Each year, the University of Washington College of Engineering confers “Diamond Awards” on alumni in four categories: Distinguished Achievement in Industry, Distinguished Achievement in Academia, Entrepreneurial Excellence, and Distinguished Service.
The recipient of the 2013 Diamond Award for Distinguished Service – to be conferred at an award banquet on May 31 – is 1988 UW CSE bachelors alum Kevin Ross.
In 2002, while working as a senior design engineer at Microsoft, Kevin became concerned that enthusiasm seemed to be declining among entry-level engineers just out of college. While book-smart, they lacked passion. In response, Kevin founded Washington FIRST Robotics. Today, Washington FIRST Robotics works with over 7,500 students and 2000 volunteers each year in Washington State, matching student groups with mentors to provide high quality experiences. Their goal is to have a FIRST robotics team available for every student in the state of Washington. Kevin and Washington FIRST Robotics are changing lives across our state – inspiring the engineers of the future.
Congratulations to Kevin! Read more here. Learn about Washington FIRST Robotics here. Read more →
Last week, UW CSE was the site of a press conference at which Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn was joined by Gig.U Executive Director (and former author of the National Broadband Plan) Blair Levin, Gigabit Squared President and co-founder Mark Ansboury, and UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska, to announce a collaborative initiative – Gigabit Seattle – to develop and operate an ultra-high-speed fiber and wifi broadband network in Seattle.
Videos of the event have now been posted – Lazowska’s remarks here; others linked from that site.
KUOW (NPR) followup interview here. Read more →
Art Rosenfeld
Lee Hood
President Barack Obama today announced that Lee Hood, President of the Institute for Systems Biology and Affiliate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, will receive the National Medal of Science. Hood and his lab have invented five instruments that are central to the modern era of biotechnology, including the gene sequencer.
President Obama also announced that Art Rosenfeld, Distinguished Scientist Emeritus at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and father-in-law of UW CSE professor Dan Weld, will receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. A distinguished physicist, Rosenfeld is internationally renowned for his transformational work on energy efficiency.
Congratulations to Lee and Art! Read the White House press release here. Read more →
Mike Fridgen, CEO of UW CSE startup Decide.com, discusses dynamic pricing, and how consumers can turn it into a benefit.
“In today’s lackluster economy, dynamic pricing often works for the consumer, says Fridgen of Decide.com. ‘It’s never been a better time to be an online consumer,’ he says. ‘You literally have retailers changing their prices minute by minute competing with each other for your business.'”
Listen to the story here. Read more →
Are you no longer sufficiently challenged by the requirement of squeezing your research into a 10-page conference paper? Try Tiny ToCS – Tiny Transactions on Computer Science!
“Tiny Transactions on Computer Science seeks papers describing significant research contributions to the field of computer science. Tiny ToCS is the premier venue for computer science research of 140 characters or less.”
Remember … if it takes more than 140 characters to explain, it’s not a Big Idea!
(For better or worse, UW CSE students Gilbert Bernstein, Raymond Cheng, Dimitrios Gklezakos, Frazi Roesner, and Will Scott, and UW CSE alums Sunil Garg and Justine Sherry, are among those behind this absurdity.) Read more →
CSE professor Magda Balazinska celebrates her brand-spanking-new U.S. citizenship with fried chicken, apple pie, baked beans, okra, questions from the web-based citizenship test cram course, and the UW CSE data management and big data groups. Read more →
The Fall 2012 issue of Most Significant Bits – the UW CSE alumni magazine – is available!
- Industry Affiliates Meeting (including a new Startup Day)
- World Lab initiative
- Phenomenal faculty hires
- Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf & Hard of Hearing in Computing
- CSE 2012 Distinguished Lecture Series
- Google’s G-Give campaign
- Datagrams – news about you!
- A spellbinding letter from Hank
Read the Fall 2012 issue here. Complete archive here. Keep in touch here. Read more →
On Saturday, 74 teams representing 26 Puget Sound area high schools – more than 200 students in all – participated in a programming competition hosted by UW CSE and the Puget Sound Computer Science Teachers Association, and sponsored by Microsoft TEALS. The Allen Center was humming!
Thanks to Hélène Martin, Stuart Reges, Magda Balazinska, and a host of volunteers for making the day a huge success!
Photographs here. Results here. CSTA post here.
Learn more about UW CSE’s K-12 outreach program, DawgBytes, here. Read more →
UW CSE alums Krista Davis (left) and Jessan Hutchison-Quillian (right) created the successful Google G-Give employee giving program. Jeff Prouty (center) is also a UW alum and helped develop G-Give.
“Two Google employees who graduated from the University of Washington have come up with a simplified way for their fellow workers to give money to social causes — an idea that raised about $120,000 for an endowed scholarship at the UW just this week … The program also raised money for the Seattle office of Solid Ground and the Kirkland office of Hopelink, as well as the Vittana Foundation, Social Justice Fund Northwest and the Post-Prison Education Program. Each program was showcased for a day on the company’s G-Give website.”
Read the Seattle Times article here. Read more about G-Give in GeekWire here. Read more →
Qualcomm has announced 33 finalist teams – from among 138 applications from 15 participating US schools – for the 2013 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships. The winning teams – which will be selected in March – each will receive a $100,000 Fellowship.
Congratulations to UW CSE’s 3 finalist teams:
Read more →
