91̽»¨researchers have helped develop a new kind of microscope to visualize cells in three dimensions, an advance that could bring great progress in the field of early cancer detection. The technique could also bridge a widening gap between cutting-edge imaging techniques used in research and clinical practices, researchers said.

Eric Seibel, a 91̽»¨mechanical engineering associate professor, and his colleagues have worked in collaboration with VisionGate, Inc., a privately held company in Gig Harbor, Wash., that holds the patents on the technology. The machine works by rotating the cell under the microscope lens and taking hundreds of pictures per rotation, and then digitally combining them to form a single 3-D image.

The 3-D visualizations could lead to big advances in early cancer detection, since clinicians today identify cancerous cells by using 2-D pictures to assess the cells’ shape and size.

“It’s a lot easier to spot a misshapen cell if you can see it from all sides,” Seibel said. “A 2-D representation of a 3-D object is never perfectly accurate — imagine trying to get an exact picture of the moon, seeing only one side.”

The new microscope, known by the trademarked name Cell-CT, is so named because it works similarly to a CT-scan — though on a very small scale, and using visible light instead of X-rays. In a CT-scan, the patient is immobile while the X-ray machine rotates. In the Cell-CT microscope, each cell is embedded in a special gel inside a glass tube that rotates in front of a fixed camera that takes many pictures per rotation. The gel has similar optical properties to the tube’s so that no light reflects off the glass. In both processes, the end result is that hundreds of pictures are assembled to form a 3-D image that can be viewed and rotated on a computer screen.

The new 3-D microscope also helps to bring imaging techniques from the lab to the doctor’s office. Although great advances have been made in microscope technology through the years, clinicians have been using essentially the same technique for cancer diagnoses for the last 300 years, Seibel said. Pathologists today still use a cell stain invented in the 1700s to examine sections of suspected cancers. Pathologists do not use any of the newer fluorescent molecular dyes that produce the precise, detailed cellular portraits found in biology journals.

“Scientists have been using fluorescent dyes in research for decades, but these techniques have not yet broken into everyday clinical diagnoses,” Seibel said. “There’s a big gap between the research and clinical worlds when it comes to cancer, and it’s getting wider. We’re trying to bridge that gap.”

Part of the reason for this gap, Seibel said, is that there is no way to accurately match an image taken using the fluorescent dyes with an image taken using the traditional stains that currently form the basis for cancer diagnoses, and for which diagnostic standards exist. The new 3-D microscope will allow that matchup — Seibel and his colleagues have shown simultaneous fluorescent and traditional staining of the same cells. The new device is the first 3-D microscope that can use both traditional and fluorescent stains, Seibel said.

“Now that we have a way to compare these stains, we hope this will provide a way to get some of those sophisticated research techniques into clinical use,” Seibel said.

The new microscope is also more precise than other 3-D machines currently available. All other microscopes producing 3-D images have poor resolution in the up-down direction, the direction between the sample and the microscope’s lens, Seibel said.

Qin Miao, a 91̽»¨bioengineering doctoral student, used a tiny plastic particle of known dimensions to show the microscope’s resolution. He found that the 91̽»¨group’s machine has three times better accuracy in that up-down direction than standard microscopes used in cancer detection. Miao presented the group’s findings for the microscope’s performance recently at the SPIE Medical Imaging conference in Orlando, Fla.

“This means we can do quantitative analysis of cells,” Miao said. “This kind of undistorted image is difficult to achieve using other technology.”

In another recent publication, Seibel and his colleagues describe a study comparing cancer detection using traditional methods with their 3-D microscope. Pathologists using 3-D technology detected cancer with one-third the error rate compared to those using the traditional microscope. The authors also describe using their microscope to discover a “pre-cancer” cell, a cell that was on the verge of turning cancerous.

“This is where we can make an impact in medicine — looking for these earliest changes,” Seibel said.

Other authors of the paper are J. Richard Rahn, Ryland Bryant, Christy Lancaster, Anna Tourovskaia, Dr. Thomas Neumann and Alan Nelson, all of VisionGate.

