UW CSE professor Ben Taskar passed away tragically, in his 30’s, in 2013, of sudden and severe heart failure.
UW CSE has commemorated Ben in a number of ways, including the establishment of the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, and of the annual Ben Taskar Memorial Lecture.
Today, the inaugural Ben Taskar Memorial Lecture was delivered to a packed house by Ben’s Stanford Ph.D. advisor and founder of Coursera, Daphne Koller.
The event began with remarks honoring… Read more →
AAAI shows UW CSE’s Dieter Fox some love with its Classic Paper Award
A paper co-authored by UW CSE professor Dieter Fox in his graduate student days was one of two papers selected this year for special recognition by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) with its Classic Paper Award, which recognizes papers that have been the most influential in the field. AAAI will show Fox and his colleagues the love during the opening ceremony of its 2016 conference on February 14th in Phoenix, Arizona.
The winning paper, “The … Read more →
Business Insider: Washington’s economy ranks No. 1 in the nation
“We ranked the economies of all the states and DC on seven measures: Unemployment rates; GDP per capital; average weekly wages; recent growth rates for nonfarm payroll jobs; GDP; house prices; and wages,” Business Insider explained.
In ranking Washington state #1, Business Insider said:
“Washington state scored extremely well on most of our metrics. Its Q2 annualized Gross Domestic Product growth was a stunning 8.0 percent, by far the highest among the states and D.C. The November 2015, average weekly… Read more →
UW CSE’s Richard Anderson talks to KPLU about digital financial services for the developing world
UW CSE professor Richard Anderson recently spoke to KPLU’s Jennifer Wing about our new Digital Financial Services Research Group that was announced last week. The new group, which aims to accelerate the development of secure mobile banking services for people in the developing world, is a collaboration between UW CSE’s Information & Communications Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab, Security and Privacy Research Lab, and the iSchool.
From the radio segment:
“In developing and third-world countries, moving money… Read more →
UW CSE alum Ben Hindman, co-creator of Mesos, wins UW College of Engineering Diamond Award
Each year, the UW College of Engineering honors a select group of alumni for their contributions to the field of engineering and to society with its Diamond Awards. Among the 2016 honorees is CSE alum Ben Hindman (B.S., ’07), Founder of Mesosphere, Inc. – an outgrowth of his graduate work at UC Berkeley – who is recognized with the “Early Career” award.
From the citation:
“Few people outside the tech industry have heard of Apache Mesos, software that provides essential… Read more →
UW rocks in “Best Paper” awards!
Brown University computer science professor Jeff Huang maintains a list of “Best Paper” awards at the major computer science conferences, going back to 1996. The list displays the award papers at each conference for each year, and the total number of award papers from each institution (with appropriate treatment of papers with co-authors from multiple institutions).
The 2015 update has just been posted.
UW has always ranked well … but we are now the #1 academic institution – bested… Read more →
UW CSE launches Digital Financial Services Research Group to accelerate innovative banking solutions for developing regions
UW CSE revolutionized data collection and analysis in low-resource settings with the creation of the Open Data Kit (ODK), a suite of free, open-source mobile tools. ODK – a project spearheaded by the late professor Gaetano Borriello – has been deployed in more than 40 countries to monitor elections, to conserve natural resources, to track health care outcomes, and much more.
Now, UW CSE is poised to do for money management what we did for data with the launch of… Read more →
UW CSE’s Martin Tompa welcomes students to weekly Schnapsen-fest
UW CSE professor Martin Tompa welcomed “a veritable horde” of undergraduate students to the first weekly Schnapsen game of the winter quarter. Schnapsen is the national card game of Austria, which Tompa uses to illustrate many probability topics in his CSE 312 course. Tompa published the definitive guide to winning at Schnapsen last September.
The very active UW Schnapsen Club provided pizza and hand-made cookies in the shapes of the Austrian card suits. Club members partnered with novice Schnapsen players… Read more →
UW CSE’s Aditya Vashistha wins Facebook Graduate Fellowship
Aditya Vashistha, a third-year Ph.D. student working in the Information & Communications Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab led by UW CSE professor Richard Anderson, has been selected as a Facebook Graduate Fellow for 2016-2017. The highly competitive program is designed to support emerging leaders who demonstrate the potential to advance Facebook’s mission of making the world more open and connected.
Social media platforms play an essential role in people’s lives, and they are an increasingly vital tool for… Read more →
Doug Walker, 1950-2015
We remember Doug Walker, a long-time friend of UW CSE and co-founder in 1981 of WRQ, a top-20 software company in its day. Doug went missing Thursday afternoon while snowshoeing with friends on Granite Mountain in the Cascades, and was found dead on Friday by a search and rescue team.
It’s impossible to convey what Doug (always along with his wife Maggie) has meant to the Seattle community. Obviously WRQ. Philanthropy – to the University of Washington, the Seattle Parks… Read more →