I’m looking for some top UW CS students (senior undergrad or grad students) who’d like to participate in this special opportunity this summer (at NO cost to you).
James

We will have a new innovative program this summer on the UW campus: The World Lab Summer Institute.  We will put 10 UW students (strong undergrads and young grad students) together with 10 top students from Tsinghua University in China. Students will work on interdisciplinary teams (designers, technologists, and social scientists) that are also cross-cultural (Chinese and Americans) to make impact on the Environment, Health, or Education. The students will work on 7-week projects (from mid-July to late August) with an optional week in Beijing to show off the demos/videos that are produced. The program will include morning lectures/design exercises (e.g., CSE 440/441 condensed plus design and entrepreneurship lectures), team work the rest of the day, and Friday industry lab tours.  This entire program will be funded by industry at no cost to the students.

—

James A. Landay  刘哲明
Short-Dooley Professor
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington
642 Allen Center, Box 352350
Seattle, WA 98195-2350
landay@cs.washington.edu
http://cs.washington.edu/homes/landay/
Co-author of The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites

World Lab Summer Institute

Program Description

There are many urgent problems facing the planet: a degrading environment, a healthcare system in crisis, and educational systems that are inadequately training innovative thinkers to solve the problems of tomorrow. A balanced approach is required to solve these problems: a balance between design and technology, a balance between human-centered and technology-centered approaches, and a balance between different world cultures and ways of thinking. The World Lab is a new research and educational institution that is ideally suited to tackle these grand challenges. The World Lab is sited jointly between two of the world’s leading computing and human-centered design institutions, the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle and Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The World Lab Summer Institute at the University of Washington brings together students from technology, design, social science and business backgrounds, and challenges them to create prototypes for products and services that solve pressing social problems.

Program Curriculum

The seven-week World Lab Summer Institute will be comprised of a set of core courses, an integrated project studio activity, and field trips to leading companies and research labs in the Puget Sound region.

Classes

The World Lab Summer Institute is organized around three core focuses:  1) human-computer interaction (HCI); 2) design; 3) tech-focused entrepreneurship.

The foundation course for the World Lab is: Introductory HCI: User Interface Design, Prototyping, and Evaluation, taught by Professor James Landay

Supplementary lectures in Design and Entrepreneurship will be given by a team of other University of Washington faculty members.

Students are assigned homework and reading as with any course. All classes are held on the University of Washington campus.

Integrative Studio

Students are divided into teams of 4-5, with a balance of Chinese and US students, as well as students from different academic disciplines. Each team works independently to develop a working prototype with demonstrable social impact.

Throughout the process student teams work closely with academic advisors from the university. This prototype is the final project by which student performance will be judged. Chinese students will present their work to an audience of academics, government officials, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and their peers upon returning to China. The final presentation will be held at Yuanfen~Flow, an incubator space in the 798 art district in Beijing.

World Lab Field Trips

Students also make bi-weekly visits to nearby companies or research labs to speak with leading tech innovators and business leaders.

Program Accommodation

Chinese students will stay in UW dorms and eat meals at UW dining halls. Card access to university buildings will be provided for the duration of the program.

Program Dates

July 9^th – August 22^nd, 2012, with optional 1 week prologue in Beijing in late August or early September

Program Requirements

10 – 15 students from China; 7 – 10 students from University of Washington
3:2 ratio of tech to design/social science students
Background in computer science, software engineering, design, or social science.
Preference to Graduate and PhD students, exceptional undergraduates will also be considered.

Program Advisors

James Landay, Professor of Computer Science, University of Washington
Yuanchun Shi, Professor of Computer Science, Tsinghua University
Ying-Qing Xu, Professor of Information Art and Design, Tsinghua University
Zhiyong Fu, Professor of Information Art and Design, Tsinghua University
Tad Hirsch, Assistant Professor of Design, University of Washington
Axel Roesler, Associate Professor of Design, University of Washington
David Ben Kay, Director of Yuanfen~Flow, Former Legal Counsel for Microsoft Asia
Nicholas Young, Co-Founder and Director of East West Coalition

Hello,

I am a PhD student in the UW CSE department.  My Advisor Aram Harrow and I are interested in hiring an undergraduate for the Summer to work on a full-time undergraduate research (REU) on searching for hard instances of isomorphism problems.  We have funding available for the whole Summer and publication opportunities should be possible if the project is successful.

In isomorphism problems, we are concerned with determining whether two combinatorial or algebraic structures are essentially the same.  Such problems have proved resistant to the development of efficient algorithms despite evidence that they are not NP-hard such as a lack of hard instances.

In this project, we plan to search for hard instances of the group isomorphism problem by exhaustively checking all groups up to a certain order.  The project will therefore involve programming and also some group theory.  Depending on how the code performs on a single core, it may be necessary to parallelize the code or port it to run on a cluster.  The results should be publishable if the project is successful.  Additional technical details are available here: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/aram/misc/search-iso.pdf

Please contact us at aram@cs.washington.edu or djr@cs.washington.edu for more information or if you are interested in working with us this Summer.

Thanks,
David Rosenbaum

We have extended the application deadline for the 5th year masters program. Applications will now be due by 11:59PM on June 10th.  We’ll attempt to notify everyone of the results by July 1st.

Link to the application: http://www.cs.washington.edu/prospective_students/bsms/application_information

Attention Citizens:

We are hosting float day today(sponsored by Amazon) in the atrium at 3pm. Come schmooze with your friends and have a float or two.

