This doesn’t have much to do with UW CSE (well, one of the co-authors is the Ph.D. alum of a Ph.D. alum of ours, and another is a Bachelors alum of ours), but it’s too good to pass up. (Plus, we figure Savage and Voelker must have had their fingers in it somewhere …)
Read about it here. More photos here.
(Thanks to Dan Ports for the tip.) Read more →
Steve Lohr, in the New York Times, features UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni (now CEO of Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence), with cameos by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska and UW CSE affiliate professor Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research). Etzioni and Horvitz delivered keynotes earlier this week at KDD, the ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
“Mr. Etzioni acknowledged the gains made possible by big data methods – identifying patterns and calculating statistical probabilities – in tasks like speech recognition and computer vision. But he then proceeded to underline the limits of the big data approach …
“At the Allen Institute, financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Mr. Etzioni is leading a growing team of 30 researchers that is working on systems that move from data to knowledge to theories, and then can reason. The test, he said, is: ‘Does it combine things it knows to draw conclusions?’ This is the step from correlation, probabilities and prediction to a computer system that can understand, in its way. That seems a steep climb of the semantic ladder of meaning. ‘We are trying to build these semantic models,’ Mr. Etzioni noted …
“Mr. Etzioni, other scientists say, makes a good point, but the current enthusiasm for big data methods is understandable. ‘The dramatic successes of big data have caused everyone to rush over to that side of the boat,’ said Edward Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington, who is on the board of the Allen Institute …
Eric Horvitz, a computer scientist at Microsoft Research, emphasized all that can be done with big data tools … Mr. Horvitz described several projects he and his team were working on. One involves using patient, treatment and historical data to predict which hospital patients are most at risk of being readmitted within 30 days, and suggest follow-up monitoring. Studies show that 20 percent of Medicare patients return to the hospital within 30 days at an estimated cost of $17.5 billion a year, in addition to the toll in human suffering …
“In an interview, Mr. Horvitz, who is an academic adviser to the Allen Institute, agreed with Mr. Etzioni that the long-range goal is computer systems that can reason rather than merely recognize patterns and correlations and make predictions. But Mr. Horvitz chose a different emphasis. ‘I think we can have a huge impact in so many fields, in the shorter term, along the way to reasoning systems,’ Mr. Horvitz said.”
Read more here. Read more →
“Plus, it gets the kid used to watching TV at an early age …”
UW News describes a UW CSE cellphone app, Bilicam, developed by Shwetak Patel’s students Lilian de Greef and Mayank Goel:
“Skin that turns yellow can be a sure sign that a newborn is jaundiced and isn’t adequately eliminating the chemical bilirubin. But that discoloration is sometimes hard to see, and severe jaundice left untreated can harm a baby.
“University of Washington engineers and physicians have developed a smartphone application that checks for jaundice in newborns and can deliver results to parents and pediatricians within minutes. It could serve as a screening tool to determine whether a baby needs a blood test – the gold standard for detecting high levels of bilirubin.”
Read more here. Learn about the project here. Read more →
Jim Fix presents the Vollum Award to Ivan Sutherland
UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus and Reed College professor Jim Fix today presented computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland with the Vollum Award for Distinguished Accomplishment in Science and Technology at Reed College’s 2014 opening convocation.
The Vollum Award was created by Reed College in 1975 as a tribute to the late C. Howard Vollum, a graduate of the Class of 1936 and the founder of Tektronix. The award “is intended to recognize and celebrate the exceptional achievement of a member of the scientific and technical community of the Pacific Northwest.”
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska received the Vollum Award in 2012.
Ivan Sutherland addresses the Reed College Class of 2018
The Napa earthquake of earlier this week has drawn renewed attention to a major award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to the University of Washington, UC Berkeley, Caltech, and the United States Geological Survey to create a west coast earthquake early warning system.
At last night’s kickoff meeting of the NSF M9 (Magnitude 9) Project, John Vidale – UW professor of Earth & Space Sciences, Washington State Seismologist, member of the eScience Institute team, and Moore Foundation PI – was presented with the first breakthrough of the earthquake early warning effort: a John Vidale bobblehead doll!
