Allen School News

UW faculty and student contributions to UbiComp 2015 are so extensive, we can barely keep up. The latest news to come out of the conference that puts UW innovation in the spotlight: technology from the Sensor Systems Laboratory led by UW CSE and EE professor Josh Smith that enables the creation of smart networks of self-localizing, battery-free cameras.

A team that includes Alanson Sample (a UW EE Ph.D. alum who also completed a postdoc in CSE before joining Disney Research), current CSE Ph.D. student Jim Younquist, and EE Ph.D. students Saman Naderiparizi and Eve Zhao devised a system in which battery-free RFID sensor tags enhanced with on-board cameras, known as WISPCams after the Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform on which they are built, are able to determine their location and orientation in relation to other cameras using LEDs.

From a Disney Research press release:

“Previous work at UW has produced battery-free RFID tags called WISPs with enhanced capabilities such as onboard computation, sensing, and image capture capabilities. WISPs operate at such low power that they can scavenge the energy needed for operation from radio waves. The new work shows that these WISPs with onboard cameras, or WISPCams, can use optical cues to figure out where they are located and the direction in which they are pointed. The ability of each node to determine its own location makes deployment of autonomous sensor nodes easier and the sensor data they produce more meaningful.

“‘Once the battery free cameras know their own positions it is possible to query the network of WISPCams for high level information such as all images looking west or sensor data from all nodes in a particular area,’ said Alanson P. Sample, a research scientist with Disney Research who previously was a post-doctoral researcher on the UW team that developed the WISP platform and the WISPCam.”

Having come up with a method to efficiently and precisely localize each camera optically – without the need for extra circuitry or components – the team envisions hundreds of WISPCams working together to measure their location with optical cues or localize and track objects of interest in 3D.

Read the full press release here, and the research paper here. Nice work, team! Read more →

The Google/CSE table at the UW Annual Recognition Gala: Darcy Nothnagle, Stephen Court, Dana Prouty, Jeff Prouty, Ed Lazowska, Lee Smith, Charlie Reis, Kate Everitt, Nicki Dell, Steve Seitz, and Lyndsay Downs

Google was honored on Friday, at the University of Washington Annual Recognition Gala, as the latest UW Presidential Laureate – individuals and organizations who have donated more than $10 million to the University of Washington.

The vast majority of Google’s generosity has come to CSE, in the form of research gifts and matches of philanthropic gifts by employees. We’re extremely grateful to companies such as Google for their support of our work.

At the event, recent UW CSE Ph.D. alum Nicki Dell described one aspect of the impact of Google’s generosity: the creation of Open Data Kit by Gaetano Borriello’s research group, used throughout the world for data collection in low-resource environments.

Jeff Prouty manages to heft Google’s UW Presidential Laureate Commemorative Globe

Yesterday we were thrilled to announce that UW CSE Ph.D. student Haichen Shen and his team captured a Best Paper Award and the inaugural Gaetano Borriello Best Student Paper Award at  UbiComp 2015, the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, currently underway in Osaka Japan. (The Gaetano Borriello Best Student Paper Award was named this year for long-time UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello, who passed away earlier this year, decades before his time.)

But wait – there’s more!

Today, the UbiComp 2015 10 Year Impact Award – recognizing the paper presented at UbiComp 10 years ago that has had the greatest impact – was awarded to the paper “Place Lab: Device Positioning Using Radio Beacons in the Wild” by a team including UW CSE professor Gaetano Borriello, UW CSE Ph.D. alum and Intel Principal Engineer Anthony LaMarca (then at Intel Research Seattle), UW CSE Ph.D. alum and Google Software Engineering Manager Jeff Hightower (then at Intel Research Seattle), and (then) UW CSE Bachelors students James Howard, Jeff Hughes, and Fred Potter.

Pop quiz: Who won the UbiComp 2014 10 Year Impact Award? Answer: UW CSE’s Gaetano Borriello and Jeff Hightower!

Extra credit: Who won the UbiComp 2013 10 Year Impact Award? Answer: UW CSE’s Don Patterson, Lin Liao, Dieter Fox, and Henry Kautz!

