Today UW CSE’s Mark Oskin brought his graduate computer architecture class plus computer architecture faculty colleagues on an end-of-the-quarter expedition to Paul G. Allen’s phenomenal Living Computer Museum.
Student Amrita Mazumdar sends this photo documenting Luis Ceze’s downfall in the retro game Oregon Trail.
(A bit less than 2 years ago, Luis actually broke his leg, with a bit of help from CSE chair Hank Levy – check it out here.) Read more →
A new technology developed by UW CSE and EE researchers could take the “touch” out of touchscreen and transform the way we interact with our mobile devices. FingerIO, which was developed in the Networks & Mobile Systems Lab led by CSE professor Shyam Gollakota, employs sonar to enable users to interact with their smartphones and smartwatches by gesturing or writing on any nearby surface.
From the UW news release:
“As mobile and wearable devices such as smartwatches grow smaller, it gets tougher for people to interact with screens the size of a matchbook.
“That could change with a new sonar technology developed by University of Washington computer scientists and electrical engineers that allows you to interact with mobile devices by writing or gesturing on any nearby surface—a tabletop, a sheet of paper, or even in mid-air….
“‘You can’t type very easily onto a smartwatch display, so we wanted to transform a desk or any area around a device into an input surface,’ said lead author Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, a UW doctoral student in Computer Science & Engineering. ‘I don’t need to instrument my fingers with any other sensors—I just use my finger to write something on a desk or any other surface and the device can track it with high resolution.'”
Vikram Iyer (left) and Rajalakshmi Nandakumar
FingerIO uses the device’s own speaker, emitting an inaudible sound wave that bounces off the user’s finger and is then recorded using the device’s microphone. That signal is used to calculate the finger’s location in space. The researchers employed a common technique in wireless communication, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, to achieve sub-centimeter tracking accuracy.
Sonar has significant advantages over other approaches. For example, unlike camera-based finger tracking, it does not require a direct line of sight—which means it can work through fabric, such as a pocket or a sleeve. And compared to radar, sonar does not require as much computing power or custom hardware to work.
“‘Acoustic signals are great—because sound waves travel much slower than the radio waves used in radar, you don’t need as much processing bandwidth so everything is simpler,’ said Gollakota…’And from a cost perspective, almost every device has a speaker and microphones so you can achieve this without any special hardware.'”
The team, which also includes EE Ph.D. student Vikram Iyer and CSE affiliate faculty member Desney Tan (Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research), will present its research paper on FingerIO at the upcoming CHI 2016 conference in San Jose, California, where it has been recognized with an honorable mention. Nandakumar previously was awarded Best Presentation for FingerIO at the Microsoft Research Student Summit on Mobility, Systems, and Networking.
Read the full news release here, and visit the FingerIO web page here. Watch a video demonstration here, and view the Discovery Channel Canada segment here. Also check out coverage by The Oregonian, GeekWire, Gizmag, FastCompany and Motherboard. Read more →
UW CSE senior Josue Rios was one of the first students to benefit from Washington State’s REAL Hope Act, an initiative that enables undocumented immigrants to access state financial aid for higher education. Nearly 20 years ago, Rios and his family left Venezuela in fear; these days, he is looking forward to graduating from UW CSE with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering. An excellent article by UW journalism student Kayla Roberts that was published today in Seattle’s civic-focused online journal, Crosscut, highlights Rios’ journey and how the REAL Hope Act has lived up to its name:
“Josue Rios, a 21-year-old student at the University of Washington, escaped violence in Venezuela with his parents when he was two years old.
“The plan was to stay in Washington six months on a tourist visa. When his family home in Venezuela was invaded and sold on false documentation, this turned into 19 years.
“‘Because we had nothing to go back to, because everything was taken away from us, we decided to start over here,’ Rios said. This meant applying himself academically in high school and eventually pursuing a college education. He is set to graduate in the spring from the computer science and engineering department at UW.”
The author notes that because undocumented immigrants are ineligible for federal financial aid, the state program is the only government support available to enable students like Rios to pursue higher education. Read the full article here.
