Join us on Tuesday November 2 at 3:30 in the Microsoft Atrium of UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering for a presentation by Stanford President John Hennessy on “The Future of Research Universities.”
American research universities are widely admired as the best in the world. The ability to turn research discoveries into new products, companies, and even industries make them the envy of the world. But, there are storm clouds on the horizon, including inadequacy of federal research funding, decreasing state commitments to higher education, emerging well-funded challengers for scientific leadership, and lagging interest and preparation in science and engineering among U.S. students. Many of these challenges will require policy challenges at the state and national level. There are, however, also steps that universities can take to improve their ability to excel and to address the major challenges society faces around the world.
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Join us on Thursday October 14 at 3:30 in the Microsoft Atrium of UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering for “A Conversation with Steve Ballmer.” Read more →
Congratulations to the dub team!
* Ubicomp 2010 Best Paper Award
ElectriSense: Single-Point Sensing Using EMI for Electrical Event Detection and Classification in the Home, Sidhant Gupta, Matt Reynolds, Shwetak Patel.
ElectriSense is a new solution for automatically detecting and classifying the use of electronic devices in a home from a single point of sensing. It relies on the fact that most modern consumer electronics and fluorescent lighting employ switch mode power supplies (SMPS) to achieve high efficiency. These power supplies continuously generate high frequency electromagnetic interference (EMI) during operation that propagates throughout a home’s power wiring. We show both analytically and by in-home experimentation that EMI signals are stable and predictable based on the device’s switching frequency characteristics. Unlike past transient noise-based solutions, this new approach provides the ability for EMI signatures to be applicable across homes while still being able to differentiate between similar devices in a home. We have evaluated our solution in seven homes, including one six-month deployment. Our results show that ElectriSense can identify and classify the usage of individual devices with a mean accuracy of 93.82%.
* Ubicomp 2010 Best Paper Honarble Mention
SNUPI: Sensor Nodes Utilizing Powerline Infrastructure, Gabe Cohn, Erich Stuntebeck, Jagdish Pandey, Gregory D. Abowd, Brian Otis, Shwetak Patel
The SNUPI paper presents the design and implementation of small ultra-low-power 27 MHz sensor nodes that transmit their data by coupling over the powerline to a single receiver attached to the powerline in the home. We demonstrate the ability of our general purpose wireless sensor nodes to provide whole-home coverage while consuming less than 1 mW of power when transmitting (one order of magnitude lower than existing nodes), and our custom CMOS transmitter consumed only 65 ?W (two orders of magnitude lower than existing nodes). This is the lowest power transmitter to date compared to those found in traditional whole-home wireless systems. (See earlier media coverage here.) Read more →
During the week of September 19th, NRC provided pre-release access to its long-delayed “Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States,” scheduled for public release during the week of September 26th.
We, along with colleagues in other computer science programs nationally and colleagues in programs in other fields at the University of Washington, quickly discovered significant flaws of three types in NRC’s data:
- Instances in which the data reported by NRC is demonstrably incorrect, sometimes by very substantial margins.
- Instances in which the accuracy of the data cannot easily be checked, but it does not pass even a rudimentary sanity check.
- Instances in which institutions interpreted NRC’s data reporting guidelines differently, yielding major inconsistencies.
The widespread availability of the badly flawed pre-release data within the academic community, and NRC’s resolve to move forward with the public release of this badly flawed data, have caused us and others to urge caution. For our program – and surely for many others – the NRC assessment is based on data that is clearly erroneous and the results are therefore meaningless.
Quoting the Computing Research Association: “NRC Doctoral Rankings for Computer Science not ready for prime time … CRA has serious concerns about the accuracy and consistency of the data being used in the evaluation of the Computer Science discipline.”
See further information here. Read more →
Incoming UW CSE grad student, Seungyeop Han, and his co-authors recently received the best poster award for their poster “Accelerating SSL with GPUs,” which proposes using the computing capabilies of the Graphical Processing Units on computer video cards to cheapen the considerable computational cost of wrapping HTTP communications with SSL encryption. SIGCOMM 2010 was held in New Delhi, India, August 30-September 3, 2010.
More information on the conference may be viewed here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Zoran Popovic talks with NPR’s David Green about Foldit. As we have reported previously, Foldit is a game in which players compete at protein folding (as improbable as that sounds!). The results give researchers new approaches as they seek to cure diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
The interview (4:33 audio with transcript) is here.
