In Amazon’s hometown, people turn to their computers to order everything from groceries to last-minute birthday presents to the odd toothbrush or medication forgotten from the store.

If online shopping continues to grow at its current rate, there may be twice as many trucks delivering packages in Seattle’s city center within five years, a new report projects — and double the number of trucks looking for a parking space.

In the , the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s at the have analyzed solutions for alleviating urban congestion by making truck parking spaces more productive and reducing the growth of truck traffic.

“Seattle is the perfect laboratory to find better ways of managing commercial truck parking and delivering packages in urban settings,” said , SCTL director and a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering. “By testing data-driven solutions on our streets and in our buildings, we hope to reduce traffic in congested areas of the city as well as missed deliveries that frustrate consumers and retailers alike.”

By mapping privately owned delivery infrastructure for the first time, a team of UW researchers and students found that 87 percent of all the buildings in downtown Seattle, Uptown (also known as lower Queen Anne) and South Lake Union have to rely on the city’s curb and alley space to receive deliveries. Only 13 percent of buildings have loading bays or docks that allow trucks to park on private property.

That’s why the report focuses on what’s known as the “Final 50 Feet” problem: the last and surprisingly complicated leg of an urban delivery that begins when a driver must find a place to park a truck or vehicle — usually on a public street or alleyway — and ends when the customer takes receipt of their package.

It’s part of a broader research initiative spearheaded the by SCTL’s , which is partnering with SDOT, Nordstrom, UPS, the U.S. Postal Service and Charlie’s Produce to re-think everything from how cities apportion curb and street space to how building owners manage the growing avalanche of packages delivered to urban towers.

“Seattle is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, and SDOT is committed to meeting the urban goods delivery challenges facing most big cities in the U.S.,” said Christopher Eaves, project manager at SDOT. “We know that issuing parking tickets to companies who are simply trying to meet the daily delivery needs of residents and businesses isn’t the right solution. So, our goal is to identify and implement scalable strategies that improve deliveries at existing buildings, as well as initiate strategic research to mine new data.”

The UW research team found that reducing the number of failed delivery attempts as well as the amount of time a delivery truck is parked in a loading space could offer significant public and private benefits. UW researchers and SDOT plan to test promising improvement strategies in and on the streets around the  this spring.

“These two actions alone could reduce congestion and free up curb space for cars, buses, bicycles and other people who need to use that shared public space,” said Barbara Ivanov, director of the Urban Freight Lab. “Those efficiencies have the added benefit of saving retailers and delivery services money, and getting orders into the hands of customers faster.”

Cutting down on failed first delivery attempts has the potential to greatly reduce truck trips in Seattle, cut business costs and ensure that tenants in multifamily buildings can shop online and get their orders when they expect them, the report finds.

By tracking real-world deliveries in a downtown office building — the Seattle Municipal Tower — a hotel, a residential building, a historic building and the retail mall at Westlake Center, the UW researchers discovered delivery drivers encounter logistical barriers that consume a significant portion of their time. Clearing security in urban towers took 12 percent of the total time, and looking for tenants and riding freight elevators took 61 percent of the total time.

The report estimates that 73 percent of delivery time is spent in buildings and, as a result, the Urban Freight Lab will pilot test a smart locker system in the loading bay of the Seattle Municipal Tower. This could substantially reduce delivery time, failed first deliveries and the amount of time that delivery trucks occupy parking spaces that serve the building.

The smart locker system pilot will allow drivers from multiple delivery companies to securely leave packages in the vestibule of the 62-story Municipal Tower. Then, the locker system will notify enrolled tenants of deliveries by text or email and send a lock code, allowing them to pick up the packages at their convenience rather than having to stop working and intercept a delivery person in their office.

The Final 50 Feet project is the first time that SDOT, in partnership with the Urban Freight Lab, has analyzed both the street network and the city’s vertical space such as office, hotel, retail and residential towers as one unified goods delivery system.

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For more information, contact Goodchild at annegood@uw.edu and Ivanov at ivanovb@uw.edu.

If you could pick an image to be preserved for thousands of years, what would it be? A picture of your family, an endangered landscape, a page of poetry, or a snapshot that sends a message to the future?

