Several families of blue herons are nesting this spring in the Sylvan Grove, which the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering overlooks. From the sixth floor, one nest in particular is easily visible, and neither the proud parents nor the nestlings seem to mind if we monitor their progress. And monitor it we are:
1. Point your web browser at www.cs.washington.edu/heroncam to get a live view of the nest from our cambot.
2. CSE faculty member Bruce Hemingway, our unofficial department photographer, has created and is continuing to add to a wonderful photo album of high-quality photographs. Click on the image at right to visit it.
3. For those of you on a multicast-capable “research network” (all of UW, plus some large companies, but probably not your home internet service), CSE staff member Fred Videon has established a stunning hi-def video feed. To view the feed, you might use the free VideoLAN Project vlc program. (1) Select Media:Open Network Stream. (2) Select UDP as the stream, enter 233.0.73.67 as the IP address, and use port 1234 (the default). (3) Press “play.”
Those of us with upper-floor offices facing the Grove are having a lot of fun watching the nestlings and their proud parents, and we invite everyone in the CSE community to join us. Read more →
Each year, roughly a half dozen outstanding UW undergraduates are awarded Bonderman Travel Fellowships to spend time abroad. CSE student Zachary Brown has been named a 2010 Bonderman Travel Fellow. Read about Zachary’s plans here. Read about all of the 2010 Bonderman Travel Fellows here. Read more →
Each spring, the University of Washington College of Engineering celebrates outstanding achievements by students, staff, and faculty at the “Community of Innovators” award event. CSE was well represented among the honorees on June 1. Congratulations to:
- Eric Arendt, recipient of the 2010 Dean’s Medal, awarded annually to two outstanding members of the graduating class.
- Anna Cavender, recipient of the 2010 Graduate School Medal, awarded by the UW Graduate School to one outstanding Ph.D. recipient each year.
- Carol Matsumoto, recipient of the 2010 Classified Staff Innovator Award.
- Jon Froehlich, recipient of the 2010 Student Research Innovator Award.
The Dean feels that it would be inappropriate to give all of the Community of Innovators awards to CSE students, staff, and faculty; we would like to congratulate our other outstanding nominees who were caught up in this unfortunate technicality:
- Tracy Erbeck, nominated for Professional Staff Innovator.
- Victoria Kirst, nominated for Student Teaching and Learning Innovator.
- Barbara Mones, nominated for Faculty Teaching and Learning Innovator.
- Marty Stepp, nominated for Faculty Teaching and Learning Innovator.
Congratulations to all of our awardees and nominees. Check out the celebratory booklet here. Read more →
CBC News interviews UW CSE’s Raj Rao: “Reasoning that fine muscle control is a difficult problem, University of Washington researchers are taking a different tack. The Neural Systems Group is experimenting with a small humanoid robot controlled by sensors worn outside the head. Because the robot has intelligence of its own, ‘when you tell it to pick up an object you don’t have to tell it how to move its hand,’ says Rajesh Rao, associate professor of computer science and engineering. So imprecise signals from many neurons — detectable without an invasive implant — are enough.”
Read the full article here. Read more →
Each year for more than a decade, UW CSE has offered a “Capstone Design Course” on videogame programming. Teams of students conceive, design, implement, and distribute videogames.
This year, part of the assessment involves how well the games do “in the wild” on the game distribution sites. There’s still a week to go before the end of the quarter, but the first two games now have full-featured review articles about them on game distribution sites, and one has a distribution contract offer after being out for only 2 days.
Play all 6 games here.
A review of the game Chromatic is here. It reads, in part, “You know what? There are just times when you need to go mellow. You know what I mean. Soft colors, round edges, smooth beats. That’s what I’m talking about, something to just lean back and let all the tension just wash away from you. And this is exactly what Arkeus’ platformer Chromatic would be if, you know, it wasn’t also completely finger burning, brain breaking, throw your laptop against the wall insane. Aside from that part of it, it’s totally relaxing.”
The game Hello Worlds! is on the front page of game site Kongregate here. Read more →
The Chronicle of Higher Education features a wonderful profile of Johns Hopkins astronomer Alex Szalay, in the context of a discussion of data-driven science. The article includes multiple quotes from UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska. Read the article here. Read more →
University of Washington News reports on a paper in Nature by UW CSE Ph.D. student Xiaoyu Chen and UW CSE professor Martin Tompa.
“We discovered that there’s a disturbingly low level of agreement between genome alignments produced by different tools,” said Tompa. “What this should suggest to biologists is that they should be very cautious about trusting these alignments in their entirety.”
Read the press release here. Read the research paper here. Read more →
Have you ever slept, read, talked, or tweeted past your bus stop?
If so, then Bus Stop Alarm is the app for you! Bus Stop Alarm lets users set a location-based alarm on their phone that will go off when they get close to a preselected bus stop. Bus Stop Alarm is the first application to incorporate publicly available bus information and GPS in an innovative bus stop alarm system.
Bus Stop Alarm has just been named one of six finalists from across the nation in the Google “Juicy Ideas Collegiate Competition.” Teams from MIT, Stanford, and UC Irvine are among the other finalists.
Bus Stop Alarm began as a project for CSE 403, taught by professor Marty Stepp. Watch the Bus Stop Alarm video here.
Congratulations to team members and UW CSE undergraduates David Truong, Huy Dang, Michael Eng, Orkhan Muradov, and Pyong Byon. Read more →
Nearly 20% of the papers at UIST 2010 (the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology) have authors/co-authors from dub – UW’s cross-campus alliance of faculty and students exploring Human-Computer Interaction and Design. Congratulations to all of dub, the authors of these 7 papers, and their collaborators at other institutions: