A team of researchers at the Allen School and University of Washington Department of Electrical Engineering have invented a long-range backscatter system that enables low-cost connectivity for a variety of objects and devices while consuming 1000x less power than existing technologies. The new system — which builds upon pioneering work by members of UW’s Networks & Mobile Systems Lab and Sensor Systems Lab on techniques for harvesting power from ambient signals — is the first of its kind capable of… Read more →
Jeffrey Heer wins IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award
Allen School professor Jeffrey Heer, who leads the Interactive Data Lab at the University of Washington, has been recognized the 2017 IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award from the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers. The IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC) selected Heer based on his contributions to the “design, development, dissemination and popularization of languages for visualization.” Winners of the Visualization Technical Achievement Award are nominated by their peers.
The IEEE VGTC award citation recounts how Heer’s… Read more →
Securing the Fourth Estate: What the Panama Papers and Confidante reveal about journalists’ needs and practices
When the Panama Papers story first broke in April 2016, its explosive revelations of a vast and hidden network of offshore shell companies and financial scandals-in-waiting tied to politicians, corporations, banking institutions, and organized crime represented a victory for good, old-fashioned investigative journalism — with a high tech twist. In addition to provoking international outrage, toppling governments, and instigating audits and investigations in more than 70 countries, the story caught the eye of researchers like Allen School professor Franziska Roesner… Read more →
UW researchers are working on a way to screen for concussion using a smartphone
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, an estimated 3.8 million sports-related concussions occur in this country alone — and roughly half of those go undiagnosed. Researchers in the Allen School’s UbiComp Lab and UW Medicine hope to reduce that risk and make sports safer by developing PupilScreen, a tool for measuring whether someone has suffered concussion by means of a smartphone app.
Currently, coaches and parents rely on subjective assessments like asking athletes questions or having them… Read more →
UW’s Sounding Board named a finalist for $2.5 million Amazon Alexa Prize
A team of researchers from the Allen School and University of Washington Department of Electrical Engineering has been named a finalist for Amazon’s inaugural Alexa Prize. The UW team, which is the only North American competitor to make it to the next round, earned one of only three available places for Sounding Board, a conversational agent developed to engage users in thoughtful, informative discussion and transform how people interact with everyday devices in their homes.
The Alexa Prize… Read more →
Snap a selfie, screen for pancreatic cancer with new app from UW researchers
They say that the eyes are a window to the soul; with a new smartphone app developed by researchers at the University of Washington, they are now also a window to one’s health. Members of the Allen School’s UbiComp Lab, working with clinicians at UW Medicine, developed BiliScreen to enable anyone to snap a selfie and get screened for pancreatic cancer. The app detects adult jaundice — an early symptom of the disease — to enable more timely… Read more →
UW’s Sham Kakade and Maryam Fazel earn NSF TRIPODS Award to advance the state of the art in data science
A team of University of Washington researchers co-led by Sham Kakade, a professor in the Allen School and Department of Statistics, and Electrical Engineering Professor Maryam Fazel have secured a $1.5 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop new algorithmic tools that will advance the state of the art in data science. The funding will support the researchers’ project titled “Algorithms for Data Science: Complexity, Scalability, and Robustness” as part of the agency’s Transdisciplinary… Read more →
Allen School’s open-source TVM framework bridges the gap between deep learning and hardware innovation
Deep learning has become increasingly indispensable for a broad range of applications, including machine translation, speech and facial recognition, drug discovery, and social media filtering. This growing reliance on deep learning has been fueled by a combination of increased computational power, decreased data storage costs, and the emergence of scalable deep learning systems like TensorFlow, MXNet, Caffe and PyTorch that enable companies and organizations to analyze and extract value from vast amounts of data with the help of neural networks.… Read more →
First-Choice Majors of UW Confirmed Incoming Freshmen
The trend continues – at the University of Washington, and across the nation. The two charts shown here tell the story: they show the ten top first-choice majors of UW confirmed incoming freshmen from fall 2010 to fall 2017, and the first-choice College of Engineering majors of UW confirmed incoming freshmen over the same period.… Read more →
Allen School researchers reveal how smart devices can be turned into surveillance devices with music
Researchers from the Allen School’s Networks & Mobile Systems Lab and Security and Privacy Research Lab teamed up on a new project, CovertBand, to demonstrate how smart devices can be converted into surveillance tools capable of secretly tracking the body movements and activities of users and their companions. CovertBand turns off-the-shelf devices into active sonar systems with the help of acoustic pulses concealed in music. The team’s findings reveal how increasingly popular smart home assistants and other connected devices… Read more →