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  • "Barron's editorial slags federal support for basic research; Lazowska responds" (Computing Research Policy Blog) (August 2008)
    "Continued investment is necessary to maintain our leadership and competitiveness. Achieving many of the 'societal grand challenges' of this century will depend critically on further fundamental advances in IT: the engineering of new tools that will transform scientific discovery; advancing personalized learning; shifting towards predictive, preventive, personalized, participatory medicine; enhancing national security; developing smart controls and smart electric grids needed to address energy and climate challenges. Many of the 'grand challenges' of IT itself will have broad implications for society: securing cyberspace; designing truly scalable systems; enhancing virtual reality; creating the future of networking; infusing 'computational thinking' into a wide variety of disciplines which are themselves becoming 'information sciences'; driving advances in entirely new approaches to computing such as quantum computing. Research is the key to making progress on these grand challenges."
  • CSE Affiliate Professor Dave Cutler wins National Medal of Technology (August 2008)
    The National Medal of Technology honors America's leading innovators. Cutler is best known for his contributions to operating systems: RSX-11/M, VAX/VMS, VAXeln, and Windows NT. CSE's Ed Lazowska, in his letter of support for Bill Gates's nomination of Cutler, wrote: "Cutler ... has an incredible facility for creating designs that will work, for leading teams that implement these designs according to spec - correct, on-time, within budget, and meeting performance goals - and for building the most critical and challenging aspects himself ... Project after project, for more than 30 years, Cutler has succeeded at accomplishing the impossible (or at least the highly unlikely) through insight, talent, skill, leadership, and force of will. The result, as the nomination states, is 'fundamental contributions to computer architecture, to compilers, to operating systems, and to software engineering' that 'enabled a trillion dollars of industry revenue.'"
  • "Vocal Joystick controls PCs for those with hand injuries" (c|net) (August 2008)
    "The project, known as the Vocal Joystick, is designed to allow someone to control a computer cursor using nothing more than their voice ... Malkin demonstrated the software in real-time, showing how it is used in conjunction with a simple game where a player controls a fish swimming around trying to catch other fish. He proceeded to sound out vowel after vowel, and sure enough, on-screen, his fish moved around dexterously, chomping up snack after snack. The Gnomedex crowd went wild."

    Vocal Joystick is a collaboration between UW Electrical Engineering and Computer Science & Engineering.

  • "An open-source approach to tracking stolen laptops" (c|net) (August 2008)
    UW's Adeona project garnered lots of press and blog coverage after a presentation at Gnomedex.

    See additional coverage here.

  • "Microsoft test-driving Wi-Fi use in vehicles: Researchers show potential of public wireless networks" (Seattle PI) (August 2008)
    Press coverage of the SIGCOMM paper "Interactive WiFi Connectivity for Mobile Vehicles" by John Zahorjan (UW), Ratul Mahajan (UW Ph.D., now at Microsoft Research), and Aruna Balasubramanian, Brian Neil Levine, and Arun Venkataramani (UMass Amherst).

    "'Today's Wi-Fi handoff protocols are incredibly fragile in outdoor environments and mobile environments,' Mahajan said in an interview. Under existing approaches, he explained, computers and devices are 'artificially limited to talking to only one access point, or only one base station at a time, even though there may be other base stations' in the area."

  • UW CSE friends and family among 2008 TR 35 (Technology Review) (August 2008)
    Each year since 1999, Technology Review has honored 35 young innovators under the age of 35 -- the TR 35. The 2008 TR 35 includes:
    • Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Microsoft Live Labs, recognized for creating Photosynth by combining work from his startup Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft) with work by UW CSE professor Steve Seitz, UW CSE graduate student Noah Snavely, and Microsoft Research computer vision researcher Rick Szeliski.
    • Tanzeem Choudhury from Dartmouth, an Affilate faculty member in UW CSE, recognized for her work on inferring social networks automatically that she conducted at Intel Research Seattle in collaboration with UW CSE professors Gaetano Borriello and Henry Kautz, UW CSE graduate student Danny Wyatt, and UW EE professor Jeff Bilmes.
    • Merrie Morris from Microsoft Research, an Affiliate faculty member in UW CSE, recognized for her work in collaborative information gathering.
  • "'Can you see me now?' Sign language over cell phones comes to United States" (UW News) (August 2008)
    "A group at the University of Washington has developed software that for the first time enables deaf and hard-of-hearing people to use sign language over a mobile phone. UW engineers got the phones working together this spring, and recently received a National Science Foundation grant for a 20-person field project that will begin next year in Seattle ..."
  • "Microsoft launches free Photosynth for combining shots into one picture" (Seattle Times) (August 2008)
    "Photosynth is a distinctly Seattle innovation. It makes use of technology for smoothly streaming large digital images, developed by Seadragon Software, a Ballard startup Microsoft acquired. The system for arranging photo collections in their three-dimensional context was developed by University of Washington computer scientists."
  • "Microsoft launches 3D photo program" (Seattle PI) (August 2008)
    "Available at photosynth.com, the program is a combination of technologies from Microsoft Research, the University of Washington and Seadragon Software, a Seattle-based startup that Microsoft acquired in 2006. Up until now, it has been a technology preview. Everyday users could view custom synths of photos created by Microsoft and selected others, but they couldn't create collections of their own."
  • "Microsoft unveils fruits of online shake-up" (Financial Times) (August 2008)
    "The technology, developed by the University of Washington and Microsoft Research, identifies patterns in pictures, then matches these with related photos to produce overlapping montages that users can then navigate in a browser."

    Articles that fail to credit UW appeared in the New York Times ("Photosynth is brought to you by a 15-person team at Microsoft Research ..."), the Wall Street Journal ("Microsoft is a little like the General Motors of technology ... Photosynth, based on technology Microsoft acquired ...").

  • "Intel Moves to Free Gadgets of Their Recharging Cords" (New York Times) (August 2008)
    "Intel has made progress in a ... technique for wirelessly powering consumer gadgets and computers, a development that could allow a person to simply place a device on a desktop countertop to power it."

    The work was carried out at Intel Research Seattle by UW CSE Affiliate faculty member Josh Smith.

  • Widespread coverage of P4P (August 2008)
    Research by UW CSE professor Arvind Krishnamurthy has yielded dramatic bandwidth conservation for peer-to-peer file sharing. Extensive press coverage of Arvind's P4P includes: See the P4P paper here.
  • CSE's Ed Lazowska featured in Harborview Medical Center's Report to the Community (pdf) (August 2008)
    UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska is featured in UW Medicine's 2008 Report to the Community. Lazowska contracted a life-threatening spine infection that was successfully treated by a team at Harborview Medical Center led by Dr. Jens Chapman.

    "As a patient at Harborview, Lazowska said he received expert care but perhaps the most extraordinary part of the experience was seeing how employees at every level, not just those providing direct patient care, took pride in patients doing well.

    "'After surgery, I was struggling to go up and down the hall with my walker,' Lazowska said. 'The custodial staff would stop to cheer for me as I passed. It meant so much for them to stop what they were doing and help motivate me as I recovered - it was utterly remarkable.'"

  • Noah Snavely and Photosynth on Microsoft Channel8 (August 2008)
    "There's no denying that some of the coolest research and projects going on happens right on your campuses by you and your professors ... One of my favorite projects going on here at Microsoft's Live Labs is PhotoSynth ... It turns out this project originated at the University of Washington by a graduate student there, Noah, the 'PhotoSynth Mastermind.' He joined us in MSR's fancy new building 99 to talk about how it all works, how he did it, and what's in store for the future - REALLY cool stuff. You'll also see Noah's mentors, the 'Patent Wizard,' Rick Szeliski, and the 'Cool Professor,' Steve Seitz ... Trust me when I say these are some of the best demos I've seen ..."
  • Dr. Dobb's CodeTalk interviews UW CSE alumnus Ethan John (August 2008)
    "Ethan John professes to not enjoy writing code. Testing, on the other hand, he enjoys immensely. That makes him my kind of Computer Science graduate: the kind who codes only because it gives him an excuse to test. Ethan currently works for Isilon Systems, who I am sure is happy to have the advantage of his love for testing.

    "Here is what Ethan has to say:

    "DDJ: What was your first introduction to testing?

    "EJ: I was in school, and got a job as a research assistant on a project called UrbanSim. It was an Agile house, minus pair programming, so they were doing test driven and iterative development in Java. I had only heard about TDD a few months prior, and my initial experiences with it had been positive. Unit tested code tended to work more consistently out of the gate than otherwise, and I was sold after just a few weeks on the project ..."

  • "The 160-mile download diet: Local file-sharing drastically cuts network load" (UW News) (August 2008)
    "Ever since Bram Cohen invented BitTorrent, Web traffic has never been the same ... Peer-to-peer networking, or P2P, has become the method of choice for sharing music and videos ... Experts estimate that peer-to-peer systems generate 50 to 80 percent of all Internet traffic ... Tensions remain, however, between users of bandwidth-hungry peer-to-peer users and struggling Internet service providers ...

