Again this year, UW CSE played host to the finalists in the Technology Alliance’s Youth Apps Challenge.
Youth Apps Challenge is a two-part program that introduces both teachers and students to the power and potential of programming. Youth Apps motivates teams of middle and high school students from across Washington to develop innovative computer applications that address everyday problems.
This year more than 50 teams of students (each with a faculty sponsor) submitted apps to the challenge. Fifteen finalists… Read more →
UW CSE RFID spinoff Impinj files for IPO
Impinj, the Seattle-based RFID solutions company founded by UW CSE professor Chris Diorio and his legendary Caltech Ph.D. mentor Carver Mead, has filed for an IPO.
The RFID market took longer than the company expected to develop, but has taken off in the past few years.
RFID is “The Internet of Everything” (at a recent presentation, Diorio’s “prop” was a belt he had just purchased at Macy’s that sported an RFID tag), and Impinj has a leadership position.
Read… Read more →
New “intelligent water” venture launches with technology from UW’s UbiComp Lab
Electronics company Belkin International and plumbing and HVAC supplier Uponor Corp. recently announced the formation Phyn, a $40 million joint venture to further scale their intelligent water innovations based on technology that was developed by CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel working with students in the UW’s UbiComp Lab.
The Belkin technology is based on HydroSense—a pressure-based sensor for monitoring home water usage developed by Patel, CSE Ph.D. alum Jon Froehlich, and EE Ph.D. alum Eric … Read more →
DNA data storage project by UW and Microsoft researchers featured in Scientific American
Scientific American published a terrific article this week highlighting the work of UW and Microsoft researchers in the Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL) as part of a broader examination of efforts to re-purpose DNA as a digital data storage medium. The magazine spoke with UW CSE and Electrical Engineering professor Georg Seelig and Microsoft researcher and CSE affiliate professor Karin Strauss about the project, which is generating a lot of buzz for its potential to revolutionize digital storage—offering massive expansion… Read more →
eScience Institute’s VizioMetrix search engine featured in MIT Technology Review
VizioMetrix—the world’s first visual search engine for scientific diagrams, developed by a team at the UW’s eScience Institute—was the subject of a great article that appeared in MIT Technology Review over the weekend. The article reports on researchers’ efforts to understand the presentation of visual information in scientific literature, or viziometrics, based on a paper co-authored by Electrical Engineering Ph.D. student Po-Shen Lee, iSchool professor and Data Science Fellow Jevin West, and Associate Director, Senior Data Science… Read more →
Lazowska featured on @techvitamin podcast
“Are our Tesla’s going to band together in the Costco lot and attack us? Find out. In this episode Ed Lazowska (@lazowska), the eminent and long-time member of UW’s Computer Science faculty, joins Facebook’s Michael Cohen and me to discuss everything from big data, deep learning, to how Universities are responding to the massive demand for computer savvy graduates.”
Listen here.… Read more →
UW CSE faculty, staff, alums and friends @ Paul Allen’s Living Computer Museum
More than 200 UW CSE faculty, staff, alums, and friends gathered at Paul Allen’s Living Computer Museum on Wednesday for a meetup.
If you haven’t been to the LCM … it’s phenomenal.
Bay Area alums and friends: See you at the Computer History Museum at the end of June!… Read more →
Yin Tat Lee to join the UW CSE faculty
We are thrilled to announce that Yin Tat Lee, who works in algorithms and optimization, will join the UW CSE faculty.
Lee’s research focuses on the design of fast algorithms for fundamental optimization problems. Leaders in convex optimization acknowledge that his work has yielded the most important breakthroughs in interior point methods in the past two decades. Together with his co-authors, Lee has developed the fastest known algorithms for linear programming, submodular function minimization, and the maximum flow problem. … Read more →
UW CSE’s Dan Weld on “the real AI threat”
UW CSE professor Dan Weld wrote a thought-provoking column for GeekWire on “the real AI threat,” just in time for the White House-sponsored workshop on AI law and policy taking place on the University of Washington campus today.
Casting aside the sensational imaginings of Hollywood directors, Weld insists that we need not fear the day that AI systems willfully turn against humanity, as “computers have no hidden goals or secret motivations.” Instead, it is the action of human beings in… Read more →
UW CSE’s celebration of “Inspirational Teachers”
Every year, we in Computer Science & Engineering invite our new majors to identify their most inspirational high school or community college teacher – the teacher (each of us had one!) who changed their perception of what they should aspire to. We host these teachers, their partners, and the students who nominated them for dinner in the Allen Center (plus a bit of propaganda designed to encourage the teachers to send us more great students!).
From early learning through graduate… Read more →