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 →
UW CSE welcomes new graduate students at the “Pit Party”
This evening, UW CSE faculty, staff, and graduate students welcomed the incoming class of graduate students at our annual “Pit Party” potluck dinner, held this year at the Burke Museum on the UW campus.
The name “Pit Party” is … a bit obscure. Of our currently active faculty, only Richard Ladner ever spent time in the actual “pit.”
In the 1960’s, CSE (then called “the Computer Science Group”) was partially housed in the basement of Roberts Hall – once the… Read more →
NPR: “Competition For Tech Talent Heats Up In Seattle Area”
“From 2010 to 2013, the number of people working as software engineers in the Seattle metro area rose 14 percent … As of last year, a total of 48,725 software engineers were employed in the region …
“And there are still thousands more engineering jobs that have yet to be filled. Microsoft and Amazon alone are advertising close to 2,500 open engineering positions …
“And it’s not just the big local companies, like Amazon, Microsoft and Expedia that are hiring.… Read more →
UW CSE’s OneBusAway continues to expand
UW CSE’s OneBusAway continues to expand. A transit rider in any of the OneBusAway regions (currently Atlanta, Puget Sound, and Tampa – and growing) can download the OneBusAway app for iPhone, Android, or Windows Mobile, which will then automatically detect which region it’s in, connect to the server for that region, and seamlessly start serving transit data. Read the blog post here.… Read more →