Seattle Business profiles UW CSE professor Zoran Popovic and his Center for Game Science.
“Housed in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, the Center for Game Science is where scientists and scholars apply gaming principles to projects as diverse as biology, education and nanotechnology.”
Read the article here. Read more →
Each year Technology Review honors 35 innovators under the age of 35 “whose work promises to change the world. Candidates from across the globe are chosen for tackling important problems in transformative ways.”
This year’s TR35 includes UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Noah Snavely, now a faculty member at Cornell.
“In 2006, as part of his PhD studies at the University of Washington, Snavely created a system that could assemble such models using an unstructured assortment of images from different cameras and viewpoints… In 2008 his work was commercialized as Microsoft’s Photosynth service, which allows users to upload photo collections and view them in a 3-D reconstruction of the space where they were taken… Snavely, now an assistant professor at Cornell, is trying to assemble a ‘distributed camera’ composed of all the individual cameras whose pictures are shared online. He hopes to use those photos to construct a street-level digital model of much of the globe.”
Read about Noah and the rest of this year’s TR35 here. Read more →
Rob Friedman
The Cake
Orlando Baiocchi
The Institute of Technology at UW Tacoma today thanked Orlando Baiocchi for five years of service as Director, and welcomed Rob Friedman, his successor.
Some editorializing by Ed Lazowska:
I worked closely with former UW Tacoma Chancellor Vicky Carwein to obtain legislative support for establishing the Institute of Technology. One of Vicky’s many wonderful qualities was that she clearly understood the mission of UW Tacoma and of the Institute: to serve as a powerful engine of revitalization for the South Sound region. Working with Vicky, Larry Crum, and the faculty to launch the Institute was one of the most rewarding things I’ve been involved with at the University of Washington.
Orlando was not so fortunate as to have Vicky as his boss: Vicky had left the University of Washington, and had been replaced by a Chancellor who simply didn’t understand the Institute (among many other things). Orlando has fought the good fight, and we owe him a real debt of gratitude for doing a fine job in difficult circumstances.
Hopefully, under new Chancellor Debra Friedman, Rob and Orlando and the faculty can get back to serving their mission and having fun doing it.
Thanks, Orlando! Read more →
More than 60 K-12 teachers from the Pacific Northwest joined UW CSE this week for the fifth annual edition of CS4HS, a summer workshop in computer science for teachers of math and science. Sponsored by Google, CS4HS began as a joint initiative of UW, CMU, and UCLA, and has grown over the years to include dozens of campuses.
Special thanks to Google, and also to Tom Cortina from CMU who has joined us every year to contribute to the success of this terrific program! (In one of the photos to the right, Tom executes a bad algorithm for making a PB&J sandwich.)
All materials from the workshop can be found here. Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Stephen Mann, a computer graphics faculty member at the University of Waterloo, is celebrated for making ice cream for his students in the Waterloo computer graphics lab.
Brian, Zoran, and Steve: Is there something you could learn from him?
Read the article here. Read more →
In order to look their best at Defcon and Usenix Security, members of the UW CSE Security and Privacy Research Lab equipped themselves with t-shirts displaying the text of the waiver they were required to sign before testing their hacked automobile on the runway at Blaine Airport.
We can confirm that no damage was done by the car at Blaine Airport. We are not so sure about the impact of these t-shirts at Defcon and Usenix Security. Read more →
This Seattle Times article offers a sad commentary on the job prospects of displaced workers, and on Washington State’s shameful level of investment in Bachelors-level higher education. It should be “must reading” for policymakers:
“An International Monetary Fund (IMF) study estimated that between 2007 and 2010, the skill level of Washington’s work force (measured mainly by years of education) got more out of whack with the available jobs than in any other state except Delaware.
“That mismatch helps explain why thousands of jobs in Washington can go unfilled at the same time more than 322,000 state residents are out of work …
“In June, more than 7,500 openings for advanced computer-related jobs in King, Snohomish, Pierce and Kitsap counties were listed on the state’s WorkSource database — more than a quarter of all 27,000-plus metro-area openings.
“But those jobs require years of training and, ideally, more years of experience.”
Read this excellent and sobering article here.
A direct link to the graphic that appears to the left: here. (Four the top 10 job openings in the Puget Sound region are for computer scientists, totaling nearly 60% of the available jobs.)
The National Science Foundation press release on the Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, directed by UW CSE professor Yoky Matsuoka, is out. According to NSF:
“The National Science Foundation announces an award to the University of Washington and its partners to establish a new NSF Engineering Research Center. The ERC will pursue interdisciplinary research and education to address questions important to both human health and robotics, and to provide the foundation for new industries through innovation. NSF will invest $18.5 million in the Center over the next five years.
“The NSF ERC for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering will create devices to restore or augment the body’s capabilities for sensation and movement. The foundation for the new devices will be new mathematical and structural understanding of the nervous system. Center researchers will combine this new understanding with improved communication and interface design and with advanced control and adaptation technologies.”
Read the NSF press release here. Visit the CSNE website to learn more about the research here. Computing Community Consortium blog post here. Read more →
UW CSE undergraduate and Facebook intern Cullen Walsh, "loaded with a Nerf gun and looking for a battle" (Seattle Times)
The Seattle Times profiles Seattle’s Facebook office on its first anniversary:
“The office — Facebook’s first development center outside of its Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters — ends its first year Tuesday …
“Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington … said the wave of Californians is ‘all to the good,’ though he said it makes it even more important for the state to adequately fund education and prepare students.
“‘Microsoft and Amazon will lose some people, but they’ll hire some other people,’ he said. ‘There will be people brought in from other states, and students who graduate here will have a much broader choice of what they can do. The only gap is, we’re failing to prepare enough kids who grow up here for these opportunities.’
“All these companies are appealing to UW computer science graduates. Over the past two years 35 percent went to Microsoft, Amazon and Google, and 30 percent went to startups and smaller companies, including Facebook …”
Read the article here. Read more →
In an article in the August 4 issue of Nature, UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni calls on experts to, literally, think outside the search box. In the article, he writes that the main obstacle to progress “seems to be a curious lack of ambition and imagination.” Etzioni proposes that instead of simply looking for strings of text, a web search engine would identify basic entities – people, places, things – and uncover the relationships between them. This is the goal of the UW’s Turing Center, which he directs.
Read the Nature article here. Read an excellent New York Times followup here. Read a UW press release here. Learn about the Turing Center’s research program here. Read more →