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 →
“Shrewd search engines know what you want”
Search engines have a dark side, and they form a vital part of hackers’ toolkits. For instance, once a potential website vulnerability emerges, a quick web search can gather a list of all sites which have that security flaw in their web code.
How better to hunt down hackers than by setting the search engines themselves on them, asks UW CSE Ph.D. student John John. With colleagues at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, John has developed SearchAudit, a system… Read more →
“Ocean Observatories Will Make Use of CENIC and Pacific NorthWest GigaPoP 10-Gigabit Peerings with Amazon Web Services”
“When a national network of ocean observatories begins streaming environmental sensor data in March 2012, researchers … will be able to use … high-speed academic networks to transmit some of that data to storage and computing clouds operated by Amazon Web Services.
“CENIC and PNWGP today announced two 10 Gigabit per second (Gbps) connections to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for the use of CENIC’s members in California, as well as PNWGP’s… Read more →
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Doug Downey is 2010 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow
Each year, roughly half a dozen faculty members from across the nation are selected as Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows. Doug Downey, a Ph.D. student of Oren Etzioni’s now on the faculty at Northwestern University, has just been announced as a 2010 recipient of this significant distinction.
“Doug Downey studies methods for automatically extracting knowledge from the World Wide Web. His work aims to enable advanced Web search engines, capable of answering complex questions by synthesizing information across multiple… Read more →
“Revolutionary Evolution: Will Consumer Apps Replace Specialized AT?”
The June 2010 newsletter of The Family Center on Technology and Disability is devoted to a comprehensive overview of the access technology (assistive technology) work of UW CSE professor Richard Ladner and his students.
“‘Much of the consumer technology that surrounds us can be adapted for classroom and non-classroom educational use for children with disabilities in the K-12 range and beyond,’ Dr. Ladner insists. ‘As less expensive consumer technology takes on universal use,’ he adds, ‘parents and teachers will eventually… Read more →
UW CSE’s “Morphy” makes the NY Times
“In a lab at the University of Washington, Morphy, a pint-size robot, catches the eye of an infant girl and turns to look at a toy.
“No luck; the girl does not follow its gaze, as she would a human’s.
“In a video the researchers made of the experiment, the girl next sees the robot “waving” to an adult. Now she’s interested; the sight of the machine interacting registers it as a social being in the young brain. She begins… Read more →
Who da man?
As a prelude to its annual “Brainstorm Tech” conference in Aspen (July 22–24), Fortune magazine has anointed “The 50 smartest people in tech” — five people in each of ten categories “whose collective intelligence propels us into a future that looks nothing like the present.”
The winner in the “Engineer” category — the “Smartest Engineer”? UW CSE bachelors alumnus, former Googler and founder of Cloudera Christophe Bisciglia!
“What kinds of problems could we solve if… Read more →
More from the ACM Awards Banquet
UW CSE faculty, alumni, and spouses at the ACM Awards Banquet at the Westin St. Francis on June 26th.
L-R: Gaetano Borriello (new ACM Fellow) and Melissa Westbrook; Lyndsay Downs and Ed Lazowska (ACM Distinguished Service Award winner); Jeff Dean (new ACM Fellow) and Heidi Hopper; Noah Snavely (ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award runner-up) and Beth Xie; John Davis and Jessica Davis; Radhika Thekkath and Chandu Thekkath (new ACM Fellow). At the banquet but missing from the photo: Thomas Kwan.… Read more →