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 →
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 →
Home wiring acts as an antenna to receive low-power sensing data
UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel and colleagues at UW and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a way to dramatically increase the battery life of sensors in the home, making their use far more practical.
The approach is called SNUPI — Sensor Nodes Utilizing Powerline Infrastructure. The “trick” is to utilize the electrical wiring in the home as a gigantic antenna, picking up very low power wireless signals from sensors and carrying them to a monitoring computer.
SNUPI, which… Read more →
dub at Ubicomp 2010
Dub — UW’s cross-campus alliance of faculty and students exploring Human-Computer Interaction and Design — will have another strong showing at Ubicomp 2010 this year, a top Ubiquitous Computing conference. There are 6 accepted papers from dub members, two of which have been nominated for the best paper award. Congratulations to all of dub, the authors of these 6 papers, and their collaborators at other institutions:
Augmenting On-Screen Instructions with Micro-Projected Guides: When it Works, and When it Fails (UW: … Read more →
dub at UIST 2010
Nearly 20% of the papers at UIST 2010 (the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology) have authors/co-authors from dub – UW’s cross-campus alliance of faculty and students exploring Human-Computer Interaction and Design. Congratulations to all of dub, the authors of these 7 papers, and their collaborators at other institutions:
Content-Aware Dynamic Timeline for Video Browsing (UW: Suporn Pongnumkul / Adobe: Jue Wang / Microsoft: Gonzalo Ramos, Michael Cohen)
Cosaliency: Where People Look When Comparing Images (Stanford: David E.… Read more →
HydroSense on Discovery News
UW CSE’s Jon Froehlich and Shwetak Patel describe HydroSense in this Discovery News interview.
HydroSense is a pressure-based sensor that automatically determines water usage activity and flow down to the source (e.g., dishwasher, laundry, shower) from a single non-intrusive installation point.
Watch this great interview here.… Read more →
Zensi, Shwetak Patel’s Energy Monitoring Startup, Purchased by Belkin
Zensi, an energy monitoring company based on technology developed by UW CSE professor Shwetak Patel and collaborators, has been purchased by Belkin.
Zensi’s technology was licensed from the University of Washington and from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Patel’s Ph.D. institution. The technology includes single-point-of-attachment sensors for electrical power, water, and natural gas — a single sensor in a home or business uses signal processing and machine learning to identify sources and rates of consumption. This dramatically reduces the cost… Read more →
Jon Froehlich featured in UW “Report to Contributors”
UW CSE Ph.D. student Jon Froehlich was one of five students profiled in the University of Washington’s “Report to Contributors.” Jon, who works with UW CSE professors James Landay and Shwetak Patel on HCI problems related to environmental concerns, is the recipient of a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship.
Read Jon’s profile here. The full “Report to Contributors” is here.… Read more →
Infrastructure Sensing in IEEE Computer
UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel is developing a system to make it easier for individuals and companies monitor “home” activity by using strategically placed sensors on air, water, gas, and electrical infrastructure. Patel expects his approach, which he calls infrastructure-mediated sensing (IMS), to be more cost effective and less labor intensive than other activity-sensing platforms.
“IMS uses a single sensor in a strategic place to measure pressure signals in air vents and waterlines as well as electrical signals in power lines. … Read more →
“While current technology is deployed, UW researchers work on next-generation devices”
University Week reports on the work of UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel.
“Most of the technology that will be installed as part of the UW smart grid demonstration project is commercially available. But UW engineers developing the next generation of smart-grid technologies will use data from the pilot project to advance their research.
“UW CSE’s Shwetak Patel is developing easily installed devices that measure consumption in real time down to the level of a single outlet. The device uses electrical… Read more →