    "To ease this tension, researchers at the University of Washington and Yale University propose a neighborly approach to file swapping, sharing preferentially with nearby computers. This would allow peer-to-peer traffic to continue growing without clogging up the Internet's major arteries, and could provide a basis for the future of peer-to-peer systems. A paper on the new system, known as P4P, will be presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications meeting in Seattle."

  • Raj Rao's "Morpheus" on cover of Journal of Neural Engineering (August 2008)
    Christian Bell, Pradeep Shenoy, Rawichote Chalodhom, and Raj Rao's paper "Control of a humanoid robot by a non-invasive brain-computer interface in humans" was the featured article in the most recent issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering.
  • "UW-Microsoft Photosynth team back at it with new mind-blowing demo" (Seattle Times) (August 2008)
    "When I saw Photosynth for the first time about two years ago, it joined a small handful of new products that really captured my attention. The software arranges sets of photos in 3-D context and allows viewers to navigate fluidly from image to image, moving their gaze from a building's facade to a detail shot of a specific fresco, for example.

    "Photosynth is a distinctly Seattle invention. It emerged from a collaboration of University of Washington graduate student Noah Snavely and computer science professor Steven Seitz, with Microsoft researcher Richard Szeliski, as well as a Ballard startup Microsoft acquired. Now at least part of that team is at it again.

    "In a paper presented at this week's SIGGRAPH (a meeting of the world's top computer graphics researchers), the UW/Microsoft team described the next iteration of their work ..."

  • CSE's Stephen Spencer wins 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award (August 2008)
    "More than the content, deliverables and events, Stephen says he most enjoys working with the members of our community, from volunteers to contributors to contractors. With this award, we collectively and formally reciprocate by expressing how much we enjoy working with Stephen, and to give him the recognition he never expects but so clearly deserves."
  • "Best Reason to Drop Your Business Major for English" (Seattle Weekly) (August 2008)
    Seattle Weekly profiles Anu Taranath, wife of CSE faculty member Raj Rao, in their annual "Best of Seattle" feature: "'Brilliant and inspirational.' 'An incredible woman.' 'Amazing': just a few of the things former students have written about the tiny, quiet, and very pregnant woman sitting at a Lake City bakery table. Dr. Anu Taranath is the highest-rated member of the University of Washington English faculty on ratemyprofessors.com - despite having one of the lower 'easiness' ratings."
  • CSE's Brett Newlin: Olympic oarsman (NY Times) (August 2008)
    2005 UW Computer Engineering bachelors alumnus Brett Newlin will represent the United States in the Men's Four at the Beijing Olympics. A four-time national team member and first-time Olympian, Brett was named USRowing's Male Athlete of the Year in 2006.

    Brett was one of six US Olympic Team members featured in an August 3 NY Times spread, Bodies of Work: "'In high school, I was kind of a beanpole. Then in college I started rowing, and muscles started popping out from all over the place.'"

    See Brett's USRowing Olympic biography here. Beijing photos by fellow Husky oarsman Scott Gault here.

  • "Google Forging Connections with University of Washington, but Still Has a Ways To Go" (Xconomy) (July 2008)
    "Lazowska's department has 150-plus alumni working for Google - many based at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, CA, but an increasing number in Kirkland and Seattle. 'We have dozens of undergraduate students doing summer internships at Google, many graduate students carrying out their research at Google, and two faculty members spending the year there on sabbatical [Gaetano Borriello and Steve Gribble],' says Lazowska. And Brian Bershad, director of Google's Seattle site, is a UW computer science professor on leave ...

    "While Google's latest efforts are highly welcomed, it will probably take some time for the search company to become as deeply established in the community. 'Despite all this, Microsoft is [still] the University of Washington's #1 corporate partner,' explains Lazowska."

  • "If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone" (New York Times) (July 2008)
    "This year, researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Washington began recruiting computer gamers to an online competition, named Foldit, aimed at unraveling one of the knottiest problems of biology: how proteins fold."
  • Mikhail Manyak: 1988-2008 (Seattle PI) (July 2008)
    Mikhail Manyak, 20, a University of Washington Computer Engineering student, died Sunday after suffering a massive allergic reaction to medications prescribed following oral surgery.
  • "Computer Science Courses Attracting More Students" (Chronicle of Higher Education) (July 2008)
    CSE's Ed Lazowska in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
  • CSE's Yoky Matsuoka profiled on PBS Nova (July 2008)
    CSE's Yoky Matsuoka is profiled by PBS's Nova science series. "A former tennis prodigy aims to create advanced prosthetic limbs controlled by human thought. Learn how a self-described 'airhead' came to embrace her inner scientist, and what she's doing to encourage young women to pursue scientific careers."
  • "Web-based program gives the blind Internet access" (Washington Post) (July 2008)
    "Blind people generally use computers with the help of screen-reader software, but those products can cost more than $1,000, so they're not exactly common on public PCs at libraries or Internet cafes. Now a free new Web-based program for the blind aims to improve the situation. It's called WebAnywhere, and it was developed by a computer science graduate student at the University of Washington."
  • "For your eyes only: Custom interfaces make computer clicking faster, easier" (UW News) (July 2008)
    "Insert your key in the ignition of a luxury car and the seat and steering wheel will automatically adjust to preprogrammed body proportions ... But open any computer program and you're largely subject to a design team's ideas about button sizes, fonts and layouts ... A new approach to design, developed at the University of Washington, would put each person through a brief skills test and then generate a mathematically-based version of the user interface optimized for his or her vision and motor abilities."

    Supple project website here.

  • "New Service Tracks Missing Laptops for Free" (PC World) (July 2008)
    PC Week describes the Adeona service, created by UW CSE undergraduate Gabriel Maganis.

    "Lose your laptop these days and you lose part of your life: You say good-bye to photos, music and personal documents that cannot be replaced, and if it's a work computer, you may be the source of a very public data breach.

    "But now, researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, have found a way to give you a shot at getting your life back ...

    "Here's how it works: A user downloads the free client software onto a laptop. That software then starts anonymously sending encrypted notes about the computer's whereabouts to servers on the Internet. If the laptop ever goes missing, the user downloads another program, enters a username and password, and then picks up this information from the servers ..."

    See Slashdot here
    See SC Magazine here

  • "Opening new portals for the blind" (MSNBC) (July 2008)
    "WebAnywhere, an Internet-based service released last month, boasts an even better price tag: free. The program's innovation isn't so much about what it does -- no more than existing Web readers that convert written text to digital speech -- as it is about its availability on almost any computer."
  • CSE's Jeff Bigham, WebAnywhere in Puget Sound Business Journal (July 2008)
    "Just imagine you're blind and trying to go online at an internet cafe in Paris. Until now, unless you had $1,000 worth of software installed, it was just about impossible. But in recent weeks hundreds of blind people found their worlds opening up online with help from a web-based program called WebAnywhere.

    The program was created by Jeffrey Bigham, a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department. He knew that many applications were moving from desktop computers to the web, and thought such a program could help blind people.

  • "Team Pastry-Powered T(o)uring Machine" tackles the STP (July 2008)
    The 2008 Seattle-To-Portland bicycle tour featured the largest-ever gathering of UW CSE bicycling jerseys. The jerseys -- for the "Pastry-Powered T(o)uring Machine" bicycle club, were created by UW CSE alumna Lauren Bricker. The theme for the design of the shirts is UW CSE's infamous "Steam-Powered Turing Machine" mural.
  • "Computer Science Enrollments: The Real News" (Computing Community Consortium blog) (July 2008)
    CSE's Ed Lazowska writes, "I regularly get contacted by reporters who read the CRA 'Taulbee Survey' and inquire about the current state of computer science undergraduate enrollments. Here's what I said last night to the most recent reporter who inquired ..."

    Re-posts with comments:
    Quantum Pontiff
    Computing Research Policy Blog

  • "Trying to give robots a human touch: UW scientist believes biology key to better-working machine" (Seattle PI) (July 2008)
    "Yoky Matsuoka, professor of computer sciences and engineering at the University of Washington and a 2007 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation 'genius' award, wants robots to function more like human beings. Her lab at the UW - full of mechanical hands, fingers and arm parts - looks like a repair shop for Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator."
  • "Project makes web more accessible to blind" (KGO San Francisco) (July 2008)
    UW CSE Ph.D. student Jeff Bigham describes the WebInSight project on KGO TV San Francisco.
  • "Playing the Science Game" (Chronicle of Higher Education) (July 2008)
    "Could the person who finds the cure for cancer be a gamer? The creators of an online game that allows players to help scientists design new proteins with therapeutic properties hope so." The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses UW's Foldit game.
  • UW's Oren Etzioni, Farecast, in Wired (pdf) (July 2008)
    "In 2001, Oren Etzioni was on a plane chatting up his seat mates when he realized they had all paid less for their tickets than he did. 'I thought, 'don't get mad, get even,'' he says. So he came home to his computer lab at the University of Washington, got his hands on some fare data, and plugged it into a few basic prediction algorithms. He wanted to see if they could reliably foresee changes in ticket prices. It worked: Not only did the algorithms accurately anticipate when fares would go up or down, they gave reasonable estimates of what the new prices would be.

