That was the comment of CSE professor Ed Lazowska’s younger son – a lawyer who majored in economics and political science as an undergraduate, so hardly a “true believer” – upon reading a Washington Post column attacking Lazowska’s recent letter in the New York Times regarding the move to offer computer science in K-12 schools across the nation.
Read Lazowska’s letter here. Read the Washington Post column here. Learn about Neanderthals here. Read more →
Trifacta, a San Francisco big data company co-founded by UW CSE professor Jeffrey Heer and UC Berkeley professor Joe Hellerstein – has completed a $25 million Series C financing round, led by Seattle-based Ignition Partners.
Trifacta provides a way to approach the bottlenecks in data analytics from a human perspective. The company is pioneering a Data Transformation Platform to prepare data for analysis.
Read more in Venture Beat here; TechCrunch here. Press release from Trifacta here. Read more →
Defense Tech writes:
“The Pentagon’s research arm unveiled a new drone built with secure software that prevents the control and navigation of the aircraft from being hacked.
“The program, called High Assurance Cyber Military Systems, or HACMS, uses software designed to thwart cyber attacks. It has been underway with the Defense Advance Research Project Agency for several years after originating at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Washington, said Kathleen Fisher, HACMS program manager for DARPA.
“‘The software is designed to make sure a hacker cannot take over control of a UAS. The software is mathematically proven to be invulnerable to large classes of attack,’ Fisher said.”
UW CSE professor (and UCSD Ph.D. alum) Yoshi Kohno and UCSD CSE professor (and UW CSE Ph.D. alum) Stefan Savage were the PIs.
Read more here. Read more →
In every student’s academic life, there are some truly special teachers who provide life-changing inspiration – who cause the student to recognize what s/he can achieve and what s/he should aspire to.
UW CSE invites our undergraduates to nominate their most inspirational teachers from middle school, upper school, or community college. We host these teachers, their partners, and the students who nominated them at a dinner in the spring.
All teachers – from preschool to graduate school – are in the same business. Parents entrust us with their most prized possession – their children. We do the best we can, for a few short years, to nurture their creativity and guide their development, then we send them on to the next stage of their lives. Later on, we see what they’ve become, and we take joy and pride in having played at least a small role in the development of these amazing young people.
UW CSE is proud to honor our 2013-14 Inspirational Teachers – 57 remarkable individuals, listed here. Thanks for all you do. Read more →
A nice article in Xconomy discusses AnswerDash, a startup based on a four-year research effort by then-iSchool Ph.D. student Parmit Chilana (now a professor at the University of Waterloo) and her faculty advisors, iSchool professors (and CSE adjunct professors) Jake Wobbrock and Andy Ko:
“The University of Washington Information School has more than a century of history, and now, it’s first startup company, AnswerDash, which aims to improve self-service online help for e-commerce, government, and other Websites.
“While startup companies and technologies with commercial potential regularly emerge from the larger UW Computer Science & Engineering department, that hasn’t been the case with the iSchool, which fosters technology innovation in areas such as human-computer interaction and information management and science.”
Read more here. Read more →
TechCrunch reports:
“Demand for computer science classes and programs is booming at universities across the U.S., according to data presented this past week at the NCWIT summit for Women in IT by Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, and Stanford Computer Science professor Eric Roberts.
“At Lazowska’s own school, the number of incoming freshmen who plan to major in computer science is soaring – the graph below, published earlier this week by Geekwire, speaks for itself …”
TechCrunch coverage here.
Hacker News coverage here.
Original UW CSE News posts here and here. Read more →
The ACM Student Research Competition is an internationally recognized venue celebrating undergraduate and graduate student research. In the Grand Finals, first, second, and third place awards are made in both undergraduate and graduate student categories, considering students from all geographies and all research areas.
In the 2014 Grand Finals:
Sai was recognized for research that addresses configuration errors, which cause correct software to behave in undesired ways. Sai created techniques and tools that enable programmers and end-users to find and fix configuration errors.
While an undergraduate at ANU, James did multiple internships at Microsoft Research. At ANU and MSR he did research on dealing with uncertainty in mainstream programming languages – for example, dealing with uncertainty from sensor readings in mobile applications.
Carlo worked at Virginia Tech on accelerating fast Fourier transform on modern GPU hardware.
Congratulations to Sai, James, and Carlo! Learn about all the winners here. Read more →
Seattle Business has published an extensive article on Seattle as “the epicenter of big data,” including profiles of many of Seattle’s leading ‘big data’ companies. It makes a great case!
“Two years ago, the University of Washington sought to recruit as faculty four of the nation’s leading minds in data science and machine learning. Competition was fierce from such schools as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, which also offer highly regarded education in data-related fields.
“However, the UW had a unique advantage. ‘Local (data and cloud) companies stepped up and offered tremendous help,’ says Ed Lazowska, director of the UW’s eScience Institute, which recently received a major grant to encourage the use of Big Data analysis in university research. Amazon.com provided two $1 million endowed professorships to help recruit two of these stars, and CEO Jeff Bezos met with them personally when they visited Seattle. In the end, all four professors joined the UW staff.
“More recently, during the recruitment of another faculty candidate, it was discovered that the spouse of the prospective professor would need to find a job in the legal profession. ‘In the space of an hour, we got [the law firm] Perkins Coie and the chief legal people at Amazon, Microsoft and Tableau Software]to offer to meet with her,’ Lazowska says.
“Big Data is an industry in its infancy. Creating local expertise, therefore, is integral to cementing a foothold. Innovation and technical expertise are traditional strengths for the area, Lazowska says, but if they’re not cultivated, they’ll disappear. The willingness of local companies to help, he says, is ‘what makes us strong.’
“‘Every field is transitioning from data poor to data rich right now,’ Lazowska adds. ‘You can make the argument that the Puget Sound [area] is in the catbird seat, both in the cloud and data analytics.'”
Read more here. Read more →
Crosscut describes the Washington Research Foundation’s $31.2 million commitment to the University of Washington, including $9.3 million to the eScience Institute:
“Talk with top UW researchers and faculty, and ‘game changing’ is the most common phrase used to describe the WRF investment …
“The dollars will support only four programs at the university, each selected because it plays to the university’s most promising strengths …
“According to WRF CEO Ron Howell, his organization’s $31.2 million gift was inspired by Jeff Bezos. In 2012, in the interests of creating a Big Data ecosystem in Puget Sound, the Amazon CEO endowed two $1 million professorships. The seed money enabled UW to lure two coveted Big Data researchers away from other top-tier schools who were recruiting them. This hiring coup “stimulated our thinking,” Howell says.
“Fittingly, more than $9 million — the largest single portion — of the WRF’s gift goes to fund the Global Leadership in Data-Intensive Discovery program in the UW’s data-centric eScience Institute. The money will help support six new faculty members, three chairs, three professorships and 13 postdoctoral researchers.”
Read more here. Read more →
Greatest conference banquet idea ever – food trucks!
Donna Brazile
Photos from the wonderful Tenth Anniversary NCWIT Summit!
Ed Lazowska and NCWIT CEO and Co-Founder Lucy Sanders
Lucy Sanders and Chelsea Clinton
Nancy Amato receives the inaugural NCWIT Harrold and Notkin Research and Graduate Mentoring Award from Akiva Notkin, Cathy Tuttle, and Mary Lou Soffa.