Search engines have a dark side, and they form a vital part of hackers’ toolkits. For instance, once a potential website vulnerability emerges, a quick web search can gather a list of all sites which have that security flaw in their web code.
How better to hunt down hackers than by setting the search engines themselves on them, asks UW CSE Ph.D. student John John. With colleagues at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, John has developed SearchAudit, a system… Read more →
“Ocean Observatories Will Make Use of CENIC and Pacific NorthWest GigaPoP 10-Gigabit Peerings with Amazon Web Services”
“When a national network of ocean observatories begins streaming environmental sensor data in March 2012, researchers … will be able to use … high-speed academic networks to transmit some of that data to storage and computing clouds operated by Amazon Web Services.
“CENIC and PNWGP today announced two 10 Gigabit per second (Gbps) connections to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for the use of CENIC’s members in California, as well as PNWGP’s… Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Doug Downey is 2010 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow
Each year, roughly half a dozen faculty members from across the nation are selected as Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows. Doug Downey, a Ph.D. student of Oren Etzioni’s now on the faculty at Northwestern University, has just been announced as a 2010 recipient of this significant distinction.
“Doug Downey studies methods for automatically extracting knowledge from the World Wide Web. His work aims to enable advanced Web search engines, capable of answering complex questions by synthesizing information across multiple… Read more →
“Revolutionary Evolution: Will Consumer Apps Replace Specialized AT?”
The June 2010 newsletter of The Family Center on Technology and Disability is devoted to a comprehensive overview of the access technology (assistive technology) work of UW CSE professor Richard Ladner and his students.
“‘Much of the consumer technology that surrounds us can be adapted for classroom and non-classroom educational use for children with disabilities in the K-12 range and beyond,’ Dr. Ladner insists. ‘As less expensive consumer technology takes on universal use,’ he adds, ‘parents and teachers will eventually… Read more →
UW CSE’s “Morphy” makes the NY Times
“In a lab at the University of Washington, Morphy, a pint-size robot, catches the eye of an infant girl and turns to look at a toy.
“No luck; the girl does not follow its gaze, as she would a human’s.
“In a video the researchers made of the experiment, the girl next sees the robot “waving” to an adult. Now she’s interested; the sight of the machine interacting registers it as a social being in the young brain. She begins… Read more →
Who da man?
As a prelude to its annual “Brainstorm Tech” conference in Aspen (July 22–24), Fortune magazine has anointed “The 50 smartest people in tech” — five people in each of ten categories “whose collective intelligence propels us into a future that looks nothing like the present.”
The winner in the “Engineer” category — the “Smartest Engineer”? UW CSE bachelors alumnus, former Googler and founder of Cloudera Christophe Bisciglia!
“What kinds of problems could we solve if… Read more →
More from the ACM Awards Banquet
UW CSE faculty, alumni, and spouses at the ACM Awards Banquet at the Westin St. Francis on June 26th.
L-R: Gaetano Borriello (new ACM Fellow) and Melissa Westbrook; Lyndsay Downs and Ed Lazowska (ACM Distinguished Service Award winner); Jeff Dean (new ACM Fellow) and Heidi Hopper; Noah Snavely (ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award runner-up) and Beth Xie; John Davis and Jessica Davis; Radhika Thekkath and Chandu Thekkath (new ACM Fellow). At the banquet but missing from the photo: Thomas Kwan.… Read more →
Magda Balazinska receives HP Labs Innovation Research Award
UW CSE professor Magda Balazinska has been selected to participate in the prestigious HP Labs Innovation Research Program. The program is designed to provide colleges, universities and research institutes around the world with opportunities to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP.
HP reviewed more than 375 proposals from 202 universities across 36 countries, choosing 52 to receive 2010 Innovation Research awards.
Congratulations Magda!… Read more →
Michael Piatek, Hoifung Poon to DARPA ISAT “Future Ideas Symposium”
Seventeen top graduate students from ten universities were invited to participate in a “Future Ideas Symposium” organized by the Information Science And Technology working group of the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency.
UW CSE was represented by Michael Piatek (working with Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy on building Internet-scale services) and Hoifung Poon (working with Pedro Domingos on statistical relational learning).
Congratulations to Michael and Hoifung!… Read more →
Lazowska co-chairs PCAST review of NITRD program
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska has been named by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to co-chair a Congressionally-mandated review of the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program on behalf of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Under the NITRD program, 14 federal agencies coordinate their investments in order to maintain America’s leadership in information technology.
Lazowska’s co-chair is PCAST member David Shaw of D.E. Shaw Research. The members of… Read more →