    "Etzioni's prediction model has grown far more complex since then, and the company he founded in 2003, Farecast, now tracks information on 175 billion fares originating at 79 US airports. The database knows when airline prices are going to change and has uncovered a host of other secrets about air travel."

    Full article here.

  • "Gates Retires from Daily Role at Microsoft" (NPR) (June 2008)
    "Forty years ago, while an eighth-grader at the private Lakeside School in Seattle, Gates was introduced to his first computer. He was immediately smitten, as was fellow student Paul Allen.

    "The two became fast friends, says Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.

    "'They did the scheduling for Lakeside School - there are rumors they and their friends got into the classes of their choice,' says Lazowska. 'It was just a couple of brilliant guys who got captured by this cool field.'"

  • "Online service lets blind surf the Internet from any computer, anywhere" (UW News) (June 2008)
    "WebAnywhere, launched today, lets blind and visually impaired people surf the Web on the go. The tool, developed at the University of Washington, turns screen-reading into an Internet service that reads aloud Web text on any computer with speakers or headphone connections."
  • "Washington: All Geared Up To Fight The Last War" (Xconomy) (June 2008)
    CSE's Ed Lazowska in Xconomy: "By now you've seen the 2008 Milken Institute "State Technology and Science Index." Washington ranks fifth, behind Massachusetts, Maryland, Colorado, and California. Not too shabby? Let's take a look under the covers."
  • "Bill Gates steps down, but not out of public eye" (MSNBC) (June 2008)
    "'It's easy to lose track of the fact that [Microsoft] was two kids with a dream,' said Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science amp; Engineering at the University of Washington and serves on the technical advisory board for Microsoft's research arm.

    "Lazowska credits Gates with helping inspire many students to go into computer science, and he says the mystique surrounding Gates still exists even as other technology luminaries, such as the co-founders of Google, have ascended as role models. When Gates recently spoke at the University of Washington, attendance was limited to 750 people, but Lazowska said 'we could have gotten 10,000 people to show up.'"

  • "Imagine Cup 2008: Web-based Screen Reader Wins Top Accessibility Prize: Student designs technology that makes any computer usable by people who are blind" (Microsoft) (June 2008)
    "When Jeff Bigham started developing a Web-based screen reader for people who are blind, he had no idea his work would bring him international recognition as one of the brightest young stars of computer science and accessible technology. He was just trying to help people.

    "Bigham, 27, and a Ph.D candidate in computer science at the University of Washington, won the first-ever Accessible Technology Award for Interface Design in the 2008 Imagine Cup technology competition sponsored by Microsoft ..."

    Visit the WebAnywhere research project website here!

  • "Scientists tap gaming's power: You, too, can help figure out proteins" (Seattle PI) (June 2008)
    The Seattle PI describes the "Foldit" videogame, a collaboration involving UW CSE's Zoran Popovic, David Salesin, and Adrien Treuille, and UW Biochemistry's David Baker. "Benjamin Baker is a 13-year-old middle school student who, like most boys his age, probably thinks his father is kind of a geek, if not a dork.

    "His father, David Baker, is, after all, a scientist. He is the type of wild-haired, frequently disheveled deep thinker who could play the role of a scientist in one of those schlocky, adolescent-targeted movies in which smart people are included only when the main characters need special help to solve problems involving girls, money or the police.

    "Given all this, and that Ben is now working hard on the home computer trying to help solve his father's real-life problem - that of protein structural analysis - is strong evidence that Baker and his colleagues at the University of Washington may have discovered something revolutionary, something huge:

    "How to make complicated science into a fun video game!"

  • Randy Wang and Digital Study Hall team win 2007 ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics (June 2008)
    ACM will present the 2007 Eugene Lawler Award to Randy Wang and the Digital Study Hall team for innovative use of cost-effective digital technology that helps improve the education of underserved children in South Asia. Wang's vision was for a system that harvested community-generated videos of the best grassroots teachers to help schools in urban slums and rural areas in India.

    Wang was a Ph.D. student of UW CSE professor Tom Anderson. A number of the concepts of Digital Study Hall were framed during Wang's visits to UW, and a number of UW students and faculty participated in the project in various ways.

  • CSE's Yoky Matsuoka in Columns (June 2008)
    Columns, the UW alumni magazine, interviews CSE professor and MacArthur "Genius" Award winner Yoky Matsuoka.
  • Columns recognizes CSE alums and near-alums (June 2008)
    Columns, the UW alumni magazine, celebrates its 100th year by highlighting the accomplishments of 100 distinguished living alumni. Among those included with ties to CSE are:
  • UW CSE 2008 commencement! (June 2008)
    Photographs and videos from the 2008 UW Computer Science & Engineering commencement ceremony.
  • CSE's Susumu Harada recognized by NISH (June 2008)
    Harada was recognized for his "'Hands-Free Voice-Driven Drawing and Diagram Creation Method for People with Motor Impairments,' a voice activated speech recognition technology that allows the user to create diagrams and drawings on the computer. This technology successfully bridges the gap that has existed between voice activated technology for dictation and hands free control of the computer. It also serves as a low cost method of drawing and designing via the computer. Harada was mentored by Dr. Jacob Wobbrock, a previous first place award winner in the National Scholar Award program."
  • "The Inexact Science Behind DMCA Takedown Notices" (NY Times) (June 2008)
    "A new study from the University of Washington suggests that media industry trade groups are using flawed tactics in their investigations of users who violate copyrights on peer-to-peer file sharing networks ...

    "The paper finds that there is a serious flaw in how these trade groups finger alleged file-sharers. It also suggests that some people might be getting improperly accused of sharing copyrighted content, and could even be purposely framed by other users."

    Slashdot ("Why would a printer, an inanimate object with no reproductive organs, be downloading pornography? It doesn't fit ... if the toner cartridge won't fit, you must acquit.") here.

  • "A Tribute to Jim Gray: Sometimes Nice Guys Do Finish First" (NY Times) (May 2008)
    "'He was one of the world's great listeners,' said Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer scientist who in recent years had collaborated with Dr. Gray on a series of projects designed to provide powerful computational tools to scientists. 'I thought we had a special relationship,' he said, only to realize that there were 500 special relationships of the same kind.

    "Several speakers quoted Jimi Hendrix, who once noted, 'Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens,' to try to explain Jim Gray's special qualities.

    "The object lesson taught by Dr. Gray, said Dr. Lazowska, was that while there is nothing you can do about improving your I.Q., it is possible to work at becoming a terrific human being.

    "'Jim was the world's greatest connector,' he said. 'He connected ideas and people and he didn't understand boundaries, either corporate or national.'"

  • "Gathering in Berkeley, Calif., today to honor legendary scientist, Microsoft researcher Jim Gray" (Seattle Times) (May 2008)
    "Today's event will also include the announcement of the Jim Gray Chair, which drew contributions from up and down the West Coast.

    "Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, and Marc Benioff, CEO of Microsoft rival Salesforce.com, each donated $250,000 within a few hours of being asked, according to Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer science professor who helped with the fundraising. A fourth donor, Mike Stonebraker, also donated $250,000. He is a Berkeley professor and founder of Ingres, a database system.

    "Their donations are being matched by $1 million from the Hewlett Foundation, as in Hewlett-Packard. A mix of additional gifts includes $75,000 from Google and $200,000 from Microsoft, which is passing on a prize that Gray won.

    "'It's another indication of how Jim spans all kinds of differences and brings people together,' Lazowska said."

    Brier Dudley blog posts (excellent!): here, here, here, here, and here.

    Joseph Joy blog post here.

    O'Reilly Radar blog post here.

  • CSE's Yoshi Kohno, Yoky Matsuoka, Tapan Parikh featured in UW College of Engineering lecture (May 2008)
    "Join us for a fascinating afternoon of lectures by five of the College of Engineering's rising stars. In an unprecedented year, the MacArthur Foundation and MIT Technology Review honored three faculty members, an alumnus, and a student for their exceptional contributions to society. Learn more about their inspiring work." (The College of Engineering seems to have ignored CSE Ph.D. alumna Karen Liu and CSE Affiliate faculty member Desney Tan, both of whom also were recognized by Technology Review.)
  • "UW software for blind Web users wins Microsoft prize" (Seattle Times) (May 2008)
    The Imagine Cup is an annual year-long student software competition with awards in 9 major categories. UW CSE's WebAnywhere project has been named the worldwide winner of the "Interface Design Accessible Technology" division. WebAnywhere is the project of UW CSE Ph.D. student Jeff Bigham. WebAnywhere is a web-based screen reader for the web. It requires no special software to be installed on the client machine and, therefore, enables blind people to access the web from any computer they happen to have access to that has a sound card. WebAnywhere runs on any machine regardless of what operating system it is running and regardless of what browsers are installed.
  • Oren Etzioni praised in Washington CEO (May 2008)
    "We can take turns guessing the source of that next great thing. One guy to watch is Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer scientist who has a knack for inventing ideas that become highly valued businesses."
  • CSE's Prasad Raghavendra wins "Best Paper" at STOC (May 2008)
    UW CSE Ph.D. student Prasad Raghavendra has been named co-winner of the Best Paper Award (and winner of the Best Student Paper Award) at the 2008 ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing.
  • A conversation between Ed Lazowska and Vint Cerf at the Technology Alliance annual luncheon (TVW) (May 2008)
    A web archive of the TVW live broadcast of the interview.

