“Decide.com already tells consumers when they should buy cameras, phones, refrigerators and other gadgets and appliances, analyzing price drops and increases. Now, the Seattle startup and brainchild of University of Washington computer scientist Oren Etzioni and others is getting into the recommendation business, assigning a score of 1 to 100 on more than 22,000 products that it tracks.”
Read more here.… Read more →
CSE’s Brett Newlin strokes USA men’s eight into Olympic finals
2005 UW CSE alum Brett Newlin stroked the USA men’s eight into the Olympic finals with a convincing victory over Australia, Poland, and the Ukraine in a tough qualifying heat on Saturday.
Read about it, and watch a video of the heat, here.
The final will be Wednesday at 12:30 p.m. BST, 4:30 a.m. PDT.… Read more →
UW CSE’s FoneAstra scores in IEEE Presidents’ Change the World Competition
The IEEE Presidents’ Change the World Competition recognizes students who develop unique solutions to real-world problems using engineering, science, computing, and leadership skills to benefit their community, the world at large, or both.
UW CSE’s FoneAstra has been recognized with third place in the 2012 competition.
FoneAstra is an ARM7-based board that plugs into the data port of low-tier mobile phones. With attached sensors, custom applications can be run through FoneAstra. As a prototype, the per-unit cost of the board… Read more →
UW CSE startup Decide.com in NY Times yet again …
In an article titled “Clearing Away the Clutter From Tech Shopping,” the New York Times recommends the use of UW CSE startup Decide.com:
“A couple of years ago, some exceedingly bright minds from the worlds of computer science and business created Farecast, a site that takes reams of data about airline ticket pricing and analyzes it to let consumers know if the fares for trips they want to take at a given moment are going to go up or down… Read more →
‘Control-Alt-Hack’ game lets players try their hand at computer security
Do you have what it takes to be an ethical hacker? Can you step into the shoes of a professional paid to outsmart supposedly locked-down systems?
Now you can at least try, no matter what your background, with a new card game developed by members of the UW CSE Security and Privacy Lab.
“Control-Alt-Hack” gives teenage and young-adult players a taste of what it means to be a computer-security professional defending against an ever-expanding range of digital… Read more →
NSF CISE AD Farnam Jahanian highlights two UW CSE research breakthroughs in Snowbird keynote address
This week, the nation’s computer science, information science, and computer engineering department heads are gathered in Snowbird, Utah for the every-other-year Computing Research Association Conference at Snowbird.
In his keynote address on Monday morning, Farnam Jahanian, the National Science Foundation’s Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, highlighted two UW CSE research breakthroughs.
Jahanian showed the NSF “Science Nation” video describing UW CSE’s “Rome in a Day” project – synthesizing tens of thousands of photographs into 3D models… Read more →
Crowdsourcing Personalized Online Education – UW/MSR 2012 Summer Research Institute
47 top researchers from across the nation gathered last week for the 17th Summer Research Institute in Computer Science, co-organized each summer by University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering and Microsoft Research.
The goal of these Summer Research Institutes is to catalyze research in emerging areas. This year’s topic was “Crowdsourcing Personalized Online Education.” The organizers were Dan Weld (UW CSE), Mausam (UW CSE), Eric Horvitz (MSR), and Meredith Ringel Morris (MSR). Quoting from the overview:
“Strong recent enthusiasm… Read more →
Demo day at the UW CSE daycamp for middle schoolers
Twenty-one 7th, 8th, and 9th grade girls from fourteen Seattle-area schools spent the past week at UW CSE’s daycamp for middle schoolers – our first of three daycamps this summer.
During the week, participants heard from members of the UW CSE community, discussed big ideas in computer science, and completed projects in Processing, a Java-based programming environment for artists and designers. The first project was to design a face made of basic geometric shapes and then animate it based on… Read more →
UW CSE nominated for two Pwnie Awards
In what CNN calls “the Oscars for hard-core computer hackers,” UW CSE has been officially nominated in two categories for the upcoming 6th annual Pwnie Awards!
Most Innovative Research: Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces
“Many hackers have been complaining about the extinction of unmitigated vanilla stack buffer overflows. It turns out that they are not extinct at all, they have all just migrated to YOUR CAR. Stephen Checkoway and the rest of his team identified and exploited… Read more →
Carlos Guestrin leads First GraphLab Workshop on Large-scale Machine Learning
Carlos Guestrin, soon to join UW CSE from Carnegie Mellon, recently hosted the First GraphLab Workshop on Large-scale Machine Learning. A Computing Community Consortium blog post describes the landmark event:
“The scale and complexity of data on the web continues to grow at a tremendous rate. A recent New York Times article compared Big Data to an economic asset for companies, like currency and gold. But, in order to extract value from 6 billion Flickr images, 900 million Facebook… Read more →