The latest issue of Communications of the ACM includes UW CSE’s “Building Rome in a Day” paper – work recently demonstrated by Intel CEO Paul Otellini at the Intel Developer Conference.
From the abstract: “We present a system that can reconstruct 3D geometry from large, unorganized collections of photographs. Our experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to reconstruct city-scale image collections with more than a hundred thousand images in less than a day.” Read more →
A terrific interview on CNN’s “The Big Idea” with UW CSE’s Zoran Popovic. Participants in the Foldit protein folding online game had recently solved a problem that had eluded scientists for a decade.
The GRAIL internal chatter following appearance of the video:
Zoran Popovic: “Disheveled hair and tired mumbling after staying up most of the night with a new grant proposal.”
Steve Seitz: “Great interview! Are you in a prison cell?”
Zoran: “No that’s my cleaned up office (or at least a cleaned up corner).”
Brian Curless: “Can you give an interview in my office next? It needs some spiffing up.”
Watch the interview here. Learn about UW CSE’s Center for Game Science and the Foldit game here. Read more →
In the context of Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s Capitol Hill testimony, UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni scores the One-Liner Of The Week Award on American Public Media’s “Marketplace”:
APM’s Steve Henn: “I talked to Oren Etzioni, who founded a startup called Farecast and sold it to Microsoft and just founded a new company called Decide, which is a search engine for shopping decisions. And I kind of expected him to have a bone to pick with Google, but instead he said, you know, ‘search needs regulation like the Pacific Ocean needs global warming.'”
More here. Read more →
(See below for Shwetak: the TV show …) Read more →
KING5 News interviews Shwetak Patel upon the announcement of his MacArthur Fellowship. Watch the interview here.
Shwetak is the second UW CSE faculty member, and the 14th University of Washington faculty member, to be recognized with a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award.” Read more →
UW’s Shwetak Patel, a faculty member in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering, has been named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow – colloquially known as the MacArthur “Genius” Award.
Each year, the MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships of $500,000 to roughly twenty “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.”
Shwetak’s research interests are in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, and User Interface Software and Technology. He is particularly interested in developing easy-to-deploy sensing technologies and approaches for activity recognition and energy monitoring applications. He is a founder of Zensi, Inc., a demand side energy monitoring solutions provider, which was acquired by Belkin, Inc. in 2010.
Shwetak is UW CSE’s second MacArthur Fellow – professor Yoky Matsuoka was honored in 2007.
CONGRATULATIONS SHWETAK!
See also Seattle Times, Xconomy. Read more →
In our recent post about the recognition of OneBusAway with a VISION 2040 Award from the Puget Sound Regional Council, we failed to note the most amazing aspect of the ceremony: Alan Borning in a suit!
But, who is the guy in the pink shirt and tie? Read more →
An excellent MSNBC Cosmic Log article on UW’s Foldit game for protein folding and protein structure calculation.
“For more than a decade, an international team of scientists has been trying to figure out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. Such enzymes, known as retroviral proteases, play a key role in the virus’ spread — and if medical researchers can figure out their structure, they could conceivably design drugs to stop the virus in its tracks.”
“One floppy loop of the molecule, visible on the left side of this image, was particularly tricky to figure out. But players belonging to the Foldit Contenders Group worked as a tag team to come up with an incredibly elegant, low-energy model for the monkey-virus enzyme.”
“‘People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at,’ Seth Cooper, a UW computer scientist who is Foldit’s lead designer and developer, explained in a news release. ‘Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans.'”
Read the MSNBC article here. Article on this breakthrough from The Scientist here. PCMag here.
Play Foldit here. Read more →
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 →