“Many students in Stuart Reges’ computer science classes pull all-nighters, cramming in hopes of acing the introductory courses at the University of Washington.
“Little do they know that their professor is doing the same – just in front of an oven and with spatula in hand.
“A principal lecturer at the UW, Reges has baked chocolate chip cookies for his students during finals week for the past six years, a tradition that first began when he taught at Stanford in… Read more →
UW CSE’s Raj Rao on brain-to-brain communication, in Scientific American Mind
“The gist of our strategy was to use electrodes arranged on one person’s scalp to pick up brain waves, a technique known as electroencephalography … The signal would dictate how to electrically stimulate the recipient’s brain.”
Read more here.
… Read more →
UW CSE’s Justin Bare and Alan Borning create carbon tax impact calculator
UW News reports:
“University of Washington computer scientists have partnered with members of the Carbon Washington grassroots campaign to create an online tool that lets residents calculate how a state carbon tax swap proposed by the organization would impact them financially.
“The calculator offers information users can’t find elsewhere and is meant to be a neutral, unbiased tool.
“‘The tool should be very useful to voters trying to decide their position on the carbon tax policy. Many people will have… Read more →
“Cracking the gender imbalance code”
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Anne Condon, Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, offers thoughts on addressing the gender imbalance in the field.
“It’s still the case today that anybody with a good high school background in science can get into computer science without any programming experience. But people probably think that without a computer background, they will get behind. That really isn’t true …
“High school students get very little exposure to… Read more →
UW CSE’s Hank Levy – “He has a Masters degree!”
(Not really …)… Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Andrei Alexandrescu: “The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of”
An article in Wired from July that we missed at the time:
“[2009 UW CSE Ph.D. alum] Andrei Alexandrescu didn’t stand much of a chance. And neither did Walter Bright.
“When the two men met for beers at a Seattle bar in 2005, each was in the midst of building a new programming language, trying to remake the way the world creates and runs its computer software …
“The result is a programming language that just might defy the odds.… Read more →
Computer Science: The Ever-Expanding Sphere
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska received the following invitation from a colleague at UCSD’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering: “Our CSE department would like to invite you to visit as part of our Distinguished Lecture Series to give a talk on your department’s experience in growing diversity – we are both interested in demographics (increasing the number of women and underrepresented students and faculty) as well as diversity of thought (how your department has benefited from growth in non-traditional areas).”… Read more →
Stuart Reges = Cookie Monster
For many years, CSE professor Stuart Reges has baked chocolate chip cookies for his students to enjoy while taking the final exam.
It was a lot easier before the enrollment in CSE 142 (our “CS 1” course) reached 1,000 this fall, and enrollment in CSE 143 (our “CS 2” course) reached 400. But Stuart, who is teaching both, was undaunted!
After all, what’s 154,000 calories (1,400 cookies) among friends?!?!… Read more →
President Obama does the Hour of Code!
It’s Computer Science Education week, and President Barack Obama is the latest newsmaker to join the challenge to learn to code. The “Coder in Chief” sat down with Code.org – the Seattle non-profit that created the Hour of Code event — to become the first president to write a few lines of Javascript. Read about it in GeekWire here.
Hadi Partovi (Code.org CEO), you are amazing!
Do your own Hour of Code here!… Read more →
“It’s Time to Intelligently Discuss Artificial Intelligence”
UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni, CEO of Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, refutes the AI fear-mongering of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking:
“The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy …
“To say that AI will start doing what it wants for its own purposes is like saying a calculator will start making its own calculations …
“So where does this confusion between autonomy and intelligence come from? From… Read more →