Funding was provided by VisionGate and the Washington Technology Center.

Researchers at the 91̽»¨have developed a prototype malaria test printed on a disposable Mylar card that could easily slip into your wallet and still work when you took it out, even months later.

Paul Yager, 91̽»¨bioengineering professor, and colleagues described the prototype cards in the December issue of the journal Lab on a Chip. These cards are a critical step in a long-term project funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative to develop affordable, easy-to-use diagnostic tools for the developing world.

“A pivotal issue in having this technology work is making these tests storable for long periods of time at ambient temperatures,” Yager said. “Normally people work with wet reagents. We’re saying we can dry the reagents down in order to store them without refrigeration. It’s the astronaut-food approach.”

The malaria cards contain reagents that would normally require refrigeration, but the researchers figured out a way to stabilize them in dry form by mixing them with sugar. Results showed that malaria antibodies dried in sugar matrices retained 80 percent to 96 percent of their activity after 60 days of storage at elevated temperatures.

The goal of the long-term project is to develop a system with which a clinician can spot a drop of a patient’s blood onto a card and feed it into an instrument that gives a yes/no answer for a panel of infectious diseases in 20 minutes or less. Tests with the prototype malaria card reached a result in less than nine minutes using an immunoassay, or antibody-based, approach.

Developing countries, which are most in need of such technology, face unique challenges when it comes to medical care.

“Something as seemingly simple as a blood test for a common disease gets more complicated when money and resources are lacking,” said Dean Stevens, 91̽»¨bioengineering doctoral student and first author on the study.

Clinicians trying to diagnose patients in rural, poor communities in the developing world face hurdles such as unsanitary conditions, lack of refrigeration for the many common lab tests using ingredients that must be kept cold, unreliable power and general lack of resources, Stevens said. In the developing world, healthcare budgets can be as low as $10 per person per year, compared to an average of $4,000 in the U.S. Tests for diseases also need to be fast and easy to use, because health-care workers might only have one visit to diagnose and treat a patient, and thus can’t wait days for lab results.

While treatments in poor, rural communities come with their own difficulties, diagnosis is the key to getting good medical care, Stevens said.

“Your treatment is really only as good as your diagnosis,” he said.

The malaria-test card is being developed as part of an automated diagnostic system informally called the DxBox, the Dx being medical shorthand for diagnosis. The DxBox team is led by Yager and includes 91̽»¨bioengineering professor Patrick Stayton; collaborators at PATH, a Seattle-based nonprofit focused on global health; Micronics Inc. of Redmond, Wash.; and Nanogen Inc. of San Diego.

The DxBox consists of a portable, fully automatic reader being developed by Micronics that will process the card-based disposable tests. The 91̽»¨prototype cards look for the presence of malarial proteins, but the team is also working on other kinds of protein tests as well as a second kind of test for each disease that looks for the pathogen’s DNA or RNA.

The UW’s malaria cards use features of common lab tests and take into account portability, automation and easy storage. The cards rely on microfluidics, the manipulation of liquids at very small scales. Thin channels crisscross the Mylar sheets, and syringes are used to pump different liquids for the tests through the channels. “It’s like plumbing, only the pipes are less than a millimeter wide,” Yager said.

Microfluidics not only save space and resources, but working with liquids on such a small scale allows the researchers to do more. “It’s not just about making big things small,” Yager said. “It’s also about doing things that are only possible at that very small scale.” The diagnostic tests in the DxBox system run much faster than conventional tests in part because the liquids involved behave differently, a key factor for clinicians who have limited time to spend with their patients.

Currently, the researchers look for colored spots on the card that indicate the presence of malaria proteins. The hue of the color indicates the intensity of the disease. The DxBox can read these small spots automatically, reducing the chance for human error.

