“Continued investment is necessary to maintain our leadership and competitiveness. Achieving many of the ‘societal grand challenges’ of this century will depend critically on further fundamental advances in IT: the engineering of new tools that will transform scientific discovery; advancing personalized learning; shifting towards predictive, preventive, personalized, participatory medicine; enhancing national security; developing smart controls and smart electric grids needed to address energy and climate challenges. Many of the ‘grand challenges’ of IT itself will have broad implications for society: securing cyberspace; designing truly scalable systems; enhancing virtual reality; creating the future of networking; infusing ‘computational thinking’ into a wide variety of disciplines which are themselves becoming ‘information sciences’; driving advances in entirely new approaches to computing such as quantum computing. Research is the key to making progress on these grand challenges.”
Article here. Read more →
Read the article here.
“A group at the University of Washington has developed software that for the first time enables deaf and hard-of-hearing people to use sign language over a mobile phone. UW engineers got the phones working together this spring, and recently received a National Science Foundation grant for a 20-person field project that will begin next year in Seattle …” Read more →
Read the article here.
“More than the content, deliverables and events, Stephen says he most enjoys working with the members of our community, from volunteers to contributors to contractors. With this award, we collectively and formally reciprocate by expressing how much we enjoy working with Stephen, and to give him the recognition he never expects but so clearly deserves.” Read more →
Read the article here.
“The project, known as the Vocal Joystick, is designed to allow someone to control a computer cursor using nothing more than their voice … Malkin demonstrated the software in real-time, showing how it is used in conjunction with a simple game where a player controls a fish swimming around trying to catch other fish. He proceeded to sound out vowel after vowel, and sure enough, on-screen, his fish moved around dexterously, chomping up snack after snack. The Gnomedex crowd went wild.”
Vocal Joystick is a collaboration between UW Electrical Engineering and Computer Science & Engineering. Read more →
Read the article here.
“When I saw Photosynth for the first time about two years ago, it joined a small handful of new products that really captured my attention. The software arranges sets of photos in 3-D context and allows viewers to navigate fluidly from image to image, moving their gaze from a building’s facade to a detail shot of a specific fresco, for example.
“Photosynth is a distinctly Seattle invention. It emerged from a collaboration of University of Washington graduate student Noah Snavely and computer science professor Steven Seitz, with Microsoft researcher Richard Szeliski, as well as a Ballard startup Microsoft acquired. Now at least part of that team is at it again.
“In a paper presented at this week’s SIGGRAPH (a meeting of the world’s top computer graphics researchers), the UW/Microsoft team described the next iteration of their work …” Read more →
Read the article here.
The National Medal of Technology honors America’s leading innovators. Cutler is best known for his contributions to operating systems: RSX-11/M, VAX/VMS, VAXeln, and Windows NT. CSE’s Ed Lazowska, in his letter of support for Bill Gates’s nomination of Cutler, wrote: “Cutler … has an incredible facility for creating designs that will work, for leading teams that implement these designs according to spec – correct, on-time, within budget, and meeting performance goals – and for building the most critical and challenging aspects himself … Project after project, for more than 30 years, Cutler has succeeded at accomplishing the impossible (or at least the highly unlikely) through insight, talent, skill, leadership, and force of will. The result, as the nomination states, is ‘fundamental contributions to computer architecture, to compilers, to operating systems, and to software engineering’ that ‘enabled a trillion dollars of industry revenue.'” Read more →
Christian Bell, Pradeep Shenoy, Rawichote Chalodhom, and Raj Rao’s paper “Control of a humanoid robot by a non-invasive brain-computer interface in humans” was the featured article in the most recent issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering.
Full cover. Read more →
Read the article here.
“In its report ‘Cybercities 2008,’ the AeA said that Seattle led the nation in net new technology jobs in 2006, adding 7,800 people to the local tech workforce. Indeed, the Washington offices of Microsoft, Amazon.com, Adobe Systems, Google and Intel say a lot about the opportunities for graduates of the University of Washington.” Read more →
Read the article here.
“Ever since Bram Cohen invented BitTorrent, Web traffic has never been the same … Peer-to-peer networking, or P2P, has become the method of choice for sharing music and videos … Experts estimate that peer-to-peer systems generate 50 to 80 percent of all Internet traffic … Tensions remain, however, between users of bandwidth-hungry peer-to-peer users and struggling Internet service providers …
“To ease this tension, researchers at the University of Washington and Yale University propose a neighborly approach to file swapping, sharing preferentially with nearby computers. This would allow peer-to-peer traffic to continue growing without clogging up the Internet’s major arteries, and could provide a basis for the future of peer-to-peer systems. A paper on the new system, known as P4P, will be presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications meeting in Seattle.” Read more →
“Ethan John professes to not enjoy writing code. Testing, on the other hand, he enjoys immensely. That makes him my kind of Computer Science graduate: the kind who codes only because it gives him an excuse to test. Ethan currently works for Isilon Systems, who I am sure is happy to have the advantage of his love for testing.
“Here is what Ethan has to say:
“DDJ: What was your first introduction to testing?
“EJ: I was in school, and got a job as a research assistant on a project called UrbanSim. It was an Agile house, minus pair programming, so they were doing test driven and iterative development in Java. I had only heard about TDD a few months prior, and my initial experiences with it had been positive. Unit tested code tended to work more consistently out of the gate than otherwise, and I was sold after just a few weeks on the project …”
Article here. Read more →
