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 →
Today’s monthly “Science Roundtable” on WXXI/NPR Connections featured UW CSE Ph.D. student Karl Koscher discussing online security in the wake of Heartbleed, former UW CSE faculty member (and current University of Rochester department chair) Henry Kautz discussing artificial intelligence, and Henry’s Ph.D. alum (and current Google[x] data scientist) Adam Sadilek discussing trend-tracking via Twitter.
Listen here. Read more →
NerdWallet set about to identify the best cities for recent college graduates. Seattle, at #2 behind Washington DC, beat out San Francisco (#4), Austin (#5), Atlanta (#6), Raleigh (#7), Boston (#8), San Diego (#11), and San Jose (#13). New York didn’t make the top 20.
Admission: If we hadn’t ranked at the top, our reaction to this survey would have been “Who the hell is NerdWallet?” But since we did, check out the survey here! Read more →
In December, more than 20 million students around the globe participated in the Hour of Code, organized by Code.org – a Seattle-based non-profit dedicated to expanding participation in computer science. The event allowed students to try their hand at coding and prompted discussions among policymakers and educators about how to provide students with greater access to computer science education.
That discussion – and Hadi Partovi, co-founder and CEO of Code.org – will come to the University of Washington’s Seattle campus May 8 for the Washington Education Innovation Forum.
Join us on Thursday May 8 at Kane Hall Room 110. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and the event and live-streaming on UWTV will begin at 7 p.m. Free registration is on EventBrite. Read more →
UW CSE’s Yoav Artzi and Luke Zettlemoyer and MIT CSAIL’s Regina Barzilay and Nate Kushman have developed a new computer system that can automatically solve the type of word problems common in introductory algebra classes. The work will be presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in June.
In the near term, the work could lead to educational tools that identify errors in students’ reasoning or evaluate the difficulty of word problems. But it may also point toward systems that can solve more complicated problems in geometry, physics, and finance – problems whose solutions don’t appear in the back of the teacher’s edition of a textbook.
Read an MIT News post here. Check out the research paper here. Read more →
MIT EECS Connector features 2012 MIT EECS Ph.D. alum and UW CSE professor Shyam Gollakota, whose research on backscatter communication, gesture recognition, and other areas has received wide acclaim. “My goal is to change our fundamental understanding of what is possible, by designing and building novel systems that challenge conventional wisdom.”
Read the MIT EECS Connector article here.
Learn about the work of Shyam and his collaborators in UW CSE’s Networks and Wireless Lab here. Read more →