Researchers from the at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý and Microsoft are looking to collect 10,000 original images from around the world to preserve them indefinitely in synthetic DNA manufactured by . DNA holds promise as a revolutionary storage medium that lasts much longer and is many orders of magnitude denser than current technologies.

The team has already encoded important compositions in DNA molecules, including The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the top 100 books of Project Gutenberg, songs from the and an .

The invites the public to submit original photographs that they’d like to see preserved in DNA for millennia. The images — which can be uploaded at the — will be encoded in synthetic DNA and made available to researchers worldwide. The researchers also are encouraging people to share their images on social media with the hashtag #MemoriesInDNA and include a story about why the photograph or video is important to them.

“It’s your turn to show us what should be preserved in DNA forever,” said , professor in the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “We want people to go out and take a picture of something that they want the world to remember — it’s a fun opportunity to send a message to future generations and help our research in the process.”

DNA data storage has emerged as a potential solution to bridge the growing gap between the amount of digital data generated today — by everything from commercial video to space imagery to medical records — and our ability to affordably and efficiently store that data.

Unlike data centers, which require acres of land and account for in the United States, DNA molecules can store information millions of times more compactly. The basic process converts the strings of ones and zeroes in digital data into the four basic building blocks of DNA sequences — adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. It employs synthetic DNA molecules created in a lab, not living DNA.

The team of UW computer scientists and electrical engineers, in collaboration with Microsoft researchers and working with Twist Bioscience, holds the for the amount of data stored in DNA.  So far they have been able to encode photographic images and video in DNA and retrieve and convert those individual molecular “files” back into digital data.

Their next challenge involves exploring how to perform meaningful data processing directly in DNA — without having to convert the images back into their electronic form.

“Let’s suppose you have a trillion images encoded in DNA and want to find all the photographs that have a red car in them, or to find out whether a person’s face exists in those images,” said Ceze. “We want to be able to do that information processing in DNA directly — to search in a smart way and make the molecules themselves carry out that computer vision work.”

The team will encode approximately 10,000 of the crowdsourced images in manufactured snippets of DNA. The researchers’ approach to searching images directly in DNA relies on the fact that certain nucleotides stick to others — A binds to T and C binds to G.

They can introduce strips of DNA into the solution that contains a coded “query” — essentially, a string of complementary DNA that causes all photographs with a red car or certain facial features or whatever meets the criteria of the query to bind to it. By attaching magnetic nanoparticles to the query DNA, they can use a magnet to pull out all the similar images that have stuck to it.

“It is thrilling to bring computer science and molecular biology together in this project,” said Microsoft senior researcher and collaborator Karin Strauss. “There has been amazing progress recently in both areas and, when combined, they can be very powerful in tackling problems created by the massive amounts of data we’ve been generating.”

“Having a set of diverse images from around the world will help us invent new ways to make molecules work with each other to carry out these computations directly,” said Microsoft partner architect and collaborator .

The team will employ machine learning to devise methods to map and encode all the visual features contained in a photograph — such as colors, curves, lines and objects — in DNA. The main challenge is doing that in a way that allows scientists to extract similar things and perform meaningful data processing.

“We will use neural networks to explore ways to classify visual patterns in the images and video that we encode in DNA,” said , UW associate professor of electrical engineering and in the Allen School. “For example, are there more red cars than blue cars in a photograph? Or are there people riding bicycles?”

“With proof-of-concept achieved for DNA as a digital data storage media, we are working to drive down the cost of synthesizing DNA to enable its potential as a widely-available commercial solution for the growing body of precious data in digital format, such as archival data, financial and health record backups, and all long-term data retention where current media is not practical,” said Emily M. Leproust, CEO of Twist Bioscience. “MemoriesInDNA is a fabulous project to showcase the technological, scientific and cultural importance of DNA worldwide and we look forward to our role in this historic event.”

#MemoriesInDNA will provide an important library of images to be encoded in a separately funded project supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) . UW was recently awarded $6.3M to accelerate the pace at which data can be encoded in DNA, and to develop new capabilities to process this data through image search and classification. The work will build the foundation on which UW can advance its next-generation work in molecular information processing.

