We hold alumni events annually at the companies in Seattle and the Bay Area that employ significant numbers of our alums. On August 12 we were at Google’s Kirkland WA engineering office; on August 13 we were at Google’s Seattle engineering office. Google has close to 2,000 engineers in these offices, growing to 3,000 – including lots of our alums. It’s great to re-connect!
Another recent post related to UW CSE alums at Google is here.… Read more →
Fracking in Pittsburgh: Will CMU’s Gates & Hillman Centers be next?
The New York Times reports on a financial lifeline for Pittsburgh International Airport:
“Pittsburgh’s airport is struggling financially and mired in debt …
“For salvation, airport officials are looking down – about 6,000 feet. The quiet runways, it turns out, are sitting on enough natural gas to run the whole state of Pennsylvania for a year and a half, and this month, Consol Energy will drill its first well here to tap the gas …
“After the drilling, which uses… Read more →
Alum of the future …
Q: What’s the perfect attire for the child of two UW CSE Ph.D. alums?
A: A UW CSE t-shirt, of course!
(As Mom said on Facebook: “So very appropriate for a kid who owes his existence to UW CSE!“)
Thanks to Julie Letchner and Seth Bridges for the cute photo!… Read more →
Chronicle of Higher Education on ties between academic CS programs and industry
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on ever-closer ties between academia and industry in Computer Science:
“Professors and industry leaders across the computer-science landscape say that their worlds have never been closer and that a new generation of tech giants is leading the push …
“The reasons are clear. Academics need access to the data and scale that only industry can generate, not to mention the money that large corporations like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo provide in an age of… Read more →
CSE’s Ryan Drapeau featured in Google Student Blog
Google’s Student Blog – news and updates especially for students – has a feature article today on UW CSE bachelors student Ryan Drapeau, who’s interning at Google Mountain View this summer along with many of his UW CSE classmates. A few excerpts:
Can you provide us with a high-level description of your summer project?
I work on the Accessibility Engineering team in Google Research in Mountain View, CA. As a team, we build innovative products and solutions to help make… Read more →
CSE alum startup Parenthoods in TechCrunch
A great article in today’s TechCrunch on Parenthoods, a new Y Combinator-backed mobile platform created by alums Siobhan Quinn and Jeni Axline:
“Becoming a parent is an amazing, life-changing experience, but it can also be one that’s isolating and lonely – especially if your pre-baby social activities involved spur-of-the moment invites, happy hours, and nights out on the town. Parenthoods, a new Y Combinator-backed mobile platform, wants to help with the social isolation parenthood can bring by offering… Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Noah Snavely wins 2014 SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award
Congratulations once again to UW CSE Ph.D. alum Noah Snavely, who on Monday will receive the 2014 SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award, the top award for young researchers in the computer graphics field.
Noah is a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, working in the Cornell Graphics and Vision Group. (He is currently on leave at Google, which acquired a startup that he founded.) His research interests are in computer vision and computer graphics,… Read more →
No-power Wi-Fi connectivity could fuel Internet of Things reality
UW News reports on UW’s WiFi Backscatter technology:
“Imagine a world in which your wristwatch or other wearable device communicates directly with your online profiles, storing information about your daily activities where you can best access it – all without requiring batteries. Or, battery-free sensors embedded around your home could track minute-by-minute temperature changes and send that information to your thermostat to help conserve energy …
“Now, University of Washington engineers have designed a new communication system that uses radio… Read more →
Alvin Cheung joins the UW CSE faculty
Alvin Cheung, a researcher in databases whose work integrates techniques from programming languages and systems, will be joining UW CSE as a faculty member this coming year.
Alvin’s research focuses on co-optimizing data-intensive applications by examining the database and the runtime system and environment together, which can enable order-of-magnitude speedups in applications. For example, his paper demonstrating how to convert application functions written as imperative code into SQL queries, so that they can be optimized by the data management… Read more →
UW’s “WiFi Backscatter” featured in MIT Technology Review
MIT Technology Review has a super article on research by professors Shyam Gollakota, Josh Smith, and David Wetherall and graduate students Bryce Kellogg and Aaron Parks:
“Engineers have worked for decades on ways to generate power by harvesting radio signals from the air, a ubiquitous resource thanks to radio, TV, and cellular network transmitters. But although enough energy can be collected that way to run low-powered circuits, the power required to actively transmit data is significantly higher. Harvesting ambient radio… Read more →