Allen School News

UW CSE startup SNUPI has announced Wally.  Our friends at GeekWire write:

“Worried about toxic mold or pesky water leaks in your home?

“Never fear, Wally is here.

“That’s the new consumer brand from SNUPI Technologies, the latest startup effort from Seattle serial entrepreneur [and UW CSE alumnus] Jeremy Jaech …

“WallyHome – which works in conjunction with an always-on Internet connection – is designed to detect environmental hazards around the home by monitoring moisture, temperature and humidity changes. The wild thing is that the company says no batteries are needed, with the system set to work continuously for 10 years. It does this by bypassing traditional Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections, instead using the copper wiring in the walls of a home as an antenna. (More on the technology behind the system here.)

“Jaech has partnered with some of the top minds at the University of Washington on SNUPI, including [CSE and EE] professors Shwetak Patel and Matt Reynolds, as well as doctoral student Gabe Cohn.”

Read more here.  Check out the Wally webpage here. Read more →

Shiri Azenkot

Franzi Roesner

MIT’s “Rising Stars in EECS” is an annual workshop that brings together top graduate and postdoc women in EECS for two days of scientific discussions and informal sessions aimed at navigating early stages of the academic career.

UW CSE Ph.D. students Franzi Roesner and Shiri Azenkot will present their research in the first session of the workshop.  Franzi will speak on “Third-Party Web Tracking: Detection, Measurement, and Prevention.”  Shiri will speak on “DigiTaps: Eyes-Free Number Entry on Touchscreens with Minimal Audio Feedback.”

Congratulations Franzi and Shiri! Read more →

The brain-to-brain interface experiment of UW CSE’s Rajesh Rao continues to attract extraordinary attention.

Discover features an in-depth explanation of the experiment and its implications, here:

“Finally, in August 2013, University of Washington scientists Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco succeeded in making one leap everyone was waiting for: A human-to-human brain-to-brain interface. By strapping one person into a non-invasive EEG helmet, and strapping the second into a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) helmet, the researchers mind-melded themselves – for the sake of science.

“The experiment went like this: Rao and Stocco sat across campus from one another, watching the same video game. Rao, wearing an EEG helmet, was at the controls – but instead of using his hand to hit the spacebar to fire, he simply imagined moving his hand.

“Every time he did this, with near-instantaneous speed, a computer converted Rao’s brain signals into a digital signal and beamed it to Stocco’s TMS helmet. That helmet converted the signal into a burst of magnetic stimulation delivered to the precise region of Stocco’s motor cortex that controlled his right hand. Stocco’s hand would then twitch involuntarily, tapping the spacebar and (sometimes) scoring a hit in the game.”

Science focuses on the implications, here:

“Restoration of normal function has driven development of devices such as cochlear implants for deafness, deep-brain stimulators for Parkinson’s disease, and bionic eyes for the blind, but there has long been a fascination with using similar technologies to “neuroenhance” healthy individuals, helping them control emotions, improve memory and cognition, and even communicate wordlessly with others …” Read more →

The paper “Crowdsourcing Multi-Label Classification for Taxonomy Creation” by UW CSE’s Jonathan Bragg, Mausam, and Dan Weld has been selected as the recipient of the Best Paper distinction at the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP-2013).

Congratulations to Jonathan, Mausam, and Dan! Read more →

The Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing – NIAC – is a joint initiative of the University of Washington and the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).  Xconomy reports on “NIAC Day” – a day of seminars and working sessions inaugurating NIAC:

“Ed Lazowska, UW computer science professor, director of the eScience Institute, and a key link between PNNL and the university, put aspirations for NIAC—unveiled early this year—in context of the ‘dawn of a new era of discovery.’

“Data-intensive scientific discovery, he says, joins computational science as another arrow in the quiver for researchers, complementing the older methods of theory, experiment, and observation.

“A proliferation of low-cost sensors and simulations is creating a torrent of data that presents enormous opportunities and huge challenges. Smart homes, smart cars, smart health, smart robots operating in unstructured environments—all are enabled by advances in areas such as machine learning, computer vision, and cloud computing.

“‘The big data revolution is what’s putting the smarts in everything,’ Lazowska says. (He is leading a discussion on data-driven discovery at Xconomy’s upcoming public forum: Big Insight—Making Sense of Big Data in Seattle on Nov. 19.)

