The IEEE Presidents’ Change the World Competition recognizes students who develop unique solutions to real-world problems using engineering, science, computing, and leadership skills to benefit their community, the world at large, or both.
UW CSE’s FoneAstra has been recognized with third place in the 2012 competition.
FoneAstra is an ARM7-based board that plugs into the data port of low-tier mobile phones. With attached sensors, custom applications can be run through FoneAstra. As a prototype, the per-unit cost of the board is $15. FoneAstra, enhanced with temperature probes, is being used for vaccine cold chain monitoring – in developing countries, this cost effective method can make vaccine implementation efficient and cut possible losses from temperatures of vaccines that are not extensively monitored. In addition, FoneAstra is being used for accurately monitoring milk temperatures by providing three levels of safety.
The FoneAstra team includes Rohit Chaudhri, William Thomas Pitts, Darivanh Vlachos, Troy Martin, Jillyn Johnson, Eleanor O’Rourke, Jaylen Scott Vanorden, Michael Falcone, Waylon Brunette, Mayank Goel, and Rita Sodt.
Congratulations! Read about the competition here. Learn more about FoneAstra here. Learn about UW’s ICTD activities – Change – here. Read more →
In an article titled “Clearing Away the Clutter From Tech Shopping,” the New York Times recommends the use of UW CSE startup Decide.com:
“A couple of years ago, some exceedingly bright minds from the worlds of computer science and business created Farecast, a site that takes reams of data about airline ticket pricing and analyzes it to let consumers know if the fares for trips they want to take at a given moment are going to go up or down soon. The price-prediction engine was later bought by Microsoft and incorporated into that company’s Bing Travel site.
“The founders of Farecast then turned their attention to consumer technology. This was much more challenging because new products are being replaced by even newer products at an alarming rate. Decide.com is the result.
“On the Decide site, you can search for tech products and find out whether one is about to be supplanted by a newer, better model, as well as whether the price is likely to rise or fall. Decide uses all kinds of algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence to comb not only pricing data, but also articles and blog posts to predict a product’s price and life span.
“Armed with that data, you can either move ahead and buy with confidence, or lie low for a little while and feel extra knowledgeable.”
Read the New York Times article here. Try Decide.com here. Learn about the UW CSE research of Oren Etzioni, Decide.com co-founder, here. Read more →
Do you have what it takes to be an ethical hacker? Can you step into the shoes of a professional paid to outsmart supposedly locked-down systems?
Now you can at least try, no matter what your background, with a new card game developed by members of the UW CSE Security and Privacy Lab.
“Control-Alt-Hack” gives teenage and young-adult players a taste of what it means to be a computer-security professional defending against an ever-expanding range of digital threats. The game’s creators will present it this week in Las Vegas at Black Hat 2012, an annual information security meeting.
Read a UW News story here. Learn about Control-Alt-Hack here. Learn about UW CSE computer security and privacy research here.
Wall Street Journal article here. GeekWire post here. Read more →
This week, the nation’s computer science, information science, and computer engineering department heads are gathered in Snowbird, Utah for the every-other-year Computing Research Association Conference at Snowbird.
In his keynote address on Monday morning, Farnam Jahanian, the National Science Foundation’s Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, highlighted two UW CSE research breakthroughs.
Jahanian showed the NSF “Science Nation” video describing UW CSE’s “Rome in a Day” project – synthesizing tens of thousands of photographs into 3D models of cities that can be navigated. Watch the great video here. Learn more about the project here.
Jahanian also highlighted Foldit, UW CSE’s web-based videogame for protein folding and protein structure calculation. Last year, gamers using Foldit cracked an AIDS-related protein structure problem that had eluded the scientific community for more than a decade. Learn about UW CSE’s Center for Game Science here. Play Foldit here.
Both of these breakthroughs came from UW CSE’s extraordinary GRaphics and Imaging Laboratory – GRAIL. Learn more about GRAIL here. Read more →
47 top researchers from across the nation gathered last week for the 17th Summer Research Institute in Computer Science, co-organized each summer by University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering and Microsoft Research.
The goal of these Summer Research Institutes is to catalyze research in emerging areas. This year’s topic was “Crowdsourcing Personalized Online Education.” The organizers were Dan Weld (UW CSE), Mausam (UW CSE), Eric Horvitz (MSR), and Meredith Ringel Morris (MSR). Quoting from the overview:
“Strong recent enthusiasm for leveraging online platforms for education has highlighted opportunities to leverage ‘the crowd’ in novel ways. We seek to explore challenges and opportunities at the intersection of online education and crowdsourcing – at a time when ideas and methods in both areas are accelerating.”
