Carnegie Corporation of New York has named Carnegie Mellon University’s David Danks a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

Each of the 35 new fellows will receive $200,000, for a total of $7 million in funding, making it the most generous stipend for humanities and social sciences research available.

David Danks

Danks, the L.L. Thurstone Professor of Philosophy and Psychology and head of the Department of Philosophy, will use the fellowship to explore human trust in the age of autonomous technologies. Other winning proposals address issues such as inequity in U.S. education, radicalization via social media, voting and election processes, the global increase in violence against women in politics and the legal limbo facing immigrants.

“The health of our democracy depends on an informed citizenry, and our universities, academies and academic associations play an essential role in replenishing critical information and providing knowledge through scholarship,” said Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York. “The Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program is designed to support scholarship that brings fresh perspectives from the social sciences and humanities to the social, political, and economic problems facing the United States and the world today.”

Well known for using computational cognitive science to develop computational models to describe, predict and, most importantly, explain human behavior, Danks is a leading expert in the ethics of artificial intelligence. As autonomous technologies become more prevalent, Danks said he believes a structure must be established to guide their use, assess their impacts, develop policies and regulations and inform the public.

To do this, Danks will focus on the key relationship of trust, both between different people, and between people and the technology.

“When David gets interested in a topic, the array of philosophical, psychological, computational and mathematical tools he can bring to bear is amazing,” said Richard Scheines, dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “A few years ago, he became interested in the ethics of electronic surveillance and cyber warfare and how human decision in the presence of semi-autonomous agents will play in these arenas. This work led him to focus on the unique role that trust plays in our increasingly technological culture. I am really looking forward to what will emerge from the work David will now get to do on trust and autonomous technology, thanks to the Carnegie Fellows Program.”

Four technologies will be part of Danks’ fellowship work: self-driving vehicles; autonomous kinetic and cyber weapons systems; medical decision systems and autonomous robots; and privacy and mass surveillance. In the first phase, Danks will develop a general framework and principles for identifying and describing threats and opportunities to trust for new autonomous technologies. A second component will push that theory into practice.

Danks also plans to use the fellowship to fund visiting scholars at CMU and a weeklong workshop during the summer of 2018 for an international group of external scholars, practitioners and decision-makers.

“Trust is critical for human flourishing, both in our relationships with others and our use of technologies. But these relations of trust face diverse challenges and opportunities because of the introduction and proliferation of autonomous technologies,” Danks said. “I’m grateful to Carnegie Corporation of New York for their support as we start the work toward providing a systematic conceptual framework and principles for understanding the potential and actual impacts of autonomous systems on this key aspect of our personal, social and political lives.”

 
Carnegie Mellon University is leading a research effort sponsored by Intel Corp. that will enable cloud-based services to process a rapidly increasing volume of online video and put new analytics and immersive technologies within reach of consumers, businesses and public officials.

The Intel Science and Technology Center (ISTC) for Visual Cloud Systems, now underway, is tapping Carnegie Mellon expertise in computer vision, storage systems and databases, and networking. The goal of the $4.125 million project, supported by Intel over the next three years, is to accelerate large-scale development and adoption of cloud-based computing systems architecture.

This work would enable systems to handle the rapidly increasing amount of video content generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices including online cameras and drones, as well as by content creators and broadcasters.

In addition to its technical expertise in visual cloud systems computing and architectures, Intel provides technologies including Intel® Xeon® processors, edge devices, and imaging and camera technology.

“Online video is one of the richest data sources we have,” said David Andersen, associate professor of computer science and co-director of the new center with Kayvon Fatahalian, assistant professor of computer science. “Amazing progress is being made at analyzing and searching images, thanks to deep learning, but the approaches that work so well in still images don’t scale to video. Unlocking the immense amount of information that now goes unused will be a major focus of our work.”

“Intel and Carnegie Mellon University are extending our historic collaborations in cloud computing to tackle the challenges and opportunities these applications bring to the worldwide infrastructure of content creation, content distribution and video analytics,” said Jim Blakley, general manager of Intel Corporation’s Visual Cloud Division. “Intel’s investment and collaboration with CMU should accelerate our understanding of these big challenges, and bring more breakthrough ideas to light.”

