Read the article in the Seattle Times here.
“Say ‘ahh’ and the cursor zips toward the northeast corner of the computer screen. ‘Ooo’ sends it shooting straight south. Want it to head southeast? Say ‘ohh.’ To make the cursor do a circle or figure eight, let vowel sounds bleed into one another, like eee into ahh into aww and so on. You can make it hurry or slow by regulating the volume of your voice. To open a link, make a soft clicking sound.
“So goes the University of Washington’s ‘Vocal Joystick’ software, which uses sounds to help people with disabilities use their computers.
“Its development has been a multidisciplinary task with faculty and students from several university departments – electrical engineering, linguistics, computer science, as well as the Information School blending their expertise. (It is just one of a series of UW-generated assistive-technology projects ranging from enabling the blind to use touch screens to developing an alternative to the point-and-click method of computer navigation).” Read more →
Read the article at ABC News here.
“Kohno and his colleagues at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, have developed Adeona, a free piece of software that records location information in such a way that only a legitimate user should ever be able to gain access to it.” Read more →
Read the article at Xconomy here.
Xconomy interviews UW CSE’s David Wetherall, Director of Intel Research Seattle. “‘Our strongest ties are with the University,’ he replies, citing joint projects with faculty in computer science, electrical engineering, public health, and aeronautics and astronautics.” Read more →
Read the article here.
“An application for household registration of births and deaths is being developed in a project under the umbrella of the UN Millennium Project.
“Brian DeRenzi, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington in the US, is helping test the application as it is being fine tuned at a health facility in Uganda.
“In Uganda, DeRenzi says, there are community health workers who go from house to house to collect health information and do health promotion. The goal is to enable those health workers to use the service to register births and deaths on their mobiles and send the information to a central database via GPRS.” Read more →
Read the article here.
CSE Affiliate Dave Cutler received the National Medal of Technology & Innovation at a White House ceremony on September 29, “for having designed and implemented standards for real-time, personal, and server-based operating systems, carrying these projects from conception through design, engineering, and production for Digital Equipment Corporation’s RSX-11 and VAX/VMS, and for Microsoft’s Windows NT-based computer operating systems; and for his fundamental contributions to computer architecture, compilers, operating systems, and software engineering.” Read more →
Read the article here.
“As college students head back to school with gleaming new laptops, some will, unfortunately, see the last of their machine in a library, cafeteria or dorm room … Researchers at the University of Washington and at the University of California, San Diego have created a new laptop theft-protection tool. The software not only provides a virtual watchdog on your precious machine – reporting the laptop’s location when it connects to the Internet – but does so without letting anybody but you monitor the whereabouts.”
Adeona website here. Read more →
Read the article here.
Nature profiles four MacArthur “Genius” Award winners, including UW CSE’s Yoky Matsuoka. Read more →
Read the article here.
“Sitting at the final table of the prestigious Borgata Poker Open last week, $1.4 million on the line and a clear advantage in chips, University of Washington graduate Vivek Rajkumar had a plan …
“This isn’t the situation either he or his parents envisioned a few short years ago when Rajkumar was compiling his whiz-kid academic resume: He enrolled in the U-Dub’s Early Entrance Program at 15 and graduated before turning 19 with degrees in applied mathematics and computer engineering …” Read more →
Read the article here.
“As a hearing child of deaf parents, Richard Ladner saw firsthand the impact of communications technology on his parents’ lives. ‘Back in the early 1970s, they got their first teletypewriter,’ he said. ‘It was a very big box, the size of a computer, but it opened a new world for them.'”
MobileASL project web page here. Read more →
Read the article here.
“One of the scenes from The Empire Strikes Back gives you an idea of what Yoky Matsuoka is pursuing. It’s the part where Luke Skywalker tests out a prosthetic hand that he can control with all the dexterity of a natural one, well enough to wield one mean light saber.
“Matsuoka, a MacArthur “genius” award winner (and an Xconomist), and one of the up-and-comers on the faculty at the University of Washington, described her work in what she calls “neurobotics” this morning at the Technology Alliance’s Science & Technology Discovery Series in Seattle.” Read more →
