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 →
NY Times: “Microsoft’s Top Lawyer Is the Tech World’s Envoy”
A wonderful New York Times profile of Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel:
“Mr. Smith is one of the most influential voices inside Microsoft …
“But Mr. Smith’s weight extends to the wider tech industry as well, partly because of his understanding of Washington. Mr. Smith worked for years as a lawyer there before moving to Microsoft’s headquarters here outside Seattle. While much of the tech industry looks upon government with a strong sense of skepticism, if not disdain, he has… Read more →
“The Creative Mind”: Conversations with Brown University computer scientists Andy van Dam and Chad Jenkins
Brown University has produced video interviews with one dozen of its leading faculty members in a series titled “The Creative Mind.” Included in the series are computer science faculty members Andy van Dam – who mentored UW CSE faculty members Ed Lazowska, David Notkin, Zoran Popovic, David Salesin (now at Adobe), and John Zahorjan, plus countless UW CSE graduate students, as undergraduates – and Chad Jenkins.
The full set of interviews is here. Andy’s interview is here. Chad’s… Read more →
Bellingham Herald and The Olympian: “Expand, don’t dilute, UW medical school”
The Bellingham Herald and The Olympian, in identical editorials, argue persuasively that the most cost-effective way to expand medical education in the Pacific Northwest is to grow the University of Washington’s now-43-year-old WWAMI program, rather than spending $150M to create a new medical school at Washington State University.
“It was a revolutionary concept in 1971 when the University of Washington School of Medicine pioneered the nation’s first collaborative medical school with the University of Alaska and Washington State University. The… Read more →
Bloomberg interviews Ed Lazowska, Matt McIlwain, others, on Microsoft job cuts
Bloomberg interviewed UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska, Madrona Venture Group’s Matt McIlwain, and others regarding the impact of Microsoft’s job cuts on the Puget Sound region.
‘”We all have effectively an infinite number of open positions for software developers, program managers,’ said Spencer Rascoff, chief executive officer of Zillow …
“‘I guarantee you Microsoft is going to keep hiring like crazy,’ said Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle.… Read more →
Noah Smith joins UW CSE, helping to create a world-class NLP group at UW
Noah Smith, an expert in natural language processing (NLP) and computational social science, will join UW CSE next year. He is currently Finmeccania Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science, Language Technologies Institute, at Carnegie Mellon University.
Noah is widely regarded as a leading researcher in NLP, known for significant contributions in both core algorithms and innovative applications. His honors include a Best Paper Award from the Association for Computational Linguistics for work in syntactic parsing and a… Read more →