Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen shoots purple Allen School T-shirts into the crowd at a University of Washington celebration of the school’s establishment. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
There’s no question that an extra $50 million will raise the University of Washington’s profile in computer science and engineering – but how high can it rise? How worried should MIT and Carnegie Mellon University be?
Here’s the message from Ed Lazowska, who’s marking his 40th year on the UW faculty and now holds the university’s Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering: Don’t worry, but make room.
“The goal here is, instead of there being a Top 4 program, to be a Top 5 program, and for us to be the fifth,” Lazowska said. “And we’re very close to that.”
Microsoft executive Todd Holmdahl is leading the effort to create scalable quantum hardware and software. (Red Box Pictures via Microsoft / Scott Eklund)
Microsoft says it’s moving ahead from just talking about quantum computing to building an actual quantum computer, based on the physics that won a Nobel Prize this year.
The project will be headed by longtime Microsoft executive Todd Holmdahl, who previously played key roles in developing the Xbox gaming console, the Kinect motion sensor and the HoloLens augmented-reality system. Now he’s corporate vice president of Microsoft’s quantum program.
“I think we’re at an inflection point in which we are ready to go from research to engineering,” Holmdahl said in a Microsoft blog posting about the project on Nov. 20.
Microsoft isn’t alone in the field: For several years, Google has been working with NASA and a Vancouver-area company called D-Wave to evaluate quantum computer designs.
All the movies, images and other data from more than 600 basic smartphones (10 terabytes) can be stored in the pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube. (Credit: Tara Brown Photography / UW)
Researchers at the University of Washington and Microsoft are developing a digital storage system that can archive data in DNA molecules, with the random-access readability and error correction protocols that’d be required for real-world applications.
Once they’ve overcome those hurdles, they just have to figure out how to make the technology affordable. Eventually, such research could help open the way for data storage devices that can pack information millions of times more tightly than current silicon-based methods.
“Life has produced this fantastic molecule called DNA that efficiently stores all kinds of information about your genes and how a living system works — it’s very, very compact and very durable,” Luis Ceze, UW associate professor of computer science and engineering, said in a news release. “We’re essentially repurposing it to store digital data — pictures, videos, documents — in a manageable way for hundreds or thousands of years.”
Ceze and his colleagues describe their work in a paper presented this week in Atlanta at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, or ASPLOS.
Retired Intel executive and tech pioneer Andrew Grove has died at the age of 79. (Credit: Intel)
Andrew Grove – the Intel chairman and CEO who helped usher in the age of microprocessors, personal computers and the Internet – passed away today at the age of 79, the company said.
Intel said Grove played a critical role in the California-based company’s transition from memory chips to microprocessors like the 386 and the Pentium. Those chips greatly expanded the capability of personal computers, and contributed to Microsoft’s long-lasting primacy in the desktop market.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates paid tribute to Grove in a statement emailed to GeekWire.
Computer science plays an increasingly significant role in aerospace development. (Credit: Boeing)
The most reliable way to break into the aerospace industry of tomorrow is to learn computer science today. That’s one of the preliminary findings from a study that estimates how many workers will be available to fill future jobs at King County’s aerospace ventures.
The aerospace industry study hasn’t yet been released, but this month Community Attributes shared a draft version of its analysis with stakeholders. The University of Washington’s computer science and engineering department touted the study in a blog posting on Friday.
“What field has the largest total number of current employees in King County’s aerospace industry? Computer science,” the department said.
MIT Professor Emeritus Marvin Minsky has died at 88. (Credit: Louis Fabian Bachrach via MIT)
Marvin Minsky, the computer scientist who helped blaze the trail for virtual smartphone assistants and other manifestations of artificial intelligence, died of a cerebral hemorrhage on Sunday at the age of 88.
As the co-founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, now known as theComputer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Minsky contributed to the decades-long drive to make machines more humanlike – through the development of robotic hands and neural networks, as well through his musings on the philosophical underpinnings of intelligence.
