ColdTrace – research by Nexleaf Analytics and UW CSE Ph.D. student Rohit Chaudhri – has won this year’s Vodafone Wireless Innovation Competition.
ColdTrace is a low-cost wireless sensor designed to improve access to vaccines which protect thousands of children against diseases such as tuberculosis and polio. The sensor remotely monitors the temperature of vaccines. It also provides a better understanding of the vaccine cold storage, transportation and distribution infrastructures, particularly in areas where regular records are not maintained.
Nexleaf… Read more →
CSE’s Kevin Ross accepts UW College of Engineering Diamond Award for Public Service
Kevin Ross, a 1988 UW CSE alum, accepted the UW College of Engineering Diamond Award for Public Service at last night’s annual awards banquet. Kevin, a former Microsoft design engineer, founded Washington FIRST Robotics in 2002. WFR today works with over 7,500 students and 2000 volunteers in Washington State and matches student groups with mentors to provide high quality experiences. Their goal is to have a FIRST robotics team available for every student in the state. Kevin and WFR are… Read more →
Xconomy: “Jobs for Non-Natives: Washington Tech Economy Fueled by ‘Imports’”
More on Wednesday’s Technology Alliance “State of Technology” annual luncheon, and UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska’s on-stage interview with Expedia, Zillow, and GlassDoor founder Rich Barton:
“Nevertheless, Washington innovation is thriving by several measures …
“How does Washington reconcile the tech sector’s continued success with the paltry investment in generating talent, the key input to innovation economies?
“Imports.
“It’s no secret that Washington has been a leader in attracting smart, entrepreneurial people for generations, from Boeing to Bezos to Barton. … Read more →
It takes the Turkish to fully appreciate us …
Our new favorite ranking of world universities – the University Ranking by Academic Performance from the Informatics Institute of Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey – ranks UW sixth in the United States and eighth internationally in academic performance. ‘Nuff said … read all about it in the UW Daily here.… Read more →
UW CSE welcomes Shayan Oveis Gharan, Zach Tatlock to faculty
UW CSE is thrilled to welcome Shayan Oveis Gharan and Zach Tatlock as the newest members of the faculty.
Shayan has just finished his Ph.D. at Stanford. He will spend next year as a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley before joining us during the 2014-15 academic year. His research involves the development of provably efficient algorithms for problems that seem intractable. He has worked on the classical Traveling Salesman Problem (see an article about this work in Wired),… Read more →
CSE’s Zoran Popović, on KING5-TV’s “New Day NW,” describes Washington State Algebra Challenge
“Schools across Washington State are being challenged to complete 250,000 Algebra problems in one week … The challenge runs June 3 – 7 …
“Zoran Popović, Director of the UW’s Center for Game Science, and Maile Hadley, Educational Technology Director for the Technology Alliance, a non-profit organization of leaders from our state’s technology-based businesses, joined host Margaret Larson to talk about the Washington State Algebra Challenge, while students Elena and Chase demonstrated the game.”
Watch a terrific video interview here… Read more →
GeekWire: “The state of education: Yes, we suck”
A second GeekWire report on yesterday’s annual Technology Alliance “State of Technology” luncheon:
“Despite the fact that Washington state is actually falling behind in key areas, [Technology Alliance Chair Cheryl] Vedoe said the tech industry is moving forward and thriving. However, the innovation economy is moving forward, largely through the import of talent from other places.
“‘It seems you can grow an innovation economy by largely relying on imported talent. And that’s what we are doing — relying on imported… Read more →
Zillow co-founder Rich Barton: ‘Kill the squirrel’
GeekWire reports on the Technology Alliance “State of Technology” luncheon:
“If you’re a squirrel, make sure you stay well clear of Rich Barton. The founder of Expedia and Zillow on Wednesday offered some key advice from his dad: a driving lesson from the road that he’s used in business to this day.
“My dad used to say: ‘kill the squirrel,” noted Barton. In other words, don’t swerve out of the way or change course just because a pesky little creature… Read more →
The $33 Trillion Technology Payoff … All computer science, all the time …
Steve Lohr reports in the New York Times:
“A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm … not only selects a dozen ‘disruptive’ technologies from a candidate list of 100, but also measures their economic impact.
“By 2025, the 12 technologies … have the potential to deliver economic value of up to $33 trillion a year worldwide, according to the McKinsey researchers.”
The top six on the list:
Mobile internet
Automation of… Read more →
UW CSE’s Evangelos Theodorou wins King-Sun Fu Best Transactions on Robotics Paper Award
UW CSE postdoctoral fellow Evangelos Theodorou has received the 2012 King-Sun Fu Best Transactions on Robotics Paper Award for the paper “Reinforcement Learning With Sequences of Motion Primitives for Robust Manipulation,” co-authored with Freek Stulp and Stefan Schaal. The paper appeared in Volume 28, No. 6, pages 1360-1370, 2012. (T-RO typically receives over 650 submissions each year!)
Congratulations to Evangelos!… Read more →