A shiny new Cadillac with a hidden talent — driving itself; headlights that can direct beams between snowflakes to improve visibility; a snowplow that projects on the windshield a clear-weather image of the terrain ahead, including lane markings and potentially dangerous obstacles; traffic signals that adapt to real-time road congestion; smartphone-based sensors that inspect road conditions.

These technological marvels are more than futuristic imaginings. They're in development at Carnegie Mellon University.

Long at the forefront of employing innovative technologies to address society’s problems, CMU student and faculty researchers are using their talents to solve transportation challenges. They’re bringing together multidisciplinary teams from top-ranked departments across the university, including computer science, engineering, design, business, public policy and information systems.

"We take all these different skills and apply them to real-world problems in transportation. That's the nature of CMU," said Stan Caldwell, executive director of the Traffic21 Institute and Technologies for Safe and Efficient Transportation (T-SET), a U.S. Department of Transportation National University Transportation Center in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania.

These entities house many of the cutting-edge research efforts aimed at solving pressing transportation issues, using Pennsylvania as a test bed for technology deployment.

"When we were building this transportation system over the last 50 years, it was primarily civil engineering-focused," Caldwell continued. "Now, how do we optimize it? How do we look at mobility from a multi-modal, holistic view? You need these multidisciplinary skills to build the smart cities of the future."

Transportation leaders are listening. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx recently visited CMU's National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) in connection with the DOT's Beyond Traffic initiative, a draft framework for the future of the U.S. transportation network.

Foxx sat down with CMU students working at the intersection of technology and transportation for a roundtable discussion covering topics from autonomous vehicles to the role of drones in shipment. While touring the NREC facility, he met with researchers who discussed the above projects and more.

"We are entering into a phase where the technology is becoming much smarter, much more capable of taking on tasks that human beings had previously taken on, all the way to the possibility of driverless vehicles," Foxx said during an address at the event.

"This is a watershed moment in transportation," Foxx said. "You are clearly focused on the future. That's what you're doing every single day here."

Krzysztof Matyjaszewski, the J.C. Warner University Professor of Natural Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, has won the 2015 Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences.

The international prize awarded by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation is given every two years to recognize accomplishments in different areas of chemistry. This year’s prize, which consists of $250,000, a medal and a citation, is being presented for excellence in “Making Molecules and Materials.” Matyjaszewski will receive the award at a ceremony and lecture held at the university’s Pittsburgh campus in the fall.

“Krzysztof Matyjaszewski’s work in polymer chemistry follows in the tradition of Camille and Henry Dreyfus, who were major innovators in their day in making polymer materials. We are proud to recognize his immense accomplishments with the Dreyfus Prize,” said Henry C. Walter, president of the Dreyfus Foundation.

Matyjaszewski is best known for developing atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP), a process cited by the Dreyfus Foundation as being the most important advance in polymer synthesis in half a century.

Matyjaszewski is best known for developing atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP), a process cited by the Dreyfus Foundation as being the most important advance in polymer synthesis in half a century. ATRP allows scientists to precisely control the size and architecture of polymers, which has paved the way for the creation of thousands of new materials, including coatings, adhesives and sealants, and smart materials being investigated for use in the industrial, environmental and biomedical fields.

Matyjaszewski has played a critical role in bringing ATRP to industry for commercial use. Through his ATRP Consortia, he has taught representatives from more than 50 multinational corporations how to incorporate ATRP into the development of new products. As a result, products created using ATRP have a commercial value estimated at more than $20 billion.

“I feel very honored and flattered to receive the Dreyfus Prize for making molecules and materials. This recognition addresses not only contributions of my students and collaborators but also all polymer chemists working in the area of macromolecular materials with controlled architecture and functionality for targeted applications,” Matyjaszewski said.

Born in Poland, Matyjaszewski received his doctorate from the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1976 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Florida in 1977. From 1978 until 1984 he was a research associate at the Polish Academy of Sciences. After spending a year at the University of Paris, Matyjaszewski came to Carnegie Mellon in 1985, and remains an active faculty member. While at Carnegie Mellon, Matyjaszewski founded the Center for Macromolecular Engineering, served as head of the Department of Chemistry from 1994 to 1998, and was named a University Professor in 2004. The title of University Professor is the highest distinction a faculty member can achieve at Carnegie Mellon.

CMU students don't just have big dreams — they make big things happen.

Courtney Williamson (TPR'12, '15), a Tepper School of Business Ph.D. candidate, is determined to improve the quality of life for Parkinson's patients.

"There are 20 million Parkinson's patients worldwide, and western Pennsylvania has the largest percentage per capita," stated Williamson, whose own mother suffered with the disease for 25 years.

"She struggled day to day with simple tasks we all take for granted, including posture and balance, causing trouble with walking, reading and having a conversation at eye level," Williamson explained. "I decided to do something to change that."

She founded AbiliLife, a startup whose first product is a unique, adjustable back brace that restores equilibrium.

Williamson and her fledgling company were given a leg up at CMU by the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship's Project Olympus. It's an opportunity shared by many student and faculty entrepreneurs-in-the-making.

AE Dreams is developing connected toys like Turtle mail to increase hands-on play.

Alysia Finger (TPR'14, A'14) points out that the average American child spends seven hours a day in front of a screen. She and Niko Triulzi (A'10) co-founded AE Dreams, a startup developing connected toys that increase hands-on play. Turtle Mail, their first creation, is a mailbox that prints messages from family and friends.

John Dieser (S'14) and Glenn Philen (E'15) plan to change the future of freight with their startup, Carbon Freight. They're designing lightweight, carbon fiber freight containers to replace the heavy aluminum ones in use for decades. The product would improve fuel efficiency, durability and cost.

"Our mission has always been to bridge the gap between cutting-edge university research/innovations and commercialization."
— Lenore Blum

Srinath Vaddepally (E'13) wants to "help hospitals and senior care communities reduce cost and improve quality of care." His startup RistCall, is developing a wearable call bell. This cleanable, rechargeable device would reduce call time and improve patient safety and clinical workflow.

"When we started in 2007, there were no other student incubators in town," said Lenore Blum, Project Olympus founding director and distinguished career professor of computer science.

"Our mission has always been to bridge the gap between cutting-edge university research/innovations and commercialization," she continued. "And we start this process at the very, very early stages of the value creation chain, as our students and faculty explore the commercial potential of their research and ideas."

Since its founding in the School of Computer Science, Olympus has supported more than 160 student and faculty teams. This has led to the formation of more than 120 companies (two-thirds of these student-led) that have received more than $165 million in follow-on funding.

Notable success stories include DuoLingo, Apple's 2013 app of the year, founded by CAPTCHA creator Luis von Ahn (CS'03, '05) and SolePower, a 2015 SXSW Accelerator finalist that created shoe insoles that generate on-the-go, renewable power for mobile devices.

The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a campus-wide organization that demonstrates the entrepreneurial focus and support of the university's thriving innovation ecosystem.

Debra Lam talks with Eleanor Haglund (DC'16) at the recent Show and Tell event.

The student and alumni teams presented at Project Olympus Show & Tell 19 — an annual event highlighting new developments and fostering connections.

"These are great forums to show-off the incredible interdisciplinary collaborations between our students and faculty," said Dave Mawhinney, co-founder/director of the CIE and associate teaching professor of entrepreneurship. "Designers, engineers and business people come together to innovate and create new value in the form of products and companies."

"I am so impressed with the caliber of the professors and student entrepreneurs here," added Debra Lam, the Pittsburgh Mayor's Office chief innovation officer and guest speaker. "It reminds me from a city perspective how lucky we are to have CMU right in our backyard. There are wonderful activities going on. It's a tremendous asset."