“For data-intensive science to reach its potential, the onus is on computer scientists to build tools that can be used directly by oceanographers, biologists, geologists, and even sociologists and researchers in other fields, without having to wait for a data scientist to run reports for them. (He likened this potential bottleneck to the database administrators who sat between researchers and their data in the 1970s.)”

Read more here.  See Lazowska’s slides here. Read more →

The paper “Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations with Google Street View” has received the Best Paper Award at the 2013 ASSETS conference – the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing.

Among the authors: Shiri Azenkot and Megan Campbell are UW graduate students. Kelly Minckler and Rochelle Ng are UW undergraduates.  Cynthia Bennett is a staff research assistant working with Professor Richard Ladner.  Jon Froehlich is a former Ph.D. student at UW, now an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland.  Groups at the University of Washington and University of Maryland were working on similar projects using crowdsourcing with Google Street View to identify physical landmarks at bus stop locations that would be useful for blind bus riders.   They combined forces to study areas of Seattle and Washington DC in several interesting studies.

UW researchers also received the Best Paper award at ASSETS 2012.

  Read more →

Google’s Marion Daly

Or as Marion Daly says in her email auto-response: “Thanks for your email. I’m out of the office right now attending a very important costume competition at UW. However, don’t fear (unless you’re watching a horror movie or have just chopped of a digit while carving a pumpkin) I’ll be back online this afternoon.”

This year’s winners

Googler-as-Cookie-Monster has an illustrious history in CSE; see Yin Lu here. Read more →

“‘We need to grow our degree programs at all levels to meet the demand for computing education, both for our own majors and outside,’ said Hank Levy, the department’s Wissner-Slivka Chair …

“Finally, Lazowska said that ‘Washington’s kids must have the opportunity to become educated for Washington’s jobs.’ It’s a topic he’s sounded off on before …

“‘We need more space and more faculty to meet these needs,’ Lazowska said.”

Read more in GeekWire here.

Follow the Levytown exponential crowdsourced fundraising effort here! Read more →

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel, gives a spectacular talk at last week’s Leadership Conference of the Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce:

“Right now we are an average state when it comes to computer science in schools. And by average I mean pathetic. Because as a country, we’re actually quite pathetic. Only 5% of the high schools in the entire country currently offer the AP course in computer science. In Washington state we have 771 high schools and last year the number that offered the AP course in computer science was 35. There will be some state in this country that becomes the first state to get computer science into every high school, and I ask, “Why not Washington?” We are a leader in this field. We recognize, we understand, that it is a field that is foundational not just for creating software but franky for creating almost everything.”

It’s worth 30 minutes of your time to watch Brad’s remarks, here. Read more →

Our crowd-sourced exponential fundraising effort for Levytown had stalled after Eric Rudder put up $400, doubling Gaetano Borriello’s $200, doubling Shyam Gollakota’s $80, doubling Marc Fiuczynski’s $40, doubling Dieter Fox’s $20, etc.

However, as a result of Brier Dudley’s column in today’s Seattle Times, Johnson Apacible has put up $800, leaving us only 16 gifts from having our new building fully funded.

Track the progress here. (Being conservative, we are not counting Marc Fiuczynski’s second gift, of $1,000,000.)

Seem unlikely? It worked for the Allen Center – here.

Track Levytown fundraising progress here!

Levytown update, October 29: Alums Yaw Anokwa and Hélène Martin have bested Johnson, contributing $1,600 to Levytown. Only 15 gifts to go! Who’ll be next??

Further update, October 30: Alum Sunil Garg is in for $3,200.  Only 14 more gifts needed to make Levytown a reality! Better move quickly!

Yet more, October 30: Alum Ratul Mahajan and his wife Marta Penas Centeno have doubled down on Sunil.  Only 13 more gifts needed to make Levytown a reality! Get in on the lower floors – the penthouse is expensive!

Wait! There’s more! On November 6, alums Jeff & Carolyn (Holmes) Hughes doubled down on Ratul & Marta! Only 12 more gifts to go!!!!!

November 7: The CSE faculty has claimed the next level!  11 more gifts to fully fund Levytown!

THANKS to all the participants!
Read more →