The Seattle Times reports on privacy concerns related to the ORCA card.
“The ORCA network offers the convenience of using a single card to pay for rides on buses, trains, boats, streetcars and vans … But what thousands of commuters might not realize is that their movements also could be checked by their bosses.”
UW CSE has for several years raised concerns about this technology, at the University of Washington and statewide, in the context of the RFID Ecosystem Project, a large-scale research investigation of how to preserve privacy in an RFID-equipped universe.
UW CSE graduate student Karl Koscher, a member of the RFID Ecosystem Project, is quoted in the Seattle Times article. Read it here. Read more →
The New York Times on eScience:
“In a speech given just a few weeks before he was lost at sea off the California coast in January 2007, Jim Gray, a database software pioneer and a Microsoft researcher, sketched out an argument that computing was fundamentally transforming the practice of science …
“In computing circles, Dr. Gray’s crusade was described as, ‘It’s the data, stupid.’ It was a point of view that caused him to break ranks with the supercomputing nobility, who for decades focused on building machines that calculated at picosecond intervals …
“’The advent of inexpensive high-bandwidth sensors is transforming every field from data-poor to data-rich,’ Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist and director of the University of Washington eScience Institute, said in an e-mail message. The resulting transformation is occurring in the social sciences, too.
“’As recently as five years ago,’ Dr. Lazowska said, ‘if you were a social scientist interested in how social groups form, evolve and dissipate, you would hire 30 college freshmen for $10 an hour and interview them in a focus group.’
“’Today,’ he added, ‘you have real-time access to the social structuring and restructuring of 100 million Facebook users.’”
Read the complete article here. Read more →
Confused about how the University of Washington fared in the 2009-11 biennial budget? There can be room for honest debate about whether the decisions that were made were smart in terms of the future of the state. But there should not be any confusion concerning the facts. Here they are! Read more →
While it will be long time before “one laptop per child” is true everywhere in the world, UW CSE undergraduates have developed a system that lets up to four students share a single computer to do interactive math problems.
UW undergraduate students Clint Tseng, Heather Underwood, and Sunil Garg, who participated in Joyojeet Pal‘s computer science project course, decided to try building a system for a numeric keypad similar to Microsoft MultiPoint platform, which connects multiple mice to one computer. Their system, developed over the past year, connects four numeric keypads, each of which costs about $4, to a standard computer running Windows software. The screen is split into four columns. Each student looks at one column, where he or she is given math problems based on performance on previous answers. Early qualitative tests of the system in India, which were presented earlier this year in Qatar at the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, showed positive results.
Read the full U Week article here. Read more about MultiLearn here. Read more →
Even though James Cameron’s movie Avatar is still a few weeks away from opening, there already exist real-life systems for controlling another body remotely. UW CSE’s Raj Rao has developed an elegant mind-controlled robot that takes care of the boring, low-level stuff so the controller can concentrate on more interesting, higher level goals. The little humanoid bot is controlled by the human brain. By measuring electric signals through the surface of the skull (no surgery required), you can command the robot to perform a simple task.
Read the Wired UK post here. Read the Singularity Hub post here. Read more →
A research collaboration between UW CSE’s James Landay and graduate student Scott Saponas, Microsoft Research, and the University of Toronto is developing a muscle-controlled interface enabling gesture-driven interaction with computers. “It’s perhaps the most promising of the billion or so Minority-Report-aspiring prototype interfaces,” says Popular Science.
“The new muscle-sensing project is ‘going after healthy consumers who want richer input modalities,’ says Desney Tan, a researcher at Microsoft and UW CSE affiliate faculty. As a result, he and his colleagues had to come up with a system that was inexpensive and unobtrusive and that reliably sensed a range of gestures.”
Read the MIT Technology Review article here. Read the Popular Science article here. Read the paper presented at the User Interface Software and Technology 2009 here. Read more →
December 6-12 is Computer Science Education Week. Learn more here! Read more →
Columns, the University of Washington’s alumni magazine, writes on UW CSE’s Vanish project:
“The Vanish program encrypts a message, breaks the encryption key into many tiny pieces, and then sprinkles these pieces throughout a large peer-to-peer network that consists of more than a million computers all over the world. As individual computers leave the network and those that remain purge their memories, pieces of the key are gradually lost. Once a certain number of pieces are lost, the key can never be reassembled and the message can’t be decrypted.”
Read the full article here. Learn more about Vanish here. Read more →
On Thursday December 3, UW CSE hosted more than 100 women in technology from the Seattle area for the Seattle Girl Geek Dinner. CSE’s Magda Balazinska and Yoky Matsuoka provided the technical content. CSE’s Susan Eggers and Justine Sherry coordinated the event.
A terrific brochure prepared for the event is here. Read more →
“12:42 a.m. Having had one too many margaritas to drive, you open OneBusAway, created by UW students Brian Ferris and Kari Watkins, to find the closest bus route, nearby stops and exactly what time it will arrive to whisk you safely home.”
(Why else would you take the bus?)
Read the article here. Read more →