Related Links:

• More Olympus Success Stories
• LaunchCMU Event in Silicon Valley 

A pair of Carnegie Mellon researchers have made a key discovery about amino acids, the most basic building blocks of life. For centuries, scientists have been perplexed by the fact that amino acids in living organisms exist exclusively in only one of two possible forms, or “enantiomers.” The researchers’ findings on how this may have come about in nature could also lead to the production of better pharmaceuticals, and were published in this week’s edition of Nature Chemistry.

“Pharmaceuticals are a 300 billion dollar industry, and rely on the ability to make one enantiomer in a drug, not a mixture of both,” said Andrew Gellman, the principle investigator of the study from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. “If you make a drug that has both enantiomers and ingest it, one of them might be therapeutic, but the other probably isn’t. In fact it could be highly toxic.”

Enantiomers, commonly termed “left-” or “right-handed,” are molecules that are mirror images of each other, but they are not exact replicas and thus take on different properties when ingested by people or living organisms. When amino acids or pharmaceuticals are synthesized in laboratories, both enantiomers are produced and it is exceedingly difficult to separate the two.

But in this study, researchers were able to successfully produce a highly-purified mixture of “left-handed” enantiomers by reacting a gas consisting of slightly more “left-handed” enantiomers than “right-handed” ones with the surface of a piece of copper. This small initial imbalance was amplified after interacting with the copper surface, in spite of the fact that this copper surface is not “handed.”

“You could do this in a distillation-like process to make a substance more and more exclusively one-handed,” Gellman said. “This could be very useful for the pharmaceutical industry. But it also helps explain how the ‘primordial soup’ in which life began went in the direction of one-handedness.”

By Sherry Stokes / 412-268-5976 / stokes@cmu.edu

Top Parental Controls

1. Control to set speed limit, curfew time and number of passengers (84 percent)
2. Control feature to limit the geographic range the car will travel (61 percent)
3. Parent text display to communicate with driver (60 percent)

Roughly 84 percent all respondents wanted to control: a car’s speed, the number of friends who can pile into the car and the driver’s curfew time. Women (87 percent) were strongly in support of this capability, as were 91percent of people aged 66 to 70. Even 81 percent of the youngest polled, ages 18-24, favored these novel features.

Implementing these types of control technologies could save lives, prevent injuries and reduce costs associated with accidents.  In 2013, 2,524 teenagers perished in motor vehicles crashes, making vehicle accidents the leading cause of death for teenagers. Compared to older drivers and miles driven, teen drivers are three times more likely to be in a fatal wreck. Young, inexperienced drivers tend to speed and drive too fast for road conditions. Further, teens are more likely to crash when they have teen passengers in the car.

When it comes to curtailing the distance teen drivers can travel, men (62 percent) and women (61percent) closely align on this point. This notion, however, did not resonate well with 18- to 24-year-olds. Only 54 percent of them opted for this feature, whereas nearly 65 percent of drivers aged 36 to 45 would constrain a car’s geographic range.

The one area where 18- to 24-year-olds outscored all other age groups was in their receptiveness to having a parental text display in the car. Surprisingly, 69 percent of the youngest respondents thought this was useful while only 53 percent of people aged 56 to 65 would consider this option. Women (63 percent) tended to be more receptive than men (57 percent) to this communication feature.

Countless research and self-help books claim that having more sex will lead to increased happiness, based on the common finding that those having more sex are also happier. However, there are many reasons why one might observe this positive relationship between sex and happiness. Being happy in the first place, for example, might lead someone to have more sex (what researchers call 'reverse causality'), or being healthy might result in being both happier and having more sex.

In the first study to examine the causal connection between sexual frequency and happiness, Carnegie Mellon University researchers experimentally assigned some couples to have more sex than others, and observed both group's happiness over a three month period. In a paper published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, they report that simply having more sex did not make couples happier, in part because the increased frequency led to a decline in wanting for and enjoyment of sex.

One hundred and twenty eight healthy individuals between the ages of 35–65 who were in married male-female couples participated in the research. The researchers randomly assigned the couples to one of two groups. The first group received no instructions on sexual frequency. The second group was asked to double their weekly sexual intercourse frequency.

Each member of the participating couples completed three different types of surveys. At the beginning of the study, they answered questions to establish baselines. Daily during the experimental period, the participants answered questions online to measure health behaviors, happiness levels and the occurrence, type and enjoyableness of sex. The exit survey analyzed whether baseline levels changed over the three-month period.

The couples instructed to increase sexual frequency did have more sex. However, it did not lead to increased, but instead to a small decrease, in happiness. Looking further, the researchers found that couples instructed to have more sex reported lower sexual desire and a decrease in sexual enjoyment. It wasn't that actually having more sex led to decreased wanting and liking for sex. Instead, it seemed to be just the fact that they were asked to do it, rather than initiating on their own. 

"Perhaps couples changed the story they told themselves about why they were having sex, from an activity voluntarily engaged in to one that was part of a research study. If we ran the study again, and could afford to do it, we would try to encourage subjects into initiating more sex in ways that put them in a sexy frame of mind, perhaps with babysitting, hotel rooms or Egyptian sheets, rather than directing them to do so," said George Loewenstein, the study's lead investigator and the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Despite the study's results, Loewenstein continues to believe that most couples have too little sex for their own good, and thinks that increasing sexual frequency in the right ways can be beneficial.

One of the study's designers, Tamar Krishnamurti, suggested that the study's findings may actually help couples to improve their sex lives and their happiness.

"The desire to have sex decreases much more quickly than the enjoyment of sex once it's been initiated. Instead of focusing on increasing sexual frequency to the levels they experienced at the beginning of a relationship, couples may want to work on creating an environment that sparks their desire and makes the sex that they do have even more fun," said Krishnamurti, a research scientist in CMU's Department of Engineering and Public Policy.

In addition to Loewenstein and Krishnamurti, the research team included Jessica Kopsic and Daniel McDonald.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health funded this research.

Read the study at www.sciencedirect.com/.

Four of the world's best players of Heads-up No-limit Texas Hold'em amassed more poker chips than the Carnegie Mellon University artificial intelligence program called Claudico as they collectively played 80,000 hands of poker in a two-week competition that concluded today at Rivers Casino.

Though three of the four pros had higher winnings than Claudico, their $732,713 collective lead over the A.I. program was not quite large enough to attain statistical significance — in other words, the results can't be accepted as scientifically reliable. In all, $170 million was "bet" during the two-week "Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence" exhibition. So despite the apparent lead by the humans, the competition ended in a statistical tie.

"We knew Claudico was the strongest computer poker program in the world, but we had no idea before this competition how it would fare against four Top 10 poker players," said Tuomas Sandholm, the CMU professor of computer science who directed development of Claudico.

The Poker Pros (l-r): Bjorn Li, Doug Polk, Dong Kim and Jason Les.

"It would have been no shame for Claudico to lose to a set of such talented pros, so even pulling off a statistical tie with them is a tremendous achievement."

In the final chip tally, Bjorn Li had an individual chip total of $529,033, Doug Polk had $213,671 and Dong Kim had $70,491. Jason Les trailed Claudico by $80,482. Each of the players is ranked among the world's top 10 professionals in Heads-up (two-player) No-limit Texas Hold'em.

"We know theoretically that artificial intelligence is going to overtake us one day," Li said. "But at the end of the day, the most important thing is that the humans remain on top for now," even though scientists don't consider the results statistically significant.

Claudico played 20,000 hands with each pro in the two-player game. No actual wagering took place during the exhibition, though the pros will receive appearance fees based on their performance from a prize purse of $100,000 donated by Rivers Casino and Microsoft Research.

"Thanks to the online stream, the pros had fans rooting for them from all over the world throughout the challenge, in addition to the local players visiting our gaming floor," said Craig Clark, general manager of Rivers Casino. "It's been very exciting to see this unfold over the last two weeks, and it was a pleasure to partner with Carnegie Mellon University and host these outstanding players."

