UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni is featured in a new video describing the UW Foster School of Business Business Plan Competition.
“‘What’s most impressive to me is the incredible creativity of the students… coming together to produce what’s both technically feasible and makes business sense,’ said Oren Etzioni, computer science and engineering professor and entrepreneur.”
Watch the video here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni is quoted in this New York Times article:
“But parsing and categorizing language, with its ambiguity and subtlety, remains a formidable hurdle for computers. So the challenge facing Watson was far greater than the one I.B.M. overcame in 1997 with its Deep Blue chess-playing computer, which beat the world champion Garry Kasparov.
“‘It’s a lot more difficult for a computer to understand language at the level of an 8-year-old than to beat a grandmaster at chess,’ observed Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle.”
Read the article here. Read more →
UW CSE professor Raj Rao was one of the headliners at the TED2011 conference, speaking in Session 11, “The Echo of Time,” along with paleontologist Jack Horner, President of the Institute of Medicine Harvey Fineberg, and General Stanley McChrystal. More photos here. Raj the cartoon here. Read more →
The CHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made extensive contributions to the study of Human Computer Interaction and who have led the shaping of the field.
This year seven new members were elected to the CHI Academy, including UW CSE’s James Landay. James’s citation reads:
“James Landay is the Short-Dooley Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His research over the past two decades has included contributions in the areas of automated usability evaluation, demonstrational interfaces, ubiquitous computing, user interface design tools, and web design. As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, he began creating tools to support fluid user interface design and development through sketching. From 1997-2003, he was a professor at UC Berkeley, where he was tenured after creating a strong HCI research community and continuing to develop tools for non-programmers that explored the then-novel design spaces of web site, pen and speech interaction. He moved to Seattle in 2003 to join the faculty in CSE at UW and to direct the Intel Research Seattle lablet, which focused under his leadership on technologies and applications of ubiquitous computing. He has continued his leadership in developing tools for designers, adding to his long list of publicly available design tools through the investigation of location-aware computing, activity-based computing and ubicomp in the home. He was a founding member of the cross-university DUB Group at UW, which under his leadership has quickly become an international power in HCI research. He is currently helping to establish an HCI research center at Microsoft Research Beijing. He has also had success in commercialization efforts. His research contributions and those of his current and former students are alone worthy of election into the CHI Academy. But James’ most lasting legacy will be his outstanding ability to create communities of HCI researchers (Berkeley, Intel Research Seattle, Washington) with international prominence and lasting impact.
Congratulations James! Learn more about his research here. Learn about UW’s cross-campus DUB research group here. Read the CHI Academy citation here.
Read more →
Communications of the ACM reports on the report of the Presidents Council of Advisors on Science and Technology concerning the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program. (UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska co-chaired the Working Group that advised PCAST on the report.)
“An example of high payback was given at the report’s public release by Akamai founder Tom Leighton. He related a story of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funding he received in the 1990s to study ‘highly mathematical and highly theoretical subjects … the living example of high-risk research.’ When the research was finished, Internet companies weren’t interested in the results – even for free.
“‘So we started a company called Akamai Technologies,’ Leighton says. ‘We [now] carry over a third of Web traffic … and are probably paying over $100 million in taxes this year. But it wasn’t the kind of research that companies fund.'”
Read the article here. Read more →
Our friends at Madrona Venture Group, working with a number of top Seattle technology companies, have introduced the Cascadia Innovation Fellowship.
The Cascadia Innovation Fellowship is targeted at computer science undergraduate and graduate students from across the nation. If selected, students receive a paid summer internship, plus a $5,000 scholarship. The Seattle technology community will support the fellows and provide them with networking, education, and insights that will benefit them as they finish school and well beyond into their career.
Applications are due by March 10. Learn more about this great opportunity here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Open Data Kit (ODK), a collection of free and open source tools, in use around the world, that make data collection easier and more flexible, has received the 2011 Washington Technology Industry Association Industry Achievement Award for Best Use of Technology in Government, Non-Profit, or Education.
ODK began as a collaboration between UW CSE and Google.
Learn more about ODK here. Learn more about the WTIA Industry Achievement Awards here.
UW CSE’s Living Voters Guide was another of the three finalists in the Best Use of Technology in Government, Non-Profit, or Education category of the WTIA Industry Achievement Awards. Read more →
TechFlash interviews UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni:
“The folks at University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering have been watching IBM’s Watson computer on ‘Jeopardy!’ this week with even more interest than the rest of us. They even hosted a viewing party last night on campus, followed by expert commentary. We followed up today with one of those experts, computer science professor Oren Etzioni, the director of the UW Turing Center, to get his take on the whole thing. Continue reading for excerpts from our conversation.”
The interview is here. Read more →
On February 15, UW CSE and IBM hosted a viewing of the second of three Jeopardy! matches pitting IBM’s Watson Artificial Intelligence system against two human champions.
More than 250 fans, ranging in age from 7 to 70, turned out! Commentary was provided by UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni, Ed Lazowska, and Luke Zettlemoyer, Microsoft Research’s Eric Horvitz, and IBM’s Greg Dietzel.
There are some wonderful background videos on the IBM Watson website, here.
And don’t miss “Watson, The Jeopardy! Supercomputer, Sizes Up One of His Opponents Before the Show.”
Then there’s Conan. Read more →
“‘It is, in my mind, a historic moment,’ says Oren Etzioni, director of the Turing Center at the University of Washington, Seattle. ‘I watched Gary Kasparov playing Deep Blue. This absolutely ranks up there with that.'”
Read the complete interview here. Read more →