Note: To be included in the DNA image collection, photographs cannot be copyrighted by any other party and must be free of violent or inappropriate content. The image dataset will be preserved in DNA indefinitely and shared with researchers worldwide. For more details about how to upload and share images, visit the .

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For more information, contact misl-info@cs.washington.edu or visit the #MemoriesInDNA Project website: .

The ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý is launching a new augmented and virtual reality research center — funded by Facebook, Google, and Huawei — to accelerate innovation in the field and educate the next generation of researchers and practitioners.

The $6 million , funded with equal contributions from the three initial sponsors, creates one of the world’s first academic centers dedicated to virtual and augmented reality. The new center in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and located in Seattle — a national hub of VR activity — will support research and education initiatives with potential to deliver game-changing breakthroughs in the field.

“Allen School faculty have produced pioneering research in many of the areas that underpin AR and VR technologies, including computer vision, graphics, perception, and machine learning,” said , Allen School director and Wissner-Slivka Chair in Computer Science and Engineering. “Through our partnership with Facebook, Google, and Huawei, the Allen School and UW will be at the forefront of the next great wave of AR and VR innovation — pursuing breakthrough research and educating the next generation of innovators in this exciting and rapidly expanding field.”

To date, AR and VR applications are making their first steps, mostly focusing on entertainment and games. Yet everyone is interested to find the “killer app” for AR and VR. The goal of the UW Reality Lab is to develop technology to power the next generation of applications that will speak to a wider population. Those diverse ideas range from learning Spanish by seeing objects labeled in your field of view to achieving telepresence by conversing with a remote relative or co-worker as if you were in the same room.

“We’re seeing some really compelling and high quality AR and VR experiences being built today,” said center co-lead and Allen School professor . “But, there are still many core research advances needed to move the industry forward — tools for easily creating content, infrastructure solutions for streaming 3D video, and privacy and security safeguards — that university researchers are uniquely positioned to tackle.”

The UW Reality Lab will bring together an interdisciplinary team of UW faculty, graduate students and undergraduates working in 3D computer vision and perception, object recognition, graphics, game science and education, distributed computing, stream processing, databases, computer architecture, and privacy and security.

Another key function of the UW Reality Lab will be to educate tomorrow’s AR and VR researchers and workers. The funding will support new courses and access to state-of-the-art labs and infrastructure for UW students to develop new technologies and applications. That includes accessing emerging technologies from the center’s sponsors and allowing those companies to test new ideas in a focused setting with computer science students. An advisory board of luminaries from across the AR and VR community will help the center remain at the forefront of this burgeoning field.

The UW Reality Lab builds on the Allen School’s established leadership in cutting-edge AR/VR education and research. In one example, the school in 2016 introduced the world’s , in which students built AR applications using 40 HoloLens units loaned from Microsoft before they were commercially available.

“Students had fantastic ideas and were able to create amazing AR and VR applications ranging from Holographic Chess to teaching one how to play the piano or cook. This opened our eyes to the potential of investing deeper in development of algorithms and applications for AR and VR,” said center co-lead and Allen School assistant professor . “We realized there were so many cool things we could do if only we had more resources, more time and more devices. Given those, we can help bring the world’s AR and VR dreams to life.”

The UW Reality Lab’s location in Seattle — one of the world’s most active centers for VR and AR innovation — paves the way for unique industry and academic collaborations aimed at achieving new capabilities and offering users seamless experiences.

“Having an opportunity to be at the leading edge of this industry is really exciting,” said co-lead and Allen School professor . “It’s big, it’s happening now and there’s a lot of research to be done. We’re thrilled to take a leading role in making it all happen.”

For more information, contact realitylab@cs.washington.edu or on Twitter.

The ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý celebrated two major fundraising and construction milestones on Wednesday for the Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering, which will allow the UW to double its annual computer science and engineering degree production, offer an unparalleled education to more of Washington’s students and grow its high impact research programs.

The UW Board of Regents voted in October to name , after Microsoft and a group of their longtime friends and colleagues joined to contribute more than $30 million in the couple’s honor. On Wednesday, the university announced a separate $15 million gift from Bill and Melinda Gates that brings fundraising for the $110 million building to a close.

