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 →
Google to double Seattle presence, targeting cloud services
Various media report an announcement by Google on Tuesday that the company plans to double the size of its Kirkland engineering facility, one of two Google sites in Seattle. Xconomy quotes UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska:
“’20 years ago, the tech industry here could have been described as ‘Microsoft and the 499 dwarfs.’ Now we have a really robust tech ecosystem with companies of all sizes reinforcing each other – large numbers of great startups, great mid-size companies and great major… Read more →
TechCrunch on Clerky: “YC-backed Clerky Helps Startups Save Time”
Clerky, a Y Combinator-backed startup co-founded by UW CSE alum Darby Wong and Stanford alum Chris Field, is a web application that makes it easy for startups to get legal transactions done.
“When we cover a startup’s launch, we often focus on the market opportunity, funding and investors and how the company’s product is solving a particular problem. We rarely mention the initial set of challenges every entrepreneur must face when they actually turn an idea into a startup… Read more →
UW wins Hawaiian “Big Splash” Cyber Defense Competition
Batman’s Kitchen, an interdisciplinary team involving students from CSE, the iSchool, EE, and pre-engineering, won the Hawaiian “Big Splash” Cyber Defense Competition held 8-10 March 2013. The competition is designed to bring practitioners in industry and government together with students in a competition environment. Teams were given a scenario of critical infrastructure in a business setting to defend against attacks by hackers (the red team) while also completing injects (e.g., setup a database, block certain websites, database audits, etc.)… Read more →
Open Information Extraction: The Movie
UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni and collaborators describe their work on Open Information Extraction in this excellent short video.
How can a computer accumulate a massive body of knowledge? What will Web search engines look like in ten years? To address these questions, UW CSE’s Open IE project has been developing a Web-scale information extraction system that reads arbitrary text from any domain on the Web, extracts meaningful information and stores in a unified knowledge base for efficient querying.
Watch the… Read more →