A terrific crew of UW CSE students returned from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing just in time for a brunch for CSE’s women graduate students hosted by Magda Balazinska.
We are proud to have received, last spring, the inaugural annual award from the National Center for Women & Information Technology for Excellence in Promoting Women in Undergraduate Computing.
Karl Koscher (left) accepts his award at CCS
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Karl Koscher has been named runner-up for the second annual SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award for Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis in Computer and Information Security for his UW Ph.D. thesis, “Securing Embedded Systems: Analyses of Modern Automotive Systems and Enabling Near-Real Time Dynamic Analysis.” The award was announced at the Conference on Computer and Communications Security, the flagship annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC), held this week in Denver, Colorado.
Karl, who worked with UW CSE professor Yoshi Kohno in the Security and Privacy Research Lab, is now a postdoctoral researcher at UCSD. He was part of the team that hacked a car driven by correspondent Lesley Stahl for an episode of CBS News’ 60 Minutes, a dramatic illustration of his research assessing the security vulnerabilities of the connected systems found in today’s automobiles.
To learn more about Karl’s work, read his dissertation here, and see our previous blog posts on UW’s and UCSD’s car hacking research here, here and here.
Way to go, Karl! Read more →
UW faculty and students worked with Microsoft Research on the development of a new, affordable hyperspectral camera called HyperCam that is capable of capturing details unseen by the naked eye – including those beneath the surface of an object. The system, which has many potential applications, was created by UW CSE+EE professor Shwetak Patel; UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello; CSE graduate students Mayank Goel, Eric Whitmire and Alex Mariakakis; and Scott Saponas, Neel Joshi, Dan Morris, Brian Guenter and Marcel Gavriliu of Microsoft Research.
From the UW media release:
“Hyperspectral imaging is used today in everything from satellite imaging and energy monitoring to infrastructure and food safety inspections, but the technology’s high cost has limited its use to industrial or commercial purposes. The UW and Microsoft Research team wanted to see if they could make a relatively simple and affordable hyperspectral camera for consumer uses….
“HyperCam, which uses the visible and near-infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, illuminates a scene with 17 different wavelengths and generates an image for each.
“One challenge in hyperspectral imaging is sorting through the sheer volume of frames produced. The UW software analyzes the images and finds ones that are most different from what the naked eye sees, essentially zeroing in on ones that the user is likely to find most revealing.”
While existing hyperspectral imaging systems can cost tens of thousands of dollars, HyperCam comes in at around $800 – and could cost as little as $50 to incorporate into a mobile phone camera. The team envisions several potential uses for HyperCam, including food quality monitoring, biometric security, gaming, and health sensing. In one demonstration, the researchers were able to predict the ripeness of fruit with 94 percent accuracy using hyperspectral images of the flesh beneath the skin. In another, HyperCam was shown to be able to differentiate between different users’ hands with 99 percent accuracy.
According to Patel, “‘It’s not there yet, but the way this hardware was built you can probably imagine putting it in a mobile phone…With this kind of camera, you could go to the grocery store and know what produce to pick by looking underneath the skin and seeing if there’s anything wrong inside. It’s like having a food safety app in your pocket.”
Read the full media release and watch a video demonstration here, and read the research paper here. Read about HyperCam in GeekWire here. Read more →
UW CSE professor and cybersecurity expert Yoshi Kohno and two teams of graduate students from the Security and Privacy Research Lab were featured in this week’s episode of NOVA, “CyberWar Threat,” that aired on PBS.
The first part of the segment revisited the now-famous car hacking research done in conjunction with UCSD. Yoshi and his team – which included former CSE Ph.D. students Karl Koscher, now a postdoc at UCSD, and Franzi Roesner, now a professor at UW CSE – remotely take over the brakes of a car in a dramatic illustration of how vulnerable embedded systems in automobiles are to attack.
In the second segment, EE Ph.D. student Tope Oluwafemi and CSE bachelor’s student Tariq Yusuf (both now alumni) required nothing more than a laptop and their own wireless hotspot in order to hack into CSE Ph.D. student Alex Takakuwa’s laptop as he sat in a local coffee shop. By directing his laptop to an “evil twin” network rather than the coffee shop’s own WiFi, the hackers were able to discover his home security login, and subsequently figure out where he lives. NOVA follows Tope and Tariq as they later break into Alex’s house, demonstrating the potential vulnerability of home automation systems that enable remote control over the internet.
