Allen School News

A depth-sensing camera and a palm-top projector turn an ordinary work surface into an interactive one.  UW CSE graduate student Ryder Ziola developed this system, dubbed Oasis, with researchers at Intel Labs Seattle, led by Intel senior scientist and CSE affiliate faculty member Beverly Harrison.

“If you put, for example, a steak on the surface, it will recognize the steak and come up with a recipe,” says Ziola. “It may also come up with nutritional information.'” The camera can also track the motion of a person’s hand, and discern when he is touching the surface or not, allowing the surface to be interactive.

Read full Technology Review article here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. student Brian Ferris saw the need for better public transit information. So in his spare time, he wrote code that’s now used for OneBusAway — an open source application that aggregates bus data in real time.

King County officials hope others will also take advantage of their raw data to build useful apps, like Ferris did, and plan to make hundreds of additional data sources available.

Ferris is now studying how his app has changed transportation behavior as part of his Ph.D. work.  “OneBusAway users are more satisfied with public transit, spend less time waiting, take transit more frequently and feel safer at bus stops,” he said. “People actually reported walking more.”

Read the full article in Government Technology here. Read more →

Search engines have a dark side, and they form a vital part of hackers’ toolkits. For instance, once a potential website vulnerability emerges, a quick web search can gather a list of all sites which have that security flaw in their web code.

How better to hunt down hackers than by setting the search engines themselves on them, asks UW CSE Ph.D. student John John.  With colleagues at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, John has developed SearchAudit, a system that uses the Bing search engine – and the hackers’ own known malicious queries – as guides to malicious sites and forums.

Reach the NewScientist article here. Read more →

“When a national network of ocean observatories begins streaming environmental sensor data in March 2012, researchers … will be able to use … high-speed academic networks to transmit some of that data to storage and computing clouds operated by Amazon Web Services.

“CENIC and PNWGP today announced two 10 Gigabit per second (Gbps) connections to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for the use of CENIC’s members in California, as well as PNWGP’s multistate K-20 research and education community. With these new ultra-high-performance peering connections, members of CENIC and PNWGP can take full advantage of those services, whether for K-12 education or for university-based research …

“’21st century discovery will be driven by the automated analysis of massive amounts of sensor data captured from the world around us,’ said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering and Director of the eScience Institute at UW.  ‘The focus is on data, more than cycles. Cloud resources are an essential component.  The direct connections to the Amazon Web Services cloud from CENIC and PNWGP provide scientists with the bandwidth they need to utilize these resources.'”

Read the full announcement here. Read more →

Each year, roughly half a dozen faculty members from across the nation are selected as Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows.  Doug Downey, a Ph.D. student of Oren Etzioni’s now on the faculty at Northwestern University, has just been announced as a 2010 recipient of this significant distinction.

“Doug Downey studies methods for automatically extracting knowledge from the World Wide Web. His work aims to enable advanced Web search engines, capable of answering complex questions by synthesizing information across multiple Web pages. Building on techniques from natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, Downey is currently investigating how to harness human interaction to improve knowledge extraction systems.”

Congratulations Doug! Read more →

The June 2010 newsletter of The Family Center on Technology and Disability is devoted to a comprehensive overview of the access technology (assistive technology) work of UW CSE professor Richard Ladner and his students.

“‘Much of the consumer technology that surrounds us can be adapted for classroom and non-classroom educational use for children with disabilities in the K-12 range and beyond,’ Dr. Ladner insists. ‘As less expensive consumer technology takes on universal use,’ he adds, ‘parents and teachers will eventually come to see that the academic horizons of many children with disabilities need not be limited to the K-12 timeframe.’ In fact, Dr. Ladner, who has worked closely with deaf and blind students for many years, sees the advent – and acceleration – of consumer apps use by students with disabilities ultimately resulting in a dramatic increase in the number of deaf and blind students achieving Ph.D. status in the years ahead. Rather than simply being consumers he envisions that students with disabilities will become computer professionals who will be creators of apps that make life easier for themselves and others like them.”

Read this terrific article here. Read more →

“In a lab at the University of Washington, Morphy, a pint-size robot, catches the eye of an infant girl and turns to look at a toy.

“No luck; the girl does not follow its gaze, as she would a human’s.

“In a video the researchers made of the experiment, the girl next sees the robot “waving” to an adult. Now she’s interested; the sight of the machine interacting registers it as a social being in the young brain. She begins to track what the robot is looking at, to the right, the left, down. The machine has elicited what scientists call gaze-following, an essential first step of social exchange.

“‘Before they have language, infants pay attention to what I call informational hotspots,’ where their mother or father is looking, said Andrew N. Meltzoff, a psychologist who is co-director of university’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. This, he said, is how learning begins …

“‘It turns out that making a robot more closely resemble a human doesn’t get you better social interactions,’ said Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at University of California, San Diego. The more humanlike machines look, the more creepy they can seem.

“The machine’s behavior is what matters, Dr. Sejnowski said. And very subtle elements can make a big difference.”

Read the full article here.  Research web page here. Read more →

As a prelude to its annual “Brainstorm Tech” conference in Aspen (July 22–24), Fortune magazine has anointed “The 50 smartest people in tech” — five people in each of ten categories “whose collective intelligence propels us into a future that looks nothing like the present.”

The winner in the “Engineer” category — the “Smartest Engineer”?  UW CSE bachelors alumnus, former Googler and founder of Cloudera Christophe Bisciglia!

“What kinds of problems could we solve if everyone had access to the computing heft that powers Google? Christophe Bisciglia joined the search giant as a software engineer when he was just out of college and quickly realized that if he shifted his digital workload from an individual computer to a cluster of networked computers, he could crunch data faster. Problem was, most scientists didn’t have access to the kind of web-based, or “cloud,” computing power of Google.

“After teaching a class called Google 101, which taught software engineers at the University of Washington to program on a cloud-size scale, Bisciglia, 29, became obsessed with the possibilities emerging from an open-source project called Hadoop. Hadoop lets engineers take advantage of the massive computing efficiencies that come from networking hundreds of computers. He left Google in 2008 to help start Cloudera, which makes it easier for customers to turn their data into insights using Hadoop. Bisciglia resigned from Cloudera in June but tells Fortune he remains committed to harnessing the massive power of the cloud in new ways. Brains and brawn are definitely a potent combination.” Read more →

UW CSE faculty, alumni, and spouses at the ACM Awards Banquet at the Westin St. Francis on June 26th.

L-R:  Gaetano Borriello (new ACM Fellow) and Melissa Westbrook; Lyndsay Downs and Ed Lazowska (ACM Distinguished Service Award winner); Jeff Dean (new ACM Fellow) and Heidi Hopper; Noah Snavely (ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award runner-up) and Beth Xie; John Davis and Jessica Davis; Radhika Thekkath and Chandu Thekkath (new ACM Fellow).  At the banquet but missing from the photo:  Thomas Kwan. Read more →

UW CSE professor Magda Balazinska has been selected to participate in the prestigious HP Labs Innovation Research Program.  The program is designed to provide colleges, universities and research institutes around the world with opportunities to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP.

HP reviewed more than 375 proposals from 202 universities across 36 countries, choosing 52 to receive 2010 Innovation Research awards.

Congratulations Magda! Read more →