More than 60 K-12 teachers from the Pacific Northwest joined UW CSE this week for the fifth annual edition of CS4HS, a summer workshop in computer science for teachers of math and science. Sponsored by Google, CS4HS began as a joint initiative of UW, CMU, and UCLA, and has grown over the years to include dozens of campuses.
Special thanks to Google, and also to Tom Cortina from CMU who has joined us every year to contribute to the success… Read more →
Ice Cream Mann
UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Stephen Mann, a computer graphics faculty member at the University of Waterloo, is celebrated for making ice cream for his students in the Waterloo computer graphics lab.
Brian, Zoran, and Steve: Is there something you could learn from him?
Read the article here.… Read more →
UW Security and Privacy Research Lab members wear their waivers on their backs
In order to look their best at Defcon and Usenix Security, members of the UW CSE Security and Privacy Research Lab equipped themselves with t-shirts displaying the text of the waiver they were required to sign before testing their hacked automobile on the runway at Blaine Airport.
We can confirm that no damage was done by the car at Blaine Airport. We are not so sure about the impact of these t-shirts at Defcon and Usenix Security.… Read more →
“Wide gap in skills leaves many unemployed, many open jobs”
This Seattle Times article offers a sad commentary on the job prospects of displaced workers, and on Washington State’s shameful level of investment in Bachelors-level higher education. It should be “must reading” for policymakers:
“An International Monetary Fund (IMF) study estimated that between 2007 and 2010, the skill level of Washington’s work force (measured mainly by years of education) got more out of whack with the available jobs than in any other state except Delaware.
“That mismatch helps explain why… Read more →
“New NSF Engineering Research Center to Pursue Ideal Mind–Machine Interface”
The National Science Foundation press release on the Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, directed by UW CSE professor Yoky Matsuoka, is out. According to NSF:
“The National Science Foundation announces an award to the University of Washington and its partners to establish a new NSF Engineering Research Center. The ERC will pursue interdisciplinary research and education to address questions important to both human health and robotics, and to provide the foundation for new industries through innovation. NSF… Read more →
Seattle’s Facebook office, one year old
The Seattle Times profiles Seattle’s Facebook office on its first anniversary:
“The office — Facebook’s first development center outside of its Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters — ends its first year Tuesday …
“Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington … said the wave of Californians is ‘all to the good,’ though he said it makes it even more important for the state to adequately fund education and prepare students.… Read more →
UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni in Nature: “Search needs a shake-up”
In an article in the August 4 issue of Nature, UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni calls on experts to, literally, think outside the search box. In the article, he writes that the main obstacle to progress “seems to be a curious lack of ambition and imagination.” Etzioni proposes that instead of simply looking for strings of text, a web search engine would identify basic entities – people, places, things – and uncover the relationships between them. This is the goal… Read more →
“Exploring Photobios” on KING5 News
“Exploring Photobios” – a SIGGRAPH 2011 paper by UW CSE postdoc Ira Kemelmacher along with Eli Shechtman (Adobe Systems), Rahul Garg (UW CSE and Google), and Steve Seitz (UW CSE and Google) – is featured in this story on KING5 news.
The research, which automatically integrates sequences of images of the same person over time, is the basis of the Face Movie feature in Google’s Picasa.
Watch the KING5 video here. Read about the research here. See a… Read more →
Rick Szeliski wins Computer Graphics Achievement Award
Rick Szeliski, a Microsoft Research staff member and long-time Affiliate Professor in UW CSE, has been named the recipient of the 2011 SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award “given each year to recognize an individual for an outstanding achievement in computer graphics and interactive techniques.”
Rick’s extensive involvement with UW CSE includes, most recently, co-advising Ph.D. student Noah Snavely, whose thesis research included the technology underpinning Photosynth.
Previous UW CSE “friends and family” recipients of the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement… Read more →
ShareMeNot — Protecting Against Tracking from Third-party Social Media Buttons
Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing is reporting on UW CSE grad student Franzi Roesner‘s latest project, ShareMeNot. Cory writes: “[ShareMeNot is] a Firefox Add-On that defangs social media buttons like the Facebook ‘Like’ button (and others) so that they don’t transmit any information about your browsing habits to these services until (and unless) you click on them. That means that merely visiting a page with a Like or a Tweet or a +1 button (like this one) doesn’t generate… Read more →