In a Seattle Times Sunday op-ed, UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska sets the record straight on the demand for computer science graduates:
“Technology workforce issues are much in the news these days, stimulated by proposed changes to the nation’s H-1B ‘guest worker’ visa policy …
“Allow me to inject a few facts into the conversation. (As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, ‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.’)
“It’s indeed the case, both nationwide and in our state, that there is no overall shortage of STEM graduates. But this is not news – it’s been the case for many years. This does not mean you shouldn’t major in a STEM field if that’s your passion, any more than that you shouldn’t major in journalism (where the job prospects are far more grim).
“However, nationwide there is a well-documented shortage of graduates in computer science. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 70% of all newly-created jobs across all STEM fields during this decade – across engineering, the physical sciences, the life sciences, and the social sciences – will be in computer science. The field is booming.
“And in Washington there is a well-documented shortage in the health professions and in engineering, as well as in computer science …
“Due to staffing and facilities limitations, UW CSE – ranked among the top ten programs in the nation, along with the likes of Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Berkeley – can accommodate only about 25% of the students who successfully fulfill prerequisite courses and apply to the major. This is a critical issue for Washington’s economy, but more importantly for Washington’s students: 80% of UW CSE undergraduates are Washington residents, and the vast majority remain here after graduation.
“Computer science: It’s where the jobs are. It’s also where the future is.”
Read the op-ed in the Seattle Times here. Can’t surmount the paywall?
Charts of data:
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UW CSE’s Center for Game Science has partnered with the Technology Alliance to launch the first Washington State Algebra Challenge.
During the week of June 3-7, students in Washington State K-12 classrooms will attempt to complete 250,000 algebra equations, using the school-adapted algebra learning game DragonBox. Even students who have never been exposed to algebra before will be encouraged to participate!
Learn more about the Washington State Algebra Challenge here. Read a press release here. Learn about the Center for Game Science – inventing next-generation technologies for learning and for scientific discovery – here.
Read a GeekWire post on the Challenge here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni! (Along with a real live geeky physician, in an unprecedented GeekWire Awards tie vote.) Read more →
Today, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn launched Startup Seattle, a multi-pronged initiative to further enhance Seattle’s climate for tech startups. GeekWire reports:
“As part of the Startup Initiative, the City does plan on centering its first ‘innovation hub’ around the UW. Lazowska said that, given the critical role of research universities in innovation, he and his colleagues have worked hard to get more tech companies to open up their HQs in the U-District. But because the surrounding area is ‘an ocean of head shops, pho restaurants, and squalid student housing,’ that’s been extremely difficult.
“However, a new light rail station that will open toward the end of the decade could change things, and combined with the research coming out of the UW, may turn the U-District into a humming innovation center.
“‘There will be lots of construction going on, and at the end of it, the U-District will be a big-time transit hub,’ Lazowska said. ‘Let’s take advantage of this to envision a broader transformation …’
“‘I think we are on the verge of the big time,’ Lazowska said. ‘We’re right at the tipping point. The goal of this initiative is to push us over the edge.'”
Read more: GeekWire here, Seattle Times here, Xconomy here. Read more →
“Albert Wong had spent his whole life trying —and failing — to type Cantonese characters on a computer.
“But now, thanks to time allowed by Google’s 20-percent projects, some terrific teamwork and a whole lot of effort, he’s helped build an answer.
“A year’s worth of work has come to fruition today, as Google just released the first tool ever that allows users to easily input Cantonese into a web browser using English phonetics, solving a problem that’s existed for decades …
“Wong, a Seattle native and software engineer at the Google office here in the Emerald City, was traveling last year with [fellow Google software engineer and fellow UW CSE alum] Hannah Tang in Hong Kong, where Cantonese is widely spoken. The two had trouble using a Yelp-equivalent app because they couldn’t figure out how to enter particular Cantonese characters …
“So for the next 12 months, Wong and Tang rallied up fellow Googlers from Mountain View, New York City, Beijing and Singapore to help them develop a way to fix this difficult and complex problem …”
Read more in GeekWire here. Read more →
For a number of years, Mark Hill and Guri Sohi of the University of Wisconsin have maintained an informal “Hall of Fame” for the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, based on the (admittedly imperfect) metric of having co-authored 8 or more papers that have appeared in this premier venue for computer architecture research.
CSE professor Luis Ceze and CSE affiliate professor (and Microsoft Research staff member, as well as Luis’s partner) Karin Strauss have just been “inducted.”
Stanford, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin each have 5 members. Microsoft Research has 4. The University of Texas has 3. HP Labs, UC Berkeley, UCSB, and the University of Colorado each have 2. CMU, MIT, and a dozen other institutions each have one. See the list here. Read more →
UW CSE professor Shyam Gollakota has received the 2012 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award – presented annually to the author of the best doctoral dissertation, worldwide, in computer science – for his MIT doctoral dissertation “Embracing Interference in Wireless Systems.”
Congratulations to Shyam, and to his MIT Ph.D. advisor Dina Katabi!
Read the ACM press release here.
(UW CSE just got five papers into SIGCOMM 2013, two of which were co-authored by Shyam!)
Scrolling back through time:
- Just last year, UW CSE Ph.D. student Seth Cooper (now the Creative Director of UW CSE’s Center for Game Science) received the 2011 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
- Two years before that, UW CSE Ph.D. student Noah Snavely (now a faculty member at Cornell) was the Honorable Mention recipient in the 2009 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award competition.
- UW CSE Ph.D. student Aseem Agarwala (now a Principal Scientist at Adobe Systems) was the Honorable Mention recipient in the 2006 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award competition.
- UW CSE Ph.D. student AnHai Doan (now a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin – Madison) received the 2003 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
- UW CSE professor Venkat Guruswami (now at Carnegie Mellon – boo!) received the 2002 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
- UW CSE Ph.D. students William Chan (now deceased) and Mike Ernst (now a UW CSE professor, returned after receiving tenure at MIT) were the Honorable Mention recipients in 2000 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award competition.
- UW CSE Ph.D. student Anne Condon (now a faculty member at the University of British Columbia) was the Honorable Mention recipient in the 1988 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award competition.
- UW CSE professor Carl Ebeling (now at Altera) was the Honorable Mention recipient in the 1986 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award competition.
Go team! Read more →
On Saturday, UW CSE demonstrated that ice cream and Java go hand in hand! Around 50 local students who will be taking the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam came to UW to eat ice cream and do some last-minute review.
Thanks to the many UW students and faculty who led review sessions on different AP CS topics and who took pictures! And good luck to all the high school students on the AP exam!
See photographs of the event here. Check out DawgBytes, UW CSE’s K-12 outreach program, here. Read more →
UW CSE professor Martin Tompa and his Ph.D. alum Jeremy Buhler (now a faculty member at Washington University) have received the 2013 “Test of Time” Award from RECOMB – the Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology – for their paper “Finding Motifs Using Random Projections” which was presented at RECOMB 2001 and published in full length in the Journal of Computational Biology.
Congratulations to Martin and Jeremy! Read more →
The Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award competition recognizes undergraduates in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. Universities may nominate as many as four students annually.
In the 2013 competition (results announced today), three UW CSE nominees were recognized – extending UW CSE’s record of having the largest number of students recognized in the most recent ten years of this competition!
Congratulations to 2013 national winner Matt Bryan, and to honorable mentions Kevin Clark and Grace Muzny! Also to Megan Torkildson from UW’s Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering, who also received honorable mention. Read more →
