The Washington Post praises UW CSE’s WiSee technology:
“Imagine standing in your kitchen preparing dinner, while the TV magically turns on in the living room, the dimmer lights flicker into action, a Netflix movie queues up for your viewing pleasure and the air conditioning adjusts just so. All of that, with just a wave of the hand, a swipe of your finger or a flick of the wrist.
“That’s the technological promise of new WiSee technology, a new gesture-recognition technology being developed at the University of Washington that is able to transform slight changes in the frequency of wireless signals into specific actions.
“What makes WiSee technology all the more extraordinary is that it essentially repurposes existing wireless signals within your home or business—there’s no need to purchase new cameras or sensors to make it work. Your wireless-enabled devices are already communicating with each other using a part of the wireless spectrum that’s unseen and unrecognized by humans. While we may take these wireless signals for granted, they are capable of penetrating through doors and walls (which is why your wireless router in the living room can power tablets or laptops elsewhere in your house or apartment). Any time you move a hand or arm or leg, you are ever-so-slightly changing the frequency of those wireless signals – a phenomenon that the University of Washington researchers refer to as a Doppler frequency shift.”
Read more here. Read more →
The 2013 Seattle Science Festival is the region’s only large-scale, community-wide celebration of science and technology. It brings hands-on exhibits, shows, demonstrations and performances to venues throughout the Pacific Northwest. All events provide experiences that educate, engage and inspire an interest in science and technology and stimulate imagination and innovation. The festival runs June 6-16, 2013.
SSF features a “cool jobs”‘ series where attendees can learn, first-hand, from successful and dynamic professionals in some of the most promising fields in science and technology. CSE’s Oren Etzioni, Yoshi Kohno, and Hélène Martin will join Code.org’s Hadi Partovi in a panel that highlights the opportunities in computer science: this Sunday, June 9th, from 7:00 – 9:00 pm, at the Seattle Public Library – Central Library in the Microsoft Auditorium. (The event is free, but registration is required – seattlesciencefestival@pacsci.org.)
Info here. Read more →
The largest gift ever made to UC San Diego by one of its alumni was received today by UCSD Computer Science & Engineering. The gift – from an alum who wishes to remain anonymous – will fund new faculty endowed chairs, top-of-the-line teaching labs, support for graduate students, expanded mentoring and tutoring programs for the next generation of undergraduates, and a more diverse offering of project-based courses.
The UCSD CSE faculty is chock full of UW CSE Ph.D. alumni, including Bill Griswold, Sorin Lerner, Stefan Savage, Steve Swanson, Dean Tullsen, Amin Vahdat (we claim half-credit for Amin, with Berkeley), and Geoff Voelker. They have returned the favor by sending to our faculty Yoshi Kohno and – soon to arrive – Zach Tatlock. Undergraduates from both schools populate the graduate program at the other.
Congratulations to our friends in UCSD CSE! Read more here. Read more →
Can Washington students solve 250,000 algebra equations in one school week? That’s the Washington State Algebra Challenge, a partnership between UW’s Center for Game Science and the Technology Alliance. And with three days down and two days to go, we’re almost there: 3,459 participating students have solved 246,033 equations – and counting!
Follow the action here. Read more →
A scary graphic from our friends at GeekWire. The blue segments are infringement lawsuits brought by companies actually practicing their patents. The red segments are infringement lawsuits brought by non-practicing entities – patent trolls. The National Economic Council and the Council of Economic Advisers released a detailed report accusing trolls of having “negative impact on innovation and economic growth.”
Read more here. Read more →
Presentation materials from sessions for high school counselors conducted by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska and Hélène Martin. Includes information on the nature of the field, workforce demand, and UW CSE’s program.
Check it out here. Learn more about UW CSE’s undergraduate program here. Learn about DawgBytes, our K-12 outreach program, here. Read more →
The Economist describes work by UW CSE researchers and collaborators that utilizes mobile phones and signal processing to create medical diagnostic instruments and other novel applications.
“Microphones exist in many shapes and sizes, and work in many different ways … These microphones all do the same thing: they convert sound waves into an electrical signal.
“It turns out, however, that with the addition of suitable software, microphones can detect more than mere audio signals. They can act as versatile sensors, capable of tuning into signals from inside the body, assessing the social environment and even tracking people’s posture and gestures. Researchers have reimagined microphones as multi-talented collectors of information. And because they are built into smartphones that can be taken anywhere, and can acquire new abilities simply by downloading an app, they are being put to a range of unusual and beneficial uses.”
Read the article here. Learn more about SpiroSmart (mobile phone spirometry) here. Learn more about SoundWave (gesture sensing) here. Read more →
The work of UW CSE’s Qifan Pu, Sidhant Gupta, Shyam Gollakota, and Shwetak Patel is described in this UW News article:
“Forget to turn off the lights before leaving the apartment? No problem. Just raise your hand, finger-swipe the air, and your lights will power down. Want to change the song playing on your music system in the other room? Move your hand to the right and flip through the songs.
“University of Washington computer scientists have developed gesture-recognition technology that brings this a step closer to reality. Researchers have shown it’s possible to leverage Wi-Fi signals around us to detect specific movements without needing sensors on the human body or cameras.
“By using an adapted Wi-Fi router and a few wireless devices in the living room, users could control their electronics and household appliances from any room in the home with a simple gesture.”
Read more here. Learn more about the WiSee research here.
Slashdot noticed! And NBC News! And the LA Times! Also The Verge, The Register, Wired, BBC, GeekWire. Read more →
“‘We are the ass end of the donkey in providing educational opportunity for our kids, despite this booming economy,’ said Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at UW. ‘It’s absolutely crazy.’
“Lazowska is on a crusade to let the public know that many of these great, yet-to-be-filled tech jobs are going to be taken by college graduates from other states – not from Washington. And that’s because the state isn’t educating its homegrown kids for these homegrown jobs.
“‘The vast majority of states in this country are doing better than we are at educating their kids, and then they are sending them here,’ he said.
“Indeed, per capita, Washington state is number one in the nation when it comes to ‘importing’ talent.”
Read more and watch the report here. Read more →
Captricity – a service that quickly and easily turns paper information into structured, digital data – has closed a $4.5 million round of funding.
Captricity was co-founded by UW CSE bachelors alum Kuang Chen at the conclusion of his UC Berkeley Ph.D. studies. At UW, Kuang was a double major in CSE and Comparative History of Ideas. His undergraduate research led to the creation of the Seattle startup Teranode, where he worked for four years following graduation. At Berkeley, his research leading to Captricity was advised jointly by Joe Hellerstein and UW CSE Ph.D. alum Tapan Parikh. This research – on how data-centric approaches could help organizations better serve their disadvantaged clients – revealed that one of the biggest barriers to efficient operations was getting data from paper into digital form, the problem that Captricity solves.
Read the full article in Venture Beat here. Read more →
