TechFlash interviews HCDE professor (and CSE adjunct professor) Julie Kientz:
“Julie Kientz wants to make technology more human. Not by creating human-like robots or apps that talk like people, but by taking existing technology and finding ways to use it to better people’s lives.”
Read more here.… Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Ed Felten tells Congress: Bulk phone data reveals ‘startling insights’
Seemingly minor bits of information collected by the National Security Agency, such as the phone numbers that citizens dial, can reveal far more personal information than is commonly believed, Princeton University professor and UW CSE Ph.D. alum Ed Felten told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Oct. 1.
Felten said that searching for patterns in large collections of metadata “can now reveal startling insights about the behavior of individuals or groups.”
“It is no longer safe to assume that… Read more →
UW CSE at the 13th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is a series of conferences, dating back to 1994, designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. This year’s conference – the 13th – was held in Minneapolis, MN, with an estimated 4,000 attendees.
UW’s strong commitment to diversity is reflected in our perennial position among the best-represented schools at the Hopper conference, regardless of location. This year was no exception. UW participants were a… Read more →
WiSee wins Mobicom 2013 Best Paper Award
The paper “Whole-Home Gesture Recognition Using Wireless Signals” by CSE’s Qifan Pu, Sidhant Gupta, Shyam Gollakota, and Shwetak Patel has received the Best Paper Award from Mobicom 2013.
The paper describes WiSee, a novel interaction interface that leverages ongoing wireless transmissions in the environment (e.g., WiFi) to enable whole-home sensing and recognition of human gestures. In a nutshell, your motion distorts the ambient signal in ways that can be detected, interpreted, and used to control devices.
Read… Read more →
Reports from the MOOC front lines
UW News features a report on 2012-13 UW MOOC experience. Three of the four courses examined were CSE courses: Programming Languages (Dan Grossman), Computer Networks (David Wetherall, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and John Zahorjan), and Introduction to Data Science (Bill Howe).
Read the article here – lots of interesting material is linked.… Read more →
Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?
A New York Times article that should be required reading for everyone.
“In the end, I graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in the major, having excelled in the department’s three-term sequence in quantum mechanics and a graduate course in gravitational physics, all while teaching myself to program Yale’s mainframe computer. But I didn’t go into physics as a career. At the end of four years, I was exhausted by all the lonely hours I spent catching… Read more →
A programming language to build synthetic DNA
UW CSE professor Georg Seelig and collaborators have developed a programming language for chemistry that they hope will streamline efforts to design a network that can guide the behavior of chemical reaction mixtures in the same way that embedded electronic controllers guide cars, robots and other devices. In medicine, such networks could serve as “smart” drug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level.
UW News article here. Pentagon Post article (milliseconds before the shutdown …) here.… Read more →
“A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning”
One year ago, CSE professor Pedro Domingos published the paper “A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning” in Communications of the ACM. Since it was published, the free version linked from Pedro’s Web page has been downloaded over 100,000 times. Not bad for a technical paper!
Haven’t read it yet? Check it out here.… Read more →
Raj Rao: “Brain-Computer Interfacing: An Introduction”
After a labor of love lasting 5 years, UW CSE professor Rajesh Rao’s book “Brain-Computer Interfacing: An Introduction” is finally out!
The idea of interfacing minds with machines has long captured the human imagination. Recent advances in neuroscience and engineering are making this a reality, opening the door to restoring and potentially augmenting human physical and mental capabilities.
Buy it here!… Read more →
NBC News: “The next big ideas from ‘Idea Man’ Paul Allen: A.I. and cell biology”
NBC News reports on the new Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, led by UW CSE professor Oren Etzioni:
“Allen, the 60-year-old co-founder of Microsoft, laid out his plans during an interview on the sidelines of the Allen Institute for Brain Science’s annual symposium …
“[AIBS] serves as the model for Allen’s ventures to expand the frontiers of artificial intelligence and cell biology. Just this month, he laid out his plan for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2, or “A.I.… Read more →