CSE Undergrad News

Hi all,

Barbara Mones is hosting one more info session on the animation program for next year. They will be wrapping up the application process soon and would like all interested students to have a chance to apply.

Here are the details:

Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) and the Animation Research Labs invite you to an information session on the Animation Production undergraduate course sequence at UW Seattle.  This sequence runs from Autumn 2010 through Spring 2011. The Animation Capstone culminates in a professional and collaboratively produced digital short film, similar in process to Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks productions.  Examples of previous award winning films produced in this course series will be shown and questions regarding applications and admission, etc. will be addressed. We look forward to seeing you there. Light refreshments will be served.

What:
Animation Capstone Series Information Session

When:
3:30pm on Monday August 16, 2010

Where:
Paul G. Allen Center for CS&E, Room  674 (Gates Commons conference room)

Questions?

Contact:

Barbara Mones, Animation Production Program Director (mones@cs.washington.edu)
Robert Forsberg  Program Assistant (dybbek@cs.washington.edu)

Clean Power Research tech talk is tonight from 5:30-7 in the atrium.  Food will be provided.

For more information on Clean Power Research, see their website:

http://www.cleanpower.com/

Win a FREE IPad

from UIEvolution

Tuesday, April 13th 5:30 PM
Atrium, The Allen Center

If you have a passion for making scalable, usable and innovative software applications we’d love to meet you. Please join us for an information session on April 13^th or submit your resume to uwjobs@uievolution.com. We are looking for full-time and internship candidates and will be conducting on-campus interviews April  15^th.

Visit www.uievolution.com to learn more.

On-Campus Interviews: April 15th
for fulltime and internship positions

Submit resumes to: uwjobs@uievolution.com

From: faculty-admin@cs.washington.edu [mailto:faculty-admin@cs.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Ed Lazowska
Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2010 8:09 PM
To: talks – Mailing List; faculty – Mailing List; cs-grads – Mailing List; cs-ugrads – Mailing List; Leung Tsang
Subject: Energy Future lecture series

CSE and EE folks:  Please be aware of this lecture series!

—————————

ENERGY FUTURE
Energy Production, Consumption, Policy, and the Environment
Public Lecture Series: http://courses.washington.edu/efuture
Seminar Course:  http://courses.washington.edu/efuture/academic.html

The coming decades will see dramatic changes in the production, consumption, and overall availability of energy.  This free UW public lecture series will bring world-leading experts address many of the core technical, social, economic, and political issues and opportunities which will accompany the forthcoming transition to renewable energy.

April Lectures (Kane 130 at the UW, starting at 6:30 pm):
April 1: Plastic Solar Cells?  Challenges and Opportunities for Photovoltaics
David Ginger (UW Chemistry Department)

April 20: Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air
David J.C. MacKay (Cambridge University and Chief Science Advisor to the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change)

For the full schedule of speakers and descriptions of the their lectures, see http://courses.washington.edu/efuture

Questions? Contact efuture@uw.edu.

Energy Future is sponsored by the University of Washington, the Office of the Provost, the Applied Physics Lab, the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and the Environment, the Evans School of Public Affairs, the Institute for Advanced Materials and Technology, the NSF Science and Technology Center for Materials and Devices for Information Technology Research, the NSF Center for Enabling New Technologies Through Catalysis, and the UW Department of Physics.  They all care about energy.  You should, too.

If you want info on all the talks, join the list:

http://www.cs.washington.edu/events/

—–Original Message—–
From: cs-ugrads-admin@cs.washington.edu [mailto:cs-ugrads-admin@cs.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Connie Ivey-Pasche
Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2010 4:27 PM
To: talks – Mailing List; faculty – Mailing List; cs-grads – Mailing List; cs-staff – Mailing List
Subject: [cs-ugrads] UW CSE Colloq / 3-30-10 / Vaikuntanathan / MIT/IBM T.J. Watson Research Center / Side Channels and Clouds: New Challenges in Cryptography

Next week at UW CSE – Spring quarter kicks off!

