University Week reports on the fabulous Puget Sound Tech Universe map recently published by a collaboration of Seattle University, the Washington Technology Industry Association, and Virginia Tech. The map shows the geneology of over 700 local technology companies, institutions, and organizations represented as astronomical bodies. Most orbit one of six “suns,” of which the University of Washington is one. (Interactive version of the map is available online here.)
Read the full article here.
We previously covered the Puget Sound Tech Universe project here. Read more →
UW Director of News and Information Bob Roseth writes in University Week about a large-scale study of the computing needs of the UW research community. One hundred and twenty-five researchers were interviewed in what CSE professor and University of Washington eScience Institute director Ed Lazowska calls the most comprehensive study of its kind yet conducted. “No other university has conducted such a balanced study of top researchers’ information technology needs. What we have found is a rich texture of IT needs, because these researchers are using computing in increasingly sophisticated ways.”
Results of the study will be presented at a Catalyst Spark session on Friday, February 20 at 1:00PM in 220 Odegaard on the UW Seattle campus.
The full article is available here.
Read more →
KOMO News reports on One Bus Away in this February 12 broadcast television story, Where’s that bus?!? Sweat no more. One Bus Away is a web site and a collection of bus-locating services created and run by UW CSE grad student Brian Ferris. It allows transit users in King County to track the buses they are interested in five different ways, most available from a cellphone (voice, text, or web). You can view the broadcast video segment on demand at the site.
We previously covered One Bus Away here.
[One Bus Away was also the subject of a February 11 radio news story by Tom Tangney on KIRO-FM, Riding the bus just got easier. You can listen to the audio on demand at the site. On the same day, Fox Television affiliate Q13 looked at One Bus Away in Real-time bus schedules– on your cell phone!] Read more →
Brian Bershad at the Paul Allen Center
TechFlash reporter John Cook writes about the Seattle Startup Weekend held at Google‘s Fremont engineering office last weekend, and quotes UW CSE professor and graduate (PhD ’90) Brian Bershad, currently on leave to serve as site manager at the Fremont facility.
We are trying to be good neighbors. We don’t want to stomp on people. We don’t want to go raiding people of their employees. We want people to feel like they can come to us and talk openly about what they are doing and feel safe.
Cook says that Microsoft— which co-sponsored the event– has been working to rehabilitate their image with the start-up community after mis-steps led to a poor image in the ’80s and ’90s.
Read the full article here. Read more →
Six months after Linden Rhoads took the reins as Vice Provost at UW Tech Transfer, Xconomy Seattle reporter Luke Timmerman has done a two-part interview with her to find out what’s been accomplished so far and what lies on the road ahead.
UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska had this to say about the Rhoads era at Tech Transfer:
There’s been a dramatic change since Linden’s arrival. The tech transfer officers are crawling all over our building working with students and faculty. An Entrepreneur-in-Residence program has been started. Janis Machala, an incredibly experienced and well-connected startup “coach” who many of our previous startups have worked with, has been brought on-staff. It’s like night and day.
Read part 1 and part 2 of the full article. Read more →
Randall Stross devotes his Digital Domain column in the Business section of the Sunday New York Times to a look at the ham-handed marketing of SongSmith, based on work from Dan Morris and Sumit Basu from Microsoft Research and UW CSE graduate student Ian Simon that generates instrumental accompaniment to match users’ vocal input.
A four-minute video promoting the product has been the target of derision, attracting (at this writing) more than half a million views and several thousand comments. But hey, buzz is buzz!
Stross notes the emergence a new genre of parody video, where YouTube content mashers feed the vocals from famous rock videos into SongSmith, remix the generated instrumentals with the vocals, and replace the audio with what, in combination, kills the buzz dead. An example.
We previously covered SongSmith here. Read more →
Seattle Times technology reporter Benjamin J. Romano surveys the current job prospect landscape for MBA and tech graduates, talking to UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska and UW CSE PhD candidate Andrew Putnam. Bottom line: it’s no picnic, but it’s not as bleak as one might think, particularly for top candidates, and the internship process is still healthy. Most companies at the UW CSE Winter Recruiting Fair are offering internships only.
The full article is here. Read more →
CNN is harnessing Microsoft PhotoSynth technology to “crowdsource” the Tuesday inauguration of the 44th president of the United States, producting the first “synth” of a major historical event. Photos mailed to themoment@cnn.com will be processed in real time to create synths that will be available at The Moment site. CNN coverage starts at 5AM Eastern time (2AM Pacific).
Read the article announcing the collaboration and explaining how to participate here.
PhotoSynth technology grew out of collaborative research involving UW CSE graduate student Noah Snavely (now on the faculty at Cornell University), CSE professor Steven Seitz, Microsoft Research’s Rick Szeliski (also UW CSE affiliate professor), and others.
Previous UW CSE News coverage of PhotoSynth is here Read more →
The regular and wonderful Wired Magazine feature Jargon Watch seeks out and exposes emerging English language words and phrases as they are minted to describe our changing world. In current issue 17.01, feature editor Jonathon Keats highlights the term cloaker, coined by CSE graduate student Tamara Denning in the paper Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder: New Directions for Implantable Medical Device Security (joint with Kevin Fu and Tadayoshi Kohno) to describe a device designed to keep heartless hackers from altering the radio-controlled settings on pacemakers. Read more →
