By Julianne Mattera

Adam Savage talks with Shaun Burley, who is pursuing a master's degree in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

Carnegie Mellon University's IDeATe Network will be featured in a web series hosted by former "MythBusters" star Adam Savage on Tested.com. The series runs through June 19.

Savage and a production crew interviewed students and faculty in the Integrative Design, Arts and Technology (IDeATe) Network last fall during a national tour focused on maker spaces and innovation in education, entrepreneurship and workforce development.

The Fab Foundation, an umbrella organization that emerged from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's fab lab program that stewards more than 1,000 fabrication labs around the globe, partnered with Savage, now editor-in-chief of Tested.com, and Chevron for the tour to Pittsburgh, Austin, New Orleans, Boston, Detroit and the San Francisco Bay Area.

"CMU seems to clearly understand that properly preparing its students to enter a 21st century reality means training them in a wide array of approaches to problem solving." — Adam Savage

During his visit, Savage explored IDeATe's labs in the basement of Hunt Library. He met with students and faculty who introduced Savage to some of the program's maker courses, ongoing work and finished projects that combine innovation with technology.

"CMU seems to clearly understand that properly preparing its students to enter a 21st century reality means training them in a wide array of approaches to problem solving," Savage said. "By adding a minor in making and encouraging cross-campus collaboration, they whet students' appetite for looking outside the box for solutions and ideas. This is, to my mind, a terrific approach."

Keith Webster, CMU's dean of University Libraries and director of emerging and integrative media initiatives, told Savage that the program brings together students from nearly every discipline, who learn how others outside their field think.

"In the 21st century, our students are going to be dealing with big challenges, which no one can solve on their own," Webster said. "We need to find a way in which students can gain those experiences of learning to work with other people and what each other brings to the problem."

Since launching in the fall of 2014, the IDeATe program has been learning from its students and is constantly evolving, he said.

"We're also learning about the importance of engaging with companies from outside the university who give our students real-world problems to work on," Webster said. "We've got some returning veterans who need particular adaptations in their home environment. [They] help us build the solution over the course of a semester, and watching our students react to those problems and give so much back to the community is a tremendously fulfilling part of this whole process."

Savage said his introduction to IDeATe was "very inspiring."

Sonya Pryor-Jones, chief implementation officer for The Fab Foundation, said CMU's IDeATe was among a variety of maker spaces and fab labs they visited. Some of the other locations during the two-day trip included the Elizabeth Forward School District, Carnegie Science Center, the Children's Museum Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh.

"The role anchor universities play is essential to the livelihood of communities. So, it was great to include CMU in our Pittsburgh visit and to see what university students and faculty were doing," Pryor-Jones said. "With the emergence of project-based learning in K-12, it was great to see the interdisciplinary approach at the university level."

Pryor-Jones said students in higher education are seeking this kind of hands-on learning experience.

"These spaces are wonderful platforms for innovation and creativity, and put student learners of all ages in the driver's seat," she said, "building the kind of core skills and self-efficacy necessary for our future workforce."

From left, Shannon Iacion, Varun Patel, Ernest Bellamy, Shruti Srikar and Lola Ben Alon will represent CMU in a national design competition in April.

For the first time, a team from Carnegie Mellon University is a finalist in the national ULI Gerald Hines Urban Design Competition. The four teams in the finals will vie for the top prize of $50,000 when they present their work to the Hines Competition Jury in Chicago in April.

The CMU team, four graduate students from the School of Architecture and one from the Tepper School of Business, was one of five teams from CMU that competed against 120 teams from 58 universities in the competition. CMU teams earned honorable mentions in the past, but have never advanced to the finals until this year.

Asked to design a master-plan proposal to redevelop the North Branch Industrial Corridor in Chicago, the CMU finalists created “IN-district,” a strategy that preserves and celebrates the historic context of the area by revitalizing it into a new center for culture, innovation and industry. Their proposal included presentation boards with drawings, site plans, tables and market-feasible financial proformas, and addressed details, such as parking, sustainability, job creation, changing demographics and overall development goals of the city. Although it’s based on a hypothetical situation, the competition reflects many real-life concerns of Chicago.

“They were well-organized from the very beginning,” said Don Carter, a School of Architecture faculty member and the David Lewis Director of Urban Design and Regional Engagement for the Remaking Cities Institute at CMU. “It may have worked to their advantage that they didn’t know each other; they met at a mixer at the Tepper School. They represent a rich mix of experience, diversity and areas of study.”
 
Carter, along with Valentina Vavasis, an adjunct faculty member in the School of Architecture, served as the team’s academic advisers. The team members are Lola Ben Alon, a doctoral student in Architecture/Engineering/Construction Management (AECM); Shannon Iacion, a master’s degree student in Building Performance and Diagnostics (BPD); Varun Patel, a master’s degree student at Tepper; Shruti Srikar, a master’s degree student in AECM; and team leader Ernest Bellamy, a student in the Master of Urban Design program (MUD).

CMU’s team visited Chicago in March to look at the actual site and to evaluate their proposal’s effectiveness. They will make adjustments before presenting their final work on April 6 in Chicago.
 
Bellamy, the team captain, said “This experience has been personally rewarding because of the opportunity to work in a multidisciplinary team with individuals who have strengths and talents outside my own as an urban design student.”

He said it was refreshing to see different perspectives on similar approaches.

“Everyone brings to the table their own specialties and insights, being able to share not only from their personal experiences working prior to graduate school, but also what they are currently learning from the dynamic staff of professors we have here on campus,” he said.

The competition was created and funded by Gerald Hines, one of the world’s premier developers. It offers graduate students the opportunity to engage in a challenging exercise in responsible land use. Carter, a former jury member for the competition, said the projects usually focus on large parcels slated for redevelopment that pose design, financial and social problems.

In addition to the CMU team, the finalists are teams from Université Laval (Quebec), the University of Maryland and the University of Texas.

By Abby Simmons

"Mama Mia" is performed during Greek Sing 2016. Photo by Jason Chen

Carnegie Mellon University's Greek community is stepping up to help children cope while their parents battle cancer.

CMU fraternities and sororities have set a goal of raising $150,000 over the next two years for the university's Camp Kesem chapter, which trains college students to run and manage a free summer camp for children of parents with cancer. This year's fundraising effort culminates with Greek Sing at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, April 1, in Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall in Oakland.

The show, which features 13-minute musicals written and performed by students, will include Disney favorites "Hercules," "The Little Mermaid," "Moana" and "Peter Pan." Three original productions are on the playbill, along with Broadway hits like "Little Shop of Horrors" and "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee."

CMU's Camp Kesem chapter, founded in 2014, hosts about 40 campers between the ages of 6 and 18 annually at Camp Sequanota in Boswell, Pa. Approximately 45 student volunteers run the camp, set for Aug. 13-19.

"There are a lot of CMU students, especially Greek students, who are counselors for the camp session over the summer. It's a good way for us to benefit a charity students directly work with here," said Greek Sing Co-chair and Sigma Chi brother Gus Henry, a senior who is majoring in information systems and human-computer interaction.

While some funds will help to operate the camp, part of the money raised from Greek Sing will help start  a Camp Kesem chapter at the University of Pittsburgh. CMU chapter co-directors David Stone, a junior business administration major, and Ansley Sharna, a senior biological sciences major, will accept a check at Greek Sing along with a child and family who have benefited from the camp.

In addition to Greek Sing, many fraternities and sororities took creative approaches to fundraising this year. Delta Gamma bought more than 130 pounds of yams and hosted "Delta Yamma," an opportunity for students to send a message to friends written directly on a yam with an edible marker. Alpha Phi hosted a blacklight Zumba party, and Kappa Alpha Theta and Alpha Sigma Phi joined forces to sell fanny packs for Spring Carnival. Local restaurants also dedicated a portion of their proceeds to the fundraising effort.

Alpha Chi Omega sister Stephanie Kane sang and danced her way into the role of overall co-chair this year.

"It's my favorite night of the year to be Greek," Kane said.

The senior dramaturgy major used the experience to apply skills she developed in the School of Drama.

"I feel like I am able to offer creative solutions to a lot of problems the chapters are facing, like how to tell a story very quickly — especially a story that might be unfamiliar or challenging," Kane said.

Greek Sing involves the entire campus community. Schools, colleges and departments buy program ads, while alumni and parents often provide sponsorships. The Andrew Carnegie Society Scholars donated $2,000 to the event as part of their annual philanthropic program.

Faculty and staff serve as judges. This year's panel of judges  includes David Kosbie, associate teaching professor of computer science; Lance LaDuke, artist lecturer in euphonium; Gizelle Sherwood, assistant teaching professor of chemistry; Shernell Smith, assistant director in the Office of the Dean of the Student Affairs; and Bonnie Younts, teaching professor of French.

Awards are presented for the best performances and the most money raised by a single chapter, but Greek Sing is a time when fraternities and sororities unite for a common cause andfriendly competition.

"It's hard to be unfriendly when you are putting on a musical," Henry said.

Greek Sing Adviser Ashley Christ, a staff member in the Office of Student Leadership, Involvement, and Civic Engagement, has been impressed by how passionate the students have been about hosting a philanthropic show.

"It's not about, 'Let's have the best fundraiser, let's raise the most money.' It's, 'How can we support each other to help raise that goal and make a good impact?'" Christ said.

Tickets are available for advance purchase and will be available the night of the show. Doors open at 5 p.m.

By Julianne Mattera

Jenn Lim spoke at TEDxCMU in 2013. Lim is the CEO and chief happiness officer of Delivering Happiness, a company cofounded with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh to inspire science-based happiness, passion and purpose.

TEDxCMU 2017, a student-run conference designed to provide a TED-like experience, will be held on Saturday, April 1, at Carnegie Mellon University. The theme of this year's sold-out event is Pivot.

"To me, pivot means taking a change in direction that leads to improvement and innovation," Kishan Patel, a junior at CMU and president of TEDxCMU's team. "Through our theme, we hope that our speakers will inspire attendees to push the boundaries of their comfort zone and pursue their dreams."

Speakers in the series, including CMU President Subra Suresh, will offer talks on a variety of topics including photography, design, data science, happiness and artificial intelligence.

CMU faculty scheduled to give talks include Charlie White, head of the School of Art; Steven Chase, an assistant professor in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and Biomedical Engineering; Rebecca Nugent, director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Statistics; Molly Steenson, an associate professor in the School of Design; and Jeff Schneider, research professor in The Robotics Institute and engineering lead at Uber Advanced Technologies Center.

In addition, the event will show two pre-recorded talks and performances by the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble and the CMU K-Pop Dance Club.

Nugent, associate department head for Statistics in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, said people need to embrace their inner data scientist and move away from the notion that data science is intimidating and only meant for a specific set of people.

"Humans do data science and statistics incessantly," Nugent said. "If I cross the street right now, will I get hit by that car? That's a probabilistic model of us looking at the car, looking at how much time we have and space and thinking, 'If I walk out right now, what is the probability? Am I safe?'

"We do this stuff all the time," Nugent said. "For some reason, we have this nervousness about seeing that we are skilled inherently in thinking about data and probability."

The first TED conference was a 1984 California event designed as a forum to share the best ideas in 'T'echnology, 'E'ntertainment and 'D'esign. It has since grown into a global movement.

The 'x' in TEDx signifies an independently organized event that aims to recreate the TED experience in which speakers give "the talk of their lives" on a local level.

By Heidi Opdyke

Michael Craig is hoping the third time will be the charm for him in Carnegie Mellon University's Three Minute Thesis competition.

Craig, a doctoral student in the College of Engineering, is one of the finalists who will be discussing their research from 5-6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 4, in McConomy Auditorium. Three Minute Thesis is a research communication competition that challenges Ph.D. students to give a compelling presentation on their thesis and its significance in just three minutes, in language that anyone can understand.

This is Craig's second time in the finals — he placed second in 2015 — and third time participating in the program. Each year he has discussed a different aspect of his research. This year his talk is titled "Grid-scale electricity storage: A help or hindrance for mitigating climate change?"

"Last year I got too involved in the details," Craig said. "But it's such a good experience. More people should participate."

Pallavi Bajlejkar, a student in the School of Computer Science's Language Technologies Institute, is participating for her second year. Her research focuses on speech, but she said while public speaking makes her nervous, "people should try it even if you're scared."

Her talk, "Speech Synthesis from Found Speech," looks at how she is working with large sets of data publicly available from sites like YouTube from low-resource languages on the web to create acoustic models with it.

For example, Konkani and Kannada are languages spoken in regions of India. While both are spoken by more than a million people, there are relatively few sites that are translated into them or have text-to-speech capabilities. Bajlejkar said companies such as Google and Amazon are starting to devote more resources for languages found in emerging markets.

"There are more and more special conferences popping up devoted to low-resource languages," she said.

