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 →
The smartphone’s shape-shifting future
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 →
“Faculty Awards” in the NRC doctoral program assessment
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 →
Seattle developers release new open source tool to combat ballot fatigue
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 →
John Hennessy at UW CSE, Tuesday November 2
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 →
Steve Ballmer at UW CSE, Thursday October 14
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 →
dub Wins Best Paper at Ubicomp 2010
Congratulations to the dub team!
* Ubicomp 2010 Best Paper Award
ElectriSense: Single-Point Sensing Using EMI for Electrical Event Detection and Classification in the Home, Sidhant Gupta, Matt Reynolds, Shwetak Patel.
ElectriSense is a new solution for automatically detecting and classifying the use of electronic devices in a home from a single point of sensing. It relies on the fact that most modern consumer electronics and fluorescent lighting employ switch mode power supplies (SMPS) to achieve high efficiency. … Read more →
NRC Graduate Program Assessment Data is Erroneous
During the week of September 19th, NRC provided pre-release access to its long-delayed “Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States,” scheduled for public release during the week of September 26th.
We, along with colleagues in other computer science programs nationally and colleagues in programs in other fields at the University of Washington, quickly discovered significant flaws of three types in NRC’s data:
Instances in which the data reported by NRC is demonstrably incorrect, sometimes by very substantial margins.… Read more →
Seungyeop Han receives Best Poster at SIGCOMM 2010
Incoming UW CSE grad student, Seungyeop Han, and his co-authors recently received the best poster award for their poster “Accelerating SSL with GPUs,” which proposes using the computing capabilies of the Graphical Processing Units on computer video cards to cheapen the considerable computational cost of wrapping HTTP communications with SSL encryption. SIGCOMM 2010 was held in New Delhi, India, August 30-September 3, 2010.
More information on the conference may be viewed here.… Read more →
“Computer Game Could Help Cure Diseases”
UW CSE’s Zoran Popovic talks with NPR’s David Green about Foldit. As we have reported previously, Foldit is a game in which players compete at protein folding (as improbable as that sounds!). The results give researchers new approaches as they seek to cure diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
The interview (4:33 audio with transcript) is here.
See earlier news coverage here.… Read more →