Poker has become a major test of artificial intelligence, Sandholm explained, because it is an incomplete information game. Players don't know what cards their opponents hold and all players try to mislead their opponents by bluffing, slow play and other devices.

"Beating humans isn't really our goal; it's just a milestone along the way," Sandholm said. "What we want to do is create an artificial intelligence that can help humans negotiate or make decisions in situations where they can't know all of the facts."

Claudico's strategy was created using algorithms rather than trying to program in human poker expertise. The algorithms ran on the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Blacklight computer with just the rules of poker as input. The same sort of algorithms could also be used to create strategies for applications involving cybersecurity, business transactions and medicine. For instance, an AI similar to Claudico might help doctors develop sequential treatment plans for a patient, or design drugs that are less prone to resistance. Or, such an AI might help people negotiate their best deal when purchasing a house or a car.

An earlier version of the computer program, called Tartanian7, decisively won the Heads-up No-limit Texas Hold'em category against each opponent with statistical significance of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Annual Computer Poker Competition last July. The poker pros had a chance to observe Tartanian7's play prior to this spring's competition.

"The advances made in Claudico over Tartanian7 in just eight months were huge," Les said, a rate of improvement that suggests the AI might need only another year before it clearly plays better than the pros.

As it stands, Claudico is a good, but not top-notch player, Polk said.

"There are spots where it plays well and others where I just don't understand it," he added. Some of its bets, for instance, were highly unusual, in Polk's estimation. Where a human might place a bet worth half or three-quarters of the pot, Claudico would sometimes bet a miserly 10 percent or an over-the-top 1,000 percent. "Betting $19,000 to win a $700 pot just isn't something that a person would do," he observed.

But Claudico is a supremely cool player. Losing a large bet might rattle a person, changing the way subsequent hands are played. But Claudico never showed signs of being fazed, Polk said.

If Claudico's game play sometimes left the pros baffled, the computer science team, including Ph.D. students Noam Brown and Sam Ganzfried, were often equally puzzled. Claudico sets its own strategy, Brown noted, and that strategy occupies about two terabytes of data — far more than the CMU team could analyze.

The Blacklight computer was used throughout the event to compute a better and better approximation of game-theory-optimal strategy. The work with Blacklight was supported in part by an allocation from XSEDE, the National Science Foundation's network of supercomputing resources.   

Sandholm expressed confidence that AI will soon be able to clearly exceed the play of top professionals, noting that he and his team already have ideas for improving the algorithms at the heart of the program. Plus, they now have 80,000 hands of data on how top professionals play the game — data the scientists can use to train, test and perfect the successors to Claudico.

The work continues Carnegie Mellon's pioneering research in artificial intelligence, which dates back to the first AI program in 1956 and includes the establishment of the world's first Machine Learning Department. CMU faculty members are among the world's leading scientists in computational game theory, market design, natural language processing, computer vision, speech translation, thought identification and collaboration among intelligent agents. CMU laid the groundwork for computer chess programs that ultimately defeated Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997 and made significant contributions to the Watson program that defeated Jeopardy! champions in 2011.

The site of the Brains Vs. AI competition, Pittsburgh's Rivers Casino, opened in 2009 and has been named "Best Overall Gaming Resort in Pennsylvania" for five consecutive years by Casino Player Magazine.

Carnegie Mellon University chemists, led by Mark Bier, have separated and weighed virus particles using mass spectrometry (MS). This is the first time that researchers successfully used matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization MS to analyze a mixture of intact virus particles.

Structure of the icosahedral Cowpea mosaic virus, credit: Thomas Splettstoesser (www.scistyle.com)

Bier, research professor of chemistry and director of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Molecular Analysis, and graduate student Logan Plath will present their findings in a poster session at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics today, June 2, in St Louis.

“It is important to study virus particles because they are everywhere on our Earth and in enormous numbers. They are not all bad for humans and, in fact, it could be said that bacteriophages are essential for life as we know it,” Bier said. “We need to understand the good from the bad to better understand nature and how we can best take advantage of these molecular forms.”

Mass spectrometers separate ionized molecules based on their mass-to-charge ratio. One limitation of mass spectrometry is in the analysis of macromolecules. Most instruments are unable to efficiently detect such large molecules at low charge states or must resort to creating high charge states that require high-resolution mass analysis. As a result, most researchers don’t analyze whole macromolecules. Instead, they break down macromolecules into smaller parts in wet chemistry laboratories and analyze the subunits. While effective, this wet lab process can be time consuming and doesn’t allow researchers to study intact macromolecules directly in the gas phase.

“It is important to study virus particles because they are everywhere on our Earth and in enormous numbers. They are not all bad for humans and, in fact, it could be said that bacteriophages are essential for life as we know it.”
—Mark Bier

Because of their size, which can be more than a million times larger than a water molecule, viruses are one type of molecular complex that has seen only limited study by scientists using mass spectrometry. To overcome the high mass limitations, Bier’s group uses a cryodetector-based matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time of flight mass spectrometer, called a Macromizer, that has 16 superconducting tunnel junction detectors. The 3.75 meter-long apparatus can analyze low charge heavy ions with a significantly higher signal than mass spectrometers with standard ionizing detectors. Carnegie Mellon is home to the only known active cryodetector mass spectrometer research lab in the U.S. and Bier’s group also is developing the next generation cryodetector mass spectrometer.

Using samples of cowpea mosaic virus gathered and purified by the lab of Case Western Reserve University’s Nicole Steinmetz, Bier’s team used mass spectrometry to weigh and separate a mixture of two variants of the virus. One contained RNA1 and weighed 5.65 megadaltons; the second contained RNA2 and weighed 4.84 megadaltons. These weights were close to the theoretical weights that had been proposed for the virus particles.

Bier hopes that the technique, which he calls a form of “heavy ion mass spectrometry,” can be used to analyze and study other viruses, and will be helpful in understanding the robustness of viral structure, the mechanics behind viral infection and provide new ways of virus detection and treatment. He also plans to continue to use the technique to study other types of heavy ions.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

A single dose of an FDA-approved intravenous nutrition source may be able to significantly reduce the toxicity and increase the bio-availability of platinum-based cancer drugs, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon University biologists published in Scientific Reports.

Platinum-based drugs, including cisplatin, carboplatin and oxyplatin, have been used to treat cancer for more than 35 years. While they remain among the most prescribed and most potent chemotherapy drugs, they also cause serious side effects, including kidney damage.

Many of the side effects of these drugs occur when the drug settles in healthy tissue. To deliver these drugs in a more targeted way, researchers have created nanoscale delivery systems engineered to make the drug reach and accumulate at the tumor site. However, tests of these nanodrugs show that only between 1 and 10 percent of the drugs are delivered to the tumor site, with the majority of the remainder being diverted to the liver and spleen.

“The body’s immune system, especially the liver and spleen, has been one of the biggest stumbling blocks in developing nanoscale chemotherapy drug delivery systems,” said Chien Ho, the Alumni Professor of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon. “When the drugs collect in those organs, they become less available to treat the cancer, and can also cause toxicity.”

In the past few years, Ho and his colleagues were developing cellular nanotags to help detect organ rejection, when Ho noticed that Intralipid, a fat emulsion that is FDA-approved for use as an intravenous nutrition source, reduced the amount of nanoparticles that were being cleared by the liver and spleen by about 50 percent. As a result, the nanoparticles remained in the blood stream for longer periods of time.

Ho and his colleagues decided to see if Intralipid had the same effect on platinum-based anti-cancer nanodrugs. In the newly published study, the researchers administered a single, clinical dose of Intralipid to a an animal model. One hour later, they administered a dose of a platinum-based chemotherapy drug that had been incorporated into a nanoparticle.

