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 →
UW CSE ACM Student Chapter spring picnic
Perfect weather on Friday for the UW CSE ACM Student Chapter spring picnic! (As usual, faculty pie-throwing was the highlight …)… Read more →
Workforce gaps in Washington State: It’s all Computer Science
The latest update of the authoritative Washington State workforce gap analysis was released in April by the Washington Student Achievement Council, the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, and the Workforce Training and Education Coordinating Board.
The report – A Skilled and Educated Workforce: 2015 Update – examines supply and demand in roughly 500 occupations divided into a dozen major categories.
At the Bachelors level, four fields are identified as having significant gaps between annual completors entering the workforce… Read more →
UW CSE team wins Best Robotic Manipulation Paper Award at ICRA 2016
UW CSE Ph.D. student Vikash Kumar and professors Emo Todorov and Sergey Levine captured the Best Robotic Manipulation Paper Award at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2016) in Stockholm, Sweden this week. Their submission, “Optimal Control with Learned Local Models: Application to Dexterous Manipulation,” presents the results of their work on a dexterous robot hand that learns from experience. The paper details how the researchers achieved local learning, demonstrating the ability of the robot hand… Read more →
UW CSE’s Irene Zhang, Richard Ladner @ 2016 NCWIT Summit
At this week’s 2016 Summit of NCWIT – the National Center for Women & Information Technology – UW CSE Ph.D. student Irene Zhang was recognized as a Runner Up for the 2016 NCWIT Collegiate Award (honoring the outstanding technical accomplishments of collegiate women at all levels), and UW CSE professor Richard Ladner spoke on including people with disabilities.
UW CSE is an NCWIT Pacesetter School, and in 2015 received the inaugural NCWIT Award for Excellence in Promoting Women in Undergraduate … Read more →
UW CSE’s Paris Koutris, Alvin Cheung recognized by ACM SIGMOD
The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on the Management of Data (SIGMOD) announced that UW CSE Ph.D. alum Paris Koutris is the recipient of this year’s Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award. UW CSE professor Alvin Cheung’s MIT Ph.D. dissertation was recognized with an Honorable Mention. The award recognizes outstanding Ph.D. dissertations in the data management field.
Koutris, who completed his Ph.D. working with professor Dan Suciu in the UW Database Group before joining the faculty… Read more →
Karin Strauss: One of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business”
Karin Strauss – Microsoft researcher and UW CSE affiliate professor – is featured in Fast Company‘s list of “100 Most Creative People in Business,” released today.
“In April 2016, Strauss and a group of computer scientists and molecular biologists unveiled an experimental DNA data storage system … Practical applications for the technology might include deep-storing video archives or recording genomic data, which requires vast amounts of memory.”
Read the Fast Company profile here. Learn more about the… Read more →
UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni on all things AI …
Oren Etzioni – long-time UW CSE faculty member and CEO of Paul G. Allen’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, has become a GeekWire regular on all things AI.
Most recently, Oren on Georgia Tech’s surreptitious replacement of human teaching assistants with IBM’s Watson. (Can TA unionization be far behind at Georgia Tech?)
In April, Oren on the future of robots and humanity. (No sense in piddling around with small topics.)
A few days before that, Oren on the … Read more →
UW CSE’s Supasorn Suwajanakorn collects GeekWire Innovation of the Year Award
Ph.D. student Supasorn Suwajanakorn of UW CSE’s GRAIL group took home the coveted Innovation of the Year Award at GeekWire’s annual awards bash—a.k.a. “the Oscars of Northwest tech.” He collected the award, which was voted on by members of the local tech community, for his work with with professors Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman and Steve Seitz on What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks?, which combines 3-D face reconstruction, tracking, alignment, and multi-texture modeling to create a digital… Read more →