Dr. Arun Majumdar became the first Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), the country’s only agency devoted to transformational energy research and development, in October 2009.
His visit to UW CSE includes one-on-one meetings and a roundtable with scientists and engineers, a roundtable with entrepreneurs and investors, a public lecture “ARPA-E: Addressing the Sputniks of our Generation,” a meeting with United States Senator Maria Cantwell, and a meeting with the Washington Clean Energy Leadership Council.
Majumdar’s… Read more →
2010 Sloan Research Fellowships
The 2010 class of Sloan Research Fellowship recipients has been announced. Once again, the UW CSE family is well represented!
UW CSE faculty member Luis Ceze, a computer architect, was recognized — the seventeenth (17!) UW CSE faculty member to have received this honor.
Additionally, UW CSE Ph.D. alums Karen Liu (a faculty member at Georgia Tech) and Li Zhang (a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, following a postdoc at Columbia University) were recognized. Both did their… Read more →
“Brain-controlled cursor doubles as neural workout”
“Harnessing brain signals to control keyboards, robots or prosthetic devices is an active area of medical research. Now a rare peek at a human brain hooked up to a computer shows that the two can adapt to each other quickly, and possibly to the brain’s benefit.”
UW CSE’s Raj Rao, his grad student Kai Miller, and a team of researchers looked at signals on the brain’s surface while using imagined movements to control a cursor. Electrodes attached to the… Read more →
Computer Engineer Barbie!
As noted in a previous post, Mattel has been running a web-based contest to choose Barbie’s next career.
The results are in! “You voted! We listened!!” (Even if “you” is a bot …) The winner of the popular vote is … Computer Engineer Barbie!
The New York Times reports: “Barbie has come a long way since 1992, when the blond bombshell of a doll was programmed to say, ‘Math class is tough.’ Barbie, whose various careers have taken… Read more →
“Microsoft and Amazon square off, sorta, in a very Seattle rivalry”
A TechFlash article on the overlapping businesses of Microsoft and Amazon.com
“‘I don’t view this as ‘competition vs. cooperation.’ There is plenty of business out there,’ said Ed Lazowska, computer science professor at the University of Washington. ‘Users — customers — are going to prefer different approaches. What’s great for us, for our future as a tech region, is that Amazon.com has emerged as one of the nation’s great technology companies, and that two of the three big players in… Read more →
Xconomy: What’s Your Breakthrough Idea?
UW CSE will host a half-day Xconomy forum on March 29th. Titled “What’s Your Breakthrough Idea?,” the event will feature Lee Hood, Nathan Myhrvold, and UW CSE’s Steve Seitz and Dan Weld, among others. Read all about it here.… Read more →
CACM cover story: Dave Bacon on “Recent Progress in Quantum Algorithms”
UW CSE’s Dave Bacon has the cover article in this month’s Communications of the ACM.
“It is impossible to imagine today’s technological world without algorithms: sorting, searching, calculating, and simulating are being used everywhere to make our everyday lives better. But what are the benefits of the more philosophical endeavor of studying the notion of an algorithm through the perspective of the physical laws of the universe? This simple idea, that we desire an understanding of the algorithm based upon… Read more →
Peter Lee on the future of DARPA, and the Transformational Convergence Technology Office
Five months ago, Peter Lee took a leave of absence as Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University to begin a stint at DARPA as the Director of the new Transformational Convergence Technology Office (DARPA/TCTO). TCTO is re-establishing basic research programs in a broad range of rapidly emerging computing-enabled technology areas such as social media, synthetic biology, high-performance computing, and networking, as well as employing a diverse range of innovation strategies including broad community programs, competitions/challenges, and… Read more →
NSF and Microsoft announce “Azure for Science”
A New York Times article describes a new initiative by Microsoft and the National Science Foundation to assist scientists in utilizing cloud services to manage and analyze the tsunami of data that characterizes modern sensor-based science.
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska is quoted in the article: “Simplicity of use is one Microsoft goal. So far, programming modern cloud systems for full efficiency has been difficult. The company is trying to overcome this difficulty in creating a variety of software tools for… Read more →
Jon Froehlich featured in UW “Report to Contributors”
UW CSE Ph.D. student Jon Froehlich was one of five students profiled in the University of Washington’s “Report to Contributors.” Jon, who works with UW CSE professors James Landay and Shwetak Patel on HCI problems related to environmental concerns, is the recipient of a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship.
Read Jon’s profile here. The full “Report to Contributors” is here.… Read more →