The ParkSmart team, composed of UW CSE’s graduating seniors Alireza Garakani and Jonathan McKay and Informatics’ Linda Le, won 2nd prize at the 2009 Usability Professionals Association Student Design Competition. ParkSmart, which was completed as part of CSE 440, “Introduction to Human Computer Interaction,” aims to reduce drivers’ impact on the environment by making it easier to find parking spaces in congested cities.
Go team!! Read more →
MIT Technology Review features TextRunner, software created by UW CSE’s Oren Etizioni and the KnowItAll group that extracts knowledge from billions of lines of text by analyzing basic relationships between words. TextRunner represents a scaling up in terms of both the number of pages and the scope of topics that it can analyze.
According to Etzioni, “what we are showing is the ability of the software to achieve rudimentary understanding of text at an unprecedented scale and scope.”
Read the full Technology Review article here. Read more →
A University Week profile of CSE professor Richard Ladner, winner of the 2009 University of Washington Outstanding Public Service Award for his work with the deaf and blind communities.
“‘It is kind of interesting at this point in my career. You would think I would be winding down,’ says Ladner, the Boeing Professor in Computer Science & Engineering … But instead of making plans for retirement, he has a pile of cell phones on his desk that he’s adapting to make them accessible, a project to bring American Sign Language to the UW campus, and ongoing relationships with groups on campus and around the country.”
Read the full article here. Congratulations Richard! Read more →
Each year, we invite our UW Computer Science & Engineering undergraduates to identify “influential teachers” who shaped their careers prior to arriving at UW. We host a dinner for the teachers, their guests, and the students who nominated them. There are three goals: to honor these life-changing teachers, to reacquaint them with their highly successful students, and (crassly) to get them to send us more great students.
This year’s dinner was held on June 3rd. Photos (taken by our own Bruce Hemingway) from the event may be viewed here. (Select “Inspirational Teacher Dinner-2009” in the upper left.) Information regarding past nominees may be found here.
Congratulations to the teachers recognized this year!!
Technology Review looks at Microsoft’s cherry new search engine, Bing, and turned to CSE web search expert Dan Weld for his take.
“Bing is a limited start, but for a reasonable set of queries, it is better.” But there’s still plenty of room for both search leader Google and Bing to improve. “Search can and will get much, much better,” says Weld.
Read the full article here. Read more →
The Robotics Team from Gatewood Elementary visited UW CSE’s Yoky Matsuoka back in February on a field trip with their after school program. Now two of the fifth graders, who share a passion for building robots, have been invited to spend a week this summer at Yoky’s lab.
Read the full post from the West Seattle Blog here. Read more →
In Fall 2009, each incoming University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering graduate student will receive a Kindle DX, Amazon’s latest wireless reading device, to use in place of traditional printed textbooks and research papers in their first-year graduate courses. The students also will receive textbooks and other required reading materials free of charge for the Kindle DX.
The University of Washington is one of seven colleges and universities conducting a Kindle DX pilot program. The goals of the pilot are to explore the use of electronic readers in university classes, and to discover their strengths and weaknesses relative to traditional content delivery. At the University of Washington, Computer Science & Engineering and the Foster School of Business are participating in the pilot. The other institutions taking part in the pilot are Princeton University, Case Western Reserve University, Reed College, Arizona State University, Pace University, and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.
Learn more here!
TechFlash article here. Read more →
Scott Silver
Peter Wilson
TechFlash reported today that Scott Silver will be the new site director for Google’s Kirkland office. He will replace Peter Wilson, who is leaving to launch his own start-up. When asked for his reaction, UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska said, “‘The positive is that it contributes a seasoned veteran to the local startup scene – Peter spent a number of years at Microsoft before Google, so is really well connected and experienced. The great news is the diversity of the information technology businesses that have grown up around here, largely as a result of Microsoft making Seattle its home.'”
View the full article here. Read more →
A National Science Foundation news release regarding the President’s 60-day assessment of cybersecurity. “[NSF CISE Assistant Director Jeannette] Wing asked Fred Schneider, a computer science professor at Cornell University and chief scientist of the NSF-funded TRUST Science and Technology Center, and Ed Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, to gather ideas from experts in trustworthy computing from a variety of academic institutions and turn them into a viable set of policy recommendations.”
See the NSF press release here. Read more →
For decades, humans have struggled to create machines that can extract meaning from human language. Traditional approaches require a great deal of manual work up front to render material understandable to computer algorithms, and the ultimate goal is to make this step unnecessary. In May’s Technology Review, David Talbot discusses how IBM hopes to advance this objective. Expected later this year, Watson — a natural-language computer system — will play Jeopardy! (the popular TV trivia show) against human contestants.
UW CSE’s Dan Weld is quoted: “‘I expect that this whole area will heat up significantly in the next few years.” His group has applied to take part in a five-year DARPA research effort that is aimed at advancing the state of natural-language processing.
See the full article here. Read more →