While the prototype developed by the 91̽»¨researchers only tests for malaria, Yager and his collaborators are working towards cards that also will test for five other diseases that, like malaria, cause high-fever symptoms: dengue, influenza, Rickettsial diseases, typhoid and measles. The “fever panel” of six diseases is merely a starting point, Yager said. The 91̽»¨technology could be adapted to include other diseases in the future.

Other authors on the paper are Camille Petri, undergraduate at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Mass.; Jennifer Osborn, 91̽»¨bioengineering doctoral student; Paolo Spicar-Mihalic, 91̽»¨chemistry doctoral student; and Katherine McKenzie, 91̽»¨bioengineering doctoral student.

Nathan Kutz, 91̽»¨applied mathematics professor, felt particularly daunted when he realized that more than 200 students had enrolled in his fall quarter course, Beginning Scientific Computing. It would take at least five teaching assistants just to wade through the grading alone, he said.

So Kutz created a program to do the grading for him, freeing his time and his TAs’ time for actual teaching. The application, Scorelator, is now available for beta testing in 91̽»¨classes with programming-based homework.

“There’s been a huge increase in computationally based courses in the last five to 10 years, both at 91̽»¨and at other universities and community colleges,” Kutz said. Programming classes used to be concentrated in computer science departments, Kutz said. But now, many math and science departments at 91̽»¨and other institutions offer basic computational courses with programming-based assignments.

And someone has to grade those assignments, no small feat when each assignment could contain 100 or more lines of code. Now multiply that by five assignments and 200 students, and add in large variations in how each student will code a given problem — that’s a lot of time spent grading. Kutz has been using Scorelator in his beginning computing class this fall, and was pleased to find how much extra time he and his three TAs now have to actually teach and help students, he said.

Scorelator grades assignments nearly instantly. Students upload their program files, and Scorelator returns their current score and identifies those portions of the assignment that need correcting. Instructors can set the number of times students are allowed to revise their assignments before the submission is final. The application will then show students their grades and the grade distribution of the class. It could also be used as a supplementary grader, or just a checker if instructors prefer to do their own grading, Kutz said.

“It’s extremely simple to use,” Kutz said. “The student sees two buttons: ‘Upload file’ and ‘View grade.'” Students and instructors will log on to .

Right now, Scorelator can grade codes written in MATLAB, Mathematica, Maple and Python languages. The majority of computing courses across engineering, math and physical sciences use these languages, Kutz said, but they may expand Scorelator in the future to accommodate other languages as well.

Kutz has been using the program for the past two years in his applied mathematics courses, and has been very happy with the results, he said. He is offering Scorelator for free use at 91̽»¨and a few other universities for the next term in exchange for the teachers and students filling out satisfaction surveys at the end of the course. In the next year or two, he hopes to make it commercially available to all universities and colleges.

“There’s really nothing like Scorelator out there yet,” Kutz said. “This could be quite transformative.”

Faculty or instructors interested in beta testing Scorelator in one of their classes can attend an information session and demo from 2 to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 16, in 415L Guggenheim, or email Kutz at kutz@amath.washington.edu.

The 91̽»¨’s DO-IT Scholars program is now accepting applications from Washington state high school sophomores and juniors with disabilities who are interested in preparing for college and challenging careers.

DO-IT, which stands for Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology, introduces high school students with disabilities to technology, peer support and work-based learning in an effort to help them be successful in a college environment. Participants are loaned laptop computers, software and adaptive technology for long-term use in their homes and at school or work. This technology enables them to network online with peers, DO-IT staff and DO-IT mentors — many of whom are working professionals with disabilities.

The students also attend 91̽»¨summer study sessions. They learn about college selection, career options, technology and self-advocacy. Living in dormitories and navigating the campus helps them get an early taste of college life.

“Some young people with disabilities have expectations that are lower than they need to be,” said Sheryl Burgstahler, director of accessible technologies in 91̽»¨Technology Services and founder and director of DO-IT. “We try to change that. Our focus is on the use of empowering technology and teaching students the skills they need to succeed in challenging careers.”

Approximately 20 students are selected each year. For this unique program, DO-IT is seeking students who:

• Are sophomores or juniors in high school.

