Control-Alt-Hack is a tabletop card game about white-hat hacking, based on game mechanics by gaming powerhouse Steve Jackson Games. According to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, the game is “a delightful strategy card game about white-hat hacking.”
Read the full review here. Control-Alt-Hack site here. Learn more about the Security and Privacy Lab here.… Read more →
Wired: “Google Hires Brains that Helped Supercharge Machine Learning”
Wired reports on Google’s acquisition of DNNresearch, Geoff Hinton’s University of Toronto spinoff, quoting UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska:
“‘Deep learning, pioneered by Hinton, has revolutionized language understanding and language translation,’ said Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington. In an email interview, he said that a pretty spectacular December 2012 live demonstration of instant English-to-Chinese voice recognition and translation by Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid was ‘one of many things made possible by Hinton’s work.'”
Read… Read more →
Google to double Seattle presence, targeting cloud services
Various media report an announcement by Google on Tuesday that the company plans to double the size of its Kirkland engineering facility, one of two Google sites in Seattle. Xconomy quotes UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska:
“’20 years ago, the tech industry here could have been described as ‘Microsoft and the 499 dwarfs.’ Now we have a really robust tech ecosystem with companies of all sizes reinforcing each other – large numbers of great startups, great mid-size companies and great major… Read more →
TechCrunch on Clerky: “YC-backed Clerky Helps Startups Save Time”
Clerky, a Y Combinator-backed startup co-founded by UW CSE alum Darby Wong and Stanford alum Chris Field, is a web application that makes it easy for startups to get legal transactions done.
“When we cover a startup’s launch, we often focus on the market opportunity, funding and investors and how the company’s product is solving a particular problem. We rarely mention the initial set of challenges every entrepreneur must face when they actually turn an idea into a startup… Read more →
UW wins Hawaiian “Big Splash” Cyber Defense Competition
Batman’s Kitchen, an interdisciplinary team involving students from CSE, the iSchool, EE, and pre-engineering, won the Hawaiian “Big Splash” Cyber Defense Competition held 8-10 March 2013. The competition is designed to bring practitioners in industry and government together with students in a competition environment. Teams were given a scenario of critical infrastructure in a business setting to defend against attacks by hackers (the red team) while also completing injects (e.g., setup a database, block certain websites, database audits, etc.)… Read more →
Open Information Extraction: The Movie
UW CSE’s Oren Etzioni and collaborators describe their work on Open Information Extraction in this excellent short video.
How can a computer accumulate a massive body of knowledge? What will Web search engines look like in ten years? To address these questions, UW CSE’s Open IE project has been developing a Web-scale information extraction system that reads arbitrary text from any domain on the Web, extracts meaningful information and stores in a unified knowledge base for efficient querying.
Watch the… Read more →
Wrestle Brania!
At UW’s Brain Awareness Week festivities, Kennedy Catholic High School students Thane Maudslein and Nick Correa use muscle activity to play Wrestle Brainia – an electronically powered device getting its signals through a computer hooked to the wrestlers’ arms. Wrestle Brainia was developed by Jeremiah Wander and Dev Sarma – graduate students in CSE’s Neural Systems Lab, and undergraduate student Vivek Paramasivam, with support from UW’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering.… Read more →
CSE’s Yoshi Kohno profiled in Columns
CSE professor Yoshi Kohno is profiled in the March issue of Columns, UW’s alumni magazine.
“Kohno’s experiments are the stuff of science fiction movies: using a kid’s Erector Set to spy on its owner, tracking a runner using his mileage monitor or even hackers taking over a car while it’s driving and forcing it to brake to a stop. The only difference between Hollywood make-believe and reality is that this white hat hacker doesn’t need special effects to make them… Read more →
“Changing the Face of Computing”
The opening keynote of the 2013 SIGCSE (Computer Science Education) conference on March 7 in Denver featured 7 5-minute “flash talks” on “Changing the Face of Computing.” The first – “Why Broadening Participation Matters” – was presented by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska. See Ed’s slides here. Read more about UW CSE’s motivations and activities here. Learn about DawgBytes, UW CSE’s K-12 outreach program, here.… Read more →
UW CSE’s Zoran Popović on NPR
NPR’s Joe Palca today highlighted how computer gamers are helping to push the frontier of brain research. One of those interviewed was UW CSE’s Zoran Popović. Popović talked about Foldit, a game designed to tackle the problem of protein folding.
“People can get pretty addicted to computer games. By some estimates, residents of planet Earth spend 3 billion hours per week playing them. Now some scientists are hoping to make use of all that human capital and harness it for… Read more →