This is CMU's fourth year hosting the event, which started at the University of Queensland in 2008. The competition has been adopted in more than 57 countries at hundreds of institutions.

University Libraries Dean Keith Webster brought the concept to CMU and hosts the competition.

"Our students are doing such interesting, innovative and complex work. It's a joy to learn more about their research and see how they approach the challenge of conveying it to a non-specialist audience," Webster said.

This year saw CMU's highest number of participants, with 78 graduate students participating in 10 rounds of preliminary competitions.

Ania Jaroszewicz, who is pursuing a doctoral degree in behavioral decision research in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Science's Department of Social and Decision Sciences, is competing for the first time. The focus of her talk is "How the Psychology of Poverty Affects Behavior and Financial Outcomes."

She said she hopes people take away from her talk the idea that poverty is complicated and goes beyond financial issues.

"There are a lot of other factors, helplessness, isolation, hopelessness," she said. "Poverty is much more complex than many people perceive it to be and consequently, understanding those complexities can improve the effectiveness of welfare programs."

Jaroszewicz said Three Minute Thesis has given her an opportunity to think about how she communicates her work to people who might use it to help shape policy or nonprofit programming.

"For researchers like me, you get used to speaking to other people in your field and using terminology and shortcuts that others may not understand," she said.

A panel of judges will select the overall winner and runner-up. The audience will select the People's Choice Award winner.

This year's finalists who have been announced so far are:

• Pallavi Balejikar, Language Technology Institute
• Michael Craig, Engineering and Public Policy
• Jooli Han, Biomedical Engineering
• Ania Jaroszewicz, Social and Decision Sciences
• Sudipto Mandal, Materials Science and Engineering
• Diane Nelson, Biomedical Engineering
• Will Penman, English
• Emily Simon, Biological Sciences
• Jesse Thornburg, Electrical and Computer Engineering

An automated face detection method developed at Carnegie Mellon University enables computers to recognize faces in images at a variety of scales, including tiny faces composed of just a handful of pixels.

Spotting a face in a crowd, or recognizing any small or distant object within a large image, is a major challenge for computer vision systems. The trick to finding tiny objects, say researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, is to look for larger things associated with them.

An improved method for coding that crucial context from an image has enabled Deva Ramanan, associate professor of robotics, and Peiyun Hu, a Ph.D. student in robotics, to demonstrate a significant advance in detecting tiny faces.

When applied to benchmarked datasets of faces, their method reduced error by a factor of two, and 81 percent of the faces found using their methods proved to be actual faces, compared with 29 to 64 percent for prior methods.

“It’s like spotting a toothpick in someone’s hand,” Ramanan said. “The toothpick is easier to see when you have hints that someone might be using a toothpick. For that, the orientation of the fingers and the motion and position of the hand are major clues.”

Similarly, to find a face that may be only a few pixels in size, it helps to first look for a body within the larger image, or to realize an image contains a crowd of people.

Spotting tiny faces could have applications such as doing headcounts to calculate the size of crowds. Detecting small items in general will become increasingly important as self-driving cars move at faster speeds and must monitor and evaluate traffic conditions in the distance.

The researchers will present their findings at CVPR 2017, the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference July 21-26 in Honolulu. Their research paper is available online.

The idea that context can help object detection is nothing new, Ramanan said. Until recently, however, it had been difficult to illustrate this intuition on practical systems. That’s because encoding context usually has involved “high-dimensional descriptors,” which encompass a lot of information but are cumbersome to work with.

The method that he and Hu developed uses “foveal descriptors” to encode context in a way similar to how human vision is structured. Just as the center of the human field of vision is focused on the retina’s fovea, where visual acuity is highest, the foveal descriptor provides sharp detail for a small patch of the image, with the surrounding area shown as more of a blur.

By blurring the peripheral image, the foveal descriptor provides enough context to be helpful in understanding the patch shown in high focus, but not so much that the computer becomes overwhelmed. This allows Hu and Ramanan’s system to make use of pixels that are relatively far away from the patch when deciding if it contains a tiny face.

Similarly, simply increasing the resolution of an image may not be a solution to finding tiny objects. The high resolution creates a “Where’s Waldo” problem — there are plenty of pixels of the objects, but they get lost in an ocean of pixels. In this case, context can be useful to focus a system’s attention on those areas most likely to contain a face.

In addition to contextual reasoning, Ramanan and Hu improved the ability to detect tiny objects by training separate detectors for different scales of objects. A detector that is looking for a face just a few pixels high will be baffled if it encounters a nose several times that size, they noted.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency supported this research. The work is part of CMU’s BrainHub initiative to study how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors, and to develop new technologies that build upon those insights.

By Sammi Jamison

This wearable device would noninvasively stop the progression of seizure activity in the brain by launching a random spatio-temporal pattern of ultrasonic waves from outside of the brain to target populations of neurons in various locations across the cortex.

Carnegie Mellon University and University of California, Berkeley researchers have introduced a noninvasive approach that could mitigate epileptic seizures for the more than 50 million people who suffer from epilepsy.

Maysam Chamanzar, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at CMU, and Reza Alam, professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, recently published their work in the Royal Society Journal Interface.

Patients of all ages diagnosed with epilepsy often experience recurrent seizures triggered by the firing of a large collection of neurons in the brain. This ultimately generates a high-energy wave that spreads across the brain's surface.

Chamanzar, Alam and Ben Zhang, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, based their approach on a wave phenomenon called Anderson localization. The phenomenon explains how random disruptions of a medium can decrease waves, such as how ocean waves lose their energy as they spread over irregular topography. Chamanzar and his colleagues prove the principle can be applied to epileptic seizures.

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In their study, the scientists used simulated activity from a tonic-clonic seizure, formerly known as a grand mal seizure. Then, they disrupted the activity by applying changing parameters governing the firing rates of neurons in the brain.

"Mitigating seizures right at the starting moment is crucial. Using our technique, we do not need to have a-priori knowledge of where exactly the seizure originates. As soon as the onset of a seizure is detected, our method can suppress the seizure waves effectively," Chamanzar said.

Chamanzar and his colleagues discovered the technique is most effective when focusing on both decreasing the strength and frequency of seizures. Chamanzar said this suppression method is significant because it can immediately provide relief for patients.

The team envisions that doctors could test this method by having epileptic patients wear a device to noninvasively stop the progression of seizure activity. The device would detect the onset of seizures and launch a random pattern of ultrasonic waves to target neurons.

