A phenomenal article by John Markoff in the New York Times, discussing the approaches of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, with extensive quotation of Paul G. Allen and AI2’s CEO (and UW CSE professor) Oren Etzioni.
“Mr. Allen, who noted that he came from a family of librarians, said his decision to fund an artificial intelligence research lab was inspired by the question of how books and other knowledge might be encoded to become the basis for computer interactions… Read more →
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska leads academic amici supporting Microsoft in key privacy case
Microsoft General Counsel and Executive Vice President Brad Smith writes:
“Today represents an important milestone in our litigation concerning the U.S. Government’s attempt to use a search warrant to compel Microsoft to obtain and turn over email of a customer stored in Ireland. That’s because 10 groups are filing their ‘friend of the court’ briefs in New York today.
“Seldom has a case below the Supreme Court attracted the breadth and depth of legal involvement we’re seeing today. Today’s ten… Read more →
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska to NRC Computer Science & Telecommunications Board: “Use the commercial cloud!”
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska addresses the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board’s “Committee on Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure to Support US Science in 2017-2020.”
“We have a crazy obsession with buying shiny objects – the bigger and more expensive, the better!”
“We’re investing 9:1 in hardware over software – it ought to be the reverse!”
“We have a dogged resistance to utilizing commercial software, services, and systems. We purchase our own. We operate our own.… Read more →
UW CSE’s Stuart Reges in GeekWire: “This professor bakes 1,400 cookies for his computer science students during finals week”
“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 →