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

Computer Science and Engineering

COLLOQUIUM

SPEAKER:    Vinod Vaikuntanathan, MIT/IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

TITLE:            Side Channels and Clouds: New Challenges in Cryptography

DATE:       Tuesday, March 30, 2010

TIME:       3:30pm

PLACE:            EEB-105

HOST:       James Lee

ABSTRACT:

Emerging trends in computation such as cloud computing, virtualization, and trusted computing require that computation be carried out in remote and hostile environments, where attackers have unprecedented access to the devices, the data and the programs. This poses new problems and challenges for cryptography. In this talk, I will present two such challenges, and my recent work towards solving them.

1. Protecting against Side-channel Attacks: Computing devices leak information to the outside world not just through input-output interaction, but through physical characteristics of computation such as power consumption, timing, and electro-magnetic radiation. Such leakage betrays information about the secrets stored within the devices, and has been successfully utilized to break many cryptographic algorithms in common use. These attacks, commonly called side-channel attacks, are particularly easy to carry out when the device is in the physical proximity of the attacker, as is often the case for modern devices such as smart-cards, TPM chips, mobile phones and laptops.

In the first part of the talk, I will describe my recent work that lays the foundation of leakage-resilient cryptography — the design of cryptographic schemes that protect against large classes of side-channel attacks.

2. Computing on Encrypted Data: Security in the setting of cloud computing involves a delicate balance of privacy and functionality: while the client must encrypt its data to keep it private from the server, it should also allow for the server to compute on the encrypted data.  Can we simultaneously achieve these opposing goals?

In the second part of the talk, I will describe an elementary construction of a cryptographic mechanism (called a “fully homomorphic encryption scheme”) that allows arbitrary computation to be performed on encrypted data.

Both these works leverage new mathematical techniques based on geometric objects called lattices.

Bio:

Vinod Vaikuntanathan is a postdoctoral fellow in the cryptography group at IBM T.J. Watson. He received a Ph.D. from MIT in 2009 under the guidance of Shafi Goldwasser. He is a recipient of the MIT Akamai Graduate Fellowship, the IBM Josef Raviv Postdoctoral Fellowship, and more recently, the MIT George M. Sprowls award for the best Ph.D. thesis in Computer Science. The focus of his research involves the dual goals of devising new mathematical tools for cryptography, as well as applying theoretical cryptography to counter practical attacks.

Refreshments to be served in room prior to talk.

*NOTE* This lecture will be broadcast live via the Internet. See

http://www.cs.washington.edu/news/colloq.info.html for more information.

Email: talk-info@cs.washington.edu

Info: http://www.cs.washington.edu/

(206) 543-1695

The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accomodation in its services, programs, activities, education and employment for individuals with disabilities. To request disability accommodation, contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance of the event at: (206) 543-6450/V, (206) 543-6452/TTY, (206) 685-3885/FAX, or access@u.washington.edu.

_______________________________________________

Cs-ugrads mailing list

Cs-ugrads@cs.washington.edu

https://mailman.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/cs-ugrads

Hey all,

We have a great opportunity coming up next week — Gayle Laakmann of careercup.com will be giving a talk about preparing for technical interviews, which I think should be valuable for many of us.

Who: Gayle Laakmann
When: March 8, 4:30pm
Where: Gates Commons (CSE 691)

See below for details, and let us know if you have any questions.

-your friendly neighborhood ACM officers

————————

Gayle Laakmann
“Cracking the Technical Interview: Advice for Programmers”

Abstract:
Computer Science interviews are a different breed from other interviews and, as such, require specialized  skills and techniques.  Cracking the Technical Interview will teach you how to prepare for technical interviews, what top companies like Google and Microsoft really look for, and how to tackle the toughest programming and algorithm problems.  This talk will include stories from the speaker’s extensive interviewing experience as well as a live “demo” of how  to tackle a technical problem.
Bio

Gayle Laakmann is the founder and CEO of CareerCup.com and the author of “Cracking the Technical Interview” (http://www.careercup.com/book). Career Cup is the leading source of technical interview preparation and provides a free forum with 3000+ technical interview questions, a book, a video, and mock interviews.  Gayle has worked for Google, Microsoft and Apple as a Software Engineer and has extensive interviewing experience on both sides of the table.  At Google, she interviewed over 120 candidates at Google and served on its hiring committee.  Gayle received her bachelors and masters in  Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvalnia in 2005.