Learn more about this year’s Summer Research Institute here. Learn about previous Institutes here. Read more →
Twenty-one 7th, 8th, and 9th grade girls from fourteen Seattle-area schools spent the past week at UW CSE’s daycamp for middle schoolers – our first of three daycamps this summer.
During the week, participants heard from members of the UW CSE community, discussed big ideas in computer science, and completed projects in Processing, a Java-based programming environment for artists and designers. The first project was to design a face made of basic geometric shapes and then animate it based on ambient noise. For example, many students made their faces’ mouths grow as the volume increased so that the faces looked like they were singing along to songs or talking back to them as they talked. Other projects included a paint program with creative custom brushes and image manipulation filters – programs put on Android phones.
Parents joined the girls for a demo day on Friday. The place was vibrating!
Congratulations to the girls for all they achieved, and thanks to CSE faculty member Helene Martin, who is masterminding the daycamps, and to Garfield High School alums Quynh Huynh (soon to be a sophomore at UW), Sierra Kaplan-Nelson (soon to be a freshman at Stanford), and Jane Singer (soon to be a sophomore at Emory) who are serving as counselors at the camps.
More information about what the students learned last week can be found here. Information on CSE’s overall middle school and high school summer daycamp program here. Overview of DawgBytes, CSE’s broad K-12 outreach program, here.
Read more →
In what CNN calls “the Oscars for hard-core computer hackers,” UW CSE has been officially nominated in two categories for the upcoming 6th annual Pwnie Awards!
Most Innovative Research: Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces
“Many hackers have been complaining about the extinction of unmitigated vanilla stack buffer overflows. It turns out that they are not extinct at all, they have all just migrated to YOUR CAR. Stephen Checkoway and the rest of his team identified and exploited these vulnerabilities through a burned CD, paired BlueTooth device, unpaired BlueTooth device, and through a phone call to the car’s internal GSM cell phone. Yes, they can call up your car and install malware on it, which they actually implemented (how non-Academic of them). The future is a very scary place. Luckily, the majority of the Pwnie Award judges don’t drive. Or use computers. Or phones.”
Best Song: The UW CSE Band for “Click Me”
The UW CSE Band has the unique distinction of being the first Best Song nominee that is sung (not rapped) by someone who can actually sing on key. This song, a cover of The Cranberries’ ‘Zombie,’ gives us flashbacks to the mid-90’s when server-side remotes and raver pants were plentiful.”
Winners will be announced at the awards ceremony this Wednesday at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Read more →
Carlos Guestrin, soon to join UW CSE from Carnegie Mellon, recently hosted the First GraphLab Workshop on Large-scale Machine Learning. A Computing Community Consortium blog post describes the landmark event:
“The scale and complexity of data on the web continues to grow at a tremendous rate. A recent New York Times article compared Big Data to an economic asset for companies, like currency and gold. But, in order to extract value from 6 billion Flickr images, 900 million Facebook users, 24 million Wikipedia articles, or the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute, we need machine learning techniques that can scale to these huge datasets. The First GraphLab Workshop on Large-scale Machine Learning, held in San Francisco on July 9th, sought to bring together folks from industry and academia to explore the state of the art on this fundamental challenge.”
Read the CCC blog post here. Learn about the workshop here. Learn about GraphLab here. Read more →
“Catch and Release,” UW CSE’s 2011 animation capstone film, has been selected for screening at th DC Shorts Film Festivals, the largest short film event on the East Coast. Catch and Release will be screened in the Family Friendly Showcase on September 8th and again on September 15th. More information may be viewed here.
“Catch and Release” and “Nebbish,” the 2010 animation capstone film, will be screened at Bumbershoot’s 1 Reel Film Festival curated by SIFF (September 1-3, 2012). Schedule information for Bumbershoot here. “Catch and Release” is in Films4Family at 12 noon on Saturday, September 1. “Nebbish” is in Flashes of Funny at 2 pm on Saturday, September 1.
Congratulations to Barbara Mones and the entire “Catch and Release” and “Nebbish” crews!
See all of UW CSE’s animation productions here. Read more →
Helene Martin engages the throngs at UW CSE’s daycamp for middle school students
UW CSE, in collaboration with UW’s Women in Computer Science & Engineering and Society of Women Engineers organizations, is sponsoring three weeklong daycamps for middle school and high school students. The first is underway this week.
Learn more about the daycamps here. Learn about DawgBytes, UW CSE’s K-12 outreach program, here. Read more →
