Communications of the ACM Cover Story for Former Grad and Faculty Member

If you are in the computer industry or in computer science education then you are familiar with the "Communications of the ACM". If you are not, it is a highly respected publication read world wide. Aside from the 90,000 members of the ACM who receive each issue, it is read by many more non-members as well.

Here is a snippet of how the publication describes itself:

Communications of the ACM is the leading print and online publication for the computing and information technology fields. Read by computing professionals worldwide, Communications is recognized as the most trusted and knowledgeable source of industry information for today’s computing professional.

So it is quite an accolade that former Institute of Technology Computing and Software Systems graduate student Kristen Shinohara and Institute Faculty member Josh Tenenberg landed the cover spot and are a featured article in the August edition. Kristen is now a Ph.D. Student in the Information School of the University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

Professor Josh Tenenberg has been teaching and conducting research at the Institute of Technology at the University of Washington, Tacoma, for many years. He has recently been interested in Computer Ethics, Social Informatics, Human-Computer Interaction Design, Commons Governance, and Computer Science Education. Just this last year he started an Industry Partners co-teaching program that brought one of Google's Human Interface Design experts into the classroom for a quarter to share the course.

The article comes from the capstone project that Kristen was working on to complete her degree with the support and sponsorship of Josh, who was the faculty Chair. The focus was on a blind person's interaction with technology and is described nicely by the publication as follows:

One of the most effective methods for designing technologies for blind users is to observe how they interact with tools that are part of their daily lives, say Kristen Shinohara and Josh Tenenberg in this month's cover story (see page 58). The findings illustrate how elements of meaning can be as important as usability in the design of technology. In fact, their article inspired this month's cover image – a Braille representation of a quote by Helen Keller: "It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision."

If you would like to read the article, here is a link to it online, as well as a link to the entire publication.

A Blind Person's Interaction with Technology

Communications of the ACM

Congratulations to the both of them.

BarCamp Tacoma, Be There and Change the World

In August of 2005, Tim O’Reilly, technology publisher extraordinaire invited 250 of his friends to join him for a day of activities that would allow them to get to know each other better and to “hopefully come up with some cool ideas about how to change the world.” The idea was to have people who are doing interesting work share it with others. Interesting in this case meaning the topics of web services, data visualization, opening source programming and data security among other things.

This had been going on for about three years by 2005, and was a pretty exclusive event. Those that were not invited, but were also doing interesting things decided that they could organize a similar opportunity, make it open to anyone interested in explaining why they were interesting and garner enough interest in the event to fill it. It was a success and in answer to the O’Rielly event, named “FooCamp”, it became known as “BarCamp” in a gesture toward its tech geek roots. It is also known as an “unconference” because it shapes itself on the day of the event and speakers present in half hour slots on a first come/first served basis. Chris Messina’s idea was an unqualified success and the occasion for BarCamps has increased in number and venues.

If you were interested and had heard of BarCamp over the last few years, it would likely to have been one somewhere in Seattle or on the East Side.

That was until this August 8th at the Suite 133 offices. Thanks to Scott Kuehn, Michael Maitlen, Jennifer Halveron Kuehn and Robert Peaslee an open invitation to participate and interact is available to the Tacoma set. You DO NOT have to be a tech geek to participate. Perhaps your interest is in marketing or art or economic development. If you are willing to speak, you are welcome to the event.

Open at 9:00am with presentations starting at 10:00am, the event will go until 5:00pm. Coffee is your friend. Perhaps we will all get to know each other better and come up with some cool ideas to change the world, the state, the county, or maybe Tacoma.

For more information check out www.barcamptacoma.org and sign up there.

Commencement!

This Friday is the University of Washington Tacoma's Commencement Ceremony. The Institute has students graduating with Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Arts, and Master of Science degrees in Computing & Software Systems. The Institute is also graduating its very first class of Computer Engineers (BS in Computer Engineering & Systems)!

Congratulations to all the graduates!

The Institute is hosting a party for graduates and their families and friends immediately following the ceremony. Please join the faculty and staff of the Institute in CP 206C for refreshments.

Commencement Ceremony
tacoma.washington.edu/commencement
June 12, 2009
10:00 am (doors open at 9:00 am)
Tacoma Dome
Speaker: Governor Chris Gregoire

Institute Graduation Party
June 12, 2009
1:00-3:00 pm (following the ceremony)
Cherry Parkes 206C

Computing News: Google's Annual Founders' Letter

Google's founders take turns writing a letter each year to include with their annual report to the stockholders. This year was Sergey Brin's turn and he writes about the history of the internet and what Google has accomplished in the last few years. Brin addresses Search, YouTube, Books, Geo, Ads, Apps, Chrome, Android, AI, and then concludes with:

Given the tremendous pace of technology, it is impossible to predict far into the future. However, I think the past decade tells us some things to expect in the next. Computers will be 100 times faster still and storage will be 100 times cheaper. Many of the problems that we call artificial intelligence today will become accepted as standard computational capabilities, including image processing, speech recognition, and natural language processing. New and amazing computational capabilities will be born that we cannot even imagine today.

