New Year's resolutions are mostly about making better choices with a singular goal in mind. Eat less sugar. Make time to exercise daily. What seems so simple can actually be hard to do.

Carnegie Mellon University behavioral economists use a distinct fusion of economics and psychology to examine the decisions people make. They work to understand why we eat unhealthy food, pay women less than men and avoid — or choose not to believe — certain information. Then, they design and test multifaceted interventions to change the way we make decisions, alter the way organizations operate and influence how policies are implemented.

Looking at resolutions through the lens of CMU behavioral economists, here are four ways to map out a plan of attack and to make 2018 goals stick.

Be clear about your goal.

Gretchen Chapman, professor of social and decision sciences in CMU's Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, focuses on improving health behaviors. One of her studies looked at how people's walking routines were influenced by goal-setting and comparing results against their peers. Participants walked further when they aimed for a lofty goal. They would fall short of the high goal but performed better than those with lower goals.

Chapman recommends setting a specific challenging goal with a deadline. For example, "lose 20 pounds by April 1," which would be a difficult feat but offers inspiration and a clear finish line.

Find a partner or group.

Another technique is to encourage a friend to take up a new routine with you. Chapman found that participants walked significantly more steps when they could compare how they were doing to other participants.

"Some friendly competition with another person, such as exercising with a friend, will enable social comparison. You won't want to run fewer miles per week than your friend, so you will goad each other on. Some exercise apps have leaderboard features that capture this idea," Chapman said.

Not the competitive type? A friend could still help. People can be motivated simply by the notion that they do not want to let down their friends, said Julie Downs, associate professor of social and decision sciences.

"It's hard to make yourself do something unpleasant, but you could rope yourself into something that you will have a hard time getting out of, such as a promise to a friend," Downs said.

Remove temptations.

It helps to reflect on and identify traps that will make a New Year's resolution hard to keep. Be honest.

If salty potato chips are a weakness, avoid the snack aisle so they do not end up in the grocery cart. The smell of cigarette smoke may coax you to light up. If that is the case, then take a route to work away from smoking areas.

"Based on what the research shows about the difficulty of resisting temptation, you will benefit by setting up your life so that you don't even face the temptation at all," Downs said.

With perseverance, the old habit will become replaced by the new routine.

Find a tool, and make it a game.

Digital devices and apps offer good support and show progress as calorie counters and fitness trackers. Research suggests using daily rewards for meeting small goals. Technology can help set up a reward system.

Apps also give social motives through connections with others. Cooperation and competition were highly effective getting older adults to engage in online cognitive exercises in a study conducted by George Loewenstein, the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology and a co-founder of the field of behavioral economics.

"Seek out a partner and compete against another two-person team to combine the motivational power of both cooperation and competition," Loewenstein said.

Incentives help to pave the path to success, but on the rare occasion a New Year's resolution is achieved, bragging rights may be the best reward. (Just be careful not to "humblebrag" too much, because Loewenstein's work shows that can backfire, too.)

For the 19th year, high school and college students from across western Pennsylvania addressed topics of difference and diversity in Carnegie Mellon University's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Writing Awards. This year's winners touched on issues ranging from racial and sexual identity to the current political climate and more.

The student winners will receive cash prizes, have their pieces published in a booklet and will read their poems and essays at an awards ceremony at 4:30 p.m., Monday, Jan. 15, in CMU's Cohon University Center Rangos Ballroom. Campus music groups will perform, and the event is free and open to the public.

"We were particularly pleased to receive entries from a number of new schools this year, and the quality of the entries overall was exceptionally high," said Jim Daniels, the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English who founded and directs the awards program.

CAPA student Emma Steckline, 15, won first place in the high school prose category for "Where's Waldo," an analysis of LGBTQ representation in the media. Last year, Steckline won an honorable mention in the high school prose category.

"Last year I finally came to terms with the fact that I am gay, one of 'those people.' 'Those people' who every single day are reminded of our minority status. When we see our world powers we are looking in a misprinted 'Where's Waldo' book except the stripes on Waldo's shirt are rainbow colored and they forgot to print his picture on any of the pages. And there are different versions of the book: 'Where's Waldo Book Two: Can You Find Any Queer Singers?' 'Where's Waldo Book Three: Can You Find Any Queer CEO's?' 'Where's Waldo Book Four: Can You Find Any Queer People in Government?' The list goes on and on. America sits on copies upon copies of books with no representation for centuries, and I know it isn't just us."

Placing first in college poetry, Marina Lopez's "Penance After DACA" reacts to the repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Lopez is a graduate student in CMU's School of Music.

Your silence is deafening.
Who's to blame you;
it's hard to relate to people who you don't know and who don't look like you.

But your silence is deafening.
And the world seems so strange in its normalcy;
and the continual chug of the gears of the daily business-as-usual grinds my bones to dust.
And I know that I also ignore those who suffer in far away lands
so I can have all these daily comforts, trinkets, small treats of emptiness...

I understand how it goes: out of sight, out of mind.

But we are right here.
Can't you see us?
We're forced to stay low, tumbling from shadow to shadow,
but I really thought you'd noticed us by now.

And I'm sorry for feeling personally aggravated by this
even though it doesn't directly impact me
yet.

I feel it encroaching upon me, like a many-fold roach;
strong and dark and nuclear-resistant,
drowning my morning sun.

Your silence is deafening.
And it's hard to keep on loving you
when you stripped all hope from my brothers
for no good reason.

Your silence is deafening.
Normalcy burns.
And I guess the rest of the world will keep on hating you
and I'll have less and less arms with which to defend you.

You'll keep believing you're a beacon of hope, when you're not.
And you'll keep going about your days.

And I'm sorry I resent you;
Life is tragedy.
And you're probably just trying to get on by.

I'm sorry I'm so self centered
and keep focusing so much on the heart
you shred to pieces.

And I'm sorry that I came here
(there is nowhere else to go).
And I'm sorry that I left my homeland to rot and fester in its own sins.
Your silence is deafening.

In addition to the annual writing awards, an anthology, "Challenges to the Dream: The Best of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Writing Awards at Carnegie Mellon University," was published by CMU Press last fall. The book features 91 pieces by 83 writers from the first 18 years of the awards program.

Tracy K. Smith, poet laureate of the United States and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, called the anthology "the mortar that will mend our nation's spirit."

"It is consoling beyond words to witness these young writers wrestling with the realities of race, bringing solid thought and well-wrought language to bear upon that process," Smith said.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Writing Awards are sponsored by CMU's Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Department of English, the Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion and UPMC.

Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller Gallery presents “Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries,” the first retrospective exhibition of the influential feminist artist, Saturday, Jan. 20, through Sunday, Feb. 25.

An Artist Talk will take place at 5 p.m. Friday, Feb. 16, followed by a reception from 6-8 p.m., co-sponsored by the Center for the Arts in Society. The exhibit, talk and reception are free and open to the public.

Wilding played a key role in the formation of the Feminist Art Program at California State University in Fresno and at the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s. She was a major contributor to the historically significant month-long collaborative installation “Womanhouse,” sited in an abandoned mansion in Los Angeles in 1972, where she performed her highly celebrated work, “Waiting.”

A widely exhibited international artist, Wilding has strong connections to Pittsburgh. She was a visiting assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art from 1995-1998. She has been a fellow of CMU’s Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry since 1998. She also co-founded and collaborates with subRosa, originating in Pittsburgh in 1998.

“Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries,” curated by Shannon R. Stratton in collaboration with Wilding, includes a selection of works from Wilding’s studio practice spanning the past 40 years, highlighting a range of works on paper — drawings, watercolors, collage and paintings. Taking up key allegorical imagery in Wilding’s work, the exhibition focuses on themes of becoming, both the transformative event itself, and the threshold to transfiguration. This state of in-between-ness is articulated through imagery of leaves, the chrysalis, hybrid beings, and liminal circumstances themselves, such as waiting, the subject of Wilding’s two prominent performances “Waiting” and “Wait-With.”

Wilding’s work is both delicate and harsh in its exploration of the pivotal moment between private revelation and public manifestation. Viewed together in this exhibition, her work makes a powerful impression about psychological and physical transition and transformation. In the depiction of the chrysalis and the embryo, for example, gestation is suggested, while in imagery of tears, wounds, and recombinant bodies, emergence and materialization are pronounced. The sum of these parts provides a unique account of how themes of emergence were central to Wilding’s articulation of feminism, and her own reflections on a childhood growing up in an intentional Christian commune.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication featuring original writings by Wilding, Irina Aristarkhova and Mario Ontiveros.

About the Artist: Faith Wilding is professor emerita of performance art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a graduate faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a visiting scholar at the Pembroke Center, Brown University. Born in Paraguay, Wilding received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa and her master’s degree in fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts. Wilding was a co-initiator of the Feminist Art programs in Fresno and at CalArts, and she contributed "Crocheted Environment" and her "Waiting" performance piece to the historic "Womanhouse" exhibition. Her artwork has been featured in major feminist exhibitions including "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution"; "Sexual Politics"; "Division of Labor: Women’s Work in Contemporary Art"; and "re.act Feminism." Her writing has been featured in such books as "The Power of Feminist Art," "By Our Own Hands," "The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader," "MEANING" and many more.

Wilding has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid; Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow; MoMA PS1 and the Bronx Museum of Art in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art and Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; University of California Riverside Museum of Art; the Singapore Art Museum; and many others. Wilding co-founded and collaborates with subRosa, a cyberfeminist cell of cultural producers using bioart and tactical performance in the public sphere to explore and critique the intersections of information and biotechnologies in women’s bodies, lives and work, and she is the co-editor of "Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices!" She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital grant and artist grants from National Endowment for the Arts.

Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries originated at Threewalls in Chicago in January 2014 with an archive, reading room and screenings curated by Abigail Satinsky. It has since been exhibited at: Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee (Sept. 5 - Oct. 4, 2014); Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California (Sept. 26, 2015 - Jan. 3, 2016) and University of Houston-Clear Lake Art Gallery, Houston, Texas (Sept. 2 - Dec. 8, 2016).

The Board of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute has appointed Byron C. Clayton, an experienced leader in public-private partnerships and technology commercialization, as chief executive officer. Clayton will succeed Gary Fedder, who has held the interim CEO role since early 2017.

The Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute (ARM), founded at Carnegie Mellon University in January 2017 and now operating as an independent nonprofit, won an $80 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to become the leading catalyst of robotics innovation and expertise to accelerate growth in U.S.-based manufacturing and high value careers. ARM operates as part of the Manufacturing USA network, and is supported by an additional $173 million in commitments from more than 120 members and partners in industry, academia, technology, government and economic development groups. By creating a collaborative ecosystem of like-minded organizations, ARM is speeding the movement of industrial robots into commercial use, while preparing a labor force to operate and manage these technologies.

ARM is an integral part of Pittsburgh’s strategy to define the future of the global manufacturing economy and will be the lead tenant at Hazelwood Green, a unique hub that will revolutionize U.S. manufacturing. The Heinz Endowments, Richard King Mellon Foundation and Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation joined forces in 2002 to purchase the Hazelwood Green property and to later work with Carnegie Mellon  and ARM to support this revolution.

“Advanced robotics has the potential to transform the entire manufacturing sector, and ARM is poised to provide global leadership in this historic shift,” said Farnam Jahanian, interim president of Carnegie Mellon  and a member of the ARM Board of Directors. “Dr. Clayton is an outstanding choice to lead ARM in this next chapter, bringing both the leadership and the experience to help fulfill the vision for this landmark partnership among industry, government and academia.”

Clayton most recently served as the president and CEO of Research Park Corporation (RPC). RPC was formed by the Louisiana legislature in the early 1990s to help grow and diversify the innovation economy of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Prior to this role, Clayton was based in Northeast Ohio, where he led regional innovation clusters in printed electronics, advanced energy and water technologies. In addition, he has more than 25 years of experience developing, commercializing and implementing advanced manufacturing systems and software for various industries. During that time, he facilitated the market entry of more than 40 high-tech products and systems, published articles in academic and trade journals, and received patents for manufacturing optimization software used by numerous production plants across North America.

"I am truly honored to lead and serve ARM as its new CEO”, Clayton said. “It is incredibly exciting to join ARM’s staff, members and partners in our journey to create a brighter future for American manufacturers and workers."

Professor Gary Fedder returns to his role as vice provost for Research (VPR) for Carnegie Mellon, while remaining an active champion for ARM. Fedder will work closely with Clayton over the next few months to ensure a smooth transition of leadership.

“As CEO, Clayton is driving the next exciting chapter for ARM to build upon the considerable momentum gathered during its inaugural year. As VPR, I look forward to continuing to grow the opportunities in the research enterprise at Carnegie Mellon, which includes maintaining close interaction and the relationship with ARM,” Fedder said.

Clayton’s appointment comes as ARM celebrates the start of its second year of operation, and at the beginning of an ambitious first quarter, during which ARM will announce the projects receiving funding from its first project call, release details for a second Education/Workforce project call, and unveil the organization’s new website, branding and member engagement platform.