Twenty-four hours after the drug was administered, the researchers found that pre-treatment with Intralipid reduced the accumulation of the platinum-based drug by 20.4 percent in the liver, 42.5 percent in the spleen and 31.2 percent in the kidney. Consequently, in these organs, the toxic side effects of the nanodrug decreased significantly. Furthermore, the researchers found that Intralipid pre-treatment allowed more of the drug to remain available and active in the body for longer periods of time. After five hours, availability of the drug was increased by 18.7 percent, and after 24 hours it was increased by 9.4 percent. The researchers believe that this increased availability will allow more of the drug to reach the tumor site, and could perhaps also allow clinicians to reduce the dosage needed to treat a patient.

The researchers are currently investigating the possibility of bringing this research to a clinical trial.

Additional authors include Li Liu and Qing Ye of Carnegie Mellon; Maggie Lu, Ya-Chin Lo, Yuan-Hun Hsu, Ming-Cheng Wei, Yu-Hsiang Chen, Shen-Chuan Lo and Shian-Jy Wang of the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan; and Daniel J. Bain of the University of Pittsburgh. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (P41EB-001977) and Carnegie Mellon’s Disruptive Health Technology Institute.

Broadway's biggest night is nearly here.

The 2015 Tony Awards, which will be hosted by Kristin Chenoweth and Alan Cumming, will be broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall in New York City, on Sunday, June 7 (8-11 p.m. EDT/PT time delay) on the CBS Television Network.

Alumnus Christian Borle (A'95) has been nominated for best performance by a featured actor in a musical for "Something Rotten!" and Stephen Schwartz (A'68) has been named this year's recipient of the Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award, which is presented annually to a member of the theatre community who has made a substantial contribution of volunteered time and effort on behalf of one or more humanitarian, social service or charitable organizations.

Borle along with two other CMU alumni will be a part of the live performances during the awards show. Corey Cott (A'12), the male lead of "Gigi," will be singing as will Michelle Veintimilla (A'14), who plays the young Chita Rivera in "The Visit."

Award presenters for the night include Sutton Foster (A'93-'94), Joe Manganiello (A'00) and Judith Light (A'70).

In addition, the Tony Awards in partnership with CMU will announce the recipient of the inaugural "Excellence in Theatre Education Award." The award is the first, national recognition program to honor K-12 theatre educators.

There were more than 4,000 applications for this year's educator award, with nominees from across the country. The annual award recognizes theatre educators in the U.S. who demonstrate monumental impact on the lives of students and who embody the highest standards of the profession. A panel of judges comprising representatives of the American Theatre Wing, The Broadway League, Carnegie Mellon and other leaders from the theatre industry selected the finalists and winner. Light, a Tony Award-winning actress, and CMU School of Drama Head Peter Cooke were two of the six who served on the judging panel.

CMU is the first, exclusive higher education partner of the Tony Awards. Carnegie Mellon's School of Drama is the oldest drama degree-granting program in the United States and celebrated its centennial in 2014. Recognized as an international leader in the arts and technology, CMU's Drama School consistently ranks as one of the world's best and has produced hundreds of Tony nominees and its alumni have won 40 awards to date.


Related:

• Carnegie Mellon Congratulates Borle, Schwartz on Tony Awards Recognition
• CMU & The Tonys
• The Tony Awards

Corey Mitchell, theater arts teacher at the Northwest School of the Arts in Charlotte, N.C., is the winner of the inaugural Exellence in Theatre Education Award.

This special honor recognizes a K-12 theatre educator in the U.S. who has demonstrated monumental impact on the lives of students and who embodies the highest standards of the profession. More than 4,000 nominations were received from across the United States for the 2015 Excellence in Theatre Education Award.

“The submissions for these educators by their students and colleagues were extremely moving, and the lasting impact they have made was made very evident by the videos and stories they shared. We are extremely honored to have this opportunity to recognize their outstanding work in this manner and are thrilled to have them join us on Sunday evening at the Tony Awards,” said Charlotte St. Martin, president of The Broadway League, and Heather Hitchens, president of the American Theatre Wing.

A panel of judges comprising representatives of the American Theatre Wing, The Broadway League, Carnegie Mellon and other leaders from the theatre industry selected Mitchell as the winner and Hicken and Adams as the runners-up. Mitchell will receive the Excellence in Theatre Education Award at Radio City Music Hall during the 69th Annual Tony Awards telecast on CBS at 8 p.m. EDT, Sunday, June 7.

Mitchell is proudest of the love for the stage he instilled in thousands of young artists over the years.

“In light of CMU’s rich history of producing Tony Award-winning talent, Carnegie Mellon is proud to partner with the Tonys in celebrating arts education with this first-ever honor for theatre teachers,” said Carnegie Mellon President Subra Suresh. “The importance of arts education and its impact on the human condition cannot be overstated.”

Reared in rural North Carolina and educated at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Mitchell is now completing 20 years in the classroom and his 14th year at Northwest School of the Arts in Charlotte. He teaches acting and leads a dynamic musical theatre program. His musical theatre history final exams have become legendary, and his love for Uta Hagen is unparalleled. 

Mitchell does not shy away from material that challenges his students, the audience or his own skills. Some of the most notable of his 70-plus productions include “For Colored Girls,” “Pippin,” “Edges,” “Aida,” “Rent” and “Hair.” During his career, Mitchell has garnered recognition as a director, performer and teacher. He was named the North Carolina Outstanding Theatre Arts Educator in 2007.

In addition to his work at Northwest, Mitchell is involved as a director and actor with the Charlotte-area theatre community and is a strong advocate for arts education through his work on the board of directors for the North Carolina Theatre Conference.

Additionally, Mitchell, his colleagues and his students are the subject of the 2015 feature-length documentary “Purple Dreams.” The film chronicles the journey of Northwest's production of “The Color Purple” and its journey to the main stage of the International Thespian Festival. With past and present students performing, writing and composing for community, university and regional theatre, as well as theme parks, the West End and even Broadway, Mitchell is proudest of the love for the stage he instilled in thousands of young artists over the years.

Adams received her bachelor's degree in theatre arts from the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She has directed many mainstage productions for Grandstreet, most recently “The 25th Annual Putnam Co. Spelling Bee,” “Big River,” “Ragtime,” “Annie,” “Peter Pan,” “Into the Woods,” “Oliver” and “Songs for a New World.” She teaches acting classes for the Theatre School, and also has worked as a mentor and artist-in-residence in the Helena Public Schools and surrounding areas.

Hicken has directed “Red,” “Heroes,” “Fifty Words,” “Shooting Star,” “Our Town,” “I Am My Own Wife,” “The Turn of the Screw,” “Betrayal,” “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Jacques Brel,” “My Children! My Africa!,” “Watch On The Rhine,” “The Road To Mecca” and “The Lion in Winter” for Everyman Theatre. He also has directed at The Berkshire Theatre Festival, The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, The Kenyon Festival Theatre, Round House Theatre, Rep Stage and Pennsylvania Stage Company. For his production of “The Glass Menagerie” (a co-production of Everyman Theatre and Round House Theatre), he created and directed “Steps in Time: Scenes from 1840 Baltimore” for the Baltimore City Life Museums.

Hicken founded The Center Stage Conservatory, The Actors’ Conservatory and has taught master classes at The Berkshire Theatre Festival, where he developed “Fog People,” a celebration of the Eugene O’Neill centenary. He has been department head of theatre at the Baltimore School for the Arts since 1979, where his productions include “Romeo and Juliet,” “Lysistrata,” “The Rimers of Eldridge,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Marat/Sade,” “Curse of the Starving Class,” “Yerma,” “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” “The Lady From Maxim’s,” his own adaptation of “The Wind in the Willows,” “A Chekov Sampler,” “Ionescorama” (an evening of one-act plays by Eugene Ionesco), the world premiere of “Chalk” by Al Letson (co-commissioned with the Baltimore Theatre Project) and “Our Town.”

