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 →
“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 →