Read the article here.
UW CSE’s “Web Tripwires” paper was received enthusiastically (and covered extensively) when presented at this week’s NSDI conference. “Web Tripwires” measures the extent to which ISPs (or others) modify web pages “in flight,” e.g., to insert revenue-generating advertisements.
Run the experiment here
FAQ and research paper here
Slashdot here
ars technica article here
PC World article here
eCanadaNow article here Read more →
Read the article here.
“Microsoft is the mystery buyer of Farecast …
“Madrona Venture Group’s Matt McIlwain, the earliest venture investor in Farecast, said the company entertained multiple offers … he said the deal is notable because it touches nearly every part of the innovation economy in the Pacific Northwest.
“Farecast was started by University of Washington computer scientist Oren Etzioni, initially bankrolled by Madrona, built with people from local companies such as Alaska Airlines and AdRelevance and, ultimately, acquired by Microsoft.”
PI Microsoft Blog here
PI Venture Blog here
Seattle Times here
Puget Sound Business Journal here Read more →
Read the article here.
“A common new technology for monitoring defibrillators is vulnerable to hacking and even to reprogramming that could stop the devices from delivering a lifesaving shock …” Read more →
Read the (pdf) article here.
“Alexei Czeskis … is one of the initial recipients of the new Students First fellowships — the Hacherl Endowed Graduate Fellowship established by alumnus Don Hacherl (’85) … Czeskis is now immersed in computer security research under the mentorship of Assistant Professor Yoshi Kohno, who last fall was recognized by Technology Review as one ofthe nation’s top 35 innovators under age 35.” Read more →
Read the article here.
Wired riffs on CSE professor Yoshi Kohno’s undergraduate computer security course. “Good engineering involves thinking about how things can be made to work; the security mindset involves thinking about how things can be made to fail … I’ve often speculated about how much of this is innate, and how much is teachable … Which is why CSE 484, an undergraduate computer-security course taught this quarter at the University of Washington, is so interesting to watch. Professor Tadayoshi Kohno is trying to teach a security mindset …” Read more →
Read the article here.
The Chronicle of Higher Education interviews UW CSE professor Richard Ladner. “Disabled students face a host of challenges. Mr. Ladner, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, has spent much of his career trying to improve their opportunities for success in the discipline. The Computing Research Association recently gave him its A. Nico Habermann Award for advancing underrepresented groups.” Read more →
Read the article here.
“Junior Koshal Thirumalai, from India, is majoring in computer engineering at the UW. ‘It doesn’t make sense to go anywhere else if you are into computers,’ he says.” Read more →
Read the article here.
“Some University of Washington students, faculty and staff are being tracked as they move about the computer-science building, with details of where they’ve been, and with whom, stored in a database.
“Professor Gaetano Borriello checks a computer to find graduate student Evan Welbourne’s last location: on the fourth floor, outside room 452 at 10:38 a.m. Wednesday. He opens another screen to reveal the building’s floor plan, and a blinking green dot representing Welbourne shows him walking down the hall.
“If it seems a bit like Big Brother, that’s the intention. The project is meant to explore both positive and negative aspects of a world saturated with technology that can monitor people and objects remotely.
“‘What we want to understand,’ Borriello said, ‘is what makes it useful, what makes it threatening and how to balance the two.'” Read more →
“Photosynth was born from … the marriage of Seadragon and Photo Tourism, a Microsoft project intended to revolutionize the way photo sets are packaged and displayed. Photo Tourism had begun as the doctoral thesis of a zealous 26-year-old University of Washington graduate student named Noah Snavely. One of Snavely’s advisors was Rick Szeliski, a computer-vision researcher at Microsoft Research, the company’s R&D arm … Working with Szeliski and a University of Washington professor named Steve Seitz, Snavely was intent on coding a way forward through a computationally forbidding challenge: how to get photos to merge, on the basis of their similarities, into a physical 3-D model that human eyes could recognize as part of an authentic, real-world landscape.”
“Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna wants to better protect computer users from spyware. He’s called for legislation to close loopholes in existing law. KUOW’s Joshua McNichols has more.”
Article here. Read more →