UWTV: Engineering & Computer Science

World Wide Access: Accessible Web Design

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Creating an accessible website involves making your information accessible to all visitors, including those with disabilities. Learn the essential elements for designing a site that is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. (Series: DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology))

Noun Phrase Coreference Algorithms

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Claire Cardie introduces noun phrase coreference resolution. She also describes the specific supervised and weakly supervised algorithms applied to the problem of noun phrase coreference resolution, presents empirical results on two standard coreference data sets, and discusses the problems encountered in applying each framework to the coreference task. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2004)

Accessible Information Technology in Education: Building Toward A Better Future

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Information technology (IT) is used in most educational settings. Students use a variety of IT tools such as email, websites, discussion boards, and courseware. They may use IT to attend school from a distance or as an adjunct to traditional classroom attendance. When these tools are accessible they can significantly reduce the effort required of individuals with disabilities and increase access to education. When they are inaccessible, they can block participation by students and faculty with disabilities. This video presents the voices of students with disabilities and experts in accessible IT as they discuss the importance of ensuring that information technology is accessible in educational settings.

Mira and the Wind

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

UW Student teams created this animated short in a Computer Animation Capstone Design course taught by Barbara Mones. The short demonstrates how a young girl comes to terms with death of her grandfather.

CSE477 Capstone Design, Spring 2008- Technology for Low-Income Regions

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Program Description: Capstone courses give students experience solving a substantial problem using concepts that span several topic areas in Computer Science and/or Computer Engineering. Students must work together in teams to define the problem, develop a solution plan, produce and demonstrate an artifact that solves the problem, and present their work using written and oral reports. Cross-disciplinary projects that require interaction with other departments are encouraged.

This year-long capstone design course looks at problems in health care, agriculture, transportation, and education that arise in the developing world and rural regions of the developed world.

(Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

2008 Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf & Hard of Hearing in Computing - Speaker Series

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

This program highlights deaf or hard-of-hearing professionals who spoke to University of Washington Summer Academy students about their experience obtaining advanced degrees and pursuing careers in computer science. Each speaker discusses their experiences as deaf or hard-of-hearing people in the computing industry.

There are a variety of computing careers in industry and academia, including those that require skills in animation, games, and robotics. The Summer Academy will specifically explore animation and will provide an opportunity for students to speak with deaf and hard of hearing persons who are already working in various computing fields.

(Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Regulatory Elements in Microbial Genes

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

This program showcases an innovative University of Washington student-faculty academic project. The goal of the project was to write software that starts from a single microbial gene of interest, finds a large collection of corresponding genes from multiple microbes, and uses this collection to identify evolutionarily conserved patterns in their DNA regulatory regions. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2005)

Multi-robot Exploration

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Efficient exploration of unknown environments is a fundamental problem in multi-robot coordination. As autonomous exploration and map building becomes increasingly robust on single robots, the next challenge is to extend these techniques to large teams of robots. Dieter Fox provides an overview of research into multi-robot exploration and mapping, developed within the CentiBOTS project. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2005)

Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are computer-based instructional tools that rely on artificial intelligence techniques to generate individualized interactions tailored to a student's learning needs. Cristina Conati discusses how the scope and effectiveness of ITS can be increased by extending the range of features captured in a student model to include domain independent, meta-cognitive skills and affective states. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2005)

Google: A Behind-the-Scenes Look

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Search is one of the most important applications used on the Internet and poses interesting challenges in computer science. Providing high-quality search requires understanding across a wide range of computer science disciplines. In this program, Google Fellow Jeff Dean describes some of these challenges, discusses applications Google has developed, and highlights systems they've built, including GFS, a large-scale distributed file system, and MapReduce, a library for automatic parallelization and distribution of large-scale computation. He also shares observations derived from Google's Web data. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2005)

Bioinformatics: The Search for Non-Coding RNA

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

One of the biggest users of scientific computing cycles in Europe is a bioinformatics application -- genome-wide searches for 'non-coding RNAs' (ncRNAs) routinely monopolize 1000 computers for an entire month. ncRNAs are functional RNA molecules that do not code for proteins. Covariance Models (CMs), statistical models based on probabilistic context-free grammars, are the leading approach to describing ncRNA families and searching for new members. In this colloquia, Larry Ruzzo describes his development of novel algorithms to make CMs faster, which allows genome databases to be scanned in days instead of years, and can greatly facilitate biological discovery. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2005)

Group 01: Computer Tech and Learning Disabilities

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

"People with Disabilities and Computer Technology" addresses adaptive technology and computer applications for people with disabilities. In "Computers and People with Learning Disabilities," people with disabilities demonstrate the wide array of current technology they use for school and work.

Semiconductor-Organic Heterostructures

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Adina Scott of Purdue University explores recent interest into incorporating molecular monolayers into electronic devices for sensing, nanoelectronic, energy conversion and biological applications. Device properties can be modulated using surface chemistry, leading to flexible fabrication schemes and new system functionalities. Examine key challenges related to the fabrication, structural characterization and electrical properties of such systems. Look at results for metal-molecule-silicon devices in which the electronic transport is governed by the interplay between the molecular-electronic properties and silicon bandstructure, enabling novel hybrid organic/semiconductor functionality. Combining these device concepts with optically-, biologically- or electrically-active molecular layers will result in new classes of hybrid devices with the potential for low-cost, highly-integrated systems. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Learning to Map Sentences to Meaning

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Building automated systems that participate effectively in natural language conversations is one of the classic goals of research in artificial intelligence. Machine learning methods hold significant potential for addressing many of the challenges involved with these systems. This talk describes machine learning algorithms for the problem of mapping natural language sentences to representations of their underlying meaning. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Bionic and Bio-ionic Neural Interfaces

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Open your eyes to the latest developments in retinal prosthesis, which could restore vision to patients suffering from diseases such as age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. Luke Theogarajan of MIT discusses the two leading approaches to retinal prosthesis, a novel bio-ionic neural interface and one that is electrically based, and the hope it holds for researchers and patients alike. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Self-Defending Software: Collaborative Learning for Security

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

This University of Washington talk addresses software monoculture, many computers running the same application, which offers benefits for system administrators and users. But, every copy of the application is vulnerable to the same security exploits. The work discussed here by Michael Ernst of MIT enables a monoculture, or application community, to automatically defend itself against previously unknown zero-day exploits by creating patches that defeat those exploits without affecting application functionality. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Practical Analysis Tools for Large-Scale Software

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

UC Berkeley's Manu Sridharan presents two techniques -- refinement-based pointer analysis and thin slicing -- that enable powerful new tools for debugging and understanding large-scale software. His group’s refinement-based pointer analysis is the first to compute precise answers in interactive time, allowing tools to handle previously inscrutable program behaviors interactively. Thin slicing is the first technique to give usable answers to code relevance questions, a long-standing challenge for analysis tools. Sridharan also describes new tools enabled by the two techniques. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Statistical Failure Diagnosis in Software and Systems

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Alice Zheng presents a case study illustrating how statistical machine learning algorithms, along with appropriate system instrumentation, can aid in failure diagnosis. She proposes a statistical software debugging framework that collects information from past successes and failures via fine-grained instrumentation of the program and then analyzes this information to locate suspicious program predicates. Zheng discusses the algorithmic challenges of the approach and demonstrates a bi-clustering algorithm that is effective at simultaneously clustering failed runs and selecting useful predicates. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Market-Making: From Algorithms for Price-Setting to Emergent Market Properties

Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

With the dramatic increase in electronic exchanges and automated trading in recent years, it has become important to develop new computational and algorithmic tools for analyzing market properties and designing software agents that participate in market activities. This program presents a Bayesian algorithm that can be used by a market-making agent to continuously post prices and update its beliefs based on the sequence of trades it sees. This algorithm leads to an interesting characterization of the market- maker's exploration-exploitation dilemma as a tradeoff between price discovery and profit-taking. It also allows for the building of richer agent-based models of markets that can be useful both in understanding properties of existing markets and in predicting the impacts of structural changes. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Community Systems: The World Online

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The Web is about you and me. Until now, for the most part, it has denoted a corpus of information that we put online sometime in the past, and the most celebrated Web application is keyword search over this corpus. Sites such as del.icio.us, flickr, MySpace, Slashdot, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and YouTube, which are driven by user-generated content, are forcing us to rethink the Web -- it is no longer just a static repository of content; it is a medium that connects us to each other. What are the ramifications of this fundamental shift? What are the new challenges in supporting and amplifying this shift? (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

