Inspired by the global nature of the Olympic games, the UW CSE Systems Group’s Icelandic Ph.D. students treated us to a lunch of treats from their homeland: fermented shark, smoked and salted foal meat, sheep’s head cheese, liver sausage, blood pudding, flat bread with smoked lamb and butter, sheep pate on rye bread, …
Michael Phelps may have won twenty two gold medals, but we bet he wouldn’t have been able to work his way through this stuff …… Read more →
UW Interactive Data Lab’s Vega-Lite earns Best Paper at InfoVis 2016
Researchers in the UW Interactive Data Lab led by UW CSE professor Jeffrey Heer have captured the Best Paper Award at InfoVis 2016 for their paper presenting Vega-Lite, a new high-level grammar for rapid and concise specification of interactive data visualizations.
Although interaction is at the heart of effective data visualization, existing systems for designing interactive visualizations are either complex or overly limiting—particularly when it comes to customization. Enter Vega-Lite, which combines a traditional grammar of graphics—including visual encoding… Read more →
MIT Technology Review has the dirt on UW CSE’s Maya Cakmak and her housecleaning robots
UW CSE professor Maya Cakmak and her efforts to train robots to perform everyday tasks are the subject of a recent MIT Technology Review article that posed the question, “What will it take to get a robot to clean your home so you don’t have to do it?”
As it turns out, we have a ways to go before you will be able to trade your Roomba for a Rosie.
Cakmak specializes in programming by demonstration, in which a robot… Read more →
GeekWire reports UW CSE machine learning spinoff Turi acquired by Apple
GeekWire is reporting that Turi, the spin-off founded by Carlos Guestrin, Amazon Professor of Machine Learning in UW CSE, has been acquired by Apple.
According to GeekWire’s breaking news post:
“Machine learning and artificial intelligence startup Turi has been acquired by Apple in a deal characterized as a blockbuster exit for the Seattle-based company, formerly known as Dato and GraphLab, GeekWire has learned.
“The acquisition reflects a larger push by Apple into artificial intelligence and machine learning. It… Read more →
UW CSE’s Magda Balazinska and Luna Dong to be recognized at VLDB 2016
Professor Magda Balazinska and Ph.D. alum Luna Dong of UW CSE’s Database group will be honored for their research contributions to the field of data management at the Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2016) conference next month. Balazinska receives the inaugural VLDB Women in Database Research Award for her “inspirational research record on scalable distributed data systems.” Dong, who earned her Ph.D. in 2007 working with former UW CSE professor and Database group founder Alon Halevy, receives the VLDB… Read more →
In His Own Words: Gary Kildall
UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Gary Kildall was a pioneer of personal computer software. He wrote programming language tools including assemblers (Intel 4004), interpreters (BASIC), and compilers (PL/M). He created a widely-used disk operating system (CP/M). He and his wife, Dorothy McEwen, started a successful company called Digital Research to develop and market CP/M, which for years was the dominant operating system for personal microcomputers.
Gary died in 1994, at the young age of 52. In 1993, the year before his… Read more →
UW CSE’s Tom Anderson, Albert Greenberg elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences
UW CSE professor and alum Tom Anderson (Ph.D., ’91) and alum Albert Greenberg (Ph.D., ’83) have been elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences. Anderson and Greenberg, who were elected to the National Academy of Engineering earlier this year, are among two dozen new WSAS members selected based on “their outstanding record of scientific achievement and willingness to work on behalf of the academy in bringing the best available science to bear on issues within the state of… Read more →
UW CSE spinoff Impinj off to a roaring start with IPO
Impinj, the Seattle-based RFID company founded by UW CSE professor Chris Diorio and his Caltech Ph.D. advisor Carver Mead, made its debut on Wall Street today to great fanfare. Impinj is the first Seattle technology company to go public in 2016.
From the GeekWire article:
“Wall Street likes what they see in Impinj, a 16-year-old Seattle-based maker of Radio Frequency Identification technology that today went public on Nasdaq at $14 per share. That was the upper end of… Read more →
UW CSE’s Dreambit imaging software lets people change their appearance virtually
Have you ever wondered what you would look like with a different hairstyle or if you were born in a different historical period? Now you can find out thanks to new imaging software created by UW CSE professor Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman.
Dreambit enables an individual to upload his/her photo and generate personalized search results in which the person’s face is synthesized with images matching the search terms.
Dreambit identifies a set of images that satisfy the search parameters, such as “curly… Read more →
Microsoft Research recognizes 3 UW CSE faculty, 2 Ph.D. alums with Outstanding Collaborator Awards
Microsoft Research has recognized UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska, CSE and Electrical Engineering professors Shwetak Patel and Georg Seelig, and CSE Ph.D. alums Todd Millstein and Tao Xie, with Outstanding Collaborator Awards. The five are among 32 academics from around the world who are being honored for their contributions to the direction, visibility and value of Microsoft’s research and products.
Rick Rashid—the founder and former head of Microsoft Research, and now Chief Technology Officer for the… Read more →