The Spring 2009 issue of Most Significant Bits, the UW CSE alumni newsletter, is now available! This issue includes:
(The usual giant photo of Hank appears on page 2.)
See all MSB issues here. Read more →
KPLU’s Jennifer Wing (@kplujwing) reports how social networking technology like Twitter is breathing new life into the typical end-of-the-day conversation parents have with their kids, thanks to teachers that seed the conversation with a daily tweet. UW CSE’s James Landay (@landay) discusses current research on sensing and social networking.
Listen to the full 4:48 audio story on KPLU (@kplu) here. Read more →
Susan Eggers, Microsoft Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, has been named the 2009 Distinguished Alumnus of UC Berkeley’s Computer Science Division. She will be recognized at the UC Berkeley commencement on Sunday May 24.
Eggers’s achievements in computer architecture have earned her recognition as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and as a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.
Eggers, who will be recognized along with Steve McCanne, joins a “Who’s Who” of computer scientists who are Berkeley alums and have received this recognition — among the recipients during the first decade of the award were Doug Engelbart, Ken Thompson, Bill Joy, Jim Gray, Niklaus Wirth, Butler Lampson, Randy Katz, Len Adleman, Chuck Thacker, Eric Schmidt, Steve Wozniak, and Barbara Liskov.
Congratulations Susan on another well-deserved honor! Read more →
HydroSense — a team led by UW CSE graduate student Jon Froehlich and advised by UW CSE faculty members Shwetak Patel, James Fogarty, and James Landay — finished 3rd out of 90 entrants in the 2009 University of Washington Business Plan Competition. HydroSense received the $5,000 WRF Capital Finalist Prize, and was named the “Best Clean-Tech Idea.”
Hopes were high as HydroSense won the $10,000 UW Environmental Innovation Challenge in early April, then made it to the Round of 16 and the Round of 5 in the 90-entrant Business Plan Competition. Much of the $10,000 Environmental Innovation Challenge prize was spent by Fogarty purchasing his first suit in the hopes of influencing the final judging of the Business Plan Competition, but wearing it over a t-shirt with an orange tie probably doomed the outcome.
HydroSense attacks the problem of water leakage in the United States, which accounts for 10 percent of average household water used. As part of their strategy, the team developed a device that screws onto a single water faucet and uses an analysis of acoustic vibrations and pressure differential signatures of water flow to determine usage.
Congratulations to Jon and his team! Read more →
UW CSE graduate students Roxana Geambasu and Michael Piatek are among 13 exemplary Ph.D. students from across the nation who have been named recipients of the inaugural Google Fellowships.
Leading graduate programs in computer science and related fields were invited to nominate two students each. The students could be studying any of 20 different technical areas.
Both of UW’s nominees were awarded Google Fellowships. Roxana received the 2009 Google Fellowship in Cloud Computing. Her research focuses on the challenges, as well as the untapped opportunities, created by today’s rapid move to cloud computing.
Mike received the 2009 Google Fellowship in Computer Networking. His research interests span problems involving networks, distributed systems, and peer-to-peer systems.
More information on these fellowships may be found here.
Congratulations Roxana and Mike! Read more →
UW CSE faculty member Magda Balazinska has won a 2009 NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. Magda’s award is for her work developing new techniques for large-scale data management aimed at cloud-computing environments and scientific data analysis applications. In addition to efficient query processing techniques, she is also developing new query management tools that provide runtime query control, intra-query fault tolerance, query composition support, and seamless query sharing.
Magda joins CSE’s Luis Ceze and Yoshi Kohno as 2009 NSF CAREER Award recipients. Magda, Luis and Yoshi are among twenty seven current CSE faculty members who have won CAREER or NSF/Presidential Young Investigator Awards. Read more →
Xconomy reports on the OVP Venture Partners Technology Summit.
“Seattle can be a very politically correct place, and one very un-PC thing to say is that we’re a second-rate burg when it comes to spawning innovative industries of the future. But Ed Lazowska, one of Seattle’s gutsiest public intellectuals, let it rip yesterday in front of a small gathering of about 100 technology elites at the Four Seasons Hotel.
“‘We’re very smug and self-satisfied,’ said Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington … ‘We think of ourselves in the innovation big leagues, but we are, in fact, in the minors compared to the real big leagues of the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston’ …
“This was easy to say in front of an audience of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who travel a lot, and know all these points to be true. One of the things that baffles me about Seattle – after having lived in Boston and San Francisco – is that so few public officials here would ever dare utter such an obvious truth about how far Seattle lags behind the world-leading clusters for biotech and high tech. If they can’t do that, there’s no way they can engage in serious discussion with the general public about systemic ways this region can improve.”
Read the full Xconomy article here. Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. student Jeff Bigham has been recognized as the 2009 UW College of Engineering “Student Innovator: Research” in the Community of Innovators award competition.
UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Scott Hauck, now a faculty member in UW EE, has been recognized as the “Faculty Innovator: Teaching and Learning.”
Congratulations to Jeff and Scott! Read more →
“University of Washington computer science professor Ed Lazowska is known as a straight talking rabble-rouser who doesn’t pull many punches. And he certainly lived up to that reputation today at the OVP Venture Partners Technology Summit …
“Lazowska – who appeared on stage with the equally opinionated Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service – reserved his toughest comments for a Lake Wobegon mentality in the state where everything appears to be above average.
“‘It seems to me that the issue with this state is that we are one big happy family in which everybody is doing extremely well. Everyone’s college program is above average. And everyone’s company is above average. And everyone’s venture fund is above average. And if you go a little bit more above average than the next guy, then they get all Dirty Harry and whack you down. It’s the State of Whac-a-Mole … I worry that those who excel, and excel honestly, aren’t celebrated in this state'”
Read the full TechFlash article here. Read more →
UW’s Foldit protein folding game received nice coverage in a Computerworld article on human computation (and more generally the importance of human-computer symbiosis).
“You can play a video game called Foldit on the Web while making important contributions to science. Understanding how 3-D proteins ‘fold’ into their optimum structures is critical to understanding disease, but it’s difficult computationally because there are an astronomical number of possible folds for most proteins.
“The thousands of people who play Foldit use their pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving skills to predict protein structures in a way computers can’t easily duplicate. ‘Teenaged gamers are beating the pants off Ph.D. biochemists,’ says Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, where Foldit was created.”
See the full Computerworld article here. Read more →