UW CSE startup Decide has been acquired by eBay.
Co-founded by UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni and four students, Decide uses machine learning and text mining algorithms on billions of price points across millions of products, blog posts, and articles on the web to enable shoppers to make the best buying decisions possible.
Decide had raised $17M in venture capital from Madrona Venture Group, Maveron, Vulcan Capital, and angel investors.
Read the Decide announcement here. GeekWire here. Seattle… Read more →
UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni to lead Paul Allen’s new Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Oren Etzioni – UW’s Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in Computer Science & Engineering – has been selected to lead Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen’s new Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2).
“I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to launch a major AI research institute in Seattle,” said Oren. “Our goal is to revolutionize the field, and with Paul’s vision and support, the sky’s the limit.”
Oren joined the UW CSE faculty in 1991, after receiving his Bachelors degree from… Read more →
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!
Recently UW Vice President for University Advancement Connie Kravas received an email from a colleague in the UC Berkeley advancement office, forwarding an email he had received from a Berkeley donor, which had been sent to draw his attention a video that her husband, a UW CSE donor, had received from UW CSE. (Apologies – you may need to diagram this in order to comprehend the cast of characters …)
The Berkeley donor wrote: “Check out the great video UW… Read more →
UW CSE’s eight “DawgBytes” summer day camps for middle and high school students
Last week UW CSE concluded this year’s summer programs for middle and high school students. Under the DawgBytes (“a taste of UW CSE” – our overall K-12 outreach effort) umbrella, we introduced more than 160 kids from across the state to computer science, which they now associate with fun, creativity and making friends!
This summer we hosted 4 week-long introductory day camps for girls, 3 co-ed day camps on mobile development, and 1 co-ed day camp on physical computing.
Infinite… Read more →
Maya Cakmak, Shayan Oveis Gharan, Matt Reynolds, and Zach Tatlock join the UW CSE faculty
A new brochure highlights UW CSE’s 2013 faculty hires:
Maya Cakmak, a robotics Ph.D. from Georgia Tech via Willow Garage.
Shayan Oveis Gharan, an optimization algorithms Ph.D. from Stanford who will spend a year as a Miller Fellow at Berkeley before joining us.
Matt Reynolds, a Duke ECE faculty member in ultra-low power sensing and computation with an MIT Ph.D., who will have appointments in UW CSE and EE.
Zach Tatlock, a software reliability and security Ph.D. from UCSD.
In… Read more →
Ed Felten and the ACLU vs. the NSA
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Ed Felten is getting a lot of coverage for his latest foray into the legal realm: filing a legal brief in support of an ACLU lawsuit against the NSA, in which Felten argues that phone call metadata can be more revealing than content, and that the NSA is building a database that could reveal some of the most intimate secrets of American citizens.
(Felten is Professor of Computer Science and of Public Policy at Princeton University,… Read more →
The world’s best Internet cities …
As usual, we only publicize the rankings where we rock …
Quoth GeekWire:
“UBM’s Future Cities, a blog that focuses on how cities are developing, just put together a list of its ten best Internet cities in the world and the findings may surprise you.
“The only U.S. city to make the cut was not New York City, San Francisco, Boston or Austin — it was Seattle …
“In its description of Seattle, UBM actually didn’t have… Read more →
UW CSE’s Rajesh Rao demonstrates first non-invasive human-to-human brain interface
UW CSE researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.
Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard.
While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain… Read more →
The launch of the UW Tech Policy Lab
The Tech Policy Lab is a unique interdisciplinary collaboration between UW Computer Science & Engineering, the UW School of Law, and the UW Information School. It aims to enhance technology policy through research, education, and thought leadership. The Tech Policy Lab is being established with a generous gift from Microsoft.
A launch event will be held in the Atrium of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering at 5:30 on Thursday September 12. Welcoming remarks will be… Read more →
Google Student Blog features UW CSE’s Zorah Lea Fung (sporting the “Ed & Hank” Google intern t-shirt she designed!)
“For our ‘Better Know an Intern’ post, meet Zorah Fung, a software engineering intern on the Google Docs Team in New York. Zorah is a rising senior at the University of Washington, double majoring in computer science and interdisciplinary visual arts. Fun fact about Zorah: one of her life goals is to own and be able to play every musical instrument in the world. She’s already accumulated about 20!”
Read the full interview here.… Read more →