  • "Vint Cerf: Internet pioneer, coffee drinker" (Seattle PI) (May 2008)
    A conversation between Vint Cerf and CSE's Ed Lazowska highlights the Technology Alliance annual luncheon.

    IT World here

  • Puget Sound Business Journal interviews UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni (May 2008)
    "Etzioni's spinout companies include airfare prediction website Farecast, just bought by Microsoft for a reported $115M."
  • "Free video game from UW: Wiggling and shaking for science" (Seattle Times) (May 2008)
    "A group at the University of Washington developed a clever new way to get the public's help with the massive computing challenge of researching cures for conditions such as HIV and Alzheimer's.

    "They created a free, downloadable video game called FoldIt! that 'turns protein folding into a competitive sport.'

    "I was skeptical, too, but after I downloaded it and played for awhile, it became addictive. The game draws out any latent obsessive-compulsive disorder you may have, encouraging you to wiggle, shake and pull 3D proteins to 'fix' their shapes."

    Science Daily here
    UW News & Information here
    The Economist here
    Technology Review here
    Nature here
    Howard Hughes Medical Institute here
    Mother Jones here
    Popular Science here
    Discovery Channel here

  • Yoky Matsuoka at New Yorker "Stories from the Near Future" conference (May 2008)
    "The bold visionaries of today share the bright ideas of tomorrow at the second annual New Yorker Conference -- newly expanded to two days of forward thinking and eye-opening innovation."
  • "'CSI' sleuths out Microsoft's latest technology" (USA Today) (April 2008)
    Photosynth, a collaboration between UW CSE's computer graphics group and Microsoft, has been featured in an episode of CBS's hit crime drama CSI: NY.

    This is a significant move uptown from the graphics group's other recent television exposure: visualization of "drafting" as part of NASCAR coverage.

    Seattle Times article here
    Seattle PI article here
    Washington Times here
    Discover here

  • UW CSE's Julie Letchner, Kate Everitt win Google Anita Borg Scholarships (April 2008)
    UW CSE students Julie Letchner and Kate Everitt are among 23 nationwide winners of 2008 Google Anita Borg Scholarships. Google established the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships "to honor the work of Dr. Anita Borg, a computer scientist who dedicated her professional career to increasing the participation of women and other under-represented minorities in the field of technology."
  • "UW helped nurture computing ideas, Gates says" (Seattle Times) (April 2008)
    "As teenagers, Paul Allen and Bill Gates wandered the University of Washington campus, trying to pilfer free computer time. They let their minds wander to a future when computing power would essentially be free.

    "Gates, in the final stop of his last university-speaking circuit as a full-time Microsoft employee, told students and faculty at the UW on Friday about what they imagined then and how much of what they dreamed of is becoming reality ...

    "A common thread is the UW itself. Gates acknowledged the important relationship he, Microsoft and the Foundation have with the university. It starts with his parents, who met there as students, he said. He took an algebra class there, but the main benefit was finding time to practice his skills on unused mainframe and minicomputers around the campus - before the PC era he helped create ... He said the UW has received more Gates Foundation grants than any other university. Microsoft, in a typical year, hires about 100 people from the UW, making it the top source of talent for the company, Gates said ... He also highlighted work at the UW on collaboration software and an innovative photo-viewing technology that became a Microsoft product called Photosynth."

  • Bill Gates at UW (Seattle PI) (April 2008)
    Bill Gates visits UW CSE and speaks to a packed house of students in the final stop on his 2008 tour of six universities.

    "With his father and two sisters watching from the front row, Gates recounted for the overflow crowd the well-known story of roaming the University of Washington campus as a boy with Paul Allen, who would become the Microsoft co-founder, looking for research computers that they could use in off-hours. They were 'stealing computer time, and now I'm giving it back,' Gates said, to laughter."

    Seattle PI article (vs. blog) here

  • "Bill Gates Unplugged: On Software, Innovation, and Giving Back" (UWTV) (April 2008)
    "University of Washington President Mark Emmert and UW Computer Science & Engineering host Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates for the final stop of his six-university tour, as Gates transitions from Microsoft to the Bill amp; Melinda Gates Foundation."

    A UWTV web archive of Gates's UW speech and Q&A session.

  • "MobileASL" project on KUOW/NPR (MP3; starts at 43:40) (April 2008)
    The Mobile ASL project is described on KUOW/NPR. Choose "MP3" and scroll to 43:40.

    See MobileASL project information here

  • "To defeat a malicious botnet, build a friendly one" (New Scientist) (April 2008)
    "Beating the 'botnets' - armies of infected computers used to attack websites - requires borrowing tactics from the bad guys, say computer security researchers.

    "A team at the University of Washington want to marshal swarms of good computers to neutralise the bad ones. They say their plan would be cheap to implement and could cope with botnets of any size."

    Read UW CSE "Phalanx" paper here

  • UW's "Vocal Joystick" named one of "25 leading-edge IT research projects" by Network World (April 2008)
    "University of Washington researchers have developed software designed to let those who can't work a handheld mouse use their voice instead to navigate the Web." (See #17)

    Project webpage here

  • "UW to lead $6.25 million project creating electronic Sherlock Holmes" (University Week) (April 2008)
    "The UW will lead a multi-institutional group pushing the limits of computers' ability to interpret data and ultimately predict the behavior of complex systems. The project, involving seven U.S. universities, has received a $6.25 million, 5-year grant from the Department of Defense.

    "'A complex monitoring system has far too many pieces of information for any one person to look at,' said principal investigator Pedro Domingos, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering. 'This award lets us do the research to develop a system for the military to look at all the available information that might be valuable and use it to predict behavior.'"

  • "Microsoft acquires Farecast - Seattle travel cost predictor's price tag put at $115 million" (Seattle PI) (April 2008)
    "Microsoft is the mystery buyer of Farecast ...

    "Madrona Venture Group's Matt McIlwain, the earliest venture investor in Farecast, said the company entertained multiple offers ... he said the deal is notable because it touches nearly every part of the innovation economy in the Pacific Northwest.

    "Farecast was started by University of Washington computer scientist Oren Etzioni, initially bankrolled by Madrona, built with people from local companies such as Alaska Airlines and AdRelevance and, ultimately, acquired by Microsoft."

    PI Microsoft Blog here
    PI Venture Blog here
    Seattle Times here
    Puget Sound Business Journal here

  • UW CSE startup Farecast purchased by Martians (Seattle PI) (April 2008)
    "Farecast's sale to an unknown buyer is the latest score for superstar University of Washington computer scientist Oren Etzioni, who has watched several of his Internet companies gobbled up at attractive valuations over the past 15 years.

    "Those include comparison shopping service NetBot, which was acquired by Excite in 1997, and MetaCrawler, a search engine that is now part of InfoSpace."

    Farecast, like many other UW CSE startups, included Madrona Venture Group and the WRF Capital as early investors.

  • UW CSE's "Web Tripwires" are the hit of NSDI (ars technica) (April 2008)
    UW CSE's "Web Tripwires" paper was received enthusiastically (and covered extensively) when presented at this week's NSDI conference. "Web Tripwires" measures the extent to which ISPs (or others) modify web pages "in flight," e.g., to insert revenue-generating advertisements.

    Run the experiment here
    FAQ and research paper here
    Slashdot here
    ars technica article here
    PC World article here
    eCanadaNow article here

  • "'Black holes' charted on the Internet" (MSNBC) (April 2008)
    "Ethan Katz-Bassett, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington, and his advisor, Arvind Krishnamurthy, designed a program to continuously search for strange Internet gaps, when a request to visit a Web site or an outgoing e-mail gets lost along a pathway that was known to be working before."

    Hubble project web here
    Parody from The Spoof! here.
    LiveScience here
    Fox News here
    "Connected" interview (KJR FM) here
    Computerworld here
    Ars Technica here
    Boing Boing here
    Digg here
    Slashdot here
    Wired.com here
    UW News & Information here

  • "Illumita is now Skytap, unveils first product" (Seattle PI) (April 2008)
    "The secretive Seattle virtualization startup Illumita has changed its name to Skytap and unveiled details around its first product, dubbed Skytap Virtual Lab ... Started as a project by University of Washington computer scientists, Skytap's goal with its first product is to create an easy and cost-efficient manner by which companies can test Web applications or software code in a virtual lab."

