This morning President Obama announced Computer Science For All, a $4 billion initiative to empower all American students from Kindergarten through high school to learn computer science and computational thinking.
Congratulations to Jan Cuny (NSF), Hadi Partovi (Code.org), Megan Smith (US CTO), and the many others who have worked so hard over so many years to get us to this point.
Now the question is: Will Washington State up its game?
Learn more here. Read more →
Supasorn Suwajanakorn (photo credit: Abhishek Sugam)
Advances in computing have disrupted many industries, from financial services and retail, to travel and real estate. Could psychic readings be next?
In a story posted on MyNorthwest.com, KIRO Radio reporter Rachel Belle foresees the day when you will be able to interact with a 3-D model of your dearly departed. And it will all be thanks to members of UW CSE’s GRAIL Group. From the article:
“Five years ago I sat down with my Grandma Sue and a tape recorder and interviewed her for two hours. I asked her to tell me stories of her childhood in New York City, her marriage, anything about her life. I learned that she got married at 16 years old in a jail, along with several other young women and their soldier fiancés. They later divorced and, on tape, she advised me not to marry a bum.
“Unfortunately, a few weeks later I accidentally deleted the recording. And before I could schedule another visit to re-record, she died. Now, the only recording I have of Grandma Sue’s thick, New York accent is a five second video on an old, out-of-service cellphone.
“What if you could have one more conversation with someone who passed away? Or many conversations? Would you do it? Eventually, this may be possible. Computer scientists at the University of Washington are working on bringing photos and video to life.”
Belle is referring to research by CSE graduate student Supasorn Suwajanakorn and professors Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman and Steve Seitz in which they construct and animate 3-D models of celebrities from photos and videos. The project—What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks?—is attracting a lot of interest and promises to advance the state of the art in animation and augmented reality.
We predict you will want to read the full article here, and check out our past coverage of the project here.
IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: Richard Anderson notes that the recent research by Suwajanakorn, Kememacher-Shlizerman and Seitz ignores prior work on “Necrocomputing” carried out in 2001 by UW CSE Ph.D. student Craig Kaplan, now a faculty member at the University of Waterloo. We regret this lapse in scholarship. See Kaplan’s talk on the subject here.
Read more →
At Davos, Microsoft President Brad Smith points to the UW “solar system” in the Seattle Tech Universe map
At a Davos event hosted by his alma mater Princeton University, Microsoft President Brad Smith used the Seattle Tech Universe map to illustrate “the connection between leading universities and innovation ecosystems, using the University of Washington as an example.”
GeekWire article here. More information on the Seattle Tech Universe map here. Read more →
UW CSE professor Ben Taskar passed away tragically, in his 30’s, in 2013, of sudden and severe heart failure.
UW CSE has commemorated Ben in a number of ways, including the establishment of the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, and of the annual Ben Taskar Memorial Lecture.
Today, the inaugural Ben Taskar Memorial Lecture was delivered to a packed house by Ben’s Stanford Ph.D. advisor and founder of Coursera, Daphne Koller.
The event began with remarks honoring Ben by UW CSE professor Carlos Guestrin – like Ben, a Daphne Koller Ph.D. alumnus and machine learning star – and a overview of the Taskar Center by its director (and Ben’s wife) Anat Caspi.
Daphne followed her own remarks honoring Ben with an inspirational talk describing the mission and impact of Coursera.
“Anyone, anywhere can transform their life by accessing the world’s best learning experience.”
That is the vision of Coursera, which has transformed access to higher education through a robust platform for delivering massive open online courses (MOOCs) to people around the world.
Daphne talked about the growth of Coursera as an online learning platform and the impact that it has had on learners and instructors. She shared some impressive numbers: four years ago, the first online courses offered by Stanford reached around 100,000 learners. Today, Coursera has surpassed 17 million registered learners around the globe, with more than 130 institutions and 1,000 instructors offering classes on the platform (including the UW, which was an early partner). And it is opening up pathways to learning for people who would not otherwise have access to quality higher education: 40% of active learners on Coursera are from emerging economies.
The data tell a compelling story on their own, but Daphne also shared personal anecdotes that illustrate the tremendous impact that Coursera and MOOCs in general have had on people’s lives around the globe—real people who gained access to a world of learning they otherwise would not have had.
