Computing Research Highlight of the Week: Archive

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COMPUTING RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS ARCHIVE

"One Keypad per Child" Lets School Children Share Screen to Learn Math

Week: January 14 - 21, 2010
Keywords: educational technology, information technology for development, University of Washington

University of Washington computer science undergraduates have developed a system that lets up to four students share a single computer to do interactive math problems. Early tests show that students using the tool are able to share a single screen while working on problems at their own pace, effectively quadrupling the number of computers available for math exercises.

New Search Technique for Images and Videos

Week: November 13 - November 20, 2009
Keywords: object detection, action recognition, UCSC

Engineers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have developed a powerful new approach to a fundamental problem in computer vision: how to program a computer to recognize or categorize what it "sees" in an image or video. Their software could change the way people search the Web for photos and videos, and it may have applications in many other areas as well, such as video surveillance and security systems.

Open Data Kit: Cell Phones Become Handheld Tools for Global Development

Week: October 30 - November 6, 2009
Keywords: technology for development, developing world, Android, Google, data collection, University of Washington

Computer scientists at the University of Washington have used Android, the open-source mobile operating system championed by Google, to turn a cell phone into a versatile data collection device. Organizations that want a fully customizable way to, say, snap pictures of a deforested area, add the location coordinates and instantly submit that information to a global environmental database now have a flexible and free way to do it.

Rome Was Built in a Day, with Hundreds of Thousands of Digital Photos

Week: October 1 - 8, 2009
Keywords: computer graphics, computer vision, computational photography, 3D reconstruction, Photosynth

Several years ago, a collaboration between computer graphics and computer vision researchers at the University of Washington and Microsoft yielded Photosynth (http://photosynth.net/), a revolution in organizing and navigating digital photographs. Now, that same collaboration has yielded "Rome In A Day," which reconstructs entire cities from images harvested from the web, in less than a day of computation time per city.

Cornell Computer Scientists Track the News Cycle

Week: August 14 - 21, 2009
Keywords: Data-mining, Media, News-tracking, Memes

Cornell computer scientists have mapped the way stories rise and fall in popularity over time. As more and more information becomes available online, it is possible to track the life cycle of a particular news story.

Vanish: A Tool to Make Online Personal Data Self-Destruct

Week: July 24 - 31, 2009
Keywords: Internet, security, privacy, P2P, encryption, cryptography, distributed hash tables

Vanish is a research system designed to give users control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. Specifically, all copies of Vanish encrypted data - even archived or cached copies - will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.

Kidney Exchange Algorithm Launches Chain of 10 Transplants

Week: July 17 - 24, 2009
Keywords:Kidney exchange, kidney donation, organ donation, live donation, live organ donation, kidney paired exchange, matching algorithm, clearing algorithm, exchange clearing, CMU, Carnegie Mellon University, Tuomas Sandholm, United Network for Organ Sharing, UNOS, New England Journal of Medicine

An algorithm devised by Carnegie Mellon computer scientists launched a long-running chain of live kidney donations that thus far has resulted in 10 patients receiving kidney transplants, with the potential for even more.

IBM Claims Cryptographic Cloud Security Challenge Solved

Week: July 3 - 10, 2009
Keywords: Cryptography, Cloud Computing Security

Stanford Ph.D. student and IBM researcher Craig Gentry may have taken a big step forward in the solving the problem of data security in cloud computing. In his recently released paper, "Fully homomorphic encryption using ideal lattices", Gentry describes a method which allows processing of encrypted data without knowing its content.

Machine Learning Applied to Indus Script

Week: May 15 - 22, 2009
Keywords: machine learning, linguistics, India, ancient languages

The Rosetta Stone allowed 19th century scholars to translate symbols left by an ancient civilization and thus decipher the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics. But the symbols found on many other ancient artifacts remain a mystery, including those of a people that inhabited the Indus valley on the present-day border between Pakistan and India. Some experts question whether the symbols represent a language at all, or are merely pictograms that bear no relation to the language spoken by their creators.

Robots that Take Orders From the Brain

The Neurobotics lab is developing the most anatomically correct robotic hand system in the world - illustrated. Source: http://neurobotics.cs.washington.edu/projects.html Week: April 17 - 24, 2009
Keywords: neurobotics; prosthetics; disabilities; artificial hand; brain-computer interface

At the University of Washington, MacArthur "genius" award-winner Yoky Matsuoka is leading an effort to build robotic hands and other devices that will take commands directly from the human brain — and revolutionizing the opportunities for people with disabilities to function more fully.