On stage this spring at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama will be a mix of farce and dark political satire, providing humor and food for thought to Pittsburgh audiences.

“From political intrigue and drama at its most tempestuous, to the joy and delight of a musical fantasia, this spring the School of Drama showcases why it is one of our country’s leading conservatories,” said Peter Cooke, head of the school.

“The Drowsy Chaperone” will shake theatergoers out of the winter blues with its hysterical musical-within-a-comedy structure that harkens back to productions by Cole Porter or the Gershwins. Directed and choreographed by Tony Award-nominee Marcia Milgrom Dodge, the musical will be a spectacle that should not be missed. The show runs from Feb. 22 to March 3 in the Philip Chosky Theater. Tickets to the School of Drama musicals typically sell out, so be sure to purchase yours soon.

Tony Kushner’s eerily relevant play, “A Bright Room Called Day,” will conclude the mainstage season in the Philip Chosky Theater. Director Jed Allen Harris will bring to life the story of women and men who are trying to hold together a world that is tearing apart in 1932, during the rise of the Weimar republic. In this play, the demons of the past are the prophets of the future. “A Bright Room Called Day” runs from April 12-14, and from April 24-28.

Bertolt Brecht’s satirical play about the rise of a tyrant, “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” will play at CMU’s warehouse space in Point Breeze, Studio 201 (201 N. Braddock Ave.). Under the direction of graduating John Wells Directing Fellow Stephen Eckert, this production will include puppetry, cabaret and comedy to explore the rise of nationalism and the influence of charismatic men on today’s global politics. The play will run from April 25-28.

The spring studio productions comprise existing and original works. John Wells Directing Fellow Philip Gates will lead a production of Euripides’ “Alkestis,” translated by Anne Carson, that runs Feb. 21-23, in the John Wells Video Studio. Concurrently in the Helen Wayne Rauh Studio Theater, Jack Dentinger will direct a performance that tackles the culture of toxic masculinity in “Smitten.”

Another new piece, penned and directed by Burke Louis will follow a young medical marijuana farmer in California, as he treks across the state on a mission to destigmatize his crops. “I’m Sure I’ll Figure It Out” will run from March 21-23 in the Helen Wayne Rauh Studio Theater.

From April 25-27, the final studio production of the season will be “Stumpy Legs Too Short” by Katja Brunner. The piece, directed by Bronwyn Donohue, finds a young woman trying to make sense of the sexual abuse she experienced as a child.

Additionally, the School of Drama will screen an original film by Grace McCarthy about the appropriation of Native American culture called “Teaching Yourself How to Die Fast.” The screening date will be announced.

Learn more about these pieces and to purchase tickets. 

Carnegie Mellon University has awarded its Dickson Prize in Science to Jennifer A. Doudna, professor of chemistry and molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Doudna is best known for her contributions to developing the gene editing technology CRISPR/Cas9.

Doudna will accept the award, which includes a cash prize and medal, and present the Dickson Prize Lecture at 4:30 p.m., on Wednesday, Jan. 31 in Rangos 1 on the second floor of the Cohon University Center. The lecture, titled “CRISPR Systems: Nature’s Toolkit for Genome Editing,” is free and open to the public, with a reception following in Rangos 3.

Doudna, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, first proposed using CRISPR/Cas9 technology to easily and accurately edit genomes in a 2012 paper in Science. The system, which uses a protein guided by RNA that can cut and insert nucleotides into a gene sequence, was hailed as a scientific "Breakthrough of the Year" by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2015, and has found many uses in medicine, agricultural science, manufacturing and other fields.

"I can't even begin to describe the entire scope of Doudna's contributions, but she has been central to virtually every discovery and idea about CRISPR," said Aaron P. Mitchell, head of the Department of Biological Sciences in the Mellon College of Science. Mitchell nominated Doudna for the prize.

Doudna received a bachelor of arts degree from Pomona College and a doctoral degree in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard Medical School. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002, Doudna was a professor at Yale University. She  also has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.

Doudna's numerous honors, which have their own Wikipedia page, include being elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society. Some of her other notable awards include the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, the Gruber Prize in Genetics, the Massry Prize and the Japan Prize. Along with other CRISPR researchers, Doudna was a runner-up for Time magazine's 2016 Person of the Year.

Carnegie Mellon's Dickson Prize in Science was established in 1969 by the late Pittsburgh physician Joseph Z. Dickson and his wife, Agnes Fisher Dickson. It is awarded annually to individuals in the United States who make outstanding contributions to science.

Carnegie Mellon University will lead a $27.5 million Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) initiative to build more intelligence into computer networks.

Researchers from six U.S. universities will collaborate in the CONIX Research Center headquartered at Carnegie Mellon. For the next five years, CONIX will create the architecture for networked computing that lies between edge devices and the cloud. The challenge is to build this substrate so that future applications that are crucial to IoT can be hosted with performance, security, robustness, and privacy guarantees.

“The extent to which IoT will disrupt our future will depend on how well we build scalable and secure networks that connect us to a very large number of systems that can orchestrate our lives and communities. CONIX will develop novel architectures for large-scale, distributed computing systems that have immense implications for social interaction, smart buildings and infrastructure, and highly connected communities, commerce and defense,” said James H. Garrett Jr., dean of Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering.

CONIX, an acronym for Computing on Network Infrastructure for Pervasive Perception, Cognition, and Action, is directed by Anthony Rowe, the Dr. William D. and Nancy W. Strecker Early Career (Associate) Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU. The assistant director, Prabal Dutta, is an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Other CMU principle investigators include James Hoe, Vyas Sekar, Bryan Parno and Brandon Lucia of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Chris Harrison of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

IoT has pushed a major focus on edge devices. These devices make our homes and communities smarter through connectivity, and they are capable of sensing, learning and interacting with humans. In most current IoT systems, sensors send data to the cloud for processing and decision-making. However, massive amounts of sensor data coupled with technical constraints have created bottlenecks in the network that curtail efficiency and the development of new technologies, especially if timing is critical.

“There isn’t a seamless way to merge cloud functionality with edge devices without a smarter interconnect, so we want to push more intelligence into the network,” Rowe said. “If networks were smarter, decision-making could occur independent of the cloud at much lower latencies.”

The cloud’s centralized nature makes it easier to optimize and secure, however, there are tradeoffs. “Large systems that are centralized tend to struggle in terms of scale and have trouble reacting quickly outside of data centers,” Rowe explained. CONIX researchers will look at how machine-learning techniques that are often used in the context of cloud computing can be used to self-optimize networks to improve performance and even defend against cyberattacks.

