Many thanks to David Dawson (CSE ’06; StashRewards), Will Pittman (CSE ’08; DocuSign), Claire Suver (CSE ’09; Amazon); Becky Tucker (our Microsoft recruiter), and Tony Vigil (CSE ’06, Disney Interactive) for a fantastic “employer panel.”
Next event: resume review workshop, October 6 in the Atrium! Read more →
“Sound Startups,” a new 30-minute special airing this Saturday, October 4th at 7:30pm, on KIRO 7 Eyewitness News, showcases Seattle and Puget Sound as a leading region for innovation. Our startup community is hot – and growing fast. This Saturday, KIRO will talk to some of the most innovative minds in Seattle and learn about new businesses thriving in the Puget Sound region.
“Sound Startups” airs Saturday, October 4 at 7:30pm (PST) and Saturday, October 11 at 8:30pm (PST) on KIRO 7 Eyewitness News.
UW, UW CSE, and UW CSE startups are featured prominently!
Here’s the original promo for the series.
Here’s the most recent announcement.
(The show will be live-streamed and web-archived, in addition to broadcast.) Read more →
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation joined last year with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in a process that ultimately selected the University of Washington, UC Berkeley, and New York University as partners in a 5-year, $38.7 million collaborative effort to advance data-intensive discovery.
The Moore Foundation has just announced the results of a subsequent competition to identify leading individual researchers as “Data-Driven Discovery Investigators,” funded at $1.5 million each. From an original field of more than 1,000 pre-proposals, roughly 100 researchers were invited to submit full proposals. 28 of these were invited to participate in a workshop, after which 14 were selected as recipients of $1.5 million Moore Foundation Data-Driven Discovery Investigator Awards – including UW CSE professor Jeff Heer.
Jeff is a data visualization expert – his research group investigates the perceptual, cognitive, and social factors involved in making sense of large data collections, and develops novel interactive systems for visual analysis and communication.
Congratulations to Jeff, and also to UW CSE Ph.D. alum and Stanford (boo!) faculty member Chris Re, also selected as a Moore Foundation DDDI award recipient.
Learn more about Jeff and his research here. Read the Moore Foundation announcement here. Profiles of all 14 DDDI award recipients are here. Read the UW press release here. Read more →
“New RFID technology helps robots find household objects” is the actual headline of this University of Washington and Georgia Institute of Technology press release describing the work of UW CSE and EE faculty member Matt Reynolds.
If a PR2 takes as long to find car keys as it does to fold laundry, we have three words for you: “Take the bus.”
Actually, we have three additional words for you: “Read more here.”
Addendum: The research paper describing this work – “Finding and Navigating to Household Objects with UHF RFID Tags by Optimizing RF Signal Strength” by Travis Deyle, Matt Reynolds, and Charlie Kemp – was one of 3 Finalists (out of over 1,600 papers submitted) for the IROS 2014 Robocup Best Paper Award! Read more →
Including … “The University of Washington has invested deeply in its computer science program and recently spent $1.5 million to remodel their Startup Hall.”
Read more here. Read more →
Beautiful Sieg Hall – home of UW Computer Science & Engineering from 1975-2003 – has been the subject of postcards, the backdrop for Vietnam war protests, the victim of crumbling concrete, the site of an invasion by vines, and, most recently, home to a hornet’s nest. What’s next? Stay tuned! Read more →
GraphLab VP Marketing Johnnie Konstantas, Chief Architect Yucheng Low, VP Engineering Sethu Raman, and Co-Founder and CEO (and UW CSE Amazon Professor of Machine Learning) Carlos Guestrin
CSE startup GraphLab inaugurated its new office space in Fremont last week. The Seattle Times writes:
“Big-data analytics startup GraphLab may need to use its number-crunching software to manage its seating chart.
“After outgrowing a series of incubation spaces at the University of Washington, the company is now filling up a standalone space down the canal in Fremont …
“GraphLab makes software that companies can use to build predictive applications – the kind that analyze huge data collections to figure out what people are likely to shop for, where crime may occur or what kind of music people may like to hear next. Early users include Zillow, Zynga, Adobe and Exxon.”
Read more here. Learn about the company here. Read more →
UW News writes:
“With almost all of the U.S. population armed with cellphones – and close to 80 percent carrying a smartphone – mobile phones have become second-nature for most people.
“What’s coming next, say University of Washington researchers, is the ability to interact with our devices not just with touchscreens, but through gestures in the space around the phone. Some smartphones are starting to incorporate 3-D gesture sensing based on cameras, for example, but cameras consume significant battery power and require a clear view of the user’s hands.
“UW engineers have developed a new form of low-power wireless sensing technology that could soon contribute to this growing field by letting users ‘train’ their smartphones to recognize and respond to specific hand gestures near the phone.
“The technology – developed in the labs of Matt Reynolds and Shwetak Patel, UW associate professors of electrical engineering and of computer science and engineering – uses the phone’s wireless transmissions to sense nearby gestures, so it works when a device is out of sight in a pocket or bag and could easily be built into future smartphones and tablets.”
Read more here. Learn more about the project here. (In addition to Matt and Shwetak, project members are graduate students Chen Zhao, Ke-Yu Chen, and Md Tanvir Islam Aumi.) Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Roxana Geambasu, now on the Computer Science faculty at Columbia University, has been honored by Popular Science as one of its “Brilliant Ten” for 2014:
“As a computer scientist, Roxana Geambasu of Columbia University says she picks new projects based on what ‘really, really annoys me.’ She hates ceding control of her personal data online, which is why she’s building software that allows people to see where the information they upload to the cloud goes.”
Read more here. Learn more about Roxana and her research here.
Congratulations Roxana!!
(Last year, UW CSE postdoc alum Justin Cappos, now on the Computer Science faculty at NYU-Poly, was among the Brilliant Ten. You’re welcome, NYC!) Read more →
The 2004 research paper “Particle Filters for Location Estimation in Ubiquitous Computing: A Case Study” by UW CSE’s Jeff Hightower and Gaetano Borriello has been recognized with the “10-Year Impact Award” from Ubicomp 2014, the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing.
These “test of time” awards are particularly meaningful: they identify the work presented 10 years previously that, with the benefit of that hindsight, has had the greatest impact.
In selecting the paper, the award committee said “The committee is unanimous in awarding you this prize based on the quality of the research and of the paper, and especially the impact the paper has had in terms of citations (both primary and secondary) and inspiration to similar research. The proposed method of particle filters is still a widely used approach and the paper provides very strong empirical evaluations and results.”
Jeff, a 2004 UW CSE Ph.D. alum, is an engineer at Google. At UW he studied with Gaetano, the Jerre D. Noe Professor of Computer Science & Engineering.
Congratulations to Jeff and Gaetano. And while we’re at it, we would be remiss in not noting: