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.

MSNBC.com’s Technology & Science section reports on UW CSE grad student Tamara Denning’s recent presentation at the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, following it up with a lengthy and informative interview.

“’Robots may look like toys or appliances but they’re not, says Tamara Denning, lead author of the study, A Spotlight on Security and Privacy Risks with Future Household Robots: Attacks and Lessons.”

Read the full article here.

Adrian Sampson

Michael Bayne

Peter Hornyak

Franzi Roesner

TechFlash interviews UW CSE graduate students Franzi Roesner, Peter Hornyak, Michael Bayne, and Adrian Sampson regarding their experiences with the Amazon.com Kindle DX educational pilot project.

Read the post here.

Xconomy reports on Mundie’s themes.  Hear his talk in Kane 120 on Thursday at 4:15.   Read the post here.

The Seattle Times reports on Craig Mundie’s university speaking tour, which concludes with a talk sponsored by UW CSE on Thursday November 5th at 4:15 in Kane 120.  Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, will speak on “Re-Thinking Computing.”  Earlier in the day, he will meet with UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska, UW President Mark Emmert, a faculty panel, and a student panel.

Read the article here.

TechFlash article on Craig’s talk here.

OVP Venture Partner’s Mark Ashida writes in Xconomy about the UW CSE Industrial Affiliates Meeting, particularly the panel discussion on “The Changing Face of Venture Capital” which featured Mark, Greg Gottesman (Madrona Venture Group), Ron Howell (WRF Capital), Bill McAleer (Voyager Capital), Cam Myhrvold (Ignition Partners), and was moderated by CSE’s Ed Lazowska.

“The University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering Affiliates day is one of the most fun and rewarding days of the year for me as venture investor and geek. It involves a showcase of projects and research areas by professors and students and is a festival of creativity, new ideas, and engaged smart people. It is a day my colleagues and I look forward to every year …”

See the full post here.

UW CSE’s Vanish project on self-destructing data is featured in an NPR piece on privacy in the digital age.

“Roxana Geambasu is a computer science graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she’s been working on self-destructing data. The simplest application is a form of e-mail that comes with a finite life span.

“‘After the time out, you will never be able to read the message again,’ she says.

“The system is called Vanish, and it works by encrypting your data — e-mails, photos, Facebook posts — then placing the decryption ‘keys’ in several places around the Internet. The keys are readily available to anyone for a few hours. But as the keys disappear, the message rots away. All copies become unreadable; even the copies made along the way — at the Internet service provider, at the National Security Agency, wherever.”

Read and hear the story here.  Vanish project information here.