• Have an aptitude and interest in attending college.

• Have a significant disability such as a mobility impairment, a learning disability, sensory impairment, or health impairment.

• Are interested in interactions with other students with disabilities.

Students are encouraged to apply by Jan. 10, 2009. Applications will be accepted after that time only until all openings are filled. For more information or to request information or application materials, contact the DO-IT office at (206) 685-3648 (V/TTY), or download forms at .

###

For more information, contact the DO-IT office at (206) 685-3648, or Scott Bellman, DO-IT project coordinator, at swb3@u.washington.edu.

Planning on gobbling a few extra treats this holiday season? Soon, your cell phone may be able to help you maintain your exercise routine and keep the pounds off over winter months, without your having to lift a finger to keep track.

Researchers at the 91̽»¨and Intel have created two new cell phone applications, dubbed and , to automatically track workouts and green transportation. The programs display motivational pictures on the phone’s background screen that change the more the user works out or uses eco-friendly means of transportation.

The applications are designed to change people’s behavior for the better, said Sunny Consolvo, a recently graduated 91̽»¨Information School doctoral student and one of UbiFit’s creators. In a three-month field experiment, people using UbiFit with the background display kept up their workout routines over the winter holidays, a period when people typically slack off on exercise, while people without the display let their regimen slide.

UbiFit and UbiGreen are part of a larger project at the 91̽»¨to use mobile computing in everyday activities and long-term goals such as fitness, said project leader James Landay, 91̽»¨computer science and engineering associate professor. “You can’t get fit in a short period of time in one place,” he said. “It happens long-term, in many different places and ways.”

Current versions of UbiFit and UbiGreen use an external sensing device (the Intel Mobile Sensing Platform) clipped to the user’s waist. The device includes an accelerometer to sense the user’s movement. The programs could run on phones with built-in accelerometers, such as the iPhone and the new Android G1, with no need for external equipment, Landay said. UbiGreen also relies on changing cell phone tower signals to determine whether a person is taking a trip.

The sensing device determines what the user is doing based on how it gets jiggled around, Landay said — the localized motion at your waist will be different if you’re walking, jogging or sitting in a car. The sensing device sends signals three times per second via Bluetooth to the cell phone, where the application averages these rapid signals and translates them into, for example, a 20-minute jog or a drive to work.

UbiFit displays an empty lawn at the beginning of the week, and flowers grow as the user works out during the week. Different kinds of workouts yield different colored flowers. Users set weekly workout goals and are rewarded with a butterfly when the goal is met. Users can also enter workout information manually if the sensor made a mistake, they forgot to wear it or they did an activity that the sensor does not detect.

This background display proved motivational, said Consolvo, who is a researcher at Intel Research Seattle. She ran a field study from November 2007 through January 2008, with 28 participants. The results were presented at the UbiComp conference in Seoul in September. In her study, participants using the UbiFit background screen maintained their workout activity through the holiday months, while people using a version of UbiFit without the display let their workouts slide.

“The background display was definitely one of the biggest wins of our study,” Consolvo said.

The design of UbiGreen was inspired by UbiFit, Landay said. The project was presented Nov. 18 at the Behavior, Energy and Climate Change conference in Sacramento, Calif.

UbiGreen automatically logs a trip that involves walking, running or biking using accelerometer data, and uses cell phone tower signals to determine if someone is riding in a vehicle. A quick survey pops up at the end of the trip and the user chooses car, carpool, bus or train. Eventually, the application could be programmed to glean almost all this information just from the accelerometer, Landay said, because the movements of cars, buses and trains are very different from each other.

UbiGreen displays a tree on the cell phone’s background that grows leaves, flowers, then fruit as the user makes green choices. Icons light up when a choice saves money, incorporates exercise or allows the user to multi-task. A green bar and number also display how many pounds of carbon dioxide each trip saves compared to a car ride.

UbiFit and UbiGreen could be released to the public within the next year or two, Landay said, especially as phones with built-in accelerometers become more common.