Shake, rattle, and roll … Read more →
UW President Michael Young, WRF President and CEO Ron Howell, and WRF Board Chair Kent Carlson
UW formally thanked the Washington Research Foundation yesterday, at a reception at the President’s home, for their extraordinary and transformational $31 million commitment to four leading-edge research initiatives at the University of Washington.
Computer Science & Engineering is integrally involved in two::
Leadership of WRF, UW, and the four WRF Innovation Initiatives
Other WRF awards went to the Institute for Protein Design, led by CSE adjunct professor David Baker, and the Clean Energy Institute, led by Chemical Engineering’s Dan Schwartz.
Thank you WRF! Read more →
The University of Washington’s Master of Human-Computer Interaction + Design (MHCI+D) program is a truly interdisciplinary experience with world-class faculty and students from four departments in the cross-disciplinary group DUB (Design-Use-Build): Computer Science & Engineering, Design, Human Centered Design & Engineering, and the Information School.
On Friday the MHCI+D program graduated its first-ever class of 29 students. Of the graduates, about 12 were focused on Design, 10 on User Research, and 7 on Interface Technology – the three core areas of the program. The graduates were from 9 countries; 15 were female, and 14 male. About 17 had work experience prior to entering the program. All have bright futures, with a number of them already securing jobs at top companies. They completed the degree in an intensive 11 months.
Learn more about the MHCI+D program here. Learn more about UW’s DUB collaboration here. Photos of the MHCI+D graduation here. Read more →
The Seattle Times writes:
“Months before the recent Ebola outbreak erupted in Western Africa, killing more than a thousand people, scientists at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design were looking for a way to stop the deadly virus.
“For inspiration, they turned to an unlikely source: gamers.
“Specifically, they asked thousands of computer-game enthusiasts worldwide to tackle an Ebola puzzle on the interactive game Foldit, a 6-year-old project that encourages people to solve puzzles for science.”
Foldit is a collaboration between UW CSE’s Center for Game Science and the Institute for Protein Design. One of many notable successes occurred several years ago, when Foldit gamers solved an AIDS-related protein structure problem that had baffled the scientific community for a decade.
The Seattle Times article is fascinating – read it here. Learn more about the Center for Game Science here. Read more →
Washington (DC) Monthly, a policy magazine for wonks and insiders, has ranked universities since 2005 on how much good they do for the country. It uses measures such as the social mobility that schools provide students, the research output of faculty and students, and the degree to which students engage in public service. The metrics are arbitrary, of course, but so are those of all other rankings.
This year’s Washington Monthly rankings are out.
The University of Washington is ranked 7th among National Universities, behind four UC campuses (San Diego, Riverside, Berkeley, and UCLA), Texas A&M, and Stanford.
In a separate ranking of “Best Bang for the Buck” UW is ranked 6th among National Universities, behind the University of Florida, Georgia Tech, UNC, San Diego State, and Texas A&M.
We’ll take it. And a discipline-specific reminder for Washington students:
There are various OK reasons to go out-of-state for college: get away from your boyfriend/girlfriend, get away from your parents, get away from the rain.
Getting a better Computer Science education is not one of them!
Learn more about Computer Science, and about UW CSE, here. Read more →
Hélène Martin graduated from UW in Computer Science and Linguistics in 2008. She worked for the Grameen Foundation for a year, then created and led the outstanding Computer Science program at Seattle’s Garfield High School for two years. In 2011 she re-joined UW CSE as a Lecturer and as our K-12 Outreach Coordinator.
In addition to being an amazing teacher (and an all-around great person!) Hélène created our many-faceted DawgBytes (“A Taste of CSE”) K-12 outreach program which has impacted many, many hundreds of students in the past three years.
Today was the final day of this year’s 8 DawgBytes summer day camps for K-12 students, and the final day of Hélène’s formal duties in CSE. In the fall, she and her husband, CSE Ph.D. alumnus Yaw Anokwa, will be headed for warmer climes.
We’ll miss you both! Read more →