“This new building is vital to Washington,” said Microsoft President Brad Smith, who spearheaded the fundraising campaign. “More than 300 donors contributed to the project because they believe in the importance of preparing students for not just today’s world, but tomorrow’s. Bill and Melinda Gates’ generous gift concludes the fundraising effort for a facility that will benefit the Allen School, the UW, the Puget Sound region and the world.”

Smith — who, with his wife Kathy Surace-Smith, is a member of the “Friends of Bill & Melinda” who enabled the building to be named in the Gateses’ honor — will be joined by roughly 300 of his fellow donors, friends and other members of the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering community Wednesday at a “topping out” ceremony, which celebrates the placement of the final steel beam at the top of the structure. The topping out comes at roughly the halfway point in construction and marks the start of work on the enclosure and interior of the building.

When the Bill & Melinda Gates Center opens in early 2019, it will feature an undergraduate commons that will serve as a “home away from home” for the more than 1,000 undergraduates enrolled in the major; a state-of-the-art robotics laboratory; a wet lab for leading-edge research at the intersection of computing and biology; and much-needed classroom, office and collaboration spaces — to name only a few highlights. The 135,000- square-foot building is located across the street from the existing Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering at the heart of the UW’s Seattle campus.

“I’m especially excited about the opportunities that this building will create for women in computer science. That’s an area where the Paul G. Allen School has excelled, and an area where I hope this new building will enable women to do even more,” said Melinda Gates.

“This is a special honor, because the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý is a special place to me. Melinda and I are thrilled to be able to support this world-class institution in various ways. Thank you to everyone who made this building possible. I’m excited about what it will mean for the university and our entire community,” said Bill Gates.

Like the Paul G. Allen Center, the new Bill & Melinda Gates Center was funded through a public-private partnership. In addition to the contributions from Microsoft and couples who contributed as the “Friends of Bill & Melinda,” Amazon, Zillow, Google, the Washington state Legislature and more than 350 friends and alumni supported the Allen School’s expansion.

The topping out ceremony caps a banner year for Computer Science & Engineering at the UW. After breaking ground on the new building at the start of 2017, the program marked its 50^th anniversary in March by , celebrated its first graduating class as a school in June and announced the naming of the Bill & Melinda Gates Center in August.

“This has been a transformational year for the Allen School and for the University’s ability to prepare students — whether they’re majoring in CSE or in another discipline — to be successful in our technological world. That’s going to pay dividends for them, and for our state and nation, and we have our many generous friends to thank for this progress,” said UW President Ana Mari Cauce.

With major fundraising for the building complete, the school will focus the remainder of its on increasing support for students to ensure a world-class computer science education remains within reach regardless of background or means; graduate fellowships and professorships that will enable the program to attract the best and brightest research talent and educators to our state and region; and strategic investment in entrepreneurial research.

The Campaign for CSE is part of the University’s most ambitious campaign in history, “Be Boundless—For Washington, For the World,” that seeks to raise $5 billion by 2020.

For more information, contact Ed Lazowska at lazowska@cs.washington.edu.

Imagine a bottle of laundry detergent that can sense when you’re running low on soap — and automatically connect to the internet to place an order for more.

����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý researchers are the first to make this a reality by that can collect useful data and communicate with other WiFi-connected devices entirely on their own.

With that the team is making available to the public, 3-D printing enthusiasts will be able to create objects out of commercially available plastics that can wirelessly communicate with other smart devices. That could include a battery-free slider that controls music volume, a button that automatically orders more cornflakes from Amazon or a water sensor that sends an alarm to your phone when it detects a leak.

“Our goal was to create something that just comes out of your 3-D printer at home and can send useful information to other devices,” said co-lead author and UW electrical engineering doctoral student . “But the big challenge is how do you communicate wirelessly with WiFi using only plastic? That’s something that no one has been able to do before.”

The system is described in a presented Nov. 30 at the Association for Computing Machinery’s .

To 3-D print objects that can communicate with commercial WiFi receivers, the team employed that allow devices to exchange information. In this case, the team replaced some functions normally performed by electrical components with mechanical motion activated by springs, gears, switches and other parts that can be 3-D printed — borrowing from principles that allow battery-free watches to keep time.

