Adrian Sampson
After considering nearly 300 applications, Facebook has announced 12 winners and 30 finalists for 2012-2013 Facebook Fellowships.
Winners each receive full payment for their 2012-2013 tuition, a $30,000 stipend to cover study expenses, $5,000 for conference travel, and $2,500 for a personal computer.
Congratulations to UW CSE Ph.D. student Adrian Sampson and UW Information School Ph.D. student Jeff Huang, who are among the 12 winners, and to UW CSE Ph.D. student Alan Ritter, who was among the 30 finalists.
See the Facebook announcement here. See a Seattle Times article here. Read more →
Noah Snavely
Prasad Raghavendra
Shwetak Patel
UW CSE professor Shwetak Patel, along with recent UW CSE Ph.D. alums Prasad Raghavendra (now a faculty member at Georgia Tech) and Noah Snavely (now a faculty member at Cornell), were named today as recipients of 2012 Sloan Research Fellowships.
Sloan Research Fellowships – among the most prestigious awards available to young scientists – emphasize individual creativity in the selection process. Patel is the 18th UW CSE faculty member to receive a Sloan Research Fellowship!
Congratulations to Shwetak, Prasad, and Noah!
See the complete list of 2012 Sloan Research Fellows here. Read more →
In this Seattle Times article, Kate Starbird – Lakes High School graduate, Stanford and professional basketball star, and soon-to-be University of Colorado ATLAS Institute Ph.D. recipient – credits UW CSE’s David Notkin for reaching out and helping her make the return from professional sports to computer science.
“After playing professionally in Spain, she was thinking about returning to school when she received an email out of the blue from Notkin, inviting her to a meeting of the executive leadership of the National Center for Women & Information Technology.
“Notkin knew she had studied computer science at Stanford and ‘sort of kept a vague eye on her.’
“At the meeting, Starbird sat next to the head of Colorado’s technology program, who invited her to apply there.”
Starbird is speaking this week at the ACM Computer-Supported Cooperative Work conference in Bellevue. On March 5, she will speak in UW HCDE. On March 6, she will speak in UW CSE. The University of Colorado’s ATLAS Institute is led by UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus John Bennett.
Read Brier Dudley’s Seattle Times article here. Read more →
On Thursday, a daylong “semi-technical” symposium marking the 20th anniversary of the Federal NITRD Program – under which more than a dozen Federal agencies coordinate their investments in networking and information technology research and development – will be held in Washington DC and webcast live.
Speakers (at 15 minutes apiece) include Jeannette Wing, Kevin Knight, Beth Mynatt, Helen Nissenbaum, Sebastian Thrun, UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel, Erik Brynjolfsson, Tom Lange, Vint Cerf, Bill Scherlis, UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Stefan Savage, Russ Altman, David Keyes, Kathy Yelick, Tom Davis, Eric Brown, UW CSE affiliate professor Eric Horvitz, Alex Szalay, Tom Kalil, Peter Lee, and Chuck Vest.
Former Vice President Al Gore will provide a luncheon keynote.
The complete program, and (soon) a link to the webcast, may be found here. These will be excellent talks – you be sure to watch parts of the webcast. A blog post with additional information may be found here. (NOTE: The times on the program are Eastern Time!)
The symposium is organized by the Computing Community Consortium, co-chaired by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska and by Susan Graham, and directed by Erwin Gianchandani. CCC is an activity of the Computing Research Association. Read more →
The New York Times describes the PocketTouch system – work carried out at Microsoft Research by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Scott Saponas and collaborators. The article quotes UW CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Bigham, now on the computer science faculty at the University of Rochester, and UW CSE Ph.D. alum Krzysztof Gajos, now on the computer science faculty at Harvard.
“Yes, there are still a few inhibiting social settings where people must forgo that primal urge to pull out a cellphone and send a quick text message or two.
“But those who can’t bear such timeouts may soon have a way to keep communicating.
“Researchers have created a prototype for a touch screen that can be used to send messages while it’s concealed in a jacket or pants pocket. The stealthy screen works when it is touched through the fabric, whether it is silk, cotton or even thick fleece.
“In classes or meetings of the future, with your hands tucked beneath the conference table or desk, you may rest a fingertip discreetly on the pocket that holds the touch screen and handle a call by tracing a message like ‘Running late. In a mtg.’ on the fabric above the hidden screen …
“So while you’re writing on your pocket, you can maintain polite eye contact with the group, no longer betrayed by those telltale downward gazes necessary to text with a standard screen.”
Read more here. Read more →
Hélène Martin
Lauren Bricker
UW CSE alum Lauren Bricker, who teaches Computer Science at Seattle’s Lakeside School, and UW CSE alum Hélène Martin, who taught Computer Science at Seattle’s Garfield High School and has now returned to UW to drive K-12 outreach, are quoted extensively in this Seattle Times article.
“Computer programming helps develop critical thinking skills, such as how to break down a problem into manageable parts or how to put tasks into a logical sequence, as well as the importance of precise communication. ‘These skills are completely transferable,’ said Lauren Bricker, a computer science teacher at Seattle’s Lakeside School. ‘Students can use them to write a computer program or a history paper.'”
Read more here. Read more →
Our friends at Microsoft Research drew our attention to this tally of Best Paper Awards at major Computer Science conferences.
Needless to say, we only post the beauty contests where we place well. To find the others, you’ll have to look elsewhere. But we recommend this one! Check it out here. Read more →
Yesterday the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) testified, with others, before the House Higher Education Committee about the degree “gap” in Washington, especially with regards to computer science.
A shameful lack of investment by the state and by its universities has caused a huge shortfall in computer science graduates, starving the state’s companies and denying opportunity to the state’s students.
See the WTIA Government Affairs blog post here. Read more →
Microsoft Research is releasing a collection of videos from its 20th Anniversary Symposium.
“On the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Microsoft Research, we invited innovators in computer science and related fields to join us for a day to look back and then forward to the next 20 years of computer science. These reflections on advice to young scientists are provided as a gift to the computer science community. We plan to release one set of thoughts per month over the anniversary year. We hope you’ll subscribe to the series and check in again soon.”
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska speaks on “role models and inspiration,” “mentor, empower, and share the credit,” and “leadership and service.”
Videos have also been posted from Dave Patterson (UC Berkeley), Ed Feigenbaum (Stanford), Bob Colwell (Intel -> DARPA), and Eva Tardos (Cornell). More to come, including UW CSE’s Anna Karlin. Read more →
Vaughn Iverson is a UW CSE Masters alum, now a Ph.D. student working in Ginger Armbrust‘s lab in UW Oceanography. The New York Times writes:
“By filtering through 25 gallons of seawater from Puget Sound, a computer scientist in Washington State has managed to tease out and sequence the DNA of a tiny microbe that has eluded scientists for years.
“The creature is Euryarchaeota, one of the archaea, a class of micro-organisms that were once thought to be bacteria but are actually quite distinct. ‘Nobody’s been able to grow it in a laboratory despite trying,’ said Vaughn Iverson, the computer scientist and doctoral student in oceanography at the University of Washington whose software sequenced the genome.”
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska is on Vaughn’s thesis committee; UW CSE’s Bill Howe and the UW eScience Institute work extensively with Ginger’s lab.
Read the New York Times article here. Read more →
