Computer Science and Engineering

News | December 10, 2019

‘Carpentry Compiler’ turns 3D models into instructions on how to build them

Even to an experienced carpenter, it may not be obvious what the best way is to build a structure they’ve designed. A new digital tool, Carpentry Compiler, provides a way forward, converting the shapes of the structure to a step-by-step guide on how to produce them. It could help your next carpentry project get off the…

News | July 24, 2015

1st International Workshop on Smart Cities & Urban Analytics (UrbanGIS)

Now Taking Submissions! CALL FOR PAPERS: The 1st International Workshop on Smart Cities and Urban Analytics (UrbanGIS) 2015 in conjunction with ACM SIGSPATIAL 2015 Seattle, WA, USA – November 3, 2015 http://engineering.nyu.edu/urbangis2015/ IMPORTANT DATES: Paper Submission: September 1, 2015 (midnight PT) Notification of Acceptance: September 19, 2015 Workshop date: November 3, 2015 Paper Submission Site:…

News | October 18, 2018

4 fresh ideas to ease Seattle’s coming traffic nightmare

Seattle is doomed — at least in terms of its traffic for at least the next three years. Already, morning and evening gridlock seems to start earlier and end later. I-5 through downtown is nearly always jammed up. Overloaded buses wait through multiple light cycles attempting to inch through intersections at rush hour. And it’s…

News | November 18, 2020

Accessible pedestrian routing tools expand to three Washington cities

Whether navigating urban spaces with different abilities, or simply seeking a walking or biking path that prioritizes specifications other than the quickest route and shortest distance, having access to standardized, comprehensive data about pedestrian pathways offers wide-ranging benefits. However, this information is often difficult to find due to local variations in data collection, inconsistencies and…

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Alan Borning

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Anat Caspi

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Anna Karlin

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Batya Friedman

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Behçet Açikmeşe

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Bill Howe

News | January 23, 2024

Building community resilience: A $2 million NSF grant will transform disaster response

Amy Sprague January 16, 2024 “Our advantage of being an interdisciplinary project at the University of Washington is that we are drawing from an excellent corps of researchers with complementary expertise at a University whose mission includes working for the greater good across the state of Washington and has excellent ties into our communities.” Professor…

News | September 15, 2022

Can Blockchain Help King County’s Urban Carbon Credits Go Further?

In June, King County made headlines for a huge deal in the fight against climate change: three parcels of land – in King County, Issaquah and Shoreline – got the highest prices ever for carbon credits generated by urban forests. The purchaser is Regen Network Development, a Delaware-based blockchain company that plans to offer the…

News | August 21, 2019

Can Project Sidewalk use crowdsourcing to help Seattleites get around?

Jon Froehlich distinctly remembers the moment when Google first unveiled Street View in 2007. The computer scientist spent hours virtually wandering through distant city streets and immersing himself in parts of the world he had yet to visit in real life. Then Froehlich had a thought: “What else could we use this for?” Within a decade, he’d developed…

Center & Lab

Computing for Development (C4D)

Research in information and communication technologies for development (ICTD) is a relatively new and important area in computing research. When deploying systems in highly resource-constrained environment (unsophisticated users, lack of reliable power, expensive or non-existent data connectivity, etc.) they must be designed to be much more robust than when designing for the developed world. This…

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Daniel Kirschen

News | July 7, 2016

Data Science for Social Good 2016

This summer we are thrilled to be supporting the eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program. Modeled after similar programs at the University of Chicago and Georgia Tech, with elements from eScience’s own Data Science Incubator, sixteen DSSG Student Fellows have been working with academic researchers, data scientists, and public stakeholder groups on…

News | May 14, 2019

Delivery bots could make cities more accessible for everyone

Last week, Washington’s governor Jay Inslee signed a bill allowing robots to roll through the state, delivering goods and food orders. Washington joins seven other states that have legalized bot deliveries, and other cities and college campuses have allowed companies to pilot their services. Perhaps new tech could be what spurs more accessible city design, creating more navigable public spaces…

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Ed Lazowska

News | March 8, 2017

Honoring Women Collaborators at Urban@UW

In honor of International Women’s Day, we are highlighting just some of UW’s brilliant female professors, scholars, and and change-makers with whom Urban@UW is proud to collaborate. Click on their names to explore their work.   Leadership: Thaisa Way, Executive Director, Urban@UW; Department of Landscape Architecture Executive Committee: Margaret O’Mara, Department of History Susan P….