Rios has been an active contributor to the UW CSE community, serving as a teaching assistant in our Systems Programming and Introduction to Digital Design courses. He spent last summer as an intern at Amazon and has plans to work with Microsoft and a start-up company after graduation.
Thanks, Josue, for sharing your inspirational story. We look forward to celebrating your achievements with you in June! Read more →
Today, Google announced that UW Ph.D. student Tianqi Chen has been chosen as a 2016 Google Ph.D. Fellow in machine learning. Chen works with professor Carlos Guestrin in the UW MODE Lab (Machine Learning, Optimization, Distributed Systems and Statistics) and is the creator of XGBoost, an open-source, end-to-end tree boosting system that is designed to be efficient, flexible and portable.
Tree boosting is a highly effective and widely used machine learning method. Researchers have embraced XGBoost because it is capable of running 10 times faster on a single machine and of scaling beyond billions of examples while using fewer resources compared to existing systems. More than half of the teams who won Kaggle machine learning challenges last year used it, as did every top-10 winning team at the 2015 KDDCup. Learn more about Chen’s work on the XGBoost project page here.
Arvind Satyanarayan, a Ph.D. student who works with UW CSE professor Jeff Heer in the Interactive Data Lab, also won a Google Ph.D. Fellowship – his in human-computer interaction. While technically a student at Stanford University (Heer moved from Stanford to UW several years ago), Satyanarayan spends the bulk of his time here in UW CSE; he is currently co-instructor with Jeff of the graduate course in User Interface Software & Technology in the Masters of Human-Computer Interaction & Design program. Learn more about Satyanarayan’s work here.
Read the Google announcement here.
Google Ph.D. Fellows are considered to be among the most promising young academic researchers across the globe. The competition has been particularly kind to UW CSE students, including past winners Aaron Parks and Kyle Rector (2015), Robert Gens and Vincent Liu (2014), Adrian Sampson (2013), Tom Bergan (2011), and Roxana Geambasu and Michael Piatek (2009).
Congratulations, Tianqi and Arvind, and thanks to Google for supporting UW CSE students and their work! Read more →
Sergey Levine, who will join the UW CSE faculty this spring, has been recognized with a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research.
Sergey’s research focuses on the intersection between control and machine learning, with the aim of developing algorithms and techniques that can endow machines with the ability to autonomously acquire the skills for executing complex tasks. In particular, he is interested in how learning can be used to acquire complex behavioral skills, in order to endow machines with greater autonomy and intelligence.
Sergey received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2014. He is spending the current year as a post-doctoral researcher at UC Berkeley working with Pieter Abbeel, and as a research scientist at Google.
Congratulations Sergey! Read more →
Lars Crawford, Brian Mogen, Tyler Libey and Dimitrios Gklezakos
The finals of the inaugural Health Innovation Challenge, hosted by the UW Foster School of Business Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, took place yesterday on campus. Three finalists with a UW CSE connection—FitTraction, HLTH, and MultiModal Health—were among the 18 interdisciplinary teams (out of a competitive field of 34) invited to pitch their ideas to improve health with technology to a roomful of judges drawn from the local community.
MultiModal Health, which captured third place, developed an interactive platform for physical rehabilitation. The company’s vHAB product line gamifies therapy exercises to improve patient engagement and outcomes and provide real-time data to providers. The MultiModal Health team includes UW CSE student Dimitrios Gklezakos, bioengineering students Tyler Libey and Brian Mogen, and neurobiology alum Lars Crawford.
FitTraction is a mobile and web app that could revolutionize the fitness industry by providing a way for gym members and their trainers to share and track workouts. The goal of FitTraction is to improve motivation and accountability—which will lead to improved health. The FitTraction team includes UW CSE students Ian Turner and Justin Lee, and entrepreneurship and information systems student Christian Taylor.
The HLTH app is designed to empower underserved and low-income populations to follow medically recommended preventative health schedules. HLTH was created by UW CSE student Travis Chen, medical student Daniel Dudley, HCDE student Anastacia Jaime, and international marketing student Yamato Abe.
