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 →
Franzi Roesner
The story includes interviews with UW CSE’s Franzi Roesner and Ed Lazowska.
(Speaking only for myself, the article completely ignored the tenor of a 1-hour conversation and an email exchange — it’s a crappy hatchet-job article where the reporter had an agenda and ignored counterbalancing input. Read it here if you must.)
(Franzi says “Speaking for myself, I agree.”) Read more →
Barbara Mones (along with all of the participants in her 2008 Animation Capstone) signs posters of the UW CSE animated short “Kings” in the lobby of the SIFF Theater following its world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival on May 21st.
UW students from the most recent three years of the UW CSE Animation Capstone joined hundreds of other SIFF attendees at the premiere. The showing (which included a dozen other animated shorts) was a sellout; a second SIFF showing has been scheduled for June 6.
Congratulations to the entire team — and to the long line of UW students in the Animation Capstone who have produced amazing work each year! Read more →
John Zahorjan
Gaetano Borriello
Anup Rao
Luis Ceze
Dan Grossman
This year, the UW CSE ACM student chapter replaced the traditional faculty dunk tank with a faculty pie toss. Lots of good licks were had by all.
Victims included professors Dan “Was That Really Your Best Shot?” Grossman; Luis “I Think I May Have Messed My Pants” Ceze; Anup “Maybe I Should Have Given An Easier Final Exam In CSE 421” Rao; Gaetano “Take Him Out With The Trash, He’s Already Bagged” Borriello; and John “This Was My Only Clean Shirt” Zahorjan.
Photos by Ed “On The Smart Side of the Lens” Lazowska.
Other photographs of the event, by a real photographer (Bruce Hemingway) with a real camera, here. Read more →
This year’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (“The Oakland Conference”) marked the presentation of a paper describing a UW / UCSD collaboration on automotive security and privacy, and also the debut of the UW CSE security group t-shirt.
In the photo (you can tell from the background that it’s really Oakland …): Roxana Geambasu (UW CSE Ph.D. student), Tammy Denning (UW CSE Ph.D. student), David Molnar (MSR, teaching in UW CSE), Alexei Czeskis (UW CSE Ph.D. student), Franzi Roesner (UW CSE Ph.D. student), Stefan Savage (UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus, now UCSD CSE faculty), Steve Checkoway (UW CSE B.S. alumnus, now UCSD CSE Ph.D. student), Damon McCoy (UW CSE Ph.D. intern, now UCSD CSE postdoc), Karl Koscher (UW CSE Ph.D. student), Tadayoshi Kohno (UW CSE faculty and UCSD CSE Ph.D. alumnus), Gabriel Maganis (UW CSE B.S. alumnus, now UCD Ph.D. student), Charlie Reis (UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus, now Google Seattle), Miro Enev (UW CSE Ph.D. student), Vitaly Shmatikov (UW CSE B.S. alumnus, now UT Austin faculty). Read more →
New Scientist reports on two recent results in robotics, including work by UW CSE’s Peter Henry and collaborators Christian Vollmer, Brian Ferris, and Dieter Fox.
“Rather than pre-programming fixed instructions, the team thinks it’s simpler to drop a robot untrained into the real world but equip it with the smarts to study and mimic the behaviour of those around them. They have developed an algorithm that allows a virtual robot to navigate a crowd as a human might by first monitoring how the properties of the crowd – density and flow – affect the way virtual crowd members move through the throng.”
Read the New Scientist article here. See the Crowd Navigation project web page here. Read more →
