UW CSE kicked off CSEdWeek (Computer Science Education Week) on Saturday. 750 K-12 students and parents filled the Allen Center for an Open House featuring demonstrations by many dozens of UW CSE undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and staff. A huge success! Many thanks to Hélène Martin for conceiving and organizing the event, to all of the CSE participants, and to the sponsors of the event: Amazon.com, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
UW CSE will close CSEdWeek next Saturday by hosting the UW/TEALS Programming Competition, organized by the Puget Sound Computer Science Teachers Association and sponsored by Microsoft.
Many terrific Bruce Hemingway photographs here. Learn more about DawgBytes, UW CSE’s outreach program, here – and “like” the DawgBytes Facebook page here! Read more →
During the previous century, under memorable President Dick McCormick, the University of Washington hired a bunch of consultants who modernized its athletic logo from a husky to a ferret.
The University of California – ever a laggard, but never by too much – is now keeping pace, changing the UC seal to a pull-tab.
We commend UC leadership, and congratulate our colleagues at Berkeley, San Diego, and the other UC campuses, on this important modernization.
Read more here.
(Update: In related news, Stanford changes its wordmark to Comic Sans …) Read more →
Cloudera – co-founded by UW CSE alum Christophe Bisciglia along with Jeff Hammerbacher and Amr Awadallah, and with Mike Olson as CEO – has closed a massive round of funding at a valuation of $700 million!
“The biggest and best known company in the Hadoop world is Cloudera. Started in 2008 by a trio of engineers from Facebook, Google and Yahoo … it has in four years gone from the start-up that few really understood to the company you have to talk to if you want to stand a chance wrestling your data challenges to the ground.”
Read more in All Things D here. Read more →
According to a study released this week by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, Washington State has the greatest concentration of technology jobs in the U.S. A whopping 11.4 percent of jobs in Washington state are tied to the tech economy, more than double the national average.
Go team!
Read a GeekWire post (with a link to the study) here. Read more →
The New York Times describes the difficulty of learning science in a language that does not include many scientific terms – sign language:
“Gallaudet has tried to take a democratic approach to the problem: it collaborates on the ASL-STEM Forum, a wiki-style Web site dedicated to ‘enabling American Sign Language to grow in science, technology, engineering and mathematics’ that was set up in 2009 by researchers at the University of Washington. Anyone can submit, critique and vote for science signs, which are demonstrated in short videos. The idea is to let those who are hearing-impaired and learning science decide which new signs should become standard.”
The ASL-STEM Forum is a project of UW CSE professor Richard Ladner and collaborators; Ladner has a long-standing interest in increasing participation in computer science and other scientific fields by the deaf and hard-of-hearing.
Read the New York Times article here.
A related NPR interview with Ladner’s Gallaudet collaborator Caroline Solomon here.
UW News article here. Read more →
Congratulations to Rob Gens, who received the 2012 NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) Best Student Paper Award for his paper “Discriminative Learning of Sum-Product Networks.”
NIPS is one of the top two machine learning conferences, and this is the only award it gives. (UW CSE is two for two with papers on sum-product networks to date – Hoifung Poon won the UAI-11 Best Paper Award for the previous one.) Read more →
Xconomy reports on a session at last Thursday’s Washington Innovation Summit chaired by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska. Other participants quoted in the article include Christian Chabot (Tableau Software), Cameron Myhrvold (Ignition Partners), Ruben Ortega (Google), and Mike Fridgen (Decide.com).
Read it here. Read more →
Control-Alt-Hack is a computer security-themed card game designed to be entertaining, give a glimpse into white hat hacking, and highlight some of the more surprising aspects of computer security. It targets kids age 14 and up. It’s fun, and also educational / awareness-building. The game designers – Tamara Denning, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Adam Shostack from UW CSE – are computer security experts, and took care to include as much juicy and accurate(ish) content as possible. Game mechanics were provided by gaming powerhouse Steve Jackson Games (Munchkin and GURPS).
Control-Alt-Hack is newly available on Amazon.com. The University of Washington will also be shipping some free copies out to educators (in industry and academia). If you’re an educator and are interested in a copy, please see the “request an educational copy” page here.
A big thank you to Intel Labs, NSF, and ACM SIGCSE for supporting the development and distribution of this game, and to Steve Jackson Games for licensing the Ninja Burger mechanics!
UW C4C press release here. Read more →
The morning session at Thursday’s Washington Innovation Summit focused on “big data.” It began with a keynote by Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith – a rousing call for greater focus on computer science education. UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska then introduced the “big data” topic. Lazowska then emceed a panel with Christian Chabot (CEO, Tableau Software), Mike Fridgen (CEO, UW CSE startup Decide.com), Cameron Myhrvold (Founding Partner, Ignition Partners), and UW CSE alum Ruben Ortega (Engineering Director, Google). This was followed by short presentations by UW CSE professor Shwetak Patel (on the smart home), PNNL’s Carl Imhoff (on the smart grid), and Sage Bionetworks’ Mike Kellen (on smart discovery), and a Q&A session moderated by Lazowska. Isilon’s Bill Richter then introduced the Information Technology Coalition.
Washington Governor-elect Jay Inslee and President of the Washington DC – based Information Technology & Innovation Foundation Rob Atkinson provided luncheon keynotes. A panel discussion on regional competitiveness was followed by a panel discussion on education and workforce issues featuring UW CSE Chair Hank Levy and UW CSE alum (and UW Regent) Jeremy Jaech.
Seattle Times coverage here, here, and here. GeekWire coverage here. Lazowska’s talk here. Read more →
