Several families of blue herons are nesting this spring in the Sylvan Grove, which the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering overlooks. From the sixth floor, one nest in particular is easily visible, and neither the proud parents nor the nestlings seem to mind if we monitor their progress. And monitor it we are:
1. Point your web browser at www.cs.washington.edu/heroncam to get a live view of the nest from our cambot.
2. CSE faculty member Bruce… Read more →
CSE’s Zachary Brown wins Bonderman Travel Fellowship
Each year, roughly a half dozen outstanding UW undergraduates are awarded Bonderman Travel Fellowships to spend time abroad. CSE student Zachary Brown has been named a 2010 Bonderman Travel Fellow. Read about Zachary’s plans here. Read about all of the 2010 Bonderman Travel Fellows here.… Read more →
CSE rocks at UW College of Engineering “Community of Innovators” awards
Each spring, the University of Washington College of Engineering celebrates outstanding achievements by students, staff, and faculty at the “Community of Innovators” award event. CSE was well represented among the honorees on June 1. Congratulations to:
Eric Arendt, recipient of the 2010 Dean’s Medal, awarded annually to two outstanding members of the graduating class.
Anna Cavender, recipient of the 2010 Graduate School Medal, awarded by the UW Graduate School to one outstanding Ph.D. recipient each year.
Carol Matsumoto, recipient of… Read more →
“Human-machine mergers promising, but reality yet to live up to hype”
CBC News interviews UW CSE’s Raj Rao: “Reasoning that fine muscle control is a difficult problem, University of Washington researchers are taking a different tack. The Neural Systems Group is experimenting with a small humanoid robot controlled by sensors worn outside the head. Because the robot has intelligence of its own, ‘when you tell it to pick up an object you don’t have to tell it how to move its hand,’ says Rajesh Rao, associate professor of computer science and… Read more →
“Completely finger burning, brain breaking, throw your laptop against the wall insane …”
Each year for more than a decade, UW CSE has offered a “Capstone Design Course” on videogame programming. Teams of students conceive, design, implement, and distribute videogames.
This year, part of the assessment involves how well the games do “in the wild” on the game distribution sites. There’s still a week to go before the end of the quarter, but the first two games now have full-featured review articles about them on game distribution sites, and one has a distribution… Read more →
UW CSE Band at TGIF
Check out their YouTube channel if you dare!… Read more →
“The Rise of Crowd Science”
The Chronicle of Higher Education features a wonderful profile of Johns Hopkins astronomer Alex Szalay, in the context of a discussion of data-driven science. The article includes multiple quotes from UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska. Read the article here.… Read more →
“Genome comparison tools found to be susceptible to slip-ups”
University of Washington News reports on a paper in Nature by UW CSE Ph.D. student Xiaoyu Chen and UW CSE professor Martin Tompa.
“We discovered that there’s a disturbingly low level of agreement between genome alignments produced by different tools,” said Tompa. “What this should suggest to biologists is that they should be very cautious about trusting these alignments in their entirety.”
Read the press release here. Read the research paper here.… Read more →
Bus Stop Alarm is finalist in Google “Juicy Ideas Collegiate Competition”
Have you ever slept, read, talked, or tweeted past your bus stop?
If so, then Bus Stop Alarm is the app for you! Bus Stop Alarm lets users set a location-based alarm on their phone that will go off when they get close to a preselected bus stop. Bus Stop Alarm is the first application to incorporate publicly available bus information and GPS in an innovative bus stop alarm system.
Bus Stop Alarm has just been named one of six … Read more →
Seattle Times does one-sided hatchet-job on Kindle
The story includes interviews with UW CSE’s Franzi Roesner and Ed Lazowska.
(Speaking only for myself, the article completely ignored the tenor of a 1-hour conversation and an email exchange — it’s a crappy hatchet-job article where the reporter had an agenda and ignored counterbalancing input. Read it here if you must.)
(Franzi says “Speaking for myself, I agree.”)… Read more →