Control-Alt-Hack is a tabletop card game about white-hat hacking, based on game mechanics by gaming powerhouse Steve Jackson Games. According to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, the game is “a delightful strategy card game about white-hat hacking.”
Read the full review here. Control-Alt-Hack site here. Learn more about the Security and Privacy Lab here. Read more →
Wired reports on Google’s acquisition of DNNresearch, Geoff Hinton’s University of Toronto spinoff, quoting UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska:
“‘Deep learning, pioneered by Hinton, has revolutionized language understanding and language translation,’ said Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington. In an email interview, he said that a pretty spectacular December 2012 live demonstration of instant English-to-Chinese voice recognition and translation by Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid was ‘one of many things made possible by Hinton’s work.'”
Read the Wired article here. It includes a video of Rashid’s amazing demo. Read more →
Various media report an announcement by Google on Tuesday that the company plans to double the size of its Kirkland engineering facility, one of two Google sites in Seattle. Xconomy quotes UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska:
“’20 years ago, the tech industry here could have been described as ‘Microsoft and the 499 dwarfs.’ Now we have a really robust tech ecosystem with companies of all sizes reinforcing each other – large numbers of great startups, great mid-size companies and great major companies. Some were born here. Some chose to locate here or move here. Some are major branches of companies headquartered elsewhere. Some have been acquired but still have a major Seattle presence. Together they’re creating an incredibly vibrant region.'”
Xconomy here. NY Times here. Seattle Times here. Read more →
Clerky, a Y Combinator-backed startup co-founded by UW CSE alum Darby Wong and Stanford alum Chris Field, is a web application that makes it easy for startups to get legal transactions done.
“When we cover a startup’s launch, we often focus on the market opportunity, funding and investors and how the company’s product is solving a particular problem. We rarely mention the initial set of challenges every entrepreneur must face when they actually turn an idea into a startup — incorporation, stock issuance documents and more. Most of the time, startups have to incur legal costs to do this. However, Clerky, a Y Combinator-backed startup launching today, is hoping to offer entrepreneurs a quality, cost-effective, automated way to handle incorporation documents and more.”
Read the full TechCrunch article here. Read more →
Batman’s Kitchen, an interdisciplinary team involving students from CSE, the iSchool, EE, and pre-engineering, won the Hawaiian “Big Splash” Cyber Defense Competition held 8-10 March 2013. The competition is designed to bring practitioners in industry and government together with students in a competition environment. Teams were given a scenario of critical infrastructure in a business setting to defend against attacks by hackers (the red team) while also completing injects (e.g., setup a database, block certain websites, database audits, etc.) throughout the three-day competition.
On Day 2 of the competition, the head of the red team initiated a full-on attack against the UW team – beyond the scope of the regular competition. The team successfully protected their network for several hours while under attack. By 5pm on the final day of the competition, it was announced that the UW team had won by hundreds of points over the military teams entered in the competition.
The trophy for the competition will be awarded in Seattle next week.
UW participants:
Go team! Read more →
UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni and collaborators describe their work on Open Information Extraction in this excellent short video.
How can a computer accumulate a massive body of knowledge? What will Web search engines look like in ten years? To address these questions, UW CSE’s Open IE project has been developing a Web-scale information extraction system that reads arbitrary text from any domain on the Web, extracts meaningful information and stores in a unified knowledge base for efficient querying.
Watch the video here. Learn more about Open IE here. Read more →
At UW’s Brain Awareness Week festivities, Kennedy Catholic High School students Thane Maudslein and Nick Correa use muscle activity to play Wrestle Brainia – an electronically powered device getting its signals through a computer hooked to the wrestlers’ arms. Wrestle Brainia was developed by Jeremiah Wander and Dev Sarma – graduate students in CSE’s Neural Systems Lab, and undergraduate student Vivek Paramasivam, with support from UW’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering. Read more →
CSE professor Yoshi Kohno is profiled in the March issue of Columns, UW’s alumni magazine.
“Kohno’s experiments are the stuff of science fiction movies: using a kid’s Erector Set to spy on its owner, tracking a runner using his mileage monitor or even hackers taking over a car while it’s driving and forcing it to brake to a stop. The only difference between Hollywood make-believe and reality is that this white hat hacker doesn’t need special effects to make them reality.”
Read the full article here. Learn more about UW CSE’s Security and Privacy Research Lab here. Read the complete March issue of Columns here. Read more →
The opening keynote of the 2013 SIGCSE (Computer Science Education) conference on March 7 in Denver featured 7 5-minute “flash talks” on “Changing the Face of Computing.” The first – “Why Broadening Participation Matters” – was presented by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska. See Ed’s slides here. Read more about UW CSE’s motivations and activities here. Learn about DawgBytes, UW CSE’s K-12 outreach program, here. Read more →
NPR’s Joe Palca today highlighted how computer gamers are helping to push the frontier of brain research. One of those interviewed was UW CSE’s Zoran Popović. Popović talked about Foldit, a game designed to tackle the problem of protein folding.
“People can get pretty addicted to computer games. By some estimates, residents of planet Earth spend 3 billion hours per week playing them. Now some scientists are hoping to make use of all that human capital and harness it for a good cause.
“Foldit has been a big success. Popovic says there are a half-million people registered to play the game, and that has made other scientists and inventors take seriously the idea of using games to solve scientific questions.”
Read full article here. Learn more about Foldit here. Learn about the Center for Game Science here. Read more →