"Our proposed method is the first step toward noninvasive suppression of seizures using a novel modality," Chamanzar said. "When it comes to modulating the brain activity to mitigate a disorder, we need to think about new paradigms for interfacing that do not suffer from the limitations of conventional invasive methods."

Chamanzar is a member of the university's BrainHub initiative, an effort that brings together CMU's strengths in biology, computer science, psychology, statistics and engineering to study how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors, and to develop new technologies that advance and build upon this research.

By Daniel Tkacik

Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab is teaching middle- and high-school students the basics of hacking.

CyLab, CMU's Security and Privacy Institute, is hosting its third annual picoCTF competition, a nationwide online computer security contest, March 31-April 14.

The virtual game of capture the flag (CTF) previously has drawn nearly 30,000 people.

"Right now, we're facing a tremendous shortfall in computer security experts," said David Brumley, project lead for picoCTF, the director of CyLab and a professor of electrical and computer engineering. "The root of the problem is that most people don't even know that computer security is a field they can go into. Building awareness is a major goal of picoCTF."

Players will be competing for over $30,000 in prizes, thanks to this year's corporate sponsors. Anyone may register to play in the free online competition, but only U.S. students in grades 6-12 are eligible for prizes. Registration will remain open until the end of the competition.

Participants will learn to reverse engineer, break, hack, decrypt or do anything necessary to solve a series of challenges centered around a storyline. Challenges start out easy and become increasingly difficult.

"To get started, you just need critical thinking skills," Brumley said. "We lead you throughout the game to develop more and more sophisticated notions of computer security so that by the end, you're solving real crypto problems and performing at a high level."

Tim Becker, an undergraduate student studying computer security at Carnegie Mellon, played picoCTF in 2013 as a high school student and uncovered his hidden talent.

"I competed with some friends for fun, but none of us expected to do that well," Becker said. "But we ended up finishing in third place, and that's how I ended up getting into this field."

Today, Becker is a captain on Carnegie Mellon's student hacking team, the Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP). The team has won DefCon's Capture the Flag competition — informally known as the "Super Bowl of Hacking" — three times in the past four years.

The Carnegie Mellon team has open-sourced picoCTF, enabling teachers to run their own versions of the competition. Because of this, several high schools have made their own version of picoCTF and have introduced thousands more K-12 students to computer security, such as Phillips Academy CTF, High School CTF and Thomas Jefferson CTF.

Carnegie Mellon CyLab is a university-wide initiative working to develop new technologies for measurable, secure, available, trustworthy, and sustainable computing and communications systems.

Rev. Tim Smith, the executive director of Center of Life, leads students on a walking tour through the neighborhood of Hazelwood.

Students in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design are learning how a community changes over time.

"I Lived, We Live: What Did We Miss," this year's senior capstone project, is exploring how the identity and memories of Pittsburgh's Hazelwood community have been affected by urban violence. The class culminates with an exhibit from 5-9 p.m. Wednesday, May 10, at Hazelwood's Center of Life at 161 Hazelwood Ave.

Students Temple Rea and Diana Ji Young Ahn talk with Barbara Robinson about her memories of Hazelwood and hopes for its future. They were looking at photographs, both past and present, as a springboard for discussion.

Guiding the students are professors Kristin Hughes and Dylan Vitone, and Rev. Tim Smith, director of the Center of Life, a faith-based, community-empowerment organization serving the neighborhood. Charlie Humphrey, former director of Pittsburgh Filmmakers, is contributing his visual storytelling expertise to the class.

"Together, this collective knowledge will help to tell a story about this community in an effort to invite often difficult conversations about loss of human capital, race, power and privilege," Hughes said. "As a society, we often avoid honest and open conversations about difficult subject matter like race, privilege, social exclusion and violence. We must all work together to understand how these types of inequalities result in misunderstanding, racism and loss of social capital."

Rev. Smith brings a personal perspective to the project, having witnessed the impact that loss and injustice can have on a community. He has been impressed with the participatory approach and how engaged the students have been with the community.

"When a community loses young people too early, it takes something out of it. It changes what the present is, but, more importantly, it directly impacts what the future could be," Smith said. "This exhibit will speak to the fact that it's not normal for young people to die before their parents. It is not normal for people to die in this volume. This project might reach people who are thinking about living that life."

Hughes said the students are planning to create a space that will commemorate and shed light on the issues within Hazelwood. Through active listening, hands-on activities and designing alongside community members who have experienced loss firsthand, students are designing an exhibit that will leave an impression on future generations.

"So far, our meetings with the Hazelwood community have been very inspiring and eye-opening," said CMU student Praewa Suntiasvaraporn. "We have learned a lot about the struggles they have had in the past, and I am so grateful that the people at Center of Life are so ready to share with us some of the most difficult and saddest parts of their lives."

Student Lauren Zemering said the final concept for their installation aims to highlight the beauty within Hazelwood, while giving a voice to its residents and creating hope for the future.

"It's easy to get caught up in your own life and those immediately surrounding you, and easy to forget about all the lives outside of our immediate radius," Zemering said. "Meeting with the Hazelwood community has reinforced for me how much you can learn from leaving your bubble."

Rev. Smith said the students have been responsive to the community members they have met.

"Designers are people who put things together in ways that regular artists don't," Smith said. "Designers tend to understand the human side of community and do interesting research on the communities they work with. This group of students has so many great ideas. It is refreshing working with them."

The students' work is captured on their blog.

By Katelyn Howard

John Choi, a senior in computer science and arts, demonstrates an educational robotics platform created by his company, Choitek. Choi was among the finalists for this year's McGinnis Venture Competition.

Startups RoBotany and Inventory Connection took the top spots in Carnegie Mellon University's 2017 McGinnis Venture Competition among student entrepreneurs.

"The McGinnis Venture Competition is the culmination of the entrepreneurship training we provide students at Carnegie Mellon," said Dave Mawhinney, executive director of the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship.

"They have learned the frameworks in courses and workshops. They have practiced their skills in our incubator and on our treks," Mawhinney said. "The McGinnis Venture Competition is an opportunity to bring it all together and showcase their company's potential to real-world investors."

RoBotany received a $25,000 investment for taking first in the graduate student track. The company, founded by Austin Webb and Daniel Seim, two master's of business administration students, creates robotic indoor vertical farming using automated robotics and software analytics to transform modern agriculture. The company has leveraged the school's alumni network to raise over $700,000, was accepted into the Project Olympus incubator and opened a location on Pittsburgh's South Side.

