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 →
UW CSE featured: “Some Universities Crack Code in Drawing Women to Computer Science”
The New York Times reports:
“One of the reasons so few women work in tech is that few choose to study computer science or engineering. Only 18 percent of computer science graduates in the United States are women, down from 37 percent in 1985.
“At a few top college programs, though, that appears to be changing.
“At Carnegie Mellon University, 40 percent of incoming freshmen to the School of Computer Science are women, the largest group ever. At the University… Read more →
CS4HS 2014: Supporting K-12 teachers
This is the 8th year of CS4HS, a computer science summer workshop for middle school and high school teachers of STEM subjects.
CS4HS is sponsored by Google. The program was initiated by UW, Carnegie Mellon, and UCLA in 2007, and in recent years has had more than 100 participating universities.
60 teachers are joining us this week for 3 days of intensive exposure to computer science and “computational thinking” led by UW CSE faculty, staff, and friends.
Learn about CS4HS… Read more →
U.S. Representative Derek Kilmer: “How America can produce the next Bill Gates”
A phenomenal essay by U.S. Representative Derek Kilmer from Washington’s 6th District:
“America must play for keeps in this increasingly competitive environment. If we’re going to have any chance at keeping up, we absolutely have to make research and development a top priority.”
Read it! It’s worth your time. It’s here.… Read more →
Seattle Times on UW CSE’s Center for Game Science and non-profit educational startup Enlearn
“Educators have been struggling for decades to resolve a fundamental problem: Students who are in the same grade because of age often vary greatly in skills, abilities and experiences, even on the first day of kindergarten.
“Teachers are told to differentiate their instruction so that each student gets what she needs — a good idea in theory, but hard to pull off in a real classroom …
“That’s the big puzzle that University of Washington computer science professor Zoran Popović… Read more →
Remembering Brett Helsel
Brett Helsel, a friend of UW CSE for nearly 30 years, died last week at age 54 after suffering a cardiac arrest while paddle boarding on Lake Washington.
Brett is best known for leading the engineering teams at Seattle’s F5 Networks (1998-2003) and Isilon Systems (2008-2012). His history with UW CSE, though, goes back to the late 1980s, when he was an engineer with Digital Equipment Corporation. Working with UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska, Brett arranged for DEC to donate equipment… Read more →