From January through March 31, 2015, submissions were accepted online for K-12 theatre educators for the inaugural Excellence in Theatre Education Award. Anyone — from students and school administrators, to friends, neighbors and family — was invited to submit a worthy teacher for consideration. Submissions were accepted for current teachers at an accredited K-12 institution or recognized community theatre organization anywhere in the United States whose position is dedicated to and/or includes aspects of theatre education. 

Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama is the oldest drama degree-granting program in the United States and celebrated its centennial in 2014. In the past century, CMU has produced hundreds of Tony nominees, and its alumni have won 40 awards to date. During last year’s live Tony Awards telecast, CMU alumni Zachary Quinto (A'99) and Matt Bomer (A'00) announced the educator award initiative.

###

Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering have concluded that switching from petroleum-based fuels to natural gas-based fuels offers very little to no potential for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction in heavy-duty vehicles like buses and tractor trailers.

The results, which were recently published in Environmental Science & Technology, could act as a key influencer in environmental policy debates on using natural gas for transportation.

The low cost of shale gas has sparked a growing interest in the topic of natural gas-based fuels and an overarching assumption that this fuel source is cleaner.

“There is a lot of interest in how natural gas-based fuels should be used in vehicles, especially heavy-duty vehicles, to reduce emissions,” said Paulina Jaramillo, assistant professor of engineering and public policy (EPP) and co-author of the paper. “Natural gas may not help us reach this goal. It is worth rethinking if we are going to indeed use natural gas-based fuels or if we instead need to focus on electrification.”

Jaramillo and her co-authors, EPP Ph.D. student and lead author Fan Tong and EPP Associate Professor Inês Azevedo, performed a comparison of natural gas-based fuels in medium and heavy-duty vehicles using five different types of vehicle engines. They specifically focused on estimating the emissions of three greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

“While natural gas could be used in transportation in many ways, ranging from compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG) to using natural gas to produce electricity, we find that different natural gas-based pathways have different consequences in terms of greenhouse gas emissions,” Tong said. “While using natural gas-based fuels (electricity and hydrogen) in electric vehicles could reduce GHG emissions, other current technologies that use natural gas-derived fuels do not offer any significant opportunities for large emission reduction in heavy-duty vehicles.”

Although the study focused on greenhouse gas emissions, it recognizes that there are other potential environmental benefits to using natural gas for road transportation. In order to further explore these benefits, the authors plan to look at the potential benefits of reducing air pollutants.

The paper, the first study to include all viable pathways for natural gas as a fuel, lays the groundwork for further discussion on how natural gas-based fuels should be used in vehicles.

“Emission reductions could be higher if there are significant improvements in process and increased vehicle efficiencies,” Azevedo said.

Read “A Comparison of Life Cycle Greenhouse Gases from Natural Gas Pathways for Medium and Heavy-Duty Vehicles.”

CHIMP successfully drove and exited a car, one of the eight tasks it performed.

CHIMP, a four-limbed robot designed and built by Carnegie Mellon University’s Tartan Rescue Team, finished third and won $500,000 Saturday (June 6) at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), a two-day event that pitted 24 of the world’s most advanced robots against each other in a test of their ability to respond to disasters.

During its best run on Friday, the robot engaged the enthusiastic audience as it overcame several mishaps and missteps to complete all eight of the possible tasks in 55 minutes, 15 seconds — good enough to put the team in first place on the first day of competition.

But that time was surpassed on Saturday, when the winning team from KAIST in South Korea recorded a winning time of 44 minutes, 28 seconds on the eight tasks. The second-place finisher, Team IHMC Robotics from the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, Fla., completed eight tasks in 50 minutes, 26 seconds. The top prize was $2 million.

“It was an incredible experience,” said Tony Stentz, the team leader and a CMU research professor of robotics. “I think it was best exemplified on the first day, when we had trouble at several points in the course — problems we never saw before. But our team operating the robot kept their cool. They managed to get CHIMP to recover and complete all of the tasks. It says a lot about the robot and a lot about the people. It means there’s great promise for this technology.”

Carnegie Mellon also participated on a second team, Team WPI-CMU, with Worcester Polytechnic Institute. That team’s robot, Warner, finished in 7th place, completing seven tasks in just over 56 minutes.

The Tartan Rescue Team received $500,000 during the awards ceremony.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored the event to spur development of robots capable of responding to manmade and natural disasters, such as the Fukushima nuclear power plant crisis of 2011. The robots were to perform human-like activities in environments too dangerous for humans.

The robots were given an hour to complete eight tasks on courses assembled in front of the grandstands at the Fairplex in Pomona. The robots were given two attempts, one on Friday and one on Saturday. Scoring was based on the number of tasks completed, with elapsed time the deciding factor for ties.

CHIMP’s first run on Friday was remarkable both because it placed the robot in first place following the first day of competition and because the team was able to recover from several significant setbacks. Those included an improbable fall that sent the usually stable robot sprawling during a door-opening task. The crowd roared as CHIMP regained its feet — the only robot of the many that fell during the competition that was able to get back on its feet unassisted.

“It was an incredible experience. It means there’s great promise for this technology.” — Tony Stentz

Despite the fall and other setbacks, CHIMP completed all eight tasks — driving and exiting a car, opening a door, closing a valve, using a power tool to cut a hole in a wall, clearing debris, turning off a switch and climbing stairs during its allotted time. In its second run on Saturday, the robot avoided any major missteps, but failed to complete several tasks before time ran out.

CHIMP, the CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform, was designed and built for the competition by the National Robotics Engineering Center, which is part of CMU’s Robotics Institute. Many DRC competitors, including the two top winners, were humanoid, walking robots. But NREC designed CHIMP to be statically stable and to roll on tank-like treads on each of its limbs, minimizing the risk of falls.

The robot is roughly the size of a human, an inch short of 5 feet when it’s standing and almost 3 feet when it’s crawling. It weighs 443 pounds. CHIMP’s arms are 4.3 feet long — long enough to reach the ground, which is useful and gives the robot a simian-like stance. It can operate for 90 minutes or more with its battery pack. It can move on all fours or can stand upright.

About 60 people contributed to the Tartan Rescue Team, though about a dozen worked on the project full-time. The team has a number of sponsors, including Amazon, Foxconn and Carnegie Robotics. See the complete list of sponsors.

The NREC performs advanced research and prototype development for a variety of government and industrial clients.

The Tartan Rescue team was presented with a third-place prize of $500,000.

The robots were given an hour to complete eight tasks on courses assembled in front of the grandstands at the Fairplex in Pomona. The robots were given two attempts, one on Friday and one on Saturday. Scoring was based on the number of tasks completed, with elapsed time the deciding factor for ties.

CHIMP’s first run on Friday was remarkable both because it placed the robot in first place following the first day of competition and because the team was able to recover from several significant setbacks. Those included an improbable fall that sent the usually stable robot sprawling during a door-opening task. The crowd roared as CHIMP regained its feet — the only robot of the many that fell during the competition that was able to get back on its feet unassisted.

Despite the fall and other setbacks, CHIMP completed all eight tasks — driving and exiting a car, opening a door, closing a valve, using a power tool to cut a hole in a wall, clearing debris, turning off a switch and climbing stairs during its allotted time.
In its second run on Saturday, the robot avoided any major missteps, but failed to complete several tasks before time ran out.

CHIMP, the CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform, was designed and built for the competition by the National Robotics Engineering Center, which is part of CMU’s Robotics Institute. Many DRC competitors, including the two top winners, were humanoid, walking robots. But NREC designed CHIMP to be statically stable and to roll on tank-like treads on each of its limbs, minimizing the risk of falls.

The robot is roughly the size of a human, an inch short of 5 feet when it’s standing and almost 3 feet when it’s crawling. It weighs 443 pounds. CHIMP’s arms are 4.3 feet long — long enough to reach the ground, which is useful and gives the robot a simian-like stance. It can operate for 90 minutes or more with its battery pack. It can move on all fours or can stand upright.

