Science – flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science – extensively quotes UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska in this article about job opportunities in scientific fields:
“Lazowska notes that the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) examined similar data from 2 years earlier and produced a report, signed by John P. Holdren, assistant to the president for science and technology and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy; Eric Lander, president and… Read more →
Washington Roundtable: “Increase computer science, engineering and health care capacity in Washington”
A new report from the Washington Roundtable focuses on the need to increase educational capacity in computer science, other engineering fields, and health care (in that order!) in order to respond to student demand and employer demand in Washington State.
Duh … but it’s good to have another sane report that identifies the true “high impact” fields.
The new report is entirely consistent with a report 18 months ago from the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Board which placed computer science… Read more →
UW wins Pacific Rim Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition for 6th consecutive year!
For the sixth year in a row, the University of Washington has won the Pacific Rim Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. Next month the team will head to San Antonio in an attempt to win their third consecutive National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition crown.
Members of this year’s Team Hillarious (hey, that’s how they spell it …):
Alexei Czeskis, CSE
Morgan Hein, iSchool
Atanas Kirilov, CSE
Karl Koscher, CSE
David Mah, CSE
Michael McKerinan, pre-engineering
Jordyn Puryear, iSchool
Ed Samson,… Read more →
Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat win ACM – Infosys Foundation Award
UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus and Google Fellow Jeff Dean, along with MIT CSAIL Ph.D. alumnus and Google Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, have been honored with this year’s ACM – Infosys Foundation Award “For their leadership in the science and engineering of Internet-scale distributed systems.” The citation goes on to say:
“Dean and Ghemawat led the conception, design, and implementation of much of Google’s revolutionary software infrastructure, which has transformed the practice and understanding of Internet-scale computing. Their efforts, along with those… Read more →
CSE’s Lydia Chilton, Nicki Dell win Facebook Graduate Fellowships
UW CSE Ph.D. students Lydia Chilton and Nicki Dell have been named as winners of 2013-14 Facebook Graduate Fellowships.
Lydia works with James Landay and Dan Weld on crowdsourcing. She spent the 2010-11 academic year at MSR-Asia in Beijing observing Landay trying to speak Chinese.
Nicki works with Gaetano Borriello and Linda Shapiro on computer vision, machine-learning and human-computer interaction, with a focus on designing and evaluating applications that improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions.
Lydia and… Read more →
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s General Counsel and Executive Vice President, addressed Washington’s Congressional delegation in Washington DC today on the dismal state of STEM education in our state. The Seattle Times reports:
“By one measure, Washington has the nation’s highest concentration of STEM jobs. But the state ranks near the bottom in the proportion of students enrolled in graduate programs in engineering and science, and the gap between the growth in jobs requiring STEM skills and people qualified to fill them… Read more →
Algorithms and beer …
UW CSE professor Anup Rao writes:
My undergraduate algorithms course has taught the students two things:
How to handle stress with beer.
How to design algorithms.
I guess I should be proud of at least one of them. Here is the post-final-exam discussion on the class message boards:
Larry Ruzzo adds:
We need to amend the catalog description: “Must be 21 with valid Washington ID by time of final.”… Read more →
Sift Science lifts the veil
Founded by CSE alums Brandon Ballinger and Jason Tan, Sift Science has been bubbling along for many months and revealed itself to the public on March 19th. The company also announced $4 million in Series A Funding.
Sift Science started as part of the Y Combinator’s 2011 summer batch. It fights fraud with large-scale machine learning that automatically discovers new fraud patterns. The service is primarily targeting online marketplaces, payment networks, and e-commerce sites, where fraud is most prevalent. Businesses… Read more →
UW CSE’s Control-Alt-Hack reviewed in Boing Boing
Control-Alt-Hack is a tabletop card game about white-hat hacking, based on game mechanics by gaming powerhouse Steve Jackson Games. According to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, the game is “a delightful strategy card game about white-hat hacking.”
Read the full review here. Control-Alt-Hack site here. Learn more about the Security and Privacy Lab here.… Read more →
Wired: “Google Hires Brains that Helped Supercharge Machine Learning”
Wired reports on Google’s acquisition of DNNresearch, Geoff Hinton’s University of Toronto spinoff, quoting UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska:
“‘Deep learning, pioneered by Hinton, has revolutionized language understanding and language translation,’ said Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington. In an email interview, he said that a pretty spectacular December 2012 live demonstration of instant English-to-Chinese voice recognition and translation by Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid was ‘one of many things made possible by Hinton’s work.'”
Read… Read more →