UW CSE and Microsoft Research sponsored their 13th annual Summer Research Institute, held July 27-29th. The purpose of each institute is to gather thought leaders to deeply explore a timely research topic. The 2009 institute focused on “Unraveling the technological knot in homes.” Modern homes are well on their way to becoming one of the richest everyday computing environments with a diverse mix of inter-connected devices, infrastructure and services. The goal of this summer institute was to articulate the key aspects of this problem space, identify new and promising solution approaches, and encourage inter-disciplinary research efforts that will create the revolution of the intelligent home.
Links to presentations from the institute, including keynote presentations by Anders Vinberg, Microsoft, and Keith Edwards, Georgia Tech, may be viewed here.
Information on past summer institutes may be viewed here. Read more →
The Seattle Times describes UW CSE’s Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Computing, organized by Professor Richard Ladner with support from the National Science Foundation.
“The summer academy – the only one of its kind in the country – introduces deaf and hard-of-hearing students to careers in computer science. For many of the participants, it’s their first glimpse inside the high-tech world. For some, it is the first time as students that they have been able to spontaneously talk to their classmates.
“‘It’s inspiring,’ said 17-year-old Johanna Lucht, of Anchorage, through an interpreter. ‘It’s opening a whole new world for me.'”
Read the rest of this terrific article here. Read more →
Recent UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus Jonathan Carlson has received the 2009 University of Washington Graduate School Distinguished Dissertation Award. Carlson’s thesis work on “Phylogenetic Dependency Networks: Inferring Patterns of Adaptation in HIV,” co-supervised by Larry Ruzzo of UW CSE and David Heckerman of Microsoft Research, seeks to enable improved HIV vaccines by identifying HIV adaptations that the virus employs against the immune system. Carlson now works with Heckerman in the Microsoft Research eScience Group in Los Angeles. Read more →
Microsoft’s Bing Travel technology – which provides advice on when to buy in order to minimize cost – represents technology from UW CSE spinoff Farecast, acquired by Microsoft for more than $100 million last year. See a new spot that captures the magic of Bing Travel, here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Richard Ladner talks with Rachel Tompa in an Xconomy article regarding the hurdles that must be cleared to make a phone or a computer usable to the blind or deaf. He believes that technologies developed for the blind and deaf may eventually lead to broader technological advancements. This belief is not such a far-fetched idea: mobile GPS, now used by milliions, was originally developed as an aid for the blind. Ladner, along with his students, use engineering and computational tools to work on several of these hurdles—and the commercial applications could have far-ranging impact.
Ladner is currently working with UW TechTransfer to commercialize MobileASL, his oldest project on accessibility for the deaf. This project uses video compression technology to enable signing over video cell phones on low-bandwidth wireless networks (such as those in the U.S.). Currently, deaf people can’t reliably use video cell phones to communicate using sign language, because the videos are too choppy to be intelligible.
Read the full article here. Read more →
NPR’s “Living on Earth” features UW CSE’s Hydrosense technology:
“In the heat of summer, droughts bring water rationing and limits on outdoor use. A new household sensor could soon detect every drip coming out of your pipes, making it easier to conserve water.
“Professor Shwetak Patel from the University of Washington has invented a gadget that he calls Hydrosense … A single Hydrosense device can detect water use from anywhere in the house.”
Listen to the story here. Read more →
Xconomy reports on the UW Tech Showcase, where faculty members Yoky Matsuoka, Zoran Popovic, Brian Curless, and Steve Seitz demo’d their latest innovations to leaders of the gaming industry.
“In my time, I’ve seen dozens of really cool academic projects in graphics, imaging, and robotics that would never see the light of day in a commercial game, despite their best intentions. Because of the caliber of the UW labs and the nature of their applications, I wonder if they’ve actually turned the corner on some very tough problems that will have major implications for game developers.”
See the full post here. Read more →
Widespread press coverage of UW CSE’s “Vanish” project. From the New York Times: “A group of computer scientists at the University of Washington has developed a way to make electronic messages ‘self destruct’ after a certain period of time, like messages in sand lost to the surf. The researchers said they think the new software, called Vanish, … will be needed more and more as personal and business information is stored not on personal computers, but on centralized machines, or servers.”
Researchers on the project include CSE PhD candidate Roxana Geambasu, CSE undergrad Amit Levy, and CSE professors Tadayoshi Kohno and Hank Levy.
Read the UW press release here.
See research project information here.
Read the NY Times article here. (It was the 4th most emailed science article, ranking just ahead of “Toilet is Fixed on Space Station.”)
TechFlash here. KUOW (Seattle NPR) here. KING-5 TV here. Ars Technica here. UPI.com here. Network World here. The Chronicle of Higher Education here. Science Daily here. Discovery Channel blog here. CRA/CCC “Computing Research Highlight of the Week” here. Science Friday NPR interview here. Economist here. USA Today Technology blog here. Read more →
UW CSE’s Yoshi Kohno is featured in the Times of India — a report on Yoshi’s recent paper in the journal Neurosurgical Focus. Read the article here (pdf). Read more →
“The Indus civilization, which flourished throughout much of the third millennium B.C., was the most extensive society of its time … About 22 years ago, in Hyderabad, India, an eighth-grade student named Rajesh Rao turned the page of a history textbook and first learned about this fascinating civilization and its mysterious script. In the years that followed, Rao’s schooling and profession took him in a different direction – he wound up pursuing computer science, which he teaches today at the University of Washington in Seattle – but he monitored Indus scholarship carefully, keeping tabs on the dozens of failed attempts at making sense of the script. Even as he studied artificial intelligence and robotics, Rao amassed a small library of books and monographs on the Indus script, about 30 of them. On a nearby bookshelf, he also kept the cherished eighth-grade history textbook that introduced him to the Indus.”
Read the article here. Read more →