About 60 people contributed to the Tartan Rescue Team, though about a dozen worked on the project full-time. The team has a number of sponsors, including Amazon, Foxconn and Carnegie Robotics. See the complete list of sponsors and other information about the team.

Christian Borle accepts the Tony for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical for "Something Rotten!"

Carnegie Mellon University alumnus Christian Borle (A’95) received a Tony Award on Sunday night at Radio City Music Hall, increasing the number of Tonys received by Carnegie Mellon alumni to 41.

Borle received the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical for “Something Rotten!” It marks his second Tony win, following his Tony Award in 2012 for “Peter and the Starcatcher.” He was also nominated for a Tony Award for his role as Emmet Forrest in 2007’s “Legally Blonde.”

He has numerous film and TV credits to his name, most notably his role in the NBC musical television program “Smash,” and his roles in the NBC live productions of “The Sound of Music” and “Peter Pan.”

“This is terrific recognition for Christian's hard work and dedication to his role in ‘Something Rotten.’ It is just one of his many truly transformational and remarkable performances in film, television and on stage,” said Dan Martin, dean of CMU’s College of Fine Arts. “We are very proud of Christian as a CMU alumnus. He is an exemplary graduate and deserves this recognition.”

“We are very proud of Christian as a CMU alumnus. He is an exemplary graduate and deserves this recognition.” — Dan Martin

During the broadcast on CBS, Carnegie Mellon and the Tony Awards announced Corey Mitchell, theater arts teacher at the Northwest School of the Arts in Charlotte, N.C., as the winner of the inaugural Excellence in Theatre Education Award. He was recognized during the show by another CMU alumnus, Joe Manganiello (A’04), who introduced Mitchell from the audience. The award is the first, national recognition program to honor kindergarten through high-school (K-12) theatre educators who demonstrate a monumental impact on the lives of students and who embody the highest standards of the profession. More than 4,000 nominations were received from across the United States for the award.

Reared in rural North Carolina and educated at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Mitchell is now completing 20 years in the classroom and his 14th year at Northwest School of the Arts in Charlotte. He teaches acting and leads a dynamic musical theatre program.

Mitchell does not shy away from material that challenges his students, the audience or his own skills. Some of the most notable of his 70-plus productions include “For Colored Girls,” “Pippin,” “Edges,” “Aida,” “Rent” and “Hair.” During his career, Mitchell has garnered recognition as a director, performer and teacher. He was named the North Carolina Outstanding Theatre Arts Educator in 2007.

The Tony Awards also recognized CMU alumnus Stephen Schwartz (A’68), who was named this year’s recipient for the Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award. Schwartz is best known for his music and lyrics for such shows as Godspell, Pippin and Wicked. The Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award is presented annually to a member of the theatre community who has made a substantial contribution of volunteered time and effort on behalf of one or more humanitarian, social service or charitable organizations.

CMU’s School of Drama is the oldest drama degree-granting program in the United States. Recognized as an international leader in the arts and technology, CMU’s drama school consistently ranks as one of the world’s best and has produced hundreds of Tony nominees.

The Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space is the veritable Olympics of theater. You might say the SXSW for scenographers, costumers and technicians, who create spectacle, onstage or off.

At this year's festival in June, 27 students from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Drama and eight School of Drama faculty will participate.

"The Prague Quadrennial is the pre-eminent scenographic exhibition in the world, and one of the theater design community's most important international competitions and events," said Susan Tsu, the Bessie F. Anthan Professor of Costume Design at CMU. "The PQ celebrates innovations in theater design by exhibiting thousands of creations from as many as 70 countries around the world … and has been a major factor in shaping the direction of international theater for the past 30 years."

One of the events at PQ is Sound Kitchen, a curated selection of performances by nearly 50 international sound artists. The event is billed as "a place of presentations and exchange in the field of sound design for performance."

Just four sound artists were chosen to represent the United States at Sound Kitchen, three of whom are affiliated with CMU's School of Drama.

"It's pretty remarkable that three of the four U.S. sound artists that were selected are connected to Carnegie Mellon," said Joseph Pino, associate professor of Sound Design and one of the three representatives chosen to perform. "It means that roughly 10 percent of the Sound Kitchen — 10 percent of the sound work being showcased from sound designers around the globe — will be from Carnegie Mellon artists."

Pino's project "Room Temperature" evaluates the eternal subject of time. He's taken a high/low approach to creating the design by using gear he built that feeds and processes into Kyma, an extremely high-end audio design environment.

"It's a sound piece about the perception of time, particularly the phenomenon of elastic time — for instance, when you're excited time flies, when you're bored time crawls — and about how sound affects memory," Pino said.

Alumnus Erik T. Lawson (A'12) will also present at Sound Kitchen. "The Mercury Survey" uses climate change data and harp phrases and textures to illustrate the effects of climate change such as destabilized marine environments and deteriorating polar ice. Additionally, his work for the production "Victor Frange Presents Gas!" will represent the United States in the exhibit "SharedSpace: Music Weather Politics."

"The Prague Quadrennial is a wonderful opportunity for theater artists to explore contemporary theater and performance design from around the globe," said Lawson, who attended the previous PQ. "I am most interested in experiencing the diverse and imaginative storytelling, as well as the camaraderie among fellow artists and designers. The 2011 Prague Quadrennial was absolutely inspirational; I'm looking forward to exploring the creativity again this summer."

Nicholas Erikson, an incoming graduate student at the School of Drama, was taken off guard when his proposal to perform a semi-improvised sound design created out of field recordings from PQ was accepted for Sound Kitchen.

"If you'd asked me anytime before this past December, I never thought I'd be participating," Erikson said. "I thought my odds of getting selected were slim. The whole thing is still a little surreal to me, but I'm thrilled to go perform sound art on an international stage. Who wouldn't be?"

This is Erikson's first time at Prague Quadrennial, and he won't be alone. Many of the students traveling from Carnegie Mellon to the Czech Republic will be newcomers to the festival experience.

The Road to Prague
To help make the experience happen, School of Drama students used Carnegie Mellon's new propriety fundraising site CMU Crowdfunding to raise money for the trip.

The participating students sought to raise $10,000 to help cover travel expenses, including airfare and accommodations. They created a video describing the significance of the festival and worked to get the word out via personal and social media channels. The campaign raised $17,854.

"Seeing the best work being done around the world and meeting their international peers is life-altering for the students," Pino said of PQ. "In a few days they are exposed to more ideas and exceptional art than we could ever hope for them to absorb in a class or three we offer here. That's why we've made it such a huge priority to help make it accessible to as many students as we can."

Ultimately the Prague Quadrennial will be an eye-opening experience for students and faculty who will learn about new applications of their talents as well as witness innovative collaborations in the world of theater art.

"I'm fascinated with how theater makers discuss design, and I want to see firsthand where we are in that conversation," Erikson said. "The opportunity to be immersed in new ideas is really exciting."  

Additional PQ performances by School of Drama students and alumni include:

• "The Lady in Red," with scenic design by Bryce Cutler (A'13);
• Daniel T. Mathews (A'15), DeLisle Merrill (A'15), Hannah Prochaska (A'16) and Jamie Gross (A'15) will showcase costume designs in the festival Maker space;
• Joe Hill (A'17), Michael James (A'17) and Molly Griggs (A'16) will perform a piece called "Surrounded"; and
• Zoe Clayton (A'17), Olivia Hern (A'18) and Dani Kling-Joseph (A'18) will perform a piece called "Enfantine."

It has been well established that people have a “bias blind spot,” meaning that they are less likely to detect bias in themselves than others. However, how blind we are to our own actual degree of bias, and how many of us think we are less biased than others have been less clear.

