CSE’s Stuart Reges has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Computer Science Teachers Association, as one of two “University Faculty Representatives.” CSTA is a national organization that supports and promotes the teaching of computer science in K-12.
Stuart has a long record of engagement with both the national CSTA organization and the Puget Sound chapter, PS CSTA.
Learn more about UW CSE’s K-12 outreach activities – DawgBytes – here. Read more →
UW CSE's Carl Hartung, a developer of Open Data Kit - which the Grameen Foundation uses to create apps for its project in Uganda - trains a Community Knowledge Worker.
The feature article in the most recent Alaska Airlines flight magazine, “Data Delivery: Researchers tap the potential of mobile technologies to gather and interpret information,” contains an extensive discussion of UW CSE’s “Open Data Kit,” an open source toolkit that turns mobile phones into data collection devices.
Read the article here. Read more →
UW’s Trend in Engineering interviews UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska and UW Dean of Engineering Matt O’Donnell regarding the impact on students and employers of the longstanding failure to invest in engineering capacity at the University of Washington.
“‘It’s heartbreaking,’ said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering. ‘We are turning away outstanding students who would absolutely succeed in the program. It’s depriving students of the preparation they need, and it’s depriving employers of the employees they need.’ …
“‘Engineering education is booming because of the preparation it gives students. That preparation is teamwork, interdisciplinary projects and problem solving, and a connection to the real world. Engineering education has become more hands on and experiential in recent years. The value that we add is in the lab, and that pervades all engineering fields. All the upper division courses have a significant lab component.’ …
“‘Our economy is creating great jobs and they are going to other people’s kids. Every smart, motivated kid who grows up here ought to have the opportunity to become a first-tier participant in this new economy. That is not the case today because of lack of capacity.’ …
“‘The nation’s great public universities provide socioeconomic upward mobility for the smart kids who grow up in their regions. The UW enrolls more Pell-Grant-eligible (economically disadvantaged) students than the entire Ivy League combined. We cannot sacrifice that mission.'”
Main article here. Q&A here. Read more →
A lovely article on Hans Berliner in the Spring 2012 issue of The Link – the alumni newsletter of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science – includes an early 1980’s photograph of Carl Ebeling, now a UW CSE faculty member but then a CMU Ph.D. student working with Hans. Ebeling’s Hitech chess machine was the top chess-playing computer in the United States.
Photo here. Full issue of The Link here. Read more →
GigaOM profiles UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni:
“In Oren Etzioni’s world, telling you where to buy a product is so 20 years ago. He did that with his first startup, Netbot, in 1996. Today, Etzioni wants to tell you when to buy — that ideal moment when the price won’t fall for a while and you won’t get burned by the release of a new model a week later. Tomorrow, well, maybe he can let you know when you’re in the vicinity of a great deal.
“Etzioni, who spends his days as a computer science professor at the University of Washington, is probably best known as the co-founder of Farecast. That company, which Microsoft bought for $115 million in 2008 and incorporated into Bing, helped even the playing field between travelers and airlines by predicting the best times for travelers to purchase their tickets. Airlines practice yield management by regularly changing their prices to maximize profit, but Etzioni was able to find a fair amount of predictability once Farecast was able to get the data it needed from the airline industry.
“Lately, though, Etzioni has been focused on his latest startup, Decide.com, which launched in 2010 and applies the premise behind Farecast to consumer electronics and appliances. At some point, Etzioni told me, the practice of yield management had migrated to ‘pretty much every non-trivial good.’ Consumer electronics was the natural place to start, he said, because they tend to be highly considered purchases and enough of them are made online to generate lots of data and justify the existence of a web application.”
Read the rest of this terrific post here. Read more →
Quoth GeekWire:
“Startup Decide [a UW CSE company] hired Kate Matsudaira as its vice president of engineering earlier this year, as she shifted from her previous position as vice president of engineering post at SEOmoz.
“The University of Washington computer science grad prevailed in the voting over a strong field of finalists — Daryn Nakhuda of Amazon, Dan Shapiro of Google, Wibe Wagemans of Big Fish Games and Mitch Hill of Opscode.”
Read all about the Seattle 2.0 Startup Awards here!
Congratulations to Kate and to Decide! Read more →
Peng Dai, a 2011 UW CSE Ph.D. now working at Google, has received Honorable Mention in the 2012 Best Dissertation Award competition of ICAPS, the International Conference on Automated Planning & Scheduling.
Peng’s dissertation, “Decision Making under Uncertainty: Scalability and Applications,” was supervised by Dan Weld and Mausam.
Congratulations Peng! Read more →
UW CSE graduate students Jenny Abrahamson and Nicki Dell are among 25 outstanding young women from across the U.S. named today as winners of 2012 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships.
The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship honors the memory of Dr. Anita Borg, who devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing and founded the Institute for Women in Technology in 1997. Anita passed away in 2003, and the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship was established in 2004 to honor her memory. Anita’s legacy lives on today through this scholarship and the organization she created, which has since been re-named the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology.
Congratulations to Jenny and Nicki! Read more →
2011 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Seth Cooper, now Creative Director of UW CSE’s Center for Game Science, has been named the winner of the 2011 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
The award is presented annually to the top Ph.D. dissertation in the field. (Roughly 1,500 Ph.D.s in computer science were awarded last year in the United States alone.)
Seth’s dissertation, “A Framework for Scientific Discovery through Video Games,” was advised by UW CSE professor Zoran Popovic. The dissertation explores how the video game environment can be used for solving difficult scientific problems. Seth is the co-creator and lead designer and developer of Foldit. Employing the collective efforts of tens of thousands of gamers, Foldit players solved the structure of a key protein in the fight against HIV, putting the combined power of humans and computers toward solving problems that neither could solve alone.
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Noah Snavely, now a faculty member at Cornell, received Honorable Mention in the 2009 competition. UW CSE Ph.D. alum Aseem Agarwala, now a principal scientist at Adobe Systems, received Honorable Mention in the 2007 competition. (Noah and Aseem, like Seth, were members of GRAIL, UW CSE’s superb computer graphics and computer vision group.) UW CSE Ph.D. alum AnHai Doan, now a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, won the award in 2003. UW CSE Ph.D. alums Mike Ernst (now returned to the UW CSE faculty after a period of exile at MIT) and William Chan (tragically deceased) were co-Honorable Mentions in 2000. (UW CSE’s annual departmental dissertation award, which Seth, Noah, Aseem, AnHai, and Mike all received, is named in honor of William.) UW CSE alum Anne Condon, now Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, received Honorable Mention in the 1988 competition.
Congratulations to Seth, and to the long line of superb UW CSE Ph.D. students that he joins! Read more →
