Allen School News

UW CSE Ph.D. student Eytan Adar‘s research is among the projects described in this Technology Review article. Read more →

The Putnam Mathematical Competition, offered each year by the Mathematical Association of America, began in 1938, and is open to undergraduate students in the United States and Canada.  The six-hour test is administered on the first Saturday in December.  Roughly 4,000 students typically participate.

In this year’s competition, UW CSE junior Will Johnson finished sixth – an extraordinary performance.   (In a typical year, more than half of the competitors earn a grand total of zero points.  Will scored 99 – the top score of any student at a public university.)

Two other University of Washington students finished in the top 500, including UW CSE freshman Keyun Tong.

Each institution also selects three students to compete as a team.  The UW team, which included UW CSE junior Igor Tolkov as well as Johnson, finished 15th out of 405 teams.

UW CSE senior Michael Rutherford also competed.

Great coaching makes a big difference; UW Putnam participants were coached by Mathematics professors Ioana Dumitriu and Julia Pevtsova.

See a University Week article here. Read more →

Yoshi Kohno

Luis Ceze

We are pleased to announce that UW CSE faculty members Yoshi Kohno and Luis Ceze have both won 2009 NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards.  Yoshi’s award is for his work to develop the framework and applications to enhance the security and privacy of records such as email (home or business) and electronic voting audit logs.  Luis’ award will fund his research to make it easier to program  multicore processors. His  work will improve software reliability and lead to energy savings in computer systems.

Luis and Yoshi are UW CSE’s 25th and 26th current faculty members who have won NSF CAREER Awards. Read more →

An Xconomy post by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska – see full post here.

“In Washington, higher education is slated for far deeper cuts than in any other high-tech state.  In other words, a system that already disadvantages smaller companies and kids who grow up here is going to get far worse.

“This craziness could be addressed by making different budgetary choices (as all other high-tech states seem to be doing), and/or by allowing tuition to rise in order to avoid reducing capacity (UW tuition, even with an increase double what the Governor and the State Senate have proposed to allow, would still be the lowest among Global Challenge State peer institutions – less than $8,000 per year for a top-tier education; federal and institutional financial aid increases would maintain affordability).

“You’ve got to decide what sort of future you want for your kids and your state.  And then tell your legislators.”

See the full post here. Read more →

The Seattle Times profiles UW CSE professor Yoky Matsuoka in Pacific Northwest magazine.

“At the University of Washington, MacArthur ‘genius’ award-winner Yoky Matsuoka is leading the effort to build robotic hands and other devices that will take commands directly from the human brain — and revolutionizing the opportunities for people with disabilities to function more fully.”

See the complete Seattle Times article here, and a great set of 10 accompanying photographs here.

See Yoky’s web page here, the UW Neurobotics Laboratory web page here, and the new YokyWorks web page here. Read more →

Xconomy profiles, yet again, UW CSE startup Skytap.  “‘One of the key attributes of Skytap is that they give you cloud computing with your existing apps, whereas the others require you to develop specially for their restricted model of computing,’ says Ignition partner Brad Silverberg.  ‘It means you can go cloud computing right now.'”  Read the full post here. Read more →

Oren Etzioni

Matt McIlwain

Celebrating VentureWire’s 10th anniversary, The Venture Capital Dispatch blog (part of the Wall Street Journal) recently asked a panel of venture capitalists to share their favorite memories of business in the past decade or so.  Matt McIlwain, one of our friends at Madrona Venture Group, talks about CSE’s Oren Etzioni and Farecast.

Read the full article here. Read more →

CSE’s Yoky Matsuoka, recently interviewed by KPLU radio’s Keith Seinfeld, talks about her research on prosthetic hands.  The human hand has been one of the most difficult limbs for medicine to replace. War veterans are learning the hard way–as their best option continues to be a mechanical claw.

Listen to the complete interview here (5min MP3).  Read about the hand on Keith’s KPLU blog here. Read more →

CSE's Jon Froehlich presents HydroSense

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, won the $10,000 grand prize in UW’s Environmental Innovation Challenge.  Other members of the Hydrosense team included CSE graduate student Kate Everitt, MechE junior Tim Campbell, EE senior Alex Horton, EE graduate student Jianlei Shi, BioE graduate student Rahber Thariani, and Community, Environment and Planning senior Conor Haggerty.

HydroSense focused on the problem of water leakage in the United States, which accounts for 10 percent of average household water used.  As part of their winning 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.

UW Daily article here.

Xconomy article here.

TechFlash article here.

University Week article here.

Executive summary here (pdf).

Interview with the winning team here. Read more →

CSE professor Susan Eggers has received the 2009-2010 Athena Lecturer Award.  The Athena Lecturer Award, given by ACM-W, recognizes women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.  Susan was recognized for her work on computer architecture and experimental performance analysis has led to the development of Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), the first commercially viable multithreaded architecture.

Congratulations Susan!

Read the full press release here. Read more →