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News & events

News archive for 2016

Wed, 09/07/2016 | UW Today

HemaApp screens for anemia, blood conditions without needle sticks

HemaApp measures hemoglobin levels and screens for anemia non-invasively by illuminating the patient’s finger with a smartphone’s camera flash.

Tue, 08/30/2016 | The Seattle Times

Remembering Joseph F. Sutter

Alumnus Joe Sutter (1921 – 2016), ‘Father of the 747,’ was an engineering giant and pioneer of the aerospace industry.

Fri, 08/26/2016 | The Whole U

Faculty Profile: Gary Hsieh, HCDE

Gary Hsieh, an assistant professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE), studies incentives, motivation, and the tools that make our lives more efficient. If you stumbled on a list of his publications, it would be hard to guess which department he belongs to. He’s researched mindfulness, nutrition, teen moms, activism, volunteering, video games, and advertising. Hsieh says his research is about everyday life. He’s analyzed websites like Wikipedia and Change.org, and this summer he’s prototyping an app that helps doctors and pharmacists navigate drug risks for pregnant patients.

Wed, 08/24/2016 | College of Engineering

UW hyperloop team sets its sights on SpaceX

The UW Hyperloop team is taking part in Elon Musk's competition to design a pod that can travel at transonic speed within a vacuum tube. After winning the Safety Subsystem Technical Excellence Award this January, the team will advance to the next leg of the competition, set to take place in January 2017 at SpaceX.

Wed, 08/17/2016 | UW Today

Interscatter communication enables first-ever implanted devices, smart contact lenses, credit cards that ‘talk’ Wi-Fi

University of Washington researchers have introduced a new way of communicating that allows devices such as brain implants, contact lenses, credit cards and smaller wearable electronics to talk to everyday devices such as smartphones and watches.

Mon, 08/15/2016 | UW Today

Unearthing trackers of the past: UW computer scientists reveal the history of third-party web tracking

At the USENIX Security Conference in Austin, Texas, a team of University of Washington researchers on Aug. 12 presented the first-ever comprehensive analysis of third-party web tracking across three decades and a new tool, TrackingExcavator, which they developed to extract and analyze tracking behaviors on a given web page. They saw a four-fold increase in third-party tracking on top sites from 1996 to 2016, and mapped the growing complexity of trackers stretching back decades.

Wed, 08/10/2016 | Civil & Environmental Engineering Blog

Satellite-based text message irrigation advisory system helps Pakistani farmers stay above water

CEE researchers are helping Pakistani farmers be more profitable and sustainable with a satellite-based app that advises them how much to water their crops. More than 700 farmers in Pakistan who grow bananas, wheat and other crops receive weekly text messages. "The farmers were previously going on instinct and overwatering the crops," Civil & Environmental Engineering Associate Professor Faisal Hossain said. "Now, it is scientifically driven and uses satellite data." Also see the video story from King5 News ».

Mon, 08/01/2016 | UW Today

Twelve UW faculty elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences

Four College of Engineering faculty were elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences: Tom Anderson, professor of computer science and engineering, also elected to the National Academy of Engineering; François Baneyx, professor and chair of chemical engineering; Cecilia Giachelli, professor and chair of bioengineering; and Daniel Schwartz, professor of chemical engineering.

Mon, 08/01/2016 | College of Engineering

Alumnus Marc Edwards named one of the world’s most influential people by Time Magazine

Civil and environmental engineering alumnus Marc Edwards led a team of volunteers to uncovered the source of lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan during the "Flint water crisis." Time Magazine has named him one of the world’s most influential people for this work.

Wed, 07/27/2016 | UW Today

Carbon-financed cookstove fails to deliver hoped-for benefits in the field

A team of researchers, including civil and environmental engineering professor Julian Marshall, investigated the benefits of cleaner carbon-burning cookstoves in the field. They found that the increased efficiency observed in the lab did not carry over when these stoves were used in Karnataka, India. The continued use of traditional cooking methods alongside the new stoves contributed to the lower than expected results.

Mon, 07/25/2016 | College of Engineering

Crafting a dream: An engineer’s passion for brewing

Since 2010, Mike Francis, ’06, has been an emerging leader in the Northwest’s craft brewing industry, thanks to a degree in Industrial & Systems Engineering. His brewery, Payette Brewing Company, is now the largest in the state of Idaho.

Fri, 07/22/2016 | Department of Mechanical Engineering

UW Human Powered Submarine Team places third at international competition

The Human Powered Submarine team traveled to Gosport, England, for the European International Submarine Races, where they also placed first for top speed by a female pilot.

Thu, 07/21/2016 | UW Today

Imaging software predicts how you look with different hair styles, colors, appearances

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.

Fri, 07/08/2016 | UW Today

Researchers show phone calls can forecast dengue fever outbreaks

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.

Thu, 07/07/2016 | UW 360

UW|360 video: DNA Data Storage

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.

Thu, 07/07/2016 | UW Today

UW, Microsoft researchers break record for DNA data storage

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. "

Tue, 07/05/2016 | College of Engineering

A riveting combination: The UW and Boeing advance research together through BARC

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.

Fri, 06/24/2016 | UW Today

UW’s Clean Energy Institute to participate in national smart manufacturing initiative

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.

Thu, 06/23/2016 | UW Today

How well do facial recognition algorithms cope with a million strangers?

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.

Tue, 06/21/2016 | UW Today

UW-led team awarded $1M bioelectronics innovation prize

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.

Sun, 06/19/2016 | College of Engineering

UW team places second at Formula SAE Lincoln competition

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.

Tue, 06/14/2016 | College of Engineering

The College of Engineering and Burke Museum partner on a 3-D scan-and-print project of mammoth proportions

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.

Mon, 06/06/2016 | College of Engineering

Alumna Sally Jewell selected as 2016 UW commencement speaker and ASLD award recipient

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.

Tue, 05/31/2016 | UW Chemical Engineering

Gov. Inslee appoints ChemE UG Austin Wright-Pettibone as student regent

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.

Tue, 05/31/2016 | Foster School of Business

Big Wins for ChemE at UW Business Plan Competition

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.