Allen School News

Researchers in UW’s UbiComp Lab led by CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel have developed a new mobile tool that enables the non-invasive monitoring of blood hemoglobin. HemaApp uses a smartphone’s camera flash to shine light through a patient’s finger and analyzes the color of his/her blood to estimate the concentration of hemoglobin. The app provides a way to screen for anemia and other conditions, and to monitor patients’ response to treatment, without the pain or risk of infection associated with blood draws—particularly in low-resource settings.

From the UW News release:

“In an initial trial of 31 patients, and with only one smartphone modification, HemaApp performed as well as the Masimo Pronto, the more expensive Food and Drug Administration-approved medical device that non-invasively measures hemoglobin by clipping a sensor onto a person’s finger.

“‘In developing countries, community health workers have so much specialized equipment to monitor different conditions that they literally have whole bags full of devices,’ said lead author and UW electrical engineering doctoral student Edward Wang. ‘We are trying to make these screening tools work on one ubiquitous platform — a smartphone.'”

HemaApp is not intended to replace blood tests completely; rather, it provides an effective and low-cost way for providers to initially screen patients and determine whether more invasive testing is needed. The app is the latest development from UW CSE’s UbiComp Lab that makes use of smartphones’ increasingly sophisticated sensing capabilities to provide low-cost, mobile health care solutions. Others include BiliCam, which uses a smartphone’s camera to screen for newborn jaundice, and SpiroSmart, which uses a smartphone’s microphone to measure lung function.

According to Patel, “We’re just starting to scratch the surface here. There’s a lot that we want to tackle in using phones for non-invasively screening disease.”

The research paper was co-authored by EE undergraduate researcher William Li, pediatric oncologist Doug Hawkins of Seattle Children’s Hospital, and hematologist Terry Gernsheimer and research nurse Colette Norby-Slycord of UW Medicine. The team will present HemaApp at the UbiComp 2016 conference taking place next week in Heidelberg, Germany.

Read the full news release here, and watch a video demonstrating HemaApp here. Check out coverage of HemaApp in MIT Technology Review, Engadget, New Atlas, and Digital Trends. Read more →

GeekWire reports:

“‘WiBotic is creating the infrastructure for robots to charge whenever and wherever – so companies can focus on robot tasks rather than keeping their robots charged,’ WiBotic CEO and co-founder Ben Waters said in a statement. ‘Enabling better access to power and autonomous charging opens up a whole new world of possibilities for robots.’

“WiBotic also said its adaptive near-field wireless charging technology provides higher efficiency than standard inductive and other resonant systems, while also minimizing maintenance costs. The product also works in varying weather conditions and underwater.”

WiBotic‘s technology was developed in UW’s Sensor Systems Laboratory, led by Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering professor Joshua Smith.

Read more in GeekWire here. Read more →

In a thought-provoking new piece published in the Communications of the ACM, UW CSE professor and Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence CEO Oren Etzioni and sociologist Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University make the case for development of “AI guardians” to provide oversight for increasingly autonomous AI systems. (Aside: How cool is it to publish papers with your parent?!?!) The guardians, they argue, would ensure that operational AI adheres to our laws and ethical norms. They write:

“All societies throughout history have had oversight systems. Workers have supervisors; businesses have accountants; schoolteachers have principals. That is, all these systems have hierarchies in the sense that the first line operators are subject to oversight by a second layer and are expected to respond to corrective signals from the overseers….

“AI systems not only need some kind of oversight, but this oversight must be provided—at least in part—not by mortals, but by a new kind of AI system, the oversight ones. AI needs to be guided by AI.”

The duo offer three reasons why such oversight is needed: AI systems are learning systems, and therefore have the potential to stray from the initial guidelines given to them by their programmers; they are becoming more opaque to humans—either intentionally, or due to public incomprehension or sheer scale of the application; and these systems increasingly function autonomously, empowered by complex algorithms to make decisions independently of human input. Likening their proposed guardians to a home’s electrical circuit breaker—a system considerably less sophisticated than the electrical system it is designed to monitor and intervene when something goes awry—they suggest that the guardians don’t need to be more intelligent than the systems they oversee; just sufficiently intelligent to avoid being outwitted or short-circuited by those systems. The authors go on to examine the various forms such oversight might take when it comes to AI systems, from auditors and monitors, to enforcers and ethics bots.

In the case of both the operational and the oversight systems, they conclude, “humans should have the ultimate say.”

Read the full article here.

For more on the topic of AI and society from UW CSE researchers, see professor Dan Weld‘s column, The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence, published in GeekWire earlier this year, and professor Pedro Domingos’ book, The Master Algorithm, exploring how machine learning will remake our world. Read more →

GeekWire’s Dan Richman published an excellent article today examining the Seattle region’s dominance in cloud computing and how our region is poised, once again, to transform technology.