Reminder—
Malcolm MacIver from Northwestern will be giving the robotics
colloquium tomorrow (Friday).  He does very interesting work on
electrolocation in fish and robots.

Title:
Robotic Electrolocation

Malcolm MacIver, Northwestern University
2:30 pm
May 25
Paul Allen Center, CSE 305

Abstract:
Electrolocation is used by the weakly electric fish of South America
and Africa to navigate and hunt in murky water where vision is
ineffective. These fish generate an AC electric field that is
perturbed by objects nearby that differ in impedance from the water.
Electroreceptors covering the body of the fish report the amplitude
and phase of the local field. The animal decodes electric field
perturbations into information about its surroundings. Electrolocation
is fundamentally divergent from optical vision (and other imaging
methods) that create projective images of 3D space. Current
electrolocation methods are also quite different from electrical
impedance tomography. We will describe current electrolocation
technology, and progress on development of a propulsion system
inspired by electric fish to provide the precise movement capabilities
that this short-range sensing approach requires.

Bio:
Malcolm MacIver is Associate Professor at Northwestern University with
joint appointments in the Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical
Engineering departments. He is interested in the neural and mechanical
basis of animal behavior, evolution, and the implications of the close
coupling of movement with gathering information for our understanding
of intelligence and consciousness. He also develops immersive art
installations that have been exhibited internationally.

—
Joshua R. Smith
Associate Professor, Depts. of CSE & EE, University of Washington
Box 352350 [Express mail: add “185 Stevens Way”]
Seattle, WA 98195-2350, USA
Office: CSE 556; Lab: EE 359
Email: jrs@cs.washington.edu Phone: 206 685 2094, Fax: 206 543 2969

Please RSVP (the the address at the end of this message)  if you’d like to join us at this student project fair

HCI Project Fair – Student Presentations

Each fall, students in UW CSE’s Human-Computer Interaction courses organize into teams and spend a quarter designing, prototyping, and most importantly evaluating a user interface. CSE 441 is our second quarter, advanced HCI course, which allows the top teams to continue to iterate and improve on their designs.

Come join us on Thursday, June 7th, from 10:30 AM – 1:00 PM to see what the students created this quarter. Lunch is on us. It is a great chance to meet top graduating students in computer science, informatics, design, & digital arts who have an interest in user interfaces. This select group of students includes the designers, programmers, and evaluation specialists of the future.

The students had an especially challenging design charge the past two quarters. They were asked to create a mobile computing application that addressed one of the following design briefs: change (transform your or your family’s behavior), crowd sourced mobile AI (e.g., use Mechanical Turk to give perfect vision, speech recognition, etc.), creativity (help people be more creative in their everyday lives). The resulting projects have interesting mobile interfaces and usage models.

The HCI Project Fair will take place on the UW campus, in the Gates Commons (691 Paul Allen Center), University of Washington, Seattle campus. Details on the project fair activities, this quarter’s projects, and how to get there follow.

Activities:

I will use the first 15 minutes to give an overview of what was taught in the HCI course this quarter and how the student projects were structured. Then, the three student teams will each give 25 minute presentations, showing you the design and evolution of their interfaces over the two quarters.

Following the formal presentation from around noon until 1 PM we will have food, drinks, and a demo/poster session to give you a chance to meet the students and see their projects up close.

This is your opportunity to find out more about the current state of the art of human-computer interaction education, to learn its role in a university curriculum, and to see some novel ideas presented by some of the top graduating seniors in the country.

Projects:

The three innovative group projects look at applications and services on mobile platforms (e.g., Android and Augmented Reality).

RSVP & Directions:

The project fair will be held in the Gates Commons, room 691 of the Paul Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering.

Please RSVP to Nikki Lee (nikki+HCIFair@nicoleblee.com) and let us know if you need a parking permit.

CCC Blog has posted a new item, “CS URGE: A Resource for Undergraduates.”

You may view the latest post at:
http://www.cccblog.org/2012/05/21/cs-urge-a-resource-for-undergraduates/

Excerpt
————

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has developed a new website
for undergraduates seeking summer research opportunities as well as
advice and tips on applying for graduate school. The website is called
CS URGE (CS Undergraduate Research and Graduate Education), and the
URL is http://cra.org/ccc/csurge (more following the link)…

————

Read the full post at:
http://www.cccblog.org/2012/05/21/cs-urge-a-resource-for-undergraduates/

Hey everyone,

Research Night is a great opportunity for you to get involved in undergrad research. If you’re still looking for something to do this summer, why not come check out the cool research projects you could be working on here at the university? If you’re looking to start doing research in the fall, here’s your chance to find out what’s going down.

We’re going to be holding research night tomorrow, May 22, from 4pm – 6:30pm.

The event will start in EEB125 with a talk given by a faculty speaker at 4pm and then an undergrad research panel at 4:30pm.

This will be followed by a poster session in the CSE Atrium at 5pm.

Hope to see you there!

Dear Students,

I hope this email finds you well. As we have done in the past two years, we are working with a third party vendor to gather feedback from engineering and computer science college students regarding their perception of Yahoo! and I’m hoping that you won’t mind please sending this out to your students and any relevant email lists.

We’re offering a $10 Amazon.com gift card to the first 30 survey respondents at our key schools. The survey takes approximately 15 minutes to complete and the student will receive the gift card electronically in 3-4 weeks.

All of your students’ responses are confidential and anonymous.

To begin the survey, please click here:

http://survey.confirmit.com/wix5/p2064010539.aspx

Thank you and best regards,
Marlou Del Barrio
University College Recruiter at Yahoo!