Backscatter systems use an antenna to transmit data by reflecting radio signals emitted by a WiFi router or other device. Information embedded in those reflected patterns can be decoded by a WiFi receiver. In this case, the antenna is contained in a 3-D printed object made of conductive printing filament that mixes plastic with copper.

Physical motion — pushing a button, laundry soap flowing out of a bottle, turning a knob, removing a hammer from a weighted tool bench — triggers gears and springs elsewhere in the 3-D printed object that cause a conductive switch to intermittently connect or disconnect with the antenna and change its reflective state.

Information — in the form of 1s and 0s — is encoded by the presence or absence of the tooth on a gear. Energy from a coiled spring drives the gear system, and the width and pattern of gear teeth control how long the backscatter switch makes contact with the antenna, creating patterns of reflected signals that can be decoded by a WiFi receiver.

“As you pour detergent out of a Tide bottle, for instance, the speed at which the gears are turning tells you how much soap is flowing out. The interaction between the 3-D printed switch and antenna wirelessly transmits that data,” said senior author , an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “Then the receiver can track how much detergent you have left and when it dips below a certain amount, it can automatically send a message to your Amazon app to order more.”

The team from the 3-D printed several different tools that were able to sense and send information successfully to other connected devices: a wind meter, a water flow meter and a scale. They also printed a flow meter that was used to track and order laundry soap, and a test tube holder that could be used for either managing inventory or measuring the amount of liquid in each test tube.

They also 3-D printed WiFi input widgets such as buttons, knobs and sliders that can be customized to communicate with other smart devices in the home and enable a rich ecosystem of “talking objects” that can seamlessly sense and interact with their surroundings.

Using a different type of 3-D printing filament that combines plastic with iron, the team also leveraged magnetic properties to invisibly encode static information in 3-D printed objects — which could range from barcode identification for inventory purposes or information about the object that tells a robot how to interact with it.

“It looks like a regular 3-D printed object but there’s invisible information inside that can be read with your smartphone,” said Allen School doctoral student and co-lead author .

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and Google.

For more information, contact printedwifi@cs.washington.edu.

The UW team developed , a conversational agent designed to provide engaging and informative conversation and to transform how people interact with everyday devices in their homes. The team from the UW Department of Electrical Engineering and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering took home the $500,000 first prize, which will be shared among the students.

Their challenge was to produce a socialbot — an AI agent capable of coherent conversation — that could converse about popular topics and current events for a goal of 20 minutes. Teams built their socialbots using the Alexa Skills Kit and received continuous, real-world feedback from millions of Amazon customers who interacted with teams anonymously through Alexa.

Amazon from three worldwide finalists on Tuesday at the conference in Las Vegas.

“Our philosophy in developing Sounding Board was to bring a variety of relevant content into a natural conversation,” said team leader and electrical engineering doctoral student .  “Ultimately, we hope Sounding Board can become a conversational gateway to online information that users enjoy talking with.”

The Sounding Board socialbot earned an average score of 3.17 on a 5-point scale from a panel of independent judges and achieved an average conversation duration of 10:22.

The runner up team from Czech Technical University in Prague, which attained an average score of 2.72 and had an average conversation duration of 3:55, received a $100,000 prize. The third-place team from in Edinburgh, Scotland, received a $50,000 prize for an average score of 2.36 and an average conversation duration of 4:01.

The UW Sounding Board team combines expertise in natural language processing, speech technology and human-AI collaboration from additional team members EE doctoral student and Allen School doctoral students Elizabeth Clark, , and . EE professor is the lead faculty advisor for the team, working in collaboration with professors and of the Allen School’s Natural Language Processing research group.

“The students started from scratch, with no experience building a dialog system or working with Alexa skills, but together they brought a breadth of perspectives on language processing and a passion for understanding both the technical and human factors challenges of conversational AI,” Ostendorf said.

The Sounding Board design is both user- and content-driven. The system aims to understand user comments in multiple dimensions, from directives to sentiment and personality, in order to best serve user interests. At the same time, the system relies on having interesting and timely things to talk about. It actively harvests online content and leverages a knowledge graph to provide connections between related topics that can be used to steer the conversation.

