CSE Undergrad News

It’s that time of year again… ACM and ACM-W elections are coming up!

Who would you like to see in office next year? Know someone with great ideas? A proactive leader? Someone who loves being involved with the CSE community? Specific officer roles will be determined in the future. We will notify nominees with further steps after the nomination period ends.

You may nominate multiple people, including yourself, here: https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/survey/apacible/196901

If you cannot view this WebQ, please email Elise at elised[at]cs.washington[dot]edu.

This survey will close on Monday, April 15, 2013 at 5pm.

Please pass on this important message regarding commencement to your students.

–        Students who graduated Summer 2012, Autumn 2012, or Winter 2013 are eligible to walk in commencement and their names will appear in the Commencement bulletin.

–        Students who plan to graduate Spring 2013 are eligible to walk in commencement and have their names appear in the Commencement Bulletin; however, they must submit their master’s requests or doctoral final exam requests to the Graduate School no later than Friday, April 19th, 5 pm (PST).

–        Students who plan to graduate Summer 2013 are eligible to walk in commencement; however, their names will appear in next year’s Commencement Bulletin

**Please Note: There will be no exceptions to this deadline. We apologize for the inflexibility but are required by the Office of Ceremonies to adhere to this deadline so publication deadlines can be met.

All questions should be directed to the Office of Ceremonies at 206.543.2592 or commence@uw.edu

For information regarding commencement please refer to one of the pages below:

Commencement – UW Bothell: http://www.bothell.washington.edu/commencement

Commencement – UW Seattle: http://www.washington.edu/graduation/

Commencement – UW Tacoma: http://www.tacoma.uw.edu/commencement

For those of you who are interested in startups, the business school
at UW is throwing a great day-long conference at UW, focused on tech
(yay CSE!)
It’s pretty cheap for the line-up they have (plus food all day) so
consider attending!

DESCRIPTION
Silicon Valley meets Seattle in an all-day conference hosted at the
Foster School. Ken Denman, visiting Edward V. Fritzky Leadership
Chair, has assembled a stellar line up of speakers. We’ll begin with
opening remarks from Charles Songhurst, Microsoft’s Head of Corporate
Strategy. Throughout the day you’ll meet and here from a series of
panelists at the leading edge of venture capital and start-ups. Ben
Casnocha, an award-winning entrepreneur and author, will conclude the
day by talking about The Start-Up of You.

Denman and the Foster School are making this very special event
available on a first-come, first-served basis. Space is limited.
Register today.

INFO
http://www.foster.washington.edu/innovationday/Pages/innovation.aspx

SCHEDULE
http://www.foster.washington.edu/innovationday/Pages/schedule.aspx

REGISTER
Registration is $10 for students
http://www.foster.washington.edu/innovationday/Pages/registration.aspx

Come join us at the UW ACM Chill AF (“and fun”) Hackathon! Stay up all night, meet new people, learn new things, have fun, and work on cool project(s)! Everyone who wants to come is invited. That includes non-CSE students, alumni, etc.

Date: 4/5 – 4/6
Time: 7:00pm – 12:00pm
Location: CSE Undergraduate Labs – Kick off in 002

This event is not affiliated with any company. There is no judging, prizes, or winners. Please bring $10 if you want food and drink.

For more information, please check out the Facebook event page.

“The ESS group is experimenting with taking advantage of the falling prices of 3D display and computer hardware to develop an immersive visualization system optimized for solving geologic problems. The current IO components of the system would include:

1. PC workstation with stereo vision capability,
2. Kinect, and
3. Data glove (e.g. http://www.vrealities.com/dg5glove.html )

This position would be paid. In addition, we have about a $5k budget to buy additional  hardware (e.g.  see http://www.oculusvr.com/ )

Although the project would start with a project to optimally display 3d geologic structure(s) the ultimate goal of the system would be to move beyond the passive display of spatial-temporal data and emphasize the interactive refinement of complex geologic models. This effort could represent an opportunity for one of your more advanced senior students to act as a ‘consultant’ on the project. He would experience a real world project in the sense that:

• She would have clients who would view computer programing has a means to an end,
• Be exposed to different programing environment (e.g.Python),
• Stretch his CS expertise on problems where the answer is not in the back of the book, and
• Have to deal with real world trade offs (e.g. buy a bigger monitor and just upgrade an older PC or buy a small monitor and a new PC ).

