Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, has developed a new personalized image search engine called Dreambit. Dreambit lets people imagine how they would look with different hairstyles or in different time periods. To accomplish the image transformation, Dreambit searches internet photographs to locate a “doppelgänger set” of images that resemble the original person but have the desired hairstyle, color, or other characteristic.
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July 21, 2016 | UW Today
July 8, 2016 | UW Today
A team including Fahad Pervaiz, a CSE doctoral student, has developed a system that can forecast the outbreak of dengue fever by simply analyzing the calling behavior of citizens to a public-health hotline. The telephone-based disease surveillance system can forecast 2 to 3 weeks ahead of time outbreaks of dengue fever, a mosquito-borne virus that infects up to 400,000 people each year.
The forecasting system, described in a paper published July 8 in Science Advances, was developed by researchers from the UW and NYU, working teams in Pakistan.
July 7, 2016 | UW 360
CSE Professors Karin Strauss and Luis Ceze have partnered with Microsoft researchers to develop a technique to store digital data in a DNA molecule. They are among the first in the country to demonstrate how to encode, store, and retrieve digital data using manufactured DNA.
July 7, 2016 | UW Today
The team of computer scientists and electrical engineers encoded and decoded a video of the band OK Go (featuring the craziest Rube Goldberg machine ever), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in more than 100 languages, the top 100 books of Project Gutenberg and the Crop Trust’s seed database — among other things— all on strands of DNA.
Luis Ceze, the UW’s Torode Family Career Development Professor of computer science and engineering and one of the project’s lead researchers, says, "The world is producing data at an incredible rate, and storage technologies need to keep up. DNA... is millions of times denser than other storage media, it is incredibly durable (think millennia) and it never becomes obsolete. "
July 5, 2016 | College of Engineering
The Boeing Advanced Research Center, or BARC, is providing UW students with the opportunity to get real world engineering experience as they work alongside UW professors and industry leaders from Boeing. BARC projects have tackled tricky problems like building and repairing the insides of airplane wings, and this winter, BARC is launching a new aircraft engineering class that will be co-taught by UW faculty and Boeing engineers.
June 24, 2016 | UW Today
The UW’s Clean Energy Institute, which is led by ChemE Professor Daniel Schwartz, will be part of the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute. The new institute is led by the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, and its aim is to develop innovative manufacturing methods for energy-intensive industries.
June 23, 2016 | UW Today
A team of UW researchers, led by CSE assistant professor Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, is investigating how facial recognition algorithms scale in the MegaFace Challenge. All the algorithms tested experienced a drop in accuracy when given a set million images. This set is much larger than the set of 10,000 images that some algorithms have previously performed with near perfect accuracy against.
June 21, 2016 | UW Today
A team of researchers from the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, led by EE adjunct associate professor Chet Moritz, has been awarded $1 million as one of three finalists in the GlaxoSmithKline Bioelectronics Innovation Challenge. The team is developing an implantable device that could help restore bladder function for people with spinal cord injuries. The device uses a wireless power transmitter developed by UW associate professor of EE and CSE, Joshua Smith.
June 19, 2016 | College of Engineering
The UW Formula Motorsports team placed second overall at the Formula SAE competition in Lincoln. A mere 0.5 point difference, out of a 1,000 point total, separated UW's score from the first place team.
June 14, 2016 | College of Engineering
The Burke Museum plans to display a giant Columbian Mammoth in its new building, set to open in 2019; however, only 20% of the mammoth’s bones survive. So museum staff have partnered with College of Engineering students and instructors who are taking advantage of 3-D printing technology to reproduce the rest of the mammoth.
June 6, 2016 | College of Engineering
Sally Jewell, U.S. Secretary of the Interior and mechanical engineering alumna, will be the featured speaker at the UW’s Commencement exercises on Saturday, June 11. Jewell was also acknowledged by the UW with the Alumna Summa Laude Dignata award, which is the highest award the UW and the UW Alumni Association can bestow upon a graduate.
May 31, 2016 | UW Chemical Engineering
Gov. Jay Inslee named Austin Wright-Pettibone, a Chemical Engineering undergraduate, as the next student member of the University of Washington Board of Regents for the 2016-17 school year. Wright-Pettibone becomes the first undergraduate since 2008 to be selected as the UW's student regent.
May 31, 2016 | UW Today
ME professor Jiangyu Li and colleagues have developed a tiny probe capable of reading variations in the nanoscale particles that power batteries and fuel cells. The rate at which these particles react determines how fast batteries charge and how much power they can provide. This new probe could improve understanding of electrochemical systems, thus enabling the development of higher performance batteries and fuel cells.
May 31, 2016 | Foster School of Business
All three Chemical Engineering Entrepreneurial Design teams took home prizes at the UW Business Plan Competition. The team concepts included Decaf Style, a way to instantly decaffeinate beverages; Iconic Windows, a battery membrane that reduces energy costs; and Coulomb Sea, a smart electronic charger.
