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 →
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 →