Another very nice promotional video from the University of Washington, featuring a number of CSE faculty, students, and themes.

Watch it on YouTube here.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on research by UW CSE grad student Carl Hartung et al on using cellphones in rural Kenya to help test and counsel people about HIV.

“‘We were working in villages miles from electricity or running water, but we still had cell coverage,’” he wrote  in an e-mail to The Chronicle.

The work is reported in Open Source Data Collection in the Developing World, an article in the October 2009 edition of the IEEE journal Computer. See abstract.

Read the full article here.  Learn more about ODK here.

The UW Daily reports on Craig Mundie’s November 5 visit to UW.

“’In every generation, students have a blend of altruism, optimism and sensitivity with the issues that are forming,’ Mundie said … ‘We think computing is in its infancy … It’s going to be important to continue investing in computing. Without it, we’ll have difficulty solving these problems.’”

Read the complete article here.

“Online search and information discovery are being transformed before our eyes … A lot of the action is happening around Seattle … So get your tough questions ready for our panel, which will feature Brian Bershad from Google, Harry Shum from Microsoft (Bing), Steve Hall from Vulcan Capital, and Oren Etzioni from UW, Madrona Venture Group, and Farecast (acquired by Microsoft last year). Ed Lazowska will moderate the discussion …”

Read the full Xconomy post here.

Chandu Thekkath

Gaetano Borriello

Professor Gaetano Borriello is the latest UW CSE faculty member to be named a Fellow of the ACM.

ACM is the major professional society in computer science.   Roughly 1% of ACM’s members are elevated to the rank of Fellow.  Gaetano is the 14th UW CSE faculty member to be named an ACM Fellow.

UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Chandu Thekkath, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, also was named an ACM Fellow this year.

Craig's CSE Distinguished Lecture

Congratulating Anna Karlin

Faculty roundtable

Undergraduate student roundtable

Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, visited UW CSE as part of a four-campus swing in November 2009.  Craig met with UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska, with UW President Mark Emmert, with a panel of undergraduate students, and with a panel of faculty members.  He spoke to a packed house at Kane Hall, and prior to his talk, congratulated UW CSE professor Anna Karlin on being named to the Microsoft Endowed Professorship in Computer Science & Engineering.  (Photographs by Bruce Hemingway, UW CSE.)

Three teams from UW CSE competed in the 2009 Pacific Northwest Region Intercollegiate Programming Contest held at the University of Oregon in Eugene on Saturday, November 7, competing in a region that stretches from southern California up to Canada and over to Hawaii. The contest was held at five different sites simultaneously, with twenty-two teams from Washington and Oregon competing at the UO site.

The CSE teams placed first, second, and third among the teams at the site, and had our best showing ever in the region. CSE teams placed fifth and sixth in the region out of 77 teams total. Those two teams placed above all the teams from Berkeley and Simon Fraser who are normally very tough competitors, beaten only by teams from UBC, Stanford, and the University of Victoria.

CSE teams were:

• Team Captcha (first at site, fifth in region): Jeff Booth, Michael Sloan, Will Johnson
• Firefighter Endorsed (second at site, sixth in region): Joshua Snyder, Kevin Wallace, Alyssa Harding
• Three Bytes Deficient (third at site, 23rd in region): Steven Howard, Conrad Meyer, Tyler Smith

Complete results are at www.acmicpc-pacnw.org/Standings/2009.htm

Each year at UW CSE’s Industrial Affiliates Meeting, our friends at Madrona Venture Group recognize the most “entrepreneurially interesting” graduate student research presentations.

This year, a truly interdisciplinary team of students won the Madrona Prize.  CSE Ph.D. students Jon Froehlich and Sidhant Gupta, EE Ph.D. students Eric Larson and Gabe Cohn, and MechE undergraduate Tim Campbell were honored on their work on sustainability sensing.  Professors Shwetak Patel, James Landay, and James Fogarty have been closely collaborating on this effort.

Three runners up were recognized:  Roxana Geambasu and Amit Levy for Vanish (self-destructing digital data), Ethan Katz-Bassett for Reverse Traceroute, and Brandon Lucia and Joe Devietti for Deterministic Multiprocessing.

Following in Marty’s footStepps, UW CSE’s Wendy Chisholm is featured as the Seattle PI’s “Geek of the Week.”

“I believe that through design and technology we can change the world. We can change how society views ‘disabilities’ – we all need tools to do things. Why do we discriminate against some people because they need different tools? There is no ‘us’ or ‘them.’ We’re all here on spaceship earth together and we’re interconnected. None of us are truly independent and the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can start helping each other and make it a better place for all of us.”

Read the full article here.

UW CSE graduate student Shiri Azenkot interned this past summer at AT&T Labs Research.  Shiri’s research focuses on making technology accessible to people with disabilities, especially people with low vision.  While at AT&T Labs Research, she explored how technology could be used to create an easy-to-use navigation tool for enabling low-vision users to walk to a destination. The result of her work is  iWalk, an iPhone application that uses both text-to-speech and speech recognition technologies to implement a robust navigational aid.

Read more about what she was able to accomplish here.