A lovely Seattle Times article on Kate Starbird, a faculty member in Human Centered Design & Engineering and an adjunct professor in CSE.
“Kate Starbird does what she can to brighten her dreary fourth-floor office at Sieg Hall. A picture of her newborn nephew is above her desk. A cluster of succulent plants sits below a window looking out onto the University of Washington campus.
“Starbird, 37, is a first-year assistant professor in UW’s Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering and director of the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation laboratory. In English, that means she teaches how social media is used in crisis situations and how to design better applications for digital volunteers.”
Read more here. Read more →
Why do CSE 142/143 ROCK (more than 2,000 students per year in 142; more than 1,300 per year in 143; off-the-scale student evaluations)?????
Great faculty, yes! But also, 60 PHENOMENAL undergraduate teaching assistants!
Go team! Read more →
Star UW CSE bachelors alum Ben Hindman headed off to graduate school at Berkeley, then bailed for Twitter when the company adopted his Mesos system for efficiently parceling work across massive numbers of servers. Wired describes the work in “Return of the Borg: How Twitter Rebuilt Google’s Secret Weapon.” Read it here. Read more →
UW CSE professor Dan Grossman is profiled in a UW Provost’s report on enhancing teaching with technology.
Grossman is teaching one of the UW CSE Coursera MOOCs this quarter: Programming Languages. (Arvind Krishnamurthy, David Wetherall, and John Zahorjan are teaching Introduction to Computer Networks.)
Says Grossman: “For me, it is largely about being passionate about the course material and how to present it. Given this passion, why would I not want the largest rooftop I can find from which to shout? … With so many students, some will have a transformative educational experience, others will learn very little, and most who express some interest will not end up participating. To compare it to a conventional course where students get personal attention, have significant financial investments, and have shared background as part of a coherent curriculum, is difficult. I instead prefer to compare it to writing a textbook. Just as many people touching a book do not read it and those who read it have a wide range of understanding as a result, the learning in MOOCs defies description.”
Read the profile here. Read more →
TechCrunch reports on a new Google accessibility initiative, complete with a photo of UW CSE Ph.D. alum Anna Cavender, who works on accessibility at Google’s Seattle engineering office.
“Google announced that it has added a number of accessibility to Chrome, Chrome OS, Gmail and Google Drive that should make using Google suites of web apps a bit easier to use for blind and low-vision users. In addition, Google also launched a new sign language interpreter app and keyboard shortcuts for Hangouts for the deaf and hard of hearing, as well as those who can’t or don’t want to use a mouse while using Hangouts.”
Read more here. Read more →
Just a small bit of regional crowing: 5 of the top 25 companies on Fortune’s list of the world’s “most admired” companies are Seattle born and raised: Amazon.com (#3), Starbucks (#5), Nordstrom (#16), Microsoft (#17), and Costco Wholesale (#23). Go team! See the list here. Read more →
We concluded our article “Broadening Participation: The Why and the How” in the March issue of Computer by saying “Neither UW nor the field as a whole is where it needs to be, but many of us are working hard to get there.”
In the context of David Notkin’s receipt of the 2013 Computing Research Association A. Nico Habermann Award for outstanding contributions to supporting underrepresented groups in the computing research community, Lecia Barker of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (we hosted their Washington State Awards for Aspirations in Computing last weekend) sent us the chart to the right, comparing UW CSE’s performance to the national average in granting bachelors degrees to women.
We have a long way to go, but we are at more than double the (dismal) national average, and we are focused intensely on making continued progress.
Computer science is a great field for everyone – it needs everyone.
Learn about DawgBytes, UW CSE’s K-12 outreach program. And check out the inspirational new Code.org video. (UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska is on their 13-member advisory board.) Read more →
The Computing Research Association makes an award, usually annually, to a person who has made outstanding contributions aimed at increasing the numbers and/or successes of underrepresented groups in the computing research community. The award honors the late A. Nico Habermann, who headed NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate and who was deeply committed to increasing the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in computing research.
UW CSE’s David Notkin has just been announced as the 2013 recipient of the CRA A. Nico Habermann Award. Quoting from the nomination:
“David was Nico’s Ph.D. student (as well as the graduate advisor of Nico and Marta’s son Frits). For nearly thirty years – as an educator, as a research advisor, as a department chair, and as a member of the national and international computing research communities – David has lived his life in Nico’s image. David has worked tirelessly and with tremendous effectiveness – sometimes locally and sometimes nationally, sometimes in high-leverage settings and sometimes in high-touch one-person-at-a-time settings – to advance the success of all people in our field, but particularly the success of students, and even more particularly the success of women and members of other under-represented groups. With David, it’s all about people – people come first …
“David Notkin, like his Ph.D. advisor Nico Habermann, is a person who works tirelessly to make our field a better place for all; a person who sets an example that each of us should seek to emulate. David has earned this award. Nico would be pleased and proud.”
(David joins UW CSE professor Richard Ladner and UW CSE Ph.D. alum Anne Condon as a recipient of the Habermann Award.)
Congratulations David!
Read the CRA announcement here.
Learn about Notkinfest, a recent event honoring David, here.
April 22 2013: David Notkin succumbed to cancer at 3:30 a.m. Read more →
Code.org, Hadi Partovi’s nationwide effort to encourage students to learn to code, has rolled out an inspirational new video featuring some of the top names from technology and the world at large – from Bill Gates to will.i.am.
Says GeekWire:
“Seattle entrepreneur Hadi Partovi is on a mission to transform computer science education in the U.S. And Partovi is off to a pretty fast start with Code.org, the nonprofit which he formed last month with his twin brother Ali.
“Among members of Code.org’s newly-formed advisory board are some of the biggest names in technology, including venture capitalist and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen; Square CEO Jack Dorsey; Dropbox CEO Drew Houston; angel investor Ron Conway; Paypal co-founder Max Levchin and many others.
“From the Seattle area, Partovi has enlisted the advisory support of University of Washington computer scientist Ed Lazowska; Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith; and Amazon.com senior vice president Jeff Willke.
“‘I’ve never pitched an idea that has been easier to sell,’ said Partovi when asked about the power brokers he’s lined up behind Code.org.”
Visit Code.org and watch the video here. Read more →
Which means it’s the best city for good jobs that’s located in a state where anyone in his or her right mind would want to live.
Read more here. Read more →