An Effective Verification Solution for Modern Microprocessors

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Over the past four decades microprocessors have come to be a vital and inseparable part of the modern world, becoming the digital brain of numerous electronic devices and gadgets that make today's lifestyle possible. However, their computational power comes at a price: the task of verifying a modern microprocessor and guaranteeing correctness of its operation is increasingly challenging, even for most established processor vendors. This talk describes a novel verification framework targeting specifically today's complex microprocessors. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Embedded Links: A Misunderstood and Fundamental Element of Urban-Scale Networks

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Many urban communities have unequal access to Internet resources, presenting a technical challenge of providing a high-speed access infrastructure at an extremely low cost. To address this challenge, a first-of-its-kind, urban-scale wireless mesh network which provides Internet access to 1000's of users spanning multiple square kilometers in an underserved area in Houston, TX has been deployed. However, in this and other urban environments, IEEE 802.11 node interactions are affected by a vast array of factors including topology, channel conditions, modulation rate, packet sizes, and physical layer capture which are addressed in this lecture. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

The Limits of Quantum Computers

Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

In the popular imagination, quantum computers would be almost magical devices, able to "solve impossible problems in an instant" by trying exponentially many solutions in parallel. In this program, hear about four results in quantum computing theory that directly challenge this view. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Lessons Learned from Applying Control Theory to Computing Sytems: A Manifesto for Resource Management Engineering

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Joe Hellerstein summarizes his experience over the last 5 years with applying control theory to resource management solutions in computing systems. His experience at IBM and Microsoft has been that problems of dynamics can often be addressed by using a simple set of techniques based on discrete time, linear, time-invariant. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Training and Reality: Adventures of a Spaceflight Participant

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Space flight is still a very rare and exotic experience which has only recently been opened to "tourists", officially known as spaceflight participants. Charles Simonyi was the fifth of these as the 450th person in space. He will describe the decision process, the eight-month training and the flight itself from the point of view of a knowledgeable civilian, with particular emphasis on the issues of safety, traditions, and health aspects. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Working with Digital Natives

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

What makes someone a digital native? Are digital natives defined by their generation, or the technology they use? Explore this term, and the differences between those considered digital natives and those considered digital immigrants, as Michael Eisenberg, dean emeritus of the iSchool at the University of Washington, leads a diverse panel in an discussion of these topics. (Series: Seattle Innovation Symposium)

Information Technology Leadership Learning in Action

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Dick Nolan, professor emeritus of Harvard Business School, and Robert Austin, professor at the Copenhagen Business School, discuss how to train the next generation in IT management: Train today’s leaders to engage digital natives, for whom technology is an essential part of the world. With that being said, is active learning the right approach? (Series: Seattle Innovation Symposium)

Engaging Digital Natives in Information Technology Learning

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Innovative solutions are needed to ensure a new generation of digital natives is engaged in learning and becoming the future of IT management. In this program, Dick Nolan, professor emeritus of Harvard Business School, Robert Austin, professor at Copenhagen Business School and Shannon O'Donnell, PhD fellow at Copenhagen Business School, come together to discuss the future of digital natives. (Series: Seattle Innovation Symposium)

Digital Natives: Impacts on Management and Education

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

How are the work styles and learning styles of digital natives different from their counterparts? Are they more competitive? How are social networks influencing the way they live and think? Join Michael Eisenberg, dean emeritus of the iSchool at the University of Washington, and a panel of experts as they discuss these topics. (Series: Seattle Innovation Symposium)

Where Humans and Robots Connect

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

A trailblazer in the emerging field of neurobotics, in 2007 Yoky Matsuoka received the MacArthur "genius" award. Now she's transforming our understanding of how the central nervous system coordinates musculoskeletal action. Her latest quest is to build the ultimate prosthetic: a fully functional replica of the human hand, controlled directly by the brain. (Series: Engineering Lecture Series 2008)

Pathways in Computer Science

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

See the diverse pathways students pursue after receiving Bachelors degrees in computer science or computer engineering. Computer scientists work in a broad range of interesting fields, and an engineering degree is terrific preparation for almost any imaginable future. See profiles of computational biology, improving forest firefighting techniques, making textbook graphics readable to blind students, working in India to connect rural communities through technology, and creating better prosthetic devices for people with disabilities. (Series: Computer Science & Engineering: Power to Change the World)

Photo Tourism and Photosynth: UW CSE, Microsoft Research, and Microsoft Live Labs Create a Winner

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Photosynth is an amazing new technology, created through a unique collaboration between Microsoft and the University of Washington. The application will change the way you think about digital photos by taking a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzing them for similarities, and displaying them in a reconstructed 3-dimensional space. The groundbreaking innovation began with Photo Tourism research by UW graduate student, Noah Snavely, UW faculty member Steve Seitz, and Rick Szeliski, Microsoft Research. The new Microsoft Live Labs organization -- dedicated to advancing the state-of-the-art in Internet products and technology -- embraced the Photo Tourism technology and combined it with complementary photo browsing technology created by the team at Seadragon, a Madrona-backed Seattle startup headed by Blaise Aguera y Arcas that had been acquired by Live Labs. A Photo Tourism research presentation, and the rollout of the Photosynth prototype by Live Labs, stole the show at the 2006 SIGGRAPH conference. (Series: Computer Science & Engineering: Power to Change the World)

Google Ad Systems

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Billions of dollars (and euros and yen, too) flow through Google Ad Systems. In this talk, Narayanan Shivakumar, a Google distinguished entrepreneur and director of Google's Seattle-Kirkland R and D center, gives us a peek under the covers and examines how a combination of auction theory, machine learning and large systems can power successful businesses like Adwords and Adsense. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Massive Parallelism in the TeraOPS Chip

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Ambric, a Portland semiconductor startup, believes the key to massive parallelism in a high performance programmable chip is to define the right programming model first, then develop silicon architecture and tools to implement that model. In this talk, Mike Butts, Ambric, Inc., talks about Ambric's new chip that harnesses hundreds of 32-bit CPUs and memories in an power-efficient asynchronous system that is sensible to program and delivers up to one teraOPS performance. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series: Why are Graphics Systems So Fast?

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Over the last decade, graphics hardware has become a key component of mobile and personal computers. Most programmers understand CPUs well, but have a limited understanding of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). In this video from the University of Washington’s Computer Science and Engineering Department, Pat Hanrahan of Stanford University explains the architectures of different GPUs built by AMD, NVIDIA and Intel (the new Larrabee processor). The innovative combination of processor design and programming model makes for fast graphics systems. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Eye on the Universe: Final Mission to Hubble

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The 19-year-old Hubble Space Telescope has yielded stunning images and a remarkable scientific legacy – revealing new insight into the age of the universe, black holes and the role of "dark energy" in our expanding universe. University of Washington alum Gregory Johnson piloted the space shuttle Atlantis for the final service mission to Hubble. Imagine the extreme challenges of launching the shuttle 358 miles into space, capturing the huge telescope and making tricky repairs during five spacewalks. Johnson takes us on a thrilling journey into space and inside the final mission to Hubble. (Series: Engineering Lecture Series 2009: Engineering Xtreme Challenges)

Aggregating Imprecise Data in OLAP: Principles and Algorithms

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

T.S. Jayram, IBM Almaden Research Center, presents OLAP, a multi-dimensional data model in which data is analyzed across multiple hierarchical dimension attributes. Jayram considers the problem of aggregating data when there is imprecision in the hierarchy of dimension attributes. Using relevant criteria, he proposes an allocation-based mechanism to handle imprecise records. He also presents efficient algorithms of computing aggregation queries over a probabilistic database. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

The UrbanSim Project: Urban Simulation to Inform Public Decision-making

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The process of planning and constructing a new light rail system, expanding a freeway, or modifying zoning and land use plans is often politically charged. The goal in the UrbanSim project is to provide tools for planners, engaged citizens, and other stakeholders to be able to consider different scenarios, and then to evaluate these scenarios by modeling the resulting patterns of urban growth and redevelopment, of transportation usage, and of environmental impacts, over periods of 20- 30 years. Alan Borning, CSE, University of Washington, describes recent work on and applications of the project and gives some demonstrations. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Calculi for Access Control

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Access control is central to security in computer systems. Over the years, there have been many efforts to explain and to improve access control, sometimes with logical ideas and tools. Martin Abadi, Microsoft Research/UC Santa Cruz, reviews some of that work and its applications. He also explores a new approach based on type systems, specifically on a type system for tracking dependencies. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Research at Google

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

At its core, Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Alfred Z Spector, vice president of Research and Special Initiatives at Google, shares the Internet giant’s approach to research innovation in this talk at the University of Washington. Spector shares some of Google’s most promising advances in translation, speech and vision, and considers computer science’s greatest future challenges. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2010)

