Allen School News

Another report on the work of UW’s Andy Meltzoff, Rechele Brooks, Aaron Shon, and Raj Rao. “So yeah, it looks like the first wave of the robot uprising won’t be skull-headed killbots — the initial deployment will be adorable cyber-dwarf saboteurs, whose adorable, belly-pointing antics will win the hearts and minds of the youth.” How can you not love the press?  Read the article here.  Read the paper here.… Read more →

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KING 5 News discusses the phenomenal job prospects of UW Computer Science & Engineering grads. “The job market may be tough for most, but not if you’re a University of Washington computer science student. As KING 5’s Chris Daniels reports, the expertise of computer science majors is a hot commodity.” Watch the video here. (If only we had the capacity to offer a UW CSE education to more great students …)… Read more →

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What causes a baby to decide a robot is more than bits of metal? As it turns out, it takes more than humanoid looks— babies that witness a robot engaged in social interaction with adults are much more likely to themselves treat it as a social entity. UW CSE professor Rajesh Rao and UW psychologists published the study starring the Rao lab robot Morphy.  Rao’s team designed the computer programs that make Morphy appear social. Read the UW News article… Read more →

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer headlined the UW Computer Science & Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series on October 14. See a Seattle PI summary here. Watch the video here. Photographs here. CIO Magazine.  PCWorld.  The Register.  TechFlash.… Read more →

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UW CSE Ph.D. alum Jeff Bigham (now at Rochester), UW CSE grad student Chandrika Jayant, and their co-authors received the best paper award at this year’s ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) for their paper  VizWiz:  Nearly Real-Time Answers to Visual Questions. Visual information pervades our environment. Vision is used to decide everything from what we want to eat at a restaurant and which bus route to take to whether our clothes match and how… Read more →

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The smartphone of the future might lose its sleek, solid shell.   UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel, working with CSE grad Sidhant Gupta, ME undergraduate Tim Campbell, and CSE PhD alum Jeffrey Hightower (now at Intel Labs Seattle),  have developed a squeezable cellphone – called SqueezeBlock – which uses tiny motors built into the casing to mimic the behavior of a spring.  This novel feedback system changes its ‘shape’ to signal an alert to its user where visual and… Read more →

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The data reported by NRC on “Faculty Awards” appears, not surprisingly, to be no more accurate than the data reported elsewhere in the assessment.  Further information here.  Previous post on this unhappy topic here.… Read more →

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UW CSE Professor Alan Borning and CSE grad student Travis Kriplean, as part of the research conducted by the Engage project, have unveiled a new website devoted to promote civic engagement. It’s based on their open-source ConsiderIt platform. The Living Voters Guide, funded by the National Science Foundation, lets citizens discuss and share information by letting them work together to write their own voters guide.   Its purpose is to help Washington voters to make decisions about the many… Read more →

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Join us on Tuesday November 2 at 3:30 in the Microsoft Atrium of UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering for a presentation by Stanford President John Hennessy on “The Future of Research Universities.” American research universities are widely admired as the best in the world. The ability to turn research discoveries into new products, companies, and even industries make them the envy of the world. But, there are storm clouds on the horizon, including inadequacy of… Read more →

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Join us on Thursday October 14 at 3:30 in the Microsoft Atrium of UW’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering for “A Conversation with Steve Ballmer.”… Read more →

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