Evi Nemeth – a University of Colorado computer science faculty member well known for her contributions to Unix system administration and system security, and the undergraduate advisor of UW CSE faculty member Yoshi Kohno – has been lost at sea and is presumed dead. Nemeth was sailing aboard the famous schooner Niña, winner of the 1928 3900-mile race from New York to Santander Spain, of the 600-mile Fastnet Race that same year, of the 1929 race from London to Gibson Island Chesapeake Bay, of the New York Yacht Club Astor Cup in 1939 and 1940, of the 233 mile Stanford-Vineyard Race on Long Island Sound (repeatedly), and, at age 34, of the 1962 Newport to Bermuda race.
Articles here and here (with an interesting video in the latter). Read more →
The UW alumni magazine, Columns, uses UW CSE professor Richard Ladner to illustrate an article on “second careers”:
“Or consider Richard Ladner, Boeing Professor in Computer Science & Engineering and a 2008 winner of the Purpose Prize for extraordinary social innovators over 60 years of age. After 35 years as a professor, Ladner wanted to move from theory to impact. The hearing son of deaf parents, Ladner combined his expertise in computers and technology with an innate understanding of the needs and wants of people with disabilities to develop accessible technologies for disabled people.”
Read the article, “Second Acts,” here. Read more →
Better late than never, the UW Daily becomes the 99th publication to run an article on UW CSE’s WiSee technology:
“A quick wave of a hand can shut off the lights and a flick of a finger can turn on the heater. Thanks to a team of UW Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) students and faculty, this type of gesture-recognition technology is now possible.
“This newly developed home gesture system, known as WiSee, can perform simple household tasks, such as turning the lights off in a room or changing a music player’s volume, by using Wi-Fi technology to detect the user’s specific body gestures …
“To do this, the group studied the science of Doppler shifts — relative changes in the frequency of waves caused by the location of the observer.”
Read more here. Learn more about WiSee here. Read more →
Creative programming projects, car hacking, discrete math card tricks, and lots of snacks – it must be time for UW CSE’s summer day camps for middle school and high school students!
This past week marked the first of eight UW CSE day camps. Twenty one energetic, curious, driven high school girls joined us for a week of exposure to computer science.
There will be a second week-long day camp for high school girls later in the summer, as well as two week-long day camps for middle school girls.
In addition, there will be three co-ed day camps focused on building apps for Android phones – 3-day and 5-day camps for middle school students, and a 3-day camp for high school students. Finally, there will be a 4-day co-ed day camp for high school students focused on physical computing.
Learn more about our summer day camp program here.
Learn more about DawgBytes, UW CSE’s outreach program, here. And follow the action as it happens on the DawgBytes Facebook page here.
See photos from this past week’s camp here. Read more →
UW News writes:
“The UW program, called the Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Computing, is the only one of its kind in the nation that offers a full quarter of academic credit to incoming college students or those who just finished their first year.
“It also gives deaf students a chance to explore an academic field they may not have already considered, said Richard Ladner, a UW professor of Computer Science & Engineering who started the academy six years ago.
“‘It has many facets and a richness that many programs don’t have,’ Ladner said. ‘It really opens up their worldview to what they can do’ …
“Google software engineer Anna Cavender helped with practically every aspect of the summer program its first several years while she was a UW doctoral student in Computer Science & Engineering. She has seen students forge lasting friendships and land highly competitive jobs through networking.
“‘The transition to college can be a little extra daunting for deaf and hard of hearing students,’ Cavender said. ‘This program helps students navigate the hurdles and introduces them to other students with similar backgrounds and interests.'”
Read more here. Read more →
“Over the years, airline travel has been a prime testbed for advanced computing and data tools. In the late 1950s and 1960s, American Airlines and I.B.M. teamed up to develop the Sabre computerized reservations system, perhaps the most impressive private-sector computer system of its day.
“More recently, airline data has served as the raw material for predictive data-mining applications like Farecast, which tells consumers whether the price of a plane ticket, for a specific trip on a specific day, is likely to rise or fall. (Farecast, founded in 2003 by Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer scientist, was sold to Microsoft in 2008. It is now part of Bing Travel.)
“But the airlines themselves have become laggards in data-handling innovation …”
Read more here. Read more →
UW CSE professor Luis Ceze has received the IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect Award!
This annual award recognizes outstanding, innovative, high impact research contributions in the field of computer architecture by computer architects who earned their doctorates six years or less ago.
Luis received the award today at the 40th International Symposium on Computer Architecture in Tel Aviv.
Congratulations Luis! Learn more about his research here.
Update: It may appear that Luis is relaxing after receiving his award, but [choose one]:
- (a) he’s always thinking
- (b) his students are always working
Read more →
LearnSprout, a Bay Area startup, is loaded with UW CSE alums. Pictured are Frank Chien, Alex Meng, Jonathan Fung, Anthony Wu, Alex Odle, and Joe Woo. That whiteboard behind them? It converts to a bed – check out the video here. Read more →
It’s been a great year for UW CSE seniors gaining admission to the nation’s top graduate programs:
- David Colmenares, Jesse Dodge, Ekaterina Nepomnyashchaya, and Sor Sukkerd are headed to CMU (David in Mechanical Engineering).
- Sam Hopkins, Jonathan Shi, and Laure Thompson are headed to Cornell.
- Jerry Li is headed to MIT.
- Kevin Clark is headed to Stanford (after a gap year).
- Chris Dentel and Bennett Ng are headed to Berkeley (Bennett in Bioengineering).
- Changhou Han is headed to UCSD.
- Christopher Clark is headed to the University of Edinburgh.
- Melanie Jensenworth is headed to the University of Waterloo.
- Gregory Herman is headed to Colorado State (in Atmospheric Sciences).
- Shanshan Sun is headed to Washington State.
- Alexandre Bykov, Priya Rao Chagaleti, Forrest Coward, Mark Davis, Daryl Hansen, Pingyang He, Mike Hotan, Stephen Jonany, Bryce Kellog, Hye In Kim, Daseul Lee, Ajay Menon, Tyler Rigsby, Jacob Sanders, and Brian Walker will be entering UW CSE’s 5th-year Masters program.
We love being a top supplier of new graduates to Amazon.com, Google, Microsoft, and many smaller Seattle-area companies and startups. But we also love seeing our students heading off to continue their education and pursue careers in research.
Go team! Read more →
