For decades, humans have struggled to create machines that can extract meaning from human language. Traditional approaches require a great deal of manual work up front to render material understandable to computer algorithms, and the ultimate goal is to make this step unnecessary. In May’s Technology Review, David Talbot discusses how IBM hopes to advance this objective. Expected later this year, Watson — a natural-language computer system — will play Jeopardy! (the popular TV trivia show) against human contestants.
UW… Read more →
New issue of MSB!
The Spring 2009 issue of Most Significant Bits, the UW CSE alumni newsletter, is now available! This issue includes:
Three CSE faculty receive NSF CAREER awards
Sensing the water we use
Faculty and student honors
Alumni spotlight: CSE engages high school teachers with Agnes Kwan’s hands-on support
Annual CSE Scholarship and Fellowship Luncheon
(The usual giant photo of Hank appears on page 2.)
See all MSB issues here.… Read more →
“Twitter in the classroom”
KPLU’s Jennifer Wing (@kplujwing) reports how social networking technology like Twitter is breathing new life into the typical end-of-the-day conversation parents have with their kids, thanks to teachers that seed the conversation with a daily tweet. UW CSE’s James Landay (@landay) discusses current research on sensing and social networking.
Listen to the full 4:48 audio story on KPLU (@kplu) here.… Read more →
CSE’s Susan Eggers is UC Berkeley “Distinguished Alumnus”
Susan Eggers, Microsoft Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, has been named the 2009 Distinguished Alumnus of UC Berkeley’s Computer Science Division. She will be recognized at the UC Berkeley commencement on Sunday May 24.
Eggers’s achievements in computer architecture have earned her recognition as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and as a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.
Eggers, who will be recognized along with Steve McCanne, joins a… Read more →
HydroSense is 3rd of 90 in UW Business Plan Competition
HydroSense — a team led by UW CSE graduate student Jon Froehlich and advised by UW CSE faculty members Shwetak Patel, James Fogarty, and James Landay — finished 3rd out of 90 entrants in the 2009 University of Washington Business Plan Competition. HydroSense received the $5,000 WRF Capital Finalist Prize, and was named the “Best Clean-Tech Idea.”
Hopes were high as HydroSense won the $10,000 UW Environmental Innovation Challenge in early April, then made it to the Round of… Read more →
Roxana Geambasu, Michael Piatek Awarded Inaugural Google Fellowships
UW CSE graduate students Roxana Geambasu and Michael Piatek are among 13 exemplary Ph.D. students from across the nation who have been named recipients of the inaugural Google Fellowships.
Leading graduate programs in computer science and related fields were invited to nominate two students each. The students could be studying any of 20 different technical areas.
Both of UW’s nominees were awarded Google Fellowships. Roxana received the 2009 Google Fellowship in Cloud Computing. Her research focuses on the challenges, as… Read more →
Magda Balazinska Wins NSF Early Career Development (CAREER) Award
UW CSE faculty member Magda Balazinska has won a 2009 NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. Magda’s award is for her work developing new techniques for large-scale data management aimed at cloud-computing environments and scientific data analysis applications. In addition to efficient query processing techniques, she is also developing new query management tools that provide runtime query control, intra-query fault tolerance, query composition support, and seamless query sharing.
Magda joins CSE’s Luis Ceze and Yoshi Kohno as 2009 NSF … Read more →
Seattle is “Minor League” Innovation Town, So We Shouldn’t Be So Smug, Tech Leaders Say
Xconomy reports on the OVP Venture Partners Technology Summit.
“Seattle can be a very politically correct place, and one very un-PC thing to say is that we’re a second-rate burg when it comes to spawning innovative industries of the future. But Ed Lazowska, one of Seattle’s gutsiest public intellectuals, let it rip yesterday in front of a small gathering of about 100 technology elites at the Four Seasons Hotel.
“‘We’re very smug and self-satisfied,’ said Lazowska, the Bill &… Read more →
Jeff Bigham, Scott Hauck recognized by UW College of Engineering
UW CSE Ph.D. student Jeff Bigham has been recognized as the 2009 UW College of Engineering “Student Innovator: Research” in the Community of Innovators award competition.
UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Scott Hauck, now a faculty member in UW EE, has been recognized as the “Faculty Innovator: Teaching and Learning.”
Congratulations to Jeff and Scott!… Read more →
TechFlash on OVP Venture Partners Technology Summit
“University of Washington computer science professor Ed Lazowska is known as a straight talking rabble-rouser who doesn’t pull many punches. And he certainly lived up to that reputation today at the OVP Venture Partners Technology Summit …
“Lazowska – who appeared on stage with the equally opinionated Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service – reserved his toughest comments for a Lake Wobegon mentality in the state where everything appears to be above average.
“‘It seems to me that the… Read more →