OneBusAway, the popular real-time transit information system in the Puget Sound region developed by UW CSE, has gone national, with deployments in New York City and Detroit, along with experimental deployments in Tampa, Atlanta, and Washington DC.
In New York, MTA is using OneBusAway as the basis for its Bus Time service. In Detroit, a CodeForAmerica team used it for a text-messaging system, TextMyBus.
But you live in the Puget Sound region – use the original OneBusAway here.
(Brian Ferris, the CSE Ph.D. student who contributed greatly to OneBusAway, now works for Google, which one of these years will roll out a similar service. But we will crush them like a bug.) Read more →
During his State of the Union address, President Obama announced a new College Scorecard to help students and parents make better decisions about which college to attend.
How does the University of Washington stack up compared to other Washington State public institutions, and compared to its state-defined Global Challenge Peer Institutions (a selection of flagship universities with medical schools)?
Check it out! “Net cost” is shown below. Additional metrics here.
Read more →
“Dinner Dialogs” is an innovative video series featuring top Seattle entrepreneurs. UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni is one of four discussants in the first episode. Watch it here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska, along with Kathryn McKinley (Microsoft Research) and Kelly Gaither (Texas Advanced Computing Center), testified today to the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Research and Science Education on the topic of innovation in information technology.
Lazowska sang a familiar refrain:
- Research often takes a long time before it pays off – often 15 years or more.
- Research often pays off in unanticipated ways – we can’t predict what the biggest impact will be.
- Advances in one sector enable advances in other sectors.
- The research ecosystem is fueled by the flow of people and ideas back and forth between academia and industry.
- Every multi-billion-dollar IT industry sector has a clear relationship to Federal research investment. Federal investment doesn’t supplant private sector investment – it complements it.
A transcript of Lazowska’s testimony is here. Visuals are here.
See coverage in GeekWire, Computing Research Association Policy Blog. Read more →
GeekWire reports on an interview with Tableau CEO Christian Chabot:
“Building a company here in Seattle over the last 10 years has made us realize that in many ways, I think Seattle is the promised land in startup America. It’s one of the best decisions we ever made.
“We did not make the decision for business reasons. We moved because we wanted to live here. There were a few of us that were best described as Bay Area Burnouts and we saw this promised land of Seattle with a nicer-sized city rather than the Bay Area Silicon Valley sprawl. Much of Silicon Valley is a series of strip malls and it’s sort of disgusting in a certain way. It’s a high cost of living and you spend a fortune on a postage stamp apartment.
“We looked at Seattle as a great place to live with a great outdoors culture and a really vibrant startup and engineering community. We went primarily for personal reasons, but looking back from a business perspective, what a home run.”
Read more here. Read more →
Since its inception, UW CSE researchers have raised concerns regarding the security and privacy aspects of Seattle’s ORCA (“One Regional Card for All”) regional transit smartcard.
Now “there’s an app for that” – FareBot, which enables any NFC-equipped Android phone to extract the data from ORCA (and similar transit smartcards in San Francisco, Singapore, and Japan).
FareBot, created by Seattle software developer Eric Butler, builds upon work by UW CSE’s Karl Koscher.
Crosscut reports on the app today in two articles – one headed “Can you say ‘security breach?'”
“The Geeks Who Cracked the ORCA Card”
“Smart card: What your ORCA never forgets”
FareBot Read more →
On Saturday, UW CSE once again hosted STEM Out!, a terrific event to get young women excited about STEM careers. We had more than 50 participants from grades 7-12 representing schools from all over the area. The event was organized primarily by women engineers from Amazon.com led by 2004 UW CSE alumna Margaux Eng. Google engineers also assisted, as did a UW CSE DawgBytes team including outreach coordinator Hélène Martin and students Nicole Ford, Caitlin Bonnar, and Patricia McKenzie
The girls heard from three speakers: Jennifer Schleit (UW Medicine), Laura Grit (Amazon.com) and Serena Loftus (UW Foster School of Business). They participated in activities including sequencing strawberry DNA, solving puzzles and building several structures.
Photos here. Learn more about UW CSE’s outreach activities here. Read more →
“Sometimes you have to sit to take a stand.” That’s the slogan of the “Sit With Me” campaign of the National Center for Women & Information Technology:
- “We sit to inspire women in computing and IT.
- “We sit to recognize the value of women’s technical contributions.
- “We sit to embrace women’s important perspectives and increase their participation.
- “Imagine designing technology that is as broad and creative as the people it serves.
- “We won’t stand for anything less.”
CSE’s David Notkin is one of 8 national leaders featured on the sitwithme.org home page. Write’s NCWIT’s Jill Ross:
“Thank you for your amazing contributions to the field of computer science and being such a passionate advocate for technical women. We can’t think of anyone better to be sitting in (or hugging) our red chair!”
(Learn about Notkinfest, a recent celebration honoring David, here.)
April 22 2013: David Notkin succumbed to cancer at 3:30 a.m. Read more →
“For years — and especially since 2005, when Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, made his notorious comments about women’s aptitude — researchers have been searching for ways to explain why there are so many more men than women in the top ranks of science.
“Now comes an intriguing clue, in the form of a test given in 65 developed countries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It finds that among a representative sample of 15-year-olds around the world, girls generally outperform boys in science — but not in the United States.”
Read it and weep (and explore the fascinating interactive graphic) – here. Read more →
The Microsoft Research Graduate Women’s Scholarship is a one-year scholarship program for outstanding women graduate students, designed to help increase the number of women pursuing a Ph.D. This program supports women in the second year of their graduate studies.
Lilian de Greef, a Harvey Mudd College undergraduate in her first year as a UW CSE Ph.D. student in Shwetak Patel’s Ubiquitous Computing Lab, has been named one of 10 recipients of 2013 Microsoft Graduate Women’s Scholarships.
Lilian joins past UW CSE recipients Katie Kuksenok, Nell O’Rourke, and Tamara Denning, plus UW CSE bachelors alum Justine Sherry who received the scholarship as a graduate student at UC Berkeley.
Congratulations to Lilian, and thanks to Microsoft! Read more →
