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OneBusAway has a friend in Zurich

Bus riders in the greater Seattle area rely on OneBusAway, using it more than 50,000 times a week.  OneBusAway was created by UW CSE Ph.D. student Brian Ferris, who graduated this past summer and now works for Google in Zurich.  Ferris built and ran One Bus Away, a collection of phone apps that inform riders when buses are expected to arrive at their stop, using data shared by transit agencies.

UW CSE has continued to run the system since Brian’s graduation.  However, earlier this month, King County Metro did a major restructuring of its network that caused glitches to OneBusAway.  Since it wasn’t clear which agency would pick up the tab for these changes, Brian updated the system himself.

Read Brier Dudley’s post here.

QUICK UPDATE:  On October 12th, the Puget Sound transit agencies announced that an agreement had been reached to keep OneBusAway running. Read more →

ShareMeNot — Protecting Against Tracking from Third-party Social Media Buttons

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing is reporting on UW CSE grad student Franzi Roesner‘s latest project, ShareMeNot. Cory writes: “[ShareMeNot is] a Firefox Add-On that defangs social media buttons like the Facebook ‘Like’ button (and others) so that they don’t transmit any information about your browsing habits to these services until (and unless) you click on them. That means that merely visiting a page with a Like or a Tweet or a +1 button (like this one) doesn’t generate a data-trail for the companies that operate those services, but you still get the benefit of the buttons, that is, if you click them, they still work. Smart.”

Also involved are UW CSE faculty members Yoshi Kohno and David Wetherall. Read more →

“Stuart Reges: UW Distinguished Teaching Award”

UW Today published a special supplement, highlighting recipients of the 2011 UW Awards of Excellence.  As reported earlier, UW CSE’s Stuart Reges has won this year’s University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award, which is given to faculty who show “a mastery of their subject matter, intellectual rigor and a passion for teaching.”

Congratulations again to Stuart!

Full UW Today special award edition here. Read more →

“Skew in MapReduce” wins Open Cirrus Summit Best Student Paper

“A Study of Skew in MapReduce Applications,” a paper describing the causes and manifestations of skew in MapReduce applications with best practice recommendations to avoid such behavior, has received the “Best Student Paper” award at the Open Cirrus Summit 2011.  The paper was authored by UW CSE graduate student YongChul Kwon, UW CSE faculty members Magda Balazinska and Bill Howe, and Jerome Rolia from HP Labs.  Open Cirrus is an open cloud-computing research testbed designed to support research into the design, provisioning, and management of services at a global, multi-datacenter scale.

Congratulations!

More information about the SkewReduce project may be viewed here.  The paper may be read here. Read more →

UW CSE’s Stuart Reges Receives UW Distinguished Teaching Award

UW CSE’s Stuart Reges has won this year’s University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award, which is given to faculty who show “a mastery of their subject matter, intellectual rigor and a passion for teaching.”  Stuart is the 5th CSE faculty member to receive this honor.  A list of previous winners here.

This makes a hat trick for Stuart – adding to the teaching awards he has won at Stanford and Arizona.

Read the announcement here.

Congratulations Stuart! Read more →

UW CSE Cyber Defense Team on KIRO Radio

A terrific interview regarding the UW CSE team’s recent win in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.  Listen to the story here.  Read more about the competition here. Read more →

UW CSE’s Yaw Anokwa: Geek of the Week

CSE Ph.D. student Yaw Anokwa is GeekWire‘s “Geek of the Week.”

“One of the goals of GeekWire’s ‘Geek of the Week’ feature is to shine is  a light on extraordinary people in the Pacific Northwest technology community. Yaw Anokwa, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the University of Washington, certainly fits that profile — from his Open Data Kit research project to his work as a co-founder of the Change group at the UW.”

The Geek of the Week articles consist largely of the geek’s answers to a wide-ranging set of questions. Yaw gives some thoughtful and surprising answers to such questions as “If someone gave me $1 million to launch a startup, I would …”

Read the article here.

Congratulations, Yaw!! Read more →

UW CSE’s David Rosenbaum wins NDSEG Fellowship

UW CSE’s David Rosenbaum, a first year grad student studying quantum computing with Dave Bacon and Aram Harrow, has received a 2011 National Defense Science & Engineering (NDSEG) Graduate Fellowship.  He is the department’s 14th recipient of this fellowship.

David also recently won an NSF Graduate Fellowship, as reported here.

Congratulations to David! Read more →

“A Wireless Heart”

A post on the Babbage science and technology blog at The Economist looks at work by UW CSE/EE professor Joshua Smith et al. on wireless power for left ventricular assist devices (LVAD).  LVAD, implanted in failing human hearts, is a life-saving technology that suffers from problems with high patient infection rates and maintenance overhead due to the need for external power.  Smith’s new power system will be announced formally at the American Association for Thoracic Surgery annual meeting in May.

“The Free-Range Resonant Electrical Energy Delivery System, or FREE-D, as Smith calls it, is powered by induction. Specifically, it exploits a phenomenon called resonant coupling, in which metal coils that resonate at the same electrical frequency can exchange energy particularly efficiently. The process transfers the power using a tuned magnetic field, which is considered less hazardous to human health than the radio waves (or even lasers) that other wireless power systems rely on.  Smith’s version has a transmitter coil 26cm in diameter, which that can beam up to 15 watts of power to a receiver coil that is just 4.3cm across. The transmitter coil can thus be worn in a vest that also holds a battery pack while the receiver tucks nicely into the patient’s chest.”

Smith and his team are also looking at implanting the transmitter in beds and walls to eliminate the need for the patient to wear a vest.

Read the full post – complete with Dick Cheney references – here.

  Read more →

Latino Achievers Academy visits UW CSE

UW CSE faculty and grad students hosted 37 school kids from the Latino Achievers Academy last week.  After seeing several research demos, including brain-computer interfaces, the group noshed a pizza lunch in the Atrium.

Photos may be viewed here. Read more →

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