Read more about the winning teams here, and check out the terrific GeekWire article on the competition.
Congratulations to Dimitrios and his teammates, and well-done to everyone from UW CSE and across the campus who participated! Read more →
UW faculty members David Baker (Biochemistry; Director of UW’s Institute for Protein Design), Tom Daniel (Biology; Co-Director of the Institute of Neuroengineering), Ed Lazowska (CSE; Director of the eScience Institute) and Dan Schwartz (Chemical Engineering; Director of the Clean Energy Institute) discuss the role of institutes at universities:
“University research institutes such as ours eliminate sclerotic silos and bureaucratic boundaries by deftly blending teams of super-smart students, faculty, and research scientists from interconnected subject areas. As a result, these institutions stand the best chance of identifying and solving the toughest scientific and technological challenges of our age – they are confronting tomorrow today….
“These institutes stand in stark contrast to the traditional university structures of schools, colleges, and departments, which take years to create and decades — if not centuries — to eliminate. Success in the 21st Century depends upon agility. When an opportunity presents itself, bring together the optimal set of individuals to respond. When another opportunity succeeds it, restructure.”
Read more here. Read more →
Joe Heitzeberg (left) and Ethan Lowry (Kurt Schlosser/GeekWire)
Crowd Cow, a new company launched by UW CSE alum Joe Heitzeberg (B.S., ’05) and fellow startup veteran Ethan Lowry, offers a different kind of meat market—one in which Northwest steak lovers become “steak holders” by crowdsourcing their evening meal.
Unlike typical cattle-sharing arrangements that require a significant investment in freezer space, Crowd Cow enables customers to purchase only the quantity and cuts that they want online, from sources that are committed to sustainable and humane practices. By tapping into the crowdsourcing trend and uniting quality with convenience, the company hopes to transform the way people shop for meat.
From a recent article on GeekWire:
“Crowd Cow removes the mystery by working directly with select Washington ranches that are producing the best possible meat from start to finish. It also brings a high-tech sensibility to the age-old practice of processing and buying meat, taking the crowdsourced funding techniques popular among tech products and non-profit initiatives and applying them to the pasture, instead….
“The first cow, or ‘event’ as they call it, was launched with an email to 100 friends. Six hundred people ended up coming to the site, and Lowry and Heitzeberg knew they were on to something.
“‘We knew the mechanics of crowdfunding as a way to engage an audience and essentially pre-sell something….We’re the only online retailer, that I can find, where you can buy meat and know exactly where it came from, from a variety of ranchers, of the exact cuts and quantity you want,’ Heitzeberg said.”
Read the full GeekWire article here, and check out the KOMO 4 News story here. Read more →
Photo by UW CSE professor and hands-free driver Mark Oskin
We in UW CSE have been pretty laid back about the migration of Californians to Seattle. Sure, they drive up our housing prices, crowd our roads, and take our jobs, but what’s not to like?
What’s not to like is this license plate! We send many of our best Ph.D. alums to UCSD to build a world class computer science department, and they respond with propaganda like this?
We’re with Donald! It’s time to close the borders!
(OK, maybe it’s payback for the paver we purchased in front of UCSD CSE’s new building 9 years ago …) Read more →
Better late than never, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its workforce projections for the decade 2014-2024.
We focus here on STEM jobs – jobs in computer science, engineering, the life sciences, the physical sciences, the social sciences, and the mathematical sciences.
BLS projects both job growth (newly-created jobs) and job openings (all available jobs, whether newly-created or available due to retirements).
BLS projects that 73% of all job growth in STEM between 2014 and 2024 will be in computer occupations. (This is up from 71% in the 2012-2022 projections. Engineering fields are down to 10% from 15%.)
BLS projects that 55% of all available jobs in STEM between 2014 and 2024, whether newly-created or available due to retirements, will be in computer occupations – 1,083,800 jobs during the decade, more than 100,000 per year. (We’re a younger field – fewer retirements.)
Whoaboy!
(BLS data from Table 1.2 here.) Read more →