The sheer volume of video being uploaded to the web is daunting. YouTube alone processes 300 hours of video uploads every minute and Twitch, a live-streaming platform, hosts 1.7 million at-home video broadcasters per month. By 2030, Fatahalian said, nearly all vehicles will be collecting video streams, and at least a billion security cameras will be linked to the web, generating tens of billions of images each second across the world.

“By 2030, just processing online video would require the equivalent of the planet’s entire power budget,” Andersen said.

The ISTC for Visual Cloud Systems will focus on developing new system architectures and data processing techniques optimized for processing these data- and bandwidth-intensive workloads. Much of the video will never be seen by human eyes, so researchers are developing methods to analyze these video streams at scale with intelligent computing systems and to index and store videos in such a way that they can be readily searched as new questions and concerns arise.

“For instance, someone might decide to count the number of cyclists with and without helmets,” Andersen said. “We want to make it possible to go back in time, to review years of traffic camera input, to do this sort of ad hoc analytics.”

Such advances also will drive new user experiences that are important across a number of industries. These visual computing applications include virtual reality, augmented reality, 3-D scene understanding and immersive live experiences powered by data from billions of connected IoT devices.

Andersen and Fatahalian are among 10 researchers from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science and College of Engineering participating in this ISTC. Pat Hanrahan, professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University, also is part of this ISTC.

The visual cloud systems research is part of the Intel Science and Technology Center program that began in 2010 to serve academic partners and power innovative research across a wide range of technology initiatives such as Cloud Computing, Big Data and Internet of Things. Results of the work will be available to the public and will help drive the implementation of visual cloud solutions on a broad scale.

It is Feb. 27, 1943, in Berlin. Anneliese Edelman returns home with some fish, a rare treat for dinner. Her husband, Max, should be back from his double shift at the factory, but their home is empty. For Anneliese, what was an ordinary day becomes the day her soulmate disappeared.

Jessica Hammer, assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), and co-designer Moyra Turkington created this scene for Rosenstrasse, a live-action role-playing game that builds up to the 1943 Rosenstrasse protest, a non-violent demonstration led by Aryan wives whose Jewish husbands were arrested for deportation in Nazi Germany.

The game is in the final stages of development. The duo plans to add an augmented reality component, with a web app, music and sound developed by students at the ETC, which is housed in CMU’s Integrative Design, Arts and Technology (IDeATe) Network. The HCII is one of more than 2 dozen units from across the university that also participates in IDeATe.

Rosenstrasse is the first of a three-game series that Hammer and Turkington are developing highlighting historical protests led by women.

Turkington, leader of the War Birds women’s game design collective, said she found the Rosenstrasse story compelling because it pitted a few thousand women against one of the most totalitarian and oppressive regimes in modern history. In doing so, many of them saved their husbands.

“These women, who had nothing on their side but the fact that they were German citizens, stood up in the street and said, ‘No,’” Turkington said. “That’s a really inspiring story because what it tells me is there is no evil that you can’t say ‘no’ to in some way or other. You just have to be brave enough to start.”

Rosenstrasse explores the erosion of civil rights for Jewish-Aryan couples in a range of situations, from the economically and legally vulnerable to the wealthy and protected. The story begins in 1933 Berlin, and explores the developing relationships between the couples and the ongoing revocation of their civil liberties. It ends with the arrests and women’s protest. The players’ choices throughout the game determine the fate of the male characters, Hammer said. The result is an intense emotional experience that can take roughly four hours to complete.

“It’s more than a game,” said Xin Tu, an ETC student and visual designer for the project. She said when players go through the story, they become the character and care about the character’s loved one.

“You understand the situation they have, the struggles they have,” Tu said. “You go through their life at a very fast pace and you make decisions as a human, not as a player.”

Stand up first and early

For Hammer, writing the game was a personal experience. Her family was directly impacted by the Holocaust.

Her paternal grandmother was one of the few who survived imprisonment in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and she met Hammer’s grandfather in a displaced persons’ camp following the war.