See earlier news coverage here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel and colleagues at UW and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a way to dramatically increase the battery life of sensors in the home, making their use far more practical.
The approach is called SNUPI — Sensor Nodes Utilizing Powerline Infrastructure. The “trick” is to utilize the electrical wiring in the home as a gigantic antenna, picking up very low power wireless signals from sensors and carrying them to a monitoring computer.
SNUPI, which could be used in home automation or medical monitoring, will be presented this month at the Ubiquitous Computing conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. It originated when Patel and co-author Erich Stuntebeck were doctoral students at Georgia Tech and worked with thesis adviser Gregory Abowd. They discovered that home wiring is a remarkably efficient antenna at 27 megahertz. Since then, Patel’s team at the UW has built the actual sensors and refined this method. Other co-authors are UW’s Gabe Cohn, Jagdish Pandey and Brian Otis.
Read the UW News release here. Additional news coverage: TechFlash. Seattle Times. Popular Science. International Business Times. inhabitat. Slashdot. TechNewsDaily. Gizmag. R&D Magazine. Technology Review. Read more →
Yoky Matsuoka, the Torode Family Endowed Career Development Professor in Computer Science & Engineering, has been recognized by UW Medicine as the 2010 Emerging Inventor of the Year. Yoky will be honored at a reception on October 26th.
“Dr. Matsuoka pursues a broad range of activity that, in the ultimate application, would lead to the development of artificial devices that augment human capabilities under neural control. In a very important step along this path, she is developing an anatomically correct robotic hand to investigate the neural control of human hand movements. The goal of this work is a prosthetic hand capable of executing detailed hand movements autonomously or with natural neural signals. Her work is highly interdisciplinary, including the development of chronically implantable neural interfaces, as well as the mechanical, electrical, and computer systems needed to operate and control such devices.”
Announcement of Yoky’s selection here. Information on the recognition event here. Information on Yoky’s research here. Read more →
Dub — UW’s cross-campus alliance of faculty and students exploring Human-Computer Interaction and Design — will have another strong showing at Ubicomp 2010 this year, a top Ubiquitous Computing conference. There are 6 accepted papers from dub members, two of which have been nominated for the best paper award. Congratulations to all of dub, the authors of these 6 papers, and their collaborators at other institutions:
- Augmenting On-Screen Instructions with Micro-Projected Guides: When it Works, and When it Fails (UW: Shaun K. Kane, Jacob O. Wobbrock / Intel Research: Daniel Avrahami / CMU + Intel Research: Stephanie Rosenthal)
- ElectriSense: Single-Point Sensing Using EMI for Electrical Event Detection and Classification in the Home (Nominated for Best Paper) (UW: Sidhant Gupta, Shwetak Patel / Duke: Matt S. Reynolds)
- SNUPI: Sensor Nodes Utilizing Powerline Infrastructure (Nominated for Best Paper) (UW: Gabe Cohn, Jagdish Pandey, Brian Otis, Shwetak Patel / GA Tech: Erich Stuntebeck, Gregory D. Abowd)
- WATTR: A method for self-powered wireless sensing of water activity in the home (UW: Timothy Campbell, Ramses Alcaide, Eric Larson, Shwetak Patel)
- The Wi-Fi Privacy Ticker: Improving Awareness & Control of Personal Information Exposure on Wi-Fi (UW + Intel: Jaeyeon Jung / Intel: Sunny Consolvo, Ben Greenstein, Pauline Powledge, Daniel Avrahami / UC Davis: Gabriel Maganis)
- TCBI: The Design and Evaluation of a Task-Centered Battery Interface (UW: Julie Kientz, Amanda Fonville / UToronto: Khai Truong, Alyssa Rosenzweig, Tim Smith / Nokia: Timothy Sohn)
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“The educators involved argue that beyond filling the shoes of retiring scientists, broadening the range of perspectives can help create better technological solutions for everyone. Indeed, the technologies behind such innovations as the Segway and voice-recognition software were originally created for people with disabilities. ‘Great ideas come from diversity, not from single-mindedness,’ [UW CSE’s Richard] Ladner points out. ‘If you look at bigger companies like IBM and Microsoft, they pride themselves on having diverse workforces. They’re hiring people who are blind and deaf and in wheelchairs because they know they’ll do great things.'”
Read the full article here. Learn about Ladner’s Access Computing Alliance here. Read more →