“The last 30 years of personal computing has been in support of people sitting at their desks,” Landay said, “but the next wave will be these little computers that are with us all the time and have an understanding of our context in the physical world.”

Intel helped fund these projects. Other researchers involved in UbiFit and UbiGreen are Jon Froehlich, 91̽»¨computer science and engineering doctoral student, Pedja Klasjna, doctoral student in UW’s Information School, Jennifer Mankoff, computer science associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Tawanna Dillahunt, Carnegie Mellon University human-computer interaction doctoral student, and Beverly Harrison, researcher at Intel Research Seattle.

Learn more about UbiFit at and UbiGreen at .

Energy experts from the 91̽»¨want to help local businesses cut their utility bills.

The Industrial Assessment Center at 91̽»¨is offering free energy assessments for small and medium local businesses. The center is now in its third year of providing assessments, and in the past two years has made recommendations that could save local companies on average nearly $64,000 a year.

The center is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and is one of 26 similar groups at universities around the country who provide free energy assessments to companies. In 2005, $5 million in funding returned more than $25 million in energy savings through these 26 universities, according to the DOE.

The group is now taking applications for 20 new assessments. To qualify, a business must meet three of the following four requirements:

• Annual revenues lower than $100 million
  
• Annual utility expenses between $100,000 and $3 million
  
• Fewer than 500 employees
  
• No staff dedicated solely to energy efficiency

for a complete list of qualifications.

Students and faculty from the UW’s department of Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering will perform the assessments. These assessments typically take one day, and will not interrupt the company’s normal work flow, said Andrew Martin, business undergraduate student and administrator of the center. After its visit, the team sends an energy savings report to the business. The group’s recommendations are specific to each company, Martin said, but past reports have included suggestions as diverse as revamping production methods to be more energy-efficient to pointing out an error on a utility bill that saved the company thousands of dollars yearly. Other money-saving tips included repairing leaks in air compressor systems and redesigning vacuum systems to use less energy.

for more information on the 91̽»¨’s assessment team.

The Internet contains vast amounts of information, much of it unorganized. But what you see online at any given moment is just a snapshot of the Web as a whole — many pages change rapidly or disappear completely, and the old data gets lost forever.

“Your browser is really just a window into the Web as it exists today,” said Eytan Adar, 91̽»¨computer science and engineering doctoral student. “When you search for something online you’re only getting today’s results.”

Now, Adar and his colleagues at 91̽»¨and Adobe Systems Inc. are grabbing hold of the fleeting Web and storing historical sites that users can easily search using an intuitive application called Zoetrope.

“There are so many ways of finding and manipulating and visualizing data on what we call ‘the today Web’ that it’s kind of amazing that there’s no way to do anything similar to the ephemeral Web,” said Dan Weld, a 91̽»¨computer science and engineering professor who also worked on the application. One service, the Internet Archive, has been capturing old versions of Web sites for years, but the records for the stored sites are inconsistent, Weld said. More importantly, there’s no easy way to search the archive.

With Zoetrope, anyone will be able to use easy keyword searches to find archived Web information or look for patterns over time. The research was presented Oct. 22 by Mira Dontcheva, the system’s co-creator and a recently graduated 91̽»¨computer science and engineering doctoral student now at Adobe Systems Inc., at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Monterey, Calif.

There are a variety of ways people might want to search the historical Internet. For example, to find a history of traffic patterns in the Seattle area, you’d have to sort through lengthy PDF files from the state Department of Transportation, Adar said. With Zoetrope, you could easily view past versions of any traffic Web site, and getting more specific, search for drive-times on Interstate 90 at 6 p.m. on rainy Fridays. Zoetrope can also capture and help analyze information that might otherwise not be available anywhere.

Sports fanatics could use the program to check historical rankings of their favorite teams or players, information that currently may not be easy to find. The application can do more than just simple keyword searches, Adar said. It also can be used to analyze historical data or link information from different sites. For example, Adar wondered whether air pollution conditions could affect the performance of Olympic athletes, so he used Zoetrope to find daily records of pollution levels in Beijing and the number of world records broken in the 2008 Olympics on each day, and looked to see whether fewer records were broken on days with high pollution levels.

