Our alum Tim Prouty writes:
“It’s now official that I will be starting up Uber‘s Seattle engineering team! I’ll be working directly for Paul Mikesell [also a UW CSE alum], and we’re going to do an official launch in early April. I couldn’t be more excited! …
“At Uber one of my primary goals will be to grow the team very rapidly from 0 to 50+ people this year, so we’ll be working hard to make a splash in the Seattle technology community over the next few months …”
Welcome, Uber! It’s great to have another top technology company in Seattle!
Many more details in a GeekWire post here. Read more →
Richard Ladner receives the award from Valerie Taylor, Richard Tapia, and Charles Isbell.
On Friday February 20, UW CSE professor Richard Ladner received the Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing.
Richard was honored “for his incredible commitment and contributions to the disability community in computing.” After many years of research in theoretical computer science, he turned his attention to accessibility technology research, especially technology for deaf, deaf-blind, hard-of-hearing, and blind people.
In addition to being a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and a Fellow of ACM and IEEE, Richard has received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM), the Computing Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann Award, the Purpose Prize, and the University of Washington Outstanding Public Service Award.
Congratulations Richard! Read more here. Read more →
The fire marshal was blessedly AWOL for today’s UW CSE Distinguished Lecture featuring 1996 Ph.D. alum Jeff Dean, “Large-Scale Deep Learning For Building Intelligent Computer Systems.”
Jeff joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Google Senior Fellow in Google’s Knowledge Group, where he leads Google’s deep learning research team in Mountain View. He has co-designed/implemented five generations of Google’s crawling, indexing, and query serving systems, and co-designed/implemented major pieces of Google’s initial advertising and AdSense for Content systems. He is also a co-designer and co-implementor of Google’s distributed computing infrastructure, including the MapReduce, BigTable and Spanner systems, protocol buffers, LevelDB, systems infrastructure for statistical machine translation, and a variety of internal and external libraries and developer tools. He is currently working on large-scale distributed systems for machine learning. Jeff is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the AAAS, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the Mark Weiser Award and the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences. Read more →
Seattle Business writes:
“A who’s who of 23 Seattle area leaders including executives from F5, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Redfin, Concur, Zillow and Apptio sent a letter today to the Washington State Legislature in support of a $40 million capital appropriation for a downpayment on a second building for UW’s department of Computer Science and Engineering. The remainder of the money required to build the $110 million, 130,000 square-foot building would come from private sources.
“Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering, who played a key role in raising money for the existing Paul G. Allen Center for Computers Science & Engineering, is optimistic about UW’s prospects for raising private funds to supplement the state money for the second building. In the case of the Allen Center, completed in 2003, Lazowska says, the school received 200 gifts including three gifts of more than $5 million each, seven gifts of $1 million, and dozens of gifts of $100,000 or more.”
Read more here. Read more →
GeekWire writes:
“A group of 23 technology leaders in Washington state – including representatives of Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google and other tech giants – are asking the state Legislature to approve $40 million in capital spending to help fund a new, $110 million University of Washington computer science building.
“The second building, proposed last fall, would allow for a doubling of enrollment in the University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering program. The department granted 315 degrees in June, its largest class ever, but the program is at capacity and was able to accept less than a third of the undergrads who applied in the last admissions period.”
Read more here. Read more →
The Seattle Times writes:
“Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Zillow: A who’s-who of tech company leaders have written a letter urging the Washington Legislature to fund $40 million of the $110 million cost for building a new computer science and engineering building on the University of Washington campus.”
“The UW’s fast-growing computer science department has already run out of room in its 11-year-old building, the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Securing the money to build a second building is one of the university’s priorities for the current legislative session, said provost and soon-to-be interim president Ana Mari Cauce during a campus-wide meeting Tuesday.”
Read more here. Read more →
Today, 23 leaders from the State of Washington – from Alberg to Zapolsky … Amazon to Zillow – sent a letter to the Washington State Legislature supporting a $40 million capital appropriation to partially fund a second building for UW CSE, which will accommodate a doubling of our enrollment. (The project is expected to cost $110 million; the remainder will be raised privately.)
The leaders wrote:
“We are writing to express our collective support of the University of Washington’s request for $40 million in the FY 2015-17 state capital budget for the construction of a 130,000 square-foot Computer Science & Engineering building.
“Our region’s computer science community has fast become one of the leading areas for growth and innovation in the country. Home to the world’s largest software company, online retailer, and online travel company, our stellar pool of talent is charting new territory in mobile technology, enterprise software, cloud computing, interactive media and cyber security. The University of Washington is a huge engine for this industry, home to one of the top ten programs
in the nation …
“Please help us make sure Washington state continues to maintain its place at the forefront of the computer science industry and sets a strong base for future growth by ensuring UW can continue to produce the graduates we need …”
Profuse thanks to our friends for this support!
The Puget Sound region is literally the software capital of the world: more Software Developers (Systems + Applications) are located here, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, than in the San Francisco Bay Area. Computer Science is also the field with by far the greatest gap in our state between “jobs available” and “degrees granted.” UW Computer Science & Engineering is by far the leading program in the state at preparing Washington’s students for these great Washington jobs.
A few items that may be of interest:
Washington’s top students deserve the opportunity to become prepared for Washington’s top jobs!
Read more →
Katherine Long writes in the Seattle Times:
“Thirty-five years ago, higher education received 16 percent of the budget … In the last biennium, it received only 9 percent of the budget …”
Read more here. And note overwhelming voter support for increased investment in computer science education here. Read more →
Tech.Co has “scoured Silicon Valley for 50 women in tech who are empowering all of us to never stop chasing our dreams.”
Number 23 on the list is UW CSE Ph.D. alum Tessa Lau, “cofounder and Chief Robot Whisperer, Savioke. Lau’s passion is building systems that improve people’s lives. Her background in machine learning enables her to understand what roboticists are saying, while her expertise in human-computer interaction drives her to understand people’s needs and build user-focused systems that address those needs. Her goal at Savioke is to guide the development of robots that will revolutionize the service industry.”
See the full list here. Read more →
Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowships are among the nation’s most prestigious awards for young scientists.
Today, UW CSE’s Shyam Gollakota and Thomas Rothvoss were named recipients of 2015 Sloan Research Fellowships. Shyam and Thomas join 24 previous UW CSE faculty members (plus 3 adjunct faculty members) as recipients of Sloan Research Fellowships – an unprecedented number that speaks to the extraordinary caliber of our young (or, in some cases, formerly young …) faculty members.
Emily Fox, Amazon Professor of Machine Learning in UW Statistics and adjunct professor in CSE, also received a Sloan Research Fellowship.
Shyam is an expert in wireless technology. Thomas, jointly appointed with UW’s Department of Mathematics, is a leader in approximation algorithms, linear and integer programming, combinatorics, network design, and scheduling. Emily is an emerging star in machine learning.
Congratulations to Emily, Shyam and Thomas!
(Our Ph.D. grandchild Alex Halderman at the University of Michigan – a student of UW CSE Ph.D. alum and Princeton professor Ed Felten – also is a recipient!)
Full page New York Times ad from the Sloan Foundation celebrating all of this year’s recipients here. Read more →
