Several years ago, we established the tradition of honoring two outstanding UW Computer Science & Engineering alumni each year as part of our graduation ceremony. In doing this, we have three objectives:
To honor some of our most distinguished alumni by recognizing their extraordinary achievements.
To ensure that graduating students know that they are joining a long tradition of excellence and accomplishment.
To inspire current members of the UW CSE graduating class.
The recipients of the 2014 UW CSE Alumni… Read more →
New York Times: CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Dean on “Intelligence Too Big for a Single Machine”
In the New York Times special section on Cloud Computing (which also identified Seattle as the “the center of the most intensive engineering in cloud computing”), CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Dean – Google Senior Fellow – is quoted extensively:
“Jeff Dean, a research fellow at Google, focuses on accelerating the progress of artificial intelligence in tasks like computer vision and understanding the meaning of words. Until a few years ago, for example, Google image searches were executed mainly… Read more →
Happy Birthday Stefan Savage!
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Stefan Savage – star professor at UCSD CSE – turned 45 today.
At some point Stefan had expressed a fondness for Adirondack chairs. His UCSD faculty colleagues, led by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Geoff Voelker, came through.
Said Stefan, after reality met fantasy head-on:
“What is theory with these? Is this some kind of New England Calvinist thing where sitting on your lawn on a nice day felt too good so, inspired by church pews, they… Read more →
New York Times: “Silicon Valley Tries to Remake the Idea Machine”
Ed Lazowska comments in response to this New York Times article:
“The real message in this article is easy to miss:
“‘Moonshots’ are heroic engineering efforts that draw upon decades of fundamental research. Without fundamental research, there can be no moonshots.
“So, who’s doing it? ‘Back in the day,’ IBM Research and Bell Labs invested in fundamental research, alongside the Federal government. Today, to first approximation, only Microsoft (through Microsoft Research) does so. Google X, as Astro Teller states, is… Read more →
New York Times: “Seattle, the New Center of a Tech Boom”
“Rain or shine, Seattle has quickly become the center of the most intensive engineering in cloud computing: the design and management of global-scale data centers …
“Besides talent that knows how to build infrastructure, Seattle has a number of leading cloud software companies. Tableau Software, a leader in the computer visualization of large sets of data, is across the street from Google in Fremont. Concur, used for online expense forms, is in Bellevue, near Microsoft Azure. Other companies include Chef,… Read more →
Googlers and UW CSE students in uProxy hackathon
UW CSE and Brave New Software partnered to develop uProxy, a project seeded by Google Ideas.
One out of every three people live in societies where free expression is severely restricted. When corrupt or repressive groups control the Internet’s infrastructure, they often subject their citizens’ Internet traffic to censorship, surveillance, and misdirection. uProxy enables friends to provide each other with a trusted pathway to the web.
This week, Googlers and UW CSE students are participating in a uProxy hackathon… Read more →
Remembering Eliana Hechter
A memorial service was held today for Eliana Hechter, who died on Wednesday, April 16, 2014.
Eliana was briefly a CSE major, but graduated magna cum laude from the University of Washington in 2006 – at the age of 18 – with a degree in mathematics. She received a Goldwater Scholarship and was a 2006 Rhodes Scholar – at the time the second-youngest person to ever receive the Rhodes. She was also selected for a Marshall Scholarship but declined in… Read more →
UW CSE’s Tina Donahue takes Ballard Criterium Women’s Cat 4
California Chrome lost. You should have put your money on UW CSE academic advisor Tina Donahue instead. Tina took the Women’s Category 4 race in the 2014 Ballard Criterium by 15 lengths, as well as taking all but one of the intermediate sprint prizes (and you’d have to be nuts to sprint for a gift certificate to the Lock & Keel).
Congratulations Tina!… Read more →
Dr. James Mickens keynotes UW CSE PoCSci ’14
Dr. James Mickens, renowned researcher in the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft’s Redmond lab and recipient of the 2040 ACM A.M. Turing Award, delivered a stirring keynote at today’s UW CSE Potentially Computer Science Conference 2014 (PoCSci ‘14), “The Premier Sham Conference for Potentially Computer Science Research.”
PoCSci is the conference that in 2002 – its second year – revolutionized the field of Potentially Computer Science Research through Doug Zongker’s work “Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken” (YouTube… Read more →
The triumphal return of Luis Ceze
Regular readers of this space will recall that three weeks ago Luis Ceze’s knee was destroyed at a social event organized by Hank Levy.
We are pleased to report that Luis has surfaced once again (he has been seen by us only in X-rays up to this point), sporting a lasting memento of Hank’s hospitality.
Says Luis, who looks in the bright side of everything: “Now that I have a handicapped sticker, I can go to Capitol Hill for… Read more →