San Francisco-based credit card fraud prevention company Sift Science – led by UW CSE alum Jason Tan – has raised an $18 million Series B round led by Spark Capital with participation from Union Square Ventures, Max Levchin, and First Round Capital.
Sift Science has developed a method to detect fraudulent charges as they’re happening, pairing a smart UI with machine learning. Sift Science has raised $23.6 million in total funding to date.
Read more on TechCrunch here.… Read more →
NBC’s Today Show features UW CSE’s age progression software
Ever wonder what the Today Show’s Natalie Morales will look like when she’s 60?
We didn’t either. But the Today Show thought their viewers might, so featured UW CSE’s age progression software this morning. The software, created by Ira Kemelmacher-Schlizerman, Supasorn Suwajanakorn, and Steve Seitz, computes stunningly accurate age progression images from a single photograph.
Watch the video segment (preceded by an annoying 30-second commercial) below. Transcript on the Today Show website here. Learn more about the… Read more →
Yejin Choi, Franzi Roesner join the UW CSE faculty
UW CSE is delighted to announce our first two hires of the 2014 faculty recruiting season.
Yejin Choi, currently Assistant Professor at SUNY Stony Brook, will be joining UW CSE this fall. Yejin is a rising star in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a focus on studying non-literal and contextual language understanding. Her work on automatically analyzing writing style – e.g., to detect deceptive online reviews or predict the success of a novel – has gained significant academic and… Read more →
The New York Times on Code.org
The lead article in Sunday’s New York Times is about the movement to teach computer science, computational thinking, and computer programming in K-12, driven by Seattle’s Code.org:
“It is a stark change for computer science, which for decades was treated like a stepchild, equated with trade classes like wood shop …
“Computer programming should be taught in every school, said Hadi Partovi, the founder of Code.org and a former executive at Microsoft. He called it as essential as ‘learning about… Read more →
UW CSE’s Shayan Oveis Gharan is Honorable Mention in 2013 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award competition
Each year, ACM recognizes a winner and one or two honorable mentions in its Doctoral Dissertation Award competition – the highest-impact dissertations among roughly 2,000 Ph.D.s granted.
UW CSE professor Shayan Oveis Gharan is one of two Honorable Mentions in the 2013 competition, announced this week.
Shayan received his Ph.D. from Stanford last year. He is spending the current year as a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley and will join UW CSE during the 2014-15 academic year. His research involves… Read more →
Madrona scores at GeekWire Awards
CSE’s Oren Etzioni, GeekWire‘s “Hire of the Year,” is a long-time Venture Partner at Madrona Venture Group, which has backed several of his startups and more than a dozen UW CSE startups in all.
Additionally, our friend Julie Sandler, Principal at Madrona, is GeekWire‘s “Geek of the Year.”
And Rover.com, created by our friend Greg Gottesman, Managing Director at Madrona, is GeekWire‘s “Startup of the Year.”
Read about all the GeekWire Awards here.… Read more →
CSE’s Oren Etzioni is GeekWire’s “Hire of the Year”
Long-time CSE professor Oren Etzioni, recently departed to lead Paul Allen’s new Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is GeekWire‘s “Hire of the Year”:
“Perhaps no one has been more synonymous with the startup ethos at the University of Washington than computer science professor Oren Etzioni, a mainstay on campus for more than two decades and an inspiration for budding entrepreneurs in academia.
“Etzioni moved on from academia after nearly 30 years this past September after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen… Read more →
NSF highlights student projects from UW Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering
The National Science Foundation highlights games created by students in UW’s NSF Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering:
“Tech Sandbox: The playground of neural engineering. University of Washington students compete in creating projects that demonstrate the core principles of neural engineering.”
Read more here. Learn about CSNE here.… Read more →
What will you look like when you grow old?
The Seattle Times gushes over UW CSE’s age progression software, created by Ira Kemelmacher-Schlizerman, Supasorn Suwajanakorn, and Steve Seitz:
“We also asked the program to age a number of others – from Miley Cyrus to Russell Wilson to Macklemore – to show them in their 60s. It showed us what Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain would have looked like had they lived, to 71 and 47 this year, respectively.
“No wonder so many plastic surgeons get rich.”
Read… Read more →
Code.org @ UW
This evening UW welcomed Hadi Partovi of Code.org at the Washington Education Innovation Forum, organized by the Center for Reinventing Public Education. UW CSE, the UW College of Education, and Washington STEM co-sponsored the event.
State Representative Reuven Carlyle – known for advocating policies that pass the common sense sniff test – emceed a panel that included two Seattle-area high school students in addition to Hadi: Ifrah Abshir, a sophomore at Rainier Beach High School, and Megan Fu, a junior… Read more →