In today’s Gates Notes, Bill highlights four projects presented at Social Venture Partners’ recent “Social Innovation Fast Pitch,” including Living Voters Guide, a joint project of UW CSE and Seattle’s City Club:
“As government in the U.S. becomes more polarized, debate among politicians has migrated to simplistic views about what government should do or not, with no middle ground for compromise. In contrast, SIFP finalist City Club finds that voters are open to nuanced debate: 41% listen… Read more →
CSE’s Magda Balazinska: Top “Lightning Talk” at XLDB
UW CSE’s Magda Balazinska‘s “Lightning Talk” at September’s 6th Extremely Large Databases Conference has been voted one of the top two “Lightning Talks.” The prize? An invitation to talk longer at next year’s XLDB!
The topic of Magda’s talk was “Big Data Analytics Usability.” Learn more about her CQMS project here.… Read more →
“The Myth of the Black Friday Deal”
The Wall Street Journal partners with UW CSE startup Decide.com to explore pricing trends for gifts during the holiday shopping season:
“The fast rise of online shopping has presented a wealth of data for researchers looking to uncover retailers’ strategies and pinpoint when prices are lowest. Decide aims to use that data to tell its member consumers whether to buy any of a number of products now or wait until later. The company is run by veterans of Farecast, a… Read more →
“Best Paper” for CSE’s Shulin Yang
UW CSE Ph.D. student Shulin (Lynn) Yang has won a “best paper” award for her paper “Skull Retrieval for Craniosynostosis Using Sparse Logistic Regression Models” (Shulin Yang, Linda Shapiro, Michael Cunningham, Matthew Speltz, Craig Birgfeld, Indriyati Atmosukarto, and Su-In Lee) at the MICCAI Workshop on Medical Content-Based Retrieval for Clinical Decision Support.
Lynn is advised by Linda Shapiro and Su-In Lee. The paper was presented (in Nice, France!) by co-author (and CSE/Shapiro Ph.D. alum) Indri Atmosukarto, who is… Read more →
GeekWire: “Big data startup with UW ties lands cash from Accel”
Trifacta, a San Francisco big data company co-founded by incoming University of Washington computer science professor Jeffrey Heer and University of California-Berkeley computer scientist Joe Hellerstein, emerged from stealth mode today with $4.3 million in funding from Accel Partners.
Read more here.… Read more →
UW CSE alum startup Sift Science in GigaOm
Sift Science, a Bay Area startup involving UW CSE alums Brandon Ballinger, Jason Tan, and Grace Kim, is featured in GigaOm:
“The problem of online fraud, fake reviews and sock puppetry is only going to get worse, according to recent research. But there are ways to identify likely perpetrators and that’s what Sift Science aims to do.
“The 8-person San Francisco startup uses machine learning to analyze user interaction with web sites and create a digital profile of who… Read more →
UW CSE’s Living Voters Guide wins Evergreen Apps Challenge
Announced in May, the Evergreen Apps Challenge encouraged geeks around Washington State to build apps that could benefit those living here by using government data from data.seattle.gov, data.wa.gov, and datakc.org.
This week, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, King County Executive Dow Constantine, and Washington Governor Chris Gregoire recognized the winners.
Taking the first-place was Living Voters Guide, a non-partisan resource developed by UW CSE students and faculty with a host of collaborators – that fosters civil discussion and provides descriptions… Read more →
UW lands one of 8 NSF/NIH “Big Data” research awards
The National Science Foundation (NSF), with support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), today announced 8 awards totaling nearly $15 million in new Big Data fundamental research projects. These awards aim to develop new tools and methods to extract and use knowledge from collections of large data sets to accelerate progress in science and engineering research and innovation.
A UW CSE project led by Magda Balazinska, Bill Howe, and Dan Suciu was among the 8 awardees. In brief:
“The… Read more →
The 2012 election and the innovation economy
Companion GeekWire essays by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska and Madrona Venture Group’s Matt McIlwain explore the choice faced in the 2012 Presidential election by voters from the innovation sector.
“I have three principles that I hope you share. First, I try to be fact-based. Second, I try to be consistent – to display intellectual integrity. Third, I recognize that my success is due not only to my own efforts, but also to various advantages of circumstance with which I was… Read more →
“The Computer Science Mismatch”
An article on the mismatch between computer science jobs and educational capacity includes various University of Washington examples, including comments by CSE’s Ed Lazowska:
“Until recently, the University of Washington was only able to accommodate 25% of computer science applicants, though it will be expanding somewhat this year due to a recent funding increase …
“At other schools, the numbers are even starker. Carnegie Mellon, for example, enrolled just 130 of the 4,200 applicants this fall to its computer science… Read more →