Allen School News

Well, sort of …  In Episode 430, “Black Market Pharmacies And The Spam Empire Behind Them,” NPR’s “Planet Money” features UW CSE Ph.D. alum and UCSD professor Stefan Savage: “Chances are you’ve received an email with a subject line like this ‘The hottest method to please your beloved one’ … “You’ve probably wondered — who is sending these emails? Does anyone actually click on these links? What happens when they do? “On today’s show, we go deep inside the world… Read more →

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Friends from Google X – Google’s “skunkworks” – will speak in UW CSE on January 28th from 6:00-7:30 p.m. in room EEB 125, and on February 1 from 2:00-2:30 p.m. in room CSE 403. On January 28, UW CSE Ph.D. alum Adrien Treuille, a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon on leave at Google X, will begin by providing an overview of activities at Google X. Then Nick Hobbs, a graduate of Olin College and a PM at Google X, will… Read more →

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Students are busting down the doors at all of the nation’s top computer science programs. At UW, Winter Quarter enrollment in CSE 142 (“CS-1,” the first introductory course) is 810; the previous all-time high was 659.  And 1/3 of the students are women, also an all-time high.  Enrollment in CSE 143 (“CS-2,” the second introductory course) is 530, also an all-time high. Enrollment varies from quarter to quarter.  One way to understand the long-term picture is to graph a 1-year… Read more →

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SoundWave – research by UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel and Sidhant Gupta, and Microsoft Research’s Dan Morris and Desney Tan. Thrill to the KOMO TV weather guy attempting to explain the Doppler effect!  Watch it here.… Read more →

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Two UW CSE MOOCs launch this week on Coursera. Programming Languages, taught by UW CSE professor Dan Grossman, has roughly 60,000 registered students.  This course is roughly equivalent to CSE 341. Introduction to Computer Networks, taught by UW CSE professors Arvind Krishnamurthy, David Wetherall, and John Zahorjan, has roughly 50,000 registered students.  This course is roughly equivalent to CSE 461. Hey, what can possibly go wrong??… Read more →

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I mean, how high can your IQ possibly be if you say to Stefan Savage, “Buy me whatever you want for Christmas and I’ll wear it on the first day of my Winter Quarter OS class”? (Josh Smith adds:  “At least Stefan doesn’t shop at Victoria’s Secret … could have been worse.”)… Read more →

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In late 1999, UW CSE launched the fundraising effort for a marvelous facility that eventually became known as the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.  Early progress is chronicled here. Today, less than a decade after we abandoned Beautiful Sieg Hall for the Allen Center, we’re again bursting at the seams. As a result, we have launched the fundraising effort for Levytown. Concept drawing: Progress thus far: David Notkin (who also kicked off the Allen Center… Read more →

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You guessed it – college professor. Where did we go wrong? Read more here.… Read more →

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Each year, the University of Washington recognizes the top student (of roughly 7,500) in the previous year’s Freshman, Sophomore, and Junior classes as class Medalists. This year’s UW Junior Medalist is CSE’s Eric Lei.  Eric, who entered the UW after 10th grade through the Robinson Center’s UW Academy, was last year’s Freshman Medalist.  (Your correspondent is a systems guy, so is not concerned by the arithmetic implicit in that statement.) Eric is the eighteenth CSE student to be recognized as… Read more →

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“‘The expanded partnership between UW and PNNL will create tremendous new opportunities for both organizations,’ said Ed Lazowska, professor of computer science and engineering. ‘Big data is transforming the process of discovery in all fields. UW and PNNL have significant and complementary strengths.’  Lazowska leads the eScience Institute, created in 2008 to support data-driven discovery at the UW. Many of the roughly dozen UW faculty who will be involved with the new group at its launch are eScience Institute… Read more →

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