“Sounding Board is unique in its ability to understand what type of person the user is, and is able to adjust parts of the conversation based on who it thinks the user is,” said the Allen School’s Sap.

The UW team relied on the collaborative environment at the university, both for getting feedback on technical ideas and for user testing. Faculty and students from across the UW-NLP community — in computer science, electrical engineering and linguistics — provided input on the many different versions of Sounding Board as it evolved.  In addition, a key resource in system development was access to real Alexa users nationwide. “It is impossible to anticipate all the types of reactions and questions people will have, even the different ways that a simple yes-or-no question can be answered. Learning from actual user data is critical,” Ostendorf said.

More than 100 teams from universities in 22 countries applied to be part of the inaugural competition. The finalists were selected from among 12 semifinalists whose socialbots were evaluated based on customer ratings of their interactions during hundreds of thousands of conversations last summer.

The three finalists continued to improve their socialbots by leveraging customer interactions through Nov. 7, and Amazon selected the winner based on assessments of a panel of judges listening to conversations with three interactors.

Amazon will publish technical papers from all participating teams in the Alexa Prize Proceedings as a way of sharing their work with the broader research community.

“We envision that conversational AI will be integral at the interface between humans and machines, and the Alexa Prize makes an important step toward that vision,” said Choi. “It has been an exciting journey to build Sounding Board, and we look forward to working on crucial research challenges that we have identified along the way.”

, professor of industrial and systems engineering, was honored for “leadership in virtual and augmented reality” and , professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, was recognized for “contributions to robotic manipulation and human-robot interaction.”

The IEEE Fellow distinction is reserved for select members who exhibit an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest, which include aerospace systems, biomedical engineering, computing, consumer electronics, energy, telecommunications and more. Nominated by peers and conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors, fellowship is considered both a prestigious honor and a noteworthy career achievement within the technical community. The total number selected in any one year does not exceed one-tenth of 1 percent of the Institute’s total voting membership.

Furness is a pioneer in human interface technology and grandfather of virtual reality. In addition to his ISE professorship, he holds adjunct professorships in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and human-centered design and engineering. He is the founder of the  (HIT Lab) at UW and sister HIT Labs at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the University of Tasmania, in Australia. He is also the founder of the Virtual World Society, which is dedicated to bringing together hearts and minds through virtual reality to solve pervasive problems in the world.

Prior to joining the faculty at the UW in 1989, Furness served a combined 23 years as a U.S. Air Force officer and civilian scientist developing advanced cockpits and virtual interfaces for the Department of Defense. Furness lectures and speaks widely on virtual reality innovations and holds 21 patents in advanced sensor, display and interface technologies.

�������Ծ����������� this past fall as the Boeing Endowed Professor from the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a member of the Robotics Institute and founding director of the Personal Robotics Lab. He has made pioneering contributions to two fundamental areas of robotics, robotic manipulation and human-robot interaction (HRI), with the aim of enabling robots to perform complex tasks with and around people. A full-stack roboticist, Srinivasa has built several end-to-end systems that integrate perception, planning and control in the real world.

�������Ծ���������’s�� in manipulation has enabled robots to push, pull and sweep objects under conditions of clutter and uncertainty through non-prehensile, physics-based interactions. He also is credited with having created the field of algorithmic HRI through his efforts to build the formal mathematical foundations of human-robot interaction. To that end, Srinivasa and his team built HERB, the Home Exploring Robot Butler, to serve as a realistic testbed for new algorithms enabling human-robot collaboration. In addition to his role in the lab, HERB has become an ambassador of sorts for Srinivasa and his team — and for the field of robotics, generally.

In its annual list, the magazine profiles “a group of upstarts, judged by our sources and judges, to be among the most promising individuals working across the broad field of anything even tangentially ‘energy’ related.”

The UW awardees are , 28, a doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering, and , 26, a doctoral student in chemical engineering.

was cited by Forbes for her work “to design marine renewable energy devices with safer spinning blades that are proven not to harm marine mammals.”

