Allen School News

UW CSE’s most successful Industry Affiliates meeting ever was followed by our most successful graduate student pumpkin carving TGIF ever, with 54 jack-o-lanterns produced, and countless pounds of guck on the floor of the atrium.  (Thanks to Kyle Rector for organizing the event … and the cleanup.) Read more →

CSE Ph.D. students Shiri Azenkot and Kyle Rector, along with CSE professor Richard Ladner and iSchool (and CSE adjuct) professor Jake Wobbrock won the ASSETS 2012 Best Paper Award at the 14th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility for their paper “PassChords:  Secure multi-touch authentication for blind people.”

The paper presents a new non-visual technique, PassChords, for user authentication on a touch screen using mult-finger taps, rather than entering a traditional PIN on a virtual keypad.   In a study with 13 blind participants, PassChords was 3 times faster for entering a PIN than using a traditional PIN keypad with a screen reader.  The PIN strength, measured in empirical entropy, was about the same for both methods.

Congratulations to Shiri, Kyle, Richard, and Jake! Read more →

A terrific GeekWire article, with a huge number of great photos, on the UW CSE Open House held on Wednesday evening:

“We all remember school science fairs – lots of posters, people and presentations packed into a large area.  Consider Wednesday evening at University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering something similar, but instead a souped-up version hosted by computer science buffs.

“As part of UW CSE’s Industry Affiliates Annual Meeting, 89 research groups made up of over 150 grad students set up shop in rooms within the UW’s high-tech Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering to show off their latest work in a poster and demo session.  Industry representatives, regional alumni and friends of the department were on hand to see everything from animated learning games to candid portrait selection derived from video.”

Read more, and see lots of terrific photos, here. Read more →

Matt McIlwain (center) congratulates Madrona Prize winners Eric Larson and Mayank Goel

The research day of the UW CSE Industry Affiliates Meeting concludes with an open house (reception, posters, lab tours) for Affiliates attendees and regional alumni and friends.

For the 7th year, Madrona Venture Group awarded the Madrona Prize to the students whose research had the greatest commercial potential.  In addition, the People’s Choice Awards were given to the most popular research poster or demo in each lab.

Congratulations to all the winners – and to all the participants (89 posters/demos involving more than 150 students).  And thanks to Madrona for their long-standing encouragement of our entrepreneurial activities.

(Students are denoted by * in the list below)

Madrona Prize

Winner

SpiroSmart: Using a Microphone to Measure Lung Function on a Mobile Phone, by * Eric C. Larson, * Mayank Goel, Gaetano Borriello, Sonya Heltshe (Children’s Hospital), Margaret Rosenfeld (Children’s Hospital), Shwetak N. Patel.

Runners up

FreeDOM: a New Baseline for the Web, by * Raymond Cheng, * Will Scott.

Wireless Power for Left Ventricular Assist Device, by * Ben Waters, * Scott Wisdom, * Brody Mahoney, * Chen Shi, Joshua Smith.

Hank Levy with People’s Choice Award winners

People’s Choice Awards

Candid Portrait Selection from Video, by * Juliet Fiss, Aseem Agarwala, Brian Curless.

Serving Massive Earth Simulations over the Internet, by * Scott Moe, Bill Howe.

RGB-D Mapping: Using Kinect-style Depth Cameras for Dense 3D Modeling of Indoor Environments, by * Peter Henry, * Michael Krainin, * Evan Herbst, * Xiaofeng Ren, Dieter Fox.

Rethinking Storage for Non-Volatile Memory, by * Peter Hornyack, * Katelin Bailey, Luis Ceze, Steve Gribble, Hank Levy.

ODK Sensors: A Sensor Integration Framework for Android at the Application-Level, by * Waylon Brunette, * Rohit Chaudhri, * Mayank Goel, Gaetano Borriello.

Extremer Extraction: Interactive Learning of Relation Extractors with Weak Supervision, by * Raphael Hoffmann.

Fine-Grained Entity Recognition, by * Xiao Ling, Dan Weld.

Gesture Coder: Programming Multi-Touch Gestures by Demonstration, by * Hao Lü, Yang Li (Google).

