On September 23-25, NBC News hosted its third “Education Nation” National Summit, convening more than 300 of the country’s thought leaders in education, government, business, philanthropy and media to discuss successful examples of innovation in education.
In an amazing feat, UW CSE’s Center for Game Science created and launched a brand new educational game in less than 48 hours, based on specifications provided by the audience at the Summit. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams closed the Summit with a… Read more →
Google Seattle summer intern t-shirt
Zorah Lea Fung models the 2012 Google Seattle summer intern t-shirt, featuring Ed Lazowska and Hank Levy as the two O’s! “How cool is that?” say Ed and Hank!
Nice GeekWire post here: “It is typical to see star athletes immortalized in this way on campus, but pretty rare for the geeks to get their due. We’re not sure who made the shirt, but seeing Lazowska and Levy in the middle of the Google logo certainly cracked us up.”… Read more →
“Why some of the best universities are giving away their courses”
An article on MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in the Seattle Times Pacific NW Magazine leads with UW CSE alum Greg Linden and quotes UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska:
“Seattle tech entrepreneur Greg Linden … decided to go to college – without leaving home.
“Through Stanford University, he took a class on robotic-car programming from professor Sebastian Thrun, who led the team that designed Google’s self-driving car.
“He also scarfed down a class on computer program design from Google Research… Read more →
“Innovation requires creative leadership”
A terrific Seattle Times opinion piece – a companion piece to the article cited in the previous post:
“A modest proposal: Stop gutting one of the state and region’s most important competitive assets: higher education, especially the University of Washington.”
Read it here. (See a post on a related article here.)… Read more →
“Why Washington’s kids aren’t going to college”
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 →
PandoDaily profiles UW CSE alum startup Captricity
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 →
UW CSE’s SpiroSmart in GeekWire
“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 →
GeekWire profiles UW CSE alum startup Tenacity Sports
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 →
Elhanan Borenstein recognized in NIH “High Risk High Rewards” program
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 →
“A Robot With a Reassuring Touch”
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 →