UW CSE Ph.D. student Joe Devietti has been recognized with a 2011-12 Intel Graduate Fellowship.
Devietti works with UW CSE faculty members Luis Ceze and Dan Grossman on the Sampa project, seeking to make multiprocessors easier to program by leveraging changes in both computer architectures and parallel programming models. Read more →
Computerworld reports on the symposium “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything,” held in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The article (here) includes extensive references to a talk by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska – slides here. Read more →
A post on the Babbage science and technology blog at The Economist looks at work by UW CSE/EE professor Joshua Smith et al. on wireless power for left ventricular assist devices (LVAD). LVAD, implanted in failing human hearts, is a life-saving technology that suffers from problems with high patient infection rates and maintenance overhead due to the need for external power. Smith’s new power system will be announced formally at the American Association for Thoracic Surgery annual meeting in May.
“The Free-Range Resonant Electrical Energy Delivery System, or FREE-D, as Smith calls it, is powered by induction. Specifically, it exploits a phenomenon called resonant coupling, in which metal coils that resonate at the same electrical frequency can exchange energy particularly efficiently. The process transfers the power using a tuned magnetic field, which is considered less hazardous to human health than the radio waves (or even lasers) that other wireless power systems rely on. Smith’s version has a transmitter coil 26cm in diameter, which that can beam up to 15 watts of power to a receiver coil that is just 4.3cm across. The transmitter coil can thus be worn in a vest that also holds a battery pack while the receiver tucks nicely into the patient’s chest.”
Smith and his team are also looking at implanting the transmitter in beds and walls to eliminate the need for the patient to wear a vest.
Read the full post – complete with Dick Cheney references – here.
Read more →
UW CSE faculty and grad students hosted 37 school kids from the Latino Achievers Academy last week. After seeing several research demos, including brain-computer interfaces, the group noshed a pizza lunch in the Atrium.
Photos may be viewed here. Read more →

Phil Bernstein

Jayant Madhavan
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Jayant Madhavan (now at Google) and UW CSE adjunct professor Phil Bernstein (at Microsoft Research), along with their collaborator Erhard Rahm, have been announced as the winners of the VLDB 2011 “10-year Best Paper Award.”
The award recognizes their paper “Generic Schema Matching with Cupid” as the most influential paper presented at the 2001 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, with the benefit of a decade’s hindsight.
Congratulations! Read more →
A terrific article regarding the UW CSE team’s recent win in the NCCDC. Read it here! Read more →

Conversation

Krysta Yousoufian

Kyle Rector
On April 13, UW CSE hosted its annual scholarship and fellowship recognition luncheon, honoring the donors and recipients of scholarships and fellowships.
At the undergraduate level, scholarships make it possible for top students to attend UW CSE regardless of means. At the graduate level, fellowships allow us to compete successfully for the very best students from across the nation and around the world.
Undergraduate student Krysta Yousoufian and graduate student Kyle Rector described the difference that scholarship and fellowship support was making to their academic careers.
Photographs here. Brochure here. Read more →

Inger and Allan Osberg

Kristi Morton
UW CSE Ph.D. student Kristi Morton has been named the 2011 recipient of the Osberg Fellowship, a competitive fellowship awarded by the University of Washington College of Engineering thanks to the generosity of friends Allan and Inger Osberg.
Kristi – an undergraduate at Rice University – studies databases and programming languages with CSE faculty members Magdalena Balazinska and Dan Grossman, when she is not playing the drums in the UW CSE band. Read more →
“Keypad: an auditing file system for theft-prone devices,” a paper describing a new file system that enhances data security on mobile devices, has been named “Best Student Paper” at this year’s EuroSys 2011 conference. The paper was authored by UW CSE graduate students Roxana Geambasu and John P. John and UW CSE faculty members Steve Gribble, Yoshi Kohno, and Hank Levy.
Congratulations! Read more →
In the “local gal makes good” department: 2003 UW CSE alum Siobhan Quinn is interviewed by Xconomy about the tech scene in NYC. After 7 years with Google in Mountain View, Siobhan became Foursquare’s first Product Manager last summer. Read the article here. Read more →