Andrea James’ article and blog (Seattle P-I Seattle Tech Report) highlight how Amazon has had to overcome its public perception as an online bookseller so that developers and researchers would take it seriously as a technology provider.
“Last week, Amazon unveiled a new offering that would make its ‘cloud computing’ service even more appealing to researchers. Amazon will make large data sets available free — some of which are so large they would take hours to download.
“Amazon’s pricing model is attractive enough to make it take off, said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Endowed Chair in Computer Science at the University of Washington.
“Making public data available is ‘transformative,’ Lazowska said. ‘If you’re one of the very few companies or scientists who keeps a large cluster of computers going constantly at 95 percent utilization, it’s not for you. But for anyone else, it’s a win.'”
Read the full article here and Andrea’s blog here. Read more →
Zoetrope, an application that is designed to help users easily search the historical web, is in the news this week. This tool is featured as the research highlight of the week by the Computing Community Consortium, and is also profiled by Technology Review‘s Erica Naone.
Technology Review coverage here.
“Computing Research Highlight of the Week” here.
We reported earlier on Zoetrope coverage here and here. Read more →
UW CSE undergraduates Julia Schwarz and Jessica Leung were among 66 students from across the country recognized in the 2009 Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Award competition. Read more →
Richard Ladner, UW CSE professor, was one of 15 recipients of the 2008 Purpose Prize, an award for social innovators over 60. Ladner has shifted his focus from computer science theory to developing better technologies for disabled people. He and his students and colleagues have developed such applications as WebAnywhere, software to allow the blind to use the internet on the go, MobileASL, an application for deaf people to use video communication on cell phones, and a faster way to translate textbook graphics into Braille for blind students. The Purpose Prize, now in its sixth year, is awarded by Civic Ventures and funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies and the John Templeton Foundation.
See Civic Ventures’ press release here. Read more →
A group of University of Washington researchers are working on MobileASL (American Sign Language) which would allow the hearing-impaired to use sign language on cellphones. The MobileASL project is led by Eve Riskin, a UW professor in electrical engineering; co-leaders include Computer Science & Engineering professor Richard Ladner, and Information School professor Jacob Wobbrock.
We reported earlier on UW News coverage of MobileASL here.
Read the full article here. Read more →
“For Richard Ladner, it isn’t so much about helping people who are blind or deaf get better use of technology as it is about working with people who have disabilities to help us all get better use out of technology.
“‘Few people seem to be aware that a lot of mainstream technologies started out as access technologies,’ the University of Washington computer scientist said.” …
Read the complete article here. Read more →
December’s Entrepreneur Magazine features an article on Adeona: New tracking software monitors your missing laptop’s whereabouts.
“Absolute Software and Brigadoon Security Group have long been leaders of the laptop-tracking pack. But in July, a new offering emerged: Adeona. Developed by University of California Ph.D. students Gabriel Maganis and Thomas Ristenpart with University of Washington faculty Tadayoshi Kohno and Arvind Krishnamurthy, the software is open source and, get this, free.”…
We reported earlier on UW News coverage of Adeona here. Read more →
ReadWriteWeb staff writer Sarah Perez writes about Zoetrope in Zoetrope: New Web Crawler Allows For Searching, Analyzing The Ever-Changing Web. She makes the point that the project brings archival web searching to the masses, quoting CSE professor Dan Weld: “Zoetrope is aimed at the casual researcher. It’s really for anyone who has a question.”
A joint project with Adobe Systems, other researchers working on the project include CSE professor James Fogarty, CSE graduate student Eytan Adar, and Adobe researcher and CSE alumna Mira Dontcheva.
We reported earlier on UW News coverage of Zoetrope here. You can view a five-minute video on Zoetrope at UW News here. Read more →
King5 News reports on Friendbo in this video.
“Sharing photos online can be a bit scary for Facebook and MySpace
users because they don’t necessarily want everyone to see
everything. But new technology developed by UW students [including CSE graduate student Michael Toomim ] could soon change online social
networking.” Read more →
