundraising. A fourth donor, Mike Stonebraker, also donated $250,000. He is a Berkeley professor and founder of Ingres, a database system.

“Their donations are being matched by $1 million from the Hewlett Foundation, as in Hewlett-Packard. A mix of additional gifts includes $75,000 from Google and $200,000 from Microsoft, which is passing on a prize that Gray won.

“‘It’s another indication of how Jim spans all kinds of differences and brings people together,’ Lazowska said.”

Brier Dudley blog posts (excellent!): here, here, here, here, and here.

Joseph Joy blog post here.

O’Reilly Radar blog post here. Read more →

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“‘He was one of the world’s great listeners,’ said Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer scientist who in recent years had collaborated with Dr. Gray on a series of projects designed to provide powerful computational tools to scientists. ‘I thought we had a special relationship,’ he said, only to realize that there were 500 special relationships of the same kind.

“Several speakers quoted Jimi Hendrix, who once noted, ‘Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens,’ to try to explain Jim Gray’s special qualities.

“The object lesson taught by Dr. Gray, said Dr. Lazowska, was that while there is nothing you can do about improving your I.Q., it is possible to work at becoming a terrific human being.

“‘Jim was the world’s greatest connector,’ he said. ‘He connected ideas and people and he didn’t understand boundaries, either corporate or national.'” Read more →

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“Farecast‘s sale to an unknown buyer is the latest score for superstar University of Washington computer scientist Oren Etzioni, who has watched several of his Internet companies gobbled up at attractive valuations over the past 15 years.

“Those include comparison shopping service NetBot, which was acquired by Excite in 1997, and MetaCrawler, a search engine that is now part of InfoSpace.”

Farecast, like many other UW CSE startups, included Madrona Venture Group and the WRF Capital as early investors. Read more →

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“Ethan Katz-Bassett, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington, and his advisor, Arvind Krishnamurthy, designed a program to continuously search for strange Internet gaps, when a request to visit a Web site or an outgoing e-mail gets lost along a pathway that was known to be working before.”

Hubble project web here
Parody from The Spoof! here.
LiveScience here
Fox News here
“Connected” interview (KJR FM) here
Computerworld here
Ars Technica here
Boing Boing here
Digg here
Slashdot here
Wired.com here
UW News & Information here Read more →

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UW CSE’s “Web Tripwires” paper was received enthusiastically (and covered extensively) when presented at this week’s NSDI conference. “Web Tripwires” measures the extent to which ISPs (or others) modify web pages “in flight,” e.g., to insert revenue-generating advertisements.

Run the experiment here
FAQ and research paper here
Slashdot here
ars technica article here
PC World article here
eCanadaNow article here Read more →

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“Microsoft is the mystery buyer of Farecast …

“Madrona Venture Group’s Matt McIlwain, the earliest venture investor in Farecast, said the company entertained multiple offers … he said the deal is notable because it touches nearly every part of the innovation economy in the Pacific Northwest.

“Farecast was started by University of Washington computer scientist Oren Etzioni, initially bankrolled by Madrona, built with people from local companies such as Alaska Airlines and AdRelevance and, ultimately, acquired by Microsoft.”

PI Microsoft Blog here
PI Venture Blog here
Seattle Times here
Puget Sound Business Journal here Read more →

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“The UW will lead a multi-institutional group pushing the limits of computers’ ability to interpret data and ultimately predict the behavior of complex systems. The project, involving seven U.S. universities, has received a $6.25 million, 5-year grant from the Department of Defense.

“‘A complex monitoring system has far too many pieces of information for any one person to look at,’ said principal investigator Pedro Domingos, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering. ‘This award lets us do the research to develop a system for the military to look at all the available information that might be valuable and use it to predict behavior.'” Read more →

“University of Washington researchers have developed software designed to let those who can’t work a handheld mouse use their voice instead to navigate the Web.” (See #17)

Project webpage here. Article here. Read more →

Read the article here.

“Beating the ‘botnets’ – armies of infected computers used to attack websites – requires borrowing tactics from the bad guys, say computer security researchers.

“A team at the University of Washington want to marshal swarms of good computers to neutralise the bad ones. They say their plan would be cheap to implement and could cope with botnets of any size.”

Read UW CSE “Phalanx” paper here Read more →

The Mobile ASL project is described on KUOW/NPR.

See MobileASL project information here. Read more →