University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering

Each year at UW CSE’s Industrial Affiliates Meeting, our friends at Madrona Venture Group recognize the most “entrepreneurially interesting” graduate student research presentations.

This year, a truly interdisciplinary team of students won the Madrona Prize.  CSE Ph.D. students Jon Froehlich and Sidhant Gupta, EE Ph.D. students Eric Larson and Gabe Cohn, and MechE undergraduate Tim Campbell were honored on their work on sustainability sensing.  Professors Shwetak Patel, James Landay, and James Fogarty have been closely collaborating on this effort.

Three runners up were recognized:  Roxana Geambasu and Amit Levy for Vanish (self-destructing digital data), Ethan Katz-Bassett for Reverse Traceroute, and Brandon Lucia and Joe Devietti for Deterministic Multiprocessing.

Following in Marty’s footStepps, UW CSE’s Wendy Chisholm is featured as the Seattle PI’s “Geek of the Week.”

“I believe that through design and technology we can change the world. We can change how society views ‘disabilities’ – we all need tools to do things. Why do we discriminate against some people because they need different tools? There is no ‘us’ or ‘them.’ We’re all here on spaceship earth together and we’re interconnected. None of us are truly independent and the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can start helping each other and make it a better place for all of us.”

Read the full article here.

UW CSE graduate student Shiri Azenkot interned this past summer at AT&T Labs Research.  Shiri’s research focuses on making technology accessible to people with disabilities, especially people with low vision.  While at AT&T Labs Research, she explored how technology could be used to create an easy-to-use navigation tool for enabling low-vision users to walk to a destination. The result of her work is  iWalk, an iPhone application that uses both text-to-speech and speech recognition technologies to implement a robust navigational aid.

Read more about what she was able to accomplish here.

MSNBC.com’s Technology & Science section reports on UW CSE grad student Tamara Denning’s recent presentation at the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, following it up with a lengthy and informative interview.

“’Robots may look like toys or appliances but they’re not, says Tamara Denning, lead author of the study, A Spotlight on Security and Privacy Risks with Future Household Robots: Attacks and Lessons.”

Read the full article here.

Adrian Sampson

Michael Bayne

Peter Hornyak

Franzi Roesner

TechFlash interviews UW CSE graduate students Franzi Roesner, Peter Hornyak, Michael Bayne, and Adrian Sampson regarding their experiences with the Amazon.com Kindle DX educational pilot project.

Read the post here.