CSE Undergrad News

Contact Professor Kalet if you’re interested.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Ira Kalet <ikalet@uw.edu>
Date: Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 11:49 AM
Subject: Lisp programming seminar for Autumn

Hi Crystal and Lindsay,

I am running a one credit seminar this Autumn in Biomedical Informatics, on the topic of advanced Lisp programming, which may interest a few CSE students.  Both graduate and undergraduate students are welcome.  If it works better for a student to sign up for CSE independent study instead of MEBI 591 that is OK with me.  Here is a rough description:

I will be leading a study group or advanced seminar on LISP and applications in biomedical informatics.  The plan will be that we learn and discuss some really advanced programming topics, like meta-programming, programming with functions, macros, and the like. This is for people who would like to delve deeper into programming ideas and potential applications, not about how to do well known tasks in bioinformatics and the like.  We will meet once a week on Tuesdays, 11 AM to 11:50, and participation would result in one credit (details to be determined).  Although familiarity with the basics of LISP would be expected, people who are new to LISP and willing to learn fast are also welcome.  The emphasis will be on learning exotic stuff and having some fun with programming.

Thanks, and hope you are having a great summer.

Ira

—
Ira J. Kalet, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, Radiation Oncology, joint with Medical Education
and Biomedical Informatics

Email: ikalet@uw.edu
Web: http://faculty.washington.edu/ikalet/
———————–

If you have been in the department as a major for at least one quarter and have time on Thursday Sept. 29th  from 430-600 to serve as a mentor for a new CSE ugrad, please sign up on the catalyst survey. Food is included!

https://catalysttools.washington.edu/webq/survey/cseadv/61361

Please sign up soon. If you sign up, plan on attending, but we’ll try to send a follow up by noon on Wed. with a few more details.

Thank you,

CSE Advising

Some of you might want to take a look at the Capstone video from 2010-2011.  We highly encourage you to consider a capstone if you’re nearing completion of your 300 level courses.  Most capstones will have some space in them later this year, including the robotics capstone this fall that still has room.

Capstone Video:   http://www.cs.washington.edu/info/videos/

Sent Monday evening:

There is incredibly exciting news this evening — our own Shwetak Patel has just been named as a 2011 MacArthur Fellow  —  a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Award”!     This is an enormous honor and fabulous recognition of Shwetak’s accomplishments.

Congratulations Shwetak!!

Shwetak joins Yoky Matsuoka as CSE’s second MacArthur Fellow in five years — a remarkable record.

The official MacArthur information is here:

http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.7730995/k.96C7/Shwetak_Patel.htm

Hank
_________

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: John R. Petersen <jrp@cs.washington.edu>
Date: Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 8:55 PM
Subject: Re: [cs-ugrads] [wreq #170414] F15 Upgrade: Instructional File/Mail server tanaga and attu 9/14 10AM-6PM
To: faculty@cs.washington.edu, cs-ugrads@cs.washington.edu, cs-pmp@cs.washington.edu

Request #170414 was updated by jrp:

On Wednesday September 14th, from 10 AM to 6 PM, the Instructional file server tanaga, and attu will be transitioned to the CSE 64-bit Fedora 15 distribution.  Instructional home directories, /cse/courses and most /projects/instr directories will be offline during the upgrade process.

Quick Links:
Fedora 15 Lab information: http://www.cs.washington.edu/lab/sw/f15.shtml

Linux Upgrade calendar: http://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/cs.washington.edu/embed?src=cs.washington.edu_sua4p69sp50f098ojaa5cal928%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Los_Angeles&pvttk=fc94360bd17a90841d7a9cc3a779b697

Please use the Reply-to: address if replying via email.

To see the Original Request and Action Log click on:

http://rtfm.cs.washington.edu/cgi-bin/wreq/req?show-all-1-170414
_______________________________________________

Most of the ugrad labs will be closed for a deep clean until the start of fall quarter. Just a heads up in case you were planning to stop by. At most, we’ll have one lab open at a time, but that cannot be guaranteed.

— Forwarded message ———-
From: Pamela Tufts <ptufts@uw.edu>
Date: Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 2:40 PM
Subject: [Advisers] Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship – OPEN HOUSES Next Week!
To: “advisers@uw.edu” <advisers@uw.edu>

Ugrads invited too.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Jeff Bilmes <bilmes@ee.washington.edu>
Date: Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 4:10 PM
Subject: [cs-ugrads] [Speech-seminar] Research Seminar: Suvrit Sra, Max Planck Institute, Tuebingen, 8/25 11am-12noon, PAC AE108
To: speech-seminar@crow.ee.washington.edu, uw-ml@cs.washington.edu

Title: Positive definite matrices and the SS-Divergence

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems,
Tuebingen, Germany

Thursday, August 25th, 11:00am-12:00noon
PAC (Paul Allen Center) AE108

We encounter kernels, Laplacians, covariances, and other positive
definite (PD) matrices in a dazzling variety of applications.  This
ubiquity of PD matrices can be attributed in part to their rich
geometric structure: they form a differentiable Riemannian
manifold. But exploiting this manifold structure is nontrivial, as
even basic tasks such as intermatrix distance computation are
complicated. To partially address these concerns, we propose a new
distance-like measure: the Symmetric-Burg (SB)-Divergence; this
measure not only mirrors several key properties of the Riemannian
distance but also simplifies computation. I substantiate the above
claims by showing theoretical and practical results extracted from my
recent (and ongoing) work.

To offer motivation beyond the intrinsic geometric beauty of PD
matrices, I highlight an application where the SS-Divergence allows us
to develop an efficient method for covariance-based image retrieval.
A substep of our algorithm depends on certain nonlinear matrix
equations, for solving which I present a method that may be of
independent interest.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Alan Ritter <aritter@cs.washington.edu>
Date: Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 10:30 AM
Subject: Twitter Calendar
To: cs-grads@cs.washington.edu, faculty@cs.washington.edu, cs-ugrads@cs.washington.edu, cs-staff@cs.washington.edu
Cc: Oren Etzioni <etzioni@cs.washington.edu>

Hi All,
We have been working on automatically extracting a calendar of upcoming events from Twitter status messages, and have a prototype system available here:
http://statuscalendar.com/
You can click on the individual calendar entries to drill down and get more details.

A couple of details about what is happening here:

-We are continuously gathering a random sample of Tweets.

-We extract Named Entities (people, locations, products, movies, etc…) from the Text of the tweets.

-We extract and resolve temporal expressions (for example, we can figure out which calendar day “Next Friday” refers to based on the timestamp of the Tweet).

-We count the number of times each entity co-occurs with a reference to each date, and plot the highest-ranking entities on the calendar.

The idea is to provide a summary of the most popular/important events occurring in the near future.  For example you can see many people are talking about the rumored iphone 5 announcement on September 7th.

Of course there are a few errors here and there, some text processing tasks are more difficult in Twitter text due to it’s noisiness (misspellings/abbreviations, unreliable capitalization, etc…).
Anyway, if you have time for a quick look, we would love to get any comments or suggestions for improvement that you might have.
Thanks!
-Alan

From: Jeff Bilmes <bilmes@ee.washington.edu>