Brown Scientists Build Robot That Responds to Human Gestures

Brown computer scientists have built a robot that can follow nonverbal commands from a person in a variety of environments � indoors as well as outside � all without having to adjust for variations in lighting. Credit: Nathan Koenig/Brown University Week: April 10 - 17, 2009
Keywords: Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction

Brown University researchers have demonstrated how a robot can follow human gestures in a variety of environments — indoors and outside — without having to adjust for variations in lighting. The achievement is an important step forward in the quest to build fully autonomous robots as partners for human endeavors.

Epidemiologic Model Shows Potential for Wireless Infection Spread and Prevention

Week: Feb 26 - Mar 6, 2009
Keywords: Malware, wifi, indiana university, school of informatics, epidemiology, steve myers, alex vespignani

llustration of the spread of a worm through Manhattan in several time slices. Can a focus on epidemiology help create safer networks? Researchers at Indiana University have created a model based on principles of infectious disease to study how malware might spread through a WiFi network. Indiana University professors Steven Myers and Alex Vespignani, and collaborators Vittoria Colizza and Hao Hu, modeled that the spread of malware on common WiFi networks much as an epidemiologist would model the spread of disease in a population and determined that large “epidemics” of malware can be effectively halted by bringing encryption rates on networks to a given threshold value.

MIT's Sixth Sense

Week: Feb 5-12, 2009
Keywords: interfaces, just-in-time-information, mobile, tangible, ubiquitous Picture of Sixth Sense Interface

The Fluid Interfaces research group at MIT has developed a wearable, ultra-portable personal computer. This combination of a webcam, smartphone and a battery powered pico projector can turn any surface into a gesture-controlled touch screen.

Cell Phones with Sensors aid Fitness, Environmental Awareness

Week: Dec 18-25, 2008
Keywords: cell phone, ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous sensing, activity inference bodyshape

Researchers at the University of Washington and Intel have created two new cell phone applications, dubbed UbiFit and UbiGreen, to automatically track workouts and green transportation. The programs display motivational pictures on the phone's background screen that change the more the user works out or uses eco-friendly means of transportation.

Brown University's Michael Black and Alexandru Balan Create Program To Calculate Body Shape

Week: Dec 11-18, 2008
Keywords: 3-D model, body shape, vision, Michael Black, Brown University, laser scans bodyshape

Imagine you are a police detective trying to identify a suspect wearing a trench coat, baggy pants and a baseball cap pulled low. Or imagine you are a fashion industry executive who wants to market virtual clothing that customers of all shapes and sizes can try online before they purchase. The main obstacle to these and other pursuits is creating a realistic, 3-D body shape - especially when the figure is clothed or obscured.

Zoetrope Searches the Historical Web

Week: Dec 4-11, 2008
Keywords: historical Web search, university of washington query photo

University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering Ph.D. student Eytan Adar and his colleagues at UW and Adobe Systems are grabbing hold and storing historical sites that users can easily search using an intuitive application called Zoetrope. (The Internet Archive has been capturing old versions of Web sites for years, but there is no easy and flexible way to search the archive.)

Algorithm Estimates Geographic Location of Photos

Week: Nov 19-26, 2008
Keywords: Big-Data, Internet, GPS, geolocate, image, im2gps query photo

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have devised the first computerized method that can analyze a single photograph and determine where in the world the image likely was taken. It�s a feat made possible by searching through millions of GPS-tagged images in the Flickr online photo collection.

Turning 2D Images into 3D Models

Week: Nov 12-19, 2008
Keywords: image, 3D model, algorithm model, artificial intelligence Ashutosh Saxena: reconstruction3d

Many artists spend their lives trying to render three-dimensional reality into a realistic two-dimensional image. Make3D does the opposite: it takes a two-dimensional image and digitally creates a three-dimensional model to give the viewer multiple perspectives of the same image.

New Algorithm Significantly Boosts Routing Efficiency of Networks

Week: Oct 24-31, 2008
Keywords: Networks, routing, algorithms cisco by roney

A new algorithm developed by computer scientists from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering helps answer the question "What's the best way to get from here to there?" -- at least for computer networks.

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Computing Research Highlight of the Week is a service of the Computing Community Consortium and the Computing Research Association designed to highlight some of the exciting and important recent research results in the computing fields. Each week a new highlight is chosen by CRA and CCC staff and volunteers from submissions from the computing community. Want your research featured? Submit it!.