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.

SST Conference a Success!

Today's South Sound Technology Conference was a huge success!


Business leaders, technology innovators, students, faculty, and staff all attended the conference today. Attendees heard about the importance of innovation in the economy, learned about cloud computing, and saw a demonstration of facial recognition software, among other topics. Local companies Prepared Response, Serra Media, Avue Technology, NewTech, and Internet Identity all sat on a panel to discuss the local technology industry.

The Business Examiner has a short article about the conference:

While the term "tech sector" was used to grow products during the dot.com boom and bust 10 years ago, the sector has evolved to include more about innovation, said Economic Development Commission of Washington Executive Director Egils Milbergs.

"Innovation is about solving customer problems," he said.

Thank you to all who attended and all who presented!

ACM-ICPC Programming Contest - RESULTS

Two student teams from the Institute of Technology recently competed in the ACM-ICPC Regional Programming Contest.

There were a total of 85 teams competing in the Northwest region, of which 24 were at the UO site in Eugene; there were 11 problems given in the contest.

Team UWT Purple (Jonathan Hogins, Mark Jung, Kevin Stueve) finished 6 of the 11 problems, finishing 6th at the site and 20th overall. Team UWT Gold (Matthew Fiebig, Steven Hotag, Tim Simon) finished 3 of the 11 problems, finishing 16th at the site and 49th overall.

The team's coach Dr. Dan Zimmerman had this to say:

I think this is an _excellent_ showing - especially considering that it was our first competition [and] that we had so little preparation...[The Purple] team should be available to compete again next year, but I imagine they'll have to fight for it, once word spreads about how much fun these competitions are.

Congratulations to all of the participants!

The Institute of Technology's First Seminar on Thursday

On Thursday, November 13, 2008 from 12:30pm - 1:20pm in Pinkerton 131, Steve Hanks, Professor of CSS, and consulting CSO, Adready will present:

"Optimization and Online Display Advertising"

Online display advertising has traditionally been managed by agencies and optimized by humans. Smaller, more local businesses have been limited to media like print advertisements and direct mail. Advances in technology are starting to make the online channel available to smaller advertisers who cannot afford to hire an agency to build and manage their ad campaigns, and at the same time changes in consumers' buying and browsing habits is making online advertising much more effective in reaching even local customers.

Adready is a Seattle startup offering self-service technology allowing an advertiser to compose, deploy, and monitor online display ad campaigns. Its low fee structure and minimum budget opens the channel to small advertisers. Of particular technological interest is the optimization component: ideally the advertiser tells the Adready system what business goals s/he wants to accomplish through the campaign, and the system uses the budget optimally, in terms of fine-tuning the creative and the message, and deploying the ads in the best possible places and at the best possible times.

Professor Hanks explains:

Building an optimization system like this reveals plenty of interesting theoretical and engineering problems. And while optimization has a very long and very rich academic literature -- even in related areas like search-engine optimization -- starting with the needs dictated by building a practical system often leads to a very different problem statement and set of issues than one sees in the academic literature. In this talk I will sketch out the area of online display advertising and the optimization problem, point out the pressing technical problems, and talk a little about what we are doing at Adready to solve them.

About AdReady, info and above screen shot from their website:

AdReady is an advertising technology company focused on making online display advertising accessible and effective for advertisers of all sizes. Through AdReady’s data-rich library of proven creative, real-time ad customization tools, and intuitive web-based interface, marketers are learning that AdReady makes it easy to build and run effective online display ad campaigns in minutes.

Center of Excellence in Information Assurance Research

Dr. Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, Director of the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity at the University of Washington presents a NSA/DHS certificate to the Director of the Institute of Technology, Dr. Orlando Baiocchi.

The University of Washington Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity (CIAC) was awarded designation as an NSA/DHS Center of Excellence in Information Assurance Research, having been an NSA/DHS Center of Excellence in Information Assurance Education since 2004. The Center was originally formed under the leadership and guidance of the University of Washington Institute of Technology (Larry Crum and Steve Hanks), the Computer Science and Engineering Dept Seattle campus (Ed Lazowska and David Notkin) and the Information School (Mike Eisenberg).

The CIAC is one of only 23 such Centers in the United States and is distinguished from the others by the multidisciplinary research agenda that crosses several departments--law, mathematics, information and computer sciences--and a research partnership with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

South Sound Technology Conference 2008

Hello everyone,

Join us at the Institute of Technology at 8:30am on November 21st for the Ninth Annual South Sound Technology Conference. Held in the new William Phillips Hall on the University of Washington, Campus, the days topics will range from Google's Cloud Computing to Sagem Morpho's Facial Recognition software with an emphasis throughout the day on fostering innovation and technology to solve problems and create opportunity. The event will conclude at 1:00pm with a panel of local software and technology companies from the South Sound, such as Prepared Response and Newtech, providing updates and discussing new product initiatives. The conference is free but registration is highly recommended. To RSVP your attendance, send your confirmation email to Zaide Chavez (zaidec@u.washington.edu) at the Institute of Technology.

For more information or questions contact Andrew Fry

Computing News: Earthquake Detection

From The Wired Campus:

Seismologists at the University of California at Riverside and Stanford University are creating an earthquake-detection network on the cheap by using distributed-computing technology to link up laptop computers that have built-in motion sensors. The researchers’ Quake-Catcher Network has already detected several quakes — in Nevada in April and in Los Angeles in late July.

Check out their website to find out how you can join the Quake-Catcher Network with your own laptop or desktop!