Allen School News

UW CSE Ph.D. student Michael Buettner has been selected as an Intel Ph.D. Fellowship winner for the 2010-11 academic year.  Michael works with David Wetherall on wireless systems.

Congratulations Michael! Read more →

PhotoCity – a research effort and online game developed by faculty and students at the University of Washington and Cornell to capture a virtual 3D world from millions of cell phone photographs – was most recently featured in Xconomy.

“Building on a previous program called Photo Tourism [the core technology of Microsoft’s Photosyth] that pieces together photos culled from Flickr into virtual 3D models, PhotoCity is a ‘capture the flag’-esque game that re-creates sections of campuses or city blocks, or, eventually, entire cities, from user-generated photos.”

Photocity is the work of UW graduate students Kathleen Tuite and Dun-Yu Hsiao, UW undergraduate students Nadine Tabing and Sylvia Tashev, UW faculty members Zoran Popovic and Steve Seitz, and Cornell faculty member and former UW graduate student Noah Snavely.

Read the Xconomy article here. Read more →

“Typically, robots respond well to precise instruction sets but they are flummoxed if their instructions are given in the fuzzy, everyday language so beloved by humans. Now, a team at the University of Washington in Seattle has developed translation software which could enable robots to understand a set of natural-language directions …

“Cynthia Matuszek and her colleagues used the principles of machine translation – commonly used online to translate text of one language into another – to develop a navigation program for robots. Machine translation tools are designed to learn from previous efforts, improving their accuracy through experience.”

Read “Parlez-vous robot?” here. Read more →

Georg Seelig is featured in UW’s Trend in Engineering.

“Seelig describes himself as a molecular programmer. ‘We use nucleic acids as nanoscale building material for molecular circuitry. We can take advantage of design ideas from computer science and electrical engineering to build new programmable biological circuitry. The goal is to build complex control circuits that can behave similarly to existing biological circuits such as gene regulatory networks,’ Seelig said.”

Read the article here.

His team has built nucleic-acid logic circuits that function reliably in an aqueous, cell-free environment. Now the challenge is to create molecules that will detect mRNA and microRNA in a cellular environment and regulate target genes. Ultimately such circuits could lead to “smart” drug delivery systems to treat disease. Read more →

“Kings,” UW CSE’s 2008 Animation Capstone film, as been selected from among more than 3,000 entrants to be screened at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival.  Kings will be screened as an “official selection” during SIFF’s Short Film Weekend (May 21-23) at the new state-of-the-art SIFF Cinema where all formats are brilliantly projected.

SIFF is the largest and most well-attended film festival in the United States, with 150,000 attendees expected in 2010.  With extensive local, national and international media coverage, the Festival has emerged as one of the country’s most accessible and highly publicized film events.

UW CSE’s Animation Capstone courses are taught by Barbara Mones and a host of collaborators to UW undergraduates from Computer Science & Engineering, Art, and Music.  There is a long tradition of these wonderful student-created animated shorts competing well against professional submissions at national and international animation festivals.

Congratulations to Barbara and the entire Kings crew!

Learn all about the Animation Research Labs and our Animation Capstone here.  See some lovely still images from Kings here, here, and here. Read more →

Zensi, an energy monitoring company based on technology developed by UW CSE  professor Shwetak Patel and collaborators, has been purchased by Belkin.

Zensi’s technology was licensed from the University of Washington and from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Patel’s Ph.D. institution.  The technology includes single-point-of-attachment sensors for electrical power, water, and natural gas — a single sensor in a home or business uses signal processing and machine learning to identify sources and rates of consumption.  This dramatically reduces the cost of instrumenting the home or business and providing occupants with the information they need to behave in more economical and environmentally responsible ways.

According to Patel, this is just the beginning for using software to help consumers better conserve energy.  “This puts UW on the map as a premier place for energy work in the residential space,” says Patel.

Xconomy article here.  TechFlash article here.  Seattle Times article here.  CNET article here.  Yahoo! Finance article here.  Technology Review article here.  Belkin press release here.

UW CSE “Sustainability Sensing” research overview here. Read more →

UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Zack Ives, a professor in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has been honored with the 2010 Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, Penn’s highest teaching honor.

Ives “has since been a leader in curricular innovations, developing courses on Internet and database systems in which students build their own search engines or database-powered websites. ‘I never imagined an individual student could achieve so much,’ said one student. A recent alumnus who works at Google echoes, ‘there is not a day that goes by at my job that I do not take into consideration the skills and information that I learned in Professor Ives’ class.’”

Congratulations Zack!  Read the Penn press release here. Read more →

UW CSE’s Gaetano Borriello spoke at the TEDx Seattle conference on Friday April 16.

“Gaetano’s team is working on turning the mobile phone into a medical device in its own right … The camera can turn into a scope, taking pictures of the inside of ears to detect infection.  It becomes an entire doctor’s bag … The idea is to magnify human resources through the introduction of technology …”

Read the post here.  Learn about Open Data Kit here.

NEW: YouTube here. Read more →

Network World reports on incidents of academic dishonesty in introductory Computer Science courses, with a lot more perspective than other recent articles on the subject.

“‘The truth is that on every campus, a large proportion of the reported cases of academic dishonesty come from introductory computer science courses, and the reason is totally obvious: we use automated tools to detect plagiarism,’ explains Ed Lazowska, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. ‘We compare against other student submissions, and we compare against previous student submissions and against code that may be on the Web. These tools flag suspicious cases, which are then manually examined’ …

“‘Does anyone in their right mind think that [cheating] isn’t happening in large introductory courses in other fields? If so, they’re smoking something,’ Lazowska says. ‘There have been several cases in which faculty in other disciplines have adapted these tools to detect plagiarism in term papers, and have found plagiarism rates far greater than typically encountered in computer science courses’ …

“Lazowska says rising enrollment in computer science courses is a more important trend than the resulting increase in plagiarism cases.  ‘An ever-broader range of students is recognizing that, even if they major in something else, college-level preparation in computational thinking is essential,’ Lazowska says. ‘There is no reason to believe that computer science students are anything other than better than ever.'”

Read the article here. Read more →

CNN reports on a research presentation by UW CSE Ph.D. student Tamara Denning.

“Nathanael Paul likes the convenience of the insulin pump that regulates his diabetes. It communicates with other gadgets wirelessly and adjusts his blood sugar levels automatically.  But, a few years ago, the computer scientist started to worry about the security of this setup.  What if someone hacked into that system and sent his blood sugar levels plummeting?   skyrocketing?  Those scenarios could be fatal.  ‘If your computer fails, no one dies,’ he said in a phone interview. ‘If your insulin pump fails, you have problems.’  As sci-fi as it sounds, Paul’s fears are founded in reality.”

Read the article here. Read more →