“Should you buy that new camera now, or wait and see if the price drops a little more? That’s the decision Seattle startup Decide.com wants to help you answer…
“The startup was co-founded by Oren Etzioni, founder of Farecast and a computer science professor at the University of Washington, and two sets of [UW alumni] brothers, Brian and Ian Ma, and Hsu Han and Hsu Ken Ooi.”
Read more here. Read more →
“Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia is debuting his new startup today, called Odiago. Odiago develops a product called WibiData, which leverages Apache Hadoop to manage and analyze large amounts of data. And the company is launching with a number of major backers including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, and SV Angel.”
Christophe received his Bachelors degree from UW CSE in 2003 and joined Google. In 2007, he returned to UW on his Google 20% time to create the nation’s first “Google-scale programming” course, which landed him on the cover of Business Week and stimulated Google and IBM to invest in an Academic Datacenter Initiative to spread the curriculum – an effort later joined by the National Science Foundation.
In 2008, with the support of Eric Schmidt, Christophe left Google to found Cloudera, now the leading provider of Apache Hadoop-based software and services. (Hadoop had been co-developed by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Mike Cafarella, now a faculty member at the University of Michigan, and Doug Cutting, now at Cloudera.) Christophe lured Aaron Kimball, a UW CSE graduate student who had worked with him on the course, to take a leave of absence and join Cloudera.
In 2010, Christophe and Aaron left Cloudera to found Odiago. UW CSE alum Garrett Wu is also on the Odiago team.
Read the TechCrunch post here. A more technical description of Odiago’s WibiData offering appears in DBMS2 here. Read more →
Following up on a Seattle Times article announcing that Northeastern University is contemplating opening a campus in Seattle to offer master’s degrees in information assurance, health informatics and computer science, GeekWire interviews Northeastern’s senior strategist and market development officer, Sean Gallagher, and UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska.
Gallagher: “The Seattle metro area has been a leader in job creation and the growth of its knowledge economy … There has been rapid and sustained growth in Seattle and in the state in jobs preferring or requiring a master’s degree, and given state budget cuts and other dynamics, the demand for educated professionals exceeds supply.”
Lazowska … tells GeekWire that he welcomes additional educational opportunities. He points out that there is lots of demand from students and employers.
Lazowska: “We have one of the nation’s top undergraduate programs, one of the nation’s top graduate programs, and one of the nation’s top professional masters degree programs. Students who want to work at Microsoft or Amazon.com or Google or startups, or who are currently working there and want to gain additional education, are not going to choose Northeastern over UW, even independent of the significant tuition differential. The tragedy is that there isn’t more of us to go around. This leaves highly qualified individuals who live here with insufficient options.”
Read the GeekWire post here. Read more →
Desperate to come up with an encore to showing up at UW CSE’s Affiliates recruiting day in a Cookie Monster costume, Yin Lu, Google Seattle’s new UW liaison, sponsored a Halloween costume contest for our undergraduates. More than 200 students turned out, in various stages of dress and undress.
Thanks to Yin and Google for this great idea!
Read more →
On Saturday, Google sponsored the UW round of the ACM International Intercollegiate Programming Contest.
30 teams competed in the contest, organized by UW CSE’s Stuart Reges, assisted by UW CSE faculty colleagues Marty Stepp and Helene Martin; UW CSE students Victoria Wagner, Janette Sui, Shiny Yang, and Catriona Scott; and UW CSE Google alums Kevin Wallace and Ethan Apter. Google provide food, prizes, and swag.
The top five teams have won the honor of representing UW at the regional contest, which will be held November 5th:
Detailed results and information on the problems here. Read more →
Hot on the heels of his Saturday night appearance on the field and scoreboard of Husky Stadium, UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel found his way to Washington DC to demonstrate his ElectriSense and HydroSense sustainability sensing technology to Secretary of Energy (and Nobel Laureate) Steven Chu.
Back-channel from a Department of Energy person at the meeting: “Had the Secretary interested – made him 15 minutes late for his next meeting! Good opportunity to discuss learning algorithms and other CS issues.” Read more →
Shwetak on the scoreboard
Julie Kientz, Shwetak Patel, and UW President Michael Young on the scoreboard
Huskies over Wildcats 42-30? Nice.
Shwetak Patel on the Husky Stadium scoreboard? Priceless!
UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel was recognized at this evening’s game as the University of Washington’s newest MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award” winner.
Congratulations Shwetak!
Additional photos here.
And a note from CMU MacArthur winner Luis von Ahn:
From: Luis von Ahn Date: Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 10:22 AM Subject: Shwetak To: Ed Lazowska Husky stadium for Shwetak? Man, you guys do it right. When I got a MacArthur, what they said was "Don't let it go to your head" :)Read more →
The task of following Bill Gates falls to James Hamilton. James is a superb database, data center, and Internet-scale services R&D leader, as well as a superb speaker. Currently Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, he previously spent a decade with Microsoft, and before that a decade with IBM. James also maintains two extremely interesting blogs: one on all things related to technology (here), and one on all things related to cruising and living aboard (here). (Whether you’re a data center designer or a cruiser, it helps to know a lot about diesel engines – one of James’s many surprising fields of expertise.)
James’s CSE Distinguished Lecture – “Internet-Scale Storage” – will be Tuesday at 3:30 in EE 105, with a reception to follow in the Microsoft Atrium of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Please join us!
Talk abstract and speaker bio here. Read more →
A Seattle Times op-ed by State Senator Rosemary McAuliffe and UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska:
“But, we must do more to grow STEM programs in our schools. We must increase the focus on inquiry-based learning in all fields. We must increase the emphasis on “computational thinking”, which is changing every field. We must increase computer-science offerings in high schools — both here and nationally. The vast majority of job openings across all STEM fields are in computing. Let us not forget the importance of supporting our teachers to become certified to teach STEM.
“We also must increase access to bachelor’s programs at Washington’s universities in computer science and other engineering fields. When we turn qualified students away from these high-demand fields, we deny them the opportunity to be first-tier participants in our state’s innovation economy.”
To see the sad state of STEM education at all levels in Washington State, see the slideset here (a presentation by Ed Lazowska at the 2011 annual meeting of the Washington State Academy of Sciences). Read the Seattle Times op-ed here. Read more →
Bill Gates spent the afternoon at UW CSE, visiting labs and speaking to a hanging-room-only crowd.
Bill met with Gaetano Borriello, Yaw Anokwa, Rohit Chaudhri, and Nicola Dell concerning technology for health care in the developing world; with Oren Etzioni, Kevin Clark, and Alan Ritter concerning the future of search; and with Shwetak Patel, Eric Larson, Sidhant Gupta, and Gabe Cohn concerning sustainability sensing.
A web archive of Bill’s talk and Q&A (“The Opportunity Ahead: A Conversation with Bill Gates”) is available here.
GeekWire post (with many photos) here and here. Xconomy post here. Seattle Times here and here. TechFlash on the birthday cupcake here and other topics here. TechCrunch here. PC Magazine here. UW Daily here. Gizmodo here. Los Angeles Times here.
Here’s a nice reminiscence on Bill’s early days as a programmer, scamming computer time at the University of Washington with his high school pal Paul Allen – from the.gates.notes.
Many Bruce Hemingway photographs here. Read more →