Oren Etzioni and Paul Allen write:
“When IBM’s Watson system defeated the human champion on ‘Jeopardy!’ in February 2011, it surprised the world with its unprecedented command of a vast array of facts, puns, and clever questions.
“But how will that feat change our lives over the next decade? What does it mean for the future of intelligent machines?
“Watson accumulated its wide-ranging knowledge by ‘reading’ the equivalent of millions of books, foreshadowing a revolution in how computers acquire, analyze,… Read more →
Julie Kientz profiled in Columns
Julie Kientz – UW CSE affiliate professor (and professor of Human Centered Design and Engineering) – is featured in the “faculty profile” in the December issue of Columns, the UW alumni magazine:
“That sense of discovery spawned a career predicated on using technology to help others and improve their health. Kientz brought that passion to the UW in 2008 and, most recently, was named one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 for 2013.”
Read more here.… Read more →
Hour Of Code update – MINDBLOWING!
According to the amazing Hadi Partovi:
This week, more students studied computer science in US schools than in the last 10 years combined …
… more girls than in the last 30 years …
… more African Americans and Hispanics than in the entire history of computer science …
And we’re only 2 days into the week!
#HourOfCode – here!… Read more →
The Hour Of Code is here!!
Computer Science Education Week has begun – and with it, The Hour Of Code! Every student in America should spend one hour learning computer science principles, using the phenomenal programming environment developed by Hadi Partovi’s Code.org.
What does President Barack Obama have to say about it? “Don’t just buy a new videogame, make one. Don’t just download the latest app, help design it. Don’t just play on your phone, program it.”
Watch the President’s video here.
Watch the Hour… Read more →
UW Computing Open House kicks off Computer Science Education Week
More than 1,000 middle and high school students and their families attended UW’s Computing Open House on Saturday December 7, kicking off Computer Science Education Week!
Many thanks to our wonderful sponsors (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft), and to the many dozens of students, staff, and faculty from CSE and other computing-related units who made the day a success!
Information here.
Schedule of activities here.
Learn more about UW CSE’s K-12 outreach program, DawgBytes (“A Taste of CSE”), here… Read more →
UW CSE’s Carlos Guestrin, Bay Area alums @ Sift Science
UW CSE’s Amazon Professor of Machine Learning professor Carlos Guestrin headlined an evening event on Thursday for 65 Bay Area alums, hosted by our alumni startup Sift Science.
We host technical, social, and mixed events for Bay Area alums. With a host of “big data” and cloud alumni startups in the Bay Area (Cloudera, WibiData, Sift Science, and more), there was lots of demand for an event focused on large-scale machine learning. Carlos’s GraphLab is… Read more →
Computing Open House at UW CSE – Saturday December 7
Middle and high school students and families! Attend UW’s Computing Open House, 1-5 p.m. on Saturday December 7 in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering, kicking off Computer Science Education Week! Last year, more than 1,000 attended this super event!
Information here.
Schedule of activities here.
Learn more about UW CSE’s K-12 outreach program, DawgBytes (“A Taste of CSE”), here.
And don’t forget the Hour of Code – more than 5 million students… Read more →
Bill Gates lauds UW CSE’s Zoran Popović on Facebook and Twitter
“Zoran Popović is getting students excited about education by turning math into a game” says Bill Gates on Facebook and Twitter this morning.
BillG links to an article in this week’s Wired magazine, “Kids Like to Learn Algebra, if It Comes in the Right App.”
Wired writes: “A computer scientist at the University of Washington, Popović first became known for his popular online game, Foldit, which challenges players to create intricate protein patterns by bending and rearranging amino… Read more →
Penn remembers Ben Taskar
A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. on December 2. Program here.… Read more →
Stanford remembers Ben Taskar
“Daphne Koller, the Rajeev Motwani Professor in Computer Science at Stanford School of Engineering, remembered Taskar as ‘a remarkable human being. He was an exceptional researcher, who even as a graduate student and continuing to his work as a faculty member, made seminal contributions to machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing,’ Koller said. ‘Such academic talent is rare but even more so when combined with a gentleness of soul and a sweetness of nature, both of which characterized… Read more →