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 →
UW CSE unable to accommodate hundreds of highly qualified applicants in most recent round of admissions
Across the nation and in our state, student interest in computer science is booming. This is visible in enrollment in introductory courses, demand for the major, and non-major demand for upper-division courses. Extensive data on these trends is available here.
At the University of Washington, students apply to majors after successfully fulfilling prerequisite courses – either at UW or at one of the state’s community and technical colleges. The capacity of various majors – the number of students who… Read more →
UW CSE @ ISSTA
René Just and Michael Ernst of UW CSE, along with their colleague Gordon Fraser of the University of Sheffield, have been awarded an ACM Distinguished Paper award for their paper “Efficient mutation analysis by propagating and partitioning infected execution states,” presented on July 25 at ISSTA, the premier conference in software testing and analysis. The paper speeds up mutation analysis by 40% over the previous state of the art. Mutation analysis is widely used in testing research, because… Read more →
NationSwell: “All colleges should take notice of how these schools are reducing the gender gap”
NationSwell picks up on recent coverage in the New York Times of steps taken by the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, and Harvey Mudd College to increase the proportion of women pursuing computer science:
“At Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, 40 percent of incoming freshmen are women, and almost a third of computer science graduates this year were women at the University of Washington. And that’s not all. Harvey Mudd College in California boasts that 40 percent… Read more →
EFF acknowledges UW CSE’s Franzi Roesner for contributions to “Privacy Badger”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released a beta version of Privacy Badger, a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that detects and blocks online advertising and other embedded content that tracks you without your permission.
Privacy Badger includes UW CSE’s ShareMeNot, a browser extension that prevents third-party buttons (such as Facebook’s “Like” or Twitter’s “tweet” button) from tracking you, while still allowing you to use them.
UW CSE’s Franzi Roesner is acknowledged in the EFF press release… Read more →
UW CSE @ CRA Conference at Snowbird
When Harvey Mudd College president Maria Klawe needed to demonstrate how to handle a know-it-all male student during her Tuesday keynote “Broadening the Computing Research Community” at the Computing Research Association’s semi-annual Conference at Snowbird (a gathering of the leaders of North America’s Ph.D.-granting academic programs, industry labs, and government labs in computing), who’d she pick as her victim? UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska.
UW CSE was highlighted multiple times during the meeting: by Peter Swire (Georgia Institute of Technology) in… Read more →