UW CSE Videos
2013 Engineering Discovery Days is a 2-day event that brings elementary, middle and high school students to Computer Science & Engineering to participate and discover engineering innovations. Hands-on exhibits and attractions lead by UW engineering students and faculty shared their work with students, teachers, families and the community. The theme of this years Discovery Days was "Engineer your life!"
The capstone design courses are the hallmark of computer science & engineering. The capstone design course gives you the freedom to explore your interests, collaborate with other students and use your education to solve real problems. With the capstone experience, you have the skills to thrive after graduation.
We're doing something new this year - a collaborative group project involving everyone in the class. The focus is information extraction, widely believed to be the future of Web search. We will divide into small groups (eg 2 people), each working on a component of an integrated system to "read the Web", augmenting a knowledge base (like Freebase) with entity-attribute-value triples by automatically processing newswire and Web text.
This capstone will build projects utilizing computer audio techniques for human interfacing, 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 these techniques.
Sometimes something as simple as word processing and organization on a mobile phone can make a world of difference, especially to people suffering on the other side of the world. Take for instance research in computing for development. One project in this area is Open Data Kit (ODK), which is a free and open-source set of tools which help organizations replace paper forms and reports with smart apps on a smartphone or tablet. In this video, Yaw Anokwa, a 2012 UW CSE PhD alum, discusses computer science and ODK Clinic, an ODK app that helps doctors make faster and better decisions about patient care.
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.

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