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 →
You find the craziest things in airport gift shops!
Today, for example, CSE chair Hank Levy ran across this bag featuring a December 2007 Business Week cover photograph of 2003 CSE alum Christophe Bisciglia – then a Senior Software Engineer at Google, subsequently co-founder of Cloudera, now co-founder and CEO of WibiData.
Reese Witherspoon … Katherine Heigl … Christophe Bisciglia … Oprah Winfrey … your photo goes here … Read more →
ColdTrace – research by Nexleaf Analytics and UW CSE Ph.D. student Rohit Chaudhri – has won this year’s Vodafone Wireless Innovation Competition.
ColdTrace is a low-cost wireless sensor designed to improve access to vaccines which protect thousands of children against diseases such as tuberculosis and polio. The sensor remotely monitors the temperature of vaccines. It also provides a better understanding of the vaccine cold storage, transportation and distribution infrastructures, particularly in areas where regular records are not maintained.
Nexleaf Analytics is a nonprofit technology company co-founded by UCLA Ph.D. alumna Nithya Ramanathan that provides lightweight sensor technologies for measuring the impact of critical public health and environmental interventions.
Watch a descriptive video here. Read more →
Kevin Ross, a 1988 UW CSE alum, accepted the UW College of Engineering Diamond Award for Public Service at last night’s annual awards banquet. Kevin, a former Microsoft design engineer, founded Washington FIRST Robotics in 2002. WFR today works with over 7,500 students and 2000 volunteers in Washington State and matches student groups with mentors to provide high quality experiences. Their goal is to have a FIRST robotics team available for every student in the state. Kevin and WFR are changing lives across our state — inspiring the engineers of the future.
Congratulations to Kevin! Learn about all of this year’s extraordinary Diamond Award honorees here. Read more →
More on Wednesday’s Technology Alliance “State of Technology” annual luncheon, and UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska’s on-stage interview with Expedia, Zillow, and GlassDoor founder Rich Barton:
“Nevertheless, Washington innovation is thriving by several measures …
“How does Washington reconcile the tech sector’s continued success with the paltry investment in generating talent, the key input to innovation economies?
“Imports.
“It’s no secret that Washington has been a leader in attracting smart, entrepreneurial people for generations, from Boeing to Bezos to Barton. It consistently ranks among the top states for in-migration of people with college degrees.
“Anecdotal support abounds. In an informal poll of the nearly 800 technology executives in the audience Wednesday, a very large chunk — perhaps half the people in the room—identified themselves as ‘imports.’
“Rich Barton, the serial entrepreneur behind Expedia, Zillow, and GlassDoor, said in an on-stage interview at the event that he too is an import.
“While money isn’t necessarily the only solution, Washington is clearly underfunding education relative to its peer states.
“‘That’s ridiculous. We’re a high-tech state. We’re a wealthy state. I can’t believe that’s going on, and I don’t really understand why,’ Barton said.
“But when he expressed his support for a state income tax to fund education, and the audience was asked if they agreed, only a few hands went up.”
Ayup … Read more here. Read more →
Our new favorite ranking of world universities – the University Ranking by Academic Performance from the Informatics Institute of Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey – ranks UW sixth in the United States and eighth internationally in academic performance. ‘Nuff said … read all about it in the UW Daily here. Read more →