Says Brett Helsel, EMC Isilon Senior Vice President of Engineering: “Wowee. A couple of UW CSE interns (Conrad Meyer and Allison Obourn) and a couple of UW CSE alums (Jeff Hughes and Darrick Lew) for a couple of months in the summer and look at all the noise you can make.”
Read the EMC Isilon press release here.
Read more →
And the winner (in the “Interactive Games” category): UW CSE’s Foldit, as usual – the massively multi-player web-based game that, a few months ago, cracked an AIDS-related protein structure problem that had eluded scientists for a decade.
NSF news post here. More information on UW CSE’s Center for Game Science here. Read more →
Julia Schwarz
Gabe Cohn
Franzi Roesner
Gabe Cohn, Franzi Roesner, and Julia Schwarz are three of the twelve winners (from 198 nominees) of this year’s Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowships.
Gabe is a UW EE Ph.D. student working with Shwetak Patel on embedded systems and VLSI in ubiquitous computing applications. He was an undergraduate at Caltech.
Franzi is a UW CSE Ph.D. student working with Yoshi Kohno in the areas of security, privacy, and systems. She was an undergraduate at UT Austin.
Julia, a UW CSE bachelors alum who is now a Ph.D. student in the CMU HCI Institute, also was selected.
Congratulations to Gabe, Franzi, and Julia – and many thanks to Microsoft! Read more →
Yes, that’s our Jeff Dean, and we taught him everything he knows. (If you believe even 1/2 of 1% of that, we’ve got a Space Needle to sell you.)
Business Insider writes:
“Forget Larry and Sergey: At the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, the real celebrity engineer is Jeff Dean …
“Dean is such a star because Googlers widely credit his code for the blazing speed of Google search.
“How deep does this adoration go? You know those Chuck Norris jokes called ‘Chuck Norris Facts’? Like: ‘Chuck Norris doesn’t wash dishes, they wet themselves out of fear’?
“Well, over on Quora, there’s a bunch of ‘Jeff Dean Facts,’ written by Googlers and ex-Googlers who love their hero.”
Facts like, “Compilers don’t warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers.”
(As the article goes on to say, “They’re pretty funny – if you understand software engineers and their sense of humor.”
Read the article (and the facts and non-geek translations) here.
Jeff adds: “Unfortunately, they don’t have my favorite ‘fact’: ‘When Jeff Dean fires up the profiler, loops unroll themselves in fear.'” Read more →
UW CSE Affiliates winter recruiting fair. See the companies here. See a gaggle of Bruce Hemingway photos here. Read more →
“Our new Geek of the Week, Oren Etzioni, is a computer scientist and serial entrepreneur who has a knack for building businesses based on complex algorithms that help people make decisions. If you’ve used the price prediction engine in Microsoft Bing Travel, you’re familiar with his work. Etzioni was the founder of Farecast, which Microsoft acquired to form the basis for that service.
“The University of Washington computer science professor and Madrona Venture Group venture partner is currently the co-founder and CTO of Decide, which applies similar principles to consumer electronics prices. It’s latest in a long list of technology startups and computer science projects in which he has played a pivotal role over the years.”
Read the rest here.
Previous UW CSE “Geeks of the Week” include Lauren Bricker, Yaw Anokwa, Wendy Chisholm, and Marty Stepp. UW CSE GeekWire “Newsmakers of 2011” include Steve Yegge, Yoky Matsuoka, Shwetak Patel, and Daniil Kulchenko. Featured in the GeekWire 2012 calendar as “Geeks Who Give Back” are Helene Martin and Kevin Ross. Gotta love those GeekWire guys! Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. student Dan Halperin is quoted in a New York Times article on work at Microsoft Research, led by Victor Bahl and involving Dan and UW CSE professor David Wetherall, “experimenting with wireless links, mounted atop server racks, to supply extra bandwidth for moving data along at crunch times.”
“The Microsoft team forged ahead with the project, building and testing a system with tiny directional antennas at the top of each rack to send and receive data. A central controller monitors traffic patterns, finds network bottlenecks, configures the antennas and turns on the wireless links when more bandwidth is required, says Daniel Halperin, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, who worked on the project as an intern at Microsoft. Signals go out on a horizontal plane and are steered right or left. The design sped up traffic by at least 45 percent in 95 percent of the cases tested, Mr. Halperin says.”
Read the New York Times article here. Read the joint UW/MSR research paper, “Augmenting Data Center Networks with Multi-Gigabit Wireless Links,” here. See the slides from Dan’s SIGCOMM 2011 presentation on the work here. Read more →
The Tacoma News Tribune weighs in on a recent University of Pennsylvania study that castigates Washington’s leaders for under-investment in bachelors-level higher education:
“A new critique of the system from the University of Pennsylvania should give pause to anyone inclined to view cuts to public colleges as the path of least resistance in a hard budget year.
“Washington’s four-year colleges are already half-crippled, concluded the experts from the university’s Institute for Research on Higher Education …
“Hunting for the underlying causes of the system’s weaknesses, the researchers accurately nailed the chief culprit: the state’s political leadership. Collectively, our governors and lawmakers have not cared deeply enough or fought hard enough for Washington’s would-be college students. This legislative session is the time to end that sorry tradition.”
Read the editorial here. Learn more about the study here. Read more →
Congratulations to UW CSE’s Gaetano Borriello, the Jerre D. Noe Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, who will be one of two recipients of the UC Berkeley Computer Science Division’s 2012 Distinguished Alumni Award.
Gaetano joins an extraordinary list of Berkeley alums who have been recognized with this award – a list that includes UW CSE professor Susan Eggers (a 2009 recipient) and former UW CSE professor Tony DeRose (a 2011 recipient).
Congratulations Gaetano! Read more →
IEEE Spectrum, a bit late to the party, report on the automotive security work carried out jointly by the security groups at UW and UCSD:
“Researchers at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Washington say that in their tinkering research, they hit upon a cyberattack method by which thieves could cause large groups of cars to report their vehicle identification numbers (from which it is easy to determine the cars’ years, makes, and models) and GPS coordinates. Having learned where the most prized vehicles are parked, the technique would allow criminals to issue another set of commands that remotely bypass the cars’ security systems, unlock their doors, and start their engines. A similar technique, said the researchers, could be used to listen in on a driver’s phone conversations, or worse, to disable one or multiple cars’ brakes as they travel at highway speeds.
“Automakers say they have gotten the message. A Chrysler spokesman says the company is seeking the advice of security experts in order to identify its cars’ vulnerabilities. Ford says it is ‘working to ensure that we’ve developed [cars that are] as resistant to attack as possible.'”
Read the article here. Learn more about the tinkering research here. Read more →