The End of Anonymity, the Beginning of Privacy

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The new Web economy relies on the collection of personal data on an ever-increasing scale. Information about our tastes, purchases, searches, browsing history, friendships and relationships, health history, genetics and more is shared with advertisers, marketers and researchers, raising a number of privacy issues. In this talk from the University of Washington, Vitaly Shmatikov, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, considers several approaches to privacy-preserving data sharing and show that "anonymization," including popular methods based on k-anonymity and similar syntactic properties, fails to provide meaningful privacy guarantees. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2010)

Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Lecturer: Why The Algorithm Might Soon Be The Only Game in Town

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Are our brains cuckoo clocks? Do fish swarm in an algorithmic manner? In this extremely engaging discussion, Bernard Chazelle of Princeton University utilizes such examples, as well as entertaining political and historical references, to show the power of algorithms and the effects of the fast approaching era of algorithms. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Software Transactions: A Programming-Languages Perspective

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

With multicore processors bringing parallel computing to the masses, there is an urgent need to make concurrent programming easier. Software transactions hold great promise for simplifying shared-memory concurrency, and they have received enormous attention from the research community in the last couple years. This talk will provide an overview of work done at the University of Washington to help bring transactions to the next generation of programming languages. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Nucleic Acid Logic Circuits for Programming Biology

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Learn about the design and experimental implementation of DNA-based logic gates and circuits in vitro. For their operation, the gates rely exclusively on sequence recognition and strand displacement reactions. Inputs and outputs are single-stranded nucleic acids and biological nucleic acids such as microRNAs can serve as inputs. The lecture will demonstrate logical AND, OR, and NOT, as well as thresholding and catalytic signal amplification. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Static Analysis of Dynamic Data Structures

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Dynamic allocation and destructive heap updates are fundamental language constructs that allow programmers to implement complex, efficient linked data structures. However, their flexibility makes it difficult for compilers and program analyzers to statically reason about the correct manipulation of such structures. Professor Radu Rugina discusses new heap analysis techniques and their application to error detection, program verification, and compiler transformations. These analyses are based on a novel approach where the compiler uses local reasoning about single heap cells, instead of global reasoning about the entire heap. This approach makes analyses precise enough to handle a large class of heap manipulation algorithms, and lightweight enough to scale to larger programs. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Surface Computing and Computer Vision-Based Human Computer Interaction

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The vision of ubiquitous computing suggests that interactivity will be embedded throughout our physical environment in a wide variety of form factors and modes of use. Andy Wilson, a Microsoft researcher presents a series of projects which exploit sensing technologies such as computer vision to enable a wide variety of fluid, natural interactions situated on walls and tabletop surfaces. For example, PlayAnywhere is a compact tabletop projection-vision system which explores a number of new interactions on everyday surfaces, while TouchLight combines a transparent projection screen material with computer vision techniques. These new form factors have the potential of changing the way we relate to computing, but they also pose a challenge in terms of interaction design because they are so different from today's desktop computing. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

SAGE: Software for Algebra and Geometry Experimentation

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

SAGE is a University of Washington project whose goal is to create an optimal, free, open source software environment for research and experimentation in algebra, geometry, number theory, cryptography, and related areas. William Stein, a professor with the University of Washington Department of Mathematics started SAGE in 2005 by combining together the very best of existing free software, including: Singular, PARI, GAP, Macaulay2, Maxima, gfan. Next, he created interfaces to non-free software : MAGMA, Maple, Mathematical. From that point, he began to fill in the gaps with new code. Now dozens of developers have joined Stein in working on filling those gaps and making SAGE a polished and high quality piece of free software. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

DNA Self-assembly and Computer System Fabrication

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The migration of circuit fabrication technology from the microscale to the nanoscale has generated a great deal of interest in how the fundamental physical limitations of materials will change the way we engineer computer systems. The changing relationships between performance, defects, and cost have motivated research into so-called disruptive or exotic technologies. Chris Dwyer, from Duke University will present the theory, design, and methods of fabrication for DNA self-assembled nanostructures within the context of circuit fabrication. The advantages of this technology go beyond the simple scaling of device feature sizes (sub-20nm) to enable new modes of computation that are impractical under the constraints of conventional fabrication methods. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

QED: A Simplifier for Concurrent Programs

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Explore QED, a new approach for reasoning about concurrency, with Shaz Qadeer of Microsoft Research in this video from the University of Washington. Since reasoning about complicated thread interleavings is difficult, QED simply avoids reasoning about them! Instead, QED simplifies the concurrent program iteratively, eliminating concurrency in favor of nondeterminism, producing in the limit a nondeterministic sequential program. The simplification performed by QED is based on a simple rewriting calculus. Yet, it is surprisingly powerful; an appropriate combination of these rewrite rules can often simplify concurrent programs dramatically. Qadeer also looks at other applications of the theory behind QED, such as programmer-assisted parallelization and static concurrency unit testing. and static concurrency unit testing. This talk is based on joint work with Tayfun Elmas and Serdar Tasiran. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2010)

Parallel and Asynchronous Programming with F#

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Don Syme of Microsoft Research, Cambridge, looks at programming with F# in this video from the University of Washington. F# is a succinct and expressive typed functional programming language in the context of a modern, applied software development environment (.NET), and Microsoft will be supporting F# as a first class language in Visual Studio 2010. Syme offers an overview of F#, as well as some general coding, and takes a deeper look at each of these contributions and why they matter. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2010)

Usable Privacy and Security: Protecting People from Online Phishing Scams

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Phishing scams are a kind of semantic attack on computer systems that target the users of computer systems, rather than the system itself. Phishing is estimated to have cost over $3 billion in losses in 2008, with criminals impersonating banks, e-commerce sites, retail sites, and universities to trick people into giving them passwords or credit card information. Phishing attacks have also been used to steal sensitive information from corporations and governments, including the US Department of Defense. This talk will present ongoing research in protecting people from phishing attacks. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Lecturer: Declarative Networking: "What" is Next

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Declarative languages allow programmers to say what they want, without worrying over the details of how to achieve it. These kinds of languages revolutionized data management decades ago but have had limited success in other aspects of computing. The story seems to be changing in recent years, however. One new chapter is work that Joe Hellerstein and his colleagues have been pursuing on the design and implementation of declarative languages and runtime systems for network protocol specification. Distributed Systems and Networking appear to be surprisingly natural domains for declarative specifications and they are ripe for a new programming methodology. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

The Intentional Domain Workbench

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The complexity of software code is the result of the intermingling of domain knowledge with implementation information. Generative Programming and Domain Specific Languages are known techniques for factoring and reducing the total complexity. The Domain Workbench that Intentional Software Corporation is developing makes the definition, creation, editing, combination, extension, and processing of DSL's more practical. Key features of the Domain Workbench are the uniform representation of multiple interrelated domains, the ability to project the domains in multiple editable notations, and direct access to the domain code by a program generator. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Peter at DARPA

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Peter Lee, director of the new Transformational Convergence Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), shares TCTO's mission, research areas and approaches to technology innovation. TCTO aims to develop research programs that enhance the nation's ability to anticipate strategic surprise. It does this by re-establishing basic research programs in a broad range of rapidly emerging computing-enabled technology areas such as social media, synthetic biology, high-performance computing and networking, as well as employing a diverse range of innovation strategies including broad community programs, competitions and challenges, and crowd sourcing. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2010)

Bing: Intent, Knowledge and Decision Engine

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Microsoft released its new “decision engine” in 2009. Take a look at the design decisions and technology directions behind Bing with Harry Shum, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Corporation. The search paradigm is shifting from "search hit-or-miss model" to "Bing dialog model" where the search engine of the future must focus on improving user experience to facilitate task completion. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2010)

Energy Crisis, Smart Solutions

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Our nation’s electric grid must transform into an integrated digital system to meet expanding 21st century power demands. PNNL is a leading contributor in the nation’s billion-dollar push to develop “smart grids” and the technologies that will radically transform grid operation, increase energy efficiency, incorporate renewable energy, support electrification of the transportation sector and produce a smaller carbon footprint. Meanwhile, University of Washington engineers are inventing sensors to monitor resource use in real time and encourage efficiency in the home – smarter energy from source to user. (Series: Engineering Lecture Series 2009: Engineering Xtreme Challenges)

Back to Nature for the Next Technology Revolution

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Engineering researchers such as Babak Parviz are studying nature on the nanoscale to create the next technology revolution. Imagine using DNA as a template to "grow" electronic devices, or custom designing molecules to build transistors. It could transform our future. (Series: Engineering Lecture Series 2008)

