At the 2014 UW College of Engineering Diamond Awards celebration on Thursday night, 2002 CSE Bachelors alum Brad Fitzpatrick received the Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement. Brad is a widely respected leader in the open-source community, improving software development culture and creating open source projects used by millions of web sites around the world. Early-on, he created Memcached to support the exploding user community of his social network startup LiveJournal – today used by most web-scale services including YouTube,… Read more →
UW CSE hosts 2014 Youth Apps Challenge Awards
On Tuesday evening, UW CSE hosted the awards ceremony for Western Washington’s Youth Apps Challenge.
Sponsored by the Technology Alliance, the Youth Apps Challenge provided middle school and high school students the opportunity to design and build apps. Teams of up to five students were eligible to participate. Prizes for the winning students included Android tablets, t-shirts, and visits to local technology companies.
The apps were amazing! Learn more here.… Read more →
Truly Inspirational: Empowering Blind Students in Science and Engineering
On Monday and Tuesday, UW CSE’s Richard Ladner hosted a workshop that brought together 19 blind or vision-impaired college students in science and engineering fields from across the nation, 13 blind or vision-impaired STEM professionals, and a number of regional civic, technology, and education leaders. It was a truly inspirational two days.
The students themselves were hugely impressive – many of them are sure to become leaders in STEM fields.
The professionals were extraordinary. To mention just a few (read… Read more →
Emina Torlak, Xi Wang join the UW CSE faculty
UW CSE is delighted to announce our third and fourth hires of the 2014 faculty recruiting season.
Emina Torlak, a researcher in software engineering and programming languages, received her Bachelors (2003), Masters (2004), and Ph.D. (2009) degrees from MIT, and subsequently worked at IBM Research, LogicBlox, and as a research scientist at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on automating and improving the programming process; in particular, she is an expert in using SAT-solvers and constraint languages for automatic reasoning… Read more →
UW CSE’s Gaetano Borriello, students featured in Columns
The June issue of Columns – the University of Washington Alumni Magazine – features work by CSE professor Gaetano Borriello and students including Rohit Chaudhri, Brian DeRenzi, and Saloni Parikh, in the article “Mobile Medicine”:
“For infants in sub-Saharan Africa who are born pre-term, with low birth weight or with HIV, access to human breast milk can mean the difference between life and death. Human milk banks have been established to solve this problem, but they tend… Read more →
Global health care provider AMPATH reaches one millionth person powered by ODK
In 2009, global health care provider AMPATH began deploying community health workers in rural villages and communities in Western Kenya as part of a home-based HIV/AIDS counseling and testing program.
Armed with a bag of testing and counseling supplies and a smartphone with a GPS and AMPATH’s electronic medical record system, the community health workers travel by foot door-to-door assuring that every person over the age of 13 and every at-risk child was tested for HIV.
AMPATH’s smartphone-based data collection… Read more →
The value of diversity in the tech workforce
Stimulated by Google’s release of its workforce diversity statistics, USA Today describes the generally dismal under-representation of women and minorities in the tech workforce.
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska is quoted on the importance:
“Doing so isn’t about window dressing. It actually makes it a better and more profitable company, says Ed Lazowska, a professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.
“‘Engineering (particularly of software) is a hugely creative endeavor. Greater diversity – more points of… Read more →
“Meet the algorithm that can learn ‘everything about anything'”
Gigaom waxes ecstatic about research at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), led by UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni:
“Researchers from Allen Institute for AI have built a computer system capable of teaching itself many facets of broad concepts by scouring and analyzing search engines using natural language processing and computer vision techniques.”
The system, LEVAN (Learn EVerything about ANything), is a collaboration between AI2 and UW CSE, involving (among others) AI2’s Santosh Divvala (a UW CSE postdoc alumnus and… Read more →
UW CSE workshop connects blind college students with professionals
On June 2-3, the Empowering Blind Students in Science and Engineering workshop will be held at the Talaris Conference Center. This one-of-a-kind workshop brings together 18 blind undergraduate students from around the country and professionals from a broad range of field – some blind, some not – for one-on-one mentoring and networking. The program will focus on learning from each other to maximize chances for a successful career and on raising awareness of the potential of blind professionals in the… Read more →
“Shocker! The historians are against change!”
That was the comment of CSE professor Ed Lazowska’s younger son – a lawyer who majored in economics and political science as an undergraduate, so hardly a “true believer” – upon reading a Washington Post column attacking Lazowska’s recent letter in the New York Times regarding the move to offer computer science in K-12 schools across the nation.
Read Lazowska’s letter here. Read the Washington Post column here. Learn about Neanderthals here.… Read more →