Oh! Did we forget to mention that today, the Pervasive 2015 10 Year Impact Award also went to a team from UW CSE and Intel Research Seattle? Pervasive – which merged with UbiComp two years ago – recognized the paper “Learning and Recognizing the Places We Go” by a familiar set of authors including UW CSE’s Jeff Hightower, Anthony LaMarca, Ian Smith, and Jeff Hughes.

Go team! Read more →

“Innovation across the UW occurs across disciplines” … but 3 of the 6 examples that the UW alumni magazine chose to highlight in its September issue are from CSE:

“Shyam Gollakota captures energy out of thin air …

“Now a phone can diagnose sleep apnea …

“Computer scientist Shwetak Patel leads the UW’s Ubiquitous Computing Lab on projects to harvest power from variations in temperature, use humans as antennae, and use cell phone cameras to judge jaundice in newborns …”

Ayup. Read more here. Read more →

This wonderful New York Times article has nothing to do with computer science, but it has everything to do with the business we’re in – higher education – and with the proper role of intercollegiate athletics.

“[Notre Dame’s] president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, … adamantly opposes a model in which college sheds what is left of its amateur ways for a semiprofessional structure…. ‘Our relationship to these young people is to educate them, to help them grow,’ he says….

“And if that somehow comes to pass, he says, Notre Dame will leave the profitable industrial complex that is elite college football, boosters be damned, and explore the creation of a conference with like-minded universities.

“That’s right: Notre Dame would take its 23.9-karat-gold-flecked football helmets and play elsewhere.

“‘Perhaps institutions will make decisions about where they want to go – a semipro model or a different, more educational model – and I welcome that,’ Father Jenkins says.”

Read more, in the New York Times, here. Read more →

UW CSE alum Karl Koscher is still hacking cars

Wired published a fascinating article today on the car industry’s slow response to security flaws revealed by the car hack led by UW CSE professor Yoshi Kohno and UCSD professor (and UW CSE Ph.D. alum) Stefan Savage five years ago. The article notes that it took the affected manufacturer, General Motors, five years to issue a fix to its millions of vehicles equipped with the OnStar system that the team demonstrated was vulnerable to attack.

From the article:

“When a pair of security researchers showed they could hack a Jeep over the Internet earlier this summer to hijack its brakes and transmission, the impact was swift and explosive….

“But when another group of researchers quietly pulled off that same automotive magic trick five years earlier, their work was answered with exactly none of those reactions….

“For nearly half a decade, millions of GM cars and trucks were vulnerable to that privately known attack, a remote exploit that targeted its OnStar dashboard computer and was capable of everything from tracking vehicles to engaging their brakes at high speed to disabling brakes altogether.

“ ‘We basically had complete control of the car except the steering,’ says [UW CSE Ph.D. alum and UCSD postdoc] Karl Koscher, one of the security researchers who helped to develop the attack. ‘Certainly it would have been better if it had been patched sooner.’ ”

The article explains how the research team chose to notify GM and federal regulators of the vulnerability, instead of publicizing it widely as was the case with more recent car hacking demonstrations. Although it took five years for GM to issue a fix, that was less an issue of negligence than of a lack of preparation industry-wide. As the article explains it:

“GM’s glacial response is partly a result of just how far ahead of its time the UCSD and UW researchers’ OnStar attack was. Their technique, described in a pair of papers in 2010 and 2011, represented a brilliant and unprecedented chain of hacker attacks integrated into a single exploit.”

Read the full article here, and view our car hacking demonstration that aired on 60 Minutes here. Read more →

This weekend, people of all ages and abilities are invited to discover the Universal Play Kiosk presented by UW CSE’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology as part of the Seattle Design Festival. In keeping with the festival’s theme, “Design for Equity,” the Universal Play Kiosk provides a configurable space designed to facilitate equal participation of all.

The kiosk, which is a partnership between the Taskar Center, Gensler Design Firm and Hoffman Construction Co., creates an immersive, collaborative environment that truly integrates children and adults with special needs. The modular structure accommodates wheelchairs and other assistive devices, is adjustable on the fly to welcome individuals of varying abilities, and provides rich sensory stimulation through colors, shadows, textures and sounds.

