Heidi Dlubac (CSE)
Christophe Bisciglia (WibiData)
Yin Lu (Google)
Microsoft’s Brad Smith @ UW CSE
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s General Counsel and Executive Vice President for Legal and Corporate Affairs, delivered the second UW CSE Distinguished Lecture of the 2012-13 academic year today – “Creating an Environment for Innovation.”
And Christmas came early – Brad surprised the first two students to ask post-talk questions with the gift of a Microsoft Surface!
The next CSE Distinguished Lecture will be on November 13 – renowned economist Susan Athey on “Machine Learning meets Economics: Using Theory, Data, and Experiments to Design Markets.”
Please join us!
Read more →
“Kinect system simplifies the art of puppetry”
Vision Systems Design reports on a recent paper by Ankit Gupta and Brian Curless (UW CSE) and Robert T. Held and Maneesh Agrawala (UC Berkeley), “3D Puppetry: A Kinect-based Interface for 3D Animation.”
“Researchers at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA, USA) and the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA, USA) have created a system that can enable even inexperienced puppeteers to produce 3-D animations.
“To use the system, a puppeteer physically manipulates objects in front of a Kinect depth sensor. The system then uses a combination of image-feature matching and 3-D shape matching to identify and track the objects. It then renders the corresponding 3-D models into a virtual set.
“The system operates in real time so that a puppeteer can immediately see the resulting animation and make adjustments on the fly. It also provides 6-D virtual camera and lighting controls, which the puppeteer can adjust before, during, or after a performance. Layered animations can be used to help puppeteers produce animations in which several characters move at the same time.”
Read the post here. Read the technical paper here. Watch the cool video here. Read more →
UW CSE team selected to compete in DARPA Robotics Challenge
The DARPA Robotics Challenge kicked off this week with the announcement of 18 teams – 8 from universities and 10 from industry – who will be funded by DARPA to participate in the DRC. Over the next two years, these teams will compete to develop and put to the test hardware and software designed to enable robots to assist humans in emergency response when a disaster strikes.
A UW CSE team led by Emo Todorov and including Dieter Fox, Zoran Popovic, and Steve Seitz is among the competitors selected by DARPA.
Learn more about the work of UW’s Movement Control Laboratory here. Read more →
“UW touts computer science growth”
Brier Dudley reports on the UW CSE Industry Affiliates meeting, in the Seattle Times:
“A boost from the Legislature – plus grants from the likes of Amazon.com – is increasing the size the University of Washington’s computer science program by 25 percent this year …
“The school also has successfully recruited top-tier faculty, including world experts in machine learning, and more hires are in the works.
“‘We’ve had really the most remarkable year in our history,’ [UW CSE chair Hank] Levy said …
“A lunchtime lecture was given by Carlos Guestrin, a machine-learning professor that the UW lured from Carnegie Mellon University with a $1 million endowment from Amazon.com. Guestrin provided an overview of the GraphLab distributed computation framework that’s being used to explore the capability of smaller computing systems to analyze enormous datasets.”
More here. Read more →
UW CSE runoff for ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition
Last Saturday, 36 3-person teams competed in UW’s local runoff for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition to determine the 5 teams that will represent UW in the regional ICPC runoff on November 3. The international ICPC finals will be held in St. Peterburg Russia from June 30 – July 4. Unlike the World Series, the ICPC truly is an international competition – it’s been 15 years since a US team won!
Faculty members Stuart Reges and Marty Stepp organized the competition, along with student helpers Victoria Wagner, Janette Sui, Caitlin Harding, and Valerie Liang and Google staffers (and CSE alums) Queena Chen and Ethan Apter. Google was our official sponsor and provided food, prizes, and swag.
Below is a list of the top six teams:
#1 TAUNT (TAUNT’s An UnNamed Team): Sam Hopkins, Steve Rutherford, Kevin Clark
#2 UW Psychokinesis: Vaspol Ruamviboonsuk, Siwakon Srisakaokul, Lee Lee Choo
#3 O(0): Melanie Jensenworth, Raymond Zhang, Noah Siegel
#4 Stone Code Killas: Galen Knapp, Cody Thomas, Tobias Kahan
#5 6189456: Benjamin Sidhom, Chris Clark, Michael Fain
#6 Honey Badgers: Tyler Rigsby, Melissa Winstanley, Jenny Abrahamson
The #1 team can’t make it to the November 3 regional contest, but the other five will all be representing us.
You can find more detailed results along with information about the problems at this url:
http://homes.cs.washington.edu
Congratulations to all the participants, thanks to Google, and good luck to the five UW CSE teams in the regional contest! Read more →
Annual CSE pumpkin carving TGIF
UW CSE’s most successful Industry Affiliates meeting ever was followed by our most successful graduate student pumpkin carving TGIF ever, with 54 jack-o-lanterns produced, and countless pounds of guck on the floor of the atrium. (Thanks to Kyle Rector for organizing the event … and the cleanup.) Read more →
Microsoft’s Brad Smith @ UW CSE Distinguished Lecture, Tuesday 10/30 @ 3:30
Please join us for the second 2012-13 UW CSE Distinguished Lecture.
On Tuesday October 30 at 3:30, Brad Smith – Microsoft’s General Counsel and Executive Vice President for Legal and Corporate Affairs – will speak on “Creating an Environment for Innovation.”
Additional information here. Read more →
Best Paper at ASSETS 2012
CSE Ph.D. students Shiri Azenkot and Kyle Rector, along with CSE professor Richard Ladner and iSchool (and CSE adjuct) professor Jake Wobbrock won the ASSETS 2012 Best Paper Award at the 14th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility for their paper “PassChords: Secure multi-touch authentication for blind people.”
The paper presents a new non-visual technique, PassChords, for user authentication on a touch screen using mult-finger taps, rather than entering a traditional PIN on a virtual keypad. In a study with 13 blind participants, PassChords was 3 times faster for entering a PIN than using a traditional PIN keypad with a screen reader. The PIN strength, measured in empirical entropy, was about the same for both methods.
Congratulations to Shiri, Kyle, Richard, and Jake! Read more →
“Mobile app that measures lung functions headlines UW computer science show”
A terrific GeekWire article, with a huge number of great photos, on the UW CSE Open House held on Wednesday evening:
“We all remember school science fairs – lots of posters, people and presentations packed into a large area. Consider Wednesday evening at University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering something similar, but instead a souped-up version hosted by computer science buffs.
“As part of UW CSE’s Industry Affiliates Annual Meeting, 89 research groups made up of over 150 grad students set up shop in rooms within the UW’s high-tech Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering to show off their latest work in a poster and demo session. Industry representatives, regional alumni and friends of the department were on hand to see everything from animated learning games to candid portrait selection derived from video.”
Read more, and see lots of terrific photos, here. Read more →