MIT Technology Review reports on UW CSE’s “Ambient Backscatter” innovation:
“A novel type of wireless device sends and receives data without a battery or other conventional power source. Instead, the devices harvest the energy they need from the radio waves that are all around us from TV, radio, and Wi-Fi broadcasts.
“These seemingly impossible devices could lead to a slew of new uses of computing, from better contactless payments to the spread of small, cheap sensors just about everywhere.
“‘Traditionally… Read more →
“Lessons from 18 Months in Government”
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Ed Felten – Director of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, and Professor of Computer Science and of Public Affairs there, recently returned to Princeton after 18 months as the first Chief Technologist of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
Today Ed delivered the keynote at the 22nd USENIX Security Symposium: “Dr. Felten Goes To Washington: Lessons from 18 Months in Government.”
One of these days, the video will be online, presumably here. Meanwhile, you’ll… Read more →
Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken
As a UW CSE Ph.D. student more than a decade ago, Doug Zongker (now a Google engineer) first delivered his now-famous parody of unintelligible scientific presentations: “Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken.” (No video of the presentation exists, but the 2002 slides are still on the web here, as is the companion paper here.)
Attention increased in 2007, when Doug presented the work at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Fortunately, cameras were… Read more →
2013 Ubicomp “10 Year Impact Award”
The 2003 research paper “Inferring High-Level Behavior from Low-Level Sensors” by UW CSE’s Don Patterson, Lin Liao, Dieter Fox, and Henry Kautz has been recognized with the “10 Year Impact Award” from Ubicomp 2013, the 2013 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing.
The award committee concluded that “The paper … is an excellent example of how one can learn very useful context information from simple GPS traces and it formed the basis for today’s thriving… Read more →
UW News: “Wireless devices go battery-free with new communication technique”
“UW CSE researchers have created a new wireless communication system that allows devices to interact with each other without relying on batteries or wires for power.
“The new communication technique, which the researchers call “ambient backscatter,” takes advantage of the TV and cellular transmissions that already surround us around the clock. Two devices communicate with each other by reflecting the existing signals to exchange information. The researchers built small, battery-free devices with antennas that can detect, harness and… Read more →
UW CSE @ UW power plant and steam tunnels
Somehow UW CSE’s advancement officer Karen Howard Leikin managed to wangle a 2-hour tour of UW’s power plant and steam tunnels for CSE alums Kirk Glerum and Don Hacherl. Karen accompanied, along with UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska.
There’s no way to describe how cool this was! (Well, truth be told, it was actually pretty hot …)
The central power plant supplies steam heat, chilled water air conditioning, compressed air, and emergency power to 174 buildings on the the 643-acre UW… Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Dean interviewed on neural networks in Silicon Valley Business Journal
“If you’ve ever been mystified by how Google knows what you’re looking for before you even finish typing your query into the search box, or had voice search on Android recognize exactly what you said even though you’re in a noisy subway, chances are you have Jeff Dean and the Systems Infrastructure Group to thank for it.
“As a Google Research Fellow, Dean has been working on ways to use machine learning and deep neural networks to solve some of… Read more →
UW CSE “IT for the developing world” projects featured in The Atlantic
An article in The Atlantic includes work done with our collaborator PATH. The “Mobile-phone milk pasteurization” section is the work of Rohit Chaudhri and the “Digital video” section is a collaboration between PATH, UW, and Digital Green. Richard Anderson provides the UW-PATH linkages that make these projects possible. We also acknowledge our principal collaborators at PATH, Noah Perin and Kiersten Israel-Ballard (among others).
Read the article here.… Read more →
CSE’s Rajesh Rao in Scientific American
“The notion of a strict cortical hierarchy, especially a feedforward hierarchy of processing layers, is losing ground to a more nuanced view of the cortex as an interconnected and distributed network.” Read more here.… Read more →
Senator Patty Murray @ UW CSE
U.S. Senator Patty Murray visited UW CSE today for a discussion of cybersecurity issues with professors Yoshi Kohno and Ed Lazowska. Following the briefing, graduate students Karl Koscher, Franzi Roesner, and Alexei Czeskis demonstrated the security vulnerabilities of modern automobiles by controlling all aspects of a recent-model sedan from an Internet-connected laptop by exploiting vulnerabilities in the car’s telematics unit.… Read more →