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 →
Trifacta – a big data startup with UW ties – secures $25 million Series C round
Trifacta, a San Francisco big data company co-founded by UW CSE professor Jeffrey Heer and UC Berkeley professor Joe Hellerstein – has completed a $25 million Series C financing round, led by Seattle-based Ignition Partners.
Trifacta provides a way to approach the bottlenecks in data analytics from a human perspective. The company is pioneering a Data Transformation Platform to prepare data for analysis.
Read more in Venture Beat here; TechCrunch here. Press release from Trifacta here.… Read more →
DARPA unveils hack-proof drone based on UW, UCSD research
Defense Tech writes:
“The Pentagon’s research arm unveiled a new drone built with secure software that prevents the control and navigation of the aircraft from being hacked.
“The program, called High Assurance Cyber Military Systems, or HACMS, uses software designed to thwart cyber attacks. It has been underway with the Defense Advance Research Project Agency for several years after originating at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Washington, said Kathleen Fisher, HACMS program manager for DARPA.… Read more →
UW CSE honors inspirational teachers
In every student’s academic life, there are some truly special teachers who provide life-changing inspiration – who cause the student to recognize what s/he can achieve and what s/he should aspire to.
UW CSE invites our undergraduates to nominate their most inspirational teachers from middle school, upper school, or community college. We host these teachers, their partners, and the students who nominated them at a dinner in the spring.
All teachers – from preschool to graduate school – are in… Read more →
Xconomy on AnswerDash and the UW Information School
A nice article in Xconomy discusses AnswerDash, a startup based on a four-year research effort by then-iSchool Ph.D. student Parmit Chilana (now a professor at the University of Waterloo) and her faculty advisors, iSchool professors (and CSE adjunct professors) Jake Wobbrock and Andy Ko:
“The University of Washington Information School has more than a century of history, and now, it’s first startup company, AnswerDash, which aims to improve self-service online help for e-commerce, government, and other Websites.
“While… Read more →
TechCrunch: From The Ivy League To State Schools, Demand For Computer Science Is Booming
TechCrunch reports:
“Demand for computer science classes and programs is booming at universities across the U.S., according to data presented this past week at the NCWIT summit for Women in IT by Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, and Stanford Computer Science professor Eric Roberts.
“At Lazowska’s own school, the number of incoming freshmen who plan to major in computer science is soaring – the graph… Read more →