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 →
Brian Bershad at the Paul Allen Center
TechFlash reporter John Cook writes about the Seattle Startup Weekend held at Google‘s Fremont engineering office last weekend, and quotes UW CSE professor and graduate (PhD ’90) Brian Bershad, currently on leave to serve as site manager at the Fremont facility.
We are trying to be good neighbors. We don’t want to stomp on people. We don’t want to go raiding people of their employees. We want people to feel like they can come to us and talk openly about what they are doing and feel safe.
Cook says that Microsoft— which co-sponsored the event– has been working to rehabilitate their image with the start-up community after mis-steps led to a poor image in the ’80s and ’90s.
Read the full article here. Read more →
Six months after Linden Rhoads took the reins as Vice Provost at UW Tech Transfer, Xconomy Seattle reporter Luke Timmerman has done a two-part interview with her to find out what’s been accomplished so far and what lies on the road ahead.
UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska had this to say about the Rhoads era at Tech Transfer:
There’s been a dramatic change since Linden’s arrival. The tech transfer officers are crawling all over our building working with students and faculty. An Entrepreneur-in-Residence program has been started. Janis Machala, an incredibly experienced and well-connected startup “coach” who many of our previous startups have worked with, has been brought on-staff. It’s like night and day.
Read part 1 and part 2 of the full article. Read more →
An op-ed by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska and Sun Microsystems’ Bob Sproull appears today on the website of Scientists and Engineers for America. They write:
“Congress is now debating the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Included in this package is over 10 billion dollars for science facilities, research, and instrumentation.
“The reason for this inclusion is simple: today’s research is tomorrow’s infrastructure.
“When our nation faces immediate challenges, the feasible solutions depend upon the ideas, resources, and designs that are “on the shelf,” ready to deploy …
“Increasingly, information technology is the cornerstone of America’s infrastructure. Today’s information technology research is a cornerstone of tomorrow’s infrastructure.”
Read the full editorial here. A set of white papers describing the role of computing research in meeting the challenges of the 21st century is available here. Read more →
