The “Humantenna” project – joint work by UW CSE’s Gabe Cohn and Shwetak Patel and Microsoft Research’s Dan Morris and Desney Tan – is featured in today’s Computing Community Consortium blog. The CCC blog post builds on an article in New Scientist describing the research, presented at CHI 2012 earlier this month. There’s also a callout to the SoundWave project in the post – joint work by UW CSE’s Sidhant Gupta and Shwetak Patel and Microsoft Research’s Dan Morris and Desney Tan.
Humantenna uses the human body as an antenna to pick up the electromagnetic fields — generated by power lines and electrical appliances — that fill indoor and outdoor spaces. By measuring how the signal changes as users move through the electromagnetic fields, it’s possible to identify gestures, such as a punching motion or swipe of the hand.
Read the post here. Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. student Franzi Roesner has been recognized with the “Best Practical Paper” award at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The paper, “User-Driven Access Control: Rethinking Permission Granting in Modern Operating Systems,” was co-authored with UW CSE professor Yoshi Kohno, UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus and Microsoft Research staff member Alex Moshchuk, Microsoft Research staff members Bryan Parno and Helen Wang, and Microsoft staff member Crispin Cowan.
Congratulations to Franzi and her co-authors!
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PCWorld writes: “Most gesture-based control systems we use today rely on either motion-capture cameras – like the Kinect – or a touchscreen device. But researchers from Microsoft Research and the University of Washington are developing a system that can detect object with sound waves, like how a bat does with echolocation. With the SoundWave project, the researchers aim to bring gesture controls to any computer that has a set of speakers and microphone. The program uses the Doppler Effect of sound waves for to detect objects and recognize motion.” Read the PCWorld article here.
ExtremeTech writes: “Microsoft Research, working with the University of Washington, has developed a Kinect-like system that uses your computer’s built-in microphone and speakers to provide object detection and gesture recognition, much in the same way that a submarine uses sonar.” Read the ExtremeTech article here.
Geekosystem here.
Slashdot coverage here.
SoundWave is a collaboration involving Sidhant Gupta and Shwetak Patel from UW CSE, and Dan Morris and Desney Tan from Microsoft Research. Read more →
UW CSE's Carl Hartung, a developer of Open Data Kit - which the Grameen Foundation uses to create apps for its project in Uganda - trains a Community Knowledge Worker.
The feature article in the most recent Alaska Airlines flight magazine, “Data Delivery: Researchers tap the potential of mobile technologies to gather and interpret information,” contains an extensive discussion of UW CSE’s “Open Data Kit,” an open source toolkit that turns mobile phones into data collection devices.
Read the article here. Read more →
UW CSE graduate students Jenny Abrahamson and Nicki Dell are among 25 outstanding young women from across the U.S. named today as winners of 2012 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships.
The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship honors the memory of Dr. Anita Borg, who devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing and founded the Institute for Women in Technology in 1997. Anita passed away in 2003, and the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship was established in 2004 to honor her memory. Anita’s legacy lives on today through this scholarship and the organization she created, which has since been re-named the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology.
Congratulations to Jenny and Nicki! Read more →
UW CSE has just won the 2012 National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, repeating 2011’s performance.
Team members Mick Ayzenberg, Henry Baba-Weiss, Ian Finder, Karl Koscher, Landon Meernik, Miles Sackler, Cullen Walsh, and Lars Zornes – coached by Jake Appelbaum and advised by Melody Kadenko – qualified for the National competition by winning the Pacific Rim Regionals last month. Hearty congratulations to these folks, and also to Barbara Endicott-Popovsky of UW’s iSchool for encouraging a UW-wide focus on cybersecurity.
See an excellent UW News article here. See a Seattle Times article previewing the competition here. Wall Street Journal MarketWatch article on the competition here. Seattle Times article on the competition here. Other press, out the wazoo: Sacramento Bee; PR Newswire; Infosec Island; Sys-Con Media; KHQ Spokane; KFVS Eklville; KYTX Tylor Longview; splunk. Read more →
UW CSE students competing this weekend in Texas: Ian Finder is center front; back from left: Henry Baba-Weiss, Lars Zornes, Cullen Walsh, adviser Melody Kadenko, Miles Sackler, Karl Koscher, Landon Meernik and Mick Ayzenberg.
The Seattle Times previews the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition:
“Somewhere in Texas right now, 30 hackers known as the Red Team are attacking a computer network called Go Mommy, using every trick to try to bring it to its knees.
“Among the defenders: Eight computer-science students from the University of Washington, working to repel the attack — quite possibly while humming the ‘Angry Birds’ theme song.
“This is the world of college cybersecurity competitions, where a dose of black humor underscores an atmosphere of extreme suspicion, and the hackers dish out clever pop-culture references while trying to break the student networks with a bag of dirty tricks.
“The UW team is one of the best in the country. It’s one of 10 teams competing in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in San Antonio this weekend as the defending champs, having won the competition for the first time last year.”
Read more here. Read more →
Greenpeace is releasing today its ratings on how clean or dirty tech companies’ clouds are. The Seattle Times quotes UW CSE Ph.D. student Adrian Sampson in their article on the Greenpeace report:
“‘Only in the last few years have we started using more energy in the cloud than we are on the devices we have,’ said Adrian Sampson, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington who specializes in energy-efficient computing.
“Energy-conscious consumers should be aware that when they operate, say, a smartphone or a tablet, the battery is not the only energy they’re using, Sampson said. ‘Especially for things like iPhones and iPads, which are extremely energy-efficient, and they’re only able to be that efficient because they use so much energy in the cloud, in data centers,’ he said.”
Read the Seattle Times article here. Read more →
On June 15 and 16, 34 ACM A.M. Turing Award Winners come together for the first time, to honor the 100th Anniversary of Alan Turing and reflect on his contributions, as well as on the past and future of computing.
Three UW CSE programming languages and software engineering graduate students – Ivan Beschastnikh, Brian Burg, and Stephanie Dietzel – have been awarded scholarships by ACM SIGSOFT (the ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering) to attend this extraordinary event.
Congratulations to Ivan, Brian, and Stephanie! Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. students Tom Lin and Yoav Artzi have received awards in Yahoo!’s 2012 Key Scientific Challenges program. From an outstanding group of 208 proposals, 30 exceptional Ph.D. students were selected. See the complete list of winners here.
Congratulations Tom and Yoav!
Read more →
