CSE’s Ed Lazowska addressed the National Science Board (the oversight board for the National Science Foundation) on “The Future of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure.” Other participants in the 3-hour briefing were Peter Lee (Microsoft Research), David Baker (UW Biochemistry), and Thom Dunning (NCSA, but soon to be the Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing, the joint initiative of UW and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory).
The topics that Ed addressed:
- Why must America remain the world leader in computer science?
- How did we gain the lead, and how can we retain it?
- How should our competitiveness be defined?
- The coming decade: Dramatic improvements in technology and algorithms enable “smart everything”
- Cyberinfrastructure to support 21st century “smart discovery”
- Implications for academia
- Implications for research policy
- Implications for K-12 education
Ed’s slides are here. Read more →
To help develop a fascinating new prosthetic device, Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen is providing $1.5 million to a team of University of Washington researchers including specialists in neuroengineering and computer science. The team is developing a brain-computer-spine interface that’s intended to restore hand and arm function in people who have suffered spinal cord injuries. It’s basically an implantable computer, the size of a pacemaker, that will relay signals from the brain into the spinal cord.
The project is led by Chet Moritz, professor of Rehabilitation Medicine. Other faculty participants are Adrienne Fairhall, professor of Physiology & Biophysics, and Josh Smith, professor of Computer Science & Engineering and of Electrical Engineering. All three are associated with UW’s National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering.
Announcement from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation here. Seattle Times article here. Read more →
Josh Blumenstock
Nine faculty members from across the nation have been recognized by Intel in its 2013 U.S. Early Career Faculty Honor Program. Among the nine: UW CSE adjunct professor (and iSchool professor) Josh Blumenstock, and UW CSE Ph.D. alum (and University of Pennsylvania professor) Joe Devietti.
Fifteen top Ph.D. students from across the nation have been recognized by Intel in its 2013 U.S. PhD Fellowship Program, including UW CSE Ph.D. student Peter Henry.
Josh studies the social and economic impacts of technology.
Joe Devietti
Joe – advised by CSE’s Luis Ceze and Dan Grossman – studies programmability challenges raised by multicore architectures.
Peter – advised by CSE’s Dieter Fox – studies the use of depth cameras for dense 3D modeling of environments and objects.
Congratulations to Josh, Joe, and Peter! Read more here!
Peter Henry
DawgBytes is UW’s Computer Science & Engineering K-12 outreach program. We introduce students and their teachers to the exciting world of computing.
Here’s an update on summer activities and upcoming opportunities.
Get involved! Read more →
Find out from this Quora post by 2013 UW CSE graduate Ambar Choudhury:
“I’m going to talk about the undergraduate experience at the UW Computer Science Department (UWCSE), having graduated from the program in 2013. Short answer – it’s pretty darn awesome.
“The long answer lies below.”
Read more on Quora here. Read more →
UW EE professor (and UW CSE adjunct professor) Eric Klavins and UW EE and CSE professor Georg Seelig have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Expeditions in Computing program as part of a multi-investigator team working to establish the engineering foundations for molecular programming and synthetic biology.
Klavins and Seelig will receive $2 million as part of the expedition called “Molecular Programming Architectures, Abstractions, Algorithms and Applications” led by Professor Erik Winfree of the California Institute of Technology. The team also includes investigators from Harvard and the University of California at San Francisco.
The project explores how to systematically program the behaviors of a wide array of complex information-based molecular systems, from decision-making circuitry and molecular-scale manufacturing to biomedical diagnosis and smart therapeutics in living cells. The work could lead to real-world applications such as molecular instruments for probing biological systems and programmable fabrication of nanoscale devices.
Read the NSF release here! Read more →
The 1st Heidelberg Laureate Forum takes place September 22-27, 2013.
Forty Abel, Fields, Turing, and Nevanlinna Laureates – winners of the most prestigious awards in the computer and mathematical sciences – will spend a full week interacting with 200 selected young researchers from around the globe.
UW CSE Ph.D. students Kyle Rector and Paris Koutris are among the 200 invited attendees. The Heidelberg Laureate Forum blog has a wonderful writeup on Kyle’s research.
Congratulations to Kyle and Paris on this tremendous honor – and tremendous opportunity! Read more →
Justin Cappos recently completed a postdoc in UW CSE and joined the faculty at NYU-Poly in New York.
No sooner had Justin left Seattle than he was named to the ranks of Popular Science‘s annual “Brilliant Ten” – based upon his creation of the cloud computing platform “Seattle.”
Congratulations Justin! Read more here. Read more →
SNUPI Technologies is a new startup out of Shwetak Patel’s lab – Shwetak, Gabe Cohn, Jeremy Jaech, Matt Reynolds, etc.
The TechFlash Cup is a startup competition. Sixteen companies were selected as competitors. Every Monday at 9 a.m., the two companies with the fewest votes will be eliminated, until they get down to the final four, at which point there will be a “pitch competition.”
It’s up to YOU to get SNUPI into the “pitch competition.” You can vote DAILY, beginning today, here:
http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/techflashcup
(You need to “sign in” to vote. I’m not sure exactly what’s required – I already had an account with PSBJ.)
It will just take a few seconds, once you’re registered. Vote for the SNUPI of your choice, but vote!
UPDATE: On the SNUPI Technologies website, you can sign up for daily voting reminders! http://www.snupi.com/ Read more →