Developing a clean-slate distributed computing network will take an integrated view of sensing, processing, memory, dissemination and actuation. CONIX researchers intend to define the architecture for such networks now before attempts to work around current limitations create infrastructure that will be subject to rip-and-repair updates, resulting in reduced performance and security.

CONIX’s research is driven by three applications:

• Smart and connected communities — Researchers will explore the mechanisms for managing and processing millions of sensors’ feeds in urban environments. They will deploy CONIX edge devices across participating universities to monitor and visualize the flow of pedestrians. At scale, this lays the groundwork for all kinds of infrastructure management.
• Enhanced situational awareness at the edge — Efforts here will create on-demand information feeds for decision-makers by dispatching human-controlled swarming drones to provide aerial views of city streets. Imagine a system like Google Street View, only with live real-time data. This would have both civilian and military applications. For example, rescue teams in a disaster could use the system to zoom in on particular areas of interest at the click of a button.
• Interactive mixed reality — Physical and virtual reality systems will merge in a collaborative digital teleportation system. Researchers will capture physical aspects about users in a room, such as their bodies and facial expressions. Then, like a hologram, this information will be shared with people in different locations. The researchers will use this technology for meetings, uniting multiple CONIX teams. This same technology will be critical to support next-generation augmented reality systems being used in applications ranging from assisted surgery and virtual coaching to construction and manufacturing.

In addition to Carnegie Mellon and the University of California, Berkeley, other participants include the University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, San Diego, University of Southern California, and University of Washington, Seattle.

CONIX is one of six research centers funded by the SRC’s Joint University Microelectronics Program (JUMP), which represents a consortium of industrial participants and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Much of what is known about the connections between biology and psychology is because of Carnegie Mellon University's Sheldon Cohen.

To recognize Cohen for sustained career contributions to our understanding of the role of behavior in physical health, the American Psychosomatic Society (APS) has named him its 2018 Distinguished Scientist. The award also honors how his work has inspired countless scientists and scholars.

A member of the National Academy of Medicine, Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty University Professor of Psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, investigates the effects of behavioral factors in immunity and physical disease. His work includes pioneering research on the impact of psychological stress, social networks and socioeconomic status on infections, cardiovascular disease and asthma. He has contributed several scales assessing psychological and social predictors of health, including the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), the most widely used scientific tool to measure the perception of stress.

"As a founder of the field of health psychology, Sheldon is richly deserving of this honor. His seminal research and vision is an important example of how the science of psychology can have a positive real-world impact," said Michael J. Tarr, head of the Department of Psychology and the Trustee Professor of Vision Science.

Cohen has been on the CMU faculty since 1982. He was the first to provide scientific evidence that stress increases susceptibility to the common cold. His systematic work in this area has demonstrated that the longer a stressful event lasts, the greater the risk for illness and that enduring interpersonal conflicts and stress at work are especially potent risks. He has demonstrated that the biological bases for these findings include the effects of stress on the body's ability to control the release of inflammatory chemicals, and stress-associated shortening of telomeres (caps on the ends of chromosomes) in immune cells indicate progression to cell death.

Other noteworthy findings include people who sleep fewer than seven hours a night are nearly three times more likely to catch a cold; children of lower socioeconomic status grow up to be more susceptible to colds; those with diverse social networks (friends, family, group memberships) and those who regularly report being in a positive mood are less likely to get a cold when exposed to a cold-causing virus; hugs help protect against stress and infection; and children of separated parents who were not on speaking terms are more likely to develop colds as adults.

"Sheldon was a thoughtful and supportive mentor to me as a new assistant professor, and he has mentored countless others in the field. It's great to see his contributions recognized with this career award," said David Creswell, associate professor of psychology who nominated Cohen for the award.

In addition to his research, Cohen teaches at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at CMU, and has called it one of his favorite parts of his job.

"Our undergraduates are a joy to teach. They are excited about science and often surprise me with their insights. My graduate students and post-docs have been colleagues as well as students. Most go on to do work that makes me proud that they were trained at Carnegie Mellon," Cohen said.

Among his numerous awards and honors, Cohen received the 2004 American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology and the 2002 Association for Psychological Science James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Research in Applied Psychology. He was named one of the 100 Extremely Eminent Psychologists of the Modern Era and has received other top psychology professional awards. He is one of the few psychologists to frequently publish in mainstream medical journals, such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

Cohen will be presented with the 2018 APS Distinguished Scientist Award March 7-10 in Louisville, Kentucky, where he also will give a keynote address.

"I sincerely appreciate the American Psychosomatic Society's recognition of our work. I truly believe that the multi-disciplinary research we have done during my career could only have been done in Pittsburgh, and thank my many exceptional collaborators, colleagues and students for their invaluable contributions," Cohen said.

In 2016, Rachel Xiaowen Song graduated from Carnegie Mellon University's Masters of Entertainment Industry Management (MEIM) program. One year later, she signed on to produce for two feature films, "A Kid Like Jake," starring Jim Parsons (CBS's "The Big Bang Theory"), and "Nancy," starring Ann Dowd (Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale"). This month (Jan. 18-28) both are premiering at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, where Song is hoping to sell the film's distribution rights to major Hollywood players.

This year's Sundance festival is not Song's first. Throughout the two-year program, MEIM students attend several prominent film festivals, including Cannes, Sundance and the South by Southwest Film, Interactive and Music Festival.

This year's festival marks the 10th year that the MEIM program has brought its students to Sundance. MEIM is a joint program with CMU's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy and the College of Fine Arts.

"The trip highlights the importance of the deals that are being made daily at the festival," said MEIM Director Dan Green. "It's especially gratifying to go to the festival and have faculty, alumni or current students involved with one of the films being screened."

At the 2017 Sundance festival, students attended the screening of "Crown Heights," a film executive produced by MEIM faculty member Jonathan Baker, which went on to win the Sundance Audience Award for Best Dramatic Feature. Additionally, Carnegie Mellon School of Drama alumna Chante Adams took home the Sundance Special Jury Prize for Breakthrough Performance for her work in the film "Roxanne Roxanne."

Rachel Song

Song said attending Sundance during her final MEIM semester was inspirational.

"Sundance was the first real filmmaker-driven festival I'd been to, and going there really helped shaped my career path," she said. "Since I was a child, I've always loved watching films ... but after Sundance, I knew I wanted to pursue making them. I knew I wanted to be a producer."

