UW’s Foldit protein folding game received nice coverage in a Computerworld article on human computation (and more generally the importance of human-computer symbiosis).
“You can play a video game called Foldit on the Web while making important contributions to science. Understanding how 3-D proteins ‘fold’ into their optimum structures is critical to understanding disease, but it’s difficult computationally because there are an astronomical number of possible folds for most proteins.
“The thousands of people who play Foldit use their pattern-recognition… Read more →
TechFlash Compiles “100 Top Women in Seattle Tech”
TechFlash has published its inaugural list of of top women in the Seattle technology industry. Among those listed is UW CSE’s Emer Dooley. The list includes many other women who have close ties to UW CSE:
Connie Bourassa-Shaw, who runs the UW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Amanda Camp from Google Seattle, who has participated in many of our outreach and educational activities.
Suzan DelBene, who had been the CEO of UW CSE startup Nimble Technologies.
Maria Klawe, our… Read more →
Kathy Wei Receives 2009 Engineering Dean’s Medal
Congratulations to Kathy Wei! Kathy, a dual major in CSE and BioE, was selected as the 2009 College of Engineering Dean’s Medalist from a very competitive pool of applicants.
The Dean’s Medal is awarded to a graduating student in recognition of outstanding academic achievement, research activities, and campus and extra-curricular involvement. The medal is scheduled to be presented at the Community of Innovators Awards ceremony on June 4, 2009, 3:30-5:00 p.m., in the Don James Center.… Read more →
Jeff Bigham Selected 2009 NCTI “Technology in the Works” Awardee
UW CSE’s Jeff Bigham‘s team is one of five teams awarded the 2009 NCTI Technology in the Works award. His team was selected to examine web browsing made accessible for blind students— Enabling More Effective Use of the Web Anywhere with WebAnywhere and TrailBlazer.
The National Center for Technology Innovation (NCTI) assists researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs in creating innovative learning tools for all students, with special focus on students with disabilities. NCTI sponsors this annual competition to inform the… Read more →
Digital Album Puts Focus on Kids’ Health
UW CSE adjunct assistant professor Julie Kientz has built a high-tech tool that takes photos and video, creates an online diary and family newsletters, and at the same time tracks a child’s developmental milestones. The multimedia system is called Baby Steps. Her research indicates that parents who used Baby Steps had more useful information to present during visits to pediatricians and were more confident about their record keeping.
Read the post in the Technology Review blog here.
Read the… Read more →
Lazowska + Ozzie keynote annual “State of Technology” luncheon
A conversation between UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska and Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie keynoted the annual State of Technology luncheon hosted by the Technology Alliance.
More than 700 attendees heard Ozzie discuss topics such as collaborative software, cloud computing, the leadership team at Microsoft, cultural differences between large and small companies, special-purpose vs. general-purpose digital devices, intellectual property in a Web world, and the differences between Boston and Seattle as innovative regions.
Xconomy article here. TechFlash article and… Read more →
Saleema Amershi Wins 2009 Google Anita Borg Scholarship
UW CSE PhD candidate Saleema Amershi has been awarded a 2009 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, awarded each year to female computer science students selected on the basis of academic excellence and leadership. The scholarships, which carry an award of $10,000, celebrate the life’s work of the late Anita Borg. Saleema works in the areas of HCI and machine learning.
UW CSE PhD candidate Kristi Morton and undergraduate Julia Schwarz were finalists, each earning an award of $1000.
Read… Read more →
“Bringing Efficiency to the Infrastructure”
The New York Times‘s Steve Lohr discusses smart infrastructure.
“Smart infrastructure is a new horizon for computer technology. Computers have proven themselves powerful tools for calculation and communication. The next step, experts say, is for computers to become intelligent instruments of control, linking them to data-generating sensors throughout the planet’s infrastructure. ‘We are entering a new phase of computing, in which computers will be interacting with the physical world as never before,’ said Edward Lazowska, a professor of computer science… Read more →
Wenjun Hu Wins 2009 William R. Bennett Prize
A paper co-authored by UW CSE post-doctoral researcher Wenjun Hu has won the 2009 William R. Bennett Prize, given annually by the IEEE Communcations Society to the best paper published in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking in the preceding calendar year.
The paper, XORs in the Air: Practical Wireless Network Coding proposes COPE, a new architecture for wireless mesh networks that uses network coding techniques to increase throughput.
A UW CSE paper also won the 2005 William R. Bennett Prize: … Read more →
BBC interviews CSE’s Raj Rao
The BBC reports on CSE professor Raj Rao‘s efforts to use machine learning techniques to support the hypothesis that the Indus Script is a written language.
“The Indus people lived around 4000 years ago, on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. They are said to have been extremely advanced in the fields of science and maths but arguments still rage over whether they had a written language. We look at new research into the symbols they… Read more →