On Friday June 29, a group of middle school girls spent the morning in UW CSE, followed by an afternoon visit to Amazon.com. In UW CSE, the students were hosted by Crystal Eney, Caitlin Harding, and Victoria Wagner, and participated in activities including “Computer Science Unplugged” (Allison Obourn), sustainability sensing (Eric Larson), and computer security (Karl Koscher).
The girls were participating in G2CS – Girls Gather for Computer Science – a 4-week summer program. Read more →
Since its inception in 2002, the awards presented by India Abroad – the oldest and most widely-circulated Indian-American weekly newspaper – have become the most coveted community honor in the country, celebrating achievements across a wide spectrum.
This year’s winner in the “Face Of The Future” category is UW CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel, “For being a technological genius; for developing innovative sensor systems for improving daily life; and for being a brilliant, young visionary.”
Read a terrific article on Shwetak, his life, and his accomplishments here. Video of Shwetak’s acceptance speech here.
Congratulations Shwetak! Read more →
Tom Anderson, Robert E. Dinning Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, has been named the recipient of the 2013 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, “For contributions to understanding and improving the performance, reliability, and security of the Internet.”
The Kobayashi Award, established in 1986, is the top international award in the networking field, and its recipients are a “Who’s Who” of contributors – recently including Jean Walrand, Larry Peterson, Nick McKeown, Don Towsley, Nick Maxemchuk, Frank Kelly, and Van Jacobsen.
Congratulations Tom! Read more →
On June 28, more than 100 UW CSE alums joined faculty members Gaetano Borriello, Luis Ceze, Steve Gribble, Dan Grossman, and Ed Lazowska for a reception at the California Academy of Sciences.
“Proteins are the workhorses of our cells: They turn food into energy and determine our health. Each one is a chain of molecules—sometimes thousands of links long—that folds in a distinctive way. Understanding how they fold can help scientists block diseases, but there are so many variables involved that even powerful computers struggle to do it.
“Enter Zoran Popović.”
Read the post here.
We disavow all rankings except those where we come out smelling like a rose (no matter how implausible it may be).
Here’s a ranking that’s clearly authoritative: Richard Florida, a senior editor of The Atlantic, Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, and author of Rise of the Creative Class, has released his latest index ranking the top tech hubs in the U.S. And Seattle is #1. (Silicon Valley is #2; San Francisco is #3.)
Read a GeekWire post here. Read the Richard Florida post here. Read more →
We are thrilled to announce that Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman will be joining the UW CSE faculty this fall.
Ira works in computer vision and computer graphics, with a particular interest in developing computational tools to enable capturing, modeling and rendering a person’s appearance and behavior from the billions of photos that can be now found online or in personal photo collections. As a consultant to Google, she transitioned her recent work “Exploring Photobios” into “Face Movie,” the signature feature of the latest release of Picasa. Currently a Postdoctoral researcher in UW CSE, Ira received her B.Sc. with honors in computer science and mathematics at the Bar-Ilan University in 2001 and M.Sc. and Ph.D in computer science and applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2004 and 2009 respectively.
The addition of Ira and of Ali Farhadi to the UW CSE faculty further enhances our already superb capabilities in computer graphics, computer vision, games, and animation. Here’s what the GRAIL team has accomplished in just the past few years:
Student recognition:
Tech transfer:
Breakthrough games for science and for learning:
With the addition of Ira and Ali, there is even more to come! Read more →
A Wired profile of UW CSE Ph.D. alum Adrien Treuille – now a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon – and his videogame EteRNA, in which players manipulate nucleotides, the fundamental building blocks of RNA, to coax molecules into specific shapes. The work is an outgrowth of the protein folding and protein structure calculation game Foldit, which Adrien developed in the UW Center for Game Science along with fellow student Seth Cooper.
Read this terrific profile here. Read more →
“Computer science is very much a discipline that revolves around numbers. But it was something a little less mathematical that led to the University of Washington strengthening its computer science department in recent months: Love, marriage and friendship.
“In no fewer than three separate situations, the UW’s computer science department was able to attract world-class professors in ‘big data,’ ‘machine learning’ and ‘visual data analysis’ by finding work at the UW or other opportunities for their spouses.
“The new hires — including Carlos Guestrin from Carnegie Mellon University, Ben Taskar from the University of Pennsylvania. and Jeff Heer from Stanford University — come as a package deal with equally talented spouses who will be contributing to the UW or Seattle tech community in other ways …
“Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, said the collection of the new staffers is simply extraordinary. He called Guestrin, Taskar and Heer ‘instant-impact head-turners,’ noting that top computer science programs ‘are salivating’ and wondering how the UW pulled off what amounts to a trifecta … In some cases, the UW was able to beat out competing offers from the likes of MIT, Penn, Stanford and others.
“The top-notch recruiting efforts of UW computer science chair Hank Levy certainly played a role in attracting the scientists, with Lazowska calling his colleague the ‘best recruiter in the country.'”
Read more here. See a related (subsequent) UW press release here. Read more →
Carlos Guestrin, Emily Fox, Ben Taskar, and Jeff Heer
The Seattle Times reports on UW’s recruiting of four mid-career stars in Machine Learning and “big data” from Carnegie Mellon, Penn and Stanford:
“They’re a kind of dream team of the computer science world: Four of the brightest academics in the fields of “big data” and machine learning have been wooed away from top schools to join the University of Washington over the next year.
“It’s part of a push by the UW to develop expertise in a field of computer science that is already changing the way people use technology. Their work has the potential to greatly expand the ability to make sense of reams of data, gain a better understanding of the world at large, and make technology more useful in everyday life.
“The UW has had ‘some stunning recruiting successes,’ said Peter Lee, corporate vice president of Microsoft Research. The new hires ‘are all very well-known. Let’s just say, in academic circles, this has made quite a buzz.'”
“The academics include Carlos Guestrin, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University; Emily Fox and Ben Taskar, both professors at the University of Pennsylvania; and Jeff Heer, a professor at Stanford University …
“Stanford University professor Daphne Koller, an expert on artificial intelligence, had both Guestrin and Taskar as students, and ‘they are both awesome,’ she wrote via email. ‘UW is to be congratulated on making such great acquisitions, which I believe will propel them into a leadership role (with a select number of other top institutions) in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence.'”
Read the article here. See a related (subsequent) UW press release here. Read more →