Grear’s research focuses on how marine wildlife such as killer whales in Puget Sound may be impacted by tidal energy turbines, a promising resource to help combat climate change. She characterizes the material properties of marine mammal skin and blubber with the same methods used to study the material properties of steel and concrete. She uses this data to create a finite element analysis of a turbine blade striking an animal — with the ultimate goal of minimizing injury. You can watch more about her work in this video:

, co-founder of , was recognized for his work “to commercialize battery management breakthroughs to enable faster charging, finer control over degradation and longer lifetimes.”

His research through the UW focuses on inventing new ways to diagnose the state of health in batteries, a critical and expensive asset in the emerging low-carbon energy economy. Battery Informatics is licensing UW intellectual property to extract value from battery assets over the whole battery lifecycle. The company has raised federal and Washington State funding totaling $0.5 million and has been a recipient of matching funds from the WA Clean Energy Fund.

But the two princesses actually exert very different levels of power and control over their own destinies, according to from ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý computer scientists.

The team used machine-learning-based tools to analyze the language in nearly 800 movie scripts, quantifying how much power and agency those scripts give to individual characters. In their study, recently presented in Denmark at the , the researchers found subtle but widespread gender bias in the way male and female characters are portrayed.

“’Frozen’ is an interesting example because Elsa really does make her own decisions and is able to drive her own destiny forward, while Anna consistently fails in trying to rescue her sister and often needs the help of a man,” said lead author and Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering doctoral student , whose team also applied the tool to Wikipedia plot summaries of several classic Disney princess movies.

“Anna is actually portrayed with the same low levels of power as Cinderella, which is a movie that came out more than 60 years ago. That’s a pretty sad finding,” Sap said.

The team also created a searchable showing the subtle gender biases in hundreds of Hollywood movie scripts, which range from late 80s cult classics like “Heathers” to romantic comedies like “500 Days of Summer” to war films like “Apocalypse Now.”

In their analysis, the researchers found that women were consistently portrayed in ways that reinforce gender stereotypes, such as in more submissive positions and with less agency than men.  For example, male characters spoke more in imperative sentences (“Bring me my horse”) while female characters tended to hedge their statements (“Maybe I am wrong”). However, the bias is not just in the words these characters speak, but also in the way they are portrayed through narratives.

To study the nuanced biases in narratives, the UW researchers expanded prior work presented in 2016 on “” that give insights into how different verbs can empower or weaken different characters through their connotative meanings.  The study evaluated the power and agency implicit in 2,000 commonly used verbs, where the connotative meanings were obtained from Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing experiments.

The power dimension denotes whether a character has authority over another character, while the agency dimension denotes whether a character has control over his or her own life or storyline. For each verb, turkers were asked to rank the implied level of power differentials and agency on a scale of 1 to 3.

“For example, if a female character ‘i������ǰ����’ her husband, that implies the husband has a stance where he can say no. If she ‘i�Բ��ٰ��ܳ��ٲ�’ her husband, that implies she has more power,” said co-author , an Allen School doctoral student. “What we found was that men systematically have more power and agency in the film script universe.”

Verbs that imply low power or agency include words like ask, experience, happen, wait, relax, need or apologize. Verbs that confer high power or agency include words like finish, prepare, betray, construct, destroy, assign or compose.

Using the movie scripts, the researchers automatically identified genders of 21,000 characters based on names and descriptions. Using natural language processing tools, which employ machine learning, they looked at which characters appeared as a verb’s subject and object. They then computed how much agency and power were ascribed to these characters, using their crowdsourced connotation frames. The researchers also accounted for the fact that male actors spent more time on screen than female actors and also spoke more, accounting for 71.8 percent of the words spoken across all movies.

The team calculated separate power and agency scores for male and female characters in each movie. They also created scores based on words that the characters spoke in dialogue and on words that were used in narration or stage direction to describe those characters — exposing subtle differences and biases.

In 2010’s “Black Swan,” a movie centered around a female lead — a perfectionist ballerina who slowly loses grip on reality — the movie’s dialogue gives more agency to female characters. But the language used to describe the characters in stage direction and narration gave male characters more power and agency in that film.

In the 2007 movie “Juno,” about an offbeat young woman who unexpectedly gets pregnant, male characters’ scene descriptions and narratives also consistently score higher in power and agency, though the two genders come closer in their dialogue.

The UW team’s tool yields a much more nuanced analysis of gender bias in fictional works than the , which only evaluates whether at least two female characters have a conversation about something other than a man.

