Article excerpted from University of Washington's Perspectives Newsletter - September 2023 edition. Photo by Juan Rodriguez. Dr. Jevin West, picture right, is ARCS 45th Anniversary Luncheon's keynote speaker and a UW ARCS Alumnus from 2008.

Carl Bergstrom, UW professor of biology, was frustrated. Everywhere he looked, he saw information presented as fact when it was actually misleading, biased, or based on conjecture. In other words, bullshit. And he saw people believing it.

So when Jevin West, associate professor in the UW Information School, mentioned plans to teach a course on big data, Bergstrom had a strong response. “I told Jevin, ‘That’s too bad. Because if you teach a course on big data, I’ll have to start teaching a course calling bullshit on big data.’”

That got a laugh from West, who said it sounded like a fun course. “I’d teach it with you,” West said.

Those five words led to a wildly popular UW course taught by Bergstrom and West, “Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World,” and a book with a similar name. But suggesting all that happened without a hitch would be, well, bullshit. Bergstrom and West's popular course led to a book published in 2020. Read the full Perspectives article linked here.

ARCS Seattle Chapter is proud to announce that WSU's Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science is now an approved university department eligible to receive Scholar Awards. The article below is excerpted from WSU Insider's September Edition. Photo: Large data centers produce about 1% of the energy-related global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Energy Agency.

A framework that uses machine learning to make decisions about power usage can reduce energy use by up to 60% without affecting computing performance in multi-core processors used in large servers around the world. 

The innovation could lead to more efficient computing, especially in large data centers, which produce about 1% of the energy-related global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. The Washington State University and Intel researchers received a best paper award for the work at the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design.

In their work, the researchers used machine learning algorithms to manage power usage, selecting voltage and frequency levels for different clusters of a large, 64-core computer processor. These multi-core processors are typically used in servers or supercomputers. The researchers’ framework was able to learn highly optimized ways to manage the power and is scalable, so it could be used to improve the energy efficiency of even larger multi-core processors. The algorithm also didn’t reduce the performance of the multi-processor.

“We were able to come up with better decision making to determine the voltage and frequency level, so that we had significant energy savings without sacrificing performance,” said Partha Pande, a corresponding author on the paper and WSU Boeing Centennial Chair in Computer Engineering. 

Read full WSU Insider Article linked here.