“‘Decide,’ just in time for Black Friday, helps you learn whether the price of a product is about to fall. How does it accomplish this magic? The five Ph.D.’s on its staff don’t hurt. Together they’ve created an algorithm that predicts a gadget’s future price based, among other factors, on the historical price data of other gadgets in its class. Along with a suggestion of whether to buy a product now or wait for a better price or new model,… Read more →
New York Times on Oren Etzioni and Decide.com
“Oren Etzioni writes articles about artificial intelligence for scholarly journals, is a renowned expert on data mining, and gained fame when Microsoft paid $115 million for Farecast, an airline-ticket price predictor he founded.
“Now, Professor Etzioni, who teaches computer science at the University of Washington, has directed his considerable intellect at the American ritual of shopping for bargains on Black Friday. After examining billions of prices of consumer electronics, he has decided to spend the busiest shopping day of… Read more →
Michael Nielsen on “Reinventing Discovery,” December 8
Michael Nielsen will deliver the UW CSE Distinguished Lecture on December 8 at 3:30 in EEB 105.
Michael is one of the pioneers of quantum computation. Together with Ike Chuang of MIT, he wrote the standard text on quantum computation. This is the most highly cited physics publication of the last 25 years. Several years ago he left a position as Senior Faculty Member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics to write a book entitled Reinventing Discovery – published… Read more →
“‘Hello, computer!’ UW prof and students search outside the box”
GeekWire reports on research by UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni and his students:
“Like Scotty in Star Trek, the day is coming soon when we’ll talk with our computers instead of just typing at them, according to a prominent UW computer scientist and his team of researchers …
“In an essay penned for Nature, Dr. Etzioni reiterated what computer scientists have known for several years: it’s high time we thought outside of the old text box.
“Highlighting what he says… Read more →
GeekWire reprises Shwetak Patel as a “GeekWire Newsmaker of 2011″
Two days ago, GeekWire‘s highlighted “Newsmaker of 2011” was UW CSE offspring Daniil Kulchenko (son of Ph.D. student Paul Kulchenko).
Today it’s UW CSE faculty member Shwetak Patel – the photo at left, from yesterday, shows Shwetak and Ph.D. student Sidhant Gupta describing the ElectriSense technology to Art Rosenfeld, Distinguished Scientist Emeritus at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Professor Emeritus of Physics at UC Berkeley, the impetus behind California’s extraordinary energy efficiency efforts, and father-in-law of UW CSE professor Dan… Read more →
The Infinite Emotions of Coffee
Alon Halevy‘s labor of love for the past few years – in addition to leading Google’s database research group – has been researching and writing a book on coffee.
The book – The Infinite Emotions of Coffee – has launched! Discover it, and order it, here.
(Alon was a UW CSE faculty member for many years before joining Google when they acquired one of his startups. He is now an Affiliate Professor.)… Read more →
“Bus app for blind developed at UW”
KING5 news reports on UW CSE’s StopFinder, a public transit app that talks to the blind, bringing the features of UW CSE’s OneBusAway transit app to a new community of users.
“OneBusAway became one of the most popular mobile apps in the Seattle area in the last couple of years, providing easy access to maps, schedules and real-time updates on when a bus will arrive at a particular stop …
“A University of Washington student developed OneBusAway. Now students and… Read more →
“Video: Watch Bill Gates explain how technology is reshaping our world, again”
GeekWire highlights UWTV’s broadcast and web archive of Bill Gates’s Distinguished Lecture in UW CSE:
“This is Bill Gates, coming full circle.
“During a rare appearance last month on the University of Washington campus — where he snuck into buildings with his boyhood friend Paul Allen to learn how to program — the Microsoft co-founder talked about the evolution of computer science and explained how the latest advances in technology are fueling the work of his foundation and its partners… Read more →
GeekWire reprises Daniil Kulchenko as a “GeekWire Newsmaker of 2011”
“Of all the stories we covered on GeekWire in 2011, one of the most remarkable was the tale of Daniil Kulchenko, a high school sophomore from Kenmore, Wash., who sold his first startup this year at the ripe old age of 15.”
Daniil is the son of UW CSE Ph.D. student Paul Kulchenko.
Read more here and here.… Read more →
Jason Yi-Bing Lin receives 2011 TWAS Prize in Engineering Sciences
Jason Yi-Bing Lin, a 1990 Ph.D. alumnus of UW CSE, has been recognized with the 2011 Prize in Engineering Sciences from TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world.
Jason is Dean of the College of Computer Science, lifetime Chair Professor, and Vice President of the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He has been widely recognized for his many contributions to wireless communication, including (among many other honors) being named a Fellow of the Association for Computing… Read more →