Published in Management Science, new research from Carnegie Mellon University, the City University London, Boston University and the University of Colorado, Boulder, has developed a tool to measure the bias blind spot, and reveals that believing you are less biased than your peers has detrimental consequences on judgments and behaviors, such as accurately judging whether advice is useful.

“When physicians receive gifts from pharmaceutical companies, they may claim that the gifts do not affect their decisions about what medicine to prescribe because they have no memory of the gifts biasing their prescriptions. However, if you ask them whether a gift might unconsciously bias the decisions of other physicians, most will agree that other physicians are unconsciously biased by the gifts, while continuing to believe that their own decisions are not. This disparity is the bias blind spot, and occurs for everyone, for many different types of judgments and decisions,” said Erin McCormick, an author and Ph.D. student in behavioral decision research in CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

For the study, the researchers ran five experiments — the first two focused on creating and validating the tool to test for bias blind spot differences and whether it is associated with traits such as IQ, general decision-making ability and self-esteem. The final three studies examined consequences of individual differences in the bias blind spot, specifically its relation to how people make social comparisons, the weight people placed on advice from others and their receptivity to de-biasing training.

The most telling finding was that everyone is affected by blind spot bias — only one adult out of 661 said that he/she is more biased than the average person.

The most telling finding was that everyone is affected by blind spot bias — only one adult out of 661 said that he/she is more biased than the average person. However, they did find that the participants varied in the degree in which they thought they were less biased than others. This was true irrespective of whether they were actually unbiased or biased in their decision-making.

Additionally, while some people are more susceptible to a bias blind spot than others, intelligence, cognitive ability, decision-making ability, self-esteem, self-presentation and general personality traits were found to be independent characteristics and not related to the bias blind spot.

“People seem to have no idea how biased they are. Whether a good decision-maker or a bad one, everyone thinks that they are less biased than their peers,” said Carey Morewedge, associate professor of marketing at Boston University. “This susceptibility to the bias blind spot appears to be pervasive, and is unrelated to people’s intelligence, self-esteem, and actual ability to make unbiased judgments and decisions.”

They also found that people with a high bias blind spot are those most likely to ignore the advice of peers or experts, and are least likely to learn from de-biasing training that could improve the quality of their decisions.

“Our research found that the extent to which one is blind to her own bias has important consequences for the quality of decision-making. People more prone to think they are less biased than others are less accurate at evaluating their abilities relative to the abilities of others, they listen less to others’ advice, and are less likely to learn from training that would help them make less biased judgments.” said Irene Scopelliti, the study’s lead author and a lecturer in marketing at City University London.

In addition to McCormick, Morewedge and Scopelliti, who conducted the research while a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon, the research team included CMU’s Karim Kassam and Sophie Lebrecht and the University of Colorado’s H. Lauren Min.

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity funded this research.

Close to 600 researchers from 22 countries will convene at Carnegie Mellon University this month to participate in the 89^th annual meeting of the American Chemical Society Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry. The meeting, June 15 — 17, will highlight the latest scientific advances in colloid and surface science, with topics ranging from using nanotechnology to clean up oil spills to developing advanced drug delivery methods.

The annual symposium traditionally has been organized and hosted by a university that has a deep-rooted history with and expertise in colloid and surface science. This marks the third year the meeting will be held at Carnegie Mellon. It was last held at CMU in 2001. “The interdisciplinary nature of Carnegie Mellon is a natural fit for this conference, which brings a number of different fields together,” said Physics Professor Stephen Garoff, co-chair of the meeting and head of  Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Physics. “There are no borders, no limits to how we do our work.”

Colloid and surface science is a diverse field that requires input from many disciplines, including chemistry, biological physics, materials science and chemical engineering. Carnegie Mellon faculty are conducting numerous research projects in colloid and surface science that span multiple disciplines.

Research projects being presented at the meeting by Carnegie Mellon scientists include:

• Garoff has teamed up with symposium co-chair and Biomedical and Chemical Engineering Professor Bob Tilton, Biomedical and Chemical Engineering Professor Todd Przybycien and the University of Pittsburgh’s Tim Corcoran to improve the delivery of aerosolized drugs to damaged parts of the lung. Current aerosolized drugs tend to deposit on healthy parts of the lung, inadvertently shortchanging the unhealthy areas that actually need the drug. The research team is developing aerosol formulations to get around this problem.
• Kathryn Whitehead, an assistant professor in CMU’s Department of Chemical Engineering, is trying to improve drug delivery in other ways. Since many drugs are altered or destroyed by the body before they reach their target destination, Whitehead and her colleagues are developing nano-sized drug delivery “vehicles” that protect the drug during transport.
• Conference co-chair Jim Schneider, professor of chemical engineering, is working on reducing the time needed to analyze DNA for medical diagnostics and forensic identification. Current analyses, which use gel electrophoresis, take up to three hours to complete, but Schneider’s research group is using surfactant micelles, nanometer-sized lipid molecules, to speed up DNA analyses to as little as 30 seconds.
• Newell Washburn, associate professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering, is studying how lignin, a biopolymer that is found in nature and is a by-product of paper production and other manufacturing processes, can be used to enhance commercial products. Washburn’s lab is developing lignin to be used as a foaming agent, cement plasticizer and surfactant.

By Shilo Rea / 412-268-6094 / shilo@cmu.edu

Thanks to Carnegie Mellon University advances in brain imaging technology, we now know how specific concrete objects are coded in the brain, to the point where we can identify which object, such as a house or a banana, someone is thinking about from its brain activation signature.

Now, CMU scientists are applying this knowledge about the neural representations of familiar concepts by teaching people new concepts and watching the new neural representations develop. Published in Human Brain Mapping, the scientists have — for the first time — documented the formation of a newly learned concept inside the brain, which shows that it occurs in the same brain areas for everyone.

The set of "habitat" brain regions (green) and "diet" regions (red and blue) where the new knowledge was stored.

This novel research merges brain science and instructional innovation, two of Carnegie Mellon’s university-wide initiatives — BrainHub^SM, which focuses on how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors, and the Simon Initiative, which aims to measurably improve student learning outcomes by harnessing decades of learning science research.

Marcel Just, a leading neuroscientist, pointed to the Smithsonian Institute’s 2013 announcement about the olinguito, a newly identified carnivore species that mainly eats fruits and lives by itself in the treetops of rainforests, as an example of the type of new concept that people learn.

“Millions of people read the information about the olinguito and in doing so permanently changed their own brains,” said Just, the D.O. Hebb University Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “Our research happened to be examining this process precisely at that time in a laboratory setting. When people learned that the olinguito eats mainly fruit instead of meat, a region of their left inferior frontal gyrus — as well as several other areas — stored the new information according to its own code.”

The study participants learned about the habitat and diet of eight animals, such as the cytar.

Just added, “The new knowledge gained from the Smithsonian’s announcement became encoded in the same brain areas in every person that learned the new information, because all brains appear to use the same filing system.”

For the study, Andrew Bauer, a Ph.D. student in psychology, and Just taught 16 study participants diet and dwelling information about extinct animals to monitor the growth of the neural representations of eight new animal concepts in the participants’ brains.

Drawing on previous findings, the research team knew “where” to expect the new knowledge to emerge in the brains of their participants. Information about dwellings and information about eating have each been shown to reside in their own set of brain regions, regions that are common across people.

Over the course of an hour, the study participants were given a zoology mini-tutorial on the diets and habitats of the animals, while the scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the emergence of the concepts in the participants’ brains. As the new properties were taught, the activation levels in the eating regions and the dwelling regions changed.

One important result was that after the zoology tutorial, each one of the eight animal concepts developed its own unique activation signature. This made it possible for a computer program to determine which of the eight animals a participant was thinking about at a given time. In effect, the program was reading their minds as they contemplated a brand-new thought.

For the first time CMU scientists have documented the formation of a newly learned concept inside the brain, which shows that it occurs in the same brain areas for everyone.