In keeping with the day’s theme of accessibility, Daphne shared the touching story of Jerry Vickers. Vickers was diagnosed with ALS, for which the life expectancy is around 18 months. After losing his ability to move his limbs, Vickers spent what precious time remained of his life studying programming and a variety of other subjects on Coursera using a tablet controlled with his eye movements. From the Indian baker who took business classes so she could save her female friends from being sold into servitude, to the professor whose course about human trafficking enabled victims to pursue restitution for their own tragic experiences with it, Daphne’s stories revealed what a powerful—and empowering—tool MOOCs have become for both learners and instructors.
The standing-room-only lecture capped off a day of workshops and events focused on accessibility to mark the first anniversary of UW CSE’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology. Today’s program was a terrific way to honor Ben’s memory, and a terrific celebration of the work being done at the Taskar Center. Many thanks to Daphne for sharing the Coursera story with us. Read more →
Museum visitors interact with RHINO the robot
A paper co-authored by UW CSE professor Dieter Fox in his graduate student days was one of two papers selected this year for special recognition by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) with its Classic Paper Award, which recognizes papers that have been the most influential in the field. AAAI will show Fox and his colleagues the love during the opening ceremony of its 2016 conference on February 14th in Phoenix, Arizona.
The winning paper, “The Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot,” was originally presented at the 15th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence held in 1998 in Madison, Wisconsin. In it, the research team described RHINO, an autonomous, interactive robot that was designed to entertain and assist the public in highly dynamic environments.
Dieter Fox
The team focused on two priorities when building RHINO: achieving safe and reliable navigation at high speeds, and providing an intuitive and appealing user experience. Fox and his colleagues incorporated a number of innovations in localization, mapping, collision avoidance, and planning into RHINO’s software to enable it to operate under challenging conditions without having to modify the environment to aid its navigation. Because RHINO’s main purpose was to interact with people, they also placed special emphasis on user interaction, taking care to make the robot interface intuitive and user-friendly for non-experts—a relatively new concept in robotics research at the time. The team then put RHINO through its paces over the course of six days in the crowded Deutsches Museum Bonn in Germany. In addition to visitors interacting with RHINO in person, people around the world had the ability to control RHINO remotely via the Web.
In a related article on the RHINO experiment, the team noted that while most people found the robot entertaining, some took the entertainment too far and attempted to “break the system.” (In at least one case, someone who must not have received enough affection as a child attempted to lead RHINO dangerously close to a stairwell.) Happily, such attempts failed, and the robot was able to fulfill a total of 2,400 requests to tour the museum, either in-person or online—a whopping 99.75% success rate.
Fox’s Ph.D. research was a significant contribution to the paper, which was co-authored by Fox’s advisor, Armin Cremers, and colleagues at the University of Bonn, Aachen University of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University. Their RHINO experiment pointed to the future of robotics with its focus on adaptability and human-computer interaction. It was a truly astounding result at the time, for which the team deserves this accolade from the AAAI today.
Congratulations, Dieter! Read more →
“We ranked the economies of all the states and DC on seven measures: Unemployment rates; GDP per capital; average weekly wages; recent growth rates for nonfarm payroll jobs; GDP; house prices; and wages,” Business Insider explained.
In ranking Washington state #1, Business Insider said:
“Washington state scored extremely well on most of our metrics. Its Q2 annualized Gross Domestic Product growth was a stunning 8.0 percent, by far the highest among the states and D.C. The November 2015, average weekly wage of $1,073 was the second highest in the country, and was 5.6 percent higher than the weekly wage in November of 2014.”
Read the full report here. Washington slide here. Read more →
UW CSE professor Richard Anderson recently spoke to KPLU’s Jennifer Wing about our new Digital Financial Services Research Group that was announced last week. The new group, which aims to accelerate the development of secure mobile banking services for people in the developing world, is a collaboration between UW CSE’s Information & Communications Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab, Security and Privacy Research Lab, and the iSchool.
From the radio segment:
“In developing and third-world countries, moving money around digitally can be very complicated and risky. Computer science professors and students at the University of Washington are trying to make that task easier and safer.
“In remote parts of India or Africa, ‘It’s very common for a farmer to leave his village, go the city, drive a taxi and then, every month, he wants to send his wages back to his family,’ said Richard Anderson…
“But how can that taxi driver do that without worrying about financial security threats and identity theft?”
