UW CSE students and faculty in systems, architecture, and networking (SANE) spent Friday at a research retreat at the Talaris conference center.
Luis Ceze organized the event, but concocted a lame excuse for missing it. (Get well soon, Luis!)… Read more →
CSE’s Ed Lazowska in NY Times on the value of teaching kids to program
A set of letters in Friday’s New York Times were prompted by last Sunday’s article “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding.” One is from UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska:
To the Editor:
Your article provides nice exposure for the movement to expand computer science in K-12. But it does not mention several critical pieces of the argument.
Coding and computer science aren’t the same. Taught right, programming — coding — is the hands-on, inquiry-based way that students learn what… Read more →
Luis Ceze goes yachting
UW CSE professor Luis Ceze recently participated in a traditional hazing ritual for junior faculty: a trip across Lake Washington to Kirkland on CSE department chair Hank Levy’s boat.
Thanks to Dr. Paul Barei, UW Orthopaedics, Luis should be ambulatory again within a few weeks.
We echo Hank’s exhortation to all new members of the UW CSE faculty: “Break a leg, baby!”… Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Chandu Thekkath to direct Microsoft Research India
1994 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Chandu Thekkath has been named Managing Director of Microsoft Research India.
Chandu is currently Director/Principal Researcher at MSR Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. He is well known in the research community for his work in operating systems, networks, distributed systems, and computer architecture. He has contributed to key technology transfers between MSR and Microsoft product groups such as the Hotmail team. He has also played many management roles in MSR. He is also… Read more →
$9.3 million to UW eScience Institute from Washington Research Foundation
The University of Washington is receiving a $31.2 million gift from the Washington Research Foundation to support four interdisciplinary initiatives that seek to advance global innovation in clean energy, protein design, big data science and neuroengineering.
The largest award, $9.3 million, is to the University of Washington eScience Institute, committed to UW’s leadership in data science – both in advancing the methodologies, and in putting these advances to work in a broad range of fields.
The eScience Institute is… Read more →
CSE alumni startup LearnSprout announces $4.2 million Series A round
San Francisco edtech startup LearnSprout has taken in more funding – announcing a $4.2 million round that actually closed last August. Investors in the new round are prior investor Formation 8, Samsung Ventures and former Blackboard president Justin Tan.
LearnSprout’s aim is to help schools unlock the data held in their legacy Student Information Systems by offering a free big data analytics service, so educators can dig into trends in areas such as attendance, college readiness or even student health… Read more →
CSE alumni startup Sift Science raises $18 million Series B round
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 →