San Francisco-based credit card fraud prevention company Sift Science – led by UW CSE alum Jason Tan – has raised an $18 million Series B round led by Spark Capital with participation from Union Square Ventures, Max Levchin, and First Round Capital.
Sift Science has developed a method to detect fraudulent charges as they’re happening, pairing a smart UI with machine learning. Sift Science has raised $23.6 million in total funding to date.
Read more on TechCrunch here. Read more →
Ever wonder what the Today Show’s Natalie Morales will look like when she’s 60?
We didn’t either. But the Today Show thought their viewers might, so featured UW CSE’s age progression software this morning. The software, created by Ira Kemelmacher-Schlizerman, Supasorn Suwajanakorn, and Steve Seitz, computes stunningly accurate age progression images from a single photograph.
Watch the video segment (preceded by an annoying 30-second commercial) below. Transcript on the Today Show website here. Learn more about the research here.
Dan Grossman points out that this software solves a long-standing challenge articulated by the late comic Mitch Hedberg:
UW CSE is delighted to announce our first two hires of the 2014 faculty recruiting season.
Yejin Choi, currently Assistant Professor at SUNY Stony Brook, will be joining UW CSE this fall. Yejin is a rising star in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a focus on studying non-literal and contextual language understanding. Her work on automatically analyzing writing style – e.g., to detect deceptive online reviews or predict the success of a novel – has gained significant academic and media attention. She is also a leader in combining NLP and computer vision – studying the automatic captioning of photographs – and was a co-recipient the 2013 David Marr Prize for this work. Yejin received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University and her B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University. (Yejin joins CSE along with Noah Smith, currently Finmeccania Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science, Language Technologies Institute, at Carnegie Mellon University and also an expert in natural language processing – more details here. The addition of Yejin and Noah to Luke Zettlemoyer and others already on campus creates a world-class NLP group at the University of Washington.) (more…) Read more →
The lead article in Sunday’s New York Times is about the movement to teach computer science, computational thinking, and computer programming in K-12, driven by Seattle’s Code.org:
“It is a stark change for computer science, which for decades was treated like a stepchild, equated with trade classes like wood shop …
“Computer programming should be taught in every school, said Hadi Partovi, the founder of Code.org and a former executive at Microsoft. He called it as essential as ‘learning about gravity or molecules, electricity or photosynthesis.'”
The article is heavily focused on “coding” and “skills” and “jobs,” and in that sense misses the most important point: Programming is the hands-on inquiry-based way we teach computational thinking, which is an essential capability for just about everyone in the 21st century. Referencing Hadi, you don’t learn about “gravity or molecules, electricity or photosynthesis” for vocational purposes, but rather because they lead you to important “modes of thought”!
Oh well … we’ll join together in blaming Matt Richtel and fall back on the adage that “pretty much any press is good press.”
Read more here. Read more →
Each year, ACM recognizes a winner and one or two honorable mentions in its Doctoral Dissertation Award competition – the highest-impact dissertations among roughly 2,000 Ph.D.s granted.
UW CSE professor Shayan Oveis Gharan is one of two Honorable Mentions in the 2013 competition, announced this week.
Shayan received his Ph.D. from Stanford last year. He is spending the current year as a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley and will join UW CSE during the 2014-15 academic year. His research involves the development of provably efficient algorithms for problems that seem intractable. He has worked on the classical Traveling Salesman Problem, on clustering in massive graphs using spectral methods, and on stochastic optimization. Along the way he has introduced many new techniques, like maximum entropy sampling and the use of higher eigenvalues of graphs, that can be used to tackle an array of other computational tasks.
UW CSE professor Shyam Gollakota won the 2012 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. UW CSE Ph.D. alum Seth Cooper won the 2011 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. UW CSE Ph.D. alum Noah Snavely was Honorable Mention in the 2009 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award competition.
Go team!
CSE’s Oren Etzioni, GeekWire‘s “Hire of the Year,” is a long-time Venture Partner at Madrona Venture Group, which has backed several of his startups and more than a dozen UW CSE startups in all.
Additionally, our friend Julie Sandler, Principal at Madrona, is GeekWire‘s “Geek of the Year.”
And Rover.com, created by our friend Greg Gottesman, Managing Director at Madrona, is GeekWire‘s “Startup of the Year.”
Read about all the GeekWire Awards here. Read more →
Long-time CSE professor Oren Etzioni, recently departed to lead Paul Allen’s new Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is GeekWire‘s “Hire of the Year”:
“Perhaps no one has been more synonymous with the startup ethos at the University of Washington than computer science professor Oren Etzioni, a mainstay on campus for more than two decades and an inspiration for budding entrepreneurs in academia.
“Etzioni moved on from academia after nearly 30 years this past September after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen asked him to lead an ambitious new undertaking around the study of artificial intelligence, a multi-million dollar effort that could have huge implications for the region’s tech industry and, more importantly, society as a whole.
“Etzioni thanked his mother and wife after accepting the award tonight.
“‘She deserves ‘Wife of the Year,” Etzioni said of his spouse.”
Watch the award announcement and Oren’s acceptance remarks here. Read the GeekWire article here. Read more →
The National Science Foundation highlights games created by students in UW’s NSF Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering:
“Tech Sandbox: The playground of neural engineering. University of Washington students compete in creating projects that demonstrate the core principles of neural engineering.”
Read more here. Learn about CSNE here. Read more →
The Seattle Times gushes over UW CSE’s age progression software, created by Ira Kemelmacher-Schlizerman, Supasorn Suwajanakorn, and Steve Seitz:
“We also asked the program to age a number of others – from Miley Cyrus to Russell Wilson to Macklemore – to show them in their 60s. It showed us what Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain would have looked like had they lived, to 71 and 47 this year, respectively.
“No wonder so many plastic surgeons get rich.”
Read more in the Seattle Times here. Learn about the research here.
(Addendum: This was the #1 most-read article in the online Seattle Times!) Read more →
This evening UW welcomed Hadi Partovi of Code.org at the Washington Education Innovation Forum, organized by the Center for Reinventing Public Education. UW CSE, the UW College of Education, and Washington STEM co-sponsored the event.
State Representative Reuven Carlyle – known for advocating policies that pass the common sense sniff test – emceed a panel that included two Seattle-area high school students in addition to Hadi: Ifrah Abshir, a sophomore at Rainier Beach High School, and Megan Fu, a junior at Holy Names Academy (and a counselor at last summer’s UW CSE summer day camps for middle school students).
Hadi and Code.org have not just moved the needle, they have pinned the needle! Tonight’s conversation was inspiring! Read more →