May 19, 2016 | UW Today
A team of roboticists including ME assistant professor Sawyer Fuller have developed a flying, insect sized robot, nicknamed the RoboBee, which can perch on surfaces like wood or leaves using static electricity. The amount of energy required to perch is 1000 times less than that required to hover, so this breakthrough could dramatically extend the fight time of these tiny drones.
May 17, 2016 | UW Today
ME assistant professor Nicholas Boechler and UW engineers have, for the first time, analyzed interactions between microscale granular crystals. Granular materials resonate into complex patterns when forces are applied to them. Microscale granular crystals have significantly different reactions to forces than better-understood macroscale particles. Understanding how microscale granular crystals self-assemble in response to forces could enable faster and less expensive ways to manufacture microstructed materials like spacecraft shielding.
May 13, 2016 | UW Today
MSE associate professor Xiaodong Xu and colleagues have developed a promising approach to increasing optoelectronic efficiency. The key to making efficient light-captured energetics possible is to coax one photon into stimulating multiple electrons. Xu directed photons towards a "superlattice" of graphene sandwiched between two layers of boron-nitride. The superlattice creates regions of huge electron density, where one energized photon can transfer its energy to as many as five electrons. According to collaborator Sanfeng Wu, “Graphene is a tiger with great potential for optoelectronics, but locked in a cage. The singularities in this superlattice are a key to unlocking that cage and releasing graphene’s potential for light harvesting application.”
May 13, 2016 | UW Today
Sharks, skates, and rays use networks of electrosensory organs to detect the weak electrical fields produced by prey and other animals. MSE affiliate associate professor Marco Rolandi and collaborating researchers determined that a proton-conducting material found in the jelly of these organs may explain how electrical signals are transmitted from surface pores to electrosensory cells.
May 11, 2016 | UW Today
Three Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grants were awarded to UW engineering research projects by the U.S. Department of Defense. UW Electrical Engineering professor Radha Poovendran leads an effort to develop novel defenses against cyberattacks. Materials Science & Engineering assistant professor Peter Pauzauskie's team has unveiled an approach to cooling liquids using laser light. And Alberto Aliseda, associate professor in Mechanical Engineering, is part of a team addressing problems in controlling fluid sprays.
May 11, 2016 | UW Today
UW computer engineers collaborated with Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon researchers to give a piece of paper sensing capabilities. The paper can respond to gesture commands and connect to the digital world. The method relies on small radio frequency (RFID) tags that are stuck on, printed or drawn onto the paper to create interactive, lightweight interfaces that can do anything from controlling music using a paper baton, to live polling in a classroom.
May 9, 2016 | UW Today
UW engineers have built a 5-fingered robot hand that learns dexterous manipulation on its own, rather than having its actions programmed. Intricate tasks like rolling, pivoting, bending, and sensing friction are notoriously difficult for robots. Now, engineers in the UW Movement Control Laboratory have built a robot hand that can perform dexterous manipulation and learn from its own experience without needing human direction.
May 5, 2016 | UW Today
Giving young children a two-minute warning that screen time is about to end makes transitions away from tablets, phones, televisions and other devices more painful. A new study from HCDE's Alexis Hiniker asked families with children aged 1 to 5 to document what circumstances make transitions away from "screen time" smoother or more prone to cause tantrums.
May 3, 2016 | UW Today
SpiroCall enables patients to measure lung function over a phone call from all types of phones, not just smartphones.
"We wanted to be able to measure lung function on any type of phone you might encounter around the world — smartphones, dumb phones, landlines, pay phones," said Shwetak Patel, Washington Research Foundation Endowed Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the UW. "With SpiroCall, you can call a 1-800 number, blow into the phone and use the telephone network to test your lung function."
May 3, 2016 | UW Civil & Environmental Engineering
CEE professor Julian Marshall will co-lead the Center for Air, Climate and Energy Solutions, a new collaboration between more than 25 U.S. researchers to explore which pollutants are most damaging to people’s health and to detect current levels and sources of pollution. The center will provide guidance to the EPA on how air pollution emissions and concentrations are anticipated to change in the future and will evaluate strategies for reducing air pollution.
The center is funded by a $10 million Air, Climate and Energy (ACE) grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to help address the nation’s pressing need for better air quality.
April 27, 2016 | UW Today
Children with cerebral palsy may undergo invasive surgeries — lengthening tendons, rotating bones, transferring muscles to new locations — in hopes of improving their ability to walk or move. But not all children see improvement after those operations.
Kat Steele, an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering, has collaborated to develop a new quantitative assessment of motor control in children with cerebral palsy called Walk-DMC, which could help predict which patients are — or are not — likely to benefit from such aggressive treatment.
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