“For decades, every time a visitor heads downstairs into the Caltech Athenaeum Rathskellar for a burger and a brew, s/he has been confronted with a poster-size, blown-up, grainy but still magnificent black-and-white photograph of one of the greatest of the Caltech pranks …
“At the center of the picture, where the Washington fans had meant to spell out their own brand in a mosaic of thousands of hand-held cards, the word ‘Caltech’ appears instead …
“Thirty million viewers on NBC also saw it. Then that black-and-white photo was published later that January in a follow-up article in the Pasadena Star-News. But the original color image had gone missing for decades – until now.”
Read more here. Read more →
You can’t make up stuff like this! Check it out here and here.
Previous related post here. Read more →
On Saturday December 13th, 331 students from 27 schools across the region participated in the Puget Sound Computer Science Teachers Association biannual programming contest. Due to high demand the contest was hosted at two sites, UW CSE and Microsoft, with UW CSE DawgBytes (our K-12 outreach program) and Microsoft TEALS as co-sponsors.
Westside (UW contest) winners:
Advanced
- 1st Place: Friday from Roosevelt High School, earning 655 points in 2:54:56
- 2nd Place: French Toast Mafia from Ingraham High School, earning 655 points in 2:56:47
- 3rd Place: Pseudo Sandwich from Lakeside School, earning 600 points in 2:40:00
Novice
- 1st Place: Coding Coconuts from Lakeside School, earning 720 points in 2:41:00
- 2nd Place: //no comment from Nathan Hale High School, earning 715 points in 2:36:19
- 3rd Place: Frizbros from Garfield High School, earning 650 points in 3:00:00
- Honorable Mention: Kamiak Yoda from Kamiak High School, earning 600 points in 2:06:52
PSCSTA’s post with additional details here. Zillions of great photos of the contestants here.
Learn more about DawgBytes (“A Taste of CSE”), UW CSE’s K-12 outreach program, here. Read more →
GeekWire writes:
“Karan Goel is a University of Washington computer science student who designs, builds, and ships software with the goal of making the world a better place. He’s an undergrad who has interned on Google’s Street View team and at Lenskart, developing analytics dashboards for business intelligence.
“But he’s also making his mark on campus — starting the university’s first developer club, UW Hackers, with the goal of exposing students to modern technology that is otherwise left out of the classroom. He also co-founded and led the first and biggest student hackathon in the Pacific Northwest, DubHacks.”
Previous UW CSE “Geeks of the Week”: Carlos Guestrin, Julie Kientz, Melissa Winstanley, Oren Etzioni (also 2012’s “Geek of the Year”), Lauren Bricker, Yaw Anokwa, Wendy Chisholm, and Marty Stepp. We got geek!
Read more about Karan here. Read more →
Tom Anderson, a 1991 UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus and a UW CSE faculty member since 1997, has been appointed to the Warren Francis and Wilma Kolm Bradley Endowed Chair in Computer Science & Engineering. Tom’s research concerns the practical issues in constructing robust, secure, and efficient computer systems. He is a “systems generalist” – he is attracted to the biggest problems he can find, regardless of area. Perhaps his greatest impact to date has been in the area of improving Internet availability. He has also done research in operating systems, distributed systems, software engineering, system security, file systems, computer architecture, and educational software; he is, by any measure, one of UW CSE’s truly extraordinary faculty members. The Bradley Chair, created (along with an endowed graduate fellowship) by UW CSE friend Wilma Kolm Bradley, was formerly held by David Notkin. Tom previously held the Robert E. Dinning Endowed Professorship in Computer Science & Engineering.
Steve Seitz, a UW CSE faculty member since 2000, has been appointed to the Robert E. Dinning Endowed Professorship in Computer Science & Engineering. Steve is a leading researcher in computer vision, best known in the research community for seminal contributions in three areas: 1) image-based rendering, 2) Internet photos and big data, and 3) 3D reconstruction. Steve’s work has reached the public through a number of remarkable systems on which he has collaborated, including Microsoft Photosynth, Picasa Face Movie, and Google Maps Photo Tours and mapsGL. The Robert E. Dinning Chair, created by UW CSE alumna Anne Dinning and her husband Michael Wolf and honoring Anne’s father, was formerly held by Tom Anderson. Steve previously held the Short-Dooley Career Development Professorship.
Congratulations to Tom and Steve, and many thanks to Wilma Bradley, Anne Dinning, and Michael Wolf. Read more →
UW CSE students Kevin Li, Aaron Nech, and Kritin Vij are featured in a Q13 News video of today’s Seattle Police Department hackathon.
Check it out here. Read more →
Tracy, Aaron, and Jason have done their part to ensure that robust student demand will continue. (At today’s UW CSE faculty/staff holiday event.) Read more →
One year ago today, GSK – one of the world’s leading research-based pharmaceutical and healthcare companies – announced its Bioelectronics Innovation Challenge: a $1 million prize to the first team to generate a small, implantable, wireless device that can record, stimulate and block functionally-specific neural signals to and from a specific visceral organ in functional models.
In September, GSK created a $5 million Innovation Challenge Fund for teams to apply for support in their efforts to solving the challenge. After a rigorous review of 25 applications from across the globe, the GSK Bioelectronics R&D team has selected 10 teams to receive support from the Innovation Challenge Fund – including a UW-led team consisting of Josh Smith (UW CSE + EE), Bing Brunton (UW Biology + eScience Institute), Greg Horwitz (UW Physiology & Biophysics), Chet Moritz (Team Lead; UW Physiology & Biophysics + Rehabilitation Medicine), and Polina Anikeeva (MIT).
Read more here. Read more →
GeekWire reports:
“Skytap is flying high.
“The Seattle cloud computing startup today is announcing that it has raised $35 million in new funding in a deal led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from OpenView Venture Partners, Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and the Washington Research Foundation.
“Used by companies such as Boeing, IBM and Cushman & Wakefield, Skytap helps customer build and test software more quickly. Skytap dubs this ‘environment-as-a-service.'”
Read more here.
TechCrunch report here. Read more →
A real tear-jerker from the UCSD CSE holiday party, featuring UW CSE professor Zach Tatlock finally turning in his Ph.D. thesis to his UCSD advisor (and UW CSE Ph.D. alum) Sorin Lerner.
Watch it here.
Read more →
