Mayor Mike McGinn will celebrate Facebook’s opening of a Seattle engineering office — their first outside the Bay Area — at a City Hall ceremony on May 18. In addition to the Mayor, speakers will include UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Greg Badros (Facebook’s Director of Engineering), UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska, and Ari Steinberg (Manager of Engineering and head of Facebook’s Seattle office).
Attracting engineering R&D operations to Seattle is critical to Seattle’s evolution as one of the nation’s great technology hubs.
Seattle PI coverage of the event in Monica Guzman’s “Big Blog” here. TechFlash coverage of the event here. Seattle Times here. Read more →
Five junior faculty from across UW were honored today for national recognition received this year. Two of the five were from CSE: Luis Ceze (Microsoft New Faculty Fellow) and James Lee (Sloan Research Fellow).
Overheard at the event: Provost Phyllis Wise to James: “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Phyllis Wise, the Provost.” James, in response: “Actually, we’ve met, when you visited our department to gently deliver bad news.”
Congratulations to Luis and James! Read more →
Each week, the Computing Research Association and the Computing Community Consortium give visibility to a “Computing Research Highlight of the Week.” This week, it’s the PhotoCity project and “virtual capture-the-flag game” led by UW CSE’s Zoran Popovic and Cornell’s Noah Snavely (a UW CSE Ph.D. alum).
See the post (with links to the project website) here. Read more →
Eric Arendt, a dual major in CSE and EE (with a minor in African Studies!), has been named one of two recipients of the 2010 University of Washington Dean’s Medal in Engineering.
Eric is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Eta Kappa Nu. He has received multiple scholarships, and he has served as a TA and as TA Coordinator in CSE.
Eric’s nomination read, in part: “Eric is a top performer in EE and CSE. He has traveled the world. He is broadly educated; he can talk intelligently and passionately on a broad range of topics and issues. His balance and his maturity both are extraordinary.”
College of Engineering announcement here.
Congratulations Eric! Read more →
The New York Times reports on work by UW CSE professor Yoshi Kohno, UCSD professor (and UW CSE Ph.D.) alumnus) Stefan Savage, and their students.
“Automobiles, which will be increasingly connected to the Internet in the near future, could be vulnerable to hackers just as computers are now, two teams of computer scientists are warning in a paper to be presented next week.
“The scientists say that they were able to remotely control braking and other functions, and that the car industry was running the risk of repeating the security mistakes of the PC industry.
“’We demonstrate the ability to adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input — including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on,’ they wrote in the report, ‘Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile.’”
Read the article here. Read the research paper here. Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security here.
Other coverage: New Scientist, Technology Review, PC World, cnet, TechFlash interview, UPI, The Register, Popular Science, Discover Magazine. Read more →
UW CSE professor Pedro Domingos has been elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Pedro, an expert in data mining and machine learning, joins Oren Etzioni and Dan Weld as UW CSE AAAI Fellows.
AAAI elected 8 new Fellows this year — indicative of the prestige of the award. Read the AAAI press release here.
Congratulations Pedro! Read more →
Tapan Parikh
Loren Carpenter
Ed Lazowska, Tapan Parikh, Loren Carpenter
Each year, the University of Washington College of Engineering recognizes the achievements of five extraordinary alums with “Diamond Awards.”
This year, two of the five awardees were CSE alums. At a ceremony on Friday night, 1976 M.S. alum Loren Carpenter received the Diamond Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence for his many contributions to digital animation, and 2007 Ph.D. alum Tapan Parikh received the Early Career Diamond Award for his work in harnessing technology to empower people in the developing world.
Wonderful videos were prepared describing the accomplishments of both Loren and Tapan. Tapan’s video is here — Pixar doesn’t want you to see Loren’s.
Tapan and Loren each made wonderful acceptance remarks. Tapan’s remarks are here; Loren’s are here.
Congratulations to Loren and Tapan! Read more →
UW CSE’s Jon Froehlich and Shwetak Patel describe HydroSense in this Discovery News interview.
HydroSense is a pressure-based sensor that automatically determines water usage activity and flow down to the source (e.g., dishwasher, laundry, shower) from a single non-intrusive installation point.
Watch this great interview here. Read more →
From the Seattle Times:
“Facebook, the hugely popular social-media service, is planning to open an engineering office here. Announcement of the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s intentions came Wednesday out of Mayor Mike McGinn’s office …
“‘We are aggressively trying to get the best of the best technical talent around the world,’ said Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Facebook.
“In looking for places to find that talent, Schroepfer said, ‘Seattle popped to the top of the list.’ Along with quality-of-life issues, he pointed to Microsoft, Amazon.com, Boeing and other ‘magnets of talent.’ He also noted that the University of Washington ‘in particular is a well-regarded computer-science university.'”
Read the full article here. See the Facebook Seattle office announcement here. Read more →
Xconomy reports on the OVP Venture Partners Tech Summit. “‘It bothers me that my car is much better instrumented than I am. You can go to a mechanic and he’ll plug a diagnostic tool in and will tell you everything that happened in the past six months,’ Lazowska said. ‘On the rare occasion when I visit a doctor, it starts with something like ‘Where does it hurt?’.'”
Read the full post here. Read more →
Mayor Mike McGinn will celebrate Facebook’s opening of a Seattle engineering office — their first outside the Bay Area — at a City Hall ceremony on May 18. In addition to the Mayor, speakers will include UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Greg Badros (Facebook’s Director of Engineering), UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska, and Ari Steinberg (Manager of Engineering and head of Facebook’s Seattle office).