Hammer’s maternal grandfather fled Germany for the Netherlands in 1934. He emigrated to the United States in 1935 and brought his parents and siblings to America the following year.

“It was a challenging game for me to write because you ask yourself: ‘Why these protests in 1943 for this small number of men, and why not protest for all of those who were being murdered?’” Hammer said. “One of the interventions that I want to make with this game is to say: ‘You stand up first. You stand up early.’”

Hammer said games can provide a safe space for players to see the impact of their actions in ways not possible in real life. With Rosenstrasse, players can practice the skills of saying “no” to wrongdoing. For instance, when the characters take part in the Rosenstrasse protest, they are asked to confront Nazi prison guards.

“We provoke them. We put them in situations where they actually have to practice the skills of resistance and of not simply submitting to authority,” Hammer said. “These kinds of psychological changes are really important for people in their ordinary lives to be able to say, ‘No. Too far. I won’t do that.’”

Karen Schrier, assistant professor of games and interactive media and director of the Games and Emerging Media program at Marist College, said games like this allow for ethical engagement, as well as the development of skills related to ethical thinking, such as interpretation, reasoning, reflection, and gathering and evaluating information.

Schrier said that there is a mythology that people should stick to objective reasoning when making ethical decisions. However, Rosenstrasse’s focus on relationships and its prompts for reflection help show that it also is important to consider our emotions and deep ties with others when at an ethical crossroads.

Additionally, Schrier said the game encourages historical empathy and the consideration of other perspectives on historical moments.

“[Games can help] us realize that, even in our own present and future moments, there may be other interpretations of how to act, how to respond and how to think through ethical issues. Therefore, games like Rosenstrasse might also spur us to, in the future, seek out those other perspectives,” Schrier said.

By engaging with the historical subject matter, Turkington said she hopes players will have a deeper understanding of the peril people faced. Turkington said she hoped players would take modern-day events, such as the Black Lives Matter movement or the recent wave of bomb threats against Jewish community facilities, more seriously, because the game shows them how inaction and uncaringness can lead to the destruction of an entire people.

By Heidi Opdyke

Research can take on many shapes and sizes. Sometimes that means 40 yards of fabric and a motorized skirt.

Lauren Valley's "Body Electric" skirt is an instrument to create music based on user input. Valley, a senior in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art, created an iPhone app that — through a series of arm movements — allows the user to cause the dress to move and create "unsettling acoustical sounds."

It is the latest in a series of multimedia dresses that Valley has been working on since high school.

"In essence, they weren't wearable, but sculptural," said Valley, who has a concentration in physical computing through CMU's Integrative Design, Arts and Technology (IDeATe) Network. She joined the program at its inception and has been working at the intersection of art and technology, forging her own path in courses like "Interactive Art and Computational Design."

"What I've learned is how to teach myself and figure out what I wanted to do and how to do it," Valley said. The Fox Chapel, Pa., native said she knew she wanted to come to CMU as early as the fourth grade.

"What I love is the interdisciplinary approach that CMU has. I can move between robotics and art and think about creative processes in different ways," Valley said. "Technology doesn't have to be functional or marketable, sometime it can be purely visual."

The sound reactive robotic skirt is one of the hundreds of student projects and research subjects that will be on display at CMU's annual Meeting of the Minds, a university-wide celebration of undergraduate research.

The event shows the breadth of how students explore and expand their understanding of the world around them.

"What stands out at Meeting of the Minds is the diversity of projects, the range of interests, and the sheer creativity that is emblematic of Carnegie Mellon," said Stephanie Wallach, assistant vice provost for education. "It is our intellectual counterpart to Carnival — playful, historic and deeply connected to our campus and its educational mission. Everybody who attends feels uplifted by these undergraduates, their faculty mentors and their accomplishments."

Paloma Sierra-Hernandez, a sophomore studying creative writing and drama in the Bachelor of Humanities and Arts (BHA) program, will present a bilingual poetry reading that focuses on Puerto Rican identities.

