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 →
CSE startup GraphLab to release GraphLab Create
GraphLab, a Seattle-based startup launched in 2013 by UW CSE professor Carlos Guestrin and backed by our friends at Madrona Venture Group, is releasing next week its first commercial software, called GraphLab Create.
Guestrin says that the goal of Create is to help savvy engineers or data scientists take their machine learning projects from idea to production. It includes modules for building certain types of popular workloads, including recommendation engines, graph analysis and clustering and regression algorithms.
Read more… Read more →
Alumni startup Captricity raises $10M Series B round
Captricity Inc., a Berkeley, CA-based SaaS firm that gives enterprise customers fast and easy access to high quality data, today announced a $10 million Series B round of financing led by Atlas Venture, with Social+Capital also participating.
Captricity was founded by Kuang Chen, whose Ph.D. research in Tanzania and Uganda revealed the need to transform paper-based documents into digital data to improve organizations’ efficiency and service. Kuang is a UW CSE Bachelors alum, and completed his Berkeley Ph.D. working with… Read more →
Mirabile dictu! Computer Science is part of STEM!
Most of the intellectual excitement in STEM is in Computer Science.
Most of the jobs in STEM are in Computer Science.
Most of the student interest in STEM is in Computer Science.
Unfortunately, the chemists, physicists, biologists, and astronomers are partial to the STEM status quo of 100 years ago. But today, thanks to the U.S. House of Representatives, Computer Science is officially part of STEM. By voice vote, the House passed HR 5031, the STEM Education Act of 2014… Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Roxana Geambasu accepts 2014 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship
At today’s Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, UW CSE Ph.D. alum Roxana Geambasu – now a faculty member at Columbia University – was recognized along with the other recipients of 2014 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowships.
Congratulations Roxana!
… Read more →
Vint Cerf addresses Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee
In July 17 testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Google’s Vint Cerf states:
Basic and applied research go hand-in-hand, informing and stimulating each other in a never-ending Yin and Yang of partnership.
Research takes time.
It’s risky – there are no guarantees.
Failure is the handmaiden of wisdom in the scientific world: when we make predictions or build systems based on our theoretical models, we must be prepared for and learn from our failures.
Computers, computation,… Read more →
UW CSE’s Pedro Domingos wins KDD 2014 Innovation Award!
UW CSE professor Pedro Domingos has just been named as the recipient of the KDD 2014 Innovation Award, the highest award for technical excellence in the field of data mining and data science.
Pedro was recognized “for his foundational research in data stream analysis, cost-sensitive classification, adversarial learning, and Markov logic networks.”
Pedro carried out some of the earliest research on mining data streams – his VFML toolkit is one of the best open-source resources for stream mining. Another… Read more →
250 UW CSE Bay Area alums and friends convene at Pixar
Many thanks to Tony DeRose for hosting 250 UW CSE alums and friends – plus faculty members Ali Farhadi, Dan Grossman, Ed Lazowska, Hank Levy, and Barbara Mones, and staff members Casey Amundson, Kay Beck-Benton, Anne Fitzmaurice-Adams, Lara Littlefield, and Sergey Smirnov – at Pixar on the evening of Thursday July 10.
It was a phenomenal evening, and a great chance to reconnect!
Looking forward to next year!… Read more →
San Jose and Seattle top NerdWallet’s rankings of best places for tech jobs
GeekWire reports on NerdWallet’s new ranking of best places for tech jobs – San Jose and Seattle are head-and-shoulders above the rest.
See the GeekWire post here.
… Read more →
Better visualizing of fitness app data helps discover trends, reach goals
UW News describes research by CSE’s James Fogarty and his collaborators Daniel Epstein, Felicia Cordeiro, Elizabeth Bales, and Sean Munson:
“Smartphone apps can track where we eat our meals, when we commute to and from work and how many minutes we exercise each day. Ten thousand steps today? Check.
“More people are opting to use their phones as “life-logging” devices, but is the data they collect actually useful? Massive amounts of information showing your life patterns over a week, month… Read more →