UW CSE professor Shyam Gollakota and PhD student Rajalakshmi Nandakumar have been working with Dr. Nathaniel Watson of the UW Medicine Sleep Center to develop and test a new smartphone app that enables wireless diagnosis of sleep apnea.
ApneaApp turns an Android smartphone into an inexpensive and non-invasive diagnostic tool for a potentially life-threatening condition that affects more than 25 million people in the United States alone. The app employs sonar – “similar to the way bats navigate,” lead author Rajalakshmi explains – to track changes in a person’s breathing patterns.
In a recent clinical study, the researchers demonstrated ApneaApp’s accuracy matches that of a traditional hospital polysomnography test 98 percent of the time. The app can filter out background noise, is capable of distinguishing between the chest movements of two individuals in the same bed, and works with any sleeping position from a distance of up to three feet – all without requiring the patient to be hooked up to special equipment or to spend the night in a sleep center.
As Shyam notes in UW’s media release announcing the team’s findings, “Right now phones have sensing capabilities that we don’t fully appreciate. If you can recalibrate the sensors that most phones already have, you can use them to achieve really amazing things.”
The results of the clinical study will be presented at the MobiSys 2015 conference next month and SLEEP 2015, a joint meeting of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society, in June.
Read the UW media release and view a video demonstration of ApneaApp here.
Read the research paper here.
CSE graduate student Rajalakshmi Nandakumar explains ApneaApp on KIRO TV here. Read more →
A nice article by Jon Talton in the Seattle Times, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law and its impact on Seattle – with extensive quotes by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska:
“It’s Gordon Moore’s world. We just live in it.
“Moore, born in 1929, was one of the ‘Traitorous Eight’ who left Shockley Semiconductor to start Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1968, he co-founded Intel. And the rest is Silicon Valley history.
“He is also the originator of ‘Moore’s Law,’ which turned 50 this month …
“The dynamics turned metropolitan Seattle into a technopolis, beginning with [Bill] Gates and Paul Allen and PC software. Aldus developed desktop publishing. RealNetworks created streaming media. Modern cellular service came with McCaw. E-tailing and commercial cloud computing lifted Amazon.com. With more software developers than any other metro, ‘Seattle is the software capital of the nation and the world,’ [UW CSE professor Ed] Lazowska said. ‘All this is due to the progress driven by Moore’s law.'”
Read more here. Read more →
Microsoft Research brought its Code Hunt team to UW with an online programming contest for students. The winner was CSE senior Siwakorn “Ping” Srisakaoku, seen here receiving a Microsoft Band from Microsoft’s Judith Bishop with Runner-Up Vladimir Korukov, also a CSE student. Others in the top four were CSE student Alex Tsun and Mathematics major (and CSE teaching assistant) Caitlin Schaefer. Congratulations to all the participants, and thanks for an enjoyable evening. Everyone can continue to play the game and join the community!
Code Hunt is used by Microsoft to find top programmers for internships and hiring. It is played by over 150,000 students and developers worldwide. There is also a growing community of research around the data which is open sourced on GitHub. Code Hunt’s hint system was built by UW CSE graduate student Daniel Perelman while an intern at Microsoft Research. It takes advantage of the game’s foundation of symbolic execution and the over a million attempts from players in the cloud. Using data mining and program synthesis Daniel generates hints that are relevant to the student’s progress, even if the teacher had never thought of that solution. (Of course, hints are turned off during contests, like the one at UW!)
Read more here. Read more →
A lovely rainbow this afternoon, looking northeast from the Alberg Terrace of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. (Thanks to Jim Youngquist for the photo.) Read more →
UW CSE and UW’s other Engineering programs open the doors to several thousand K-12 students each year on Engineering Discovery Days – today and tomorrow.
The PR2 is always a hit! But there’s lots more!
Learn more here. Read more →
Smithsonian magazine features the work of UW CSE’s Rajesh Rao and the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering:
“Telepathy, circa 23rd century: The Vulcan mind meld, accomplished by touching the temples with the fingertips, is an accepted technique for advancing the plot of a ‘Star Trek’ episode with a minimum of dialogue, by sharing sensory impressions, memories and thoughts between nonhuman characters.
“Telepathy, 2015: At the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering of the University of Washington, a young woman dons an electroencephalogram cap, studded with electrodes that can read the minute fluctuations of voltage across her brain. She is playing a game, answering questions by turning her gaze to one of two strobe lights labeled ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ …
Read more here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Center for Game Science announced today that it is extending the dates of the 2015 Algebra Challenge in response to feedback from teachers. Under the new schedule, K-12 classrooms are invited to register online to participate in the challenge beginning April 27 and then to proceed at their own pace until June 5. Any classroom with access to a PC, Mac or Chromebook can participate in the challenge.
Read the Center for Game Science’s update here.
Learn more about the Algebra Challenge and sign up to participate here. Read more →
This is the third year that UW CSE has been privileged to host New Tech Seattle Meetup – the most vibrant and fastest growing tech meetup in the nation! Thanks to Red and Greene – Red Russak and Brett Greene for supporting UW CSE! Read more →
Each spring, UW CSE and other departments in the College of Engineering welcome K-12 students, parents and teachers to Engineering Discovery Days, an action-packed program featuring hands-on demonstrations that showcase the exciting world of engineering.
The 2015 Engineering Discovery Days are this Friday, April 24 and Saturday, April 25 on the Seattle campus. While Friday registration is full, we encourage people of all ages to join us on Saturday at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering for tours and exhibits on gaming, robotics, wireless power, ubiquitous computing and more
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Also on Saturday, high school students and their families are invited to attend information sessions on UW admissions, financial aid, and other topics of interest to prospective students.
Find a complete schedule and map of the 2015 festivities here. You can view photos of last year’s event here.
We hope to see you this weekend! Read more →
UW encourages its faculty and students to “be a world of good.” Saloni Parikh – a double-major in CSE and Public Health – has heeded that call in her work on the HOPE (Home-based Partner Education and Testing) project, using UW CSE’s Open Data Kit to improve HIV screening and data collection in Africa.
UW published a nice feature story today on Saloni’s research, tracing her journey from the late professor Gaetano Borriello’s lab in Seattle to a poverty-stricken city in Kenya.
Saloni was instrumental in improving data collection by nurses and community health workers conducting HIV testing and counseling of pregnant women and their partners in Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city. Saloni programmed mobile devices to enable the collection of patient data and spent the summer of 2013 in the city of Kisumu training providers how to use them in the field. She remains involved with the HOPE project – as well as other global health projects at UW – to this day.
Read the full article here.
Check out the UW School of Public Health’s profile of Saloni here. Read more →
