“If you use a credit card or a cell phone, chances are you get a monthly statement detailing each purchase or call. This may soon expand to your utility bills, too: a project in the works at electronics company Belkin makes it possible to see how much electricity you’re spending on everything from the TV in your living room to the washing machine in your basement.
“Called Belkin Echo Electricity, it’s a small device that connects to your utility meter and pays attention to the electromagnetic interference, or ‘noise,’ emitted by electrical appliances plugged in to wall outlets …
“Echo Electricity builds on technology acquired in 2010 from an energy-monitoring startup called Zensi together with the doctoral work of University of Washington PhD candidate Sidhant Gupta, whose advisor, Shwetak Patel, was a Zensi founder.”
Read the Technology Review article here. Read Belkin’s description of Echo Electricity here. Read more →
Nicole Torcolini has faced more obstacles than most: she lost most of her sight at age four due to cancer in the optic chiasm, and the cancer treatment she received caused her to become slightly hard-of-hearing in both ears.
While a student at Central Kitsap High School in Silverdale, Washington, Nicole attended a University of Washington summer workshop hosted by CSE professor Richard Ladner’s Alliance for Access to Computing Careers (AccessComputing). This experience inspired Nicole to invent the Nemetex Nemeth Back-Translator, a computer-based assistive technology device that translates visually incomprehensible braille math (Nemeth), produced on an electronic braille notetaker, into easily-readable print. Nicole became a high school entrepreneur, launching a small business to market the device to other blind students like her. This was just the beginning of Nicole’s journey to help build tools for vetting and enabling accessibility in technology.
Nicole was recognized with a 2007 NCWIT Seattle-area Award for Aspirations in Computing. She attended Stanford University and graduated in 2012, earning a B.S. in Computer Science with a focus in Human-Computer Interaction. She is now an engineer with Google.
Nicole is profiled in the current issue of NCWIT’s Award for Aspirations in Computing Newsletter, here.
Congratulations to Nicole for all that she has achieved, and to Richard for his long-standing national leadership in making computing and computer science accessible to students like Nicole! Read more →
UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni, GeekWire‘s 2012 GeekWire Awards Geek of the Year, was the speaker at Seattle’s monthly Startup Grind meetup on Wednesday evening. During a fireside chat at Pier 70 — which was actually once home to one of Etzioni’s past startups, Go2Net — Etzioni shared some great advice for anyone in the startup world.
“Life is short,” he said. “Don’t do the same thing everyone else is doing … And don’t do something that’s two percent better than the other person. Do something that changes the world.”
Read the interview here. Read a previous GeekWire profile of Etzioni here. Read more →
Help celebrate Seattle as an entrepreneurial hub! Find out more here. Read more →
UW CSE professor Shyam Gollakota has just been honored twice by SIGCOMM, the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication.
Shyam’s 2012 MIT doctoral dissertation “Embracing Interference in Wireless Systems” (advised by Dina Katabi) was recognized with the 2012 SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award, given annually to the outstanding Ph.D. thesis in computer networking and data communication. Shyam’s dissertation had previously been honored with the 2012 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for the top Ph.D. dissertation in all of computer science.
In addition, the research paper “Ambient Backscatter Communication: Wireless Communication Out Of Thin Air” – co-authored by UW CSE’s Vincent Liu, Aaron Parks, Vamsi Talla, Shyam Gollakota, David Wetherall, and Josh Smith – received the 2013 SIGCOMM Best Paper Award. Shyam also received the SIGCOMM Best Paper Award in 2011 and 2008!
Sheesh! Read more →
Matt Reynolds, currently Nortel Networks Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, will be joining UW this fall with a joint position in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering.
Matt’s research, which has resulted in 5 best paper awards, focuses on ultra-low power sensing and computation, RFID, wireless power transfer, biomedical applications, and smart materials and surfaces. Matt holds 12 patents and has co-founded three companies. He received his S.B., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees from MIT.