    According to CSE professor and company co-founder Hank Levy, the domain name Spinaltap was already taken.

    See also Seattle Times.

  • "Hubble maps the changing constellation of Internet 'black holes'" (UW News & Information) (April 2008)
    "You're trying to log on to a Web site and it's not working. You try again and again. But persistence doesn't pay off. The site you want is inexplicably, frustratingly, out of reach.

    "The other computer might just be turned off, but the causes could be more mysterious. At any given moment, a proportion of computer traffic ends up being routed into information black holes. These are situations where a path between two computers does exist, but messages -- a request to visit a Web site, an outgoing e-mail -- get lost along the way.

    "A University of Washington system named Hubble looks for these black holes and maps them on a Web site, providing an ever-changing constellation of the Internet's weak points. The Hubble map lets visitors see a map of problems worldwide or type in a specific Web page or network address to check its status. The work is being presented next week in San Francisco at the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation.

    "'There's an assumption that if you have a working Internet connection then you have access to the entire Internet,' said Ethan Katz-Bassett, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering. 'We found that's not the case.'"

  • "Microsoft creates 'instant backing band' for singers" (New Scientist) (April 2008)
    "Whether you're a frustrated songwriter or a shower-time crooner, you may long to hear your lyrics put to music. New software from Microsoft promises to provide just that: instant musical accompaniment to singing.

    "The software, called MySong, was developed by Dan Morris and Sumit Basu at Microsoft's research lab in Redmond, Washington, US, and Ian Simon at the University of Washington in Seattle."

  • CSE's Chad Klumb, Pavan Vaswani, and Ting-You Wang score clean sweep of UW academic medals! (April 2008)
    Each year, the University of Washington awards medals to the students who had the strongest academic record in their class during the previous year. This year, in an unprecedented clean sweep, CSE students won all three medals. The Freshman Medalist (the top student in last year's class of 5500 freshmen) is Chad Klumb. The Sophomore Medalist is Pavan Vaswani. The Junior Medalist is Ting-You Wang. Congratulations!
  • CSE's Julia Moore, Kathy Wei win Goldwater Scholarships (April 2008)
    CSE undergraduates Julia Moore and Kathy Wei have been awarded 2008 Goldwater Scholarships. Goldwater Scholarships are the premier award for undergraduates majoring in engineering and the sciences.
  • Six win NSF Graduate Research Fellowships (April 2008)
    Three UW CSE graduate students and three recent UW CSE bachelors alums have been named recipients of 2008 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, the top award for graduate students in engineering and the sciences. UW CSE graduate student recipients are Laura Effinger-Dean, Brian DeRenzi, and Jessica Chang. UW CSE bachelors alum recipients are Annie Liu (now a graduate student at Caltech), Gabriel Maganis (now applying to graduate schools), and Kurtis Heimerl (now a graduate student at UC Berkeley).
  • CSE's Alan Ritter, Tom Lin win National Defense Science & Enginering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowships (April 2008)
    CSE graduate students Alan Ritter and Tom Lin, both working with Professor Oren Etzioni in the Turing Center, have received 2008 National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellowships.
  • "UW team researches a future filled with RFID chips" (Seattle Times) (March 2008)
    "Some University of Washington students, faculty and staff are being tracked as they move about the computer-science building, with details of where they've been, and with whom, stored in a database.

    "Professor Gaetano Borriello checks a computer to find graduate student Evan Welbourne's last location: on the fourth floor, outside room 452 at 10:38 a.m. Wednesday. He opens another screen to reveal the building's floor plan, and a blinking green dot representing Welbourne shows him walking down the hall.

    "If it seems a bit like Big Brother, that's the intention. The project is meant to explore both positive and negative aspects of a world saturated with technology that can monitor people and objects remotely.

    "'What we want to understand,' Borriello said, 'is what makes it useful, what makes it threatening and how to balance the two.'"

  • "Universities see spike in applications from abroad" (Seattle Times) (March 2008)
    "Junior Koshal Thirumalai, from India, is majoring in computer engineering at the UW. 'It doesn't make sense to go anywhere else if you are into computers,' he says."
  • "Developing Tools That Help Disabled Students Use the Web" (Chronicle of Higher Education) (March 2008)
    The Chronicle of Higher Education interviews UW CSE professor Richard Ladner. "Disabled students face a host of challenges. Mr. Ladner, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, has spent much of his career trying to improve their opportunities for success in the discipline. The Computing Research Association recently gave him its A. Nico Habermann Award for advancing underrepresented groups."
  • "Inside the Twisted Mind of the Security Professional" (Wired) (March 2008)
    Wired riffs on CSE professor Yoshi Kohno's undergraduate computer security course. "Good engineering involves thinking about how things can be made to work; the security mindset involves thinking about how things can be made to fail ... I've often speculated about how much of this is innate, and how much is teachable ... Which is why CSE 484, an undergraduate computer-security course taught this quarter at the University of Washington, is so interesting to watch. Professor Tadayoshi Kohno is trying to teach a security mindset ..."
  • CSE's Alexei Czeskis featured in College of Engineering "Campaign Update" (pdf) (March 2008)
    "Alexei Czeskis ... is one of the initial recipients of the new Students First fellowships -- the Hacherl Endowed Graduate Fellowship established by alumnus Don Hacherl ('85) ... Czeskis is now immersed in computer security research under the mentorship of Assistant Professor Yoshi Kohno, who last fall was recognized by Technology Review as one ofthe nation's top 35 innovators under age 35."
  • "Hacking the Heart" (KOMO-TV News) (March 2008)
    "A common new technology for monitoring defibrillators is vulnerable to hacking and even to reprogramming that could stop the devices from delivering a lifesaving shock ..."
  • "Tracking technology in the corridors of learning: An American university is testing a system that allows participants to follow others' movements around campus" (The Guardian) (March 2008)
    "'Our goal is to ask what benefits can we get out of this technology and how can we protect people's privacy at the same time,' says Magda Balazinska, the project leader and assistant professor of computer science and engineering at UW. 'We want to get a handle on the privacy issues that will crop up if these systems become a reality.'"
  • "Hackers can attack heart devices" (Seattle Post Intelligencer) (March 2008)
    "A Seattle computer scientist who helped expose how hackers can mess with electronic voting machines is part of a team that has shown how new, wireless cardiac devices implanted in thousands of heart patients also are vulnerable to electronic attack ...

    "[UW CSE's Yoshi] Kohno and others have shown they can wirelessly extract personal medical information from an implantable cardiac defibrillator as well as reprogram or disrupt the device. The team includes Harvard University cardiologist Dr. William Maisel and Kevin Fu of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, also a computer scientist."

    Additional information here

    UW press release here
    New York Times here
    Wall Street Journal here
    Boston Globe here
    Science Daily here
    University Week here
    The Osgood File (CBS Radio) here
    Australian Broadcasting Corporation here


  • UW CSE / UW Oceanography / Microsoft Research collaboration featured at 2008 Microsoft Research TechFest (March 2008)
    UW CSE, UW Oceanography, and Microsoft Research are collaborating to create an "Ocean Scientists' Workbench" in connection with the NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative. This work was featured prominently in press coverage of the 2008 Microsoft Research TechFest.

    UW oceanographers Debbie Kelley and Mark Stoermer appeared in ComputerWorld. CSE's Keith Grochow and Microsoft's Jared Jackson appear in Microsoft's own coverage of the event. Other coverage in Scientific American, AppScout, and CosmicLog.

  • KUOW (NPR) interviews CSE's Steve Gribble concerning spyware (March 2008)
    "Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna wants to better protect computer users from spyware. He's called for legislation to close loopholes in existing law. KUOW's Joshua McNichols has more."
  • Technology Review on Photosynth (March 2008)
    "Photosynth was born from ... the marriage of Seadragon and Photo Tourism, a Microsoft project intended to revolutionize the way photo sets are packaged and displayed. Photo Tourism had begun as the doctoral thesis of a zealous 26-year-old University of Washington graduate student named Noah Snavely. One of Snavely's advisors was Rick Szeliski, a computer-vision researcher at Microsoft Research, the company's R&D arm ... Working with Szeliski and a University of Washington professor named Steve Seitz, Snavely was intent on coding a way forward through a computationally forbidding challenge: how to get photos to merge, on the basis of their similarities, into a physical 3-D model that human eyes could recognize as part of an authentic, real-world landscape."
  • "CRA A. Nico Habermann Award 2008 presented to Richard E. Ladner" (February 2008)
    This award honors the late A. Nico Habermann, who headed NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate and who was deeply committed to increasing the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in computing research. Ladner, Boeing Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at UW, is recognized for his lifelong, strong and persistent advocacy on behalf of people with disabilities in the computing community.
  • DUB dominates CHI (University Week) (February 2008)
    "Members of the UW's Design:Use:Build (DUB) Center for Human-Computer Interaction and Design swept the top conference in their field, which explores the interface between human and machine. UW researchers nabbed three out of seven Best Paper Awards selected from more than 700 submissions to this April's CHI 2008 meeting. Not only that - they had 16 papers accepted, more than any other university."
  • UW RFID research on KIRO TV 7 (February 2008)
    Magda Balazinska and Evan Welbourne are interviewed in this KIRO TV 7 report on RFID and privacy.
  • "Academic Cluster Computing Initiative" (YouTube video) (February 2008)
    A terrific Google video describing the Academic Cluster Computing Initiative launched by Google, IBM, and NSF based on work done by Google and UW Computer Science & Engineering. UW CSE alumnus and Google engineer Christophe Bisciglia is featured, along with various UW CSE faculty and students.
  • "'Dinosaur' computer stalls Seattle schools' plans" (Seattle Times) (February 2008)
    "An aging computer - so old that the University of Washington has an early model on display as a museum piece - stands etween the Seattle School Board and the changes it wants to make in how the district assigns students to schools ...

