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 →
Yuriy Brun, Thu Nguyen win 2014 Microsoft Research “Awards for the Software Engineering Innovation Foundation”
The Microsoft Research Awards for the Software Engineering Innovation Foundation (SEIF) support academic research in software engineering technologies, tools, practices, and teaching methods.
In 2014, MSR received more than 100 proposals for research grants in foundational software engineering, application of software engineering to Internet of Things, and infrastructure for cloud-scale software. After a thorough review process within Microsoft Research, 12 projects were selected for support. Among the 12:
UW CSE postdoc alum Yuriy Brun, now a faculty member at… Read more →
Oracle kicks off cloud computing technology center in Seattle
From the New York Times:
“Score another one for Seattle.
“On Tuesday, Oracle kicked off its new cloud computing technology center in Seattle …
“Amazon, of course, is based in Seattle, and has the headquarters of Amazon Web Services there. Across Lake Washington, Microsoft’s cloud business, Azure, is a centerpiece of chief executive Satya Nadella’s plans to spur Microsoft’s growth. Google has also located its cloud business in Seattle, and Century Link increased its cloud presence there when it purchased… Read more →
“New learning technologies enable school choice”
Zoran Popovic becomes the first UW CSE faculty member to be endorsed by the Heritage Foundation:
“A computer scientist may have come up with a solution for customizing math instruction for different students in the same classroom, something education has been seeking for years.
“University of Washington Professor Zoran Popovic has developed computer games that adapt to the skills of individual players to help them more efficiently learn math.”
Read more here. Learn about Zoran here. UW Center… Read more →
Xconomy: “GraphLab Off to Fast Start with System for Building Predictive Apps”
Xconomy reports on UW CSE startup GraphLab:
“In the course of a mere 14 months, Seattle startup GraphLab Inc. has gone from a computer science professor and a few colleagues creating open source software to analyze graph datasets to a 25-person company with a new, full-fledged system for building predictive applications that draw on a range of data types. Their customers include Exxon and Pandora.
GraphLab, which grew from the machine learning work of co-founder and CEO Carlos … Read more →
CSE’s Yejin Choi in Popular Mechanics
“Sports scores, quarterly earnings, and the vicissitudes of a financial portfolio are easy enough to arrange into tables of numbers, says Yejin Choi, an expert in natural language processing at the University of Washington. Opinions, however, are bit more challenging to quantify. In addition, software programs have a hard time imitating the rhetoric of a serious op-ed writer.
“‘One is the content challenge; the other is the style challenge,’ she says.
“On the content side, many AI researchers are… Read more →
Update: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science
A presentation on the explosion of student interest in computer science, prepared by UW’s Ed Lazowska and Stanford’s Eric Roberts for the 2014 NCWIT Summit on Women and Information Technology, was updated by Ed Lazowska and UMass Amherst’s Jim Kurose for the 2014 Computing Research Association Conference at Snowbird.
Additional data is presented, as well as suggestions from audiences and discussions at NCWIT, the NSF CISE Advisory Committee, and the CRA Conference at Snowbird:
Observations
Best Practices: how to respond?… Read more →
“In Silicon Valley diversity conversations, age is left out”
The San Francisco Chronicle discusses an oft-neglected aspect of tech workforce diversity: age.
“‘Walk into any hot tech company and you’ll find disproportionate representation of young Caucasian and Asian males,’ said Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. ‘All forms of diversity are important, for the same reasons: workforce demand, equality of opportunity and quality of end product.'”
That’s of course only a tiny fraction of what… Read more →