Prior to attending Sundance, Song had worked primarily in film financing, with tenures at the international sales agency IM Global and production company Kylin Pictures ("Hacksaw Ridge"). In 2015, Song co-founded the film financing company Vantage Entertainment. As its head of business, she brokered deals between U.S based productions and Chinese-based financiers, including the film "Billionaire Boys Club," starring Ansel Elgort ("Baby Driver").

Hoping to work more closely with directors and writers, she left Vantage to found the production company XS Media in early 2017. Now, she's "making a bigger difference than just putting together $300 million for a slate financing deal," Song said. XS is focused on "making something for the audience and creating a spontaneous, genuine voice for them. Maybe you'll change their lives."

"A Kid Like Jake" and "Nancy" are XS Media's first two films, and "the only two films I did this year," Song said. "I feel incredibly lucky."

"The mission for XS is to make filmmaker driven projects," Song said. "To spend the energy and capital on development and to nurture younger talent — especially writers and directors, for projects with award potential and cross-platform profitability."

Song, who was born and raised in China and is bilingual, said XS projects include English and Chinese-language films and television shows. Joining her at XS is MEIM alumna Julie Zhang, who serves as director of development.

"We're both from China," Song said. "We're developing some Chinese language features with some up-and-coming Chinese directors and writers." One of the features is the Chinese-language feature film "YOYO." Song said she hopes to bring her films to Chinese theaters.

"The cinephile audience in China is growing," Song said. "They're hungry for content."

XS English-language feature films include "The Zero," about a young boy who contracts a mysterious fatal virus, which Song is producing with 2012 MEIM alumnus Jonny Paterson.

"I met Rachel through the MEIM program," Paterson said. "Her drive and passion to be a producer was something that struck me from the first time we met. She was inquisitive yet knowledgeable, and very passionate. She's done a remarkable job in a short period of time to have two films at one of the world's most important film festivals ... I'm excited about what her future holds and think the sky is the limit for her as a film producer."

"A Kid Like Jake"

"A Kid Like Jake" follows a pair of young parents, played by Parsons and Claire Danes (Showtime's "Homeland") as they raise their transgender 4-year-old child in New York City.

"I loved the script immediately," Song said. "It's such a strong and original story. I was the first financier on-board." Directed by transgender director Silas Howard ("Transparent," "This Is Us"), "Jake" also stars Octavia Spencer (Academy Award winner for "The Butler"), and Priyanka Chopra (ABC's "Quantico").

Even though the film's budget is "small," said Song — under $5 million — "the stars are huge." Parson's company "That's Wonderful Productions" purchased the film rights after watching its original incarnation as a play at New York City's Lincoln Center Theater in 2013. The film is Parson's first leading role in a feature film, following a supporting role in 2017 Best Picture nominee "Hidden Figures."

"'A Kid Like Jake' is the first English language film that I produced and was extensively involved in," Song said.

"A Kid Like Jake" will premiere out of competition in the Premieres category, typically reserved for bigger budget films. Though Song and her fellow producers will seek to sell the distribution rights to "A Kid Like Jake" at Sundance, Song has already secured its Chinese distribution rights.

"Nancy"

"Nancy" stars Andrea Riseborough ("Birdman"), Steve Buscemi (HBO's "Boardwalk Empire"), Ann Dowd (Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale") and John Leguizamo. It will compete for Sundance's top honors in the U.S. Dramatic competition. The film follows a woman who grows to believe she was kidnapped as a child and ventures to learn the truth. Nancy, produced in part by female-driven film fund Gamechanger Films, sported an all-female production and creative team.

"When I found out that every single executive producer on Nancy was female, I thought it was important that I get on board," Song said. "I had no idea it would get into the US Dramatic Competition." Song said she has already sat down with several interested distributors.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new dynamic statistical model to visualize changing patterns in networks, including gene expression during developmental periods of the brain.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the model now gives researchers a tool that extends past observing static networks at a single snapshot in time, which is beneficial since network data are usually dynamic. The analysis of network data — or the study of relationships from a large-scale view — is an emerging field of statistics and data science.

"For any dataset with a dynamic component, people can now use this in a powerful way to find communities that persist and change over time," said Kathryn Roeder, the UPMC Professor of Statistics and Life Sciences in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. "This will be very helpful in understanding how certain diseases and disorders progress. For example, we know that certain genes are responsible for autism and can use our model to give us insight into at what point the disorder begins developing."

The model, Persistent Communities by Eigenvector Smoothing (PisCES), combines information across a series of networks, longitudinally, to strengthen the inference for each period. The CMU team used PisCES to follow neural gene expressions from conception through adulthood in rhesus monkey brains to find out what genes work together during different points of development.

"Our visualization method combines two different existing tools: community detection, which is a popular tool for static network data, and sankey plots, which are often used to visualize 'flows' of information. Our visualization organizes the actors of the network into communities that evolve over time and then depicts the evolving community memberships as a series of flows between the communities," said David Choi, assistant professor of statistics and information systems at the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy.

Their analysis revealed the existence of change points as well as periods of persistent gene community structure, including a dynamic community of genes involved in neural projection guidance that was highly active during the mid to late fetal period. This particular community includes many genes associated with risk for autism.

"Essentially our goal was to add 'smoothing' to community detection to eliminate the 'noise,' and we were able to do that," Choi said.

Although the team piloted the model by visualizing the changing patterns in the ways that genes work together, the hope is that the method could be applied to social networks, dynamic diffusion networks in physics and other relational situations.

"The model is really flexible, and we are already starting to use it with fMRI data to understand how regions of the brain interconnect and change over time," said Fuchen Liu, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics and Data Science.

Developing a new dynamic statistical model to follow neural gene expressions over time is one of the many brain research breakthroughs to happen at Carnegie Mellon. CMU has created some of the first cognitive tutors, helped to develop the Jeopardy-winning Watson, founded a groundbreaking doctoral program in neural computation, and is the birthplace of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. Building on its strengths in biology, computer science, psychology, statistics and engineering, CMU launched BrainHub, an initiative that focuses on how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors.

This work was funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health and the Simons Foundation.

A contingent of Carnegie Mellon University faculty, led by Interim President Farnam Jahanian, will attend the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 23-26.

This year's theme, "Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World," aims to rededicate international leaders from across industries and disciplines to develop a shared narrative to improve the world.

"Carnegie Mellon is proud to have participated in global conversations at the World Economic Forum for the past seven years, demonstrating our distinct expertise at the nexus of technology, business and human life," Jahanian said. "I look forward to embracing this year's theme and showcasing the CMU innovators and scholars who are tackling complex challenges and investing in a better future for all."

