Google marked today’s second anniversary of the Chrome browser with a web retrospective: “Back to the future: two years of Google Chrome.”
“Looking back today on Chrome’s second anniversary, it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just a short time. In August 2008, JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project …”
The “research project” linked from the Google post was a Hotnets talk by UW CSE’s Charlie Reis — now a Ph.D. alumnus and Google Seattle employee — describing work he did with UW CSE professors Steve Gribble and Hank Levy, “Architectural Principles for Safe Web Programs.” Aware of the work, Google Seattle site director Brian Bershad invited Charlie to join the Chrome team, where Charlie contributed to Chrome’s process structure as part of his Ph.D. work. The fact that Chrome was an open source project meant that the arrangement was no mess, no fuss, no bother — just lots of benefit for all concerned. Read more →
Crosscut discusses women in computer science, featuring a number of UW CSE students.
“‘The most important thing is not to take the gains of recent years for granted …,’ said Ed Lazowska, the Bill and Melinda Gates chair in computer science at the University of Washington.”
Read the article here. Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Scott Saponas has been named to this year’s Technology Review TR-35. “Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work –spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more — is changing our world.”
“Fingers flicking through the air, T. Scott Saponas is rocking a solo in the video game Guitar Hero — without a guitar. A soft band around his forearm monitors the muscles moving his fingers and hand. The band hides a ring of six electrodes that pick up the weak electrical signals produced by active muscle tissue. The signals are relayed to a computer, which in turn controls the game …
“Saponas created the software as a graduate student at the University of Washington. Now working at Microsoft Research, he is interested in combining the muscle interface with other sensors, including accelerometers and gyroscopes, to provide additional precision.”
Read the TR-35 article here. Read more →
In a post last December, we provided some “straight talk” regarding the impact of state budget cuts on the University of Washington in general, and on UW Computer Science & Engineering in particular. It was covered in Crosscut and elsewhere.
UW has now issued a short document that puts budget cuts and tuition increases in perspective. A significant shift in financial responsibility from the state to individuals is taking place. The increase in tuition, however, falls far short of making up for the reduction in state funds.
Somehow — now, more than ever, given shifts in America’s economy — great public universities such as the University of Washington must continue to serve as engines of socioeconomic upward mobility for the smart youngsters who grow up in their regions. Read more →
Corensic, a startup founded in 2008 by UW CSE faculty members Luis Ceze and Mark Oskin and backed by Madrona Ventures, the Washington Research Foundation, and Perkins Coie, has rolled out the first release of Jinx, its software quality tool for Linux and Windows that helps developers, testers, and IT organizations improve the reliability of multi-core applications by surfacing hard-to-find concurrency bugs. Read more →
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska is interviewed, and UW CSE alums Karen Liu and Hakim Weatherspoon are profiled, in this article on diversity in the computing field.
“’While there are many reasons for striving to increase the representation of women in our field, the selfish reason is the most compelling one: the quality of the solutions we achieve is enhanced by the diversity of the individuals contributing to these solutions.’ Lazowska added, ‘Computer science is a great field for everyone, and computer science, as a field, needs everyone.'” Read more →
UW’s MobileASL team is developing the first device able to transmit American Sign Language over U.S. cellular networks.
The tool is completing its initial field test, which allows the team to see how people use the tool in their daily lives and what obstacles they encounter. Eleven participants — all students in the UW Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Computing — are testing the phones for three weeks. They meet periodically with the research team for interviews and respond to survey questions that pop up after a call is completed.
Read the full UWeek article here.
Additional coverage: TechFlash. Seattle Times. Seattle PI. CNET. Gizmag. Wired. The Engineer. Computer World. TechNewsDaily. TGDaily. King5 news. ReadWriteWeb. Read more →
A recent article in Nature concerning the protein folding videogame Foldit — a collaboration between UW CSE professor Zoran Popovic, UW Biochemistry professor David Baker, and their students — has stimulated a great deal of coverage in the popular press. A superb article appears in today’s New York Times.
“The Foldit project was inspired by the volunteers who were contributing the downtime on their home computers to power a protein-folding program called Rosetta@home. The computer donors could see the progress of the program on their screens, and they began to note inefficiencies in the software’s folding approach. That led the scientists to look for ways to systematically harness the skills of the human volunteers.
“The University of Washington researchers have now received a $14 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s arm for supporting science and technology research. This fall Dr. Popovic plans to establish a Center for Game Science, which will pursue technologies for using the skills of both novice and expert human game players on a range of scientific problems.”
Read the complete New York Times article here. Play Foldit here. Read other coverage stimulated by the Nature paper here. Read more →
Xconomy reports on UW’s “CS4HS” workshop for high school teachers — including a great synopsis of the “Careers Panel” featuring UW CSE alums Tam Armstrong (Bungie), Krista Davis (Google), Margaux Eng (Amazon.com), and Crystal Hoyer (Microsoft).
“Figuring out how to entice student, parents, and school districts to embrace and support computer science curricula in public education was a topic at center stage at the University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering CS4HS event last week.”
Read the full article here. Learn more about this year’s CS4HS workshop here and here. Read more →
The New York Times chronicles UW CSE undergraduate student projects from Professor Richard Ladner’s “Accessibility Capstone.”
New York Times article here. KOMO News story and video (which inspired the New York Times post) here. Read more →
