G-Give is a phenomenal program originally conceived and implemented by UW CSE alums Krista Davis and Jessan Hutchison-Quillian at Google’s Seattle engineering office. Each year during the first week of December, gifts by Googler’s to select non-profits are matched twice – once by Google itself, and once by Googlers who sponsor the specific non-profit.
2014 is the fourth year of G-Give, and the fourth year that UW CSE’s Google Endowed Scholarship has been included. Our Google Endowed Scholarship makes it possible for great students to get a UW CSE education, regardless of their financial situation, despite the increases in tuition that are inevitable given the dramatic decrease in state support for UW in recent years.
Thanks to 150 friends and alumni who donated, 7 friends and alumni who matched as sponsors, and Google’s corporate match, $189,344 was raised for the Google Endowed Scholarship last week! The endowment now totals $1.13 million – CSE’s largest undergraduate scholarship endowment by nearly a factor of two.
Thank you to our 150 donors and to our 7 matching sponsors: Jeff Dean, Alan Eustace, Gene Morgan, Alyssa Pittman, Jeff Prouty, Matt Welsh, and Doug Zongker.
Wow! Read more →
On Saturday December 6, more than 450 middle school and high school students and their families visited UW CSE for the annual UW Computing Open House, kicking off Computer Science Education Week.
Check out the demos and activities here. Photos here. Read more →
An interesting Upshot piece in Sunday’s New York Times:
“Technology has contributed to the rise in inequality, but there are also some significant ways in which technology could reduce it …
“The history of technology suggests that new opportunities for better living and higher wages are being created, just not as quickly as we might like.”
Read the article here. Read more →
Top: Josh Smith exhorting Magda Balazinska, Zach Tatlock, Luis Ceze, and Luke Zettlemoyer (I think). Left: Dan “Vector” Grossman. Right: Dr. Franzi Roesner.
Participants in the faculty skit have learned: when the script is iffy (which is pretty much a given), the sight gags had better be good! And breathing a little helium before speaking your lines helps too.
Franzi Roesner, Yejin Choi, Emina Torlak, and Ed “Gru” Lazowska. Other faculty skit participants: Maya Cakmak, Dieter Fox, Barbara Mones, and author and narrator Hank Levy.
Happy holidays! Read more →
It’s too early to do holiday shopping or trim the tree. Spend Saturday afternoon at UW Computer Science & Engineering instead!
WHAT: Participate in hands-on activities and visit research labs to find out what computing is all about! Students and faculty from UW’s computing majors will introduce you to the broad range of problems computing can address. Representatives from local technology companies will show cool demos and tell you why they love their jobs.
WHO: Middle and high school students and their families.
WHEN: 1pm – 5pm THIS SATURDAY, December 6th, 2014.
WHERE: UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering (free parking after noon on Saturdays!).
WHY: Celebrate Grace Hopper‘s birthday and the start of Computer Science Education Week.
RSVP so that we get enough giveaways!
See last year’s pictures and program.
More info here! See you on December 6!
And learn more about DawgBytes (“A taste of CSE”), UW CSE’s extensive K-12 outreach program, here! Read more →
Congratulations to the Nanocrafter team at UW CSE’s Center for Game Science, who picked up the award for “Best Serious Game, Special Emphasis Category, Use of Social Media” at the Serious Games Showcase and Challenge. The event, taking place today in Orlando, Florida, celebrates excellence in the field of serious games development.
Players of Nanocrafter build nanoscale devices using pieces of DNA. The game, in addition to being fun and educational, is helping to advance scientific discovery in the field of synthetic biology by leveraging the power of crowdsourcing.
Check out their shiny plaque! And if you haven’t joined the Nanocrafter community, you can learn more and test your skills here.
Way to go, team! Read more →
The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation’s Allen Distinguished Investigator (ADI) program seeks to fund a select group of investigators to pursue new, pioneering research in academic settings that collectively move the needle towards answering broad scientific questions. ADIs approach their research in novel, creative and ambitious ways to shed light on the curious, the unconventional and the unexpected.
