Nearly 100 girls from the Puget Sound region participated this weekend in an afternoon just for girls hosted by UW CSE.
STEM Out! was organized by engineers from Amazon.com in partnership with DawgBytes, UW CSE’s K-12 outreach program. Speakers discussed academic research, biology, computer science and more! Participants extracted DNA from strawberries, solved lots of puzzles, and participated in an egg drop challenge.
Thanks to all who made this possible!
Photos of the event here. Information about DawgBytes (“A Taste of CSE”), UW CSE’s K-12 outreach program, here. Read more →
Many hundreds of UW faculty and students joined President Michael K. Young, Provost Ana Mari Cauce, Vice Provost for Research Mary Lidstrom, representatives of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, leaders of the UW eScience Institute on Friday for a campus-wide data science event.
An hour of presentations (slides here, Windows Media video here, MP4 video here) was followed by a two hour poster and networking session with more than 130 poster presentations (list of posters here, Windows Media video here, MP4 video here).
See the event announcement here. Learn more about UW’s many data science activities here. Read more →
Facebook Open Academy is a program designed to provide a practical, applied software engineering experience as part of a university student’s computer science education.
At the beginning of the term, students and mentors from open source projects come together at Facebook HQ for a weekend of learning and hacking. After this kickoff session, students return to their universities and continue to work in virtual teams. Open source mentors support their teams by helping students find and understand tasks and review code contributions.
Students and mentors from 24 universities kicked off this term’s Facebook Open Academy this weekend. Eight UW CSE 495 students, mentored by Dan Halperin, will be spending winter and spring quarters working as part of distributed development teams with four different open source projects.
Pictured, left-to-right: Hongying Sophie Zhang, Whitney Schmidt, Panji Wisesa, Eli Elefson, Dan Halperin, Grant Timmerman, Noah Lindner, Erik Chou, and Jesse Warren. Read more →
“Everyone needs a lodestar, someone who keeps them moving on the right path. Author Helen Schulman pays tribute to her own true north, a man who taught her much about how to live life to the fullest – and how to end it with grace.”
Read this moving essay here. Read more →
“No one would argue with Boeing’s importance to our state economy. However, it’s time for a similar economic development strategy focused on meeting the needs of Washington’s information technology, biotechnology and other innovation sector employers, which currently generate approximately 28 percent of all the jobs in the state …
“The attached summary outlines the key elements that must be included in this economic development strategy, including:
- Prioritizing state resources to expand higher education capacity and access and create more graduates, especially in the STEM disciplines. Boeing has made a compelling argument regarding the importance of workforce training programs at the community and technical colleges. Our industries have this same need at the baccalaureate level. Washington must attack baccalaureate STEM funding with the same focus and intensity that lawmakers directed toward major upgrades to community and technical college programs that support Boeing and its suppliers.”
Read more here. Read more →
UW CSE graduate students and faculty celebrate the second annual Notkinfest, honoring UW CSE professor David Notkin. Participants in the ratty beard contest pictured to the right. Additional photographs here.
David, we miss you! Read more →
In 2010, Anthony Wu, a 2005 UW CSE alumnus, sent a moving personal email to UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska. With a bit of distance, Anthony has now elected to publish the letter, along with an explanatory preamble. It’s must reading. Quoting from the preamble:
“This story is about a teenager who just badly wants to study computer science at an university that cannot afford to teach computer science to every interested student.
“This story is also about politics, opportunity, upward socioeconomic mobility, funding for education and one first-generation immigrant’s attempt to realize the American Dream.
“Unfortunately, it is also a cautionary tale of how a simple goal might have easily slipped away from the individual chasing it.”
Anthony’s post provides extraordinary insight into why we do what we do, and why America’s great public universities are so important. Read it here. Read more →
On Wednesday, 15 volunteers from UW CSE industry affiliate companies put 45 CSE undergraduates through the wringer in mock technical interviews, preparing them for the real thing in coming weeks. Our thanks to:
- Dan Leventhal, Tableau Software
- Akhil Patel, Pariveda
- Eddie Carlson and Robert Noble, Whitepages
- Jordan Hoyt, Jordan Kalilich, and Bingo Ngo, Amazon.com
- Alexis Cheng, Jess Gray, Travis Hobrla, Vasantha Polipelli, and Fabio Yeon, Google
- John-Gabriel D’Angelo, Samantha Luber, and Jason Thorsness, Microsoft
Read more →
From GeekWire:
Skytap, a Seattle startup that allows companies to test development environments in the cloud, has raised an additional $6.45 million in series C financing from existing investors OpenView Venture Partners, Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and WRF Capital.
Skytap was co-founded by UW CSE professors Brian Bershad, Steve Gribble, and Hank Levy, and CSE Ph.D. student Dave Richardson.
Read more here. Read more →
Roughly 40 Seattle-area alums joined UW CSE faculty members Maya Cakmak, Shyam Gollakota, Dan Grossman, Ed Lazowska, and James Lee on Tuesday evening for a happy hour (or three) at Von Trapp’s on Capitol Hill.
UW CSE hosts a variety of alumni events each year in Seattle and in the San Francisco Bay Area. Want to be in the loop? Update your address and email (we use regional address pulls to generate email advisories of events; you can configure to receive communications from CSE but not from Mother UW) and follow us on Facebook! Read more →
