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 →
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 →