Read the article here.
“Ever since Bram Cohen invented BitTorrent, Web traffic has never been the same … Peer-to-peer networking, or P2P, has become the method of choice for sharing music and videos … Experts estimate that peer-to-peer systems generate 50 to 80 percent of all Internet traffic … Tensions remain, however, between users of bandwidth-hungry peer-to-peer users and struggling Internet service providers …
“To ease this tension, researchers at the University of Washington and Yale University propose a neighborly approach to file swapping, sharing preferentially with nearby computers. This would allow peer-to-peer traffic to continue growing without clogging up the Internet’s major arteries, and could provide a basis for the future of peer-to-peer systems. A paper on the new system, known as P4P, will be presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications meeting in Seattle.” Read more →
“Ethan John professes to not enjoy writing code. Testing, on the other hand, he enjoys immensely. That makes him my kind of Computer Science graduate: the kind who codes only because it gives him an excuse to test. Ethan currently works for Isilon Systems, who I am sure is happy to have the advantage of his love for testing.
“Here is what Ethan has to say:
“DDJ: What was your first introduction to testing?
“EJ: I was in school, and got a job as a research assistant on a project called UrbanSim. It was an Agile house, minus pair programming, so they were doing test driven and iterative development in Java. I had only heard about TDD a few months prior, and my initial experiences with it had been positive. Unit tested code tended to work more consistently out of the gate than otherwise, and I was sold after just a few weeks on the project …”
Article here. Read more →
2005 UW Computer Engineering bachelors alumnus Brett Newlin will represent the United States in the Men’s Four at the Beijing Olympics. A four-time national team member and first-time Olympian, Brett was named USRowing’s Male Athlete of the Year in 2006.
Brett was one of six US Olympic Team members featured in an August 3 NY Times spread, Bodies of Work: “‘In high school, I was kind of a beanpole. Then in college I started rowing, and muscles started popping out from all over the place.'”
See Brett’s USRowing Olympic biography here. Beijing photos by fellow Husky oarsman Scott Gault here. Read more →
Read the article here.
“Insert your key in the ignition of a luxury car and the seat and steering wheel will automatically adjust to preprogrammed body proportions … But open any computer program and you’re largely subject to a design team’s ideas about button sizes, fonts and layouts … A new approach to design, developed at the University of Washington, would put each person through a brief skills test and then generate a mathematically-based version of the user interface optimized for his or her vision and motor abilities.”
Supple project website here. Read more →
CSE’s Yoky Matsuoka is profiled by PBS’s Nova science series. “A former tennis prodigy aims to create advanced prosthetic limbs controlled by human thought. Learn how a self-described ‘airhead’ came to embrace her inner scientist, and what she’s doing to encourage young women to pursue scientific careers.”
View the video at Nova. Read more →
Read the article here.
CSE’s Ed Lazowska in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Read more →
Read the article here.
Mikhail Manyak, 20, a University of Washington Computer Engineering student, died Sunday after suffering a massive allergic reaction to medications prescribed following oral surgery. Read more →
Read the article here.
“This year, researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Washington began recruiting computer gamers to an online competition, named Foldit, aimed at unraveling one of the knottiest problems of biology: how proteins fold.” Read more →
Read the article here.
“Lazowska’s department has 150-plus alumni working for Google – many based at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA, but an increasing number in Kirkland and Seattle. ‘We have dozens of undergraduate students doing summer internships at Google, many graduate students carrying out their research at Google, and two faculty members spending the year there on sabbatical [Gaetano Borriello and Steve Gribble],’ says Lazowska. And Brian Bershad, director of Google’s Seattle site, is a UW computer science professor on leave …
“While Google’s latest efforts are highly welcomed, it will probably take some time for the search company to become as deeply established in the community. ‘Despite all this, Microsoft is [still] the University of Washington’s #1 corporate partner,’ explains Lazowska.” Read more →