Her work, "COCKTAIL: Tasting Three Different Perspectives About Puerto Rican National Identity Through Poetry," discusses how individuals perceive their national identity. One percent of the Puerto Rican population moves outside of the island annually, and today, more Puerto Ricans live outside the island than within. The work was supported with a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship.

"I want my work to invite people to reflect on the natural mosaic that is national identity, through the questioning of different perspectives that define what we regard as our national identity," said Sierra-Hernandez, who lives near San Juan.

Mark Mendell, a senior studying computer science and music technology in the Bachelor of Computer Science and Arts (BCSA) program, wanted a way to transcribe songs after Google added MIDI support to Chrome. MIDI, or musical instrument digital interface, was a protocol developed in the 1980s that allows electronic instruments and other digital tools to communicate with each other. So he created an online tool to help transcribe music more quickly.

"With the vast collection of music on YouTube, as well as the real-time precision given by the MIDI format that is lacking in traditional sheet music PDFs, it also becomes easy to synchronize the note information with its actual time in the original recording, allowing for easier reference," he said.

"Typically, talking to a piano has meant downloading an application, making sure it has the right audio API support, the right graphical backend, etc." Mendell said. By MIDI being embedded in a web browser, it can make it easy to share experiments and demonstrate musical techniques interactively.

"If you have a MIDI piano and a song you want to transcribe, you can load the song and record notes in time with it, and then move them around to edit or delete," Mendell said.

"Computer science at CMU is incredible," Mendell said. "The care for curriculum design and focus on problem-solving skills has made me feel like I can take on anything. The BCSA program has let me apply that mindset to sound projects."

Visit the Meeting of the Minds website for a full schedule and a downloadable app for the event.

By Abby Simmons and Pam Wigley

Three Carnegie Mellon University alumni garnered Tony Award nominations this morning during a live segment on “CBS This Morning” and a webcast on TonyAwards.com. Denée Benton, Christian Borle and Josh Groban were nominated for their leading roles in Broadway musicals. The Tony Awards, hosted by actor and Tony Award-winner Kevin Spacey, will be broadcast live on CBS at 8 p.m. Sunday, June 11, from Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

Carnegie Mellon will present the third annual "Excellence in Theatre Education Award" at the Tonys. The award is the first, national honor to recognize K-12 theatre educators.

"We are tremendously proud of our Carnegie Mellon University alumni nominees who, through their hard work and success, serve as role models for students everywhere," said CMU President Subra Suresh. "We also are proud to partner with the Tony Awards to recognize other important role models — our nation's teachers — who provide arts education to young people. Through our Excellence in Theatre Education Award, we honor their hard work and dedication."

2017 Tony Award Nominees

The following CMU alumni, presented in alphabetical order, have been nominated for a Tony Award this year.

Denée Benton

"Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812"

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical

Denée Benton got her big break in the middle of her senior year while studying music theater at Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama when she was cast as Nabulungi in the West End and U.S. national tour of "The Book of Mormon." She graduated in 2014 and later went on to play Ruby Carter in the second season of the Lifetime series, "UnREAL." After, Benton was cast in the title role of Natasha, in "Natasha, Pierre and The Comet of 1812" at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston, Mass. She and the show transferred to Broadway in fall 2016, where she made her debut alongside fellow CMU alumnus Josh Groban.

Christian Borle

"Falsettos"

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical

A Pittsburgh native, Christian Borle attended Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama as a music theater major. He graduated in 1995. He is a two-time Tony Award winner for his work in "Something Rotten!" and "Peter and the Starcatcher" and was nominated for his performance in "Legally Blonde, THE MUSICAL." Additional Broadway credits include "Mary Poppins," "Thoroughly Modern Millie," "Spamalot," "Footloose," "Amour" and "Jesus Christ Superstar." On screen, Borle has appeared on NBC's "Smash," "Peter Pan Live!" and "The Sound of Music Live!," as well as Showtime's "Masters of Sex."