Among those innovators and scholars are faculty members Rita Singh, Marios Savvides and Jean Yang, who will collaborate for an IdeasLab presentation, "Ultra-Biometrics and Cybersecurity with Carnegie Mellon University."

Singh, an associate research professor in the Machine Learning for Signal Processing Group, will discuss her research, which allows for the pinpointing of people and insights into their biological makeup and surroundings through voice recognition.

Savvides, director of CMU's CyLab Biometrics Center, will share his research in advanced facial recognition technology, including iris detection.

Jean Yang, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science, will share her research in encoding privacy frameworks and how to make them accessible to all. One of the pillars of her research that will be discussed during the IdeasLabs is increasing security.

"Software is running more and more of our lives," Yang said. "It's deciding everything from where we eat to who we date to what disease we get diagnosed with to how it gets treated."

Randy Sargent, senior systems scientist at CMU, will sit on several panels focusing on pollution, biodiversity loss, global inequality, ending modern slavery, and historical trends and emerging geographic patterns behind the world's pressing challenges.

Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor in the Robotics Institute at CMU, will discuss how to meet the needs of all within a growing global trade, geospatial technology, autonomous drones, and how to address global hunger and food security as a panelist at WEF.

Justine Cassell, a professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, will give solo presentations, "Governing Advanced Technologies: Machine Learning" and "Global Tech, Local Solutions: Artificial Intelligence." In "Machine Learning," Cassell will address how machine learning will soon be used everywhere and discuss what first principles should shape its governance. In "Artificial Intelligence," closing the gaps in access to information and smart algorithms will be discussed.

In addition to IdeasLab, Singh, Savvides and Yang will deliver solo presentations throughout the conference. Follow Carnegie Mellon on Twitter for a daily schedule of #CMUatWEF presentations and links to live streams, when available.

Amazon's recognition of Pittsburgh as one of 20 finalists for its second headquarters is a testament to the cutting-edge innovation and world-class research happening in our region. Carnegie Mellon University is proud to be part of this effort to bring Amazon to Pittsburgh by showcasing our exceptional talent, affordable communities and opportunities for the future.

Related:

Amazon Announces Pittsburgh Makes the List

Mor Harchol-Balter

The Association for Computing Machinery has selected Mor Harchol-Balter and Venkatesan Guruswami, both professors in the Computer Science Department, as ACM Fellows in recognition of their major contributions to computer science.

They are among 54 members of the 2017 class of ACM fellows, including MIT's Shafi Goldwasser, a CMU alumna and Turing Award recipient. They join 33 current and former CMU faculty members previously named fellows.

"To be selected as a fellow is to join our most renowned member grade and an elite group that represents less than 1 percent of ACM's overall membership," said ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. "The fellows program allows us to shine a light on landmark contributions to computing, as well as the men and women whose tireless efforts, dedication and inspiration are responsible for groundbreaking work that improves our lives in so many ways."

Venkatesan Guruswami

The ACM cited Guruswami "for contributions to algorithmic coding theory, pseudorandomness and the complexity of approximate optimization." His research spans a number of additional topics in theoretical computer science, including the theory of error-correcting codes, probabilistically checkable proofs, computational complexity theory and algebraic algorithms. He joined the faculty in 2009.

The ACM cited Harchol-Balter "for contributions to performance modeling and analysis of distributed computing systems." Her work on designing new resource allocation policies includes load balancing policies, power management policies and scheduling policies for distributed systems. She is heavily involved in the SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE research community and is the author of a popular textbook, "Performance Analysis and Design of Computer Systems." She joined the faculty in 1999.

ACM will formally recognize its 2017 fellows at its annual awards banquet in San Francisco on June 23, 2018. Additional information about these and previous fellows and the awards event is available at http://awards.acm.org.

A team of American and Russian computer scientists has developed an algorithm that can rapidly search databases to discover novel variants of known antibiotics — a potential boon in fighting antibiotic resistance.

In just a few hours, the algorithm, called VarQuest, identified 10 times more variants of peptidic natural products, or PNPs, than all previous PNP discovery efforts combined, the researchers report in the latest issue of the journal Nature Microbiology. Previously, such a search might have taken hundreds of years of computation, said Hosein Mohimani, assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Computational Biology Department.

"Our results show that the antibiotics produced by microbes are much more diverse than had been assumed," Mohimani said. VarQuest found more than a thousand variants of known antibiotics, he noted, providing a big picture perspective that microbiologists could not obtain while studying one antibiotic at a time.

Mohimani and Pavel A. Pevzner, professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego, designed and directed the effort, which included colleagues at St. Petersburg State University in Russia.

PNPs have an unparalleled track record in pharmacology. Many antimicrobial and anticancer agents are PNPs, including the so-called "antibiotics of last resort," vancomycin and daptomycin. As concerns mount regarding antibiotic drug resistance, finding more effective variants of known antibiotics is a means for preserving the clinical efficacy of antibiotic drugs in general.

The search for these novel variants received a boost in recent years with the advent of high-throughput methods that enable environmental samples to be processed in batches, rather than one at a time. Researchers also recently launched the Global Natural Products Social (GNPS) molecular network, a database of mass spectra of natural products collected by researchers worldwide. Already, the GNPS based at UC San Diego contains more than a billion mass spectra.

The GNPS represents a gold mine for drug discovery, Mohimani said. The VarQuest algorithm, which employs a smarter way of indexing the database to enhance searches, should help GNPS meet its promise, he added.

"Natural product discovery is turning into a Big Data territory, and the field has to get prepared for this transformation in terms of collecting, storing and making sense of Big Data," Mohimani said. "VarQuest is the first step toward digesting the Big Data already collected by the community."

In addition to Pevzner and Mohimani, the research team included Alexey Gurevich, Alla Mikheenko, Alexander Shlemov, Anton Korobeynikov of St. Petersburg State. The U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Russian Science Foundation supported this research.

A team of students from Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy has compiled insights and recommendations for firms about the future of work. Their findings will be shared with global leaders at the 2018 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, Jan. 23-26 in Davos, Switzerland.

CMU experts have led global conversations in Davos, in fields ranging from robotics to artificial intelligence since 2011. This year's theme is "Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World."

"At Heinz College, we are deeply concerned with societal challenges that emerge at the intersection of people, policy and technology," said Ramayya Krishnan, dean of Heinz College. "The future of work has been a major research focus for us. Technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles bring with them both the promise of greater productivity and the challenge of significant social disruption. This project has empowered our students to address that challenge first-hand with an actionable solution."

