The Seattle Times interviews Dennis Quan, IBM’s director of autonomic computing development in Raleigh, N.C., regarding IBM’s new “CloudBurst” offering:
“Blueprints for IBM’s cloud offerings came from a joint research project with Google. It initially explored business intelligence at big schools and large-scale analytics, which led to the creation of a cloud-computing cluster at the UW and two run by IBM in 2007. ‘The work that was done as part of that project really informed how we can put together… Read more →
Xconomy: Dan Weld on the Future of Search
Rachel Tompa talks with UW CSE professor and search specialist Dan Weld about the future of search in an interview in Xconomy.
Weld explains the significance of the new Microsoft Bing search service in terms of its success in delivering integrated “vertical” search. “All the engines are trying to do it, but the way Microsoft has done it with Bing is somewhat better than what Google has done.”
What does the future of search look like? Weld says “I think… Read more →
5 Cool Cloud Computing Projects
Network World previews this week’s HotCloud conference in San Diego, which boasts a slew of fresh research into this hottest of computer science research topics. UW CSE’s Hank Levy, Steve Gribble, and Roxana Geambasu will present CloudViews, a public version of the cloud that shares resources without sharing data.
Read the full article in here.… Read more →
Pavan Vaswani wins UW President’s Medal!
CSE’s graduating senior Pavan Vaswani has won the University of Washington President’s Medal, awarded annually to the top student in UW’s 7,500+ person graduating class.
Pavan is majoring in CSE, neurobiology and biochemistry. His decision to come to the UW was heavily influenced by the assurance that he could become involved in research the day that he arrived on campus. Indeed, his experience working with faculty in a research setting caused him to broaden his degree ambitions, which had begun… Read more →
Etzioni’s Farecast moves forward “with a Bing, not a wimper”
TechFlash discusses Microsoft’s newly launched Bing Travel — which combines UW CSE’s Farecast’s airfare-prediction and travel-search tools with MSN editorial content — as “a key chess piece in Microsoft’s new effort to challenge Google in Internet search.”
“It’s also a high-profile example of Microsoft benefiting from technology developed in its backyard. Oren Etzioni, the University of Washington computer scientist who founded Farecast in 2003, is watching with pride.”
Read the TechFlash post here.… Read more →
ParkSmart is 2nd in International Student Design Competition
The ParkSmart team, composed of UW CSE’s graduating seniors Alireza Garakani and Jonathan McKay and Informatics’ Linda Le, won 2nd prize at the 2009 Usability Professionals Association Student Design Competition. ParkSmart, which was completed as part of CSE 440, “Introduction to Human Computer Interaction,” aims to reduce drivers’ impact on the environment by making it easier to find parking spaces in congested cities.
Go team!!… Read more →
TextRunner Extracts Meaning from 500 Million Web Pages
MIT Technology Review features TextRunner, software created by UW CSE’s Oren Etizioni and the KnowItAll group that extracts knowledge from billions of lines of text by analyzing basic relationships between words. TextRunner represents a scaling up in terms of both the number of pages and the scope of topics that it can analyze.
According to Etzioni, “what we are showing is the ability of the software to achieve rudimentary understanding of text at an unprecedented scale and scope.”
Read… Read more →
Richard Ladner: 2009 UW Outstanding Public Service Award
A University Week profile of CSE professor Richard Ladner, winner of the 2009 University of Washington Outstanding Public Service Award for his work with the deaf and blind communities.
“‘It is kind of interesting at this point in my career. You would think I would be winding down,’ says Ladner, the Boeing Professor in Computer Science & Engineering … But instead of making plans for retirement, he has a pile of cell phones on his desk that he’s adapting… Read more →
CSE Recognizes Inspirational Teachers
Each year, we invite our UW Computer Science & Engineering undergraduates to identify “influential teachers” who shaped their careers prior to arriving at UW. We host a dinner for the teachers, their guests, and the students who nominated them. There are three goals: to honor these life-changing teachers, to reacquaint them with their highly successful students, and (crassly) to get them to send us more great students.
This year’s dinner was held on June 3rd. Photos (taken by our own… Read more →
What’s Microsoft’s Bing Strategy?
Technology Review looks at Microsoft’s cherry new search engine, Bing, and turned to CSE web search expert Dan Weld for his take.
“Bing is a limited start, but for a reasonable set of queries, it is better.” But there’s still plenty of room for both search leader Google and Bing to improve. “Search can and will get much, much better,” says Weld.
Read the full article here.… Read more →