UW CSE’s Magda Balazinska has been selected as one of 59 professors to receive a 2009 HP Labs Innovative Research Award. Her research, entitled “Data Intensive Scalable Computing (DISC) as a Cloud Service,” will investigate some of the challenges behind offering MapReduce and similar data intensive scalable computing (DISC) systems as a cloud service. These challenges include (1) running DISC systems in highly dynamic environments with virtualized resources and competing workloads and also (2) performing data intensive computations that span multiple data centers.
HP reviewed nearly 300 proposals from more than 140 universities in 29 countries on a range of topics within the eight high-impact research themes at HP Labs. More details about the HP Labs Innovation Research Program and worldwide award recipients are available here. Press release located here. Read more →
Most states suffer a significant “brain drain” of graduates from their flagship universities. Not so for the University of Washington! Forbes Magazine ranks UW #1 in the nation for the proportion of its graduates that are still working in-state 5 years after graduation.
“The state doing the best job of holding onto its top public university graduates is Washington. No fewer than 74% of University of Washington grads remain in the Evergreen State, well ahead of second-ranked Minnesota, which retains 67% from the University of Minnesota.”
UW CSE contributes strongly to this, even at the graduate level. At the June 2009 commencement, UW CSE awarded 82 Masters degrees and 24 Ph.D. degrees. Of these 106 graduate degree recipients, 60 (57%) came from Washington State, and 89 (84%) remained in Washington State after receiving their degrees.
Read the Forbes article here. See the data on various flagship public universities here. Read more →
The Seattle Times interviews Dennis Quan, IBM’s director of autonomic computing development in Raleigh, N.C., regarding IBM’s new “CloudBurst” offering:
“Blueprints for IBM’s cloud offerings came from a joint research project with Google. It initially explored business intelligence at big schools and large-scale analytics, which led to the creation of a cloud-computing cluster at the UW and two run by IBM in 2007. ‘The work that was done as part of that project really informed how we can put together large cloud datacenters that can efficiently process terabytes, petabytes, of information across thousands of machines,’ he said. The early clusters also ‘kind of provide the blueprints for the designs we base these new clouds on,’ he said.”
UW’s cloud computing course was profiled in Business Week in December 2007. The web materials from the most recent version of the course, CSE490H, are here. The startup company Cloudera involves a number of the principals of the original UW course.
Read the Seattle Times article here. Read more →
Rachel Tompa talks with UW CSE professor and search specialist Dan Weld about the future of search in an interview in Xconomy.
Weld explains the significance of the new Microsoft Bing search service in terms of its success in delivering integrated “vertical” search. “All the engines are trying to do it, but the way Microsoft has done it with Bing is somewhat better than what Google has done.”
What does the future of search look like? Weld says “I think what we’ll see more of in the future is the ability to ask a question and have the search engine actually answer your question… Soon I hope I can tell you about some of the research we’re doing which I think will eventually revolutionize search.”
Read the full interview at Xconomy here. Read more →
Network World previews this week’s HotCloud conference in San Diego, which boasts a slew of fresh research into this hottest of computer science research topics. UW CSE’s Hank Levy, Steve Gribble, and Roxana Geambasu will present CloudViews, a public version of the cloud that shares resources without sharing data.
Read the full article in here. Read more →
CSE’s graduating senior Pavan Vaswani has won the University of Washington President’s Medal, awarded annually to the top student in UW’s 7,500+ person graduating class.
Pavan is majoring in CSE, neurobiology and biochemistry. His decision to come to the UW was heavily influenced by the assurance that he could become involved in research the day that he arrived on campus. Indeed, his experience working with faculty in a research setting caused him to broaden his degree ambitions, which had begun with computer science.
Pavan is a Goldwater Scholar, a Mary Gates Scholar and a Washington Scholar. He also has received the Research Fellowship for Advanced Undergraduates and is a Space Grant Scholar. He is currently working in a laboratory in the Department of Neurological Surgery, where he is developing a device to measure brain pressure non-invasively using ultrasound.
Pavan plans to attend The Johns Hopkins University in an M.D.-Ph.D. program. He is ultimately planning a career in medical research.
Previously, Pavan was the UW Sophomore Medalist and the UW Junior Medalist (awarded to the top student in each of those classes). Recently he was awarded the UW Arts & Sciences Dean’s Medal for the Sciences, given to the top graduating student in the sciences. Read more about Pavan and his accomplishments here. Read more →
TechFlash discusses Microsoft’s newly launched Bing Travel — which combines UW CSE’s Farecast’s airfare-prediction and travel-search tools with MSN editorial content — as “a key chess piece in Microsoft’s new effort to challenge Google in Internet search.”
“It’s also a high-profile example of Microsoft benefiting from technology developed in its backyard. Oren Etzioni, the University of Washington computer scientist who founded Farecast in 2003, is watching with pride.”
Read the TechFlash post here. Read more →
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 →