But even though the animals had unique activation signatures, the animals that shared similar properties (such as a similar habitat) had similar activation signatures. That is, a resemblance between the properties of two animals resulted in a resemblance between their activation signatures. This finding shows that the activation signatures are not just arbitrary patterns, but are meaningful and interpretable.

“The activation signature of a concept is a composite of the different types of knowledge of the concept that a person has stored, and each type of knowledge is stored in its own characteristic set of regions,” Just said.

Another important result was that once a property of an animal was learned, it remained intact in the brain, even after other properties of the animal had been learned. This finding indicates the relative neural durability of what we learn.

“Each time we learn something, we permanently change our brains in a systematic way,” said Bauer, the study’s lead author. “It was exciting to see our study successfully implant the information about extinct animals into the expected locations in the brain’s filing system.”

Just believes that the study provides a foundation for brain researchers to trace how a new concept makes its way into the brain from the words and graphics used to teach it, foreshadowing a capability to assess the progress in learning a complicated concept like those in a high-school physics lesson. fMRI pattern analyses could diagnose which aspects of a concept students misunderstand (or lack), in a way that could guide the next iteration of instruction.

The results from this study also indicate that it may be possible to use a similar approach to understand the “loss” of knowledge in various brain disorders, such as dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, or due to brain injuries. The loss of a concept in the brain may be the reverse of the process that the study observed.

As the birthplace of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, Carnegie Mellon has been a leader in the study of brain and behavior for more than 50 years. The university has created some of the first cognitive tutors, helped to develop the Jeopardy-winning Watson, founded a groundbreaking doctoral program in neural computation, and completed cutting-edge work in understanding the genetics of autism. Building on its strengths in biology, computer science, psychology, statistics and engineering, CMU recently launched BrainHubSM, a global initiative. The Simon Initiative is named for Herbert Simon, the late CMU Nobel Laureate, professor and co-founder of artificial intelligence.

The Office of Naval Research funded this study.

Carnegie Mellon University alumnus James R. Swartz (MSIA’66), a distinguished entrepreneur and founding partner of the global venture capital firm Accel Partners, has donated $31 million to support the university’s entrepreneurship activities. In recognition of this generous gift, the university will create the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University, which will serve as a hub for university-wide entrepreneurial activities.

The investment comes as the university builds considerable momentum as a leader in innovation, artistic creativity, learning technologies and transformational discoveries at the crossroads of different academic fields and disciplines. Startup activity among the university’s faculty, students and alumni has been robust, with more than 138 companies created since 2009. And with work beginning on the David A. Tepper Quadrangle, the university’s major new academic hub, CMU is poised to catalyze a new innovation corridor with global impact in research, invention and commercialization.

Along with his wife, Susan, Swartz has been a generous and deeply committed supporter of the university. Their latest gift, the fifth largest in university history, places them among the most generous benefactors in the university’s history.

"This gift will bring together cross-university initiatives in ways that will have a far-reaching impact on future generations of young entrepreneurs." — President Subra Suresh

“This investment will benefit the entire Carnegie Mellon University community,” said President Subra Suresh. “We are grateful to Jim and Susan for their generous gift, and for their vision, time and commitment to building on the unique strengths of CMU.

“As one of the most successful venture capitalists in the world, Jim understands the importance of nurturing innovators and creative thinkers. This gift will bring together cross-university initiatives in ways that will have a far-reaching impact on future generations of young entrepreneurs,” Suresh said.

The gift includes $13 million in permanent university endowment, which in combination with other resources will support Presidential Scholarships and Fellowships for students, a faculty chair, entrepreneurs-in-residence, an executive director and staff for the center. An additional $18 million will be directed to a number of programmatic and infrastructure projects over the next four years. This includes the $10 million committed last year for the creation of space for entrepreneurship activities in the new building in the David A. Tepper Quadrangle. The remaining $8 million, leveraged with additional support, will fund infrastructure projects at several other locations across campus, new campus-wide curriculum development, a new fund to seed ideas across CMU’s colleges and schools, and community outreach to engage local secondary schools in entrepreneurship learning opportunities.

“Carnegie Mellon is one of the world’s leading centers for learning and discovery,” Swartz said. “From its founding, entrepreneurship has been ingrained throughout the university’s culture. With its strengths in technology, science and the arts, CMU is an ideal location to cultivate the ideas, technologies and ultimately solutions that will make a true difference in the world.”

With its university-wide scope, the Swartz Center and its director will report to the provost and will serve as the hub that seamlessly connects and incorporates a number of ongoing efforts through the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the James R. Swartz Fellows Program, the Innovation Fellows Program, Project Olympus, LaunchCMU and the Open Field Entrepreneurs Fund, as well as related workshops, competitions and training programs.

"With its strengths in technology, science and the arts, CMU is an ideal location to cultivate the ideas, technologies and ultimately solutions that will make a true difference in the world.” — Jim Swartz

As founding partner of the Palo Alto, California-based Accel Partners, Swartz has led a global venture capital firm that counts many of the most revolutionary technology businesses among its investments, including Facebook, Veritas Software, Riverbed, Etsy and Dropbox. In 2007, he was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Venture Capital Association.

Swartz serves as a trustee of the Sundance Institute and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. From 1999-2002, he served on the management committee of the Salt Lake Organizing Group for the 2002 Winter Olympics. In 2007, he co-founded Impact Partners, a major provider of funding to a long line of notable documentary films. And as an accomplished Grand Prix sailboat skipper, he has won numerous championships and World Cups.

Swartz is a founding member and chair of President Suresh’s Global Advisory Council at CMU, which comprises a distinguished group of about 20 leaders, entrepreneurs and chief executives of major organizations. He also is a member of the Tepper School's Business Board of Advisers. In 2013, the Tepper School honored Swartz with a Lifetime Alumni Achievement Award in recognition of both his professional accomplishments and his commitment to education.

Maryland high school students created a 3-D printed assistive hand grip for a spoon to help a classmate with motor impairments.

A new campaign, “Make for Humanity,” begins this week, seeking to harness the excitement and creativity surrounding the growing Maker Movement to improve the world, one community at a time. Carnegie Mellon University’s Illah Nourbakhsh will launch “M4H” in a keynote address Friday sponsored by Infosys at the White House’s “Week of Making.”

“The Maker Movement has empowered people to incorporate digital technology and tools into creative projects,” said Nourbakhsh, professor of robotics and director of CMU’s CREATE Lab. “Now it’s time to use those skills for projects that empower even more people and make life a bit more livable and sustainable for us all.”

Examples include Maryland high school students who used 3-D printing to fashion a gripper that helps a classmate with motor impairments hold a pen or utensil. In some cases, makers might create data rather than physical objects. For instance, students at a school in Salt Lake City used air quality monitors developed by the CREATE Lab to gather air quality data in classrooms near the school driveway and, in turn, persuaded parents to stop idling their cars while waiting to pick up students.

“We have three goals for this new initiative,” Nourbakhsh said. “One is to be hyperlocal — to address problems that are near you so that you really understand the problem. Two, is to partner with the people who will use your creation so that it will be as effective as possible. And, three, is to be transparent, to tell us about the challenges you discovered and how you solved them.”

The CREATE Lab has launched a Facebook page to help people share their solutions, as well as a Twitter account, @make4humanity. The lab has proposed the use of the hashtag #m4h.

The Maker Movement combines digital technologies, such as robotics, computers and 3-D printing, with more traditional crafts and the do-it-yourself culture. Last year, President Barack Obama hosted the first-ever White House Maker Faire and issued a call to action for “every company, every college, every community, every citizen [to] lift up makers and builders and doers across the country.”

This year, the White House is celebrating a “Week of Making,” June 12-18, which coincides with the National Maker Faire at the University of the District of Columbia, June 12-13. CMU’s CREATE Lab will be among the hundreds of exhibitors at Maker Faire.