Allen School News

On the evening of Wednesday February 25, more than 50 UW CSE undergraduates participated in a Technical Interview Coaching event held in the atrium of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.  Students spent 20 minutes with each of 3 company representatives in “mock interview” sessions, learning what companies look for in interviews.  Our thanks to engineers from Amazon.com, Eggsprout, Google, and Microsoft for participating in this event! Read more →

“What is the most exciting company in Seattle?” Gregory Huang of Xconomy recently asked this question of Patrick Ennis, head of technology for Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures, and  was surprised at the answer:  Impinj.  Impinj, founded in 2000 by UW CSE’s own  Chris Diorio, is well-known for its focus on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies.  Diorio, a student of microelectronics pioneer Carver Mead at Caltech (and current CSE affiliate faculty), serves as Impinj’s chairman and chief technology officer. ‘“He’s a fantastic professor and entrepreneur,” Ennis says. “Usually, professors just want to be professors.  When you find an entrepreneur professor, it is heaven.”‘

Read the full article here. Read more →

University Week reports on the fabulous Puget Sound Tech Universe map recently published by a collaboration of Seattle University, the Washington Technology Industry Association, and Virginia Tech. The map shows the geneology of over 700 local technology companies, institutions, and organizations represented as astronomical bodies.  Most orbit one of six “suns,” of which the University of Washington is one.  (Interactive version of the map is available online here.)

Read the full article here.

We previously covered the Puget Sound Tech Universe project here. Read more →

CSE’s Oren Etzioni recently sat down with Rachel Tompa for Xconomy to talk about his philosophies on technology, startups, and investing in the current economy.  He also talked about his most recent projects, two new software technologies that search the web in innovative ways.

PanImages, an image search tool, mines Google Images and Flickr for pictures and is a step towards an Internet that is not limited by language barriers. With PanImages, you can find pictures on Web pages that are written in hundreds of languages. Simply type in a word in your own language, and PanImages will find a list of translations into multiple languages at once.

TextRunner searches 500 million web pages for relationships between words.  You can type in a question like “What kills bacteria?” and it finds everything in these 500 million pages that has the relationship “kill” to bacteria, returning answers ranked by the number of hits.

Read the full article here. Read more →

UW Director of News and Information Bob Roseth writes in University Week about a large-scale study of the computing needs of the UW research community. One hundred and twenty-five researchers were interviewed in what CSE professor and University of Washington eScience Institute director  Ed Lazowska calls the most comprehensive study of its kind yet conducted. “No other university has conducted such a balanced study of top researchers’ information technology needs. What we have found is a rich texture of IT needs, because these researchers are using computing in increasingly sophisticated ways.”

Results of the study will be presented at a Catalyst Spark session on Friday, February 20 at 1:00PM in 220 Odegaard on the UW Seattle campus.

The full article is available here.

Read more →

James Lee

UW CSE faculty member James Lee has received a 2009 Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most prestigious awards available to younger faculty in the sciences.  James is UW CSE’s 16th Sloan Research Fellowship recipient.

[Coverage in University Week is here. -SMR] Read more →

Pavan Vaswani

At a February 23rd reception at the home of University of Washington President Mark Emmert, CSE’s Pavan Vaswani will be recognized as the University of Washington Junior Medalist — the top student in last year’s junior class (of 7,000+ students).  Pavan knows the drill — last year he was UW’s Sophomore Medalist.  Congratulations Pavan!  (University Week article here.) Read more →

KOMO News reports on One Bus Away in this February 12 broadcast television story, Where’s that bus?!? Sweat no more. One Bus Away is a web site and a collection of bus-locating services created and run by UW CSE grad student Brian Ferris. It allows transit users in King County to track the buses they are interested in five different ways, most available from a cellphone (voice, text, or web). You can view the broadcast video segment on demand at the site.

We previously covered One Bus Away here.

[One Bus Away was also the subject of a February 11 radio news story by Tom Tangney on KIRO-FM, Riding the bus just got easier. You can listen to the audio on demand at the site. On the same day, Fox Television affiliate Q13 looked at One Bus Away in Real-time bus schedules– on your cell phone!] Read more →

UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska is organizing a public symposium on “Contemporary Topics in the Energy Field,” to be held on March 17th as part of a Regional Meeting of the National Academy of Engineering.  A number of the talks — for example one on the Smart Grid — should be of interest to CSE students, faculty, and friends.  Further information is available at http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/nae2009/. Read more →

Stimulated by a request from our friends at Google, I plotted enrollment in UW CSE’s introductory course (“CS-1” — called “CSE-142” at UW) over the past 4.5 years.  We offer this course every quarter (that is, four times a year); I plotted a 4-quarter rolling sum of course enrollment to smooth the data.  (In other words, each point on the graph shows total enrollment during the most recent four academic quarters.)

The results show a dramatic growth in total enrollment, and an even more dramatic growth in the enrollment of women — both of which are important for the health of the field.

Want to know what computer science is like?  See the terrific videos and other information here! Read more →