"RoBotany has been very fortunate to have the opportunity to plug into Carnegie Mellon and the Tepper School's entrepreneurial ecosystem," Webb said. "I have been able to marry my education at the Tepper School with the growth and progress of RoBotany, allowing for immediate application of my learning in an experiential learning setting."

Inventory Connection, which provides sales representatives with real-time inventory and point of sale data allowing them to stock their supermarket's shelves better, won the undergraduate division first-place prize of $4,000. The startup is led by Kerolos Mikaeil, a senior majoring in electrical and computer engineering and engineering and public policy.

The McGinnis Venture Competition is made possible by a generous endowment from Gerald E. McGinnis, chairman, CEO and founder of Respironics, Inc. The 2017 competition  was sponsored by Walmart Tech.

"Competitions like this are important because of the awareness and networking opportunities that they provide," Webb said. "Regardless of the results, the competition opens doors across the board, from funding to partnerships to hiring."

This year's winners were part of an opening round of competition that included 34 teams. Twelve teams were selected for the finals. The winners are:

Graduate Track

• First Place: RoBotany is a robotic indoor vertical farming using automated robotics and software analytics to transform modern agriculture. Team includes Austin Webb, Austin Lawrence, Daniel Seim and Brac Webb.
• Second Place: Teratonix converts ambient radio waves to electricity and provides a maintenance-free replacement for batteries in low-power connected devices. Team includes Ivan Pistsov and Yi Luo.
• Third Place: 101 builds active learning tools that promote student engagement in college STEM courses. Team includes Justin Weinberg and Igor Belyayev.

Undergraduate Track

• First Place: Inventory Connection provides direct store delivery sales representatives with real-time inventory and point of sale data allowing them to stock their supermarket's shelves better. Team includes Kerolos Mikaeil and John Lipari.
• Second Place: Juvi is an online marketplace for senior homes. Team includes Stella Han and Jason Huang.

By Danielle Lehmann

Vanessa Keith, principal of StudioTEKA who discussed her book "2100: A Dystopian Utopia — The City After Climate Change" as part of this year's School of Architecture lecture series.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 14 percent of architects are female. And Architecture Review's recent Women in Architecture survey indicates gender discrimination continues to be a problem.

That may be changing.

At Carnegie Mellon University, female students made up more than half of the first-year class in the School of Architecture the past two years. That trend is ahead of undergraduate programs nationwide, according to the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

"When my wife started at Carnegie Tech in 1968, she was one of three women out of a class of 65," said School of Architecture Head Stephen Lee. "During the 2000s we built up to 40 percent female entering and during the 2010s, we enroll two women for every man."

Spike Wolff, a special faculty member in the School of Architecture, is aware of the challenges. Since 2009, she has been curating the school's lecture series, which includes diverse visiting architects to reflect a wide range of work, research, and projects.

This year, the series was divided into two themes. The fall was inspired by the cultural climate and featured architects who focused on social activism and the politics of architecture. This semester the series focused on dynamic, accomplished female architects.

"In a way, this series advocates for inclusion, without compromising standards," said Wolff, who is also artistic director for the interdisciplinary arts festival wats:ON? Festival Across the Arts as part of CMU's School of Art. "These are all people I would have invited to speak anyways, they just happened to concentrate in a single series."

Lee said architecture touches all aspects of society and culture.

"It is important that the diversity of the profession represents the diversity in society, not just gender, but race and ethnicity as well," Lee said. "In light of the current political climate it is imperative to grow the architecture profession to be inclusive of professionals with a breadth of backgrounds and perspectives."

Students interested in music or drama can start practicing in elementary school, but architecture isn't commonly offered, even at the high school level.

"Seventeen- and 18-year-olds are having to make a career decision without any firsthand experience with the profession," Lee said. "Given the continuing practice of boys playing with Legos and girls being encouraged to study humanities and the arts, there is a bias pushing women to pursue careers outside of architecture or STEM fields."

The lecture series has fostered student discussions about women in architecture, including gender politics in the profession, the notion of feminism, subconscious bias, the inclusion of alternate voices within the profession and challenging the typical power structures.

"The students seem pretty receptive and enthusiastic to these two themed series, both politics in the fall and all women in the spring," Wolff said. "I think both our female and male students have been inspired by these women who are running their own firms. It's good for students to have strong role models, to see women at the top of their field."

The series has included talks from Odile Decq, an internationally renowned French architect; Sandi Hilal, a Palestinian architect and founding member of The Decolonizing Architecture Institute; Yvonne Farrell, an Irish architect and co-founder of Grafton Architects; Vanessa Keith, a New York-based architect and principal of StudioTEKA who discussed her book "2100: A Dystopian Utopia — The City After Climate Change"; and Annabelle Selldorf, a German-born architect and founding principal of New York City-based Selldorf Architects.

A film screening of "Making Space: Five Women Changing the Face of Architecture," was presented this past month in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh as part of the lecture series.

The final speaker this semester will be Nida Rehman, the Ann Kalla Visiting Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon. Her talk, "Getting Spatial with Non-Human Others," will be at 6:30 p.m. April 10 in Kresge Theatre.

"I think the students feel that we've made a statement, and were excited about the challenge to current culture and the fact that we are addressing these issues," Wolff said.

Neil M. Donahue, the Thomas Lord Professor of Chemistry, professor of chemical engineering and engineering and public policy, and director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research, has been named the winner of the 2017 Gustavus John Esselen Award for Chemistry in the Public Interest.

Given by the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Esselen Award recognizes a chemist whose scientific and technical work has contributed to the public well-being and its value to society has become apparent within the last five years. The award is named after Gustavus John Esselen, who was a distinguished member of the ACS’s Northeastern Section.

An internationally renowned expert in atmospheric chemistry and air-quality engineering, Donahue investigates how organic compounds behave and evolve in the atmosphere. His research stands to provide a better understanding of how airborne particles affect the environment and human health.

Donahue is dedicated to applying his expertise to air quality issues, especially in Pittsburgh. He has worked with the Allegheny County Health Department to redesign its air toxics policy and with the City of Pittsburgh on its climate action plan. Donahue also serves as a volunteer Science and Engineering Ambassador for the National Academies, facilitating public discourse on energy through a pilot program for the Pittsburgh community.

At Carnegie Mellon, Donahue is involved with the Center for Air, Climate, and Energy Solutions, a collaborative research center created through a partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency. Through the center, Donahue is modeling particulate matter at multiple spatial scales in Pittsburgh, Houston and Los Angeles. He is founding director of the university’s Center for Atmospheric Particle Studies.