Josh Groban

"Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812"

Best Performance By an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical

A Los Angeles native, Groban is an internationally renowned singer, songwriter and actor. Having sold more than 30 million albums and DVDs worldwide, Groban is the only artist who has had two albums land on Billboard's list of 20 best sellers of the last 10 years. On top of his music career, Groban has made acting appearances on "Glee," "The Simpsons," "The Office," "CSI: NY," "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," "The Crazy Ones," and in the feature films "Crazy, Stupid, Love," "Coffee Town" and "Muppets Most Wanted." He attended Carnegie Mellon 1999-2000. He made his Broadway debut as Comet's Pierre alongside fellow CMU alum Denée Benton this fall.

2017 Education Award Will Be Presented Live During Tony Awards on CBS

The Excellence in Theatre Education Award continues to gain significant attention, generating hundreds of nominations from across the country again this year. This annual honor 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 University and other leaders from the theatre industry recently selected the finalists and winner. CMU School of Drama Head Peter Cooke and Casey Cott, a 2016 CMU graduate and current star of the CW’s “Riverdale,” were two members of the judging panel.

A single winner will be selected to receive the Excellence in Theatre Education Award and recognized at the 71st Annual Tony Awards on Sunday, June 11.

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 School of Drama consistently ranks as one of the world’s best and has produced hundreds of Tony nominees. Its alumni have won 43 awards to date.

New research shows that limiting how pharmaceutical sales representatives can market their products to physicians changes their drug prescribing behaviors.

A team, led by the University of California, Los Angeles’ Ian Larkin and Carnegie Mellon University’s George Loewenstein, examined restrictions 19 academic medical centers (AMCs) in five U.S. states placed on pharmaceutical representatives’ visits to doctors’ offices. Published in the May 2 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the results reveal that the restrictions caused physicians to switch from prescribing drugs that were more expensive and patent-protected to generic, significantly cheaper drugs.

Pharmaceutical sales representative visits to doctors, known as “detailing,” is the most prominent form of pharmaceutical company marketing. Detailing often involves small gifts for physicians and their staff, such as meals. Pharmaceutical companies incur far greater expenditures on detailing visits than they do on direct-to-consumer marketing, or even on research and development of new drugs. Despite the prevalence of detailing and the numerous programs to regulate detailing, little was known about how practice-level detailing restrictions affect physician prescribing, until now.

For the study, which is the largest, most comprehensive investigation into the impact of detailing restrictions, the team compared changes in the prescribing behavior of thousands of doctors before and after their AMCs introduced policies restricting detailing with the prescribing behavior of a carefully matched control group of similar physicians practicing in the same geographic regions but not subject to detailing restrictions. In total, the study included 25,000 physicians and 262 drugs in eight major drug classes from statins to sleep aids to antidepressants, representing more than $60 billion in aggregate sales in the U.S.

“The study cannot definitively prove a causal link between policies that regulated detailing and changes in physician prescribing, but absent a randomized control, this evidence is as definitive as possible,” said Larkin, assistant professor of strategy at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. “We investigated 19 different policy implementations that happened over a six-year period, included a control group of highly similar physicians not subject to detailing restrictions and looked at effects in eight large drug classes. The results were remarkable robust — after the introduction of policies, about five to 10 percent of physician prescribing behavior changed.”

Specifically, the researchers found that detailing policies were associated with an 8.7 percent decrease in the market share of the average detailed drug. Before policy implementation, the average drug had a 19.3 percent market share.

The findings also suggest that detailing may influence physicians in indirect ways.

“No medical center completely barred salesperson visits; salespeople could and did continue to visit physicians at all medical centers in the study,” Larkin said. “The most common restriction put in place was a ban on meals and other small gifts. The fact that regulating gifts while still allowing sales calls still led to a switch to cheaper, generic drugs may suggest that gifts such as meals play an important role in influencing physicians. The correlation between meals and prescribing has been well established in the literature, but our study suggests this relationship may be causal in nature.”

In light of these findings, the study indicates that physician practices and other governing bodies may need to take an active role in regulating conflicts of interest, rather than relying on individual physicians to monitor and regulate.

