UW CSE professor Alvin Cheung was honored by his alma mater this week with the George M. Sprowls Award, which recognizes the most outstanding Ph.D. theses in computer science submitted to MIT each year.
Cheung received the award for his dissertation titled “Rethinking the Application-Database Interface,” in which he puts forward a novel approach for optimizing the performance of applications that interact with database management systems (DBMSs). Cheung showed that real-world applications are sped up by multiple orders… Read more →
Let’s lead the nation in Hour of Code participation!
Can Washington State lead the nation in Hour of Code participation in 2015?
A message to the state’s students, parents, teachers, and superintendents from the Governor’s STEM Education Innovation Alliance, on which UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska serves, reads:
I’m contacting you with an exciting opportunity for Washington’s students – to lead the nation in Hour of Code participation. Students are guaranteed to have FUN while learning the building blocks of computer science.
WHY: Every time we check a text on… Read more →
Happy 90th Birthday, Bill Gates Sr.!
UW CSE was honored to host a very special gathering this morning to celebrate the contributions of Bill Gates Sr. to our university, the community, the world, and countless lives on the occasion of his 90th birthday.
Bill is a UW double-alum (Bachelors and Law School), a giant in the legal profession and in the community, and long-time co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Throughout his life, Bill has been hands-on in his support for education, reproductive and… Read more →
Vote for UW CSE’s Nanocrafter to win a Vizzie!
We’re so good we’re competing against ourselves! Not only is Ph.D. student Ricardo Martin nominated in the Video category for time-lapse mining from internet photos, but Nanocrafter, the game developed by UW CSE’s Center for Game Science to advance synthetic biology research, is nominated in the Interactive category.
While theoretically only one can win the “People’s Choice” award, we are hoping there will be a tie and both UW CSE projects will be able to share bragging rights… Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Igor Mordatch and his “robot toddler” featured in MIT Technology Review
MIT Technology Review recently published a nice article about robotics research led by UW CSE Ph.D. alum Igor Mordatch, who worked with UW CSE professor Emo Todorov in the Movement Control Laboratory before taking up a postdoc position with Pieter Abbeel at UC Berkeley. Igor is the lead researcher on a project in which Darwin, a humanoid robot with simulated neural networks, learns how to move by “imagining” how to do it, and to adjust its movements based on… Read more →
UW CSE’s René Just earns ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ASE 2015
UW CSE is a recognized powerhouse in software engineering research. Our strength was once again on display at ASE 2015, the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, where postdoc René Just captured the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for the paper, “Do Automatically Generated Unit Tests Find Real Faults? An Empirical Study of Effectiveness and Challenges.”
Just and colleagues at the University of Sheffield and University of Luxembourg analyzed the effectiveness of three automated unit… Read more →
Vote for Ricardo Martin’s video!!!!!
A video illustrating UW CSE Ph.D. student Ricardo Martin’s AMAZING research on “Time-Lapse Mining from Internet Photos” has been nominated for a Vizzie award from the National Science Foundation.
Vote for the Ricardo of your choice, but vote! HERE!… Read more →
UW CSE’s Pedro Domingos in the WSJ: “Time to start getting acquainted with our digital alter egos”
UW CSE professor Pedro Domingos recently penned a column for The Wall Street Journal envisioning a not-too-distant future in which machine learning will enable us to build and control a digital model of ourselves, transforming how we approach everything from shopping, to job-hunting, to finding a mate.
From the column:
“Entrusting your money to a bank once seemed strange and risky. Similarly, entrusting all of your data to a company and letting its algorithms build a detailed model of you… Read more →
“Where Does Technological Innovation Come From?”
Many thanks to Nathan Myhrvold for providing a deeply substantive rebuttal to a nonsensical Wall Street Journal piece by Matt Ridley. Nathan writes, in email:
Matt Ridley wrote a recent piece in the WSJ (to promote a new book) arguing that basic science has nothing to do with technology and that the government should stop funding it. It’s natural for writers to want to come out with a contrarian piece that reverses all conventional wisdom, but it tends to work… Read more →
“Dear GeekWire: A coding bootcamp is not a replacement for a computer science degree”
UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska responds to an article in GeekWire by Jeff Meyerson of Software Engineering Daily, titled “Coding bootcamps question the need for computer science degrees.”
“One of the many great things about the tech industry is that it creates all kinds of jobs for all kinds of people with all kinds of preparation.
“But students, their parents, and adults seeking to re-direct their careers shouldn’t kid themselves about what sort of preparation is most likely to lead to… Read more →