Seattle Business magazine has announced the winners of its 2010 Top Innovators Awards. And the cover boy is … UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel!
“You probably don’t know it yet, but each appliance in your home sings its own particular song. Recognizing that song could help households cut their energy consumption. Shwetak Patel and his students at the University of Washington have developed intelligent in-home sensors that are able to differentiate between different appliances … Using such devices, consumers can see what appliances are using energy and take measures to reduce their use … The technology can also help utilities create incentives …”
Read the article here. See the cover here.
Congratulations Shwetak! Read more →
Elsevier’s journal Artificial Intelligence is arguably the top journal venue in the AI field.
Three of the top five “most cited” papers in the past 5 years of the journal have UW CSE authors!
- #1: Unsupervised named-entity extraction from the Web: An experimental study. Volume 165, Issue 1, 2005, Pp 91-134. Etzioni, O. | Cafarella, M. | Downey, D. | Popescu, A.-M. | Shaked, T. | Soderland, S. | Weld, D.S. | Yates, A. (all authors are UW CSE)
- #4: Learning and inferring transportation routines. Volume 171, Issue 5-6, 2007, Pp 311-331. Liao, L. | Patterson, D.J. | Fox, D. | Kautz, H. (Patterson is a 2005 UW CSE Ph.D. alum; others are current)
- #5: Explorations in engagement for humans and robots. Volume 166, Issue 1-2, 2005, Pp 140-164. Sidner, C.L. | Lee, C. | Kidd, C.D. | Lesh, N. | Rich, C. (Lesh is an Etzioni Ph.D. alumnus)
Check it out here (click the “Top 10 Cited” tab). Read more →
Another report on the work of UW’s Andy Meltzoff, Rechele Brooks, Aaron Shon, and Raj Rao.
“So yeah, it looks like the first wave of the robot uprising won’t be skull-headed killbots — the initial deployment will be adorable cyber-dwarf saboteurs, whose adorable, belly-pointing antics will win the hearts and minds of the youth.”
How can you not love the press? Read the article here. Read the paper here. Read more →
UW CSE student Kim Nguyen
KING 5 News discusses the phenomenal job prospects of UW Computer Science & Engineering grads.
“The job market may be tough for most, but not if you’re a University of Washington computer science student. As KING 5’s Chris Daniels reports, the expertise of computer science majors is a hot commodity.”
Watch the video here.
(If only we had the capacity to offer a UW CSE education to more great students …) Read more →
What causes a baby to decide a robot is more than bits of metal? As it turns out, it takes more than humanoid looks— babies that witness a robot engaged in social interaction with adults are much more likely to themselves treat it as a social entity. UW CSE professor Rajesh Rao and UW psychologists published the study starring the Rao lab robot Morphy. Rao’s team designed the computer programs that make Morphy appear social.
Read the UW News article here. Popular Science also covered this research here. Slashdot discussion is here. Read more →
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer headlined the UW Computer Science & Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series on October 14.
See a Seattle PI summary here.
Watch the video here.
Photographs here.
CIO Magazine. PCWorld. The Register. TechFlash. Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Bigham (now at Rochester), UW CSE grad student Chandrika Jayant, and their co-authors received the best paper award at this year’s ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) for their paper VizWiz: Nearly Real-Time Answers to Visual Questions.
Visual information pervades our environment. Vision is used to decide everything from what we want to eat at a restaurant and which bus route to take to whether our clothes match and how long until the milk expires. Individually, the inability to interpret such visual information is a nuisance for blind people who often have effective, if inefficient, work-arounds to overcome them. Collectively, however, they can make blind people less independent. VizWiz is an iPhone application aimed at enabling blind people to recruit remote sighted workers to help them with visual problems in nearly real-time. Users take a picture with their phone, speak a question, and then receive multiple spoken answers. VizWiz is designed to have low latency and low cost, making it both competitive with expensive automatic solutions and much more versatile.
More information on UIST 2010 may be viewed here. Read more →
The smartphone of the future might lose its sleek, solid shell. UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel, working with CSE grad Sidhant Gupta, ME undergraduate Tim Campbell, and CSE PhD alum Jeffrey Hightower (now at Intel Labs Seattle), have developed a squeezable cellphone – called SqueezeBlock – which uses tiny motors built into the casing to mimic the behavior of a spring. This novel feedback system changes its ‘shape’ to signal an alert to its user where visual and audible cues won’t suffice.
“‘You can imagine squeezing the phone to give you a little bit of information on its status – ring level, messages – without having to look at it,’ says Patel.”
This work was presented at ACM’s UIST 2010 last week in New York.
Read the full NewScientist article here. Popular Science here. Read more →
The data reported by NRC on “Faculty Awards” appears, not surprisingly, to be no more accurate than the data reported elsewhere in the assessment. Further information here. Previous post on this unhappy topic here. Read more →
UW CSE Professor Alan Borning and CSE grad student Travis Kriplean, as part of the research conducted by the Engage project, have unveiled a new website devoted to promote civic engagement. It’s based on their open-source ConsiderIt platform.
The Living Voters Guide, funded by the National Science Foundation, lets citizens discuss and share information by letting them work together to write their own voters guide. Its purpose is to help Washington voters to make decisions about the many and complex statewide initiatives on the ballot this November. The Living Voters Guide provides an interactive online platform for all Washingtonians to express their values and concerns, read contrasting ideas, weigh pros and cons, and reach decisions that are informed by community wisdom.
Read the press release here. Washington News Council here. Seattle Times here. UW’s The Daily here. Read more →
