CSE Undergrad News

— 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>

Hey everyone,

We’re going to update the ugradnews blog as we do every year. We’ll be adding only students who are current majors or new students this fall. If you want to keep receiving news after you graduate, we encourage you to join the CSE news blog:  http://news.cs.washington.edu/

We also have facebook, twitter and a bunch of other ways to stay in touch: http://www.cs.washington.edu/news/FollowingCSE.html

CSE advising

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Ed Lazowska <lazowska@cs.washington.edu>
Date: Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 8:31 PM
Subject: Fwd: FCRC Plenary Sessions
To: Faculty <faculty@cs.washington.edu>, Cs-Grads <cs-grads@cs.washington.edu>, Cs-Ugrads <cs-ugrads@cs.washington.edu>, Staff <cs-staff@cs.washington.edu>, uw-systems <uw-systems@cs.washington.edu>

Dave Ferrucci’s talk was excellent.  Worth 45 minutes for *everyone*.

Luiz Barosso is always very good too.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Pat Ryan
Date: Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 5:59 PM
Subject: FCRC Plenary Sessions
To: Ed Lazowska <lazowska@cs.washington.edu>
Cc: John White

Hi Ed,

I know that you have been asking about the availability of the
videos of the plenary sessions from FCRC.  Well, good news, they are
available finally:

IBM’s Watson/DeepQA

by David A. Ferrucci, IBM

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2019525

Algorithms: Recent Highlights and Challenges

By Ravi Kannan, Microsoft Research

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2019526

Warehouse-Scale Computing: Entering the Teenage Decade

By Luiz Andre Barroso

Warehouse-Scale Computing: Entering the Teenage Decade

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2019527

These are the three talks for which we received releases.

They can either be downloaded and are also available for streaming,

Regards,

Pat.

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Hey CSE students! Do you like free money??

The application for CSE and COE scholarships for the 2011-2012 academic year will open on August 1st and will close on September 1st. Please note that these dates are much earlier than previous years. The majority of the CSE scholarships are offered during this period with academic merit, financial need, or a combination of both as criteria for recipients.  New majors for autumn 2011 are also encouraged to apply, as many of the awards are targeted for new transfer students or freshmen. You do not want to miss out!

You can find the application here: http://www.engr.washington.edu/curr_students/scholarships.html

Or linked directly from the CSE Departmental Awards page.

Foundation for International Understanding Through Students (FIUTS)

Become a volunteer FIUTS Facilitator and make friends from around the world!

FIUTS is an independent non-profit organization that provides cross-cultural leadership and social programming for UW’s international and globally minded domestic students. FIUTS depends on the generosity and passion of our volunteers to help accomplish our goals. Volunteering is a great opportunity to learn intercultural leadership skills and make new friends.

As a FIUTS Facilitator, you will receive cross-cultural leadership training and gain valuable volunteer experience leading programs and events including UW International Student Orientation in September, when you can  help welcome over 1,500 new students from around the world to the UW and Seattle! Facilitators also have the opportunity to participate in year-round activities such as K-12 Education Outreach, Events & Activities, and more.

Volunteer opportunities are open to current UW students who have completed at least one quarter at the UW. Facilitators complete a short application and attend a short orientation.

For more information, visit our website at http://www.fiuts.org/students/volunteer/index.htm, or contact us at 206-543-0735 / orientation@fiuts.org / Condon Hall 511C.
—
FIUTS
Foundation For International Understanding Through Students
University of Washington
Box 352233
Seattle, WA 98195-2233
Tel: 206.543.0735
Fax: 206.685.8338
Website: http://www.fiuts.org

On Tuesday, August 9th Google Seattle will host an open house for local CS
students graduating in 2012! Please join for an evening of tech demos,
networking, food and drinks from 5:30-8:30pm. Space is somewhat limited in
the cafe, so please RSVP.

edit:  Here’s the actual text for the link so email can see it

https://docs.google.com/a/uw.edu/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEpEZGRlazFPLXl6WE5SdTQ2R2pCdlE6MA&ndplr=1#gid=0