Donahue is extremely active in the community of atmospheric science and air-quality researchers. He is one of the most cited scientists in the field of geosciences. He was named to Thomson-Reuters and Clarivate Analytics’ list of “highly-cited researchers” for the past three years. Donahue is an associate editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres and co-editor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. He served on the board of directors of the American Association for Aerosol Research and as local section chair of the American Chemical Society. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Donahue received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1984 from Brown University, and a Ph.D. in meteorology and atmospheric chemistry in 1991 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 2000.

Donahue will receive the award and deliver an address on April 27 at the meeting of the ACS Northeastern Section in Cambridge, Mass.

Alison Barth says knowing that algorithm is critical to understanding the role the neocortex plays in many vital functions.

Neuroscientists at Carnegie Mellon University have identified principles for information processing in the neocortex, an evolutionarily expanded area of the brain critical for cognition.

The study is one of most elaborate of its type, and lays the groundwork for understanding the algorithm neurons use to transform information during learning. The research also could further the study of disorders caused by deficits in cortical processing, like Alzheimer’s disease, autism and epilepsy. The results are published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

The neocortex is a modular and multifunctional area of the brain. It is responsible for a wide variety of functions, including decision-making and memory, and auditory, tactile and visual processing. Researchers do not know how the neocortex transforms information as it travels through the structure’s many layers.

“Anytime you pass information through a field of neurons, neural circuits perform calculations. In the case of the neocortex, we don’t know what algorithm they’re using,” said Alison Barth, professor of biological sciences and interim director of Carnegie Mellon’s BrainHub neuroscience initiative. “Knowing that algorithm is critical to understanding the role the neocortex plays in many vital functions.”

The neocortex is complex. It has six layers, and each of those layers has millions of neurons. Each of these neurons can be one of more than 20 different cell types. The first step in understanding how all of the parts work to process information is to find out how each cell type in each layer reacts to the same stimulus.

To do this, researchers in Barth’s lab, including Nicholas J. Audette, Joanna Urban-Ciecko and Megumi Matsuhita, genetically isolated a sensory input to the neocortex, then carefully mapped it as it traveled across different layers and cell types. They then recorded individual neuron’s reactions to the input to see how the inputs changed to outputs as information moved through the brain.

They found information could be split into different pathways, allowing it to be processed simultaneously in different parts of the neocortex. Information also was passed along much more slowly in the superficial layers of the neocortex, indicating the brain is allowing more time for the input to be processed. The deeper layers moved information along in a quicker fashion, but were less likely to change the information.

Additionally, they found each cell type had a characteristic response to the input. It had previously been thought that responses would vary on a cell-to-cell basis even within the same cell type.

“We took each cell and asked it ‘what’s your job?’,” Barth said. “We found out that one input was causing multiple cells to have different conversations all at the same time. Understanding how these reactions are organized will allow us to study what happens when the reactions are misorganized in diseases and cognitive disorders.”

The findings could be used to help inform the engineering of computer circuits. The brain can perform calculations that can be mimicked by computers, but computers need exponentially more size and power to perform the algorithms the brain forms. Understanding the general principles of information processing in the brain will help computer scientists and engineers as the create the next generation of circuits.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (DA0171099, NS088958), the McKnight Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation.

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.

The university launched its BrainHub initiative in 2014 to bring together CMU’s strengths in biology, computer science, psychology, statistics and engineering to study how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors, and to develop new technologies that advance and build upon this research.

By Emily Payne

Christina Cabana has won a 2017 Barry Goldwater Scholarship to help her pursue a research career.

Christina Cabana, a junior chemistry major at Carnegie Mellon University's Mellon College of Science, is the recipient of a 2017 Barry Goldwater Scholarship. Given by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, the award supports students interested in pursuing research careers in the fields of science, engineering and math.

Cabana is one of 240 students selected from an applicant pool of 1,286 students. The scholarship provides up to $7,500 per year for tuition, fees, books and room and board for up to two years.

When Cabana was first nominated for the scholarship as a sophomore, she could not think of a more perfect opportunity.

"One of the things the Goldwater scholarship recognizes is your potential as a research scientist, which is something I'm very set on doing," said Cabana, who is part of CMU's Science and Humanities Program. "The fact that I was selected as someone who might actually be good at that and can succeed meant a lot to me. It confirmed that what I want to do and what I can do are actually aligned."

Cabana said she wanted to pursue a career in science since entering her first research lab in high school. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in chemical biology or pharmacology and aspires to lead a research group in cancer pharmacology and teach at the university level.

Working in Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and Chemistry Marcel Bruchez's lab, Cabana is researching genetically targeted photoablation, helping to create a fusion protein that will target specific cell lines using fluorescent imaging techniques. The protein should be able to find a specific cell type in a specific location — like a t-regulator cell near a cancerous tumor — and, when activated using light, kill the targeted cell.

Cabana has studied the binding and kinetics of FG proteins at Rockefeller University in Professor Michael Rout's lab and conducted research as an Amgen Scholar at Columbia University Medical College in the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center. At Columbia, she studied the potential of disseminated tumor DNA quantification as a diagnostic tool to concretely predict prostate cancer prognosis in Professor Cory Abate-Shen's lab.

"Christina was a clearly talented student with a strong passion for basic scientific research from the time she approached me to do research in her first year," said Bruchez, the director of Carnegie Mellon's Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center. "She was able to turn very exciting summer research opportunities at Rockefeller University and Columbia University Medical School into new skills that she brought back to our lab at Carnegie Mellon, building up an independent set of skills and a unique project with her current photoablation work."

Outside of the lab, Cabana is president of Carnegie Mellon University Soundbytes, a coed a capella group, philanthropy chair and Greek Sing chair for Delta Delta Delta sorority and a resident assistant. She furthers her passion for science by leading demonstrations at under-resourced Pittsburgh schools as a member of the outreach organization Future Leaders of Science, raising funds for St. Jude Children's Hospital and co-writing and directing this year's chemistry murder mystery musical.

Cabana first heard of the scholarship from Carnegie Mellon's Fellowships and Scholarships Office after being nominated by a faculty committee to apply as a sophomore. This is her second year applying, and she is grateful that her dedication to research and academia resonated with the scholarship committee.

Stephanie Wallach, assistant vice provost for undergraduate education, is not surprised that Cabana's excellent work led to her winning this scholarship.

"Christina is a passionate and first-rate researcher, an exemplary citizen of Carnegie Mellon and a true powerhouse who is poised to make major contributions to cancer pharmacology research, and we are excited to follow her promising career," she said.

