Xconomy interviews Maria Klawe, a new addition to the Board of Directors of Microsoft Corporation.
Klawe, the President of Harvey Mudd College, is a computer scientist who was previously Dean of Engineering at Princeton University, Vice President and CS head at the University of British Columbia, and a group leader at IBM Research.
Klawe makes a number of interesting comments on innovation in the Pacific Northwest. “I had an interesting conversation with Google. Google wanted to invest more in… Read more →
Helping the Blind and Deaf Feel at Home in a Wired World
Columns, the magazine of the University of Washington Alumni Association, reports on the long and fruitful work that Boeing Professor in Computer Science and Engineering Richard Ladner has done making technology and opportunity more available to blind and deaf people.
Dr. Ladner had two deaf parents, which helped him understand the challenges faced by those with sensory disabilities and motivated him to work to help lower barriers
A notable project to come out of Ladner’s advocacy work is WebAnywhere… Read more →
Making Seattle transit connections on time with OneBusAway.org
TechFlash contributor Roni Ayalla reports on recent developments with UW CSE graduate student Brian Ferris‘ OneBusAway project. The open-source project now has a home at Google Code, is seeking grant funding, and has attracted faculty sponsorship from UW CSE’s Alan Borning, one of the principal investigators on the cross-disciplinary Urbansim Project. Ferris is quoted
We’re working on building a complete open-source transit traveler information system that would combine route maps/timetables, trip-planning, real-time tracking, and real-time service… Read more →
Local boy makes good
Going to UW certainly has its advantages, but at registration time, it can be exhausting and frustration. UW CSE’s senior Rylan Hawkins understands this too well. Hawkins created a web site called Visual Schedule Finder (VSF) — at vsfinder.com — to help students find available classes. VSF began as an engineering class group project last spring. Rylan now manages the site, making it much more than a class project, using his summer and holiday breaks to tweak the program.
The… Read more →
‘Solving AI’
We need a new language for artificial intelligence, writes UW CSE’s Pedro Domingos. He proposes a new mathematical language that combines logic and probability.
“The goal of artificial intelligence (at least according to the field’s founders) is to create computers whose intelligence equals or surpasses humans’. Achieving this goal is the famous ‘AI problem.’ To some, AI is the manifest destiny of computer science. To others, it’s a failure: clearly, the AI problem is nowhere near being solved. Why?… Read more →
UW CSE’s Tamara Denning wins inaugural Microsoft Research Graduate Women’s Scholarship
UW CSE graduate student Tamara Denning has been named one of ten winners of the inaugural Microsoft Research Graduate Women’s Scholarship. Congratulations Tamara!… Read more →
Investigative Journalism: First Casualty of the Net?
CNET News reporter Charles Cooper reports in his Coop’s Corner blog on a panel that looked at the impact of information technology on democracy. UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska organized the panel, which included Princeton University professor and 1993 UW CSE PhD Ed Felten and two others. The panel was held as part of a meeting of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences exploring the information technology and the public good.
Ed Felten offered some hopeful comments:… Read more →
Change Poster Session Well Attended
Change is a group of faculty, students, and staff at the University of Washington who are exploring the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in improving the lives of under-served populations, especially in the developing world. Change was started to better frame ICT for Development research in CSE, but is now being extended to bring together everyone at UW who cares about technology in developing regions.
The group hosted a poster session on February 26th in the Atrium. This… Read more →
Bus cuts and tracking your next ride
Metro bus service could be cut by as much as 20 percent. With this prospect looming, Seattle NPR affiliate KUOW‘s program The Conversation recently spoke with CSE grad student Brian Ferris about his bus-tracking tool, OneBusAway. The segment appears around minute 40.
Earlier coverage on OneBusAway may be viewed here.… Read more →
Combining BitTorrent with Darknets for P2P Privacy
Current popular peer-to-peer networks suffer from a lack of privacy. OneSwarm is a new file-sharing application that improves privacy in peer-to-peer networks. It was developed by UW computer scientists Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy and PhD students Michael Piatek and Tomas Isdal.
Read the Slashdot post here.
Read earlier coverage of BitTorrent here.… Read more →