Programming Language Ideas Escape the Lab: A Declarative Data Description Language for Managing Ad Hoc Data

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

XML. HTML. CSV. JPEG. MPEG. These data formats represent vast quantities of scientific, governmental and industrial data. In an ideal world, all data would be in such formats. In reality, vast amounts of data exist in ad hoc formats, which do not have readily available tools. In this talk from the University of Washington, Kathleen Fisher describes the PADS data description language created to address this problem. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2010)

Amdahl's Law in the Multicore Era

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

From the University of Washington, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mark Hill shares his work developing a corollary to Amdahl's Law for multicore chips. This method models fixed chip resources for alternative designs that use symmetric cores, asymmetric cores or dynamic techniques that allow cores to work together on sequential execution. The results encourage multicore designers to view performance of the entire chip rather than focus on core efficiencies. This talk is part of the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Colloquium Series. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2010)

New Directions in Multiprocessor Synchronization

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Computer architecture is about to undergo, if not another revolution, then a vigorous shaking-up. The major chip manufacturers have, for the time being, simply given up trying to make processors run faster. Instead, they have recently started shipping "multicore" architectures, in which multiple processors (cores) communicate directly through shared hardware caches, providing increased concurrency instead of increased clock speed. As a result, system designers and software engineers can no longer rely on increasing clock speed to hide software bloat. Instead, they must somehow learn to make effective use of increasing parallelism. Transactional memory is a computational model in which threads synchronize by optimistic, lock-free transactions. This synchronization model promises to alleviate many of the problems associated with locking, and there is a growing community of researchers working on both software and hardware support for this approach. In this Distinguished Lecturer Series, Maurice Herlihy, Brown University, surveys the area, with a focus on open research problems. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

The Design and Analysis of Simple Algorithms

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Allan Borodin, University of Toronto, addresses the question, "Is it time to make algorithm design more of a computer science?" A basic course in Computer Science undergraduate and graduate programs is "The Design and Analysis of Algorithms" or "Introduction to Algorithms." Looking at such course descriptions, syllabus, and textbooks, one can infer that an organizational theme is often in terms of "basic algorithmic paradigms." Maybe it is just that time does not permit us to illustrate many such paradigms or maybe there are not that many to illustrate. In any case, even though we usually "cover" very few such general techniques in our courses, we rarely if ever try to precisely define such algorithmic concepts and hence cannot rigorously address the question as to their power and limitations. Within the field of Operations Research there have been attempts to formally model and study dynamic programming and branch and bound algorithms but this work has been largely ignored in Computer Science. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

PlanetLab: Evolution vs. Intelligent Design in Global Network Infrastructure

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

PlanetLab is a global platform for evaluating and deploying network services. It currently includes nearly 700 nodes, spanning over 335 sites and 35 countries, and hosts over 500 experimental services. In this Distinguished Lecturer Series, Larry Peterson, Princeton University, identifies the requirements PlanetLab addresses, presents the design principles that follow from them, and outlines the resulting PlanetLab architecture. He also briefly discusses some of the lessons learned about building large network systems. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Broadening Computer and Robotics Education and Participation for Women

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Women and other underrepresented groups represent a vast amount of untapped human resource potential needed to fuel both industry and academic research needs. Professor Andrew Williams describes a cohesive, integrated approach to increase the participation and education of women and African Americans using innovative robotics and computer curriculum and competitions. Williams provides several examples, including how the all-women Spelman College's SpelBots RoboCup Four-Legged robot soccer team, and the joint Spelman and Carnegie Mellon University NSF-sponsored project, C.A.R.E., have inspired young girls to pursue education and research in robotics and artificial intelligence. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Rethinking Internet Traffic Management Using Optimization Theory

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Dr. Jennifer Rexford, computer science professor at Princeton University, shares fresh ideas on how to better manage Internet traffic. Recent innovations in optimization theory now make it possible to develop more flexible, efficient protocols to control Internet traffic that satisfy both users and network operators. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

The Cyberspace Data Explosion: Boon or Black Hole?

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

We are entering a cyber world where millions of sensors continuously collect data. From the ocean bottom to deep space, scientists are monitoring environments at unprecedented scales. On a more personal level, implanted medical devices can now monitor our well-being and "smart chips" embedded in passports, IDs and transit cards can track our comings and goings. Massive, ubiquitous databanks offer promise of great benefits but also dangers. How do we manage this data onslaught wisely? How do we guard our privacy and ensure our safety? UW scientists are asking these questions and blazing trails on the latest frontiers of cybersecurity. (Series: Engineering Lecture Series 2009: Engineering Xtreme Challenges)

Beyond Oil: Powering the Future

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Transportation consumes 70 percent of the oil used in our country. But as worldwide demand for oil soars and supplies tighten, how will we keep transportation moving? Current and emerging technologies can quickly convert a wide range of plant matter to transportation biofuels, offering a partial solution and contributing to an increasingly diversified and "greener" energy future. (Series: Engineering Lecture Series 2008)

Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series: Robotic Cars: Challenges and Perspectives

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

As the US automotive industry is at the brink of collapse, we now face a unique opportunity to "begin more intelligently," as Henry Ford once said. Today's automobile industry is wasteful along many dimensions, such as energy consumption, resource utilization, human comfort, and safety. Sebastian Thrun from Stanford University will talk about innovative ideas for "Car 2.0," which rely heavily on computer science. He will specifically address the topic of robotic cars, discuss his experiences with the DARPA Challenges, and highlight ongoing research on smarter, safer, and more efficient transportation. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Technology for Long-Term Care: Scaling Elder Care to the Next Billion

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Long-term care helps the elderly perform key day-to-day tasks such as eating, personal care and medication. Today, such care is overwhelmingly manual. However, the cost of manual care is unsustainable in the face of demographic trends. Without dramatic breakthroughs in the cost of care, over half of all elders are expected to be without adequate care within a generation.

This talk describes a series of studies performed at Intel (in collaboration with several major partner organizations including the University of Washington) over the past six years towards understanding how technology may substantially reduce the manual burden of care.

(Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

UBIT Research Program: Technology for All

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Universal Benefit from Information Technology is a University of Washington program researching innovative approaches to provide access to, and use of, information technology. The research is especially relevant on a university campus which serves the needs of a diverse student population which needs access to desktop applications, web sites, and mobile devices. The u b i t research projects integrate information science, human-computer interaction, and computer science disciplines.

Keynote by William Gates Sr. and Panel: “Around the World with EWB”

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Keynote address by William Gates, Sr.: "Sustaining Engineering and Global Health"

Panel discussion: "Around the World with EWB"

Engineers Without Borders is an international nonprofit organization that partners with disadvantaged communities worldwide to improve their quality of life through environmentally sustainable, equitable and economical engineering projects.

In the conference's keynote address, William Gates Sr., Co-Chair of the Bill & William Gates Foundation, presents “Sustaining Engineering and Global Health.”He discusses efforts that the Gates Foundation is currently making to help fund engineering and health projects throughout the world. Following the keynote address, learn how Puget Sound students and professional engineers are implementing development projects “Around the World.”. The University of Washington’s Donee Alexander, a Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, discusses a recent project by the UW student chapter to improve water supply and cook stoves in Yanayo, Bolivia. The Seattle University student chapter of EWB and Puget Sound professional chapter also present their groups' recent initiatives in Thailand and Ethiopia. (Series: Engineers Without Borders)

Engineers Without Borders: Engineering with Soul

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Bernard Amadei, professor of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, shares his passion to partner with disadvantaged communities to improve their quality of life through Engineers Without Borders. Engineers Without Borders is an international nonprofit organization that drives environmentally sustainable, equitable and economical engineering projects in disadvantaged communities worldwide while developing responsible engineers and engineering students. The central belief of the organization is "to build a better world, one community at a time." (Series: Engineers Without Borders)

Explore a Career in Paper Science Engineering

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT

How would you like to have most of your tuition paid for? And upon graduation know that you will have a job with a starting salary around $58,000 ? Then explore the PSE program at the University of Washington. This program applies natural products chemistry, chemical processing, and material science to the many uses of natural products and fiber based materials, including paper and biofuels manufacturing. The program also offers several grants to students and currently has 100% job placement. (Series: Explore a Career in Paper Science Engineering)

Building Secure Systems from Buggy Code with Information Flow Control

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The intensity of today’s computer security resembles an arms race: the bad guys constantly find new ways to break in and being safe requires ceaseless efforts to stay one step ahead to cut off avenues of attack. But this strategy is risky and expensive. Nikolai Zeldovich of Stanford University examines the use of information flow control to build secure systems out of buggy code and ways to reduce or even eliminate security vulnerabilities. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Securing the Web with Decentralized Information Flow Control

