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The National Medal of Technology honors America’s leading innovators. Cutler is best known for his contributions to operating systems: RSX-11/M, VAX/VMS, VAXeln, and Windows NT. CSE’s Ed Lazowska, in his letter of support for Bill Gates’s nomination of Cutler, wrote: “Cutler … has an incredible facility for creating designs that will work, for leading teams that implement these designs according to spec – correct, on-time, within budget, and meeting performance goals – and for building the most critical and challenging aspects himself … Project after project, for more than 30 years, Cutler has succeeded at accomplishing the impossible (or at least the highly unlikely) through insight, talent, skill, leadership, and force of will. The result, as the nomination states, is ‘fundamental contributions to computer architecture, to compilers, to operating systems, and to software engineering’ that ‘enabled a trillion dollars of industry revenue.'” 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 →
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The 2008 Seattle-To-Portland bicycle tour featured the largest-ever gathering of UW CSE bicycling jerseys. The jerseys — for the “Pastry-Powered T(o)uring Machine” bicycle club, were created by UW CSE alumna Lauren Bricker. The theme for the design of the shirts is UW CSE’s infamous “Steam-Powered Turing Machine” mural. Read more →
“Just imagine you’re blind and trying to go online at an internet cafe in Paris. Until now, unless you had $1,000 worth of software installed, it was just about impossible. But in recent weeks hundreds of blind people found their worlds opening up online with help from a web-based program called WebAnywhere.
The program was created by Jeffrey Bigham, a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department. He knew that many applications were moving from desktop computers to the web, and thought such a program could help blind people.
Read the article here. Read more →
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“WebAnywhere, an Internet-based service released last month, boasts an even better price tag: free. The program’s innovation isn’t so much about what it does — no more than existing Web readers that convert written text to digital speech — as it is about its availability on almost any computer.” Read more →
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PC Week describes the Adeona service, created by UW CSE undergraduate Gabriel Maganis.”Lose your laptop these days and you lose part of your life: You say good-bye to photos, music and personal documents that cannot be replaced, and if it’s a work computer, you may be the source of a very public data breach.
“But now, researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, have found a way to give you a shot at getting your life back …
“Here’s how it works: A user downloads the free client software onto a laptop. That software then starts anonymously sending encrypted notes about the computer’s whereabouts to servers on the Internet. If the laptop ever goes missing, the user downloads another program, enters a username and password, and then picks up this information from the servers …”
See Slashdot here
See SC Magazine here Read more →
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“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 →
