Allen School News

SNUPI (Sensor Nodes Utilizing Powerline Infrastructure) nodes are ultra-low-power, general-purpose wireless sensor nodes that transmit their data by coupling over the powerline to a single receiver attached to the powerline in the home. SNUPI nodes provide whole-home coverage while consuming less than 1 mW of power when transmitting (one order of magnitude lower than existing nodes), and a new custom CMOS transmitter consumes only 65 µW (two orders of magnitude lower than existing nodes). SNUPI was one of five technologies features at the Technology Alliance “Innovation Showcase.” Read more →

In 1997, an IBM Artificial Intelligence system named Deep Blue defeated the human world champion in a chess match.

The game of Jeopardy! – which requires 3-second responses and the understanding of English questions, puns, and a massive knowledge base of facts – is a much harder challenge.  On February 14th, 15th, and 16th, an IBM AI system named Watson will be pitted against two human champions.

UW CSE will host a viewing event on the second of these nights – Tuesday February 15th.   The event will take place from 7:00-8:15 in EE105.  Professors from UW Computer Science & Engineering and experts from IBM and Microsoft will be on hand to provide commentary.

Please join us! Win, lose, or draw, this is a monumental step for computer science.

Here’s an announcement of the viewing event. Read more →

The January issue of New Scientist features an article on the resurgence of artificial intelligence.  Key to the renaissance is combining probabalistic programming with classical AI techniques. UW CSE Professor Pedro Domingos is quoted and UW AI research is featured.

Read the full article here. Read more →

At the 2011 Computers, Privacy & Data Protection conference in Brussels, Belgium, UW CSE PhD students had a strong showing, winning both the Multidisciplinary Privacy Award award and an honorable mention.

The goal of the CPDP multi-disciplinary privacy research award is to promote the need for and reward the results of multidisciplinary research, with the participation of the representative of diverse constituencies engaged in the investigation of the new ideas in data protection.  Any paper published or accepted for publication in 2010 was eligible to win.

UW CSE grad student Alexei Czeskis and alumni Iva Dermendjieva and Hussein Yapit won the award for their work on balancing privacy and value tensions in mobile parenting technologies (published at SOUPS 2010 with co-authors Alan Borning, Batya Friedman, Brian Gill, and Tadayoshi Kohno).  UW CSE PhD student Tamara Denning won an honorable mention for her work on analyzing human values and security for wireless implantable medical devices (published at CHI 2010 with co-authors Alan Borning, Batya Friedman, Brian Gill, Tadayoshi Kohno, and William Maisel).

Congratulations! Read more →

This video, from Paul Kulchenko and Emo Todorov in UW CSE’s Movement Control Laboratory, is pretty amazing.  The accompanying text provides background. Read more →

An editorial in the Tacoma News Tribune:

“A recent story in The Seattle Times vividly illustrated the tight connection between college opportunity and the state economy.

“The engineering site director for Google in the Seattle region, Brian Bershad, told the Times that he can’t get enough computer scientists and computer engineers from the University of Washington.  ‘If the UW could produce 1,000 amazing engineers every year,’ he said, ‘we’d find a way to hire them.’ …

“When a state starts to strangle its universities, bad consequences follow.  Students with limited means get frozen out of school.  Bright students go to school elsewhere, and they often never come back to enrich the economy back home.  Competing out-of-state universities start spiriting away the most talented faculty members, sometimes pulling big grants and private R&D money along with them.  High-tech companies that want a university nearby decide to locate elsewhere.

“These are among the reasons the cash-strapped Legislature must give Washington’s universities more leeway …”

Read the editorial here.  Read the original Seattle Times story here.  Check out photos of UW CSE’s recent Winter Recruiting Fair here. Read more →

Katie Kuksenok

Justine Sherry

Microsoft Research has announced the ten recipients of its 2011 Graduate Women Scholarships.  Among the ten, UW CSE Ph.D. student Katie Kuksenok, and 2010 UW CSE bachelors alum (and current UC Berkeley Ph.D. student) Justine Sherry.

Congratulations Katie and Justine!! Read more →

The New York Times reports on Intel’s transition from three university-affiliated “lablets” to a larger number of university-based Intel Science and Technology Centers.

“The company said this week that it would pour $100 million over the next five years into projects at universities.  Each of the projects will involve a few Intel researchers, typically four, with far-flung teams of researchers from several universities …

“‘This assembling of multi-university dream teams to work on big computer science problems is unusual for industry,’ said Edward Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington.”

Read the New York Times article here. Read more →

UW CSE holds recruiting fairs each October and January for tech companies that are members of our Industrial Affiliates Program.  The “buzz” is a great measure of the demand for Computer Science and Computer Engineering majors.  On January 25th – as at other recent recruiting fairs – we weren’t able to accommodate all interested companies:  we can only squeeze 41 tables into our Atrium.

See a list of the recruiting companies here.  See other Bruce Hemingway photographs here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. student Morgan Dixon has been awarded one of 12 2011 Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowships – from among 174 students nominated for the award!

Morgan is a third-year Ph.D. student working with professor James Fogarty, studying Human-Computer Interaction and User Interface Software and Technology.  Learn about Morgan and his research here.

Congratulations Morgan! Read more →