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

This talk discusses how to secure both today's web sites and tomorrow's web computing platforms with a new OS technique called Decentralized Information Flow Control (DIFC). A DIFC system tracks the flow of secret data as it is copied from file to file and communicated from process to process. DIFC provides better security than standard OSes because it allows developers to concentrate security-critical code in small, audit-friendly declassifiers, which remain small and contained even as the overall system balloons with new features. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Some Hotter Topics in Information and Physical Security

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The entire technology world – not just IT – is constantly changing. Recent changes force a reexamination of assumptions about information security made only a brief time ago. Emerging technologies, once emerged, turn out to be a bit scary. Perhaps that's because the law of unintended consequences operates strongly at the bleeding edge, where tools end up cutting both ways. Many talk about "grand challenges in information security", while foolishly implementing things that are supposed to represent data but somehow end up being executable. At the moment, the most sophisticated measurements of security are things like bug counts, and do not address tradeoffs in managing security processes. Attacks which were thought to be impractical or uneconomical are now possible as a result of everything becoming smaller, faster, more sensitive, always connected, mobile, ubiquitous and cheap. Seiden’s talk lays out the landscape using stories and examples, and try to persuade you of the benefits of rethinking some of those assumptions to make your systems a bit more future-resistant. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

An Introduction to Venture Capital

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Securing financing is a critical step for most startup companies in the progression from an initial idea to a fully staffed company shipping real products. For an entrepreneur starting a company, having a clear understanding of potential financing mechanisms can be just as important as knowledge of the technology and market opportunities. This program provides an overview of startup financing in general and venture capital in particular, addressing issues and questions including: What options are available for financing a startup, and what are their pros and cons? What do venture capitalists look for in a startup company? What are the expected success rates? What should entrepreneurs look for in a venture firm? (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

The End of Alchemy Empirical Software Security Assurance

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

For more than a decade, scientists, visionaries and pundits have put forth a multitude of methodologies for building secure software, but what techniques deliver real results? Examine software security assurance as it is practiced today in this video from the University of Washington’s Computer Science and Engineering department. Hear in-depth interviews with leading enterprises such as Adobe, EMC, Google, Microsoft, QUALCOMM, Wells Fargo and Depository Trust Clearing Corporation. The lessons these leaders have learned can be applied in order to build a new effort from scratch or to expand the reach of existing security capabilities. Speakers also present a set of benchmarks for developing and growing an enterprise-wide software security initiative, including but not limited to integration into the software development lifecycle. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Introduction to Venture Capital

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Securing financing is a critical step for most startup companies as they progress from an initial idea to a fully-staffed company shipping real products. For an entrepreneur starting a company, having a clear understanding of potential financing mechanisms can be just as important as knowledge of the technology and market opportunities. Examine startup financing in general and venture capital in particular in this video from the University of Washington’s Computer Science and Engineering Department. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Content-Preserving Warps for Video Stabilization and Wide-Angle Imaging

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Content-preserving warps allow video editors to deform images while preserving the shape and appearance of salient image content. Aseem Agarwala of Adobe describes how variants of this method can be applied in surprising ways. Content-preserving warps can improve video stabilization, transforming shaky hand-held camera work and into smooth motion video. Examine a challenging case: modifying a video shot while walking through a 3D scene so that it resembles the "tracking shots" used in films, where rail-mounted cameras are carefully pushed along ideal paths. Another problem is minimizing perceptual distortion in wide-angle images. Large field-of-view images are easy to capture with wide-angle lenses or by stitching panoramas, but the images typically look distorted; straight lines in the scene may be curved, and objects stretched or squashed. The goal is to project the visual content defined across a large field-of-view into a distortion-free image. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Hardness Amplification by Repetition

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Does computing k times as many functions require k times the computational effort? In this talk, we discuss a few scenarios in which variants of this question have been studied. This talk will examine hardness of approximation, communication complexity and spherical cubes. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

ARPA-E: Addressing the Sputniks of our Generation

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The report "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" proposed the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy. The report suggested ARPA-E to be modeled after DARPA, which was created in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik.

The U.S. now faces new Sputnik-like challenges, including energy security; maintaining a technological lead; and greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. In many cases, we as a nation are lagging behind and need to change course with fierce urgency. Arun Majumdar of ARPA-E explains the agency's goal is to help catalyze this change by attracting the best minds to focus on major technical challenges and stimulating the technical and entrepreneurial community to create innovative energy technologies.

(Series: CSE Colloquia - 2010)

Computer Science & Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series: Closing the Innovation Gap

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Innovation drives economic growth, our quality of life and is the only hope of addressing the major challenges we face. But America, a cornerstone of innovation throughout the world, has become increasingly short-sighted. By taking innovation for granted we threaten not only our own strength, but the overall global economy. Judy Estrin, technology and business pioneer and author of the new book Closing the Innovation Gap, will talk about how it is essential to reignite sustainable innovation in business, education and government and what is required of business and national leaders to revive organizational, national and global Innovation Ecosystems. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

The Application of Platform-Based Design to Embedded Electronics and Synthetic Biological Systems

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Platform-Based Design is a design methodology within Computer Aided Design which at its core promotes the separation of functionality from implementation. Rigorous and formal applications of PBD have been shown to be very useful in the design of embedded electronic systems. This work has manifested itself in the development of the Polis, Metropolis, and Metro II design environments at UC Berkeley. PBD's true power lies in its ability to cross into new application areas. This talk will outline PBD techniques as they relate to both embedded electronics and synthetic biology. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Learning Hierarchical, Nonparametric Models for Visual Scenes

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Computer vision systems use image features to detect and categorize objects in visual scenes. In this University of Washington program, learn about Erik Sudderth MIT/UC Berkeley research that explores hierarchical models using contextual and geometric relationships for more effective learning from large, partially labeled image databases. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Computational Textiles and the Democratization of Ubiquitous Computing

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The blossoming research field of e-textiles integrates computation with fabric. E-textile researchers weave, solder and sew electronics into cloth to build soft, flexible and washable computational devices. E-textiles is a young discipline, and developments in the field have been relegated almost exclusively to research labs in industry and academia. In this University of Washington program, learn about advancements that make e-textiles accessible to new audiences that are helping to democratize ubiquitous computing and integrate electronic hardware with cloth. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Stream Programming: Luring Programmers into the Multicore Era

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

As the computer industry has moved to multicore processors, the historic trend of exponential performance improvements will now depend on ordinary programmers and their ability to parallelize their code. However, most programmers are already overwhelmed by the complexity of modern software and are unwilling to expend extra effort on parallelization. Hence, for programmers to embrace a parallel abstraction, it must come with new capabilities that simplify application development and lure programmers into changing their ways. Learn more in this University of Washington program presented by William Thies of MIT. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Collaborative Information Visualization

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Interactive visualizations leverage human visual processing and cognition to increase the scale of information with which we can effectively work. However, most visualization research to date focuses on a single-user model, overlooking the social nature of visual media. Visualizations are used not only to explore and analyze, but to communicate findings. People may disagree on how to interpret data and contribute contextual knowledge that deepens understanding. Furthermore, some data sets are so large that thorough exploration by a single person is unlikely. Jeffrey Heer from the University of California, Berkeley, presents a number of novel visualization techniques in this University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering program. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Network Coded Wireless Architecture

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Wireless is becoming the preferred mode of network access. The performance of wireless networks in practice, however, is hampered due to the harsh characteristics of the wireless medium: its shared broadcast nature, interference, and high error rate. Traditionally, network designers have viewed these characteristics as problematic, and tried to work around them. This talk will show how we can turn these challenges into opportunities that we exploit to significantly improve performance. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Computer Science Research for Global Development

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

On the same planet where there are 1.4 billion Internet users, a far less fortunate 1.4 billion people survive below the World Bank’s definition of the poverty line. The same technology that has transformed our lives - the lives of the wealthiest people on the planet - also remains out of reach and irrelevant for the poorest. This talk introduces the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India, where an interdisciplinary team of researchers explores solutions in the context of agriculture, education, healthcare, microfinance, and other domains of development. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Object Recognition with Deformable Models

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The problem of detecting and localizing objects in images has important applications in a variety of areas, including robotics, image retrieval and medical image analysis. Deformable models represent objects as deformed versions of an ideal template. While this approach provides an elegant framework for object recognition, it also leads to difficult computational problems. The first part of this University of Washington program describes efficient algorithms that have been developed for finding objects in images using different types of deformable models. In the second part, Pedro Felzenszwalb of the University of Chicago considers the specific problem of detecting objects from generic categories such as people and cars in realistic scenes. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Computational Biology: Comparing Vertebrate Genomes