“The rise of Amazon Web Services — along with the growth of Microsoft Azure, a burgeoning cloud startup scene, and a vibrant cloud and IT developer community — has turned the Seattle region into the epicenter of cloud technology, in the view of many tech and business leaders,” Richman writes.

“Silicon Valley is the undisputed king of the tech world, but Seattle increasingly rules the cloud…The Bay Area is more likely to churn out the next hot messaging app or social network, but Seattle ‘deals with the plumbing’ — the real and lasting infrastructure that provides the foundation for the new tech economy.

“Forty years ago, ‘technology in Seattle’ meant Boeing airplanes, Fluke digital voltmeters and Physio-Control defibrillators, said Ed Lazowska, a veteran University of Washington computer science professor.

“Then Microsoft essentially created the entire software industry.

“The region spawned desktop publishing, with Aldus; and created streaming media, with Microsoft spin-off RealNetworks. It created modern online retailing, with Amazon, and just about every derivative, from jewelry (Blue Nile) to real estate (Redfin and Zillow) to groceries (HomeGrocer and Amazon Fresh) to travel (Expedia).

“‘Today,’ Lazowska said, ‘we totally ‘own’ the cloud.'”

And one of the drivers is UW CSE. As real estate broker Dylan Simon put it, “Students come for the professor and the program and they stay for the jobs,” citing UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, as an example.

Not a region to rest on its laurels, many people see the potential for Seattle to similarly emerge as a center for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the Internet of Things. We have clearly earned the title “King of the Cloud”—perhaps “Emperor of AI” is not far behind.

Read the full article here.

Photo credit: Kevin Lisota via GeekWire Read more →

From left: Bryce Kellogg, Vamsi Talla and Vikram Iyer

A team of UW CSE and EE researchers has won the Best Paper Award at ACM SIGCOMM 2016 for interscatter, the groundbreaking technology that enables implanted devices to communicate using Wi-Fi and has the potential to transform health care as we know it. Interscatter was developed by EE Ph.D. students Vikram Iyer and Bryce Kellogg, CSE postdoc and EE Ph.D. alum Vamsi Talla, CSE professor Shyam Gollakota, and CSE and EE professor Josh Smith. The Best Paper accolades are shared with two other submissions: Eliminating Channel Feedback in Next-Generation Cellular Networks (MIT, CMU), and Don’t Mind the Gap: Bridging Network-wide Objectives and Device Configurations (Princeton, Microsoft Research, UCLA).

Way to go team! And congratulations to all of the winners!

Read our previous blog coverage here. Read more →

Jonathan Ko, a UW CSE Ph.D. alum who worked with professor Dieter Fox in the Robotics and State Estimation Lab, passed away earlier this month after a courageous five-year battle with cancer.

During his early Ph.D. research, Jonathan was a member of UW CSE’s Centibots research team working on DARPA’s Software for Distributed Robotics (SDR) project. The Centibots framework enabled large teams of robots to explore, plan and collaborate on search and surveillance tasks in previously unknown environments. He then turned to the application of machine learning techniques to robotics, where his work on GP-BayesFilters has received a lot of attention in the robotics community.

After graduating from UW CSE in 2011, Jonathan joined Google as a software engineer. That also was the year he was diagnosed with cancer.

Fellow UW CSE alum Yaw Anokwa—who became a lifelong friend after Jonathan hosted him as a prospective graduate student—recalled that he loved motorcycles. Yaw pointed us to a touching tribute on Cycle World, “A Reminder to Live While You’re Alive,” about Jonathan’s quest to ride every MotoGP track in the world in the time he had left, and how the cycle community rallied to his cause. Ultimately, Jonathan only got to ride five of the 15 tracks, but his determination inspired countless numbers of fellow riders around the world.

Jonathan is remembered for making “a deep impression on all who had the honor of knowing him, with his intellect, openness, energy, and kindness.” Our hearts go out to Jonathan’s family, friends and colleagues, especially his loving mother Jackie, siblings Clara and Paul, niece Abigail, and nephew Alexander.

Read Jonathan’s obituary here. Donations can be made in his memory to the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Richard Ladner has been selected the 2016 winner of the Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility by the Special Interest Group in Accessible Computing (SIGACCESS). In announcing the honor, SIGACCESS cited Ladner’s 30+ years of research, advocacy and leadership in the field of accessible computing.

From the award citation:

“Richard’s steadfast support and advocacy for people with disabilities have tangibly increased their participation in STEM fields….Richard was one of the first people to address the concept of accessibility in the HCI field in his 1987 CHI paper ‘A User Interface for Deaf-Blind People.’ Since then, his research has substantially advanced the state-of-the-art in access technology, resulting in products and services that are not merely academic curiosities, but have actually been adopted and used by people with and without disabilities. Examples include ASL-STEM Forum, MobileASL, ClassInFocus, Tactile Graphics and V-Braille.

“Richard has supervised nine PhD students who focused their dissertation research on accessibility related topics. Some of those students have disabilities themselves. All have been so inspired by Richard that they have gone on to pursue their own careers in accessibility research in academia or industry.”

