University of Washington leaders will celebrate a pair of recent grants to support interdisciplinary data science research and collaboration at an all-campus event 2-5 p.m. Friday, Feb. 7, in Mary Gates Hall. Faculty and students from all disciplines who are interested in using big data in their research are invited.
Read more here. Read more →
UW CSE alumnus Jeremy Jaech, co-founder and CEO of SNUPI Technologies
UW’s student newspaper, The Daily, wakes up and reports on CSE and EE startup SNUPI Technologies, whose first product will launch in ten days.
We would have posted this earlier but The Daily‘s website was down …
Read the article here. Learn more about Wally, SNUPI Technologies’ first product, here. Read more →
UW CSE professor Shyam Gollakota in the New York Times
The New York Times reports on power harvesting technologies, including UW’s “Ambient Backscatter“:
“The next breakthrough smartphone, or maybe the one after that, might not have a traditional battery as its sole source of power. Instead, it could pull energy from the air or power itself through television, cellular or Wi-Fi signals …
“‘Hoping and betting on new battery technology to me is a fool’s errand,’ said [Tony] Fadell, who is now the chief executive of Nest, which makes household technology and was bought by Google last month. ‘Don’t wait for the battery technology to get there, because it’s incredibly slow to move’ …
“Researchers at the University of Washington have also been working on a method for wireless devices to communicate without using any battery power. The technique involves harvesting energy from TV, cellular and Wi-Fi signals that are already in the air, said Shyamnath Gollakota, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering who is working on the project.
“‘The idea is basically you have signals around you,’ Mr. Gollakota said. ‘So why do you have to generate new signals to communicate?’
“In a commercial smartphone, a battery would still be necessary for powering the screen and other functions, but the signal-harvesting method would allow phone calls or text messages to be placed without using any power, he said.”
Read the New York Times article here. Learn more about Ambient Backscatter here. (The Ambient Backscatter team includes faculty members Shyam Gollakota, Josh Smith, and David Wetherall, and graduate students Vincent Liu, Aaron Parks, and Vamsi Talla.) Read more →
Gotta love it!
Ed Lazowska and Greg Gottesman model ExtraHop‘s UW CSE recruiting fair swag. Read more →
They’re all here – from Amazon to Zillow. What we need is additional capacity, so that we can enroll all of the great Washington State students who want a UW CSE education and the access it provides to these opportunities. Read more →
UW CSE runs two recruiting events annually for our students and our industry affiliates – one in October and one in January.
Each lasts two days – one day for startups and small companies, one day for larger established companies.
Today was the winter recruiting event for startups and small companies. Participating companies ranged from a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) to Weebly. (The winter recruiting event for larger established companies – tomorrow – truly runs from A (Amazon) to Z (Zillow).) Read more →
UW-Tacoma Chancellor Debra Friedman succumbed to cancer on Sunday morning.
At UW-Tacoma, and before that on the Seattle campus, Debra was a leader who understood why we’re here, and who worked tirelessly to facilitate the people and programs that were doing it right.
Debra was special. She will be sorely missed.
UW Tacoma memorial page, with links to many tributes, here. Read more →
Dave Eaton and his Tesla Model S
UW CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel and UW Dean of the Graduate School Dave Eaton are two of Washington State’s Tesla Model S owners. They’re interviewed in today’s Seattle Times:
“‘We’re subsidizing the future car,’ said Shwetak Patel … He never thought he’s spend so much on a car, but that was never the only thing they were buying.”
Read more on the Seattle Times website here. Pdf here. Read more →
The IEEE Milestones in Electrical Engineering and Computing program honors significant technical achievements in all areas associated with IEEE. It is a program of the IEEE History Committee, administered through the IEEE History Center.
IEEE has formally approved a Milestone recognizing UW CSE alumnus Gary Kildall for the creation of CP/M. The Milestone plaque will be installed in the sidewalk at 801 Lighthouse Avenue in Pacific Grove CA, home of Gary’s Digital Research office, in a ceremony on April 25 2014. The plaque will read:
Birth of the PC Operating System, 1974
Dr. Gary A. Kildall demonstrated the first working prototype of CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) in Pacific Grove in 1974. Together with his invention of the BIOS (Basic Input Output System), Kildall’s operating system allowed a microprocessor-based computer to communicate with a disk drive storage unit and provided the software foundation for the personal computer revolution.
As a student at the University of Washington, Gary received three degrees: a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics in 1967, a Master’s degree in Computer Science in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1972. He was hired as an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, and later joined Intel Corporation to write programming tools for the Intel 4004 microprocessor.
A pioneer in the computer revolution, Gary developed CP/M, which became the dominant microcomputer operating system of the 1970s. He was one of the first people to recognize that even the early, simple microprocessors could support a complete minicomputer-style operating system, and he created an editor, assembler, linker, and loader, along with the first file system to use floppy disks as a general-purpose storage medium. As personal computers began to be used, he saw that their true potential would be in connectivity, so he developed extensions to CP/M that let computers share files and peripheral devices over a network.
Gary’s company, Digital Research, Inc., introduced operating systems with windowing capability, preemptive multitasking, and menu-driven user interfaces years before Apple and Microsoft. He also created the first practical open-system architecture, which allowed operating systems and application programs to be independent of the specific machines on which they ran. A firm believer that life and work should be fun, Gary also developed an early computer-based arcade game as well as precursors to current interactive multimedia.
Gary passed away in 1994, at the age of 52. Recognition of his extraordinary accomplishments has increased with his inclusion in the wonderful 2004 book and PBS television series They Made America – brief excerpt from the detailed Kildall chapter here. Previous tributes here, here, and here. Recent Facebook tribute page, “Legacy of Gary Kildall,” here.
(Interesting bit of history: Tim Paterson, whose QDOS was purchased by Microsoft as the foundation for MS-DOS when IBM came knocking, also is a UW CSE alumnus – B.S. ’78. So whichever OS IBM chose, it was going to be an OS written by a UW CSE alumnus.) Read more →
