A team of faculty and students from UW CSE’s Computer Systems Lab today received the Best Paper Award at the 12th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ’15) for the paper “Designing Distributed Systems Using Approximate Synchrony in Data Center Networks.” The team was led by UW CSE professor Dan Ports, and included UW CSE graduate students Jialin Li, Vincent Liu, and Naveen Kr. Sharma, and UW CSE professor Arvind Krishnamurthy… Read more →
Sham Kakade joins UW Computer Science & Engineering and Statistics
Sham Kakade, a world-class expert in statistical machine learning, will join the University of Washington this fall as the holder of a Washington Research Foundation Data Science Chair appointed jointly in Computer Science & Engineering and Statistics, expanding UW’s excellence in data science and strengthening the connection between these two highly ranked programs.
Sham is currently Principal Research Scientist at Microsoft Research, New England. His research has ranged from economics to neuroscience to applied and theoretical machine learning and… Read more →
New York Times: “40 Busy Years Later, a Microsoft Founder Considers His Creation”
Nick Wingfield interviews Paul G. Allen in the New York Times:
“Looking at Microsoft’s sprawling product line and 118,000 or so employees, it’s easy to forget that the company started with one modest product made by two ambitious people.
“In early April, one of those two people, Paul Allen, offered a reminder of Microsoft’s humble origins when he posted a photograph on Twitter commemorating the company’s 40th anniversary. The picture showed the introductory lines of the printed code for Microsoft’s… Read more →
The Wall Street Journal on Artificial Intelligence and UW CSE
UW CSE is heavily featured in this Wall Street Journal article on AI:
“When the University of Washington’s computer-science department wanted to poach artificial-intelligence expert Carlos Guestrin from Carnegie Mellon, it turned to Amazon.com Inc.
“The Seattle-based tech giant ponied up $2 million to fund two professorships: one for Mr. Guestrin, and another for his wife, who also works in the field. To seal the deal, Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos met the academic during a campus visit.
“‘[Mr. Bezos]… Read more →
New York Times: “Microsoft (Yes, Microsoft) Has a Far-Out Vision”
Nick Wingfield in the New York Times:
“A big part of Microsoft’s fate rests with its research arm, the quasi-academic group responsible for conjuring breakthroughs that will keep Microsoft relevant for generations to come.
“On Monday, Harry Shum, the Microsoft executive vice president who oversees the research operation, was bursting with pride while demonstrating Skype Translator, a new product that incorporates years of work by researchers to convert voice conversations from one language to another in real time …
“Breaking… Read more →
Emma Brunskill, Emily Fox win ONR Young Investigator Awards
UW CSE Bachelors alumna (and Carnegie Mellon faculty member) Emma Brunskill, and UW CSE adjunct professor (and Amazon Professor of Machine Learning in Statistics) Emily Fox, are two of the 36 recipients of 2015 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Awards.
The ONR Young Investigator Program is designed to promote the professional development of early-career academic scientists, both as researchers and as educators. For awardees, the funding supports laboratory equipment, graduate student stipends and scholarships, and other expenses critical to… Read more →
UW CSE’s Pedro Domingos and Dan Weld on the future of Artificial Intelligence
The “Science” section of today’s edition of the UW campus newspaper, The Daily, considers the future of artificial intelligence, featuring UW CSE professors Pedro Domingos and Dan Weld.
Pedro and Dan suggest that people’s fear of machines taking over the world is greatly exaggerated based on the current state of AI research and the difference between human thought – using common sense and multipurpose intelligence – and the way machines’ “thinking” is confined by their programming and the goals… Read more →
UW team wins Seattle’s “Hack the Commute”
Earlier this week, we posted about a team of UW students advised by UW CSE’s Alan Borning and Anat Caspi who made it into the final round of the city’s Hack the Commute competition. Last night, the team pitched their app, Access Map, to a panel of judges at City Hall – and they won!
Read all about it courtesy of this great article in GeekWire here and KUOW’s story here.
Congratulations to students Nick Bolten, Allie Deford,… Read more →
Tony Hey at U Bookstore, Town Hall Seattle
Tony Hey – UW CSE Affiliate Professor, Senior Data Science Fellow in the UW eScience Institute, and retired Vice President of Microsoft Research Connections – will discuss his recent book, The Computing Universe: A Journey Through A Revolution, at two events this spring:
Tuesday, May 12, 7 p.m., at the University Bookstore, 4326 University Way NE. Information here.
Tuesday, June 23, 7:30 p.m., at Town Hall Seattle, 1119 Eighth Avenue, downstairs. Information here (registration required).
Tony’s book is… Read more →
Team Hackcessible, advised by UW CSE, heading to the finals of Seattle’s Hack the Commute competition
Hackcessible – a team of students advised by UW CSE professor Alan Borning and Anat Caspi, director of the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology – will be one of three groups competing at Seattle City Hall this Wednesday in the championship round of Hack the Commute.
The students, who hail from Electrical Engineering, Human Centered Design & Engineering, and UW Tacoma’s Computer Science & Systems program, developed an app called AccessMap that enables users to plan their route in… Read more →