In September, our friends at GeekWire reported an amazing feat by Seattle Country Day School students Kimberly and Rebecca Yeung (ages 8 and 10, respectively): launching a weather balloon filled with helium and equipped with a flight computer, two GoPro cameras, and a picture of their cat next to a Lego R2-D2 (the “Loki Lego Launcher”) to a height of 78,000 feet, and recovering it next to a cow pie in Stratford, WA. Read the terrific GeekWire article here.… Read more →
UW CSE’s Nell O’Rourke to address Rising Stars workshop at MIT
UW CSE Ph.D. candidate Nell O’Rourke will be a featured speaker at the annual Rising Stars career-building workshop for women in computer science and electrical engineering. More than 60 promising graduate students and postdocs from around the world will gather at MIT next week for a series of research talks, career advice and networking aimed at supporting young female scholars interested in pursuing careers in academia.
Nell, who works with professor Zoran Popović in UW CSE’s Center for Game Science… Read more →
Amazon Catalyst: Inspiring grassroots innovation at UW
Today our friend and neighbor Amazon announced Amazon Catalyst, a grant program to inspire grassroots innovation at the University of Washington.
The program is open to all members of the UW community – all people, all fields.
It’s a partnership with huge potential! Thank you Amazon!
Learn more here.
GeekWire here. Seattle Times here.… Read more →
UW CSE’s Yoshi Kohno, Franzi Roesner and Tamara Denning co-author policy primer on augmented reality
UW CSE professors Yoshi Kohno and Franzi Roesner and Ph.D. alum Tamara Denning (now on the faculty at the University of Utah) are among the lead authors of a new white paper that examines policy issues associated with emerging augmented reality technologies. The paper is the first of its kind published by the UW’s Tech Policy Lab, which brings together faculty and students from UW CSE, the School of Law, the iSchool and other units on campus to explore… Read more →
Seattle Times on UW faculty unionization effort
The Seattle Times reports opinions pro and con on the effort by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to unionize UW’s faculty. The article quotes CSE’s Ed Lazowska, and references a website created by Lazowska and Chemistry professor Paul Hopkins. Read the article here.
CampusReform.org focuses on the con, again quoting Lazowska. Read the article here.
A complex issue. While individual UW CSE faculty members have opinions and voice them, UW CSE itself is careful to express… Read more →
UW CSE alum Brandon Lucia recognized for “Valor” at OOPSLA 2015
UW CSE alum Brandon Lucia (Ph.D., ’13), now on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon, collected a Distinguished Paper Award and a Distinguished Artifact Award at OOPSLA 2015 last week for the paper, “Valor: Efficient, Software-Only Region Conflict Exceptions.”
Valor is a novel, software-only region conflict detection analysis that achieves high performance by eliminating the costly analysis on each read operation required by previous approaches. Existing techniques either modify hardware or slow programs dramatically, precluding always-on use. As the … Read more →
The New York Times on Paul Allen’s philanthropy
“‘It always comes back to what you are passionate about,’ said Mr. Allen, 62. Through philanthropy, he said, ‘you are transmitting your hopes, and keeping them going in the future.'”
Oren Etzioni – UW CSE professor and CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence – is quoted.
Terrific article – read it here.… Read more →
UW’s eScience Institute to co-lead new big data innovation hub
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that the University of Washington – a recognized leader in data management and visualization and data-intensive discovery – will co-lead the new Big Data Regional Innovation Hub for the western United States. Members of the UW’s eScience Institute and UW CSE faculty will partner with colleagues at the University of California, San Diego and UC Berkeley on the new initiative, which is one of four university-led hubs established by NSF to catalyze big data… Read more →
UW CSE friends and family among Seattle Magazine’s “Most Influential People of 2015”
The November issue of Seattle Magazine contains its annual list of “Seattle’s Most Influential People” – a list that was particularly kind to UW CSE friends and family this year. Among those recognized:
“Nurturing Knowledge” – Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer of Microsoft
“Game Changer” – Ana Mari Cauce, President of the University of Washington
“Leading the Causes” – Paul G. Allen, Benefactor
“Package Deal” – Amazon
“The Trailblazer” – David Brewster, Civic Activist
“Sick Leave” – Chris… Read more →
The Most Common Job in Each State
Here’s a terrific interactive map produced by NPR’s “Planet Money” based on US Bureau of Labor Statistics data. It shows the most common job in each state, biennially from 1978 through 2014.
As of 2014, in Washington, Utah, Colorado, and Virginia, it’s “Software Developer.” (In the majority of the states, it’s “Truck Driver.”
Check it out here! And think about what we need to do in order to sustain this advantage, and ensure that our own kids are the… Read more →