UW News

Technology


September 17, 2024

AI researcher discusses the new version of ChatGPT’s advances in math and reasoning

Math equations written on glass.

Niloofar Mireshghallah, a UW postdoctoral scholar, discusses why math and reasoning have so challenged artificial intelligence models and what the public should know about OpenAI’s new release.


August 28, 2024

Large language models can help detect social media bots — but can also make the problem worse

A drawing of a robot with an empty speech bubble.

A team led by University of Washington researchers found that large language models, such as ChatGPT, can make social media bots more sophisticated at evading detection. But these models can also improve systems that detect bots.


August 8, 2024

Many survey respondents rated seeking out sexually explicit ‘deepfakes’ as more acceptable than creating or sharing them

A computer keyboard is illuminated by the screen in a dark space.

In a survey of 315 people conducted by researchers at the University of Washington and Georgetown University, respondents largely found creating and sharing sexually explicit “deepfakes” unacceptable. But far fewer respondents strongly opposed seeking out these media. Previous research has shown that other people viewing non-AI image-based abuse harms the victims significantly.


August 7, 2024

Using photos or videos, these AI systems can conjure simulations that train robots to function in physical spaces

Two new studies introduce AI systems that use either video or photos to create simulations that can train robots to function in the real world. This could significantly lower the costs of training robots to function in complex settings.


July 25, 2024

How iBuyers are changing real estate racial disparities and individual homeownership rates in one major city

An overhead view of houses in a neighborhood.

University of Washington researchers investigated how iBuyers — companies that use automated algorithms to quickly buy and sell homes — have affected the well-documented racial bias against Black home sellers. Looking at Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, they found that on average iBuyers paid more equal prices to Black and white home sellers than individual buyers, largely because iBuyers paid white sellers significantly less on average than an individual buyer. They also discovered that iBuyers were significantly more likely to resell homes to institutions, such as large rental companies that’ve been tied to high eviction rates and rent-gouging.


July 16, 2024

Even on Instagram, teens mostly feel bored

New research from the University of Washington finds that teens open Instagram because they’re bored. Then they sift through largely irrelevant content, mostly feeling bored, while seeking interesting bits to share with their friends in direct messages. Then, eventually bored with what researchers call a “content soup,” they log off.


June 21, 2024

ChatGPT is biased against resumes with credentials that imply a disability — but it can improve

A hand holds a phone with the ChatGPT app open.

UW researchers found that ChatGPT consistently ranked resumes with disability-related honors and credentials — such as the “Tom Wilson Disability Leadership Award” — lower than the same resumes without those honors and credentials. But when researchers customized the tool with written instructions directing it not to be ableist, the tool reduced this bias for all but one of the disabilities tested.


June 11, 2024

Q&A: Why social media rarely leads to constructive political action

A book cover with clouds and the phrase "Log Off" at the center.

But in her new book “Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix,” Katherine Cross, a UW doctoral student in the Information School, argues that social media has limited political value.


May 29, 2024

Q&A: How AI affects kids’ creativity

An image of a person in a lab coat protruding from a small car while holding a clock

“We asked one 11-year-old how he’d feel if his favorite book series was written by AI instead of an author, and he said it would ‘dismantle’ the joy of reading for him. We often don’t think about kids having these deep, existential questions about what it means to be an artist,” said Michele Newman, a University of Washington doctoral student in the Information School.


May 23, 2024

AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd, by looking at them just once

A closeup image on a person wearing a pair of black headphones. The person’s face is out of focus; the headphones have a small microphone attached to them with electrical tape and a button on the side.

A University of Washington team has developed an artificial intelligence system that lets someone wearing headphones look at a person speaking for three to five seconds to “enroll” them. The system then plays just the enrolled speaker’s voice in real time, even as the pair move around in noisy environments.


May 15, 2024

Q&A: How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect older adults’ technology use?

University of Washington researchers interviewed 16 older adults in Washington and Oregon, ages 65 to 80, about how their technology use with their social support networks changed during the pandemic.


May 9, 2024

Can Wikipedia-like citations on YouTube curb misinformation?

A computer screen with the YouTube logo, a red rectangle with a triangle in it, above links to "Home" and "Trending"

University of Washington researchers created and tested a prototype browser extension called Viblio, which lets viewers and creators add citations to the timelines of YouTube videos.


May 1, 2024

Virtual reality environment for teens may offer an accessible, affordable way to reduce stress

Three images each set in 3D animations of a snowy forest show, from left to right: a gray sign that reads “Welcome to RESeT”; a post with six small signs on with arrows and the words from top to bottom “River Boats,” “Scavenger Hunt,” “Rock Stacking,” “Rabbits,” and “Bird Search”; a red sign with an image of a bird on it and the text “FOLLOW THE SONG.”

