The work of UW CSE professor Raj Rao is featured in the new book The Two-Second Advantage:
“The robots in Rajesh Rao’s lab at the University of Washington could be the cousins of the robot from Lost in Space, Rosie from The Jetsons, and C-3Po. They have square, electronics-laden heads, human-shaped bodies, lights, buttons, and herky-jerky movements. They look like toys but are nothing of the sort. The robots were created to help Rao learn about human brains …”
Read an excerpt here. Read more →
University of Washington President Michael K. Young
From the President’s Page of the September 2011 issue of Columns, the University of Washington alumni magazine – an issue celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the University of Washington:
“Along the way, there were a number of momentous developments that would help shape the University we see today… Then in 1975, the University took yet another step into the future by establishing the Department of Computer Science, a far-sighted step that would attract some of the world’s best computer scientists to Seattle.”
Read President Young’s article here. Read more →
ZDNet reports: “At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel CEO Paul Otellini demos how the company’s processors are being used to render a 3D model from millions of user-generated images taken from photo-sharing sites like Flicker and Picasa. The work is being done at the University of Washington, where researchers have crowd-sourced images from the Web and created 3D re-construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.”
Watch a video of Otellini’s presentation here.
This work is from the Rome in a Day project of UW CSE’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory. The video of St. Peters shown by Otellini is from Yasu Furukawa’s work. The other demo he showed – the interactive creation of the model – is Changchang Wu’s latest work. Read more →
UW CSE sponsors dozens of certificate programs through UW Professional and Continuing Education – multi-course themed clusters targeted at professionals. The latest – in which CSE collaborated with the UW eScience Institute – is the Certificate in Cloud Computing. UW CSE’s Bill Howe, who worked with an expert industry advisory board and UW PCE staff to create the program and will teach the capstone course, says “Today, the analysis of data – not the collection of it – is the bottleneck. You can now fill your hard drive with more data than you’ll ever be able to look at.”
Learn more here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Brian Ferris, the brains and brawn behind the OneBusAway transit application, may have received his Ph.D. and left for Google Zurich where the trams run like a Swiss watch … but OBA remains behind, continuing to garner awards – this time from the Puget Sound Regional Council.
PSRC’s VISION 2040 Award “recognizes innovative projects and programs that help ensure a sustainable future as the region grows.” Said Mukilteo Councilmember Jennifer Gregerson, Chair of the VISION 2040 Awards Selection Committee, “Access to real time information in a variety of mobile formats has taken some of the uncertainty out of using transit, making it an even more convenient way to get around.”
Congratulations, once again, to Brian and the OneBusAway team. Read the PSRC press release here. Try OneBusAway here. Read more →
Last week UW CSE hosted alum happy hours at Microsoft, Google Kirkland, and Google Fremont. More than 200 alums and interns and 20 faculty turned out. Many thanks to our terrific Microsoft and Google recruiters for facilitating these events, and to our terrific alums for turning out. (We apologize for coming away with nothing more than a couple of crummy cell phone photos – we promise to do better next time!) Read more →
Ed Lazowska, now and then ...
The first mention of the word “Internet” on Seattle’s KING-5 News was a 1994 interview with UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska. Recently, KING-5 News anchor Allen Schauffler compelled Ed to revisit that interview. It’s worth watching, here. Main conclusion: “The past 17 years have been a lot kinder to the Internet than to me.” Allen took the Wayback Machine photograph to the right. Read more →
Hellmut Golde
Margarete Noe
Diane and Jean-Loup Baer
UW CSE emeritus professor Jean-Loup Baer celebrated his 75th birthday on Saturday evening with a wonderful party at Bastille. Winners of the “To how many obscure questions about Jean-Loup can you guess the right answer?” contest were entered in the Jean-Loup Baer Lookalike Contest.
Happy birthday Jean-Loup!! Read more →
In honor of back-to-school season, this week’s GeekWire radio show and podcast features excerpts from past interviews with technology educators and one very impressive high school student: Ed Lazowska (Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington), Daniil Kulchenko (the 15 year-old entrepreneur who sold his cloud-computing startup earlier this year – and who is the son of UW CSE Ph.D. student Paul Kulchenko), and Hanson Hosein (Director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at UW).
Listen here.
Joint research by UW and Microsoft Research is described in the New York Times.
The research provides gestural remote control by means of algorithms that interpret and harness the interaction between the human body and the ambient electromagnetic field that is emitted as a matter of course by the wiring in households, by the power lines above homes, and by the gas pumps at service stations. The work was described in the CHI 2011 paper “Your Noise is My Command: Sensing Gestures Using the Body as an Antenna” by Gabe Cohn (UW EE graduate student), Dan Morris (Microsoft Research, and UW CSE affiliate professor), Shwetak Patel (UW CSE and EE professor), and Desney Tan (Microsoft Research, and UW CSE affiliate professor).
Read the New York Times article here. Read more →