Two additional MCS students, biological sciences major Erin Sipple and physics major Riley Xu, were named honorable mentions for this year's Goldwater Scholarships.

The Program for Research and Outreach on Gender Equity in Society (PROGRESS) encourages girls and young women to use their voices to advocate and speak up on behalf of themselves. On April 1, Duquesne University hosted an interactive negotiation workshop for girls 7 to 13+. PROGRESS is housed in Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy and is based on the research of Linda Babcock, a CMU professor and head of the Department of Social and Decision Sciences. Learn more about its program to help college students become better negotiators.

A version of CMU's Libratus, which in January became the first AI agent to defeat top poker pros at Heads-Up, No-Limit Texas Hold'em, will compete in China April 6-10. The AI will run on the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Bridges computer, shown here with Professor Tuomas Sandholm.

A version of Carnegie Mellon University’s Libratus, which in January became the first artificial intelligence to defeat top poker pros at Heads-up, No-Limit Texas Hold’em, will play six top Chinese players for a $290,000 winner-take-all purse.

The 36,000-hand exhibition, featuring an AI named Lengpudashi or “cold poker master,” will be April 6-10 on the island province of Hainan, China.

The human players, called Team Dragons, will be led by Alan (Yue) Du, a Shanghai venture capitalist and amateur player who won the $5,000 buy-in, no-limit Hold’em category of the 2016 World Series of Poker.

“I am very excited to take this new kind of AI technology to China,” said Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science and co-creator of Libratus/Lengpudashi with Ph.D. student Noam Brown. “I want to explore various commercial opportunities for this in poker and a host of other application areas, ranging from recreational games to business strategy to strategic pricing to cybersecurity and medicine.

“This is an exhibition, not a match, challenge or competition,” he added. “We are running a relatively small number of hands, so this is not a scientific experiment like the Brains Vs. AI competition in January.”

In the Brains Vs. AI competition, Libratus played 120,000 hands in 20 days at Pittsburgh’s Rivers Casino against professional players who specialize in Heads-up, No-Limit Texas Hold’em. The large number of hands was intended to ensure the outcome would be statistically significant and prove that any victory was not a matter of luck. At the end, Libratus led the human players by a collective $1,766,250 in virtual chips.

In Hainan, Team Dragon and Lengpudashi will play for 10 hours a day, with the human players each playing two hands at a time. As with Brains vs. AI, the Lengpudashi AI will run on the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Bridges computer throughout the event.

Poker is of particular interest to computer scientists because it is an imperfect information game — no player knows precisely what cards the other players have and all players must be able to bluff and recognize their opponents’ bluffs. Business negotiation, military strategy, cybersecurity and medical treatment planning are the types of applications that could benefit from automated decision-making using this kind of AI.

Sandholm recently founded Strategic Machine, Inc., which has exclusively licensed Libratus and other technologies from his CMU laboratory. Strategic Machine targets a broad set of applications: poker and other recreational games, business strategy, negotiation, cybersecurity, physical security, military applications, strategic pricing, finance, auctions, political campaigns and medical treatment planning. The company is supplying the Lengpudashi AI for the exhibition.

The Lengpudashi Vs. Team Dragons exhibition was organized by Kai-Fu Lee, a CMU alumnus and former faculty member who is CEO of Sinovation Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in startups in China and the United States. He is a former executive of Apple, Microsoft and Google and is one of the most prominent figures in China’s internet sector.

Sinovation and Hainan Resort Software Community are hosting the exhibition. The event will take place in a software park/resort in Haikou City. Video of game play will be streamed via almost 30 broadcasting partners; total views of the streaming video in China are expected to reach 30 million over the five-day event.

By Jocelyn Duffy

Seniors Thomas Swayze and Samuel Zbarsky and junior Joshua Brakensiek have been named Putnam Fellows.

Carnegie Mellon University placed first in the Mathematical Association of America's 77th William Lowell Putnam Competition, the premier mathematics competition for undergraduate students in North America.

Three Mellon College of Science students majoring in mathematical sciences, junior Joshua Brakensiek and seniors Thomas Swayze and Samuel Zbarsky, scored among the top five of all students, earning them the distinction of being named Putnam Fellows. Forty-four Carnegie Mellon students placed in the top 517, the second most of any university.

This is the sixth consecutive year that Carnegie Mellon's team has placed in the top five of the competition and the first time they have placed first. Prior to the current streak, the university had placed in the top five three other times - in 1946, 1949 and 1987. It's also the first time since 1990 that all three members of any university's Putnam team have been named Putnam Fellows.

"The meteoric rise of the Carnegie Mellon Putnam team reflects a culture of bold innovation at the university. Here we encourage fresh ideas that challenge paradigms and turn the impossible into the possible," said Po-Shen Loh, associate professor of mathematical sciences and the team's coach. Loh is also the lead coach of the U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad team, a national program organized by the Mathematical Association of America, with training hosted at Carnegie Mellon. The team has ranked first in the world for the past two years.

The university's current success is the result of a great deal of hard work by the students who took the six-hour exam and a concerted effort by the university to create an environment where students can enthusiastically engage in math and problem solving, take classes in top-ranked programs including math, finance, computer science and statistics, and receive support and mentorship from the research university's award-winning faculty.

The Department of Mathematical Sciences in the Mellon College of Science also offers a number of programs, including the Knaster Scholars Program and mathematical science honors program, that provide opportunities for advanced study, increased mentorship and research.

"Faculty mentor our students with a broad-minded view of careers and emphasize impact, excellence, innovation and entrepreneurship. We take a very comprehensive view of the undergraduate student experience, helping students to define their identities at the highest levels," said John Mackey, teaching professor of mathematical sciences and computer science.

There also are informal opportunities for students of any major to gather to engage in math. Loh brings students from across the university's schools and colleges who plan to take the Putnam exam together each week for relaxed meetings where they work together to solve problems and socialize. Loh said this extended Putnam team contains some of the most creative analytical thinkers on campus, and he believes this collaboration between students from different disciplines makes all of the students who take the exam stronger and better prepared.

This is the fifth year in a row that Carnegie Mellon has had the second highest number of students in the approximate top 500 of any university, demonstrating the excellence in mathematics among Carnegie Mellon undergraduates across the university's colleges and schools. The 175 Carnegie Mellon students who took the exam had diverse majors, including mathematical sciences, computer science, statistics, engineering, business, psychology and music.