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

There are currently 17 vertebrate genomes, ranging from primates to fishes, for which we know nearly their entire DNA sequences, and this number will increase rapidly. Comparing these genome sequences has emerged as one of the most important areas of computational biology. One way to predict functional portions of the human genome, for example, is to search among related genomes for sequences that appear to be remarkably similar due to selective pressure. Martin Tompa discusses and demonstrates some of the methods and tools for such an approach, as well as some of the challenges and unsolved problems. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Enhancing Creativity Through Toolkits

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Interface toolkits in ordinary application areas let average programmers rapidly develop software resembling other standard applications. In contrast, toolkits for novel and perhaps unfamiliar application areas enhance the creativity of these programmers. By removing low-level implementation burdens and supplying appropriate building blocks, toolkits give people a "language" to think about these new interfaces, which in turn allows them to concentrate on creative designs. This means that programmers can rapidly generate and test new ideas, replicate and refine ideas presented by others, and create demonstrations for others to try. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Traffic Matrix Inference and Anomaly Detection in Large IP Networks

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Albert Greenberg of Microsoft describes progress in IP network traffic matrix inference, arguably one of the most important technical problems in the engineering and management of large-scale IP networks. Greenberg discusses tomo-gravity (how to compute accurate traffic matrices for large ISPs in seconds), and anomography (how to accurately detect anomalies, at network-level, for large ISPs in seconds). The methods rely only on ubiquitously available link load and configuration data. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Designing Appropriate Computing Technologies for the Rural Developing World

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Tapan Parikh describes his experiences developing CAM - a toolkit for mobile phone data collection - in the rural developing world. Designing technologies for an unfamiliar context requires understanding the needs and capabilities of potential users. Drawing from the results of an extended participatory design study conducted with microfinance group members in rural India (many of whom are semi-literate or illiterate), he outlines a set of user interface design guidelines for accessibility to such users. The results of this study are used to motivate the design of the CAM toolkit, which includes support for paper-based interaction; multimedia input and output; and disconnected operation. Parikh discusses possible topics for future work and his long-term research vision. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Bill Gates Unplugged: On Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Giving Back

Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

University of Washington President Mark Emmert and the department of Computer Science and Engineering host Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates for the final stop of his six-university tour, as Gates transitions from Microsoft to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (Series: Bill Gates Unplugged: On Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Giving Back)

Virtual Private Machines: A Resource Abstraction for Multicore Computer Systems

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The computer industry is undergoing a momentous transformation. General-purpose computing is moving from desktops to diverse devices such as smart phones, digital entertainment centers and data center servers. At the same time, high-performance semiconductor manufacturers have shifted their focus from large monolithic processor designs to distributed multicore architectures. Learn more about architectures, multicore hardware, resource efficiency, and operating system policies in this University of Washington program with guest speaker Kyle Nesbit from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Stochastic Optimal Control in Biology and Engineering

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Control under uncertainty is a fundamental problem relevant to biology as well as engineering. Optimality models have explained numerous details of biological movements. Indeed optimal control and optimal (i.e. Bayesian) estimation are becoming the framework of choice for studying sensorimotor function. However most demonstrations of optimality are limited to relatively simple behaviors. In more complex and interesting behaviors we still lack the algorithms to compute what is optimal. Continued progress requires more efficient algorithms for stochastic optimal control. In this University of Washington program, Emanuel Todorov, of MIT and UCSD, presents a new problem formulation that greatly simplifies the construction of optimal control laws, and yields original algorithms. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

A Theory of Similarity Functions for Learning and Clustering

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Machine learning has become a highly successful discipline with applications in many different areas of computer science. A critical advance that has spurred this success has been the development of learning methods using a special type of similarity functions known as kernel functions. These methods have proven very useful in practice for dealing with many different kinds of data and they also have a solid theoretical foundation. In this University of Washington program, Maria-Florina Balcan of Carnegie Mellon University describes the theory that provides new and simpler explanations. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Dynamics of Real-World Networks

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Emergence of the web and cyberspace gave rise to detailed traces of human social activity. This offers great opportunities to analyze and model behaviors of millions of people. Take, for example, an examination of planetary scale dynamics of a full Microsoft Instant Messenger network that contains 240 million people, with more than 255 billion exchanged messages per month (4.5TB of data), which makes it the largest social network analyzed to date. In this University of Washington program, guest speaker Jure Leskovec of Carnegie Mellon University, focuses on two aspects of the dynamics of large real-world networks -- dynamics of information diffusion and cascading behavior in networks, and dynamics of the structure of time evolving networks. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Bringing Sensing to the Masses: Infrastructure Mediated Sensing

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The use of sensing systems in the home has the potential to impact various research areas such as chronic care management, aging in place, and sustainability. But such sensing systems can also affect our daily lives. Shwetak Patel of the Georgia Institute of Technology developed what he calls infrastructure mediated sensing, or IMS. In this video, explore the possibilities of IMS, the challenges it faces and how it may enable our homes to sense our activities as well as assist in home maintenance. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Coarse-to-Fine Natural Language Processing

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

State-of-the-art NLP models are anything but compact. Syntactic parsers have huge grammars, machine translation systems have huge transfer tables, and so on across a range of tasks. With such complexity come two challenges. First, how can we learn highly complex models? Second, how can we efficiently infer optimal structures within them? Syntactic parsing, acoustic modeling for speech recognition, and machine translation issues are all discussed in this talk. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Powerset and Natural Language Search

Thu, 17 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Central to the concept of natural language search is that users express queries in natural language with the system responses respecting the linguistic information in the query. Architecture centered on natural language, linguistic and lexical knowledge translates directly into improved capabilities and experiences for end users. This creates both challenges and opportunities. Powerset is a startup company that is tackling these challenges in an attempt to bring natural language search to the world. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Multiprocessor Architectures for Programmability

Thu, 17 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Luis Ceze believes the main problem confronting computer architects today is designing computer systems that help simplify parallel programming. Ceze presents two powerful computer architecture primitives that help with this. Together, these two techniques offer promising directions in the critical area of novel multiprocessor architectures for programmability. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Robust Design of Arithmetic Units for Error Tolerant Applications

Thu, 17 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Josephine Ammer discusses designing robust arithmetic units for new semiconductors and wireless communications. As semiconductor technology is scaled, process variation becomes an ever-increasing problem. Designs incur a larger penalty to guarantee operation at the worst-case process corner. Many applications (wireless communication, audio and video signal processing, graphics, data mining, etc.) can tolerate certain levels of errors. The key challenge is ensuring those errors cause small changes in the final system output. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Learning to Program DNA

Wed, 28 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Ongoing improvements in DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis technologies are making genetic material (physical DNA molecules) and genetic information (DNA sequence data) interconvertible. For example, researchers have demonstrated the construction of DNA molecules up to 7,700,000 base pairs, a length that is long enough to encode all known viruses, most important bacteria, and almost the entire genome of S. cerevisiae (baker's yeast). (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Modeling, Analysis and Optimization of On-chip Communication Architectures

Wed, 28 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Traditionally, design space exploration for Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) has focused on the computational aspects of the problem at hand. However, as the number of processing elements on a single chip and their performance continue to increase, the design of the communication architecture plays a central role in defining the area, performance and energy consumption of the overall system. Furthermore, the global interconnects cause unpredictable delays and high power consumption. To mitigate these kinds of effects, the network-on-chip (NoC) communication architectures have emerged recently as a promising alternative to the classical bus-based and point-to-point communication architectures. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Apprenticeship Learning for Robotic Control

Wed, 28 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Research into robotics is nothing new, but have we hit a point in robotics development at which we can teach robots instead of merely create them? Pieter Abbeel of Stanford University discusses apprenticeship learning techniques that have opened a door of possibilities for robotics, enabling a quadruped robot to traverse challenging terrain and a helicopter to perform difficult aerobatics. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Measuring the Accuracy of Distributed Algorithms on Multi-Robot Systems

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Distributed algorithms running on multi-robot systems rely on ad-hoc networks to relay messages throughout the group. The propagation speed of these messages is large, but not infinite, and problems in algorithm execution can arise when the robot speed is a large fraction of the message propagation speed. In this work, we focus on measuring the accuracy of multi-robot distributed algorithms. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Distinguished Lecturer Series: Jeff Dean - Research Challenges Inspired by Large-Scale Computing at Google