The tendency for male characters to score higher on both power and agency dimensions held true throughout all genres: comedy, drama, horror, sci-fi, thrillers. Interestingly, the team found the same gender bias even for movies with female casting directors or script writers.

“We controlled for this. Even when women play a significant role in shaping a film, implicit gender biases are still there in the script,” said co-author and Allen School doctoral student .

Next steps for the team include broadening the tool to not only identify gender bias in texts but also to correct for it by offering rephrasing suggestions or ways to make language more equal across characters of different genders. The methodology isn’t limited to movies, but could be applied to books, plays or any other texts.

“We developed this tool to help people understand how they may be perpetuating these subtle but prevalent biases that are deeply integrated in our language,” said senior author , an associate professor in the Allen School. “We believe it will help to have this diagnostic tool that can tell writers how much power they are implicitly giving to women versus men.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Google and Facebook. The other co-author is former UW Allen School undergraduate .

For more information, contact the research team at debiasing-ai@cs.washington.edu.

Grant numbers: NSF: IIS – 1524371, NSF: IIS – 1714566, NSF: DGE – 1256082

A new type of smart fabric developed at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý could pave the way for jackets that store invisible passcodes and open the door to your apartment or office.

The UW computer scientists have that can store data — from security codes to identification tags — without needing any on-board electronics or sensors.

As described in a presented Oct. 25 at the (UIST 2017), they leveraged previously unexplored magnetic properties of off-the-shelf conductive thread. The data can be read using an instrument embedded in existing smartphones to enable navigation apps.

“This is a completely electronic-free design, which means you can iron the smart fabric or put it in the washer and dryer,” said senior author , associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “You can think of the fabric as a hard disk — you’re actually doing this data storage on the clothes you’re wearing.”

Most people today combine conductive thread — embroidery thread that can carry an electrical current — with other types of electronics to that light up or communicate.

But the UW researchers realized that this off-the-shelf conductive thread also has magnetic properties that can be manipulated to store either digital data or visual information like letters or numbers. This data can be read by a , an inexpensive instrument that measures the direction and strength of magnetic fields and is embedded in most smartphones.

“We are using something that already exists on a smartphone and uses almost no power, so the cost of reading this type of data is negligible,” said Gollakota.

In one example, they stored the passcode to an electronic door lock on a patch of conductive fabric sewn to a shirt cuff. They unlocked the door by waving the cuff in front of an array of magnetometers.

The UW researchers also created fashion accessories like a tie, belt, necklace and wristband and decoded the data by swiping a smartphone across them.

They used conventional sewing machines to embroider fabric with off-the-shelf conductive thread, whose magnetic poles start out in a random order. By rubbing a magnet against the fabric, the researchers were able to physically align the poles in either a positive or negative direction, which can correspond to the 1s and 0s in digital data.

Like hotel card keys, the strength of the magnetic signal weakens by about 30 percent over the course of a week, though the fabric can be re-magnetized and re-programmed multiple times. In other stress tests, the fabric patch retained its data even after machine washing, drying and ironing at temperatures of up to 320 degrees Fahrenheit.

This is in contrast to many smart garments today that still require on-board electronics or sensors to work. That can be problematic if you get caught in the rain or forget to detach those electronics before throwing them in the washing machine — a potential barrier to widespread adoption of other wearable technology designs.

The team also demonstrated that the magnetized fabric could be used to interact with a smartphone while it is in one’s pocket. Researchers developed a glove with conductive fabric sewn into its fingertips, which was used to gesture at the smartphone. Each gesture yields a different magnetic signal that can invoke specific actions like pausing or playing music.

“With this system, we can easily interact with smart devices without having to constantly take it out of our pockets,” said lead author , an Allen School doctoral student.

In the team’s tests, the phone was able to recognize six gestures — left flick, right flick, upward swipe, downward swipe, click and back click — with 90 percent accuracy.

Future work is focused on developing custom textiles that generate stronger magnetic fields and are capable of storing a higher density of data.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Google.

For more information, contact the research team at smartfabrics@cs.washington.edu.

Grant numbers: NSF: CNS – 1420654, CNS – 1407583, CNS – 1452494