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 →
Wrestle Brania!
At UW’s Brain Awareness Week festivities, Kennedy Catholic High School students Thane Maudslein and Nick Correa use muscle activity to play Wrestle Brainia – an electronically powered device getting its signals through a computer hooked to the wrestlers’ arms. Wrestle Brainia was developed by Jeremiah Wander and Dev Sarma – graduate students in CSE’s Neural Systems Lab, and undergraduate student Vivek Paramasivam, with support from UW’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering.… Read more →
CSE’s Yoshi Kohno profiled in Columns
CSE professor Yoshi Kohno is profiled in the March issue of Columns, UW’s alumni magazine.
“Kohno’s experiments are the stuff of science fiction movies: using a kid’s Erector Set to spy on its owner, tracking a runner using his mileage monitor or even hackers taking over a car while it’s driving and forcing it to brake to a stop. The only difference between Hollywood make-believe and reality is that this white hat hacker doesn’t need special effects to make them… Read more →
“Changing the Face of Computing”
The opening keynote of the 2013 SIGCSE (Computer Science Education) conference on March 7 in Denver featured 7 5-minute “flash talks” on “Changing the Face of Computing.” The first – “Why Broadening Participation Matters” – was presented by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska. See Ed’s slides here. Read more about UW CSE’s motivations and activities here. Learn about DawgBytes, UW CSE’s K-12 outreach program, here.… Read more →
UW CSE’s Zoran Popović on NPR
NPR’s Joe Palca today highlighted how computer gamers are helping to push the frontier of brain research. One of those interviewed was UW CSE’s Zoran Popović. Popović talked about Foldit, a game designed to tackle the problem of protein folding.
“People can get pretty addicted to computer games. By some estimates, residents of planet Earth spend 3 billion hours per week playing them. Now some scientists are hoping to make use of all that human capital and harness it for… Read more →
“Kate Starbird, former basketball star, chooses a different route — as usual”
A lovely Seattle Times article on Kate Starbird, a faculty member in Human Centered Design & Engineering and an adjunct professor in CSE.
“Kate Starbird does what she can to brighten her dreary fourth-floor office at Sieg Hall. A picture of her newborn nephew is above her desk. A cluster of succulent plants sits below a window looking out onto the University of Washington campus.
“Starbird, 37, is a first-year assistant professor in UW’s Department of Human Centered Design and… Read more →
UW CSE undergraduate teaching assistants
Why do CSE 142/143 ROCK (more than 2,000 students per year in 142; more than 1,300 per year in 143; off-the-scale student evaluations)?????
Great faculty, yes! But also, 60 PHENOMENAL undergraduate teaching assistants!
Go team!… Read more →
UW CSE alum Ben Hindman profiled in Wired
Star UW CSE bachelors alum Ben Hindman headed off to graduate school at Berkeley, then bailed for Twitter when the company adopted his Mesos system for efficiently parceling work across massive numbers of servers. Wired describes the work in “Return of the Borg: How Twitter Rebuilt Google’s Secret Weapon.” Read it here.… Read more →
CSE’s Dan Grossman on MOOCs
UW CSE professor Dan Grossman is profiled in a UW Provost’s report on enhancing teaching with technology.
Grossman is teaching one of the UW CSE Coursera MOOCs this quarter: Programming Languages. (Arvind Krishnamurthy, David Wetherall, and John Zahorjan are teaching Introduction to Computer Networks.)
Says Grossman: “For me, it is largely about being passionate about the course material and how to present it. Given this passion, why would I not want the largest rooftop I can find from… Read more →