“Ever wonder if you should buy a new digital camera, or wait for a better one just around the corner?
“Even worse, did you buy the brand new HDTV right before 3-D came out?
“A new electronics shopping service is launching today to eliminate buyer’s remorse, by providing consumers with enough information to help them make a better decision.
“The Seattle-based Decide.com is the brainchild of the same folks behind Farecast.com, which helped predict whether it was the right time… Read more →
CSE’s Hoifung Poon wins UAI 2011 “Best Paper” award
CSE’s Hoifung Poon has won the “Best Paper” award from the 2011 Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2011), to be held July 14-17 in Barcelona, for the paper “Sum-Product Networks: A New Deep Architecture,” co-authored with his Ph.D. advisor, CSE’s Pedro Domingos.
It’s the third major-conference “Best Paper” award in as many years for Hoifung, who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation yesterday.
Congratulations Hoifung!… Read more →
Michael Young in the Allen Center
Columns, the University of Washington alumni magazine, captures new UW President Michael Young in what we hope will become his natural habitat – the Microsoft Atrium of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering!… Read more →
Kinect programming boot camp at UW CSE
Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360 has taken the gaming world by storm. On Thursday, Microsoft Research rolled a Kinect SDK, making full-functionality Kinect programming available for any non-commercial use. On Friday, Microsoft ran a Kinect programming boot camp for 40 UW CSE students, staff, and faculty, helping to bootstrap the UW CSE Kinect developer community.
Thanks to Stewart Tansley (Microsoft Research, and organizer of the event – who had gone 40+ hours without sleep but clearly had drunk plenty… Read more →
“A motley group of 16 ‘open data geeks'”
UW CSE’s Brian Ferris – creator of OneBusAway and recently praised by Seattlest as “oh mighty one … the God of Metro” – was brought to the White House last week as one of “a motley group of 16 ‘open data geeks'” honored as part of the “Champions of Change” program, which celebrates the fact that “Every day in communities across the country, ordinary individuals are doing extraordinary things to improve the lives of others and strengthen their communities.”
Read… Read more →
“Seattle area 15-year-old sells startup to ActiveState”
GeekWire reports:
“Some entrepreneurs wait a lifetime to experience the thrill of selling their startup companies. Daniil Kulchenko, a Seattle area high school student, accomplished that milestone at the age of 15. Kulchenko today announced that he’s sold his startup, a cloud-based computing company known as Phenona, to Vancouver, B.C.-based ActiveState in a deal of undisclosed size.”
Daniil is the son of UW CSE graduate student Paul Kulchenko, known for the development of SOAP::Lite and for a robot … Read more →
GeekWire on the red-hot tech job market
“The market remains red-hot for talented software developers and engineers. Brian Bershad, the Google site director in Seattle, told computer science faculty at a meeting on the University of Washington campus last week … ‘We are not limited the in the number of positions that we have. We are limited in the number of people that we can find that are very, very good … If you were graduating 1,500 (computer science students) per year … we’d probably be hiring… Read more →
“Computer Science’s ‘Sputnik Moment'”
Following up on an excellent article this past Saturday about rising enrollments in computer science, The New York Times has just published a fabulous “Room for Debate” essay series titled “Computer Science’s ‘Sputnik Moment’?”:
“Computer science is a hot major again. It had been in the doldrums after the dot-com bust a decade ago, but with the social media gold rush and the success of ‘The Social Network,’ computer science departments are transforming themselves to meet the demand.”… Read more →
Shwetak Patel is July Wired magazine cover story
The research of UW professor Shwetak Patel is prominently featured in the cover story of the July issue of Wired magazine.
The focus of the story is feedback loops that modify human behavior. Shwetak’s work on clever, cost-effective monitoring of the home environment (electricity, gas, water) and feeding this information back to residents to influence their behavior is the prime example (beginning halfway through the attached article.
Read the article here. Learn more about Shwetak and his work… Read more →
UW CSE’s “Exploring Photobios” is inaugural CCC “Cool Research Video”
Recently the Computing Community Consortium announced a call for short videos describing exciting research and results in computer science — with the goal of communicating to undergraduates what computing research is all about. Today the first of these videos hit the CCC web – “Exploring Photobios” from UW CSE’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory.
Read the CCC post and watch the video here. Learn more about the research here.… Read more →