“In ‘The Jetsons,’ a cartoon about a space-age nuclear family, the robot Rosie seamlessly understands and performs the commands of the Jetson family, easily completes household chores like vacuuming and dusting, while effortlessly caring for the Jetson children.
“Although this sort of technology remains out of our reach, UW researchers are bringing us one step closer.”
Read more in The Daily here. Read more in Seattle Weekly here. Read more →
“The New York Times turned its attention last weekend toward education of data scientists, highlighting a budding ‘rivalry’ between New York City and Seattle.
“The paper’s Education Life section focused on the relative merits of the two cities as big data hubs, and efforts to build curricula in this field at universities around the country. But what the coverage didn’t mention is that universities in New York and Seattle are also competing for a major grant aimed at broadening academic support for data-driven scientific discovery …
“In a few weeks, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will announce partner universities for a five-year effort to ‘dramatically accelerate data-driven research.’ The foundations plan to award grants totaling between $25 million and $40 million beginning later this year …
“Late last year, the foundations invited 15 elite universities—including the University of Washington, Columbia University, New York University, and Cornell University—to apply to the program …
“At the UW, this effort is centered on the eScience Institute. The goal ‘is to make UW a leader in inventing new approaches to data-driven discovery, and also in making these new approaches usable by researchers in a broad range of fields,’ says UW computer science professor Ed Lazowska, who leads the eScience Institute.”
Read more in Xconomy here. Read more →
Hearty congratulations to Computer Engineering senior Raymond Zhang, who has been named as one of two recipients of the 2013 University of Washington Engineering Dean’s Medal for Academic Excellence – the top award to graduating seniors in UW’s College of Engineering.
Raymond came to UW in 2008 at age 12 through the Robinson Center for Young Scholars’ early entrance program, and enrolled as a Computer Engineering major at the ripe old age of 13. Since his sophomore year, Raymond has participated in the computational biology group led by Ram Samudrala, associate professor in the department of microbiology. Under Professor Samudrala’s guidance, Raymond is developing a program to predict the structure of how a protein and nucleic acid strand interact. Raymond says he “wanted to come to the UW because of its excellent departments of CSE and Biology.”
When he’s not cutting code, Raymond is playing the piano: he has performed at Carnegie Hall and at
Lincoln Center in New York, and several times at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.
Last spring, Raymond was named a Goldwater Scholar – the top national award to undergraduates in engineering and the sciences.
Raymond is the fourteenth CSE student to win the Dean’s Medal in Engineering or Arts & Sciences.
Again, congratulations to Raymond, and to all of CSE’s superb students! Read more →
We don’t know what it means either. Except for the title – “Innovation Stuntmen” – the entire book is in German.
But it prominently features UW CSE Ph.D. alums Seth Cooper (for his work on the breakthrough protein folding and protein structure calculation game Foldit) and Yaw Anokwa (for his work on the widely-used mobile data collection platform Open Data Kit).
Yaw provides the following translation of the promotional blurb:
“Batman, Superman and Spiderman can 
retire. Because the real superheroes are: Innovation Stuntmen. Innovation stuntmen are people like us … driven by a fixed idea, which gives them a special power … the power to change the world.”
(Yaw doesn’t speak German either – we figure he just made that up.)
Learn more here. Or – go ahead, make our day – order the book from Amazon Germany here.
UW CSE’s SpiroSmart will be featured next week at TEDMED:
“SpiroSmart is a mobile phone based platform that allows for the analysis of common lung function measures (FEV1, FVC, PEF). By analyzing lip reverberation SpiroSmart is capable of monitoring pulmonary ailments such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and cystic fibrosis.”
Read more here and here. Read the SpiroSmart research paper here. Read more →
“The UW Cyber Defense Team gathere
d in a small room in Sieg Hall. [Editor’s note: They forgot the adjective “Beautiful.” It’s “Beautiful Sieg Hall.”] The whiteboards were scrawled with strategies for defending against hackers, and each student sat in front of a computer.
“The hum of hardware being tinkered with could barely be heard over the talk of the students, who are less than two weeks away from the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC).
“The UW Cyber Defense Team has won the Pacific Rim Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition for the sixth consecutive year. This year, at the national competition that takes place over three days in San Antonio, Texas, the team will attempt to defend its title for the third year in a row.”
Read more here. Go team! Read more →
The New York Times compares New York and Seattle for Geek Appeal, featuring UW CSE and Carlos Guestrin.
In New York, it’s driven by tens of millions of dollars of civic initiatives led by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
“Meanwhile, in Seattle, with its green hiking trails, coffee culture and tech industry, the University of Washington is making its own pitch. The university has opened the eScience Institute for studying data across disciplines and has a new Ph.D. program in Big Data. It also has many rich and powerful neighbors in tech to finance its data initiatives and lure big-name faculty members.
“Since 2000, Microsoft has donated $22 million to the computer science program; Google gives several million dollars a year. And Amazon has endowed two professorships with $2 million; Jeff Bezos, its founder and chief executive, personally recruited Carlos Guestrin for computer science and Emily B. Fox for statistics.
“The companies offer more than just money, said Mr. Guestrin, one of the world’s top machine-learning researchers, previously of Carnegie Mellon. ‘Money helps because students have to eat their ramen, but it’s not just that,’ he said. Companies also lend students their real-world data to crunch. ‘Companies often see big challenges we might not see at that scale or have access to at the university,’ he said, ‘and those connections can be transformative.’
“Like New York, Seattle has draws outside the classroom. ‘It attracts certain geeks like me, nature-loving and into music, food and biking,’ Mr. Guestrin said. But the biggest attraction, he said: ‘The data is on the West Coast.'”
Read more here. Read more →
Qualcomm invited multiple teams from 15 universities to submit proposals for $100,000 2013 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships. From 138 proposals, Qualcomm selected 33 finalist teams who made presentations at Qualcomm’s three R&D Centers. Today, the 8 winners were announced: teams from UW, UCLA, Princeton, Cornell, UIUC, UCSD, UCB, and Columbia.
Hearty congratulations to UW CSE Ph.D. students Adrian Sampson and Thierry Moreau, and to their advisors Luis Ceze and Dan Grossman, for winding up on top in this incredibly intense competition.
Read (a bit) more here. Read more →
The New York Times discusses the tremendous demand for data science professionals, and the sources of these professionals. (Mostly computer science programs, of course …)
Bill Howe of UW CSE and the UW eScience Institute gets the last word in the article:
“The question, said Bill Howe, who teaches data science at the University of Washington, is whether it is even possibleto instill in a single person all the skills needed, from statistics to predictive modeling to business strategy. The university’s offerings range from a free online course on Coursera to a nine-month certificate program to a Ph.D. track in Big Data.
“‘It remains to be seen,’ he said, ‘but we’re still of the mind that a curriculum that aims to train data scientists is feasible.’ He added: ‘What employers want is someone who can do it all.'”
Read more here. Learn about the UW eScience Institute here. Read more →
Across the nation, and particularly at the leading programs, student interest in computer science is booming!
UW CSE’s two introductory courses, CSE 142 (“CS 1”) and CSE 143 (“CS 2”), each are offered during all four academic quarters each year. During the most recent four quarters – the past year – 2192 students took CSE 142 and 1417 students took CSE 143 – astonishing numbers! (And fully 1/3 of the students in CSE 142 this quarter are women!)
Take a look at the trends! Read more →
