UW CSE has scored a 2014-15 academic year hat trick: “Best Paper” Awards at all three of the “DI” conferences:
Arrakis, in Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), in October;
Speculative Paxos, in Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), at the start of this week;
Herbie, in Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), today.
Go team!… Read more →
UW CSE systems group @ Ridge
UW CSE systems lab members (and friends) celebrate their award paper at NSDI with a visit to Ridge, “The Official Winery of UW CSE” – a tradition we inherited from Andrew Birrell and Mike Schroeder during their Xerox PARC CSL and DEC SRC days.
(Ridge was in fact established by engineers who worked at SRI for UW CSE’s founding chair, Jerre Noe. Jerre’s younger son Russ worked at Ridge in high school, which made it impossible for him to drink… Read more →
UW CSE scores “Best Paper” at PLDI ’15
UW CSE graduate student Pavel Panchekha, undergraduate student Alex Sanchez-Stern, graduate student James R. Wilcox, and professor Zachary Tatlock have received a “Best Paper” award at PLDI 2015, the 36th annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, for their paper “Automatically Improving Accuracy for Floating Point Expressions.”
The paper describes Herbie, a tool that automatically discovers and applies numerical analysis techniques to improve the accuracy of programs without requiring any specialized… Read more →
UW CSE scores “Best Paper” at NSDI ’15
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 →