“Just imagine you’re blind and trying to go online at an internet cafe in Paris. Until now, unless you had $1,000 worth of software installed, it was just about impossible. But in recent weeks hundreds of blind people found their worlds opening up online with help from a web-based program called WebAnywhere.
The program was created by Jeffrey Bigham, a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department. He knew that many applications were moving from desktop computers to the web, and thought such a program could help blind people.
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The 2008 Seattle-To-Portland bicycle tour featured the largest-ever gathering of UW CSE bicycling jerseys. The jerseys — for the “Pastry-Powered T(o)uring Machine” bicycle club, were created by UW CSE alumna Lauren Bricker. The theme for the design of the shirts is UW CSE’s infamous “Steam-Powered Turing Machine” mural. Read more →
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CSE’s Ed Lazowska writes, “I regularly get contacted by reporters who read the CRA ‘Taulbee Survey’ and inquire about the current state of computer science undergraduate enrollments. Here’s what I said last night to the most recent reporter who inquired …”
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“Yoky Matsuoka, professor of computer sciences and engineering at the University of Washington and a 2007 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ award, wants robots to function more like human beings. Her lab at the UW – full of mechanical hands, fingers and arm parts – looks like a repair shop for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator.” Read more →
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UW CSE Ph.D. student Jeff Bigham describes the WebInSight project on KGO TV San Francisco. Read more →
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“Could the person who finds the cure for cancer be a gamer? The creators of an online game that allows players to help scientists design new proteins with therapeutic properties hope so.” The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses UW’s Foldit game. Read more →
“In 2001, Oren Etzioni was on a plane chatting up his seat mates when he realized they had all paid less for their tickets than he did. ‘I thought, ‘don’t get mad, get even,” he says. So he came home to his computer lab at the University of Washington, got his hands on some fare data, and plugged it into a few basic prediction algorithms. He wanted to see if they could reliably foresee changes in ticket prices. It worked: Not only did the algorithms accurately anticipate when fares would go up or down, they gave reasonable estimates of what the new prices would be.
“Etzioni’s prediction model has grown far more complex since then, and the company he founded in 2003, Farecast, now tracks information on 175 billion fares originating at 79 US airports. The database knows when airline prices are going to change and has uncovered a host of other secrets about air travel.”
Full article here; page on Farecast here (pdf). Read more →
