Using magnetic properties of conductive thread, University of Washington researchers are able to store data in fabric. In this example, the code to unlock a door is stored in a fabric patch and read by an array of magnetometers.
News
October 19, 2017 | Civil & Environmental Engineering
To better protect communities during tsunamis, a faculty team comprised of Dawn Lehman, Michael Motley, Charles Roeder and Pedro Arduino have received a $1 million NSF grant to develop a new structural system.
October 18, 2017 | UW Today
University of Washington research finds that for a budget of roughly $1000, it is possible for someone with devious intent to track your location and app use by purchasing and targeting mobile ads. This research aims to raise industry awareness about the potential privacy threat.
October 17, 2017 | UW Today
Robotic and prosthetic hands must be able to sense shear forces, such as the pull created when objects slip from grasp, to manipulate items with greater precision. As yet, robotic hands have had difficulty accurately sensing vibrations and shear forces. A team of researchers, including ME professor Jonathan Posner, developed a flexible sensor “skin” that can be stretched over any part of a robot to accurately convey information about shear forces and vibration.
October 12, 2017 | UW News
A group calling themselves “Friends of Bill & Melinda” have donated more than $30 million to name the UW’s second CSE building, the Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering, in honor of the couple. The gift recognizes the Gateses’ leadership while enabling the UW to deliver an unparalleled educational experience to more of Washington’s students.
October 6, 2017 | UW News
Three University of Washington faculty members are among those honored with a biomedical research grant as part of this year’s NIH High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. The program funds exceptionally creative scientists proposing to use highly innovative approaches to tackle major challenges in biomedical research.
October 4, 2017 | UW Today
A research team, including ME associate professor Nathan Sniadecki, has developed a device to monitor anemia that is smaller than a toaster. About one quarter of the world’s population suffers from anemia, but current methods for analyzing blood require hands-on expertise to prepare and run a sample, limiting the ability to monitor anemia in many parts of the world. This new device requires only a few drops of blood for analysis and does not require additional steps to prepare the sample.
September 28, 2017 | UW News
Lisa Zurk will be the next executive director of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington (APL-UW), Vice Provost for Research Mary Lidstrom announced this week. She will be the first woman to hold the position of executive director of APL-UW. Zurk comes to the UW from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where she directed allocation of the nation’s research investments. As a program manager in the agency’s Strategic Technology Office, her area of interest was physics-based processing techniques applied to advanced sensor system concepts.
September 25, 2017 | UW News
The new Molecular Engineering Materials Center's goal is to empower the next generation of science and engineering leaders. This will involve engaging and supporting students and postdoctoral researchers — and giving them the research and educational experiences, training and cross-disciplinary mentorship that they will need to forge careers on the cutting edge of materials science.
The Molecular Engineering Materials Center is funded by a $15.6 million, six-year grant from the National Science Foundation as part of its highly competitive Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) program.
September 18, 2017 | College of Engineering
The Career Center @ Engineering (CC@E) connects engineering students and employers, assisting students with career exploration and becoming a 1-stop shop for recruiters.
September 18, 2017 | College of Engineering
The intersection of engineering and neuroscience promises great advances in health care. The UW is establishing itself as a global leader in the field.
September 14, 2017 | UW Today
A new study finds that the U.S. made little progress from 2000 to 2010 in reducing relative disparities between people of color and whites in exposure to harmful air pollution. It found disparities in NO2 exposure were larger by race and ethnicity than by income, age or education, and that relative inequality persisted across the decade.
September 13, 2017 | UW News
In the long-range backscatter system developed by UW researchers, this sensor allows devices that run on extremely low power for the first time to communicate over long distances.
September 6, 2017 | UW Today
Researchers are developing a smartphone app that is capable of objectively detecting concussion and other traumatic brain injuries in the field, which could provide a new level of screening for athletes and accident victims. PupilScreen can detect changes in a pupil’s response to light, using a smartphone’s video camera and artificial intelligence, with accuracy almost as high as a pupilometer, an expensive and rarely used machine found only in hospitals.
August 29, 2017 | Civil & Environmental Engineering
A new bachelor's program in environmental engineering launches this fall. The program was added due to student interest in the field and increasing demand for environmental engineers.
August 28, 2017 | UW News
BiliScreen is a new smartphone app that can screen for pancreatic cancer by having users snap a selfie and detecting signs of jaundice in a person’s eye.
August 16, 2017 | College of Engineering
HCDE major Tsewone Melaku is aligning her interests in engineering with her passion to make STEM education accessible to underrepresented high school students.
August 16, 2017 | UW Today
MIT Technology Review has named computer science & engineering assistant professor Franziska Roesner one of 35 “Innovators Under 35” for 2017. Roesner’s research focuses on privacy and security in emerging technologies, and she is co-director of the department’s Security and Privacy Laboratory.
August 16, 2017 | UW Today
Researchers in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering have demonstrated how it is possible to transform a smart device into a surveillance tool that can collect information about the body position and movements of the user, as well as other people in the device’s immediate vicinity. Their approach involves remotely hijacking smart devices to play music embedded with repeating pulses that track a person’s position, body movements, and activities both in the vicinity of the device as well as through walls.
August 10, 2017 | UW Today
UW researchers have demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to remotely compromise a computer using information stored in DNA.
July 26, 2017 | Department of Mechanical Engineering
UW researchers are developing devices to answer some of the trickiest questions about marine energy’s environmental effects. Working as part of the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center, researchers have developed a detection system that captures important data about interactions between marine life and marine energy converters — but only when marine life is present. This detection system drastically reduces the extreme amount of low-value data that researchers would otherwise need to store and inspect.
July 19, 2017 | College of Engineering
Imagine revolutionizing the renewable energy market with the silica gel packets you find in shoeboxes and snack bags. The research team behind Membrion is working to do just that. Developed by chemical engineering researchers Greg Newbloom (PhD ’14) and Weyerhaeuser Endowed Associate Professor Lilo Pozzo, the Membrion technology seeks to innovate battery storage with a lower cost, improved battery membrane that uses silica gel. And, the team says, they couldn’t be doing it without the support of partners on and off campus committed to advancing alternative energy research, innovation and commercialization.
July 17, 2017 | UW Today
UW scientists have discovered a simple way to raise the accuracy of diagnostic tests for medicine and common assays for laboratory research. By adding polydopamine — a material that was first isolated from shellfish — to these tests at a key step, the team could increase the sensitivity of these common bioassays by as many as 100 to 1,000 times.
July 17, 2017 | UW Today
Peter Pauzauskie, an assistant professor in MSE, leads a research team that has developed a fast, inexpensive method to make electrodes for supercapacitors, with applications in electric cars, wireless telecommunications and high-powered lasers. The team published a paper in the journal Nature Microsystems and Nanoengineering describing their supercapacitor electrode and their novel production method that starts with carbon-rich materials dried into a low-density matrix, or aerogel. This aerogel on its own can act as a crude electrode, but Pauzauskie’s team more than doubled its capacitance.
July 11, 2017 | UW Today
University of Washington researchers have developed new algorithms that solve a thorny challenge in the field of computer vision: turning audio clips into a realistic, lip-synced video of the person speaking those words.
Shwetak Patel
Steve Brunton
Mari Ostendorf
Matthew O’Donnell
Yinhai Wang
Brett Maurer
Eve Riskin
Yin Tat Lee