Refraction focuses on teaching fractions and discovering optimal learning pathways for math education. In an effort to relieve the crisis in STEM education, CSE grad students Erik Andersen and Yun-En Liu and Professor Zoran Popović are leading a team of undergrad students and artists to create video games that can discover optimal pathways for learning. They have focused so far on early math, including topics such as fractions and algebra, which are some of the main bottlenecks preventing students from pursuing a career in science. Refraction, won the Grand Prize in the Disney Learning Challenge at SIGGRAPH 2010.
Foldit is a revolutionary scientific discovery game that allows players to contribute to biochemistry by folding and designing proteins. The game is designed to tackle the problem of protein folding. Proteins are small “machines” within our bodies that handle practically all functions of living organisms. By knowing more about the 3D structure of proteins (or how they “fold”), we can better understand their function, and we can also get a better idea of how to combat diseases, create vaccines, and even find novel biofuels. UW CSE PhD alums Seth Cooper and Adrien Treuille, together with their advisor Zoran Popović, developed a game that augments the computational search for protein folds with large-scale human spatial reasoning ability. The state-of-the-art biochemistry simulations embedded within the game are created by a team lead by a UW professor David Baker, a world-renown expert in proteomics.
Unlike traditional lecture-based CSE courses, students are asked to work in groups on a single project that parallels the experience of working for a real company or customer. Students will prototype a substantial project that mixes sensing hardware and software components. Students work in teams to design and implement a software project that makes use of RGB-D sensors (e.g. Microsoft Kinect, ASUS Xtion Pro Live).
Students work in substantial teams to design, implement, and release a software project involving multiple areas of the CSE curriculum. Emphasis is placed on the development process itself, rather than on the product. This is a course that tries to have students see how it is to develop for the real world. Students know they've done well in the class when people around the world actually play their game. This capstone shows students that as he/she creates a game one has to develop very quickly, and most importantly, look at the analytics of exactly how the software is received by the general audience and then rapidly adapt the software towards its greatest level of acceptance.
As smart phones become more capable with internet connectivity and sensors, there are many new opportunities to use them as tools for people with disabilities. In the Accessibility Capstone course students worked in teams to create new applications on smart phones for blind, low vision, and deaf people.
This capstone will build projects utilizing computer audio techniques for sound recording and playback, encoding and decoding, synchronization, sound synthesis, recognition, and analysis/resynthesis. Students will work in teams to design, implement, and release a software project utilizing some of the techniques such as those surveyed in CSE 490S.
In this capstone, we'll be working on what is conceptually a single project. We'll be organized as a single team, composed of a loosely federated group of sub-teams. The theme this year focused on making your home as available to you everywhere all the time. One question that the course addressed: Can we do that? A second question addressed apps: could all apps be downloaded over the web?
Capstone design courses are the hallmark of Computer Science & Engineering. In these classes, teams of students design and implement complex hardware, software, and embedded system projects of their own invention. This allows them to further explore the areas they personally care about.
Dexterous hand manipulation is one of the most complex types of biological movement and has proven very difficult to replicate in robots. In this video, Vikash Kumar, a UW CSE graduate student, discusses his research work in robotics, artificial intelligence, and control theory at the University of Washington Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering. He specializes in solving problems with hand manipulation… problems that are difficult, but interesting. The immense freedom and infinite workings of the human hand is a challenge to figure out.
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.