“‘Decide,’ just in time for Black Friday, helps you learn whether the price of a product is about to fall. How does it accomplish this magic? The five Ph.D.’s on its staff don’t hurt. Together they’ve created an algorithm that predicts a gadget’s future price based, among other factors, on the historical price data of other gadgets in its class. Along with a suggestion of whether to buy a product now or wait for a better price or new model, the app supplies a confidence score, a price and model history, and new-product rumors from around the web. So far, CEO Mike Fridgen says it has predicted price with 77% accuracy.”
(Decide.com, founded by UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni and four UW alums, today is 80% staffed by UW alums.) Read more →
“Oren Etzioni writes articles about artificial intelligence for scholarly journals, is a renowned expert on data mining, and gained fame when Microsoft paid $115 million for Farecast, an airline-ticket price predictor he founded.
“Now, Professor Etzioni, who teaches computer science at the University of Washington, has directed his considerable intellect at the American ritual of shopping for bargains on Black Friday. After examining billions of prices of consumer electronics, he has decided to spend the busiest shopping day of the year scuba-diving in Bali.
“Why? It is not until early December, Professor Etzioni’s research shows, that prices are likely to be the lowest for electronics, products that are among the biggest sellers on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
“‘The bottom line is, Black Friday is for the retailers to go from the red into the black,’ he said. ‘It’s not really for people to get great deals on the most popular products.’ …
“The added value Professor Etzioni brings to price discussions is the computer crunching of the trove of data provided by online prices — and specific recommendations about when to make a purchase.
“Following the approach of Farecast, now part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, the professor’s start-up company, Decide.com, studies current and historical prices, information about new models and rumors about new product introductions to figure out the best time to buy.”
Read the rest here. Visit Decide.com here. Read more →
Michael Nielsen will deliver the UW CSE Distinguished Lecture on December 8 at 3:30 in EEB 105.
Michael is one of the pioneers of quantum computation. Together with Ike Chuang of MIT, he wrote the standard text on quantum computation. This is the most highly cited physics publication of the last 25 years. Several years ago he left a position as Senior Faculty Member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics to write a book entitled Reinventing Discovery – published in October. The book describes a major shift now occurring in how scientific discoveries are made, a shift driven by online tools for collaboration and sharing of scientific information. This will be the theme of Michael’s talk, “Doing Science in the Open.”
Please join us!
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UW CSE graduate students Jeff Huang and Alan Ritter
GeekWire reports on research by UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni and his students:
“Like Scotty in Star Trek, the day is coming soon when we’ll talk with our computers instead of just typing at them, according to a prominent UW computer scientist and his team of researchers …
“In an essay penned for Nature, Dr. Etzioni reiterated what computer scientists have known for several years: it’s high time we thought outside of the old text box.
“Highlighting what he says is a ‘curious lack of ambition and imagination,’ Etzioni says that the software industry’s momentum has been behind what has worked, and not on new methods.”
Read the rest of the GeekWire post here. Read more →
Shwetak Patel, Sidhant Gupta, Art Rosenfeld
Two days ago, GeekWire‘s highlighted “Newsmaker of 2011” was UW CSE offspring Daniil Kulchenko (son of Ph.D. student Paul Kulchenko).
Today it’s UW CSE faculty member Shwetak Patel – the photo at left, from yesterday, shows Shwetak and Ph.D. student Sidhant Gupta describing the ElectriSense technology to Art Rosenfeld, Distinguished Scientist Emeritus at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Professor Emeritus of Physics at UC Berkeley, the impetus behind California’s extraordinary energy efficiency efforts, and father-in-law of UW CSE professor Dan Weld.
“Is there anything Shwetak Patel can’t do with a home electrical system? We’re often left pondering that question after hearing about the latest high-tech exploits of the University of Washington assistant professor and his collaborators.”
Read the GeekWire post here. Read more →
Alon Halevy‘s labor of love for the past few years – in addition to leading Google’s database research group – has been researching and writing a book on coffee.
The book – The Infinite Emotions of Coffee – has launched! Discover it, and order it, here.
(Alon was a UW CSE faculty member for many years before joining Google when they acquired one of his startups. He is now an Affiliate Professor.) Read more →
KING5 news reports on UW CSE’s StopFinder, a public transit app that talks to the blind, bringing the features of UW CSE’s OneBusAway transit app to a new community of users.
“OneBusAway became one of the most popular mobile apps in the Seattle area in the last couple of years, providing easy access to maps, schedules and real-time updates on when a bus will arrive at a particular stop …
“A University of Washington student developed OneBusAway. Now students and researchers at UW’s Department of Computer Science & Engineering are building a transit app that talks to the blind, telling them where a stop is located and what they can expect to find when they get there.”
Check out the KING5 story here. Read about the research here. Learn about OneBusAway here. Read more →
GeekWire highlights UWTV’s broadcast and web archive of Bill Gates’s Distinguished Lecture in UW CSE:
“This is Bill Gates, coming full circle.
“During a rare appearance last month on the University of Washington campus — where he snuck into buildings with his boyhood friend Paul Allen to learn how to program — the Microsoft co-founder talked about the evolution of computer science and explained how the latest advances in technology are fueling the work of his foundation and its partners in global health and education.
“The discussion, led by UW computer science professor Ed Lazowska, was followed by an illuminating Q&A session in which students quizzed Gates on topics such as health care, politics, education and the realities of life as a billionaire.”
More here. Read more →
“Of all the stories we covered on GeekWire in 2011, one of the most remarkable was the tale of Daniil Kulchenko, a high school sophomore from Kenmore, Wash., who sold his first startup this year at the ripe old age of 15.”
Daniil is the son of UW CSE Ph.D. student Paul Kulchenko.
Read more here and here. Read more →
Jason Yi-Bing Lin, a 1990 Ph.D. alumnus of UW CSE, has been recognized with the 2011 Prize in Engineering Sciences from TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world.
Jason is Dean of the College of Computer Science, lifetime Chair Professor, and Vice President of the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He has been widely recognized for his many contributions to wireless communication, including (among many other honors) being named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the author of three textbooks: Wireless and Mobile Network Architecture (co-author with Imrich Chlamtac, 2001), Wireless and Mobile All-IP Networks (2005), and Charging for Mobile All-IP Telecommunications (2008).
Congratulations Jason! Read more →
