Read the article here.
Each year, the University of Washington awards medals to the students who had the strongest academic record in their class during the previous year. This year, in an unprecedented clean sweep, CSE students won all three medals. The Freshman Medalist (the top student in last year’s class of 5500 freshmen) is Chad Klumb. The Sophomore Medalist is Pavan Vaswani. The Junior Medalist is Ting-You Wang. Congratulations! Read more →
Read the article here.
“Whether you’re a frustrated songwriter or a shower-time crooner, you may long to hear your lyrics put to music. New software from Microsoft promises to provide just that: instant musical accompaniment to singing.
“The software, called MySong, was developed by Dan Morris and Sumit Basu at Microsoft’s research lab in Redmond, Washington, US, and Ian Simon at the University of Washington in Seattle.” Read more →
Read the article here.
“You’re trying to log on to a Web site and it’s not working. You try again and again. But persistence doesn’t pay off. The site you want is inexplicably, frustratingly, out of reach.
“The other computer might just be turned off, but the causes could be more mysterious. At any given moment, a proportion of computer traffic ends up being routed into information black holes. These are situations where a path between two computers does exist, but messages — a request to visit a Web site, an outgoing e-mail — get lost along the way.
“A University of Washington system named Hubble looks for these black holes and maps them on a Web site, providing an ever-changing constellation of the Internet’s weak points. The Hubble map lets visitors see a map of problems worldwide or type in a specific Web page or network address to check its status. The work is being presented next week in San Francisco at the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation.
“‘There’s an assumption that if you have a working Internet connection then you have access to the entire Internet,’ said Ethan Katz-Bassett, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering. ‘We found that’s not the case.'” Read more →
Read the article here.
“The secretive Seattle virtualization startup Illumita has changed its name to Skytap and unveiled details around its first product, dubbed Skytap Virtual Lab … Started as a project by University of Washington computer scientists, Skytap’s goal with its first product is to create an easy and cost-efficient manner by which companies can test Web applications or software code in a virtual lab.”
According to CSE professor and company co-founder Hank Levy, the domain name Spinaltap was already taken.
See also Seattle Times. Read more →
Read the article here.
“Ethan Katz-Bassett, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington, and his advisor, Arvind Krishnamurthy, designed a program to continuously search for strange Internet gaps, when a request to visit a Web site or an outgoing e-mail gets lost along a pathway that was known to be working before.”
Hubble project web here
Parody from The Spoof! here.
LiveScience here
Fox News here
“Connected” interview (KJR FM) here
Computerworld here
Ars Technica here
Boing Boing here
Digg here
Slashdot here
Wired.com here
UW News & Information here Read more →
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UW CSE’s “Web Tripwires” paper was received enthusiastically (and covered extensively) when presented at this week’s NSDI conference. “Web Tripwires” measures the extent to which ISPs (or others) modify web pages “in flight,” e.g., to insert revenue-generating advertisements.
Run the experiment here
FAQ and research paper here
Slashdot here
ars technica article here
PC World article here
eCanadaNow article here Read more →
Read the article here.
“Microsoft is the mystery buyer of Farecast …
“Madrona Venture Group’s Matt McIlwain, the earliest venture investor in Farecast, said the company entertained multiple offers … he said the deal is notable because it touches nearly every part of the innovation economy in the Pacific Northwest.
“Farecast was started by University of Washington computer scientist Oren Etzioni, initially bankrolled by Madrona, built with people from local companies such as Alaska Airlines and AdRelevance and, ultimately, acquired by Microsoft.”
PI Microsoft Blog here
PI Venture Blog here
Seattle Times here
Puget Sound Business Journal here Read more →
Read the article here.
“The UW will lead a multi-institutional group pushing the limits of computers’ ability to interpret data and ultimately predict the behavior of complex systems. The project, involving seven U.S. universities, has received a $6.25 million, 5-year grant from the Department of Defense.
“‘A complex monitoring system has far too many pieces of information for any one person to look at,’ said principal investigator Pedro Domingos, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering. ‘This award lets us do the research to develop a system for the military to look at all the available information that might be valuable and use it to predict behavior.'” Read more →
“University of Washington researchers have developed software designed to let those who can’t work a handheld mouse use their voice instead to navigate the Web.” (See #17)
Project webpage here. Article here. Read more →
Read the article here.
“Beating the ‘botnets’ – armies of infected computers used to attack websites – requires borrowing tactics from the bad guys, say computer security researchers.
“A team at the University of Washington want to marshal swarms of good computers to neutralise the bad ones. They say their plan would be cheap to implement and could cope with botnets of any size.”
Read UW CSE “Phalanx” paper here Read more →