“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 →
CSE’s Sam Hopkins wins 2013 UW Arts & Sciences Deans Medal for the Sciences
Sam Hopkins, a senior majoring in Computer Science and in Mathematics, has been selected to receive the 2013 University of Washington College of Arts & Sciences Deans Medal for the Natural Sciences.
Four senior medals are awarded annually by the College of Arts & Sciences: to the top graduating student in the Arts, the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Natural Sciences.
Sam – incidentally the son of long-time UW Chemistry chair Paul Hopkins – will be a Computer Science… Read more →
GeekWire: “UW’s Ed Lazowska: ‘Washington is the ass end of the donkey in just about every aspect of education'”
“The incredible talent that the University of Washington pumps out every year was on display during Tuesday’s Seattle Tech Meetup, as five startups with UW ties gave five-minute pitches to the crowd at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.
“But unfortunately for the state, the UW is one of the few bright spots amidst an otherwise struggling education system with regard to producing tech talent. While Washington ranks fourth in the nation for tech-related companies, the… Read more →
Seattle Tech Meetup @ UW CSE
God-knows-how-many-hundreds of mostly-young Seattle technologists visited UW CSE on Tuesday evening for Seattle Tech Meetup – a monthly gathering of the younger Seattle tech community clan, organized by Red Russak and Brett Greene.
See UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska’s presentation here.… Read more →
Ars Technica: 10th anniversary of UW CSE alum Brad Fitzpatrick’s memcached
“This week, memcached, a piece of software that prevents much of the Internet from melting down, turns 10 years old. Despite its age, memcached is still the go-to solution for many programmers and sysadmins managing heavy workloads. Without memcached, Ars Technica would likely be unable to serve this article to you at all.
“[UW CSE alum] Brad Fitzpatrick wrote memcached for LiveJournal way back in 2003 (check out the initial CVS commit here). While waiting for new… Read more →
Forbes: “A Very Short History of Big Data”
An article in Forbes recognizes the impact of a Computing Community Consortium white paper authored by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska, along with Randy Bryant (CMU) and Randy Katz (Berkeley):
“December 2008 Randal E. Bryant, Randy H. Katz, and Edward D. Lazowska publish ‘Big-Data Computing: Creating Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Commerce, Science and Society (PDF).’ They write: ‘Just as search engines have transformed how we access information, other forms of big-data computing can and will transform the activities of companies, scientific… Read more →