CSE Undergrad News

Dear CSE undergraduate and 5th year masters students:

As students are firming up their plans for Winter quarter and starting
thinking about Spring 2014 we want to make sure everyone knows about
CSE 490D (14wi) and CSE 481K (14sp) Designing Technology for
Resource-Constrained Environments. This is a capstone course sequence
that will be co-taught by Richard Anderson & Ruth Anderson this Winter
and Spring. It works a little differently than other capstones, so we
want to make you aware of the details. The course web page from last
year, with links to previous years can be found here:

13wi: (design studio)
http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse490d/13wi/

13sp: (capstone)
http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse481k/13sp/

In Winter quarter, CSE 490D is a 2-credit design seminar that meets
Wednesday 4-5:50 pm. The course will focus on project scoping,
performing user research, and assessing the technology landscape
(mobile phones, tablets, embedded sensors, cloud services, SMS, etc.).
Students will meet together to develop project ideas for technologies
specifically designed to address the needs of low resource communities
(in the Seattle area and internationally).

In Spring quarter, CSE 481K is a 5-credit capstone project
course. This course is for students to take the ideas developed in
Winter and actually realize a working prototype and complete
preliminary evaluations.  It is is a more traditional CSE capstone
experience with weekly milestones, demos, and some presentations. The
intent is that groups of students formed in Winter quarter will
continue on to work together in Spring quarter (although there is
always some shuffling in that not all students continue on in Spring
quarter and some new students join the groups formed in Winter).

We believe this is an interesting and productive way to do a capstone
course as we have more time to investigate the project space and
determine the best course of action by doing it in advance (in Winter)
of the actual capstone course (in Spring) where we can then get
started right away on implementation. Of course, students can take the
Spring course without having taking the Winter course, but it is more
fun to be in the midst of defining and shaping the projects and that
will happen (mostly) in Winter.  This is a great course sequence for
5th-year MS students.

We’ve done a version of this course for the past six years and it has
been very successful. Each year, we have had projects that have gone
all the way to real deployments and publications in research workshops
or conferences.

Here are a few sample projects:

*  StarBus: SMS based vehicle tracking targeting public transportation in Kyrgyzstan.
R. Anderson, A. Poon, C. Lustig, W. Brunette, G. Borriello, B. Kolko. Building a
Transportation Information System using only GPS and Basic SMS Infrastructure, ICTD
2009.
*  Multilearn: Multi-input device educational games for elementary education in India.
C. Tseng, S. Garg, H. Underwood, L. Findlater, R. Anderson, J. Pal. Examining
emergent dominance patterns in multiple input based educational systems, IDID 2010.
*  Midwives’ ultrasound. Developed an interface for antenatal ultrasound for use by
rural midwives in Uganda. W. Brunette, W. Gerard, M. Hicks, A. Hope, M. Ishimitsu, P.
Prasad, R. Anderson, G. Borriello, B., Kolko, R. Nathan.  Portable Antenatal
Ultrasound Platform for Village Midwives, ACM DEV 2010.
*  Milkbank: Developed low-cost milk banking for HIV positive mothers. R. Chaudhri, D.
Vlachos, J. Kaza, J. Palludan, N. Bilbao, T. Martin, G. Borriello, B. Kolko, K.
Israel-Ballard. 2011. A system for safe flash-heat pasteurization of human breast
milk, NSDR 2011.
*  Low-power Sensors and Smartphones for Tracking Water Collection in Rural Ethiopia.
R. Chaudhri, R. Sodt, K. Lieberg, J. Chilton, G. Borriello, J. Cook, Y. Masuda.
IEEE Pervasive Computing (special issue on Pervasive Information and
Communication Technologies for Development – ICT4D), Vol. 11, No. 3, July-September
2012.
*  Digitizing Paper Forms with Mobile Imaging Technologies. N. Dell, N. Breit, T.
Chaluco, J. Crawford, G. Borriello. ACM 2nd Annual Symposium on Computing for
Development (DEV), Atlanta, Georgia, March 2012.

For additional information, you can contact Richard Anderson
(anderson@cs.washington.edu) or Ruth Anderson (rea@cs.washington.edu).

Thanks,

Richard and Ruth

My scheduled email was incorrectly sent at 4:30AM instead of PM. Sorry for the confusion. Fallfest is still at 5:30pm.

Fallfest is starting in one hour! Be sure to come and join us for food, drinks*, and games!

Event costs $5 for non-ACM members, and for an extra $3 you can join and won’t be charged admission at future events!

Come and relax with your fellow CSE majors by coming to Fallfest Today! ACM is proud to present our annual Fallfest Today, November 22th. Enjoy food, drinks*, and games! All CSE faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students are welcome! Thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring the event!

Event costs $5 for non-ACM members, and for an extra $3 you can join and won’t be charged admission at future events!

When: TODAY 5:30pm-8:30pm

Where: Atrium

What: Fallfest!!

ACM will be using all the fridges in the ACM Lounge in preparation for Fallfest. As such use of all the fridges in the lounge will be restricted all day today.

We are happy to announce that UW will be participating in the Facebook Open Academy (a.k.a. Hacking For Credit) in Winter/Spring 2014. This class presents a unique opportunity for students interested in a job in industry to gain experience. Facebook has hand-picked important open source projects to which students will contribute, and it has chosen select Facebook engineers who will act as mentors to guide the students through the open source development process. We expect that students will learn a lot in this class and thus encourage any interested students to sign up. In particular, prior experience contributing to open source software is NOT required.

ACM will be using all the fridges in the ACM Lounge in preparation for Fallfest. As such use of all the fridges in the lounge will be restricted all day tomorrow.

4. We’ve updated the Computer Engineering writing course by removing the ‘no longer offered’ HCDE 333 and replacing it with a 4 credit UW Approved Writing or Composition course.
http://www.cs.washington.edu/students/ugrad/degree_requirements/

As a reminder, please read through our registration advice on what to do if you want to take a course that is currently full.  http://www.cs.washington.edu/students/ugrad/before_you_register#major

We have recently opened some space in CSE 481 (sound capstone)  and CSE 446 (machine learning, now taught by Professor Domingos).

Come to Research Night Today to see all the awesome research that goes on at UW CSE.  This is a great way to connect with all the undergraduate research opportunities at UW CSE.  Come to see all the possibilities!

Agenda:
4:30pm – Faculty Speaker: Alan Borning// EEB 125
5:00pm – Poster Session // CSE Atrium

Please RSVP for more details and to help us prepare!

See you there!