    "The VAX was first sold in 1979, and early models were about as big as two refrigerators. Hank Levy, chairman of the UW's computer-science and engineering department, was part of the team that designed its operating system. The VAX on display in the lobby of the department's Paul G. Allen Center was an early model that Levy said at one time 'ran our entire department ...'

    "'It was a great system for its day, but its day is long past,' Levy said ... Although it's hard to compare computing power of different systems, he also said that, in rough terms, even the later-model VAXes have only about 1/20th the power of an iPhone."

  • Ten years of CRA "Outstanding Undergraduate" awards (February 2008)
    This spreadsheet from the University of Virginia tallies ten years of Computing Research Association "Outstanding Undergraduate" awards. In a nutshell:
    • Total students recognized: UW #1, tied with CMU
    • Number of winners: UW #1, tied with CMU, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Princeton
    • Number of runners up: UW #1, tied with CMU and Harvard
    • Number of finalists: UW #2, behind CMU and tied with Harvard
    • Number of honorable mentions: UW #2, behind UVa
    Go team!

    See an excellent blog post by CMU Computer Science Department chair Peter Lee here.

  • "Yoshi Kohno wins Sloan Research Fellowship" (University Week) (February 2008)
    "Yoshi Kohno, assistant professor of computer science & engineering, has been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship, given each year to outstanding young scientists ... A total of 118 fellowships were awarded this year in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics and neuroscience ... Kohno's research interests are in computer security, electronic privacy and cryptography. Some of his past studies have investigated security concerns related to electronic voting machines and ways to ensure the security of transactions over the Internet. Other research directions include security and privacy of wireless networks, online anonymity and network forensics. Kohno earned his doctorate at the University of California, San Diego and has been at the UW since 2006."

    Kohno is UW CSE's 15th Sloan Research Fellowship recipient.

  • "Seattle has a distinct and remarkable tech ecosystem" (Crosscut) (February 2008)
    A short commentary by CSE professor Ed Lazowska. "[Markoff] simply observed that Seattle is exhibiting some of the entrepreneurial success of Silicon Valley; he described ome of the evidence and explored some of the reasons ... We have managed to develop a tech ecosystem here - a feat that has eluded many other regions of the nation. It's distinctly our own, and it's pretty remarkable."
  • "Balancing technology with privacy" (KING-5 Television) (February 2008)
    A KING-5 Television feature on the tradeoff between technology and privacy for RFID. Features interviews with UW CSE faculty members Magda Balazinska and Gaetano Borriello, as well as with on-leave faculty member Chris Diorio, who is the founder, Chairman, and CTO of CSE-spinoff RFID technology company Impinj.
  • "Wearable Tracking Tags Test Privacy Boundaries at the U. of Washington" (Chronicle of Higher Education) (pdf) (February 2008)
    "It's 2 a.m. Do you know where Evan Welbourne is? ...

    "While RFID isn't a household word, the technology behind it has long been a part of the lives of just about every American ...

    "Now, because the tags can emit individual codes, companies are using them to track specific inventory items, credit cards, and ID badges. Conceivably, sensors could follow people throughout their daily lives.

    "But who should track whom? Where, when, and how? And what effect will this constant shadowing have on the trackers and the trackees?

    "To get answers, the University of Washington developed the RFID Ecosystem. It is an attempt to 'create a future world where RFID's are everywhere,' says Gaetano Borriello, a professor of computer science. At the moment, 140 antennas that pick up signals and 35 RFID readers that interpret data are monitoring five of the six floors in the university's Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering."

    A description of UW CSE's RFID Ecosystem project.

  • "Social Networks Move Into Meatspace with 'RFID Ecosystem'" (Wired Science) (February 2008)
    "In the past, I've written about natural and built environmental sensors, and wondered whether people should be included among the vital signs of an urban ecosystem. But I've skirted most of the privacy issues because I don't have great answers for you, so I'm happy to see that these researchers, led by Magda Balazinska, are trying to come up with good tech or policy solutions, as they put it, 'before such systems become commonplace.'"
  • "Future of social networking explored in UW's computer science building" (UW News & Information Services) (February 2008)
    "If you need information, the Internet offers a wealth of resources. But if you're hunting down a person or a thing, a computer's not much help. That may soon change. Electronic tags promise to create what some call the 'Internet of things,' in which objects and people are connected through a virtual network.

    "To see what this future world would be like, a pilot project involving dozens of volunteers in the University of Washington's computer science building provides the next step in social networking ..."

    A description of UW CSE's RFID Ecosystem project.

  • "Seattle Taps Its Inner Silicon Valley" (New York Times) (February 2008)
    "Many communities dream of becoming the next Silicon Valley. This one is actually doing it.

    "Stroll through the hip Fremont District and you will sense the Valley vibe. Google recently opened a research lab here, its second in Microsoft's backyard. Technology start-ups are sprouting up amid quirky neighborhood landmarks like a bronze statue of Lenin and the Fremont Troll, the giant concrete creature lurking beneath the George Washington Memorial Bridge.

    "More young companies are moving in downtown, near the art galleries and bookstores around Pioneer Square. Still others are spreading into the surrounding suburbs.

    "'The Seattle start-up ecosystem is vibrant, and growing rapidly,' said Oren Etzioni, an artificial-intelligence expert at the University of Washington and a serial technology entrepreneur.

    "The University of Washington, in fact, is one of the big draws. It is fostering the entrepreneurial climate here the way Stanford University does in Silicon Valley."

  • "Local boy genius makes good" (Tacoma News Tribune) (January 2008)
    "Google 'Christophe Bisciglia.' You'll learn how the 27-year-old Google wunderkind, who grew up in Gig Harbor, made the cover of Business Week magazine last month for a breakthrough technological innovation.

    "Bisciglia devised a way to re-create for the academic community a computational platform similar to the one used by Google engineers to manage a world's worth of data and provide eye-blink-fast Internet searches. Bisciglia's approach started with a bank of interconnected, data-packed computers installed at the University of Washington.

    "Your Google search also will pull up a newspaper story describing how Bisciglia hacked into the computer network of a Port Orchard Internet service provider in 1999, sent disparaging e-mails about the company to all its customers, and uploaded a pornographic photo - a close-up of a man's bare rear end - to the company's Web site ..."

  • "CU sells campus bathroom's naming rights for $25K" (Boulder Daily Camera) (January 2008)
    UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus John Bennett, Director of the University of Colorado's Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) Institute, sells naming rights to a bathroom in the ATLAS building for $25K. Why didn't we think of that???

    Don't miss the video!

  • "Using Robots To Help Humans" (KUOW/NPR) (audio file) (January 2008)
    "The human hand is capable of more delicate movement than comparable organs of any other animal. It can wield a tool or weapon as easily as it can make a subtle gesture. So when a human loses her hand, she's lost a remarkable implement. Yoky Matsuoka wants to ensure a loss like that isn't permanent. She runs the Neurobiotics Lab at the University of Washington. That's where she and her staff build robots that function like hands and other human body parts. Jeannie Yandel takes a tour of the lab."
  • "10 fascinating Googlers" (Fortune) (January 2008)
    "Feeling burnt out after four years building search algorithms for Google software projects, Bisciglia, 27, floated an idea to CEO Eric Schmidt about starting a college course on large-scale computing ... Bisciglia launched a course at Washington, his alma mater ... Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Tsinghua University in Beijing have picked up on the idea, offering similar classes to their students, and Bisciglia has since worked out comparable deals with Berkeley and Stanford ..."
  • "SWsoft Snags Microsoft Legend for Senior Technical Advisor Role" (InfoWorld) (January 2008)
    "Virtualization software company SWsoft announced on Wednesday that a former Microsoft architect and pioneer software developer Mark Zbikowski has joined the company as a senior technical advisor ... With the addition of this legend and 25 year Microsoft veteran to the team, SWsoft is truly providing themselves with a huge feather in their cap. Zbikowski previously led Microsoft's efforts in MS-DOS, OS/2, Cairo and Windows NT. Zbikowski designed the DOS executable file format, and he was one of the main architects and developers of the Windows file system, NTFS. Since his retirement from Microsoft in 2006, Zbikowski has been a lecturer [in Computer Science & Engineering] at the University of Washington."
  • "Google upstart a hit" (The Peninsula Gateway) (January 2008)
    "It's no surprise that former Gig Harbor resident [and UW CSE alumnus] Christophe Bisciglia is leading one of the newest and biggest projects at Internet giant Google ... he's always been the enterprising sort."
  • Google Seattle grand opening (January 2008)
    January 15th marked the official opening of Google Seattle. The office, located in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood ("The Center of the Universe") adjacent to the University of Washington, is led by UW CSE's Brian Bershad.