“Zoetrope is aimed at the casual researcher,” Weld said. “It’s really for anyone who has a question.”

Zoetrope could eventually be built in to any other Web browser, Adar said. If you just want to browse the past versions of a given site, you drag a slider backwards to see older and older versions. Alternatively, you can draw a box around just one part of the site, if you’re interested in, say, the lead story on CNN.com but don’t care about the rest of the page. These boxes can be filtered by keyword searches or date, so you could look only for lead stories featuring Hollywood actors or stories that ran on Fridays.

Users can view historical data by moving the slider, but more sophisticated analyses are available as well. If you’re looking at something numerical, such as gas prices over time, the program can draw graphs for you. Or you can pull out images from specific times, such as traffic pictures, and compare them all side by side. These kinds of visualizations can be further organized in a timeline or by clustering — Zoetrope can make an image comparing traffic patterns on sunny days versus cloudy days, for example.

Right now, Zoetrope saves a new version of approximately 1,000 different sites every hour, Adar said. It’s been running for four months, so records go no further than that, but Adar hopes to eventually incorporate information from the Internet Archive’s nearly 14 years of records into the program.

He wants to figure out how to scale the program up from 1,000 Web pages to all pages in existence, and has run studies to figure how often each page would need to be captured. For example, a traffic site or stock-watching page would need versions saved much more often than every hour, but there are many unchanging pages that could be archived less frequently. Eventually, Zoetrope could automatically figure out how often to capture a page based on how frequently it changes, Adar said.

“This is really a new way to think about storing information on the Web,” he said.

The researchers hope to release Zoetrope free, and say it may be available as early as next summer.

The National Science Foundation, the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation and the Washington Research Foundation provided funding for Zoetrope. James Fogarty, 91̽»¨computer science and engineering assistant professor, also worked on the application.

Planning on gobbling a few extra treats this holiday season? Soon, your cell phone may be able to help you maintain your exercise routine and keep the pounds off over winter months, without your having to lift a finger to keep track.

Researchers at the 91̽»¨ and Intel have created two new cell phone applications, dubbed UbiFit and UbiGreen, to automatically track workouts and green transportation. The programs display motivational pictures on the phone’s background screen that change the more the user works out or uses eco-friendly means of transportation.

The applications are designed to change people’s behavior for the better, said Sunny Consolvo, a recently graduated 91̽»¨Information School doctoral student and one of UbiFit’s creators. In a three-month field experiment, people using UbiFit with the background display kept up their workout routines over the winter holidays, a period when people typically slack off on exercise, while people without the display let their regimen slide.

UbiFit and UbiGreen are part of a larger project at the 91̽»¨to use mobile computing in everyday activities and long-term goals such as fitness, said project leader James Landay, 91̽»¨computer science and engineering associate professor. “You can’t get fit in a short period of time in one place,” he said. “It happens long-term, in many different places and ways.”

Current versions of UbiFit and UbiGreen use an external sensing device (the Intel Mobile Sensing Platform) clipped to the user’s waist. The device includes an accelerometer to sense the user’s movement. The programs could run on phones with built-in accelerometers, such as the iPhone and the new Android G1, with no need for external equipment, Landay said. UbiGreen also relies on changing cell phone tower signals to determine whether a person is taking a trip.

The sensing device determines what the user is doing based on how it gets jiggled around, Landay said — the localized motion at your waist will be different if you’re walking, jogging, or sitting in a car. The sensing device sends signals three times per second via Bluetooth to the cell phone, where the application averages these rapid signals and translates them into, for example, a 20-minute jog or a drive to work.

UbiFit displays an empty lawn at the beginning of the week, and flowers grow as the user works out during the week. Different kinds of workouts yield different colored flowers. Users set weekly workout goals and are rewarded with a butterfly when the goal is met. Users can also enter workout information manually if the sensor made a mistake, they forgot to wear it, or they did an activity that the sensor does not detect.

