“Geekiest title you’ve ever had: I dabble in rapping in some of my lectures under the name of Vicious D Marty Slick …
“Geekiest thing you’ve ever done: I won a Nintendo competition in Phoenix when I was young. The games were Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer, and Tetris …
“Mac or PC? I wanted to get a Mac, but I’m saving for a new kidney …”
There’s more! Read it here! And don’t miss Monica Guzman’s blog, which includes Marty’s rap video, here! Read more →
UW CSE’s computer graphics team— including professor Steve Seitz, graduate student Ian Simon, graduate alumnus Noah Snavely, affiliate professor Rick Szeliski, and acting professor Sameer Agarwal— has developed a new computer algorithm that automatically reconstructs an entire city from hundreds of thousands of tourist photos in about a day (of computing). The tool is the most recent in a series developed at UW CSE to harness the increasingly large digital photo collections available on photo-sharing Web sites.
The newly developed code works more than a hundred times faster than the previous version. It first establishes likely matches and then concentrates on those parts. The code also uses parallel processing techniques, allowing it to run simultaneously on many computers, including remote servers connected through the Internet. The new, faster code makes it possible to tackle more ambitious projects.
Earlier versions of the photo-stitching technology are known as Photo Tourism (licensed to Microsoft, augmented, and now offered as Photosynth). In the near term, the “Rome in a Day” code could be used with Photo Tourism, Photosynth or other software designed to view the model output.
Read the UW News article here. More information on the research project here.
Here’s a terrific TechFlash post, “UW’s latest photo technology could supercharge Photosynth.” Also see posts on MSNBC “Cosmic Log,” here, and on Slashdot, here. Brier Dudley’s blog in the Seattle Times here. itbusiness.ca here. NewScientist here. National Geographic News here. Popular Science here. Read more →
KOMO news reports on the UW CSE Kindle DX pilot project.
“‘Our students are going to have these devices. They are going to use them. They are going to share with us their experiences. I can assure you they will give us an honest appraisal,’ said Grossman.
“Lazowska says whether its an Amazon device, an Apple device or another company’s technology, he believes the textbook is heading the way of the blackboard.
“There may be no more pencils and no more books. But as for teacher’s dirty looks, even a Kindle can’t promise to do away with them for good.”
Read the story here. Learn more about the UW CSE Kindle DX pilot project here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Yoshi Kohno talks to Xconomy reporter Rachel Tompa about computer security and privacy.
“‘We’re seeing computers in all aspects of our lives, in medical devices, exercise equipment, cars, airplanes, utility systems, power lines, everywhere,’ Kohno said. ‘One of my main concerns is that while we’ve thought a lot about security for our desktop computers, computing is much broader than that, and we need to address security for all of it.'”
Kohno, who is kicking off the Technology’s Alliance’s Science and Technology Discovery Series with a lecture this morning, also teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on computer security and privacy at UW, and has received National Science Foundation for a computer security and privacy outreach effort for middle school and high school students in the next year.
Read the full article here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Yoky Matsuoka is featured in the “Fresh Faces” section of Engineering: Go for It, a publication that opens up the world of engineering for students, their parents, teachers, and counselors. eGFI is published twice a year by the American Society for Engineering Education.
View the eGFI magazine here.
Interactive eGFI 1-12 site here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel‘s “pinpoint utility meter” is featured on the National Academy of Engineering’s weekly radio broadcast and podcast.
“Ever wonder why you can get itemized bills for credit cards and telephone calls but not electricity and water? A new technology promises that possibility.
“The engineering breakthrough would allow just one easy-to-install sensor per utility. Simply plug into an outlet to monitor your house’s entire electric system. The inventor, Shwetak Patel of the University of Washington, says everything that draws power – down to a lightbulb – has its own electrical signature.”
Listen to the full interview here. Read more →
2009 UW CSE Bachelors alumnus Jim George writes to faculty members Brian Curless and Raj Rao: “Since graduating this spring I’ve been working with an artist in New York to make an interactive dog for storefront windows. The project has been accepted into a few festivals and is really well received by the public. I couldn’t have done it without the great background in computer vision and computer graphics I got from your classes this spring, it’s been incredible to see so many of the topics we covered pivotal for making this fun art project happen.”
Jim worked with artist Karolina Sobecka to bring her concept to “life.”
Check it out at http://www.gravitytrap.com/sniff/! Read more →
Cloud services propose to save companies money by allowing them to run new applications without having to buy new hardware. Now researchers from UCSD and MIT, including UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Stefan Savage, have launched a “side-channel” attack on data stored in the cloud.
“‘A virtual machine is not proof against all of the kinds of side-channel attacks that we’ve been hearing about for years,’ said [UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus] Stefan Savage, associate professor with UC San Diego, and one of the authors of the paper.”
The side-channel research brings a whole new set of problems, according to UW CSE’s Yoshi Kohno, who is quoted in the article. “‘It’s exactly these types of concerns – the threat of the unknown – that is going to make a lot of people hesitant to use cloud services such as EC2.'”
Full PCWorld article here. Read the research paper here. Read more →
A brochure introducing the three new members of the UW CSE faculty is now available – you can download it here.
Su-In Lee, whose research focuses on devising machine learning techniques for understanding the genetic basis for complex traits, will have appointments in CSE and the Department of Genome Sciences. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford and spent the following year as a visitor at Carnegie Mellon.
Anup Rao joins our theory group. He received his Ph.D. from UT-Austin, and is now completing 2.5 years as a postdoc, divided between the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University.
Luke Zettlemoyer received his Ph.D. from MIT, followed by a one-year postdoc at the University of Edinburgh. He works on a variety of topics in artificial intelligence, including problems in natural language processing, machine learning, and decision making under uncertainty.
Read more →
Spaceflight, molecular gastronomy, wireless, and computer science:
Be there!
See the schedule here. See the poster here. TechFlash post here. Xconomy post here. Read more →