Today the first cohort of Allen Distinguished Investigators in Artificial Intelligence were announced. The focus is on three fundamental artificial intelligence topics: machine reading, diagram interpretation and reasoning, and spatial and temporal reasoning.
Five individuals or teams were selected for ADI awards – three from UW CSE:
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Ali Farhadi
UW CSE’s Ali Farhadi and UW EE’s Hannaneh Hajishirzi will receive $1.2 million to support an effort to teach computers to interpret diagrams the same way children are taught in school. Diagram understanding is an essential skill for children since textbooks and exam questions use diagrams to convey important information that is otherwise difficult to convey in text. Children gradually learn to interpret diagrams and extend their knowledge and reasoning skills as they proceed to higher grades. For computers, diagram interpretation is an essential element in automatically understanding textbooks and answering science questions. The cornerstone of this project is its Spoon Feed Learning framework (SPEL), which marries principles of child education and machine learning. SPEL gradually learns diagrammatic and relevant real-world knowledge from textbooks (starting from pre-school) and uses what it’s learned at each grade to learn and collect new knowledge in the next, more complex grade. SPEL takes advantage of coupling automatic visual identification, textual alignment, and reasoning across different levels of complexity.
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Jeff Heer
UW CSE’s Jeff Heer and UC Berkeley’s Maneesh Agrawala will receive $1.5 million to study the computational interpretation of data-driven diagrams. For hundreds of years, humans have communicated through visualizations. While the world has changed, we continue to communicate complex ideas and tell stories through visuals. Today, charts and graphs are ubiquitous forms of graphics, appearing in scientific papers, textbooks, reports, news articles and webpages. While people can easily interpret data from charts and graphs, machines do not have the same ability. Agrawala and Heer will develop computational models for interpreting these visualizations and diagrams. Once machines are better able to “read” these diagrams, they can extract useful data and relationships to drive improved information applications.
- UW CSE’s Luke Zettlemoyer will receive $1 million to study semantic parsing for knowledge extraction. The vast majority of knowledge and information we as humans
Luke Zettlemoyer
have accumulated is in text form. Computers currently are not able to figure out how to translate that data into action. Zettlemoyer is building a new class of semantic parsing algorithms for the extraction of scientific knowledge in STEM domains, such as biology and chemistry. This knowledge will support the design of next-generation, automated question-answering (QA) systems. Whereas existing QA systems, including IBM’s Watson system for Jeopardy, have been very successful, they are typically limited to factual question answering. In contrast, Zettlemoyer work aims to, in the long term, enable a machine to automatically read any text book, extract all of the knowledge it contains, and then use this information to pass a college-level exam on the subject matter.
An open call-for-proposals was announced in early March. Proposals were reviewed by the ADI Panel of Experts, which then made recommendations to the Foundation Board. UW CSE’s extraordinary showing is testament to our emergence as a major force in modern artificial intelligence.
Read the announcement from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation here. GeekWire here.
Read Oren Etzioni’s post “The Next Frontier of Artificial Intelligence Research” here. Read more →
Middle and high school students and families: Don’t miss UW’s Computing Open House, 1-5 p.m. on Saturday December 6 – a great way to launch the week!
And don’t forget to do The Hour of Code – it’s easy and fun! Read more →
Rev. Jesse Jackson speaks with Ed Lazowska, University of Washington computer science professor; and Jonathan Sposato, PicMonkey CEO and GeekWire chairman, in Seattle this afternoon.
“We did not realize how good baseball could be until everybody could play.”
Indeed.
Read more in GeekWire here. Read more →
UW CSE undergraduate Karolina Pyszkiewicz and UW Bothell undergraduate Yarelly Gomez are interviewed on stage by Patrick D’Amelio at the 2014 Washington STEM Summit.
UW CSE professor Dan Grossman will participate in a panel later in the day. UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska is in attendance as a member of the Governor’s STEM Alliance. Read more →
G-Give is a phenomenal program originally conceived and implemented by UW CSE alums Krista Davis and Jessan Hutchison-Quillian at Google’s Seattle engineering office. Each year during the first week of December, gifts by Googler’s to select non-profits are matched twice – once by Google itself, and once by Googlers who sponsor the specific non-profit.