    "Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research, provided some of the reasons why Google wanted to expand in Seattle, which now represents the third largest U.S. office for Google behind Mountain View and New York.

    "'Seattle is an excellent example of the kind of place that makes sense for us to build. It has fantastic technologists. It has a world class research university here. It has got incredibly talented engineers. It has a great entrepreneurial culture and spirit. It's got a thriving venture community. It's got a history of great innovations. It has a very supportive government and organization here that actually cares about bringing business in and making businesses successful. And for all of those reasons we are extremely happy to be here.'

    "Later, he even mentioned Seattle's cost of living and its 'family-friendly' environment.

    "'This is a very attractive place to live and for people to bring families. ... We try to give (people) the option of where they want to live and many of them actually choose the Seattle area. It is smaller. It is a friendly area. It is very family-friendly. The cost of living here is less than it is in Mountain View, and other things.'"

    "Inside look at Google Seattle: Puppies, lava lamps, etc." (Seattle PI)
    "Google open house to draw crowds" (Seattle PI)
    "The dogs of Google Seattle" (Seattle PI)
    "Perks make Google office hardly feel like work" (Seattle PI)
    "Google touts Fremont Engineering office, links to UW" (Seattle Times)
    "Google rave in Fremont draws a crowd of techies" (Seattle Times)
    "Google shows off new Seattle digs" (InfoWorld)

  • "Stefan Saroiu, Phisher King" (January 2008)
    UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Stefan Saroiu, a faculty member in computer science at the University of Toronto, is one of three young faculty members featured on the University of Toronto home page.

    "We all know now that the 20th century's most influential innovation - electronic communications by way of your computer - has given rise to a whole new breed of criminals. They are the computer hackers who find nefarious ways to use information technology to rob you. Thankfully,computer scientists like Stefan Saroiu are preparing to do battle with these IT pickpockets."

    Click the home page image to read the article, or go directly here.

  • "Google and the Wisdom of Clouds" (Business Week) (December 2007)
    UW CSE alumnus Christophe Bisciglia is profiled in a Business Week cover story.

    "What recruits needed, Bisciglia eventually decided, was advanced training. So one autumn day a year ago, when he ran into Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt between meetings, he floated an idea. He would use his 20% time, the allotment Googlers have for independent projects, to launch a course. It would introduce students at his alma mater, the University of Washington, to programming at the scale of a cloud. Call it Google 101. Schmidt liked the plan. Over the following months, Bisciglia's Google 101 would evolve and grow. It would eventually lead to an ambitious partnership with IBM, announced in October, to plug universities around the world into Google-like computing clouds ...

    "How was Bisciglia going to give students access to this machine? The easiest option would have been to plug his class directly into the Google computer. But the company wasn't about to let students loose in a machine loaded with proprietary software, brimming with personal data, and running a $10.6 billion business. So Bisciglia shopped for an affordable cluster of 40 computers. He placed the order, then set about figuring out how to pay for the servers. While the vendor was wiring the computers together, Bisciglia alerted a couple of Google managers that a bill was coming. Then he 'kind of sent the expense report up the chain, and no one said no.' ... ("If you're interested in someone who strictly follows the rules, Christophe's not your guy,' says Lazowska."

    MSNBC
    Seattle Times

    Don't miss the BusinessWeek / CHINA cover!

  • "Recap of what was cool, not so cool in tech world in 2007" (Seattle Times) (December 2007)
    "With New Year's Eve a week away, our thoughts turn to bubbles and the year that was ... We asked a panel of technology party guests to review a list of 25 events, trends and products that made the scene in 2007 and rate them on a scale of 'forget about it' (1) to 'game-changer' (5) ..."

    UW CSE's Ed Lazowska is quoted throughout.

  • "Sam Karlin, mathematician who improved DNA analysis, dies" (Stanford News Service) (December 2007 / January 2008)
    Samuel Karlin, a Stanford professor emeritus of mathematics and father of UW CSE professor Anna Karlin, died December 18 at Stanford Hospital. He was 83.

    According to UW CSE professor Martin Tompa: "Karlin was one of the pioneers who applied mathematics and statistical models to problems in biological sequence analysis. He worked in this field for the last 20 years or so. He wrote many important papers, but probably the most influential was a series of papers with Stephen Altschul in the early 1990s laying out the statistical foundation for BLAST, the most important piece of software in computational biology. Their work is known as the Karlin-Altschul Theory and is taught in many computational biology courses."

    Karlin was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1989. He was the author of 10 books and more than 450 articles.

    Earlier article from Stanford News Service here.

  • CSE alums Rob Short, Gail Murphy win 2008 UW College of Engineering Diamond Awards (December 2007)
    Each year, the University of Washington College of Engineering recognizes a small number of alumni with Diamond Awards. These alumni are chosen by a committee of their peers to be recognized for their contributions as engineers of excellence.

    The winner of the 2008 Diamond Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence is 1978 UW CSE M.S. alumnus Rob Short, recently retired as Corporate Vice President for Windows Core Technology at Microsoft.

    The winner of the 2008 Early Career Diamond Award is 1996 UW CSE Ph.D. alumna Gail Murphy, now a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia.

  • The University of Washington's economic impact (Columns) (December 2007)
    Columns, the UW alumni magazine, explores the economic impact of the University of Washington on the region. "'Eight of the companies we've invested in have come from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering,' said Tom Alberg, managing director of Madrona Investment Group. When he asked local software companies to help fund the deparment's new building, even non-Huskies relized how much they benefited by hiring UW graduates. 'To succeed, technology companies need three things - money, entrepreneurs and innovative ideas - and UW is one of the main sources of innovative ideas.'" [page 4]
  • Four UW CSE chairs lay it on the line (December 2007)
    Jean-Loup Baer (1988-1993), Ed Lazowska (1993-2001), David Notkin (2001-2006), and Hank Levy (2006-present).
  • "New endeavors aim to build a better Internet" (MSNBC) (December 2007)
    MSNBC profiles the work of UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni. "University of Washington computer scientist and search engine pioneer Oren Etzioni is hoping to make today's 'dumb' computers far more consumer-friendly. As part of a larger push in the field, his latest projects are providing a sneak preview of how online applications might look in a more intuitive Web 3.0 of the not-so-distant future."
  • "What Do Low U.S. Math And Science Scores Mean?" (Technology Daily) (December 2007)
    "University of Washington Computer Science Professor Ed Lazowska, former co-chair of the now-defunct President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, said the report 'once again clearly indicates the performance of U.S. secondary students in science and mathematics lags that of our competitor nations.' He said the results should effectively counter a widely publicized October Urban Institute report that claimed the United States, contrary to other recent reports, is not falling behind in science and math education. Lazowska acknowledged performance gaps among segments of the U.S. student population. While 'the best-prepared students in America are equal to the best in the world,' he said, 'a greater and greater proportion of America's students are not being prepared at this level and are not being equipped for success.'"
  • Oren Etzioni on spam (Seattle Times) (December 2007)
    "Oren Etzioni, a UW computer science professor, says ... there are no obvious legal cures for spam. Just as 'arresting a drug kingpin won't do much about drug use.'"
  • Michael Cohen, Ed Felten named ACM Fellows (December 2007)
    UW CSE Affiliate Professor Michael Cohen (a researcher at Microsoft Research) and UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Ed Felten (a professor at Princeton University) were among 38 eminent computer scientists named 2007 ACM Fellows. Congratulations to Michael and Ed!
  • Dana Wen, David Tepper, and Sam Whittle recognized by CRA (December 2007)
    UW CSE undergraduates Dana Wen, David Tepper, and Sam Whittle were among 89 students from across the country recognized in the 2008 Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Award competition.
  • "Software that Learns from Users" (Technology Review) (November 2007)
    "The thing that makes computers a huge pain for everybody, says Pedro Domingos, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington, is that you have to explain to them every little detail of what they need to do. 'It's really annoying,' Domingos jokes. 'They're stupid.'

    "That's why Domingos is taking part in CALO, a massive, four-year-old artificial-intelligence project to help computers understand the intentions of their human users. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and coordinated by SRI International, based in Menlo Park, CA, the project brings together researchers from 25 universities and corporations, in many areas of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, natural-language processing, and Semantic Web technologies. Each group works on pieces of CALO, which stands for 'cognitive assistant that learns and organizes ....'