Read or listen to the full segment online here.
Read our previous coverage of the new group here and the UW news release here. Read more →
Each year, the UW College of Engineering honors a select group of alumni for their contributions to the field of engineering and to society with its Diamond Awards. Among the 2016 honorees is CSE alum Ben Hindman (B.S., ’07), Founder of Mesosphere, Inc. – an outgrowth of his graduate work at UC Berkeley – who is recognized with the “Early Career” award.
From the citation:
“Few people outside the tech industry have heard of Apache Mesos, software that provides essential infrastructure enabling applications to interact with data servers. But for anyone who has asked Apple’s Siri a question, used Yelp to look up restaurants, or watched a movie on Netflix, Mesos has helped to provide the resulting content with speed, ease and reliability. Ben Hindman is the co-creator of Mesos technology and founder of the company Mesosphere. In the ten years since graduating from the UW, Ben has transformed the way software runs within data centers, the backbone of some of the most popular applications in the world, and sparked an innovative new technology industry….
“With tens of millions in funding raised to date, offices in two cities and over 100 employees, Mesosphere continues to be the biggest “infrastructure computing” company quietly serving countless end-users every day.”
Read the full citation here, and learn more about Ben’s journey since graduating from UW CSE—which he shared with a group of current undergrads as part of last year’s UW CSE Leadership Seminar Series—here and here.
Ben and his fellow 2016 award winners will be the guests of honor at a dinner on May 20th.
Ben joins a stellar group of CSE alumni who have been recognized with Diamond Awards over the past decade: Yaw Anokwa and Christophe Bisciglia (2015); Brad Fitzpatrick (2014); Kevin Ross (2013); Greg Badros and Anne Condon (2012); Loren Carpenter and Tapan Parikh (2010); Gail Murphy and Rob Short (2008); Ed Felten (2007); and Jeff Dean and Jeremy Jaech (2006).
Congratulations, Ben! Read more →
Brown University computer science professor Jeff Huang maintains a list of “Best Paper” awards at the major computer science conferences, going back to 1996. The list displays the award papers at each conference for each year, and the total number of award papers from each institution (with appropriate treatment of papers with co-authors from multiple institutions).
The 2015 update has just been posted.
UW has always ranked well … but we are now the #1 academic institution – bested only by Microsoft Research (which has roughly 20X as many Ph.D. researchers as UW CSE). It’s another sign of our ever-increasing impact.
Check it out here. Read more →
Photo credit: Brian Harries/Flickr
UW CSE revolutionized data collection and analysis in low-resource settings with the creation of the Open Data Kit (ODK), a suite of free, open-source mobile tools. ODK – a project spearheaded by the late professor Gaetano Borriello – has been deployed in more than 40 countries to monitor elections, to conserve natural resources, to track health care outcomes, and much more.
Now, UW CSE is poised to do for money management what we did for data with the launch of our new Digital Financial Services Research Group.
Led by professor Richard Anderson of the Information & Communications Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab, the new group will focus on accelerating the development and deployment of secure, practical and culturally relevant digital banking solutions to people in developing regions, where mobile phone usage is surging.
From the UW news release:
“In Kenya, the ease of transferring money via mobile phone has increased incomes in rural areas, enabled small businesses to thrive and reshaped the country’s economy….
“But the success of that service — called M-Pesa — has been difficult or impossible to replicate in other parts of the developing world.
“University of Washington computer scientists and engineers, with a grant from the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will develop, test and deploy new technological solutions to make financial products more available to the lowest-income people around the world.
“‘This technology can have tremendous impact — both for allowing people to send remittances from the city back to rural regions, and to establish savings accounts so people can have reserves so that an event like an accident or a pregnancy doesn’t send them over the edge,’ said Richard Anderson, a UW professor of computer science and engineering.”
In addition to Anderson, the core research team will include Kurtis Heimerl, an expert in community-based cellular networks who will join the UW CSE faculty in the fall; professors Yoshi Kohno and Franzi Roesner, co-directors of UW CSE’s Security and Privacy Research Lab; and iSchool professor (and CSE adjunct) Joshua Blumenstock. The group will work with mobile providers and financial institutions to test and refine new technologies in the communities they will serve.
Read the complete UW news release to learn more about this exciting new line of research for us. We look forward to sharing many success stories from this stellar group of faculty and their students in the future! Read more →