An article in the Seattle Times makes it clear. Between 1991 and 2014, per-capita taxpayer support for the University of Washington has decreased 62% – from $95 per capita to $36 per capita. (Per-capita taxpayer support for Washington’s community college system has decreased by only 28%, and is now 2.5 times as great as support for UW: $89 vs. $36.)
Sometimes, you get what you pay for …
Read the article here. Read more →
Andrew Putnam presents Catapult at ISCA
In a paper presented by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Andrew Putnam at this week’s International Symposium on Computer Architecture, Microsoft researchers described the use of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to deliver performance improvements of as much as 95 percent on Bing search. It’s incredibly cool and high-impact work!
The paper, “A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large-Scale Datacenter Services,” had 23 authors(!). In addition to Andrew, the principal technical contributors to the work were Doug Burger (Director of Client & Could Apps at Microsoft Research, and a UW CSE adjunct professor), Adrian Caulfield (MSR, and a UW CSE bachelors alum who received his Ph.D. at UCSD from UW CSE Ph.D. alum Steve Swanson), Derek Chiou (University of Texas faculty member), and Eric Chung (MSR).
Quoting from the abstract: “Datacenter workloads demand high computational capabilities, flexibility, power efficiency, and low cost… To advance datacenter capabilities beyond what commodity server designs can provide, we have designed and built a composable, reconfigurable fabric to accelerate portions of large-scale software services. Each instantiation of the fabric consists of a 6×8 2-D torus of high-end Stratix V FPGAs embedded into a half-rack of 48 machines… In this paper, we describe a medium-scale deployment of this fabric on a bed of 1,632 servers, and measure its efficacy in accelerating the Bing web search engine… Under high load, the large-scale reconfigurable fabric improves the ranking throughput of each server by a factor of 95% for a fixed latency distribution – or, while maintaining equivalent throughput, reduces the tail latency by 29%.”
Read the paper here. Read a Wired article here. Read a Microsoft press release here. Read more →
UW CSE’s 2013-14 Ph.D. graduates
A record 317 degrees were conferred by UW CSE on Saturday: 205 Bachelors students, 84 Masters students, and 28 Doctoral students were recognized at UW CSE’s graduation ceremony in Meany Hall Theater.
Congratulations to all of our students! And a few special shout-outs:
Zorah and Gaetano give each other the giggles
Congratulations to all of our wonderful graduates!
Bruce Hemingway photographs:
Mayank Goel photographs here.
Steve Ballmer wows the crowd
Again, congratulations, one and all! Read more →
UW EE Ph.D. student Julie Medero will join the Computer Science faculty at Harvey Mudd College in the fall.
A few of the many Mudders now in UW CSE and EE gathered with Julie in the Atrium to tell her all the things they had kept to themselves while she was considering the job. (Just kidding! Mudd is a phenomenal school and one of our top sources of Ph.D. students!)
Left to right: Dan Halperin (CSE and eScience Institute), Lilian de Greef (CSE), Edward Wang (EE), Calvin Loncaric (CSE), Eric Mullen (CSE), and Julie.
Congratulations to Julie on landing a great position, and to HMC on landing a great faculty member. And … keep sending us those great students! Read more →
Chris Diorio, Yoky Matsuoka, and Shwetak Patel – plus virtual onlookers
On Wednesday, Madrona Venture Group hosted an Internet of Things media dinner in San Francisco. Media attendees included journalists from Forbes, Fortune, NPR, the New York Times, Recode, Tech Review, Thomson Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Xconomy.
The panel was moderated by Madrona Managing Director Tom Alberg. Panelists:
Many thanks to Tom and our many other friends at Madrona for continuing to feature UW CSE! Read more →
UW CSE affiliate professor (and Microsoft Research staff member) Sumit Gulwani has received the 2014 ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions by young investigators in the area of programming languages.
Sumit has made pioneering contributions to the field of programming languages, especially in the areas of program analysis and program synthesis. Building on his foundational work in program analysis including using randomized algorithms, improving abstract interpretation, and reasoning about programs as continuous functions, Sumit recognized the important connection between program verification and program synthesis
Congratulations Sumit! Read more here. Read more →
At today’s University of Washington Awards of Excellence ceremony, UW Provost Ana Mari Cauce presented CSE professor Gaetano Borriello with the 2014 Marsha L. Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award, and CSE Ph.D. alumnus (and UW-Tacoma professor) Donald Chinn with one of seven 2014 Distinguished Teaching Awards.
Congratulations Gaetano and Donald!
Julia Schumacher, Sand Point Elementary School
Sand Point Elementary, a public school near the University of Washington, has started to incorporate programming classes into their curriculum. They are using the wildly popular Scratch language, which lets the students visually compose programs that animate small sprites on the screen. These sprites can be controlled by the user and can interact with each other.
“By exposing students at a young age to programming, we begin to build in them an idea of the potential for their futures. Instead of being consumers of technology, they are now creators of technology. It’s very empowering” says Julia Schumacher, school librarian and computer lab teacher.
With the help of UW CSE’s Allison Obourn and Magda Balazinska, the school ran a pilot set of 12 class sessions with 5th grade students this past year. The team plans to expand the offering next year. “Our goal is to teach some programming to the kids before they begin to think whether programming is fun or not or whether it is for them or not. Programming should simply be one of the many tools children learn in school” says Magda.
Students were enthusiastic: “Scratch is cool and I like to make the sprites move” and “I love to play the games on Scratch and it’s cool that we can make our own now.”
One of the most exciting outcomes of this pilot program is that, after this series of classes, students would choose to continue to write programs on their own whenever they had free time in the computer lab. “It is important to introduce students to computer science to increase access to the field” concludes Allison.
(Sand Point Elementary is a diverse school: over 60% free-and reduced lunch participants, 27% English language learners, 29% African American, 29% White, 26% Asian, 16% Hispanic, and 4% Native American.) Read more →
UW News reports:
“Computer scientists from the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle have created the first fully automated computer program that teaches everything there is to know about any visual concept. Called Learning Everything about Anything, or LEVAN, the program searches millions of books and images on the Web to learn all possible variations of a concept, then displays the results to users as a comprehensive, browsable list of images, helping them explore and understand topics quickly in great detail.”
Read more here. Read more →
Check out the Spring 2014 issue of most significant bits, the UW CSE alumni magazine. Stories include:
Pdf here. Html here. Read more →