While about half the people in the world are online today via computers and mobile phones, the Internet will reach billions more in the coming decade. I expect that by using simple yet powerful models of computing such as web services, everyone will be more productive. These tools enable individuals, small groups, and small businesses to accomplish tasks that only large corporations could achieve before, whether it is making and releasing a movie, marketing a product, or reporting on a war.

When I was a child, researching anything involved a long trip to the local library and good deal of luck that one of the books there would be about the subject of interest. I could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds. The dark clouds currently looming over the world economy are a hardship for us all, but by the time today's children grow up, this recession will be a footnote in history. Yet the technologies that we create between now and then will define their way of life.

You can read the entire letter at the Official Google Blog.

Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition Notes

As was expected, everyone was challenged and had a good time at the CCDC (Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition) event. Don McLane, who helps to organize and sponsor the event through coordination and support of the Institute students gave me some notes from last weekends experience.

The scenario was well balanced. Student teams did have enough time to harden their systems. The Red Team (attackers) soon figured out the systems and exploited any exposed flaws. Thank Brian Hay at the University of Alaska for a good design there.

There was an interesting dynamic on the floor. Although teams were really competing against each other, they felt like they were all against the Red Team. I noticed one occasion where someone overheard another team member describing a problem; he scooted over and whispered "our team figured that out, here's what to do ...".

Setting up the competition was an adventure. Thursday morning I drove to Microsoft with a truck full of routers and switches. We set up everything in record time. The next day, Brian Hay would fly down from Alaska with all the operating system images and we'd finish up.

Then I got the call: all flights from Alaska were canceled because of volcanic ash. I spent the entire night downloading 60 Gigabytes of data from Alaska.

Friday, even though we were constantly on the phone, there were more details than could be handled in the bandwidth of a phone call. We called a few volunteers. A couple people from Microsoft stopped by to see how it was going; they were immediately recruited to help troubleshoot. The team effort was incredible.

Luckily, the Alaska team did make it down the next day for the competition.

Don also provided some pictures from the event. The rest can be found here.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! (a day late)

Ada Lovelace was the first programmer. She wrote programs for Charles Babbage's analytical engine in the 1840s. That's right, way back in 1840! 140 years later, the US Defense Department named a programming language after her (Ada).

March 24th was named Ada Lovelace Day and is an international day for blogging about women in technology. You can find posts from around the world about all kinds of amazing women.

MS-CSS graduate admitted to MIT!

The Institute of Technology is proud to announce that Chunguang Charlotte Wang, 2006 graduate of our Master’s Program in CSS, has been admitted to MIT’s Master’s of Science in System Design Management. The program focuses on engineering system design and management. Charlotte’s Capstone project “UML2OWL-S: A Tool to Transform Business Requirements to Business Process Ontology” was chaired by Sam Chung, Ph.D.

Charlotte is a wonderful representative of UW Tacoma. She spent an exciting summer working as the interpreter for athletes and United States Olympic Committee at the Beijing Olympics. She was featured in an article in NWweekly.

Congratulations on both of these accomplishments, Charlotte!

Computing News: Computers & Music

The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) has a great article about computer scientists researching in the field of music at Georgia Tech.

A glove that helps you learn to play piano, a robotic marimba player that can jam with your band, a program to turn your cellphone into a portable music mixer, and an aquarium that musically accompanies the fish.

You are unlikely to encounter any of those devices at a typical music school or even an elite conservatory. But they all exist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which opened the Center for Music Technology in November. There, composers, computer programmers, and engineers are collaborating on projects to change how performers and audiences use technology to make and experience music — and perhaps to give new music a greater attraction for classically oriented ears.

The center's goal is to foster as significant a shift in music composition and performance as happened when the piano replaced the more limited harpsichord in the 18th century. "An endeavor of this sort in our time demands an interdisciplinary technological approach, cutting across such fields as engineering, computation, material science, design, and music, all the while keeping a sharp focus on aesthetics," the center's Web site says.
...
Others at Georgia Tech are developing technologies that could change the way musicians learn. Kevin Huang, studying for a master's degree in computer science, has created a prototype glove outfitted with standard cellphone buzzers that can be programmed to signal, with vibrations, which fingers to use while playing a piano piece. The device could even be used to help build muscle memory while a player is away from the keyboard. And it has potential as a tool for physical rehabilitation, says his instructor, Ellen Yi-Luen Do, an associate professor of human-centered computing.
...
In addition to working on musical innovations, the center is also meant to inspire the university's engineers and programmers to be more creative in all of their work. "We really want to solve real-world problems," Mr. Weinberg says.