This background display proved motivational, said Consolvo, who is a researcher at Intel Research Seattle. She ran a field study from November 2007 through January 2008, with 28 participants. The results were presented at the UbiComp conference in Seoul in September. In her study, participants using the UbiFit background screen maintained their workout activity through the holiday months, while people using a version of UbiFit without the display let their workouts slide.

“The background display was definitely one of the biggest wins of our study,” Consolvo said.

The design of UbiGreen was inspired by UbiFit, Landay said. The project was presented Nov. 18 at the Behavior, Energy and Climate Change conference in Sacramento, Calif.

UbiGreen automatically logs a trip that involves walking, running or biking using accelerometer data, and uses cell phone tower signals to determine if someone is riding in a vehicle. A quick survey pops up at the end of the trip and the user chooses car, carpool, bus or train. Eventually, the application could be programmed to glean almost all this information just from the accelerometer, Landay said, because the movements of cars, buses and trains are very different from each other.

UbiGreen displays a tree on the cell phone’s background that grows leaves, flowers, then fruit as the user makes green choices. Icons light up when a choice saves money, incorporates exercise, or allows the user to multi-task. A green bar and number also display how many pounds of carbon dioxide each trip saves compared to a car ride.

UbiFit and UbiGreen could be released to the public within the next year or two, Landay said, especially as phones with built-in accelerometers become more common.

“The last 30 years of personal computing has been in support of people sitting at their desks,” Landay said, “but the next wave will be these little computers that are with us all the time and have an understanding of our context in the physical world.”

Intel helped fund these projects. Other researchers involved in UbiFit and UbiGreen are Jon Froehlich, 91̽»¨computer science and engineering doctoral student, Pedja Klasjna, doctoral student in UW’s Information School, Jennifer Mankoff, computer science associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Tawanna Dillahunt, Carnegie Mellon University human-computer interaction doctoral student, and Beverly Harrison, researcher at Intel Research Seattle.

###

For more information, contact Landay at 206-685-9139 or landay@cs.washington.edu, or Consolvo at 206-545-2529 or sunny.consolvo@intel.com.

Learn more about UbiFit at and UbiGreen at .

The Internet contains vast amounts of information, much of it unorganized. But what you see online at any given moment is just a snapshot of the Web as a whole — many pages change rapidly or disappear completely, and the old data gets lost forever.

“Your browser is really just a window into the Web as it exists today,” said Eytan Adar, 91̽»¨ computer science and engineering doctoral student. “When you search for something online, you’re only getting today’s results.”

Now, Adar and his colleagues at 91̽»¨and Adobe Systems Inc. are grabbing hold of the fleeting Web and storing historical sites that users can easily search using an intuitive application called Zoetrope.

“There are so many ways of finding and manipulating and visualizing data on what we call ‘the today Web’ that it’s kind of amazing that there’s no way to do anything similar to the ephemeral Web,” said Dan Weld, a 91̽»¨computer science and engineering professor who also worked on the application. One service, the Internet Archive, has been capturing old versions of Web sites for years, but the records for the stored sites are inconsistent, Weld said. More importantly, there’s no easy way to search the archive.

With Zoetrope, anyone will be able to use easy keyword searches to find archived Web information or look for patterns over time. The research was presented Oct. 22 by Mira Dontcheva, the system’s co-creator and a recently graduated 91̽»¨computer science and engineering doctoral student now at Adobe Systems Inc., at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Monterey, Calif.

There are a variety of ways people might want to search the historical Internet. For example, to find a history of traffic patterns in the Seattle area, you’d have to sort through lengthy PDF files from the state Department of Transportation, Adar said. With Zoetrope, you could easily view past versions of any traffic Web site, and getting more specific, search for drive-times on Interstate 90 at 6 p.m. on rainy Fridays.  Zoetrope can also capture and help analyze information that might otherwise not be available anywhere.