Microsoft Tech Fest

Date: Thursday, February 11, 2010

Location: Paul G. Allen Center, Atrium

Tech Demos: 6-8pm

Grab some food, meet Microsoft teams, play with our demos, ask questions, and get your geek on!

Stop by for a chance to win great prizes including an HD Zune!

hey-genius.com

Note that you are all welcome to attend all colloquium talks.  You can subscribe to the talks list here: https://mailman.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/talks

NOTE:  Corrections – this talk will *not* be taped or broadcast live!  Location has also been changed!

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
Computer Science and Engineering
Research Seminar

SPEAKER:    Ranjit Jhala, UCSD

TITLE:        Finding Liveness Bugs in Systems Code

DATE:        Tuesday, February 9, 2010
TIME:        3:30pm
PLACE:        403 Paul G. Allen Center for CSE
HOST:        Michael Ernst

ABSTRACT:
In this talk, we describe a technique for finding bugs in complex concurrent and distributed systems implementations. To do so, the developer formally specifies high-level liveness properties which define desirable end-to-end system conditions, which need not always hold, perhaps as a result of failure or during system initialization, but which must eventually be satisfied.

Unfortunately, previous techniques cannot find liveness bugs because doing so requires finding an infinite execution that does not satisfy a liveness property.

We present probabilistic heuristics to find a large class of liveness violations and the critical transition of the violating execution.  The critical transition is the step in an execution that moves the system from a state that can satisfy the liveness property in the future, to a dead state that can never achieve the liveness property, regardless of any subsequent sequence of actions.

Our approach is implemented in a software model checker, MaceMC. MaceMC isolated, without any false warnings, complex liveness errors in implementations of Pastry, Chord, a reliable transport protocol, an aggregation service, Overcast, and an overlay tree implementing a failure-resilient random tree, allowing us to understand and fix problems that had eluded detection for several years.

(Joint work with Chip Killian, James Anderson and Amin Vahdat)

BIO:
Ranjit Jhala is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. Before joining UCSD, he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Ranjit is is interested in applying techniques from Programming Languages and Software Engineering to solve computing problems, in particular, to build reliable computer systems. His work draws from, combines and contributes to methods the areas of Model Checking, Program Analysis, Type Systems and Automated Deduction.

Email: talk-info@cs.washington.edu
Info: http://www.cs.washington.edu/
(206) 543-1695

The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accomodation in its services, programs, activities, education and employment for individuals with disabilities. To request disability accommodation, contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance of the event at: (206) 543-6450/V, (206) 543-6452/TTY, (206) 685-3885/FAX, or access@u.washington.edu.
_______________________________________________

UW Environmental Innovation Challenge

Thinking Through “Market Opportunity” February 10, 2010, 5:30 to 7 pm in Sieg Hall 225

Still looking for a team/team members?  This is a good opportunity to meet-up.

One of the key elements of the UW Environmental Innovation Challenge is the market opportunity summary. If you build this prototype or create this computer simulation, will anyone buy it?  Is it appropriate for the audience you’ve identified? Who has a similar product or service? Who’s your competition? What are the resources on campus that you can tap into to do market research? How much research is enough? What is “addressable market size”?

To help you answer these questions, we’re bringing in John Browne, the founder and managing director of Workpump. John spent more than 25 years in the software industry (including 11 at Microsoft) and, by his own admission, can’t remember all the products he’s shipped or the projects he’s worked on. He understands every aspect of designing, developing, testing, and marketing world-class software.

In 2001 John started Workpump to bring Microsoft-quality best practices in marketing and product development to technology firms, working with clients from Silicon Valley to British Columbia. Starting in 2003 John began assembling a team of like-minded individuals who could bring years of successful operational experience to clients. He knows this stuff.

Join us on February 10—and come with your questions!

Connie Bourassa-Shaw, Director

Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

cbshaw@uw.edu

Pamela Tufts

Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship
ptufts@uw.edu 206.685.3813

foster.washington.edu/cie