A number of major research conferences offer “Test of Time” awards — typically conferred on the paper presented ten years previously that, in retrospect, has had the greatest impact.
UW CSE’s Magda Balazinska has probably set the record for “youngest person to receive a ‘Test of Time’ award.” Her paper “Advanced Clone-Analysis to Support Object-Oriented System Refactoring,” presented at the 2000 Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, will be recognized at the 2010 WCRE conference in October.
Congratulations Magda!… Read more →
Hélène Martin, UW CSE alumna, in TechFlash
TechFlash interviews 2008 UW CSE alumna Helene Martin, now teaching computer science at Seattle’s Garfield High School.
“Dozens of K-12 math and science teachers gathered this week at the University of Washington campus for a three-day summer workshop called Computer Science for High School, or ‘CS4HS,’ an annual program started by the UW, Carnegie Mellon University and UCLA several years ago to promote computer science education in high schools. Sponsored by Google, the workshops are now held around… Read more →
UW CSE again hosts CS4HS
UW CSE hosted 50 high school math, science, and computer science teachers on August 2-4 in our fourth annual “CS4HS” (Computer Science for High Schools) summer workshop. Funded by Google, CS4HS was originally conceived by Carnegie Mellon University, UW, and UCLA, and now involves roughly 20 universities from across the country.
Teachers learn a wide variety of ways in which computer science concepts can be introduced into their courses, and participate in hands-on workshops in Mindstorm robots and… Read more →
Foldit: Gaming for a cure
Two years ago, a team from UW including CSE professor Zoran Popovic, CSE grad student Seth Cooper, and UW Biochemistry professor (and adjunct CSE professor) David Baker, launched an ambitious project harnessing the brainpower of computer gamers to solve medical problems.
“The game, Foldit, turns one of the hardest problems in molecular biology into a game a bit reminiscent of Tetris. Thousands of people have now played a game that asks them to fold a protein… Read more →
MIT Stata Center equipped with colostomy bag
In the latest desperate attempt to deal with leaks, a plastic bag collects water that drips through a 4th floor skylight and directs it to a hose, attached to a stairway railing by means of cable ties, which terminates at a trash can at the foot of the stairs. Engineering ingenuity in action!… Read more →
“Refraction” wins Grand Prize in Disney Learning Challenge
Refraction, an online puzzle game for teaching fractions created by UW CSE professor Zoran Popovic and his students, has won the Grand Prize in the Disney Learning Challenge!
Refraction is a research project of UW CSE’s Center for Game Science — focused on games for learning and for science.… Read more →
New York Times Magazine: Does the Web Ever Forget?
We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent – and public – digital files.
UW CSE computer scientist Yoshi Kohno, who helped develop the system Vanish to make online data that self-destructs, is quoted.
Read the NYT article here. A… Read more →
New York Times: Bye-Bye Batteries
In a story in the Novelties column on the New York Times, reporter Anne Eisenberg looks at work that’s being done to entirely eliminate batteries from very low-power wireless systems.
UW Electrical Engineering Professor Brian Otis explained that researchers are working on the problem from two directions, and are now starting to meet in the middle, delivering practical applications. His work is on reducing the amount of power such systems require, while others, such as UW CSE affiliate professor Joshua … Read more →
“A Kitchen Countertop with a Brain”
A depth-sensing camera and a palm-top projector turn an ordinary work surface into an interactive one. UW CSE graduate student Ryder Ziola developed this system, dubbed Oasis, with researchers at Intel Labs Seattle, led by Intel senior scientist and CSE affiliate faculty member Beverly Harrison.
“If you put, for example, a steak on the surface, it will recognize the steak and come up with a recipe,” says Ziola. “It may also come up with nutritional information.'” The camera can… Read more →
“King County, Wash.’s Open Data Turned Into Real-Time Bus Tracking App”
UW CSE Ph.D. student Brian Ferris saw the need for better public transit information. So in his spare time, he wrote code that’s now used for OneBusAway — an open source application that aggregates bus data in real time.
King County officials hope others will also take advantage of their raw data to build useful apps, like Ferris did, and plan to make hundreds of additional data sources available.
Ferris is now studying how his app has changed transportation behavior… Read more →