    "'It's insanely ambitious,' Domingos says. 'But if CALO succeeds, it'll be quite a revolution. Even if it doesn't, so much good research is happening under it that it will still have been worthwhile.'"

  • NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing (November 2007)
    "The NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing recognizes young women at the high-school level for their computing-related achievements and interests ...

    "The NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing is given out twice per year to nominees from the local metropolitan areas where NCWIT holds its bi-annual meetings. Nominations are made in conjunction with local school educators and administrators, and nominees are selected for their demonstrated, outstanding aptitude and interest in information technology/computing; solid leadership ability; good academic history; and plans for post-secondary education ..."

    On November 19, NCWIT CEO and co-founder Lucy Sanders and UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska presented the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing to eight wonderful winners from the Puget Sound region: Lenda Nguyen, Melinda Mudd, Nicole Mina Askarian, Kayleigha Holten, Kaitlin McKinnon, Amy Li, Manpreet Kaur, and Nicole Torcolini.

    See a video featuring the award recipients here.

  • "Forging a Remarkable Future: Computer Scientists Hold the Key to Astounding Advances in the Coming Decades" (UWTV) (November 2007)
    "Ed Lazowska has his gaze firmly focused on the future. He speaks not in terms of the possibilities, but the realities of the coming years. Personalized medicine based on genome sequencing. Web browsers in your brain. Quantum computers. Digital prosthetics. 'This stuff is really cool!' Lazowska foresees amazing changes in the coming years, and believes computer science is the ultimate path to this progress."
  • "UW senior wins national coding competition" (UW Daily) (November 2007)
    "Computer Science senior Michael Skinner placed first in his division of the national TopCoder Collegiate Competition in Orlando, Fla., Nov. 2 ...

    "Stuart Reges, a senior lecturer in the computer science department, said Skinner's win is the most significant accomplishment in the area of programming contests at the UW in the past 10 years. 'I hope that he can help to bring greater visibility to our undergraduate program,' Reges said. 'As a top-10 department, our research and graduate programs are well known internationally. But not all UW undergraduates seem to be aware that they have a chance to get a first-class computer science education that is comparable to what undergraduates get at Stanford, Berkeley and other top schools. Hopefully Michael's success can help to change that.'"

  • "Priming the Pipeline for Women in Computing" (PressMediaWire) (November 2007)
    "'In computer science, we're engineering systems for the whole population,' says professor Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. 'Every one of us brings our own personal baggage to any system we design. If all computers are designed by fully-able 40-year-old white males, they'll be built to be used by fully-able 40-year-old white males.' It's an argument that should resonate widely as enlightened self-interest if nothing else, Lazowska says. 'A diverse workforce [makes for] a better engineered artifact.'"
  • "Google Seattle lands UW ccmputer science professors" (Seattle PI) (November 2007)
    "Two University of Washington computer science professors are joining Google's new development office in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood, strengthening the search giant's ties to the largest research institution in the state ...

    "Brian Bershad and Craig Chambers - who together spent more than 30 years at the UW - will bring 'firepower' to the company, said Google vice president of engineering Shiva Shivakumar, who is based in the company's Kirkland office.

    "'These two are spectacular,' said Shivakumar. 'They have done some incredibly big things over the last few years. It is a huge deal.' ...

    "Losing two talented professors to Google could be viewed as a blow to the UW computer science department. But Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates chair in the department, doesn't see it that way.

    "'On one hand, it is not like we are delighted to see these guys go. But each of them was ready for a change. And I think this is going to wind up being a real plus - a plus for us, a plus for our students, a plus for collaboration, a plus for Google,' said Lazowska, who noted that close to 150 UW computer science students have been hired by Google over the years. 'Craig and Brian are guys who have enormous respect among the faculty and students. I think there are going to be a bunch of really exciting projects going on up here.'"

    See also here.

  • "CSE to launch new five-year degree program" (UW Daily) (November 2007)
    "Technologically minded students will soon have a new degree program to add to their choices thanks to the Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), if chair Hank Levy has his way. The program received approval for funding for an initial run of 10 students beginning next fall."
  • CSE's Michael Skinner is TopCoder Marathon Champion! (Seattle Times) (November 2007)
    CSE senior Michael Skinner has won the Marathon competition of the 2007 TopCoder Collegiate Challenge.

    "University of Washington computer whiz Michael Skinner scored an upset victory Friday by winning his division of an international contest aimed at finding out who can write the most effective computer programs ... Skinner, 22, a senior, was one of just two Americans among a field of 120 students gathered in Florida for the 2007 TopCoder Collegiate Challenge ... Skinner, a computer-science major better known among peers by his online handle 'Paranoia,' won $15,000 and bragging rights for the victory."

    The TopCoder Collegiate Challenge is an annual competition for collegiate programmers from around the world. There are four independent contests: Algorithm, Component, Marathon, and Studio. The finals were held at Walt Disney World in Orlando FL from October 30 - November 2.

    The first three rounds of the Marathon competition were held online in August and September. 300 competitors advanced from the first round to the second; 100 from the second to the third; and 8 from the third to the Orlando finals.

    Across all four contests, 120 collegiate programmers qualified for the Orlando finals. Michael was one of only two finalists from the United States. In winning the Marathon finals, he bested competitors from France, Poland, the Russian Federation, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Thailand, and the Netherlands.

    TopCoder announcement here
    Seattle Times article from before the finals here

  • "Vacation photos create 3D models of world landmarks" (UW News and Information) (November 2007)
    "More than 10 million members of the photo-sharing Web site Flickr snap pictures of their surroundings and then post those photos on the Internet. One group at the University of Washington is doing the reverse - downloading thousands of photos from Flickr and using them to recreate the original scenes."
  • "Whose mouse is mightiest? UW code whiz hopes it's his" (Seattle Times) (October 2007)
    "Creating fast and flawless computer programs may not sound like a competitive spectator sport. But when University of Washington senior Michael Skinner takes on other top college computer programmers from around the world in Florida today, there will be $260,000 total prize money at stake, and observers watching competitors' every keystroke on large plasma screens.

    "Skinner, 22 ... carries national pride on his back. He's one of only two Americans to make the final 120 competitors in the 2007 TopCoder Collegiate Challenge."

  • "Field Notes from UW Computer Science & Engineering Intern Fair" (blist) (October 2007)
    As I blogged previously, Justin, Matt & I from blist attended the University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering department's annual career day today. It was a terrific event that far exceeded my expectations. Here are some of my random thoughts ..."
  • "UW: New computer science programs, lab" (Seattle Times) (October 2007)
    "Growth and new programs are happening at the University of Washington's Computer Science & Engineering Department, Chairman Hank Levy said this morning at the annual 'industrial affiliates' meeting with tech companies, investors and school supporters ...

    "There for the update, and research presentations by students, were representatives of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Cray, Sony, Madrona Venture Group, Amazon.com, DreamBox Learning and other companies ...

    "Another initiative Levy outlined is already under way: a new 'Experimental Computer Engineering Lab' created as a partnership of the computer science and electrical engineering departments.

    "Six new faculty positions, three from each side, are allocated to the effort, including two now being filled.

    "Computer science is also taking more Ph.D. students and overall, Levy's planning for '25 percent growth across the board' in the department."

    Other coverage here.

  • Ph.D. alumnus Greg Barnes wins Emerald City Search (Seattle Times) (October 2007)
    "Greg Barnes was supposed to be home sick this week. Instead, he was deciphering clues, searching online about obscure Japanese history, and prowling Harbor Island, hoping to find a hidden medallion - the prize of this year's citywide treasure hunt, Emerald City Search.

    "On Wednesday morning, the 42-year-old found the blue-and-white ceramic medallion wrapped in plastic under a wooden bench in Seacrest Park in West Seattle. He won $2,500 in cash and prizes.

    "The daily clues in the treasure hunt that began Oct. 17 were inspired by the Seattle Art Museum's latest exhibit, 'Japan Envisions the West,' but that didn't help Barnes out much.

    "'My wife and I are both computer scientists,' Barnes says with a laugh, 'so Japanese history's not really our thing.'"

  • "Linus Chou dives headfirst into making UW team" (Seattle PI) (October 2007)
    "With their football team mired in a five-game losing streak, Huskies fans may be looking for a beam of light, something tangible to make them smile.

    "It can be found on special teams: No. 51, Linus Chou.

    "Perhaps the most unlikely of football players, Chou, a Chinese-American, is a computer science major. He scored 1500 on his SAT. He just interviewed for an internship at Microsoft.

    "How the Lakeside School product went from academia to special teams, managing to balance both successfully, is one of the Huskies' best feel-good stories of the season."

  • CSE Ph.D. alum Rachel Pottinger wins first annual Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award (October 2007)
    The Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award is given annually by the Anita Borg Institute to an individual under the age of 35 who has demonstrated a significant leadership capability and positive impact of the lives of women through technology. The award is named in honor of the late Denice Denton, formerly Dean of Engineering at the University of Washington.

    It's thus particularly wonderful that the inaugural recipient of the Denton Award is UW CSE alumna