Among the 44 students who placed in the top 517 were sophomore mathematical sciences major David Altizio, senior mathematical sciences major William Christerson, junior computer science major Jacob Imola, senior mathematical sciences major Ray Li and sophomore mathematical sciences and computer science major Victor Xu, who placed in the top 93, earning them honorable mentions. A full list of Carnegie Mellon students placing in the top 517 can be found here: http://www.math.cmu.edu/~ploh/putnam-2016-top500.pdf.

The Department of Mathematical Sciences in the Mellon College of Science will receive $25,000 for the first place finish, and each team member will receive $1,000 for the first-place finish and $2,500 for being Putnam Fellows.

Brakensiek, Swayze and Zbarsky are part of the Knaster-McWilliams Scholars Program. Funded by two Carnegie Mellon alumni, the program is one of only a few scholarship-supported programs in the country that is paired with an honors program and offers increased access to faculty and research opportunities.

Artificial intelligence once again triumphed over human poker players as a program developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers beat six Chinese players by $792,327 in virtual chips during a five-day, 36,000-hand exhibition in Hainan, China.

The AI program, called Lengpudashi or “cold poker master,” is a version of Libratus, the CMU AI that beat four top poker professionals during a 20-day, 120,000-hand Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold’em competition in January in Pittsburgh.

Strategic Machine Inc., a company founded by Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science and co-creator of Libratus/Lengpudashi with Noam Brown, a Ph.D. student in computer science, will take home a pot worth approximately $290,000.

The human players, called Team Dragons, were led by Alan Du, a Shanghai venture capitalist who won a 2016 World Series of Poker bracelet.

Though Libratus and Lengpudashi played different numbers of hands in their separate competitions, Lengpudashi’s final margin of victory was bigger — by 220 milli-big-blinds per game vs. 147 milli-big-blinds per game for Libratus. A milli-big blind is one-thousandth of the bet required to win a game and milli-big-blinds per game is a standard metric for comparing poker efficiency.

The exhibition was organized by Kai-Fu Lee, a CMU alumnus and former faculty member who is CEO of Sinovation Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in startups in China and the United States. He is a former executive of Apple, Microsoft and Google and is one of the most prominent figures in China’s internet sector. Sinovation and Hainan Resort Software Community hosted the exhibition.

Strategic Machine has exclusively licensed Libratus and other technologies from Sandholm’s CMU laboratory. Strategic Machine targets a broad set of applications: poker and other recreational games, business strategy, negotiation, cybersecurity, physical security, military applications, strategic pricing, finance, auctions, political campaigns and medical treatment planning.

Carnegie Mellon University faculty members Roberta Klatzky and M. Granger Morgan have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, joining the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists and civic leaders.

Klatzky, the Charles J. Queenan Professor of Psychology, is a world-renowned expert in cognition who examines the relationships between human perception and action, with a focus on touch. She investigates this from the perspective of multiple modalities, sensory and symbolic, in real and virtual environments. Her research has been instrumental to the development of telemanipulation, image-guided surgery, navigation aids for the blind and neural rehabilitation.

Klatzky, who holds appointments in the Department of Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), considers her research as a cognitive scientist who focuses on perception to be far from what most people think of as psychology. She became interested in perception while studying math at the University of Michigan and believes that her math background has been invaluable, given the quantitative nature of her work and her close collaboration with researchers in engineering and the life sciences.

Morgan, University and Hamerschlag Professor of Engineering, holds appointments in the Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) Department, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. He also serves as co-director of the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making and the Electricity Industry Center. Morgan served as founding head of the EPP Department for 38 years and was the founding director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation.

Morgan’s research addresses problems in science, technology and public policy with a particular focus on energy, environmental systems, climate change and risk analysis. Much of his work has involved the development and demonstration of methods to characterize and treat uncertainty in quantitative policy analysis.

The full list of 228 new members is available online. They will be inducted Oct. 7 in Cambridge, Mass.

“In a tradition reaching back to the earliest days of our nation, the honor of election to the American Academy is also a call to service,” said Academy President Jonathan F. Fanton. “Through our projects, publications, and events, the Academy provides members with opportunities to make common cause and produce the useful knowledge for which the Academy’s 1780 charter calls.”

CMU has been home to 22 American Academy members.

The American Academy is one of the country’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers, convening leaders from the academic, business, and government sectors to respond to the challenges facing the nation and the world.

A cross-disciplinary student team from Carnegie Mellon University has won the top prize in HP and Intel’s Design Challenge: Life in Space for creating a wearable exercise system for astronauts that relieves muscle atrophy in microgravity.
 
HP and Intel invited eight of the best engineering schools in the United States to assemble teams and design a product that would make life better for astronauts. CMU’s team consisted of five students from Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and the School of Architecture, with Diane Turnshek of the Physics Department serving as faculty adviser.
 
Deepshikha Acharya, Vishaal Dhamotharan, Cecilia Ferrando, Kevin Wang and Eugene Yu began designing their system, “Muscle Maximus,” in January, using the HP ZBook Studio Mobile Workstations they were given at the start of the contest. The International Space Station and NASA’s five core space agencies use the workstations to help astronauts with mission command and control, experiment support, health monitoring and growing food in space.
 
The team, including Turnshek, got to keep the workstations as part of their prize, which includes a trip to Cape Canaveral and Epcot Center along with $1,000 spending money.
 
“While Muscle Maximus was regarded as innovative, impactful and a top choice by HP, NASA and Intel judges, the winner was ultimately decided by public voting,” Turnshek said. “The competition win shines a spotlight on our bright, hard-working students and on our caring, connected community.”
 
The Muscle Maximus consists of three parts and is secured by Velcro. The knee and elbow joint braces provide resistance with a fin moving through a viscous fluid. The ball-and-socket shoulder support creates resistance through the interaction of two rough surfaces. An elastic band runs along the spine and straps around the shoulders and waist.
 
The CMU team’s system is self-sustaining and provides a force of one Earth’s gravity through mechanical resistance. Beyond space applications, it also could help people on Earth with medical issues. (Watch the video to see how the system works.)
 
“All of the current exoskeleton systems use electricity, and we didn’t like that,” Yu said.
 
Acharya hopes their idea takes flight.
 
“Muscle atrophy induced by microgravity is one of the leading health concerns for astronauts in space,” Acharya said. “This was a great learning experience, and it feels amazing to win. We hope our idea gets implemented on board the International Space Station soon.”
 
The team will embark on their four-day trip to Orlando in June. While they are there, they will tour Cape Canaveral and enjoy a day at Epcot Center for an exclusive HP Mission Mars Experience.