Past collaborations between geologists with interesting problems and computer scientists have produced interesting results (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=j9JXtTj0mzE  ) in the past and long term this project has the potential to do likewise.

The student should expect to  work under Windows and use the Python programing language.

For more info, contact Gregg, at gregg@hiker.org”

Hello!

Yelp’s got a whole lot of data, and we’re giving it to you. Now proudly introducing a new dataset for academic research with the launch of a Yelp Dataset Challenge!

From Yelp’s wealth of data about local businesses, we’re bringing you rich data to use for academic or extracurricular research projects.

To up the ante, we’re laying down a special challenge to graduate and exceptional undergraduate students: use our data and submit your project for a chance to win one of ten Yelp Dataset Challenge awards for $5,000! Just show us how you use Yelp data in insightful, unique, and compelling ways.

For winning research, there are additional awards available for publishing your work and presenting at industry or academic conferences.

For full details and to access the data, go to our website: http://www.yelp.com/dataset_challenge/

The deadline for submissions to the Yelp Dataset Challenge is Monday, May 20, 2013 (23:59:59 UTC). Submit your project to Yelp by visiting yelp.com/dataset_challenge/submit. You can submit a research paper, video presentation, slide deck, website, blog, or any other medium that conveys your use of the Yelp Dataset Challenge data.

We can’t wait to see what you do with our data!

If you are interested in a career at Yelp you should check out our related competition on Kaggle:

https://www.kaggle.com/c/yelp-recruiting

-Yelp Engineering Team

In case this might change anything these courses will definitely be offered this summer (although I don’t yet have final times).

Definitely offering:

CSE 456 and 464 (animation)

CSE 333

CSE 351 and 390A
CSE 154 web programming
CSE 142/143

Maybe offering:

*CSE 421, we’re not sure yet

If you want to receive emails about the various talks going on in the department, you should subscribe to the talks list.

https://mailman.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/talks

We generally will not post reminders here, but do towards the beginning of each quarter. Also, remember that you can sign in to the blog to set preferences on the types of message you receive.

Crystal

Information about upcoming Colloquia sponsored by the University of Washington, Department of Computer <talks@cs.washington.edu>	Mar 28 (4 days ago)
to cs-ugrads

Intriguing title on this one…!

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
Computer Science and Engineering
COLLOQUIUM

SPEAKER:   Shayan Oveis Gharan, Stanford University

TITLE:     New Approximation Algorithms for Traveling Salesman Problem

DATE:      Thursday, April 4, 2013
TIME:      3:30pm
PLACE:     EEB-105
HOST:      Anup Rao

ABSTRACT:
TSP is a central and perhaps one of the most well-known problems in
theoretical computer science. Due to its combination of simplicity, appeal
to imagination, and intractability, TSP has attracted the attention of
mathematicians and computer scientists for decades. Despite this
attention, the best approximation algorithm known for TSP goes back to
1976. In his unpublished manuscript, Christofides presented a simple
3/2-approximation algorithm for the problem.

In a joint work with Saberi and Singh, we design a new approximation
algorithm for a canonical special case of the TSP known as graphic TSP.
This algorithm finally breaks the 3/2 barrier by a very small constant.
Our algorithm employs a new technique for rounding the optimum fractional
solution of linear programming relaxations of combinatorial optimization
problems, called the rounding by sampling method.  Our analysis builds on
recent developments in probability theory on properties of strongly
Rayleigh measures, as well as new insights from combinatorics and
polyhedral theory. As a byproduct of our result, we show new properties of
near minimum cuts of any graph, which may be of independent interest.

Bio:
Shayan Oveis Gharan is currently finishing his PhD at Stanford University
under the supervision of Amin Saberi. Prior to Stanford, Shayan received a
BA in computer engineering from Sharif University of Technology. His
research interests include Approximation Algorithms, Spectral Algorithms,
Online Algorithms and Applied Probability. He is a recipient of several
awards including best paper award at SODA 2010 and FOCS 2011 for his works
on the Traveling Salesman Problem, Stanford Graduate Fellowship, and the
Miller Fellowship.

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) 685-7264 (FAX), or email at
dso@u.washington.edu.
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