Allen School News

This excellent (if depressing) article in the Seattle Times exposes the gaps in Washington’s education system: “We think of ourselves as a well-educated state, and in many respects we are. More than half of Seattle adults 25 and older hold a bachelor’s degree, making it one of the most well-schooled cities in the nation. “So it may come as a surprise that only about one in four public-school students from Washington’s high-school class of 2009 will finish college by 2015,… Read more →

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Captricity, a service that wants to make the paper-to-digital conversion faster and cheaper, was co-founded by UW CSE bachelors alum Kuang Chen.  (Kuang recently received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley advised by Joe Hellerstein and UW CSE Ph.D. alum Tapan Parikh.)  Writes PandoDaily: “The service is a result of cofounder Kuang Chen’s trip to Tanzania, where he worked at an HIV treatment center. After being tasked with finding patients that had started on anti-retrovirals, but for one reason or… Read more →

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“Is there anything a smartphone app can’t do?  Researchers at the University of Washington, UW Medicine and Seattle Children’s hospital have figured out how to let people measure their own lung health by breathing in the direction of the standard microphone on a smartphone, without any specialized attachments. “Here’s the cool part:  The results from the app are within 5 percent of those from commercial spirometers that run into the thousands of dollars.  That level of accuracy means the app… Read more →

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Tenacity Sports – a Seattle-based startup co-founded by UW CSE alum Don Le and his friend Jon Tam – is developing a new website called Gametiime, an online service that will help people discover, compare, and share running activities around the local area. Our friends at GeekWire profiled Tenacity Sports today.  Read the article here.… Read more →

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Elhanan Borenstein, assistant professor of Genome Sciences and adjunct assistant professor in CSE, has been recognized in the NIH “High Risk High Rewards” program. According to NIH Director Francis Collins, the High Risk High Reward program “provides opportunities for innovative investigators in any area of health research to take risks when the potential impact in biomedical and behavioral sciences is high.” Borenstein researches the human microbiome – the complex ensemble of microorganisms that populate the human body.  Borenstein and his… Read more →

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This New York Times article on modern robotics – largely focused on Rodney Brooks’s company Rethink Robotics – also discusses innovations by UW CSE’s Emo Todorov: “In contrast to the fixed repetitive tasks performed by today’s robot arms and hands, scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Washington have built several prototype hands with pliable fingers that can move as quickly as humans’ … “‘Despite decades of automation, there are relatively few types of tasks… Read more →

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“A recent survey of 1000 adults found a majority thought cloud computing actually referred to a “fluffy white thing.” Fifty-one percent also believed storms could interfere with it, according to the survey sponsored by Citrix. “Those statistics are evidence that many computer users do not fully understand this new, important technology … “‘Seattle is really ground zero for cloud computing with the presence of Amazon, founded here, Microsoft here and Google having a substantial presence here as well,’ said Bill … Read more →

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Google’s corporate-wide “Interns Making an Impact” feature today highlights UW CSE Ph.D. student Tim Blakely, working at Google Seattle.  Tim is the lead developer on BigBrain, a large-scale computational neuroscience tool built on the cloud. The project began as an exploratory venture between Google and the Allen Institute for Brain Science (AIBS) to investigate whether the cloud could provide a platform for doing massively parallel, large-scale neural simulations. Read more here.… Read more →

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A New York Times article describing Rick Smolan’s forthcoming book The Human Face of Big Data features two of our favorite computer scientists:  UW CSE professor Shwetak Patel, and MIT EECS professor John Guttag: “Mr. Smolan visited recently to offer a glimpse of what will be in The Human Face of Big Data and the imaginative photo composition involved in bringing technical subjects to life. One photograph shows Shwetak Patel, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, who… Read more →

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Today is UW CSE Ph.D. alum Geoff Voelker‘s birthday.  His UCSD CSE colleague (and fellow UW CSE Ph.D. alum) Stefan Savage writes: Dear all, Untold years ago today, our own Geoff Voelker was born.  Unfortunately, those of us who seek to communicate birthday wishes in the contemporary vernacular – a wry combination of “Happy Birthday” posts on the recipient’s Facebook “wall” and the “liking” of other such posts – are unable to do so in this case.  You see,… Read more →

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