“Social science has long demonstrated that professionals, even well-meaning ones, are powerfully influenced by conflicts of interest,” said Loewenstein, the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology at CMU. “A large body of research also shows that simply disclosing conflicts of interests is insufficient to reduce their influence, and may even exacerbate it. The results from this study underline the effectiveness of, and need for, centralized rules and regulations. We should not put the onus of dealing with conflicts on patients; the best policies are those that eliminate conflicts.”

Larkin and Loewenstein also have a Viewpoint article in the same JAMA issue that calls for physicians to be compensated on a salary basis, instead of fee-for-service, to eliminate additional conflicts of interest.

In addition to Larkin and Loewenstein, the research team included University of California, San Diego’s Desmond Ang; Austrian Institute of Technology’s Jonathan Steinhart; Williams College’s Matthew Chao; Carnegie Mellon’s Mark Patterson; Cornell University’s Sunita Sah; New York University’s Tina Wu; National Institute of Mental Health’s Michael Schoenbaum; David Hutchins and Troyen Brennan from CVS Caremark.

The National Institute of Mental Health provided funding, and CVS Caremark provided data, for the study.

Related Articles:
Information Avoidance: From Health to Politics, People Select Their Own Reality
Physicians are biased when evaluating medical conflict of interest policies
The NEW New Economics of Information
Carnegie Mellon Launches First-of-its-Kind Behavioral Economics, Policy and Organizations Major

By Julianne Mattera

Books that fit into the palm of your hand are on display on the fourth floor of Carnegie Mellon University's Hunt Library.

The miniature books, many of which are just a few inches long or wide, come from the collections of donors Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt and Mary Louise Meder. They include a tiny copy of "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe, an English and German dictionary, children's books and a "Pocket Guide to Domestic Cookery" published in 1838.

Special Collections Librarian Mary Kay Johnsen said the books typically are kept in the library's Fine Book Room. The exhibition was inspired in part by the many times students have stopped at the room's first two cases to look at the miniatures, which include the small portable works of Cicero, Izaak Walton, romantic poets and philosophers.

The exhibition is on display through May 31.

By Shilo Rea

Carnegie Mellon University's Baruch Fischhoff, a renowned expert in decision science and risk analysis, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. NAS membership is one of the highest honors a scientist can receive and recognizes distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Fischhoff, the Howard Heinz University Professor in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences' Institute for Politics and Strategy (IPS) and the College of Engineering's Department of Engineering and Public Policy, is also an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.

"Baruch is not only a highly original and productive interdisciplinary scholar, he is also an incredibly effective teacher and mentor," said Richard Scheines, dean of the Dietrich College. "Over the last three years, I have met dozens of Dietrich College alumni around the country, and it seems like over half of them say he was the most important professor they had at CMU! Baruch is an amazing force for the good in research and education at Carnegie Mellon and scientific service for our nation."

A cognitive psychologist by training, Fischhoff joined the CMU faculty in 1987 and has spent his career trying to understand and aid the decision-making of individuals and organizations. He is one of the founders of the field of decision science and has written seminal papers on decision-making in areas ranging from health to the environment to national security.

In 2016, Fischhoff joined IPS, which serves as a center for research, undergraduate and graduate education and university-wide initiatives in political science, international relations, national security policy and grand strategy. Fischhoff's addition made IPS the first international relations program at a top research university with decision science as a core part of the discipline.

"Professor Baruch Fischhoff is an outstanding exemplar of the Carnegie Mellon faculty in several important ways. He is a tireless public servant, he is relentless in bringing science to bear upon policy problems and he is committed to working intensely on specific issues while making important contributions across multiple disciplines," said Kiron Skinner, IPS director.

Beyond his research contributions, Fischhoff led the development of the Dietrich College's decision science major, the first of its kind. He has served as an adviser to many governmental agencies, including as the founding chair of the Food and Drug Administration Risk Communication Advisory Committee and the Environmental Protection Agency Homeland Security Advisory Committee. Recently, he chaired the National Research Council Committee on Behavioral and Social Science Research to Improve Intelligence Analysis for National Security and co-chaired two National Academy of Sciences Sackler Colloquia on the Science of Science Communication.

