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Shwetak Patel of the University of Washington won a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship for his work on easy-to-deploy sensor technology that tracks household energy consumption and makes buildings more responsive to our needs.

Your credit card bill tells you how much you spent on gas last Tuesday, groceries on Wednesday, and football tickets on Friday night. Wouldn't it be helpful if your electric bill did something similar?

This isn't pie in the sky for Shwetak Patel, a 29-year-old technologist who received a $500,000 "genius" grant Tuesday for his work on inexpensive and easy-to-deploy sensors that can make our lives more efficient and enjoyable.

The computer science professor at the University of Washington in Seattle is among 22 innovators in fields ranging from music and journalism to genetics and history who were named 2011 MacArthur Fellows. 

Patel is the techiest of the august bunch, a recognition he told me "that shows computer science can play a huge role beyond what people typically think of computing as." 

He received the honor for work on sensor technology that measures things such as energy and water use down to the level of individual appliances and faucets.

This is akin, he explained, to a credit card bill or telephone bill that details the price of individual purchases and calls, information that might compel a consumer to eat out less or call grandma more often.

"Right now if you get your water or electric bill it only tells you the aggregate amount of consumption which a lot of people don't really get a good understanding of what that means," Patel said.

Knowing how much energy you consume watching reruns on TV or keeping beer cold in a second fridge in the basement might prompt a change in behavior.

His sensors aren't the first products to provide details of individual component consumption, but unlike other approaches, all a consumer needs to do is plug or screw one sensor into an outlet or hose bib to get information on all the appliances in a house. 

The sensors read the "noise" that is generated by individual appliances or toilets to infer when something like the TV is turned on or the upstairs toilet flushed.

For example, a TV makes a different noise as it pulls on the power supply than does a compact fluorescent light bulb. The sensor infers this difference and then presents it to the consumer with a user-friendly graphical interface.

In the future, the data could also be supplied to utility companies so they can better understand when people do certain types of activities or shipped off to appliance manufacturers.

"We have a way to feed that information back to Whirlpool or GE and say here is how often your appliance is in the duty cycle," Patel said. "That can really help to design the system in a different way to make it more efficient and more reliable."

Patel sold a startup with this technology to Belkin International in 2010 and said the company plans to begin selling commercial versions of them this fall. Going forward, he is turning his focus to health. 

First up are health-monitoring systems that use mobile phones to keep a consistent check on people with breathing conditions such as asthma.

"You can't be in the hospital all the time, nor can you see your doctor everyday or every hour," he noted. 

A mobile phone equipped with his sensor technology, though, could turn the phone's microphone into a monitor that listens for coughing fits or changes in lung capacity.

These types of applications, according to Patel, show that computer science is more than nerds in a corner writing code. It can "solve really important health problems and really important energy problems."

More on sensor technology:

• Tiny solar powered sensor runs almost forever
• Tree power could save forests from fires
• Sensor could bring human touch to robots
• New electric grid polices power use

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

Leave it to the computer scientists to turn baby pictures into a slick animation that traces faces through the years.

The technique is already being put to use on Google's Picasa photo-sharing website as a feature called "Face Movie."

"I have 10,000 photos of my 5-year-old son, taken over every possible expression," Steve Seitz, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Washington and an engineer at Google's Seattle office, said today in a news release about the research project. "I would like to visualize how he changes over time, be able to see all the expressions he makes, be able to see him in 3-D or animate him from the photos."

Seitz and his colleagues have already started down that road, thanks to the university's "Photobios" project. UW researcher Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman is due to present their research next week in Vancouver, B.C., at a meeting of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, or SIGGRAPH.

Rapid advances in image recognition
Photobios take advantage of rapid advances in automated image recognition and tagging. In the past, such advances led to the development of Microsoft's Photosynth technology for re-creating clickable 3-D scenes from a "cloud" of images taken from many different angles. (Microsoft and NBC Universal are partners in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

Picasa's Face Movie feature takes that one step further by building in face recognition and name-tagging.

"This work provides a motivation for tagging," Seitz said. "The bigger goal is to figure out how to browse and organize your photo collection. I think this is just one step toward that bigger goal."

To build a Photobio, you'd start with a collection of photos showing the same person, whether they show your daughter or George W. Bush. You can arrange the photos chronologically, or specify the beginning and end points. The software automatically identifies the face and major features, lines up the eyes and morphs smoothly from one image to the next. Automated morphing is one of the key reasons why the results are so easy to produce and easy on the eyes.

"There's been a lot of interest in the computer vision community in modeling faces, but almost all of the projects focus on specially acquired photos, taken under carefully controlled conditions," Seitz said. "This is one of the first papers to focus on unstructured photo collections, taken under different conditions, of the type that you would find in iPhoto or Facebook."

Better 3-D avatars
Kemelmacher-Shlizerman and Seitz are already working on the next step: taking a collection of photos and turning them into a movable 3-D model of a face. They'll be presenting research on that topic this fall at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Barcelona, Spain.

The researchers say such models could be used to create more realistic animated avatars for use in video conferencing or game play. More accurate face modeling also could well lead to improved face-recognition programs, for personal use (that is, sorting through the pictures on your hard drive or Facebook friend list) as well as for security applications (that is, matching up a photo taken at a security checkpoint with a database of images taken from different perspectives).

Does that sound cool, or scary? Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts on face-tracing and other image-recognition applications you'd like to see.

In addition to Seitz and Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, the authors of the SIGGRAPH presentation, "Exploring Photobios," include Eli Shechtman and Rahul Garg. The research was funded by Google, Microsoft, Adobe Systems and the National Science Foundation.

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