News | August 29, 2019

How tech keeps Seattle’s transit system running — and why more innovation could be coming

Amid a sea of green rectangles on a computer monitor, one had turned red. A RapidRide bus — the red rectangle — was traveling a bit too rapidly. It was almost 11 a.m. on Friday, August 23 in the King County Metro Transit Control Center (TCC). Coordinators sat in front of large monitors, tracking the…

News | March 13, 2017

In the smart cities of the future, posters, signs and clothing may talk back

New research from University of Washington has shown for the first time that ambient FM radio signals can be used as a signal source for wireless communication. The technology, developed by engineers in the Networks & Mobile Systems Lab and Sensor Systems Lab, creates backscatter transmissions that can be decoded on any FM receiver, including…

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Jon E. Froehlich

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Joshua Smith

News | February 1, 2024

New nonpartisan AI nonprofit TrueMedia, led by Oren Etzioni, is making a political deepfake detector

Published in GeekWire By Todd Bishop A new nonprofit, nonpartisan technology organization called TrueMedia is developing an AI-powered tool to detect deepfake videos, photos, and audio, aiming to combat political disinformation in the leadup to the 2024 elections. Founded and led by Oren Etzioni, University of Washington professor and former CEO of the Allen Institute…

News | February 3, 2017

New route-finding map lets Seattle pedestrians avoid hills, construction, accessibility barriers

Transportation routing services primarily designed for people in cars don’t give pedestrians, parents pushing bulky strollers or people in wheelchairs much information about how to easily navigate a neighborhood using sidewalks. On Wednesday AccessMap – a University of Washington project spearheaded by the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology — launched a new online travel planner…

News | April 16, 2021

Planning the best route with multiple destinations is hard even for supercomputers – a new approach breaks a barrier that’s stood for nearly half a century

Originally written by Nathan Klein, PhD Student in Computer Science at the University of Washington.  Computers are good at answering questions. What’s the shortest route from my house to Area 51? Is 8,675,309 a prime number? How many teaspoons in a tablespoon? For questions like these, they’ve got you covered. There are certain innocent-sounding questions,…

News | August 12, 2021

Project aims to better use of municipal open data, boost equity

In this month’s installment of the Innovation of the Month series, we highlight EquiTensors, a project that is reflecting on and raising awareness of applications, opportunities and potential misuses of data science and AI applied to mobility and transportation, specifically as it refers to race, equity and diversity. MetroLab’s Josh Schacht spoke with the leader of the…

News | April 25, 2019

Project Sidewalk helps users map accessibility around Seattle, other cities

About 3.6 million adults in the United States use a wheelchair to get around, according to census data. But unless you’re one of those people, you might not know how hard it is to get around your city. Now people can help map out accessibility here in Seattle. University of Washington researchers have led the development…

News | October 20, 2022

Q&A: UnlockedMaps provides real-time accessibility information for urban rail transit in six metro areas

While many people use Google Maps and other navigation tools to plan their rail transit trips across a city, these apps and websites often lack important information about how accessible a specific station is. That’s a problem for people who use the elevators, including those with mobility disabilities, pregnant people and commuters with heavy equipment…

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Seema Clifasefi

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Shayan Oveis Gharan

News | January 25, 2018

Shocker: It’s mostly men moving to Seattle for tech jobs

For every four men who moved to Seattle for a tech job in the last decade, only one woman did, too, according to a recent analysis that looked at the trend of tech transplants nationwide.To industry experts and academics, the findings from the careers website Paysa.com came as no surprise. The data is more of…

News | February 1, 2024

Should social media pay for addicting kids? Seattle schools lawsuit gains steam

Reported by KUOW Written by Sami West A year into Seattle Public Schools’ lawsuit against social media companies, the case is gaining traction. More than 50 school districts in Washington state — and dozens more across the country — have joined Seattle’s lawsuit. Seattle became the first district to sue social media platforms last January,…

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Shyam Gollakota

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Steve Tanimoto

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Tadayoshi Kohno

News | April 7, 2021

Taskar Center researchers offer a roadmap for more robust modeling of pedestrian mobility on a city-wide scale

Many approaches to measuring and supporting city-wide mobility lack the level of detail required to truly understand how pedestrians navigate the urban landscape, not to mention the quality of their journey. Transit apps can direct someone to the nearest bus stop, but they may not account for obstacles or terrain on the way to their…

News | June 26, 2015

Urban Data Science @ UW presented by Bill Howe

Presented at June 1st Urban@UW Launch Meeting

News | June 17, 2015

UW team “Hackcessible” wins Hack The Commute Competition

UW team wins City of Seattle sponsored Hack the Commute with a web-based map that helps those Hackcessible Access Map (in beta) >

News | October 4, 2022

WA Faces an Epidemic of Inaccessible Sidewalks

Across Washington lies a glut of impassable sidewalks for people with disabilities. At thousands of intersections, sidewalks end without a ramp to the street. Where there are ramps, a Seattle Times review of more than 30 cities’ and counties’ assessments of their roads and sidewalks found no jurisdiction where even 50% comply with the Americans with…

News | May 12, 2020

What do the Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber layoffs mean for Seattle engineering outposts?

Silicon Valley engineering outposts have added an interesting dynamic to Seattle’s burgeoning tech community over the past 15 years. More than 125 of these centers now operate from Bellevue to Belltown, representing thousands of tech workers at companies such as Apple, eBay, HBO, Oracle and Sonos, according to GeekWire data. But in the era of COVID-19…

News | February 21, 2018

What would a truly disabled-accessible city look like?

To David Meere, a visually impaired man from Melbourne, among the various obstacles to life in cities is another that is less frequently discussed: fear. “The fear of not being able to navigate busy, cluttered and visually oriented environments is a major barrier to participation in normal life,” says Meere, 52, “be that going to…