Alexandra Meliou, an assistant professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst who completed a postdoc under the guidance of UW CSE professor Dan Suciu in 2012, has earned the National Science Foundation’s prestigious CAREER award.
Alexandra’s research focuses on reverse-engineering data transformations to understand, diagnose and manipulate data. She is interested in enhancing data management systems to compute and use data provenance information to identify errors, diagnose the causes of errors, and improve data quality. Learn more about her NSF-supported… Read more →
The Wall Street Journal “hearts” UW CSE alum Brandon Ballinger’s new app
The Wall Street Journal has a great article on UW CSE bachelor’s alum Brandon Ballinger (’06) and his new heart rate tracking app, Cardiogram. Brandon, who is currently working as a data scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, built the app to assist researchers with gathering data for UCSF’s Health eHeart study. But first, he decided to test the app on two things that are near and dear to many people’s hearts: Mexican food and Game of Thrones.… Read more →
UW CSE’s Pedro Domingos and Abe Friesen capture top prize at IJCAI with “magical” new algorithm
UW CSE professor Pedro Domingos and Ph.D. student Abe Friesen brought home the Distinguished Paper Award from the 2015 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) last month in Buenos Aires.
Pedro and Abe developed a new algorithm, Recursive Decomposition into locally Independent Subspaces (RDIS), capable of solving a broad class of nonconvex optimization problems. The duo demonstrated that RDIS significantly outperforms standard optimization techniques when applied to complex problems such as protein folding and mapping three-dimensional space from two-dimensional… Read more →
“UW Tech Grads Among the Most Talented in the Nation”
We admit it … this is pretty close to us talking about ourselves … but not quite.
UW !MPACT, “Informed Advocates of the University of Washington,” blogs:
“Recent UW alums don’t have to get too far off-campus to find a use for their newly-minted technology degrees. Washington’s booming tech industry is responsible for employing 238,900 people, and bringing in over $37 billion in revenue, according to a recent Washington Technology Industry Association study.
“Not only are our grads located in… Read more →
UW CSE’s Verdi team completes first full formal verification of Raft consensus protocol
Distributed systems are hard to get right in large part because they must tolerate faults gracefully: machines may crash and the network may drop, reorder, or duplicate packets. Verdi is a framework from the University of Washington to implement and formally verify distributed systems.
UW CSE’s Verdi team (students James Wilcox, Doug Woos, and Pavel Panchekha, and faculty members Zach Tatlock, Xi Wang, Mike Ernst, and Tom Anderson) has just completed the first full formal verification of the Raft consensus… Read more →
UW’s “Advanced Data Science” Ph.D. option launches!
The University of Washington’s Graduate School has approved the creation of a Ph.D. option in “Advanced Data Science” – an initiative of UW’s $2.8 million National Science Foundation IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research) award in data science, led by UW CSE’s Magda Balazinska.
The goal of the option is not to educate all students in the foundations of data science, but rather to provide advanced education to the students who will push the state-of-the-art in data science methods… Read more →
UW hosts NSF-sponsored Data Science Workshop 2015
Data Science Workshop 2015, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, will be held at the University of Washington on August 5-7. The workshop will bring together 100 graduate students from across the nation, representing diverse science and engineering domains, to interact with data scientists from industry and academia.
David Beck, the UW eScience Institute’s Director of Research for the Life Sciences, chairs the Organizing Committee. Program partners include the UW eScience Institute (CSE’s Ed Lazowska is the Director, and… Read more →
UW waives indirect cost on cloud services
The University of Washington has waived indirect cost on cloud services.
This decision removes one of several bizarre disincentives to the rational selection of research computing and storage options – disincentives that plague universities nationwide.
Federal guidelines waive indirect cost on purchased equipment – so purchasing a $100K cluster costs a grant budget $100K, despite the fact that this equipment must be housed, powered, cooled, backed up, replaced …
Meanwhile, indirect cost is charged on outsourced cloud services – so… Read more →
Kurtis Heimerl to join UW CSE faculty
We are thrilled to announce that Kurtis Heimerl will be joining the UW CSE faculty in early winter 2016. Kurtis’ research interests span information and communication technologies and development (ICTD), human-computer interaction, and networks and systems. He was recognized with a 2014 MIT Technology Review TR35 Award for his work on Community Cellular, a low-cost, low-power system for providing small-scale, locally-owned cellular networks to rural communities that lack existing cellular coverage. After building the first network in a small village… Read more →
UW CSE’s Mike Ernst talks to BBC News about the gamification of cyber-security
Normally, we don’t play around when it comes to cyber-security. But according to UW CSE professor Mike Ernst, playing around may be just what we need in order to better defend against hackers and cyber-criminals. BBC News reported this week on the Verigames project – part of DARPA’s Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV) program – which harnesses the power of citizen science to make software less vulnerable. Mike talked to the BBC about engaging players of casual games, including… Read more →