“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.”
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“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 →
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“Available at photosynth.com, the program is a combination of technologies from Microsoft Research, the University of Washington and Seadragon Software, a Seattle-based startup that Microsoft acquired in 2006. Up until now, it has been a technology preview. Everyday users could view custom synths of photos created by Microsoft and selected others, but they couldn’t create collections of their own.” Read more →
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“Photosynth is a distinctly Seattle innovation. It makes use of technology for smoothly streaming large digital images, developed by Seadragon Software, a Ballard startup Microsoft acquired. The system for arranging photo collections in their three-dimensional context was developed by University of Washington computer scientists.” Read more →
Each year since 1999, Technology Review has honored 35 young innovators under the age of 35 — the TR 35. The 2008 TR 35 includes:
- Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Microsoft Live Labs, recognized for creating Photosynth by combining work from his startup Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft) with work by UW CSE professor Steve Seitz, UW CSE graduate student Noah Snavely, and Microsoft Research computer vision researcher Rick Szeliski.
- Tanzeem Choudhury from Dartmouth, an Affilate faculty member in UW CSE, recognized for her work on inferring social networks automatically that she conducted at Intel Research Seattle in collaboration with UW CSE professors Gaetano Borriello and Henry Kautz, UW CSE graduate student Danny Wyatt, and UW EE professor Jeff Bilmes.
- Merrie Morris from Microsoft Research, an Affiliate faculty member in UW CSE, recognized for her work in collaborative information gathering.
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CSE’s Ed Lazowska writes: “How can we work together to establish, articulate, and pursue compelling visions for our field – visions that will shape the intellectual future of the field, that will catalyze research investment and public support, and that will attract the best and brightest minds of a new generation? The National Science Foundation asked the Computing Research Association to create the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to address this challenge. The mechanics of the CCC have been described elsewhere; in this column, I focus on the substance …” Read more →
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Press coverage of the SIGCOMM paper “Interactive WiFi Connectivity for Mobile Vehicles” by John Zahorjan (UW), Ratul Mahajan (UW Ph.D., now at Microsoft Research), and Aruna Balasubramanian, Brian Neil Levine, and Arun Venkataramani (UMass Amherst).
“‘Today’s Wi-Fi handoff protocols are incredibly fragile in outdoor environments and mobile environments,’ Mahajan said in an interview. Under existing approaches, he explained, computers and devices are ‘artificially limited to talking to only one access point, or only one base station at a time, even though there may be other base stations’ in the area.” Read more →
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Seattle Weekly profiles Anu Taranath, wife of CSE faculty member Raj Rao, in their annual “Best of Seattle” feature: “‘Brilliant and inspirational.’ ‘An incredible woman.’ ‘Amazing’: just a few of the things former students have written about the tiny, quiet, and very pregnant woman sitting at a Lake City bakery table. Dr. Anu Taranath is the highest-rated member of the University of Washington English faculty on ratemyprofessors.com – despite having one of the lower ‘easiness’ ratings.” Read more →
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UW’s Adeona project garnered lots of press and blog coverage after a presentation at Gnomedex.
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“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 →