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

This lecture gives some background information on Google's existing hardware and software infrastructure and will examine what works well and what does not, and some areas where interesting unsolved research problems are highlighted. The problems span a wide range of topics, including processor design, distributed systems, machine learning, information retrieval, text processing and many other areas. This talk is meant to cover a sampling of interesting problems/areas, not a comprehensive treatise. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Distinguished Lecturer Series: David Ditzel - A 25 Year Perspective on Binary Translation: What Worked, What Didn't

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Binary Translation is a technique that continues to grow in acceptance. It has been used for moving customer applications across systems which would otherwise be binary incompatible. Early examples include Hunter Systems XDOS and Digital Equipment's FX132, to Transitive Technologies current use by Apple Computer to help move customer applications from PowerPC to Intel processors. Binary translation techniques will become increasingly common in the future as a way to introduce new techniques in computer architecture while proving backwards binary compatibility. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Intelligence in Wikipedia

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Berners-Lee's vision of the Semantic Web is hindered by a chicken-and-egg problem, which can be best solved by a bootstrapping method: creating enough structured data to motivate the development of applications. UW CSE believes that autonomously Semantifying Wikipedia is the best way to bootstrap. They choose Wikipedia as an initial data source, because it is comprehensive, high-quality, not too large, and contains enough manually-derived structure to bootstrap an autonomous, self-supervised process. This talk will present their success to date in this endeavor. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Microsoft's Parallel Computing Platform: Applied Research in a Product Setting

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The goal of Microsoft's Parallel Computing Platform (PCP) team is to enable the shift to modern, multi- and manycore hardware, by providing a runtime, programming models, libraries, and tools that make it easy for developers to construct correct, efficient, maintainable, and scalable programs through the use of parallelism. In doing so, tens of years of industry research has been combined and applied in a myriad of ways. This talk examines PCP's current progress, explicitly relating it to specific research of the past and present, in addition to surveying future efforts and possible research opportunities. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Chaos in Computer Performance

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Are computers inherently chaotic? New research from the University of Colorado at Boulder suggests that computer software has grown so complex as to defy traditional tools of analysis. Join Elizabeth Bradley, professor in the department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering at the University of Colorado, for a new, dynamic and non-linear approach to computer design. This video is part of the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Colloquium Series. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Fleet, Infinity and Marina

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Simplicity isn’t a word usually associated with computer chips. For Ivan Sutherland though, it may provide the key to streamlining chip design and advancing program communication. In this video from the University of Washington, Sutherland, vice president of Sun Microsystems and founder of the Asynchronous Research Center at Portland State University, discloses his three, radically pared-down computing architectures named Infinity, Marina and Fleet. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Computer Science and Engineering Industrial Affiliates Program: The Changing Face of Venture Capital

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Learn more about the Industrial Affiliates Program, which aims to support the mutual needs of business, industry and academia in computer research, development and education. The program offers business and industry partners opportunities to influence computing research and education, the chance to participate in long-range technical assessments of problems and directions in the field as well as a link to prospective employees. Students are introduced to industrial needs and available internships.

The Industrial Affiliates Program offers a constructive relationship between industry and universities – a relationship that stimulates developments in both segments of our society.

(Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Open Data Kit: Open Source Mobile Data Collection

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Get ahead of the technology curve with Gaetano Borriello, Computer Science and Engineering professor at the University of Washington. Borriello reveals the latest data collection tool, Open Data Kit, a customizable mobile device that its creators hope will bring current research directly into the hands of citizen scientists, and public health and environmental communities. Supported by Google, ODK is sure to push information horizons in new directions. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

The Impact of Multicore Architectures on Software: Disaster or Opportunity?

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

How much information can you fit on a single microchip? Senior manager Michael Hind of the Programming Technologies Department at IBM Research reveals the most up-to-date changes in computer chip memory capacity, clock frequency and software optimization in this video from the University of Washington's Computer Science and Engineering Colloquium Series. Multiple processor cores on every chip will both challenge and revolutionize the industry. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Cybersecurity: The First Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The First Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition—or "Geeks Under Attack!"— tested students’ ability to protect enterprise network and business information systems. Hosted by Microsoft and organized by Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, Director of the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity at the University of Washington Information School, PRCCDC offered a challenging proving ground for nine teams of rising cybersecurity professionals. The documentary was funded by a generous gift from Microsoft. (Series: Cybersecurity: The First Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition)

Deduplication Storage System

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

This talk gives an overview of the latest disruptive technology in the storage systems industry called deduplication storage system. Disk-based deduplication storage has emerged as the new-generation storage system for enterprise data protection to replace tape libraries. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Overcoming Security Challenges in Emerging Technologies

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Emerging technologies have the potential to greatly improve the quality of our lives. Without the appropriate checks and balances, however, these emerging technologies have the potential to also compromise our digital (and physical) security and privacy. A key goal of the UW CSE Computer Security Lab is to help us achieve the best of both worlds: the wonderful promises offered by the new technologies without the associated security and privacy risks. This talk will examine several strands of our research, focusing first on our recent work with wireless implantable medical devices. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Diversity Redefined in the New Affirmative Action Era

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Examine the enormous challenge academic institutions face to ensure a diverse student population without giving preference to race or gender, according to the law. Dr. Juan E. Gilbert, professor and chair of the Human Centered Computing Division in the School of Computing at Clemson University, has attempted to address these issues with a data mining tool called Applications Quest. Applications Quest allows the use of race, gender or any other attributes to be considered in admissions, school assignments, employee hiring or any other application processing area, such that no preferences are given to race or gender. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

How to Get the Most Out of a Startup

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Glenn Kelman, Redfin CEO and Plumtree Software founder, talks to computer science undergraduates about how to evaluate, interview at and negotiate with startups and also how to think about some day starting a company of their own. Kelman gives tips for dealing with startups going into recruiting season. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Digital Simplicity through Activity-Based Computing

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Recent advances in small, inexpensive sensors, low-power processing, machine learning and mobile-user interfaces have enabled applications that use on-body sensing to infer people's activities throughout everyday life. The Digital Simplicity project brings this technology into our everyday lives and simplifies our high-level, long-lived activities. Target activities include supporting the elderly’s health and independence, motivating individuals to get fit and reducing a family’s environmental footprint. Explore these applications as well as the underlying sensing, inference and design tools required to bring Digital Simplicity to everyday life. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Towards a Simpler Internet

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT

While the Internet has proven to be an astounding triumph of engineering, it continues to face huge technical problems. This talk will argue that many of these problems stem from the complexity of the Internet's protocol stack. Although the Internet is often easy to use, in the presence of faults, misconfigurations, attacks, and resource contention, the Internet's behavior can be very difficult to model or even understand. The research agenda at UW has been to develop a suite of protocols to radically simplify the Internet's observable behavior, to yield a more robust, securable, and efficient system. The lecture will give examples from interdomain routing, denial-of-service protection, congestion control, and wireless media access. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Modern Views: A Conversation on Northwest Modern Architecture: Preview

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Five University of Washington alumni offer their perspectives on Northwest Modernist architecture. Architects Arne Bystrom, Gene Zema, Fred Bassetti, Wendell Lovett and Ralph Anderson shaped this regional style of architecture in the mid-20th century, adapting modernism to suit the unique needs of the Pacific Northwest. This preview offers a look at the documentary by the University of Washington Department of Architecture and studio/216.

Uncommon Sense & Innovation

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Dr. William Brody, president of Johns Hopkins University presents his lecture, "Uncommon Sense and Innovation." Brody is the 13th president of Johns Hopkins University. With his extensive education in electrical engineering and medicine, Brody knows the importance of discovery and innovation in science. With that in mind, he discusses the role of reasoning and problem solving in the real world and emphasizes how to apply it to science. (Series: Albert A. Moss Lectureship in Imaging Sciences)

Research in Educational Technology: Expanding Educational Possibilities

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The goal of the Educational Technology Group is to enhance education through novel deployments of computing technology. This includes improving the classroom experience by creating tools that allow greater flexibility in presentation and promote interaction, as well as extending the reach of education through different mechanisms for distance education. This program surveys a collection of projects the group has undertaken, including Tutored Video Instruction, Classroom Presenter, ConferenceXP, and Digital Study Hall. Learn about the challenges and future directions, including integrating a heterogeneous collection of devices to support active learning in the classroom, enhancing Tutored Video Instruction with greater support for facilitation, and creating an interactive environment in distance learning. Of particular interest are international course deployments and applications of educational technology to improve education in the developing world. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series: The Web the Way You Want It