Read the full citation here. SIGACCESS will present the award at its ASSETS 2016 conference in October.

This is the latest in a long list of honors Richard has earned for his efforts to make technology accessible to all, including the 2014 ACM CHI Social Impact Award, the CMD-IT 2015 Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award, and the 2015 Broadening Participation in Computing Community Award.

Congratulations, Richard! Read more →

A team of UW CSE and Electrical Engineering researchers have developed a novel communication system called interscatter that enables smart contact lenses, medical implants and credit cards to “talk” to smartphones and smartwatches using Wi-Fi. This groundbreaking technology, which was developed by students and faculty in the UW’s Networks & Mobile Systems Lab led by CSE professor Shyam Gollakota and the Sensor Systems Lab led by CSE and EE professor Josh Smith, has the potential to transform health care and usher in a new era of truly ubiquitous connectivity for a variety of devices.

From the UW News release:

“The team of UW electrical engineers and computer scientists has demonstrated for the first time that these types of power-limited devices can ‘talk’ to others using standard Wi-Fi communication. Their system requires no specialized equipment, relying solely on mobile devices commonly found with users to generate Wi-Fi signals using 10,000 times less energy than conventional methods.

“‘Instead of generating Wi-Fi signals on your own, our technology creates Wi-Fi by using Bluetooth transmissions from nearby mobile devices such as smartwatches,’ said co-author Vamsi Talla, a recent UW doctoral graduate in Electrical Engineering who is now a research associate in Computer Science & Engineering.

“The team’s process relies on a communication technique called backscatter, which allows devices to exchange information simply by reflecting existing signals. Because the new technique enables inter-technology communication by using Bluetooth signals to create Wi-Fi transmissions, the team calls it ‘interscattering.'”

The team, which also includes EE Ph.D. students Vikram Iyer and Bryce Kellogg, built prototypes of three technologies that are made possible by the development of interscatter: a smart contact lens that can monitor and send medical information to a smartphone, an implantable neural recording device, and credit cards that can communicate directly with one another.

“‘Providing the ability for these everyday objects like credit cards – in addition to implanted devices – to communicate with mobile devices can unleash the power of ubiquitous connectivity,’ Gollakota said.

The researchers will present interscatter at the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCOMM 2016 conference next week in Florianópolis, Brazil.

Read the full news release here and the research paper here. Learn more by visiting the project web page here. Watch the interscatter team’s video demo here, and check out coverage by MIT Technology Review, GeekWire, TechCrunch, ComputerWorld, Seattle Times, Puget Sound Business Journal, Inverse, Digital Trends, Live Science, Daily Mail, The Sun, Fusion, New Atlas, Forbes, and Engineering & Technology magazine.

Photo credit: Mark Stone/University of Washington Read more →

33 members of the DARPA ISAT (Information Science And Technology) study group are working at Woods Hole this week – 7 with strong UW CSE connections: Tom Daniel (adjunct faculty), Franzi Roesner (faculty), Ras Bodik (faculty), Hakim Weatherspoon (Bachelors alum, Cornell faculty), Brandon Lucia (Ph.D. alum, CMU faculty), Ed Lazowska (faculty), Luis Ceze (faculty). Missing: Roxana Geambasu (Ph.D. alum, Columbia faculty). Read more →

Seattle Business magazine announced that it has named UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska its Tech Impact Champion for 2016. In selecting Lazowska for the award, the magazine’s editors and judges cited his lifetime of work building UW CSE into one of the top 10 programs in the nation, his leadership in establishing the eScience Institute and advancing our region’s position at the forefront of data analytics, and his tireless promotion of the local tech industry.

From the announcement:

“When Lazowska arrived in Seattle 39 years ago as an assistant professor, both the University of Washington and the region were very different places. In computer science, he was the newest of only 13 faculty members. The region’s tech industry largely consisted of Boeing, Fluke and Physio-Control. Microsoft at the time was still a dozen people in Albuquerque.

“Today, the UW’s Computer Science & Engineering Department rivals Stanford’s and Carnegie Mellon’s for attracting tech talent and major research — accomplishments that Lazowska helped bring about….A decade after leading fundraising to build the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering, he is doing so again to build a new CSE facility that will help double the center’s capacity.”

The magazine goes on to note that, in his role as “educator, researcher, adviser and booster,” Lazowska has helped lead the greater Seattle region’s transformation into a global center of innovation. It also celebrates his commitment to promoting gender diversity in computing and for providing greater opportunities to the region’s K-12 students.

Lazowska joins an impressive list of local tech titans previously honored for their lifetime contributions to the industry and region, including serial entrepreneur and UW CSE alum Jeremy Jaech (2013), former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (2014), and Madrona Venture Group co-founder Tom Alberg (2015). He will receive the award at Seattle Business’ annual Tech Impact Awards bash on September 21st.

Read the full announcement here.

Congratulations, Ed! Read more →