Working with teens, UW researchers have designed RESeT: a snowy virtual world with six activities intended to improve mood. In a 3-week study of 44 Seattle-area teens, researchers found that most used the technology about twice a week without being prompted and reported lower stress levels after using the environment.


April 26, 2024

New circuit boards can be repeatedly recycled

A small brown circuit board sits on a gray background. To its right are a small copper plate, sheets of glass fibers in a crosshatch pattern, small chunks of vitrimer plastic that’s been removed from a circuit board, and a computer chip.

A team led by researchers at the University of Washington developed a new PCB that performs on par with traditional materials and can be recycled repeatedly with negligible material loss. Researchers used a solvent that transforms a type of vitrimer — a cutting-edge class of polymer — into a jelly-like substance without damage, allowing solid components to be plucked out for reuse or recycling. With these “vPCBs” (vitrimer printed circuit boards), researchers recovered 98% of the vitrimer and 100% of the glass fiber.


April 24, 2024

Q&A: How TikTok’s ‘black box’ algorithm and design shape user behavior

A hand holds a smartphone with the TikTok app open.

Franziska Roesner, a University of Washington associate professor, and collaborators will present two papers that mine real-world data to help understand TikTok’s personalized its recommendation algorithm and its impact.


March 28, 2024

Q&A: How to train AI when you don’t have enough data

A drawing of dots connected to lines

As researchers explore potential applications for AI, they have found scenarios where AI could be really useful but there’s not enough data to accurately train the algorithms. Jenq-Neng Hwang, University of Washington professor of electrical and computer and engineering, specializes in these issues.


March 14, 2024

UW researchers taught kids to code with cultural research and embroidery machines

University of Washington researchers taught a group of high schoolers to code by combining cultural research into various embroidery traditions with “computational embroidery.” The method teaches kids to encode embroidery patterns on a computer through a coding language called Turtlestitch.


March 11, 2024

Q&A: How Instagram influencers profit from anti-vaccine misinformation

A person's hand holds a smartphone, with the Instagram analytics page open. There's a green plant in the background.

New research from the UW examines how three wellness Instagram influencers profited from anti-vaccine misinformation.


February 15, 2024

Q&A: What is the best route to fairer AI systems?

Two people's hands gesture to pieces of paper between two laptops on a desk.

Mike Teodorescu, a University of Washington assistant professor in the Information School, proposes that private enterprise standards for fairer machine learning systems would inform governmental regulation.


February 7, 2024

Q&A: Helping robots identify objects in cluttered spaces

A shelf in a lab. The shelf contains the following items: a pitcher on its side, a bowl in front of a bottle of Soft Scrub, a mug on a plate and a spoon balanced on the plate. Everything except the plate has a green box around it. The plate has a red box around it.

Robots in warehouses and even around our houses struggle to identify and pick up objects if they are too close together, or if a space is cluttered. This is because robots lack what psychologists call “object unity,” or our ability to identify things even when we can’t see all of them. Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a way to teach robots this skill.


UW-developed smart earrings can monitor a person’s temperature

The temperature sensing earring is shown attached to a person’s ear. The portion touching the earlobe has a gemstone on it. Dangling a few centimeters below it is a small circular circuit board.

University of Washington researchers introduced the Thermal Earring, a wireless wearable that continuously monitors a user’s earlobe temperature. Potential applications include tracking signs of ovulation, stress, eating and exercise. The smart earring prototype is about the size and weight of a small paperclip and has a 28-day battery life.


January 9, 2024

Q&A: UW researchers answer common questions about language models like ChatGPT

A cellphone running ChatGPT sits on a textbook that's slightly out of focus.

A team University of Washington researchers have published a guide explaining language models, the technology that underlies chatbots.


November 29, 2023

AI image generator Stable Diffusion perpetuates racial and gendered stereotypes, study finds

Four images created by AI image generator Stable Diffusion with the prompt "person from Oceania" show four light-skinned people.

University of Washington researchers found that when prompted to make pictures of “a person,” the AI image generator over-represented light-skinned men, failed to equitably represent Indigenous peoples and sexualized images of certain women of color.


November 16, 2023

Q&A: How an assistive-feeding robot went from picking up fruit salads to whole meals

An assistive-feeding robotic arm attached to a wheelchair uses a fork to stab a piece of fruit on a plate among other fruits.

A team led by researchers at the University of Washington developed 11 actions a robotic arm can make to pick up nearly any food attainable by fork. This allows the system to learn to pick up new foods during one meal.


November 15, 2023

WhaleVis turns more than a century of whaling data into an interactive map

A humpback whale breaches in the Pacific Ocean.

A team at the University of Washington has created an interactive dashboard called WhaleVis, which lets users map data on global whale catches and whaling routes from 1880 to 1986. Scientists can compare this historical data and its trends with current information to better understand whale populations over time.


