A lovely article on Hans Berliner in the Spring 2012 issue of The Link – the alumni newsletter of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science – includes an early 1980’s photograph of Carl Ebeling, now a UW CSE faculty member but then a CMU Ph.D. student working with Hans. Ebeling’s Hitech chess machine was the top chess-playing computer in the United States.
Photo here. Full issue of The Link here.… Read more →
“Is this data scientist a consumer’s best friend?”
GigaOM profiles UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni:
“In Oren Etzioni’s world, telling you where to buy a product is so 20 years ago. He did that with his first startup, Netbot, in 1996. Today, Etzioni wants to tell you when to buy — that ideal moment when the price won’t fall for a while and you won’t get burned by the release of a new model a week later. Tomorrow, well, maybe he can let you know when you’re… Read more →
CSE’s Kate Matsudaira, Decide.com, is Seattle 2.0 Startup Awards “Hire of the Year”
Quoth GeekWire:
“Startup Decide [a UW CSE company] hired Kate Matsudaira as its vice president of engineering earlier this year, as she shifted from her previous position as vice president of engineering post at SEOmoz.
“The University of Washington computer science grad prevailed in the voting over a strong field of finalists — Daryn Nakhuda of Amazon, Dan Shapiro of Google, Wibe Wagemans of Big Fish Games and Mitch Hill of Opscode.”
Read all about the Seattle 2.0 Startup Awards… Read more →
CSE’s Peng Dai receives Honorable Mention in ICAPS 2012 Best Dissertation Award competition
Peng Dai, a 2011 UW CSE Ph.D. now working at Google, has received Honorable Mention in the 2012 Best Dissertation Award competition of ICAPS, the International Conference on Automated Planning & Scheduling.
Peng’s dissertation, “Decision Making under Uncertainty: Scalability and Applications,” was supervised by Dan Weld and Mausam.
Congratulations Peng!… Read more →
CSE’s Jenny Abrahamson, Nicki Dell win Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships!
UW CSE graduate students Jenny Abrahamson and Nicki Dell are among 25 outstanding young women from across the U.S. named today as winners of 2012 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships.
The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship honors the memory of Dr. Anita Borg, who devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing and founded the Institute for Women in Technology in 1997. Anita passed away in 2003, and the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship was established in 2004… Read more →
CSE’s Seth Cooper wins ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award!
2011 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Seth Cooper, now Creative Director of UW CSE’s Center for Game Science, has been named the winner of the 2011 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
The award is presented annually to the top Ph.D. dissertation in the field. (Roughly 1,500 Ph.D.s in computer science were awarded last year in the United States alone.)
Seth’s dissertation, “A Framework for Scientific Discovery through Video Games,” was advised by UW CSE professor Zoran Popovic. The… Read more →
Congratulations to the Spring CSTA programming contest winners!
This past Saturday, the Puget Sound region Spring CSTA high school programming competition was hosted by Amazon.com – following the Winter competition, hosted at the University of Washington.
Andy Davidson, the computer science instructor at Roosevelt High School, says:
It’s instructive to look at the list of winners this year and see how many of their teachers got their CS pedagogical training from the UW CSE program:
Winter
Novice – 1st Place – Lakeside School
Novice – 2nd Place – … Read more →
David Notkin named Acting Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies
UW Dean of Engineering Matt O’Donnell has named CSE’s David Notkin as Acting Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies for the coming year.
In announcing Notkin’s appointment to faculty in the College of Engineering, O’Donnell stated: “He has won numerous awards including most recently, the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award in 2012. … In this role, David will foster multidisciplinary collaborations within and outside the college, work with new faculty to develop successful research programs, and strengthen programs to… Read more →
Carlos Guestrin and Emily Fox join the University of Washington
Carlos Guestrin and Emily Fox, experts in machine learning, will join the University of Washington in the fall, driving us to a new level of excellence and impact in this hugely important field.
Carlos is currently the Finmeccanica Associate Professor in the departments of Machine Learning and Computer Science in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, with courtesy appointments in Civil and Environmental Engineering and in the Robotics Institute. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading… Read more →
UW President Michael Young attends dub retreat
dub – short for “design … use … build” – is the University of Washington’s interdisciplinary effort in human-computer interaction and design, including faculty and students from across the campus.
Over 100 UW faculty, students, and industrial collaborators came out for the 4th annual dub retreat. The meeting included a celebration of awards, short research talks, and poster sessions. The excitement of the event was bolstered by the attendance of UW President Michael Young. President Young saw talks on topics… Read more →