In this video, Nicola Dell, a UW CSE graduate student, discusses her research in human-computer interaction, computer vision, and machine-learning with a focus on designing and evaluating systems that improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions. She has been working on using smart phones to diagnose diseases in developing countries. Smart phones are a great platform because each has a camera and is also powerful enough to do a lot of processing.
Computing is playing a huge role in a lot of different parts of our lives. One example is in health. These UW CSE students are developing ways for mobile phones to be medical instruments to collect someone's health data easily, efficiently, and more cost effectively. Take for instance a spirometer - an expensive device that measures the amount of air expelled by the lungs. Students are working to adapt mobile phones to do that.
The overall goal of this capstone is to design and implement a robotic system that can learn new skills from human demonstration. This involves learning to write software for controlling a humanoid robot (the NAO) using a Kinect RGB+depth camera. Working as a team, students tackle the various sub-problems of (1) human motion capture and interpretation from video, (2) control of a humanoid robot, and (3) application of probabilistic reasoning and machine learning algorithms to the problem of learning from human demonstration. You will gain experience in applying machine learning and probabilistic reasoning algorithms to concrete problems in 3D vision and robotics.
UW CSE Ph.D. student Yaw Anokwa discusses his work on information technology for the developing world in this terrific UW College of Engineering video.
We live in a world of computers. Every day, we use computers to find information, communicate, or be entertained. Capstone design courses are the hallmark of Computer Science & Engineering. In these classes, teams of students tackle complex hardware, software, and embedded system design and implementation projects of their own invention. This year nine different capstones were offered to our students. We had a camera crew ask students what benefits they received from taking a capstone course. Hear how our students describe some of their capstone course experiences.
Homes are ever increasing hotbeds of new technology such as game consoles, TVs, smartphones, cameras, tablets, and remotely controllable lights and locks. This rapid pace of innovation, however, is breeding heterogeneity and complexity that frustrates even technically-savvy users' attempts to manage their technological devices or implement functionality that uses these devices in combination. In this capstone, student focus is on developing solutions for the connected home - a home rich with sensors, actuators, controllers, processors, and input and output devices. Orientation is towards systems software - infrastructure that facilitates building effective applications for the home space. Students work in substantial teams to design, implement, and release a software project that addresses one or more issues in the home, such as configuration-less setup, interoperability, privacy, and usable security.
This capstone began with a brief survey of computer audio techniques for sound recording and playback, encoding and decoding, synchronization, sound synthesis, recognition, and analysis/resynthesis. Students then worked in teams to design, implement, and release a software project utilizing some of the techniques surveyed.
The top 10 reasons to take a capstone course, counted down by our own students.
In 2009-10, for the third year, Computer Science & Engineering joined with Human Centered Design & Engineering to offer a year-long senior undergraduate capstone design course on “Designing Technology for Resource-Constrained Environments.” Students in this year’s course worked to develop a low-cost, easy-to-use portable ultrasound for midwives that will be tested in Uganda — the Midwives’ Ultrasound Project. The course is a collaboration of CSE’s Richard Anderson, Ruth Anderson, and Gaetano Borriello, with HCDE’s Beth Kolko.
As cell phones become more capable with connectivity with the internet and sensors such as cameras, compasses, GPS, and accelerometers, there are opportunities to use them as accessibility or assistive devices. In this capstone, students work in teams to create new applications on cell phones that allow persons with disabilities to accomplish tasks that would be difficult to impossible to do without the applications.