Check out the installation in Pioneer Square’s Occidental Mall and Park between 10:00 am and 6:00 pm this Saturday, September 12^th and Sunday, September 13^th at the Seattle Design Festival Block Party, a two-day street fair celebrating Seattle’s diverse design community. More details are available here. Read more →

Franzi Roesner at the NAE Frontiers of Engineering Symposium

Every year, the National Academy of Engineering invites roughly 100 of the top engineers under the age of 45 from around the country to participate in its Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, a two-and-a-half day event focused on cutting-edge research in various fields of engineering. The 2015 symposium, which is taking place this week in Irvine CA, features a diverse range of topics, including the search for exoplanets, metamaterials, forecasting natural disasters, and cybersecurity and privacy.

It is an honor to be invited to the symposium, and an even higher honor to be invited to speak. This year, professor Franzi Roesner, co-director of UW CSE’s Security and Privacy Research Lab, delivered one of the opening talks of the program.

In her presentation, Computer Security and Privacy: Where Human Factors Meet Engineering, Franzi highlighted the challenge of designing technologies that match user expectations when it comes to security and privacy. She described a new model for granting permissions, “user-driven access control,” that removes the burden of making decisions from the user in favor of having the system automatically grant permissions based on how the user naturally interacts with existing applications.

Franzi is one of only 15 people who are giving talks at the symposium this week – yet more proof that UW CSE is home to some of the brightest rising stars in computer science and computer engineering! Read more →

UW CSE’s Haichen Shen

UW CSE faculty and students are on a roll when it comes to conference awards. Last week, we reported that a team of researchers in our natural language processing group earned one of only two Best Paper Awards granted from among 600 submissions at EMNLP 2015. This week, we are celebrating more recognition at UbiComp 2015, where UW CSE Ph.D. student Haichen Shen and his team captured a Best Paper Award and the inaugural Gaetano Borriello Best Student Paper Award, named this year in honor of the late, great UW CSE professor – a fitting tribute, given Gaetano’s devotion to students and leadership within the ubiquitous computing community.

The winning paper, Enhancing Mobile Apps to Use Sensor Hubs without Programmer Effort, presents MobileHub, a system that automatically rewrites applications to leverage a smartphone’s sensor hub to enable continuous sensing apps to function without draining the device’s battery. By buffering sensor data until an application needs to act on it, MobileHub conserves a device’s power by allowing the application and the main processor to remain idle. This is a critical area of research in ubiquitous computing: reducing power consumption is going to be vital in order to fully realize the potential of continuous sensing apps, such as those developed for health monitoring. The paper was co-authored by Shen and former postdoc Aruna Balasubramanian (now a faculty member at Stony Brook University), affiliate faculty member Anthony LaMarca of Intel Labs, and former faculty member David Wetherall (now at Google).

UW CSE’s Gaetano Borriello

Two other UbiComp papers with UW CSE connections were recognized with Honorable Mentions:

HyperCam: A collaboration between UW and Microsoft Research proposes a low-cost, easy-to-use hyperspectral imaging system that improves upon the typical RGB camera sensors used in ubiquitous computing applications. UW co-authors include CSE Ph.D. students Mayank Goel, Alex Mariakakis, and Eric Whitmire, professor Gaetano Borriello, and CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel.

DoppleSleep: Researchers at UW, Cornell and Michigan State University put forward a contactless sensing system that uses short-range Doppler radar to monitor sleep quality. UW co-authors include CSE and EE professor Shwetak Patel, HCDE professor (and CSE adjunct) Julie Kientz, and EE graduate student Ruth Ravichandran.

Congratulations to Haichen and the entire team at UbiComp 2015! You make UW proud!

And we once again remember our friend and colleague Gaetano and his extraordinary contributions to UW CSE, the field, and the world. Read more here. Read more →

UW CSE professor Zach Tatlock – a.k.a. Mr. “I wear open sandals even in the snow” – has finally succumbed to peer pressure from his colleagues and is trying out a new foot covering technology known as “shoes.”

As part of the experiment, Zach even learned to tie shoestrings by watching YouTube videos on the topic. (Note the use of so-called “socks” as well!)

Way to go, Zach! Read more →