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The decentralized architecture of the web was designed from the outset to create an environment where content producers and consumers could come together without the need for everyone to use the same server and client. To participate in the web revolution, users only needed to subscribe to the basic architecture of a web of content delivered via HTTP and addressable via URLs. Given this architecture, specialized browsers have always existed to a greater or lesser degree alongside mainstream web browsers. This talk will highlight specialized browsers in the context of accessibility; for use in mobile environments, or for use by persons with specific needs. As we evolve from the purely presentational web to a more data-oriented web, such specialized tools become center-stage with respect to providing optimal information access to the end-user. The talk will conclude with a brief overview of where such web technologies are headed and what this means to the future of making web content accessible to all. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Internet Evolution and Some Challenges for the Early 21st Century

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Although the Internet has been around for 35 years in concept and 25 years since roll out, there are still many capabilities that could improve its utility. Broadcast models of operation; dealing with mobility and multi-homing, coping with persistent connections, accommodating strong end/end authentication, expanding the address space, dealing with multilingual domain names, implementing DNSSEC, supporting an interplanetary extension of the Internet, adding more security to all layers and a host of other features. These topics will be explored in this talk. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2008)

Part 1 - Privacy: Reconciling Reality

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Hear a discussion about new federal and state laws meant to protect our privacy. What are the laws designed to achieve? How do they impact the general public, researchers, system managers and private organizations? In this program by The Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity at the University of Washington, learn strategies and tools under development to enhance information privacy and protection. (Series: Unintended Consequences of the Information Age)

Part 2 - At Odds: Victims Rights vs. Free Speech

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Examine the muddy crossroads where online anonymous free speech can morph into harmful, targeted crimes of hate in this program by The Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity at the University of Washington. State Attorney General Rob McKenna introduces this moderated discussion on how two tenets of the American consciousness –- a deeply held belief in the value of laissez-faire economics and in the first amendment –- collide with real-life victims of Internet crime. (Series: Unintended Consequences of the Information Age)

Computer Science: Past, Present and Future

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Computing research has made remarkable advances, but there's much more to be accomplished. The next ten years of advances should be even more significant, and even more interesting, than the past ten. The National Science Foundation has created the Computing Community Consortium to engage computing researchers in an ongoing process of visioning -- of imagining what we might contribute to the world, in terms that we and the world might both appreciate. This process is just beginning. In this program, Ed Lazowska reviews the progress the field has made and presents a number of "grand challenge" problems we should be prepared to tackle in the coming decade. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

The Desktop: Frontiers in Systems Research

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Desktop software, in the form of Web browsers, browser features and operating system distributions, are a growing area of engineering activity at Google. Brad Chen of Google, Inc. offers a look at Native Client as an example project in the space. Native Client is an open-source research technology for running x86 native code in Web applications, with the goal of maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability and safety that people expect from Web apps. It supports performance-oriented features generally absent from Web application programming environments, such as thread support, instruction set extensions such as SSE and use of compiler intrinsics and hand-coded assembler. Google combines these properties in an open architecture designed to leverage existing Web standards and to encourage community review and third-party tools. Overall, Google's desktop efforts seek to enable new Web applications, improve end-user experience and enable a more flexible balance between client and server computing. Google has open sourced many desktop efforts, in part to encourage collaboration and independent innovation. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series: Cooking in Silico: Understanding Heat Transfer in the Modern Kitchen

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

During the last decade, haute cuisine has undergone a scientific revolution. Leading chefs have taken an interest in the science of cooking and in scientific tools found more commonly in research laboratories. Centrifuges, freeze dryers, digitally-controlled water baths and liquid-nitrogen filled Dewar flasks are just a few examples of technologies that have transformed the modernist kitchen. The computer remains an underutilized tool for exploring the hows and whys of cooking. In this talk at the University of Washington, Nathan Myhrvold and Chris Young of Intellectual Ventures show how computationally intense heat-transfer calculations can reveal the subtle factors that influence the success or failure of a cook's efforts in the kitchen. Explore the virtues of computational cooking, and watch novel techniques and creations made possible when science informs the culinary arts. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Cognitive Developmental Robotics: An Approach To Understand Ourselves And To Design Robots Like Us

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Cognitive Developmental Robotics (CDR) aims to provide new understanding of how human higher cognitive functions develop by means of a synthetic approach that developmentally constructs cognitive functions. From the University of Washington’s Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series, Minoru Asada of Osaka University shares how the core idea of CDR is "physical embodiment'' that enables information structuring through interactions with the environment, including other agents. The idea is shaped based on the hypothesized development model of human cognitive functions from body representation to social behavior. Along with the model, Asada will introduce studies of CDR and related works in the talk, and discuss the model and future issues. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series: Return to the Final Frontier

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Spaceflight participant and former Microsoft software developer Charles Simonyi compares his first and second spaceflights as part of the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series. He’s observed encouraging maturity in manned space technologies, as well as valuable lessons from his experiences in space. Simonyi also shares video of his return from orbit in a Soyuz capsule. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series: Rethinking Computing

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft, presents “Rethinking Computing,” a look at how software and information technology can help solve the most pressing global challenges we face today. Part of UW’s Computer Science and Engineering’s Distinguished Lecture Series, Mundie demonstrates a number of current and future-looking technologies that show how computer science is changing scientific exploration and discovery in exciting ways. He also discusses the role of new science in solving the global energy crisis, and answer questions from the audience. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Unifying Logical and Statistical AI

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Intelligent agents must be able to handle the complexity and uncertainty of the real world. Logical AI has focused mainly on the former and statistical AI on the latter. Markov logic combines the two by attaching weights to first-order formulas and viewing them as templates for features of Markov networks. Markov logic has been successfully applied to problems in information extraction, robot mapping, social networks and others, and is the basis of the open-source Alchemy system. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Image Segmentation using Spectral Rounding

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

This lecture presents a new image segmentation algorithm, Spectral Rounding (SR), and a fast solver used for segmenting 2D images. The second issue addressed is fast algorithms for finding the associated eigenvectors and solving related linear systems. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series: Interactive Machine Learning

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Machine learning offers the promise of assisting users to create new tools simply by demonstrating the desired outcome. The tool "Image Processing with Crayons" was built for creating classifiers for image-based problems. The tool empowers a much larger class of people who can create image-based interactive techniques. However, observations of people using Crayons have pointed out several challenges in the way machine learning algorithms are designed. People do not behave in statistically uniform distributions and more importantly their interaction with the learning algorithm distorts their behavior in specific ways. The lessons we have learned will be discussed along with new directions for machine learning algorithms that might learn faster in the face of user behavior. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2007)

Our Infrastructures - Online and Vulnerable? Part 2 of 3

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

This program includes a presentation by Mark Hadley, a research scientist with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory focusing on cybersecurity and the protection of critical infrastructure systems. He outlines the historical reasons for the vulnerability of networked digital control systems, and the technical requirements for better securing them. It also includes a presentation by Kevin Desouza, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Information School at the University of Washington and the director of the Institute for National Security Education and Research, an inter-disciplinary university-wide initiative. He speaks about the intelligence perspective on critical infrastructure protection, and the need for effective frameworks governing the gathering and use of intelligence.

This program is presented by The Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity at the University of Washington Information School and sponsored by UW Institute for National Security Education and Research and The UW Master of Strategic Planning for Critical Infrastructures online graduate program, with additional support fro The Information School, The Pacific Northwest Center for Global Security, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

(Series: Unintended Consequences of the Information Age)

Our Infrastructures - Online and Vulnerable? Part 3 of 3

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Part Three is a presentation by Dan Ryan, J.D., professor of systems management at National Defense University and an expert on information assurance and cyberlaw. He spoke about the highly varied legal issues -- many of them new -- that could flow from attacks on critical infrastructures via networked control systems, and how the existing legal system might or might not respond to those issues.

(Series: Unintended Consequences of the Information Age)

Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series and Dean Lytle Electrical Engineering Endowed Lecture: From Cell Phones to Smart Phones to Smart Books - An Exciting Journey

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

More than one billion cellular devices are now shipped each year to more than four billion subscribers worldwide. More than half will soon support wide-area broadband access to the Internet with devices that are increasingly more powerful, more compact and less expensive than their predecessors. Irwin Jacobs, co-founder of Qualcomm, will touch on the history of the wireless telecommunications research and development company, and explore further developments in wireless technology, devices and applications. (Series: CSE Colloquia - 2009)

Our Infrastructures - Online And Vulnerable? Part 1 of 3

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

From electricity usage to municipal water consumption, from traffic lights to dams, our world is monitored by computer systems. But the control systems that warn of impending problems may themselves be vulnerable to failure or attack because they are often online or otherwise hackable. Are they safe enough for lives to depend on them? Join a panel of experts who will take us into this invisible but critical world.

(Series: Unintended Consequences of the Information Age)