Sports fanatics could use the program to check historical rankings of their favorite teams or players, information that currently may not be easy to find. The application can do more than just simple keyword searches, Adar said. It also can be used to analyze historical data or link information from different sites. For example, Adar wondered whether air pollution conditions could affect the performance of Olympic athletes, so he used Zoetrope to find daily records of pollution levels in Beijing and the number of world records broken in the 2008 Olympics on each day, and looked to see whether fewer records were broken on days with high pollution levels.

“Zoetrope is aimed at the casual researcher,” Weld said. “It’s really for anyone who has a question.”

Zoetrope could eventually be built in to any other Web browser, Adar said. If you just want to browse the past versions of a given site, you drag a slider backwards to see older and older versions. Alternatively, you can draw a box around just one part of the site, if you’re interested in, say, the lead story on CNN.com but don’t care about the rest of the page. These boxes can be filtered by keyword searches or date, so you could look only for lead stories featuring Hollywood actors or stories that ran on Fridays.

Users can view historical data by moving the slider, but more sophisticated analyses are available as well. If you’re looking at something numerical, such as gas prices over time, the program can draw graphs for you. Or you can pull out images from specific times, such as traffic pictures, and compare them all side by side. These kinds of visualizations can be further organized in a timeline or by clustering — Zoetrope can make an image comparing traffic patterns on sunny days versus cloudy days, for example.

Right now, Zoetrope saves a new version of approximately 1,000 different sites every hour, Adar said. It’s been running for four months, so records go no further than that, but Adar hopes to eventually incorporate information from the Internet Archive’s nearly 14 years of records into the program.

He wants to figure out how to scale the program up from 1,000 Web pages to all pages in existence, and has run studies to figure how often each page would need to be captured. For example, a traffic site or stock-watching page would need versions saved much more often than every hour, but there are many unchanging pages that could be archived less frequently. Eventually, Zoetrope could automatically figure out how often to capture a page based on how frequently it changes, Adar said.

“This is really a new way to think about storing information on the Web,” he said.

The researchers hope to release Zoetrope free, and say it may be available as early as next summer.

The National Science Foundation, the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation and the Washington Research Foundation provided funding for Zoetrope. James Fogarty, 91̽»¨computer science and engineering assistant professor, also worked on the application. 

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For more information, contact Adar at eadar@cs.washington.edu or (650) 799-8823, or Weld at weld@cs.washington.edu or (206) 543-9196.

Energy experts from the 91̽»¨ want to help local businesses cut their utility bills.

The Industrial Assessment Center at 91̽»¨is offering free energy assessments for small and medium local businesses. The center is now in its third year of providing assessments, and in the past two years has made recommendations that could save local companies on average nearly $64,000 a year.

The center is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and is one of 26 similar groups at universities around the country who provide free energy assessments to companies. In 2005, $5 million in funding returned more than $25 million in energy savings through these 26 universities, according to the DOE.

The group is now taking applications for 20 new assessments. To qualify, a business must meet three of the following four requirements:

• Annual revenues lower than $100 million

• Annual utility expenses between $100,000 and $3 million

• Fewer than 500 employees

• No staff dedicated solely to energy efficiency

A complete list of qualifications is available at http://www.ee.washington.edu/energy/iac/assessment.html.

Students and faculty from the UW’s department of Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering will perform the assessments. These assessments typically take one day, and will not interrupt the company’s normal work flow, said Andrew Martin, business undergraduate student and administrator of the center. After its visit, the team sends an energy savings report to the business. The group’s recommendations are specific to each company, Martin said, but past reports have included suggestions as diverse as revamping production methods to be more energy-efficient to pointing out an error on a utility bill that saved the company thousands of dollars yearly. Other money-saving tips included repairing leaks in air compressor systems and redesigning vacuum systems to use less energy.

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For more information on the 91̽»¨’s assessment team, see http://www.ee.washington.edu/energy/iac/index.html or contact Martin at (206) 841-6742 or uwiac@u.washington.edu.