Watch the entire episode here (the segment featuring the UW team starts 29 minutes in). Read more →
UW CSE’s annual Open House for friends, alumni, and industry affiliates will take place on Tuesday October 20 from 5-7 p.m. in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Food, drink, posters, demos, friends, and the awarding of the Madrona Prize.
Please join us! Information here!
Read more →
UW CSE’s annual Industry Affiliates Meeting takes place next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday:
In the run-up, 315 student resumes were reviewed on Tuesday by 15 exhausted industry volunteers!
Many thanks to Cynthia Claeys, Brittany Ruiz and Carolyn Balousek (Google), Greg Geiger and Kerri Keafer (Amazon), Jennifer List and John Schmid (Marchex), Liz Symes (Zillow), Ken Parker and Robert Noble (Indeed), Hilary Ayers and Anne Moergeli (Redfin), and Brooke Simpson, Chelsey Rooney, and Brandon Feicho (Microsoft)!
Next prep event: practice interviews on Thursday!
Learn more here! And please plan to attend Tuesday evening’s Open House, 5:00-7:00 p.m.! Read more →
Congratulations to us!
Ana Mari is one of us. She arrived here as a faculty member in 1986, and she’s made her career here, not just as a faculty member, but as Director of the Honors Program, Chair of Psychology, Dean of Arts & Sciences, Provost, and Interim President. She has risen through the ranks on her very considerable merits, and she is committed to the University of Washington’s missions of excellence and access.
Seattle Times, UW Today, Chair of the Board of Regents Bill Ayer’s statement, GeekWire Read more →
Eric Brewer
Melissa Westbrook and Jim Jeffries
John Bennett
Ed Lazowska
Richard Anderson, Carl Hartung, Sam Sudar, Waylon Brunette, and Nicola Dell
Melissa Westbrook and Sheree Wen
Saturday marked the Gaetano Borriello Feet on the Ground Humanitarian Symposium, held in conjunction with the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC 2015).
Following an introduction by Ed Lazowska, awards commemorating Gaetano’s achievements were presented to his wife Melissa by IEEE USA President Jim Jeffries and by UNESCO United States National Commissioner Sheree Wen. Eric Brewer (UC Berkeley) and John Bennett (University of Colorado), leaders in ICTD, presented keynotes. Richard Anderson, organizer of the symposium, chaired a panel that included Gaetano’s students Waylon Brunette, Nicola Dell, Carl Hartung, and Sam Sudar. The symposium concluded with technical presentations by Lorenzo Violante Ruiz (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies), Kiersten Israel-Ballard (PATH), Roy Want (Google) Heather Underwood (University of Colorado), and David Thau (Google).
The symposium was a wonderful way to commemorate Gaetano’s extraordinary leadership in developing and deploying appropriate technologies to improve the lives of the under-served throughout the world.
Videos of the talks will be available soon. Read more →
Pedro Domingos’ popular book about machine learning, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine will Remake our World, is #7 on the Washington Post‘s best seller list!
Watch out, The Martian – can a feature film be far behind?
Late to the party? Buy it from Amazon here!
Check out Pedro on the big screen here and here, and watch the video of his appearance at Seattle’s Town Hall here. Read more →
Shwetak Patel
SNUPI Technologies, the startup resulting from the research of UW CSE and EE professors Shwetak Patel and Matt Reynolds and graduate student Gabe Cohn, and led by serial entrepreneur (and UW CSE alum) Jeremy Jaech, has sold its WallyHome sensing technology to Sears. SNUPI, which stands for “Sensor Network Utilizing Powerline Infrastructure,” also plans to license related technology to the company and to consult on the development of future products. As part of the deal, Sears announced it is opening an engineering office in Seattle — on the UW campus.
From the GeekWire article:
“The deal gives Sears technology that can sense changes in moisture, temperature and humidity — alerting property owners to water leaks and other potential problems. The technology promises to bolster the company’s lineup of Connected Solutions smart home devices.
Matt Reynolds
“As part of the acquisition, Sears will also assume a 10,000-square-foot lease on the University of Washington campus, where the retail and home services giant will operate a new tech development center….”
“Patel, who sold a previous startup to Belkin, said in a statement that the deal with Sears ‘further amplifies the University of Washington’s leadership in the research and commercialization of IoT solutions.’ ”
This is the second corporate engineering office located in Seattle as a result of Patel’s research: a year ago Belkin located the headquarters of its WeMo home automation division in Seattle after acquiring Patel’s earlier startup Zensi.
Jeremy Jaech
Read the full article here. Read more →
