The first mention of the word “Internet” on Seattle’s KING-5 News was a 1994 interview with UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska. Recently, KING-5 News anchor Allen Schauffler compelled Ed to revisit that interview. It’s worth watching, here. Main conclusion: “The past 17 years have been a lot kinder to the Internet than to me.” Allen took the Wayback Machine photograph to the right.… Read more →
Jean-Loup Baer’s 75th!
UW CSE emeritus professor Jean-Loup Baer celebrated his 75th birthday on Saturday evening with a wonderful party at Bastille. Winners of the “To how many obscure questions about Jean-Loup can you guess the right answer?” contest were entered in the Jean-Loup Baer Lookalike Contest.
Happy birthday Jean-Loup!!… Read more →
“Educating the next generation of geeks”
In honor of back-to-school season, this week’s GeekWire radio show and podcast features excerpts from past interviews with technology educators and one very impressive high school student: Ed Lazowska (Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington), Daniil Kulchenko (the 15 year-old entrepreneur who sold his cloud-computing startup earlier this year – and who is the son of UW CSE Ph.D. student Paul Kulchenko), and Hanson Hosein (Director of the Master of… Read more →
“Remote Control, With a Wave of a Hand”
Joint research by UW and Microsoft Research is described in the New York Times.
The research provides gestural remote control by means of algorithms that interpret and harness the interaction between the human body and the ambient electromagnetic field that is emitted as a matter of course by the wiring in households, by the power lines above homes, and by the gas pumps at service stations. The work was described in the CHI 2011 paper “Your Noise is My … Read more →
Gail Murphy, David Notkin, and Kevin Sullivan win ACM SIGSOFT 2011 Retrospective Impact Paper Award
ACM’s Special Interest Group on Software Engineering – SIGSOFT – launched an initiative several years ago to recognize research papers that have been particularly influential in software engineering research. Annually an award is made to a paper published a decade earlier, and in each of the first five years of the award, an additional committee is asked to select up to five papers published prior to 1998 for a special Retrospective Impact Award.
The 1995 paper “Software Reflexion Models: … Read more →
“In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column”
A New York Times article on improvements in computer-generated text (and specifically on some great work by Narrative Science, a Northwestern University startup) quotes UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni. Read the article here.… Read more →
VLDB “Best Paper” Awards
VLDB 2011 – the 37th International Conference on Very Large Databases – was held in Seattle this week.
As previously noted here, the VLDB 10-year Award, recognizing the paper that appeared in the VLDB conference 10 years ago and has had the greatest impact on database research since then, was received by Jayant Madhavan (a UW CSE Ph.D. alum, currently at Google) and Phil Bernstein (a UW CSE Affiliate Professor, working at Microsoft Research), along with their co-author Erhard… Read more →
Videogame Deus Ex cribs from UW/UMass/Harvard 2008 Oakland paper!
From the “any publicity is good publicity” department …
The game developers of Deus Ex have lifted text from the Oakland 2008 paper “Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: Software Radio Attacks and Zero-Power Defenses” for their dystopian video game shoot up.
Check out a Deus Ex screenshot here. Compare it to the highlighted section of the research paper here. And, for those of you who are researchers rather than gamers, check out the Medical Device Security Center website… Read more →
Oren Etzioni’s Decide in The Economist
“Dr. Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who has founded four firms in all, says Decide relies on three main data sources: pricing data, news and rumours, and technical specifications. Pricing data comes from a variety of sources. Most are the company’s trade secret, though they always include current prices of goods and sales data. The model also uses feedback about how its predictions fare over time to fine-tune their probability estimates. With… Read more →
Decide.com in Xconomy
“Decide uses sophisticated data-mining and analysis techniques to predict whether prices will change for a given product, giving consumers a better window into volatile retail prices. If this sounds familiar, it’s the same basic idea behind Farecast, another [UW CSE professor Oren] Etzioni company that predicted price changes for airline tickets. Microsoft bought Farecast in 2008 for a reported $115 million, and has incorporated the technology into its Bing search engine.
“But where Decide gets really futuristic is its… Read more →