Allen School News

An editorial in the Tacoma News Tribune:

“A recent story in The Seattle Times vividly illustrated the tight connection between college opportunity and the state economy.

“The engineering site director for Google in the Seattle region, Brian Bershad, told the Times that he can’t get enough computer scientists and computer engineers from the University of Washington.  ‘If the UW could produce 1,000 amazing engineers every year,’ he said, ‘we’d find a way to hire them.’ …

“When a state starts to strangle its universities, bad consequences follow.  Students with limited means get frozen out of school.  Bright students go to school elsewhere, and they often never come back to enrich the economy back home.  Competing out-of-state universities start spiriting away the most talented faculty members, sometimes pulling big grants and private R&D money along with them.  High-tech companies that want a university nearby decide to locate elsewhere.

“These are among the reasons the cash-strapped Legislature must give Washington’s universities more leeway …”

Read the editorial here.  Read the original Seattle Times story here.  Check out photos of UW CSE’s recent Winter Recruiting Fair here. Read more →

Katie Kuksenok

Justine Sherry

Microsoft Research has announced the ten recipients of its 2011 Graduate Women Scholarships.  Among the ten, UW CSE Ph.D. student Katie Kuksenok, and 2010 UW CSE bachelors alum (and current UC Berkeley Ph.D. student) Justine Sherry.

Congratulations Katie and Justine!! Read more →

The New York Times reports on Intel’s transition from three university-affiliated “lablets” to a larger number of university-based Intel Science and Technology Centers.

“The company said this week that it would pour $100 million over the next five years into projects at universities.  Each of the projects will involve a few Intel researchers, typically four, with far-flung teams of researchers from several universities …

“‘This assembling of multi-university dream teams to work on big computer science problems is unusual for industry,’ said Edward Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington.”

Read the New York Times article here. Read more →

UW CSE holds recruiting fairs each October and January for tech companies that are members of our Industrial Affiliates Program.  The “buzz” is a great measure of the demand for Computer Science and Computer Engineering majors.  On January 25th – as at other recent recruiting fairs – we weren’t able to accommodate all interested companies:  we can only squeeze 41 tables into our Atrium.

See a list of the recruiting companies here.  See other Bruce Hemingway photographs here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. student Morgan Dixon has been awarded one of 12 2011 Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowships – from among 174 students nominated for the award!

Morgan is a third-year Ph.D. student working with professor James Fogarty, studying Human-Computer Interaction and User Interface Software and Technology.  Learn about Morgan and his research here.

Congratulations Morgan! Read more →

Xconomy Boston reports on the Seattle-area innovation ecosystem, noting UW CSE, Impinj, Madrona Venture Group, etc.

“The other component in the ‘entrepreneurial ecosystem’ is the University of Washington … the Computer Science & Engineering program is one of the top ten in the country …”

Read it here. Read more →

Intel has launched the first of a new breed of Intel Science and Technology Centers (ISTCs).

ISTCs are Intel-funded, jointly-led research collaborations between Intel and the U.S. academic community.   Each ISTC will be centered at a leading U.S. university and will focus on a specific technology area or discipline, bringing together a community of top researchers from across academia.

The ISTC in Visual Computing is centered at Stanford and brings together thought leaders from Stanford, the University of Washington, UC Berkeley, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, UC Davis, UC Irvine and Intel to collaboratively advance the state-of-the-art in visual computing.

Read about the ISTC-VC here.  Read about the ISTC concept here. Read more →

Each year, the University of Washington recognizes a Freshman, Sophomore, and Junior Medalist – essentially, the most accomplished student in the previous year’s freshman, sophomore, and junior classes.

This year’s UW Junior Medalist is our very own Krysta Yousoufian.

CSE has a considerable string of UW Medalists, going back more than 20 years.  This is testimony to the extraordinary abilities of CSE students.  To be in a major this challenging and emerge at the top of the 5000-7000 students in your class is a mind-blowing accomplishment.

Congratulations to Krysta!

Read the UW announcement here. Read more →

Members of UW’s winning iGEM team. CSE's Sean Wu is second from right in the front row.

We missed the news, back in November, that a team of UW undergraduates including CSE student Sean Wu took home the top prize in the Health and Medicine category at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) synthetic biology competition.

The team’s winning creation is a bacterium that has been modified to seek out and destroy anthrax.  It is now being tested in Maryland by the U.S. Army’s Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases.

Read about it here.  Congratulations to Sean, his teammates, and the team advisors! Read more →

"Former UW professor Brian Bershad, front center, has hired dozens of former students for Google, his new employer. He says he'd hire many more if the university could keep producing enough, but the state budget crisis may prevent that."

The Seattle Times reports on the loss of opportunity represented by University of Washington budget cuts.

“Consider the situation faced by Brian Bershad, a former UW computer science professor who is now the engineering site director for Google Seattle/Kirkland.  He’d like to hire more UW computer scientists and computer engineers — a lot more.

“‘If the UW could produce 1,000 amazing engineers every year,’ Bershad said, ‘we’d find a way to hire them.’

“But the university’s computer science program already turns away hundreds of smart kids who apply annually. Future budget cutbacks could mean turning away still more …

“Bershad and others say the reductions have another, hidden cost: They erase opportunities for Washington students, meaning local kids won’t receive the training they need to land a job at Google — or with a local startup that one day could become the Next Big Thing.”

Read this excellent article here.

The Stranger has a similar, although less polite, take on the subject, here.

And UW asks “What is a College Education Worth … for the Citizens, Community, Employers, State and Students” here. Read more →