November 9, 2023

New AI noise-canceling headphone technology lets wearers pick which sounds they hear

A man wearing a surgical mask and headphones walks through the University of Washington campus while holding a smartphone. People walk behind him.

A team led by researchers at the University of Washington has developed deep-learning algorithms that let users pick which sounds filter through their headphones in real time. Either through voice commands or a smartphone app, headphone wearers can select which sounds they want to include from 20 classes, such as sirens, baby cries, speech, vacuum cleaners and bird chirps.


November 2, 2023

Can AI help boost accessibility? These researchers tested it for themselves

Four AI-generated images show different interpretations of a doll-sized “crocheted lavender husky wearing ski goggles,” including two pictured outdoors and one against a white background.

Seven researchers at the University of Washington conducted a three-month autoethnographic study — drawing on their own experiences as people with and without disabilities — to test AI tools’ utility for accessibility. Though researchers found cases in which the tools were helpful, they also found significant problems.


October 30, 2023

A Google Slides extension can make presentation software more accessible for blind users

A user demonstrates creating a presentation slide with A11yBoard on a touchscreen tablet and computer screen.

A team led by researchers at the University of Washington has created A11yBoard for Google Slides, a browser extension and phone or tablet app that allows blind users to navigate through complex slide layouts, objects, images and text.


October 24, 2023

How can social media be better? Four UW researchers compare strategies

A silhouette of a person looking at a phone.

The turmoil at large tech platforms has many people reconsidering what they want out of social media. Four researchers at the University of Washington are exploring different approaches to improve people’s experiences.


October 17, 2023

Q&A: Researchers aim to improve accessibility with augmented reality

A drawing of a phone labeling accessibility problems in a kitchen.

This month, University of Washington researchers will introduce multiple projects that deploy augmented reality — through headsets and phone apps — with the aim of making the world more accessible for people with disabilities.


September 27, 2023

MilliMobile is a tiny, self-driving robot powered only by light and radio waves

Two fingers are about to pick up a tiny robot

The robot, equipped with a solar panel–like energy harvester and four wheels, is about the size of a penny, weighs as much as a raisin and can move about the length of a bus in an hour on a cloudy day.


September 25, 2023

Q&A: Can AI in school actually help students be more creative and self-directed?

A woman sits in an office setting

Katie Davis, a University of Washington associate professor in the Information School, discusses how generative AI might support learning, instead of detracting from it, if kids can keep their agency.


September 22, 2023

Q&A: How new software is changing our understanding of human brain development

An MRI image of a baby's brain

A team including researchers at the University of Washington recently used new software to compare MRIs from 300 babies and discovered that myelin, a part of the brain’s so-called white matter, develops much slower after birth.


September 21, 2023

UW team’s shape-changing smart speaker lets users mute different areas of a room

The seven robotic microphones sit in their charging station

A team led by researchers at the University of Washington has developed system of robotic self-deploying microphones, which lets users control sound in a room, muting certain areas and creating “active zones” in others.


September 13, 2023

Battery-free robots use origami to change shape in mid-air

A hand holding tweezers that are holding a yellow square with circuits on it

UW researchers developed small robotic devices that can change how they move through the air by “snapping” into a folded position during their descent.


August 16, 2023

Q&A: As AI changes education, important conversations for kids still happen off-screen

Jason Yip, a UW associate professor in the Information School, discusses how parents and schools can adapt to new technologies in ways that support children’s learning.


July 27, 2023

Q&A: UW researcher discusses just how much energy ChatGPT uses

A hand holding a phone that has ChatGPT on the screen

Training a large language model, such as ChatGPT, uses on average roughly equivalent to the yearly electricity consumption of over 1,000 U.S. households, according to Sajjad Moazeni, UW assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, who studies networking for AI and machine learning supercomputing.


July 24, 2023

With a new app, smart devices can have GPS underwater

A scuba diver swims in dark water.

A team at the University of Washington has developed the first underwater 3D-positioning app for smart devices. When at least three divers are within about 98 feet of each other, the app tracks each user’s location relative to the leader.


July 18, 2023

Learning from superheroes and AI: UW researchers study how a chatbot can teach kids supportive self-talk

a smart speaker sits beside school supplies

Researchers at the University of Washington created a new audio chatbot, Self-Talk with Superhero Zip, aimed to help children speak positively to themselves. This chatbot is “a ‘Sesame Street’ experience for a smart speaker.”


June 21, 2023

An app can transform smartphones into thermometers that accurately detect fevers

A researcher holds a phone to a patient's forehead.

A team led by researchers at the University of Washington has created an app called FeverPhone, which transforms smartphones into thermometers without adding new hardware.



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