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.

Computing News: Facial Recognition

Hopefully you got to see the demonstration of Sagem Morpho's facial recogition software at the South Sound Technology Conference. Today's News Tribune has an excellent article about how the Pierce County Sherriff's Department is using the software to pursue unsolved cases.

The forgery and theft case had victims, a witness and decent surveillance images from an ATM. What it didn’t have were any leads on who committed the crime. But instead of being tossed aside, as happens in so many property crime cases, the ATM images were e-mailed to Steve Wilkins at the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department.

Wilkins, the department’s forensic services supervisor, picked the clearest image and used new facial recognition software to compare it to 16 years’ worth of prisoner mug shots taken at the Pierce County Jail.

Within 15 minutes he’d found a match.

Detectives followed the new lead and eventually arrested Susan Bennett, who was charged in October with 11 crimes in connection with the ATM thefts. She pleaded guilty Thursday and was sentenced to 91/2 years. Half of that will be served in prison, and half in community custody under Department of Corrections supervision.

The match was the first for the Sheriff’s Department’s six-month pilot project with Sagem Morpho Inc.’s new facial recognition software, MorphoFace.