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“The human hand is capable of more delicate movement than comparable organs of any other animal. It can wield a tool or weapon as easily as it can make a subtle gesture. So when a human loses her hand, she’s lost a remarkable implement. Yoky Matsuoka wants to ensure a loss like that isn’t permanent. She runs the Neurobiotics Lab at the University of Washington. That’s where she and her staff build robots that function like hands and other human body parts. Jeannie Yandel takes a tour of the lab.” Read more →
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UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus John Bennett, Director of the University of Colorado’s Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) Institute, sells naming rights to a bathroom in the ATLAS building for $25K. Why didn’t we think of that???
Don’t miss the video! Read more →
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“Google ‘Christophe Bisciglia.’ You’ll learn how the 27-year-old Google wunderkind, who grew up in Gig Harbor, made the cover of Business Week magazine last month for a breakthrough technological innovation.
“Bisciglia devised a way to re-create for the academic community a computational platform similar to the one used by Google engineers to manage a world’s worth of data and provide eye-blink-fast Internet searches. Bisciglia’s approach started with a bank of interconnected, data-packed computers installed at the University of Washington.
“Your Google search also will pull up a newspaper story describing how Bisciglia hacked into the computer network of a Port Orchard Internet service provider in 1999, sent disparaging e-mails about the company to all its customers, and uploaded a pornographic photo – a close-up of a man’s bare rear end – to the company’s Web site …” Read more →
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Samuel Karlin, a Stanford professor emeritus of mathematics and father of UW CSE professor Anna Karlin, died December 18 at Stanford Hospital. He was 83.
According to UW CSE professor Martin Tompa: “Karlin was one of the pioneers who applied mathematics and statistical models to problems in biological sequence analysis. He worked in this field for the last 20 years or so. He wrote many important papers, but probably the most influential was a series of papers with Stephen Altschul in the early 1990s laying out the statistical foundation for BLAST, the most important piece of software in computational biology. Their work is known as the Karlin-Altschul Theory and is taught in many computational biology courses.”
Karlin was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1989. He was the author of 10 books and more than 450 articles.
Earlier article from Stanford News Service here. Read more →
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“With New Year’s Eve a week away, our thoughts turn to bubbles and the year that was … We asked a panel of technology party guests to review a list of 25 events, trends and products that made the scene in 2007 and rate them on a scale of ‘forget about it’ (1) to ‘game-changer’ (5) …”
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska is quoted throughout. Read more →
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UW CSE alumnus Christophe Bisciglia is profiled in a Business Week cover story.
“What recruits needed, Bisciglia eventually decided, was advanced training. So one autumn day a year ago, when he ran into Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt between meetings, he floated an idea. He would use his 20% time, the allotment Googlers have for independent projects, to launch a course. It would introduce students at his alma mater, the University of Washington, to programming at the scale of a cloud. Call it Google 101. Schmidt liked the plan. Over the following months, Bisciglia’s Google 101 would evolve and grow. It would eventually lead to an ambitious partnership with IBM, announced in October, to plug universities around the world into Google-like computing clouds …
“How was Bisciglia going to give students access to this machine? The easiest option would have been to plug his class directly into the Google computer. But the company wasn’t about to let students loose in a machine loaded with proprietary software, brimming with personal data, and running a $10.6 billion business. So Bisciglia shopped for an affordable cluster of 40 computers. He placed the order, then set about figuring out how to pay for the servers. While the vendor was wiring the computers together, Bisciglia alerted a couple of Google managers that a bill was coming. Then he ‘kind of sent the expense report up the chain, and no one said no.’ … (“If you’re interested in someone who strictly follows the rules, Christophe’s not your guy,’ says Lazowska.”
MSNBC
Seattle Times
Don’t miss the BusinessWeek / CHINA cover! Read more →
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UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Stefan Saroiu, a faculty member in computer science at the University of Toronto, is one of three young faculty members featured on the University of Toronto home page.
“We all know now that the 20th century’s most influential innovation – electronic communications by way of your computer – has given rise to a whole new breed of criminals. They are the computer hackers who find nefarious ways to use information technology to rob you. Thankfully,computer scientists like Stefan Saroiu are preparing to do battle with these IT pickpockets.”
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