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“An application for household registration of births and deaths is being developed in a project under the umbrella of the UN Millennium Project.

“Brian DeRenzi, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington in the US, is helping test the application as it is being fine tuned at a health facility in Uganda.

“In Uganda, DeRenzi says, there are community health workers who go from house to house to collect health information and do health promotion. The goal is to enable those health workers to use the service to register births and deaths on their mobiles and send the information to a central database via GPRS.”

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CSE Affiliate Dave Cutler received the National Medal of Technology & Innovation at a White House ceremony on September 29, “for having designed and implemented standards for real-time, personal, and server-based operating systems, carrying these projects from conception through design, engineering, and production for Digital Equipment Corporation’s RSX-11 and VAX/VMS, and for Microsoft’s Windows NT-based computer operating systems; and for his fundamental contributions to computer architecture, compilers, operating systems, and software engineering.”

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“As college students head back to school with gleaming new laptops, some will, unfortunately, see the last of their machine in a library, cafeteria or dorm room … Researchers at the University of Washington and at the University of California, San Diego have created a new laptop theft-protection tool. The software not only provides a virtual watchdog on your precious machine – reporting the laptop’s location when it connects to the Internet – but does so without letting anybody but you monitor the whereabouts.”

Adeona website here.

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“Sitting at the final table of the prestigious Borgata Poker Open last week, $1.4 million on the line and a clear advantage in chips, University of Washington graduate Vivek Rajkumar had a plan …

“This isn’t the situation either he or his parents envisioned a few short years ago when Rajkumar was compiling his whiz-kid academic resume: He enrolled in the U-Dub’s Early Entrance Program at 15 and graduated before turning 19 with degrees in applied mathematics and computer engineering …”

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Nature profiles four MacArthur “Genius” Award winners, including UW CSE’s Yoky Matsuoka.

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“As a hearing child of deaf parents, Richard Ladner saw firsthand the impact of communications technology on his parents’ lives. ‘Back in the early 1970s, they got their first teletypewriter,’ he said. ‘It was a very big box, the size of a computer, but it opened a new world for them.’”

MobileASL project web page here.

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“One of the scenes from The Empire Strikes Back gives you an idea of what Yoky Matsuoka is pursuing. It’s the part where Luke Skywalker tests out a prosthetic hand that he can control with all the dexterity of a natural one, well enough to wield one mean light saber.

“Matsuoka, a MacArthur “genius” award winner (and an Xconomist), and one of the up-and-comers on the faculty at the University of Washington, described her work in what she calls “neurobotics” this morning at the Technology Alliance’s Science & Technology Discovery Series in Seattle.”

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“Skytap, the UW spinoff that offers a virtual testing lab in the cloud, is announcing a new API and VPN capabilities today. The company now has 20 paying customers, including several large enterprises, according to Chief Executive Scott Roza. ‘We see more enterprises that are willing to put their toe in the water and put strategic projects in the cloud,’ he said.”

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Growth in peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading has led some ISPs to limit, or “throttle,” connection speeds to preserve bandwidth for everyone else. But the University of Washington in Seattle has hit on a promising alternative.”

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“The convenience and relatively low cost of cell phones in the U.S. has made them an indispensable part of life. Unless, of course, you are one of the 37 million or so hearing-impaired adults living in this country. But University of Washington in Seattle researchers are hoping to change that by developing software that lets callers communicate on their mobile phones using sign language via real-time video instead of being limited to text messaging.”