Automation and the future of work will be major topics at this year's forum. In preparation for the event, forum leaders worked with a team of Heinz College students to create an assessment tool that will allow firms to gauge their organization's readiness for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or 4IR, which Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab said is "characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres."

The students also provide insights and recommendations aimed at helping leaders more fully prepare for 4IR,Those recommendations range from awareness of emerging technologies and upgrading employees' skills to larger changes in corporate culture and the creation of "Innovation Councils."

"Research shows that as much as half of today's work could be fully automated by 2055, and most of Generation Z's jobs don't even exist yet," said project manager Victoria Zuber, a graduate student in public policy and management. "It's not a one-time adjustment where a switch is flipped and suddenly a company is ready. These shifts will be decades in the making, but the response has to start now."

The students created a body of research and insights that they wove together to form the "Seven Principles of Leadership in the Fourth Industrial Revolution." The seven principles are:

Awareness
Organizations with a comprehensive understanding of the opportunities presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead the change.

Organizational Changes
As technologies disrupt businesses, companies must adopt flexible organizational structures that enable digital and augmented workforces.

Continuous Learning
Creating a culture of continuous learning cultivates a workforce with the skills needed for new phases of technology.

Leadership Adaptability
To respond to the demands of change, leaders must adapt their skill sets and attitudes.

Evolving HR Strategy
Human Resources managers are at the forefront of a rapidly evolving employment landscape. They are uniquely positioned to anticipate and prepare for future skills requirements and evolve existing talent management strategies. HR leaders can positively influence their organization's?human capital?pace of adaptation.

Empowered Employees
True employee empowerment is shaped by internal policy adaptation and employee influence in decision-making. Organizations that foster this working environment will have a competitive advantage.

Learning from the Success of Others
Leading companies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution display a commitment to their workers, increased agility, and cultural strength.

The students' assessment tool, a survey based on the famed Capability Maturity Model, will be shared with attendees at Davos. Respondents will receive a readiness score and receive recommendations targeted to their organization's 4IR maturity level. As an added benefit at the conference, respondents will be encouraged to attend specific sessions based on their readiness score.

"The team displayed a level of creativity and analytical thought that is quite rare," said Dominika Anna Merzenich, client-partner representing the forum. "They excelled in producing and delivering this groundbreaking assessment tool, which we are proud to share at the World Economic Forum."

The Capstone Project, titled "Examining the Future of Work," was completed by Brittany Dies, Chinmayee Joshi, Kathryn MacAulay, Claire Souchet-Jacquillat and Zuber . The project was co-advised by Krishnan and Jon Nehlsen, associate dean of Partnerships and Communication Strategy at Heinz College.

"We want our students to leave Heinz College as data-driven decision-makers, working for the public good," Nehlsen said. "I can't think of a better example of putting those learning objectives into action than helping companies understand what skills their employees will need to be active and secure in an ever-evolving labor landscape."

Sarah E. Mendelson has been appointed distinguished service professor of public policy and head of Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy campus in Washington, D.C.

Mendelson joins the Carnegie Mellon community after serving as U.S. ambassador to the Economic and Social Council at the United Nations under President Barack Obama.

"As head of Heinz in D.C. and as a member of the senior management team, Sarah will lead in shaping and executing the strategic vision of the college as it pertains to programs and activities in D.C.," said Ramayya Krishnan, dean of Heinz College. "She will also work closely with our public policy and management students. Her rich set of experiences as a diplomat, scholar, and expert in development and human rights make her the ideal person to help shape these students into the leaders of tomorrow."

Through the Master of Science in Public Policy and Management-D.C. program, Heinz College students spend their first year in Pittsburgh and their second year in the nation's capital, where they work for government, nonprofit and private sector organizations while attending school. In her new role, Mendelson will help these students build professional relationships as they prepare to enter the workforce as data-driven decision-makers.

"I'm very excited to be joining an institution that prioritizes interdisciplinary approaches to timely challenges and opportunities that occur when you mix people, public policy and technological innovation," Mendelson said. "I look forward to exploring new areas around which Heinz and CMU faculty and students have deep expertise, such as data visualization and machine learning, and helping apply these innovations to a range of pressing policy challenges — from inequality and the future of work to refugee flows and better delivery of humanitarian assistance."

Through 2018, Mendelson also will serve as a distinguished fellow at the International Youth Foundation, where she will incubate an initiative called "Cohort 2030" that aims to grow the generation that knows about and demands the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.

"Sarah's work mentoring young people and developing them into global citizens made her a natural fit for our D.C. policy students, who are enthusiastic about using the public sector as a platform to improve the lives of others," said Jackie Speedy, associate dean of the School of Public Policy and Management at Heinz College.

Confirmed by the Senate in October 2015, Mendelson was the lead on international development, human rights and humanitarian affairs at the United States Mission to the UN. There, she oversaw campaigns to pass country-specific resolutions in the General Assembly and to accredit nongovernmental organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, to the UN. She also led efforts to elevate the issue of combating human trafficking and was a senior lead for the President's Summit on Refugees.

A long-time policy entrepreneur, Mendelson has spent over two decades working on development and human rights as a scholar and practitioner, including in Moscow with the National Democratic Institute, on the faculty of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and as senior adviser and inaugural director of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She served four years during the Obama administration as a deputy in the Bureau of Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of over 70 scholarly and public policy publications, Mendelson received her bachelor's degree in history from Yale University and her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has declared the state's congressional map is unconstitutional, thanks in part to expert testimony given by Carnegie Mellon University Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences Wesley Pegden.

Pegden has published a number of studies that use mathematics and computer science to address gerrymandering. His testimony focused on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February 2017, in which Pegden, University Professor of Mathematical Sciences Alan Frieze and the University of Pittsburgh's Maria Chikina used Markov Chains to show there was little chance that the state's congressional districts could have been drawn at random, indicating that it was highly likely the map was biased. The paper was named one of the top 100 science stories of 2017 by Discover Magazine.

"Our analysis of Pennsylvania's map, which is based on a general theorem we proved about detecting outliers using small random changes, demonstrated rigorously that the Congressional map of Pennsylvania exhibited more carefully crafted partisan bias than more than 99.99 percent of possible Congressional districtings of the state," Pegden said.

According to the court's ruling, the current maps will not be able to be used in the May 2018 primaries. Pegden also has come up with a solution for redrawing congressional district maps. He and Associate Professor of Computer Science Ariel Procaccia have mathematically proven that the "I-Cut-You-Choose" method can create a fair districting map.

Pegden's work has been cited in an amicus brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on the Gil v. Witford case about gerrymandering in Wisconsin.

