Seventeen top graduate students from ten universities were invited to participate in a “Future Ideas Symposium” organized by the Information Science And Technology working group of the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency.
UW CSE was represented by Michael Piatek (working with Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy on building Internet-scale services) and Hoifung Poon (working with Pedro Domingos on statistical relational learning).
Congratulations to Michael and Hoifung! Read more →
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska has been named by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to co-chair a Congressionally-mandated review of the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program on behalf of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Under the NITRD program, 14 federal agencies coordinate their investments in order to maintain America’s leadership in information technology.
Lazowska’s co-chair is PCAST member David Shaw of D.E. Shaw Research. The members of their working group are Francine Berman (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Stephen Brobst (Teradata Corporation), Randal Bryant (Carnegie Mellon University), Mark Dean (IBM Research), Deborah Estrin (UCLA), Ed Felten (Princeton University), Susan Graham (UC Berkeley), Bill Gropp (University of Illinois), Anita Jones (University of Virginia), Michael Kearns (University of Pennsylvania), Paul Kurtz (Good Harbor Consulting), and Bob Sproull (Sun Labs). Read more →
Seattle Business magazine discusses workforce gaps in Washington State.
“According to a 2009 report by the HECB, state universities are producing less than half the number of computer science majors needed to meet projected demand in 2011. However, state universities are not able to produce these graduates. Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, says his program turns away between 50 and 80 percent of qualified applicants each year. These are freshman who have already been admitted to the UW and have completed all the prerequisites for the computer science and engineering program, but cannot be accepted due to a chronic shortage of student places in the programs.
“Would-be college students in Washington state who hope to graduate and find jobs in high-demand industries are not getting the training they need. As a result, these industries end up with vacant positions, which they must fill by recruiting out-of-state or from overseas. The state of Washington ranks first in the nation for the number of college degree holders from out-of-state as a proportion of the total population.
“’The question is, does every kid who grows up here and has the interest and the capability have the opportunity to compete for these jobs?’ Lazowska says. ‘And the answer is no’ …
“The reason for the low capacity in education is a lack of funding … Last year, the UW faced a 27 percent budget cut, which led to a 10 percent cut in the computer science and engineering department.”
Read the entire article here. Read more →
Ed Lazowska accepts the ACM Distinguished Service Award (other photos to follow)
UW CSE was well represented at the annual ACM Awards Banquet, held this year at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco on the evening of Saturday June 26th.
UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska received the ACM Distinguished Service Award “for more than two decades of wide-ranging and tireless service to the computing community, especially in advocacy at the national level.”
UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello and UW CSE Ph.D. alumni Jeff Dean (now a Google Fellow) and Chandu Thekkath (now a Director and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley) were inducted as ACM Fellows, a distinction awarded to roughly 1% of ACM’s members.
UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Noah Snavely (now on the computer science faculty at Cornell University) was recognized with an Honorable Mention in the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award competition.
UW CSE bachelors alumni John Davis (now a Researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley) and Thomas Kwan (now Director of Research Operations at Yahoo! Research) also were in attendance. Read more →
Corensic (formerly PetraVM) is a UW CSE startup that provides tools for eliminating concurrency bugs from multicore software — launched by faculty members Luis Ceze and Mark Oskin, and backed by our friends at Madrona Ventures, the Washington Research Foundation, and Perkins Coie.
Today Corensic launched Windows and Linux versions of Jinx, its first tool. Read about it here. Read more →
On June 27, more than 60 UW CSE Bay Area alums gathered at the home of Jeff Dean and Heidi Hopper, joined by UW CSE faculty members Gaetano Borriello, Dan Grossman, and Ed Lazowska. Many thanks to Jeff and Heidi for hosting a terrific event! Photos here. Keep in touch here. Read more →
“Threads,” UW CSE’s 2009 computer animation capstone production, has been invited to be screened at the 15th Annual 1 Reel Film Festival (September 4 – September 6, 2010), part of Bumbershoot, Seattle’s Music and Arts Festival, which annually draws over 150,000 people to the grounds of the Seattle Center to celebrate the arts.
Congratulations to Barbara Mones and the entire Threads crew!
See all of UW CSE’s animation productions here. Read more →
“Refraction,” a game to teach fractions to youngsters, has been named a finalist in the Disney Research Learning Challenge. Learn more about Refraction here. Read more →
UW CSE researchers have developed a mind-controlled robot (called Mitra) that is directed by human brainwaves. Discovery News’ Kasey-Dee Gardner interviews UW CSE’s Raj Rao, undergrad Mike Chung, and grad Johnathan Lyon as they demonstrate Mitra to find out the human benefits of such a robot.
See the video here. Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Noah Snavely, now a faculty member at Cornell University, received Honorable Mention in the 2009 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award competition. Noah’s dissertation, “Scene Reconstruction and Visualization from Internet Photo Collections,” provides much of the technology behind Microsoft’s Photosynth offering, as well as the “Rome in a Day” project.
Congratulations Noah! Read more →