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 →
More than 100 women are members of the UW Computer Science & Engineering student and faculty community. This brochure was prepared for a meeting of the Seattle Girl Geek Dinner group that we’re hosting tonight. Read more →
Harry Shum, Brian Bershad
TechFlash reports on the Xconomy-sponsored “Future of Search” event held at the University of Washington on November 30. UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska moderated a panel of four experts: Google Seattle site director (and UW CSE affiliate professor) Brian Bershad, UW CSE professor (and Farecast founder) Oren Etzioni, Vulcan investment manager Steve Hall, and Microsoft Bing engineering director Harry Shum.
” … the primary challenge facing any company thinking about getting into the business was summarized succinctly in a zinger from panelist Harry Shum … ‘Google is like smoking cigarettes. It’s a habit that’s going to be difficult to give up.’ [Etzioni] joked in response: ‘It is a known fact that more Google users die every year than users of all other search engine combined.'”
The TechFlash article — a terrific synopsis of the evening — is here.
An Xconomy photo gallery is here.
Two Xconomy articles here and here. Read more →
Each year the Computing Research Association recognizes a small number of the nation’s undergraduates with the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards.
In the 2010 competition, CSE’s Justine Sherry was selected as the national winner among females.
CSE’s Rita Sodt was selected as a finalist.
And CSE’s Eric Kimbrel received an honorable mention.
Congratulations to Justine, Rita, and Eric! They join 32 previous CSE undergraduates who have been recognized by CRA since the inception of this award in 1995. As of a year ago, UW CSE ranked #1 in the nation in the number of undergraduates recognized with CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards in the preceding decade; that record should continue. Read more →
Ratul Mahajan, a 2005 UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus now working at Microsoft Research, has received the 2009 SIGCOMM Rising Star Award.
Each year, ACM SIGCOMM presents the “Rising Star” Award, recognizing a young researcher – an individual no older than 35 – who has made outstanding research contributions to the field of communication networks during this early part of their career. Depth, impact, and novelty of the researcher’s contributions are key criteria upon which the Rising Star Award Committee evaluates the nominees. Also of particular interest are strong research contributions made independently from the nominee’s PhD advisor.
Congratulations Ratul! Read more →
Bill Howe, Senior Scientist at the UW eScience Institute and adjunct professor in CSE, is quoted in a New York Times story on the democratization of access to scientific computing and scientific data.
“For decades, the world’s supercomputers have been the tightly guarded property of universities and governments. But what would happen if regular folks could get their hands on one?
“Bill Howe, a senior scientist at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington, has urged research organizations to reveal their information. ‘All the data that we collect in science should be accessible, and that’s just not the way it works today,’ he said.
“Mr. Howe said high school students and so-called citizen scientists could make new discoveries if given the chance.
“’Let’s see what happens when classrooms of students explore this information,’ he said.”
Read the story here. Read more →