Build18 provides Carnegie Mellon University students with a risk-free environment to pursue personal engineering challenges, limited only by their ingenuity. Originally named after the Electrical and Computer Engineering course prefix, Build18 signifies the start of the spring semester and a chance for students to build for fun.

Some of this year's creations included a motion controlled drone, a virtual quidditch, a wireless phone charger and a smart mirror.

"Build18 is where creativity, curiosity and engineering intersect," said Cyrus Tabrizi, a Build18 co-chair. "It's a chance for every innovator at Carnegie Mellon — every student and faculty member with a passion for invention — to make and break things together in pursuit of new ideas. It is exciting to see what everyone comes up with every year."

Build18 activities and events are funded each year by alumni and corporate sponsors. The festival typically has well-known technology company sponsors, many of whom attend some or all of the Build Week activities. In addition to supporting the festival, some sponsors host Innovation Tech Talks exclusively for Carnegie Mellon students. These seminars allow builders the opportunity to learn how their projects may be adapted in the real world.

The festival started nine years ago out of ECE students' interest to spend time on their own projects for the joy of tinkering, rather than for a grade. Teams are made up of students from school and colleges across Carnegie Mellon.

The intense week of building culminates with Demonstration Day, when teams showcase projects to the public. Visitors can interact with projects, ask questions and enjoy the innovative spirit of the festival.

Immediately following the demonstrations, Build18 concludes with a banquet for builders, sponsors and faculty members to celebrate the achievements from the past week. In an effort to maintain the creative spirit of the event, recent Build18 alumni hold panel discussions focusing on the importance of creativity in the workplace.

Jonathan Francis

Language Technologies Institute students Jonathan Francis and Juncheng (Billy) Li are the inaugural recipients of Bosch SCS Graduate Research Fellowships.

The fellowships were made possible by a gift this fall from the Bosch Group. The fellows' research will strengthen Bosch's capabilities in human-machine interaction (HMI) technologies, and will be performed in close coordination with the Bosch Research and Technology Center's Pittsburgh office.

Francis, an LTI Ph.D. student, has research interests including conversational AI, especially in the context of smart environments, with focuses in multimodal sensing, statistical inference, knowledge representation and decision-making. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees, with honors, from CMU's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is advised by Professor Eric Nyberg.

Li, a master's degree student, has research interests in deep learning, multimedia machine learning, natural language processing and audio/speech processing. He earned a bachelor's degree at Tongji University in Shanghai, China, and a dual master's degree in advanced infrastructure systems and engineering technology innovation and management at CMU. He is advised by Associate Research Professor Florian Metze.

Juncheng (Billy) Li

Bosch Research and Technology Center North America has offices in Palo Alto, Calif.; Cambridge, Mass.; and Pittsburgh. It is part of the global Bosch Group (www.bosch.com) — headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany — with more than 70 billion EUR in revenue, 400,000 employees worldwide, diverse industrial and commercial product portfolios, and a legacy of more than 125 years. It has worked closely with CMU for almost two decades.

The focus of Bosch's global HMI research includes conversational AI, visual computing, audio and language processing, smart wearables and haptics, user experience and human factors. The R&D team develops intuitive, interactive and intelligent solutions that facilitate inspiring collaboration between human and machine for Bosch products and services in such application areas as: autonomous driving; car infotainment and driver assistance systems (ADAS); intelligent and context-aware personal assistance; Industry 4.0 and the internet of things; security systems; smart home and building solutions; health care; and robotics.

Three-, four-, and five-year-olds interact with science kits on knee-high tabletops. A smartboard displays a lesson on "Animals in the Wild," and iPads send children's photos and messages to parents during the school day.

As one of the most sought after preschool programs in Pittsburgh, the Children's School at Carnegie Mellon University, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, has always been a place where children play and learn.

In 1968, Founding Director Ann Baldwin Taylor received a grant from the Esso Foundation, and with administrative support from psychology professor John Sandberg, she established a new laboratory school for young children in the vision of education reformer John Dewey. It became the Children's School.

Instructors taught child development and nutrition to undergraduates in the Margaret Morrison Carnegie College. The Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences placed the school into the Department of Psychology in 1973.

Sharon Carver, a 1986 graduate of the Dietrich College, carried the torch when Taylor retired in 1993 and celebrates her silver anniversary as director this year.

"I was looking for a way to better integrate psychology and education," Carver said.

The school has thrived under only two directors. The 96-student laboratory school facilitates observations and research in a range of disciplines, from early childhood development and educational practices to child-friendly furniture design and more.

The children benefit, too, Carver said. The Children's School set up one of the earliest computer labs with Macintoshes in the early 1980s. In exchange for the lab, Taylor negotiated with the university to provide computer literacy training to the administrative staff.

Today, the Children's School is racially and economically diverse, with only 15 percent of the children from CMU-affiliated households. Some have special needs. One-third of the children attend on a partial or full scholarship.

"Where we have zero diversity is every single one of the parents believes in early childhood education as a priority," Carver said.

The Children's School designs its own curriculum and equips parents to talk at home about lessons. An annual Family Festival in February and the kindergarten graduation in May celebrate the children's learning.

"The needs of the children have not changed all that much over the years, but each year the Children's School makes a greater impact on CMU and the broader community of early childhood development, research and education," Carver said.

Robert Siegler, the Teresa Heinz Professor of Cognitive Psychology, studies development of math skills and has demonstrated a variety of positive effects of playing numerical board games with young children.

"Having the Children's School on campus is an invaluable resource to me for several reasons," Siegler said. "One is that it provides a population of preschoolers with whom to conduct research. Sometimes, the children participate in formal research studies; other times, they participate in pilot studies that allow me to work out the bugs in initial procedures and improve them.

"The children are happy and have a positive attitude toward participating," he added. "Another advantage is that Dr. Carver often provides useful suggestions for research projects conducted at the school."

Three psychology courses led by Carver incorporate Children's School observations and research opportunities. Outside departments partner with the school as well.

Computer science students have conducted usability studies to improve children's products. Projects with the School of Design have led to real-world products created for Crayola and Radio Flyer, among other corporate partners.

"College students do not ordinarily gain much exposure to young children," Carver said. "For CMU students who want a career working with children, whether it is designing computer programs for children, becoming a pediatrician, or designing architectural spaces or products for children, the Children's School is an outstanding resource that provides rich educational experiences."

In 2010, the reach of the school stretched internationally through a partnership and exchange program with Duksung Women's University in Seoul, South Korea. Regionally, the Children's School participates in a consortium of laboratory schools in Oakland. It will co-host the International Association of Laboratory Schools Conference  (IALS) in May.