Last weekend, Marty Stepp and the student ACM officers hosted our annual Hack-U competition, sponsored by Yahoo! The contest gives undergraduate groups of 3-4 up to 24 hours to come up with interesting web applications. We had a total of 88 students compete on 28 teams, with many of the students pulling an all-nighter in the Gates Commons to finish their work.
There were lots of fun entries this year, such as: A role-playing game called DevKnull that runs in the browser; a Facebook add-on called “Where the Haters At?” that lets you see when people unfriend you and taunt them for it; a word game where you have to type words quickly before they run into you and kill you; a multi-player Asteroids spaceship game; a 3-D Pokemon game that uses the Google Earth API; a Spotify add-on that recommends music to you based on what your friends are listening to; and many more. As always, our students created impressive results in a short time.
Check out the results, and try out the apps in your browser, here.
Many thanks to Marty and the ACM officers, particularly James Athappily – and to Yahoo! and Google for funding and prizes. Read more →
Kim Polese is a leading Silicon Valley entrepreneur and innovator. She will speak on Thursday at 3:30 in EEB 105 on “The Journey of the Entrepreneur.” She will discuss her experiences from 25 years in Silicon Valley founding and leading groundbreaking technology projects and software companies, sharing stories from the trenches, lessons learned, and insights about what it takes for a promising technology to become an innovation that changes the world.
Ms. Polese earned a Bachelor’s degree in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley and studied Computer Science at the University of Washington.
Complete information here. Please join us! Read more →
UW CSE bachelors alumnus Willy Cheung has won a 2012-13 Fulbright Scholarship.
The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Since its establishment in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Fulbright Program has given approximately 300,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists, and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.
Congratulations to Willy! He joins UW CSE alum Chris Raastad, who won a Fulbright last year. Read more →
Each of us looks back on a small number of particularly inspirational K-12l or community college teachers who gave us a sense of academic purpose and direction. Each year, UW CSE invites our students to nominate these teachers for recognition. We host the teachers, their partners, and the students who nominated them at a dinner in the Microsoft Atrium of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.
Congratulations and thanks to the 2011-12 UW CSE Inspirational Teachers – and to all of the K-12 and community college teachers who inspire their students and send them on to UW CSE!
Many Bruce Hemingway photographs of the May 10 dinner here. Read more →
Eric Larson, a Ph.D. student working with UW CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel, will receive the UW College of Engineering “Student Innovator: Research” Award at the Community of Innovators award celebration on May 29.
Eric’s research concerns sensing and signal processing for health care and sustainability applications.
Congratulations Eric! Read more →
Many thanks to UW CSE alum and Google engineer Shen Lee for running a 3-session MapReduce Bootcamp for UW CSE students. There was overwhelming interest in this 3-evening bootcamp, just concluded. Read more →
TouchDevelop is a new programming environment for Windows Phone – a typed, structured programming language built around the idea of only using a touchscreen as the input device to author code, with built-in primitives that make it easy to access the rich sensor data available on a mobile device.
On Friday and Saturday, 30 UW CSE students participated in a TouchDevelop Hackathon. The event started on Friday evening with a short tutorial about TouchDevelop. Throughout Friday night and Saturday, student teams worked hard and the TouchDevelop team was at hand to answer questions and keep the students going. At the end of the Hackathon, on Saturday evening, there were 14 completed entries. Each project was given three minutes to present and demo. And the Oscar goes to …
First place
Second place
Third place
Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to the other participants and to Microsoft (particularly Judith Bishop, Arjmand Samuel, Peli de Halleux, and Nikolai Tillmann). Read more →
PCWorld writes: “Most gesture-based control systems we use today rely on either motion-capture cameras – like the Kinect – or a touchscreen device. But researchers from Microsoft Research and the University of Washington are developing a system that can detect object with sound waves, like how a bat does with echolocation. With the SoundWave project, the researchers aim to bring gesture controls to any computer that has a set of speakers and microphone. The program uses the Doppler Effect of sound waves for to detect objects and recognize motion.” Read the PCWorld article here.
ExtremeTech writes: “Microsoft Research, working with the University of Washington, has developed a Kinect-like system that uses your computer’s built-in microphone and speakers to provide object detection and gesture recognition, much in the same way that a submarine uses sonar.” Read the ExtremeTech article here.
Geekosystem here.
Slashdot coverage here.
SoundWave is a collaboration involving Sidhant Gupta and Shwetak Patel from UW CSE, and Dan Morris and Desney Tan from Microsoft Research. Read more →
This is what happens to UW CSE Ph.D. alums who do research on the spam value chain using fake viagra sales as their case study.
Page 45 of the May issue, here.
[In a followup to this post, Savage notes: “Now, one might suggest that there is a trend among UW CSE Ph.D. alums on the UCSD faculty, given Sorin Lerner’s 2010 recognition by the adult entertainment industry. As Yoshi might say, ‘Interesting!’ However, I can assure you that this kind of press is just a natural byproduct of hard work and a firm dedication to science.”] Read more →
OK, we admit it – it’s not news. But how can you not love this UW-themed hot dog????? (From a collection of Seattle PI photographs of the May 5 “Opening Day” (of the boating season) activities on the Montlake Cut.) Read more →