Origin-Bound Certificates: A Fresh Approach to Strong Client Authentication for the Web, by * Alexei Czeskis.

Prefab: Modifying an Graphical Interface, by * Morgan Dixon, James Fogarty.

User Interface Toolkit Mechanisms for Securing Interface Elements, by * Franziska Roesner, James Fogarty, Tadayoshi Kohno. Read more →

David Pogue’s PBS NOVA Science NOW featured the work of UW CSE’s Yoshi Kohno and the UW CSE Security and Privacy Research Lab as the final segment of the episode “Can Science Stop Crime?”

In addition to Yoshi, those featured include Yoshi’s wife Taryn Kohno, UW CSE Ph.D. alum Dan Halperin, and UW CSE Ph.D. students Karl Koscher, Franzi Roesner, Alexei “Crash” Czeskis – and the work of these and others.

Watch this terrific 12-minute PBS NOVA Science NOW segment!

Read more →

On Wednesday, 75 women Ph.D. students from UW Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Human Centered Design & Engineering, and the iSchool spent the afternoon at Microsoft Research discussing research with women Ph.D.s working at Microsoft.

Among the 9 Microsoft participants were UW CSE Ph.D. alums Saleema Amershi, Kate Everitt, Julie Letchner, and Maya Rodrig, and UW CSE affiliate professors Merrie Morris; and Karin Strauss (who is also the partner of UW CSE professor Luis Ceze).

Thanks to Microsoft (particularly Rane Johnson) for organizing a terrific event! Read more →

The Seattle Times describes this Wednesday’s PBS TV NOVA scienceNOW:

“For most people, computer security means just that: Keeping viruses off your desktop or laptop, your PC or your Mac.

“But when Tadayoshi Kohno thinks of computers and security, he thinks about the vulnerabilities inherent in a whole range of devices that are increasingly connected wirelessly to the Internet, to cellphones or to each other.

“A computer scientist at the University of Washington, Kohno has proved that you can hack and take over the circuitry of a pacemaker, an implantable defibrillator, a child’s toy, a mileage-tracking device for runners, and — perhaps most chilling of all — a car.

“Kohno, 34, is so good at what he does that government regulators and manufacturers habitually beat a path to his door, in the UW’s computer science and engineering department, where he is an associate professor.

“Kohno will be featured Wednesday on PBS’s NOVA scienceNOW, in an episode that examines whether science can help solve crime.”

Read more here.  Watch NOVA scienceNOW on PBS TV on Wednesday (in Seattle, 10 p.m. on KCTS-9)! Read more →

Alexei Czeskis, a Ph.D. student in UW CSE’s Security and Privacy Research Lab, is interviewed by The Voice of Russia – American Edition.

“After news surfaced over the weekend that a U.S. government computer network was breached by hackers, computer security experts have weighed on the situation, calling it ‘a game between defenders and attackers.’ …

“Host Jessica Jordan spoke with Alexei Czeskis, a Ph.D. candidate in the Security and Privacy Research Lab at the University of Washington, to learn more about the hacking and computer security.”

Listen to the interview here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. student Shulin (Lynn) Yang has won a “best paper” award for her paper “Skull Retrieval for Craniosynostosis Using Sparse Logistic Regression Models” (Shulin Yang, Linda Shapiro, Michael Cunningham, Matthew Speltz, Craig Birgfeld, Indriyati Atmosukarto, and Su-In Lee)  at the MICCAI Workshop on Medical Content-Based Retrieval for Clinical Decision Support.

Lynn is advised by Linda Shapiro and Su-In Lee.  The paper was presented (in Nice, France!) by co-author (and CSE/Shapiro Ph.D. alum) Indri Atmosukarto, who is now a research scientist at ADSC in Singapore.  The other authors are doctors at Seattle Childrens.

Congratulations one and all! Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. student Tamara Denning, who works with professor Yoshi Kohno in UW’s Security and Privacy Research Lab, has been named on of 18 recipients of 2012 Intel Ph.D. Fellowships.  Tamara was one of 3 of the 18 to win special recognition of her research at a technical poster session for all of the awardees.

Meet Tamara and the other 2012 Intel Ph.D. Fellowship winners here.  Learn about Tamara’s work here.

  Read more →