UW CSE’s Haichen Shen
UW CSE faculty and students are on a roll when it comes to conference awards. Last week, we reported that a team of researchers in our natural language processing group earned one of only two Best Paper Awards granted from among 600 submissions at EMNLP 2015. This week, we are celebrating more recognition at UbiComp 2015, where UW CSE Ph.D. student Haichen Shen and his team captured a Best Paper Award and the inaugural Gaetano Borriello Best Student Paper Award, named this year in honor of the late, great UW CSE professor – a fitting tribute, given Gaetano’s devotion to students and leadership within the ubiquitous computing community.
The winning paper, Enhancing Mobile Apps to Use Sensor Hubs without Programmer Effort, presents MobileHub, a system that automatically rewrites applications to leverage a smartphone’s sensor hub to enable continuous sensing apps to function without draining the device’s battery. By buffering sensor data until an application needs to act on it, MobileHub conserves a device’s power by allowing the application and the main processor to remain idle. This is a critical area of research in ubiquitous computing: reducing power consumption is going to be vital in order to fully realize the potential of continuous sensing apps, such as those developed for health monitoring. The paper was co-authored by Shen and former postdoc Aruna Balasubramanian (now a faculty member at Stony Brook University), affiliate faculty member Anthony LaMarca of Intel Labs, and former faculty member David Wetherall (now at Google).
UW CSE’s Gaetano Borriello
Two other UbiComp papers with UW CSE connections were recognized with Honorable Mentions:
HyperCam: A collaboration between UW and Microsoft Research proposes a low-cost, easy-to-use hyperspectral imaging system that improves upon the typical RGB camera sensors used in ubiquitous computing applications. UW co-authors include CSE Ph.D. students Mayank Goel, Alex Mariakakis, and Eric Whitmire, professor Gaetano Borriello, and CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel.
DoppleSleep: Researchers at UW, Cornell and Michigan State University put forward a contactless sensing system that uses short-range Doppler radar to monitor sleep quality. UW co-authors include CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel, HCDE professor (and CSE adjunct) Julie Kientz, and EE graduate student Ruth Ravichandran.
Congratulations to Haichen and the entire team at UbiComp 2015! You make UW proud!
And we once again remember our friend and colleague Gaetano and his extraordinary contributions to UW CSE, the field, and the world. Read more here.