Matt joins Maya Cakmak, Shayan Oveis Gharan and Zach Tatlock as new additions to the CSE faculty. Matt, Maya, and Zach will be arriving this fall (along with 2012 hire Jeff Heer), while Shayan will join us following a one-year Miller Fellowship at UC Berkeley.
Matt is the 4th hire in the UW College of Engineering ExCEL program (“Experimental Computer Engineering Lab”) for joint hires between CSE and EE. ExCEL has yielded remarkable hires: Shwetak Patel, Georg Seelig, and Josh Smith in addition to Matt. Read more →
Saleema Amershi, a 2012 UW CSE Ph.D. alumna who is now a Researcher in the Computer Human Interactive Learning (CHIL) group at Microsoft Research, has received the University of Washington Graduate School’s 2013 Distinguished Dissertation Award.
Saleema’s research interests are at the intersection of human-computer interaction and machine learning. She is interested in designing effective end-user driven machine learning for a variety of real-world applications. Her dissertation – “Designing for Effective End-User Interaction with Machine Learning,” was advised by UW CSE professor James Fogarty.
(Jon Froelich, a 2011 UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus now on the faculty at the University of Maryland, received the 2012 award.)
Congratulations Saleema! Read more →
Georg Seelig – UW professor of CSE and EE – working with David Zhang of Rice University and Sherry Chen, a UW EE doctoral student, this week unveiled a groundbreaking new method for detecting minute changes known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the human genome. The human genome has more than 6 billion base pairs, and one of the revelations of modern genomics is that even the slightest change in the sequence – a single-nucleotide difference – can have profound effects.
The new SNP genotyping technique, dubbed “double-stranded toehold exchange,” is described in a new paper in Nature Chemistry. The method is markedly different – in both form and performance – from any of the dozen-plus methods already used to detect SNPs.
“There are two axes of performance in SNP detection – read length and specificity,” said Zhang. “We’re at least an order of magnitude better on each axis. In fact, in terms of specificity, our theoretical work suggests that we can do quadratically better, meaning that whatever the best level of specificity is with a single-stranded method, our best will be that number squared.”
Read more here: UW News, Health News, Science Daily, nanowerk. Read more →
Hélène Martin + Yaw Anokwa
Emily Fox + Carlos Guestrin
July 27 … a big day for UW CSE weddings …
Adjunct CSE faculty member (and Amazon Professor of Machine Learning in Statistics) Emily Fox + Amazon Professor of Machine Learning in Computer Science & Engineering Carlos Guestrin …
CSE Lecturer (and CSE bachelors alumna) Hélène Martin + CSE Ph.D. alumnus (and co-founder of the software startup Nafundi) Yaw Anokwa …
Congratulations one and all! Read more →
The 18th UW/MSR Summer Research Institute in Computer Science was held this week at Alderbrook in Union, WA.
Each summer UW Computer Science & Engineering and Microsoft Research co-organize a summer research institute that brings together dozens of the world’s top researchers to discuss an important emerging topic. This year’s topic was “Understanding Situated Language in Everyday Life” – organized by Luke Zettlemoyer (UW CSE) and William Dolan (MSR). Quoting from the overview:
“Robust natural language understanding systems have the potential to completely revolutionize our interactions with computers. From Apple’s Siri to Google Now and Microsoft’s XBox Kinect, we now talk to our computers, phones, and entertainment systems on a daily basis. Similarly, as we interact with social media we constantly watch, comment on, and otherwise caption massive streams of image and video data. Recently, there has been growing interest in approaches that learn to understand these rich data sources, with a common focus on studying how language use is grounded in the physical or a virtual world.”
The Institute gathered 40 top researchers from across the world whose research focus included natural language processing, speech, computer vision, robotics, and cognitive science. The goal was to provide a forum for identifying common research themes and challenges across all of these disciplines.
Learn more about this year’s UW/MSR Summer Research Institute here. Learn about previous Institutes here. Read more →