Fischhoff is a past president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and of the Society for Risk Analysis. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists and the Society for Risk Analysis. He has published many articles and books, including "Risk: A Very Short Introduction."

"We in EPP are thrilled that Baruch received this well deserved recognition with his election into the NAS," said Douglas Sicker, head of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy. "Baruch is well known for his many contributions to the field of behavioral decision making, but less known and possibly more important are his contributions to applying decision making to better informing public policy choices."

Overall, CMU has been home to 17 NAS members. This is the third straight year that the Dietrich College has had a faculty member elected into NAS: Marlene Behrmann, the Cowan University Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, in 2015, and Larry Wasserman, professor of statistics and machine learning, in 2016. John Anderson, the R.K. Mellon University Professor of Psychology and Computer Science, is also a NAS member.

The College of Engineering's other NAS members are M. Granger Morgan, University and Hamerschlag Professor of Engineering, and CMU President Subra Suresh.

Fischhoff joins 84 new members and 21 foreign associates elected into NAS this year.

Alejandro Villanueva talks with CMU football players (l-r) Stanley Bikulege, Sam Benger and Quinn Zsido.

Pittsburgh Steeler Alejandro Villanueva told fellow Carnegie Mellon University students they should believe in themselves. “Always bet on yourself,” he said.

Villanueva, a former Army Ranger and current graduate student in the Tepper School of Business, delivered the advice during a talk to CMU student-athletes. He spoke about leadership and how his experiences have made him who he is today.

After graduating from the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., Villanueva served three highly decorated tours in Afghanistan. As an Army Ranger and captain, he earned several military awards, including the Bronze Star Medal and the Bronze Star Medal of Valor for heroism in combat.

“Alejandro's unflinching fearlessness and confidence in the face of danger and denial was inspiring,” said Tartan junior running back Sam Benger. “Often times we have no idea of our true potential until we get out of our comfort zone and push ourselves.”

Following his military career, Villanueva turned to football and joined the Steelers as a free agent in 2014. During the last season he played a key role for the Steelers as their starting left offensive tackle.

In fall 2015, he enrolled in the Tepper School’s Part-Time, On-Campus MBA program to prepare for his next set of experiences.

“It was a privilege to have Alejandro spend time with our student-athletes,” said Director of Athletics Josh Centor. “I have had the chance to spend time with him, and have found his perspective on leadership — as an American hero, elite athlete and student — to be incredibly inspiring.”

Villanueva’s talk was the latest event in an expanded leadership program offered by the Department of Athletics. Earlier this spring, student-athletes heard from Carnegie Mellon alumni Mark Weinsten, a senior managing director of corporate finance at FTI Consulting Inc., and Buddy Hobart, founder and owner of Pittsburgh-based Solutions 21. Hobart played basketball for Carnegie Mellon from 1977-1981.

Related Link:
Villanueva Prepares at CMU for Life After Football

Graduate student Davey Steinman and Drama senior Joe Mertz sit on The Conversation Bench, a project created for a School of Drama Class called “Mediated Reality.”

Dramatic experiences can happen anywhere. Students in Lawrence Shea’s class are using Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood as their studio.

“We really want to think about how we can curate people’s daily activities through experiential theatre,” said Shea, an associate professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama who is teaching a course titled “Mediated Reality.”

The class is working on an iOS app that they hope to have available in future to showcase East Liberty’s past and provide conversation starters to help users interact with people they meet.

Some of the installations include a mural that triggers music from musicians with Pittsburgh ties, a photograph that prompts a video of Franco Harris’ “Immaculate Reception” and information about the nickelodeon theatres that used to contribute to street life in the city.

“It’s really about the contemporary concept of space,” Shea said. “Digital technology puts us in a non-place. With this project, you have to be in a place to experience it.  And then there’s the chance that someone might walk by and ask what you’re doing. And that could create a conversation with a real human being.”

The projects are hidden in plain site, such as a façade of a building that when viewed through an iPhone or iPad uncovers a billboard that once existed.

“There’s a map that’s visible inside the app as you start it up,” said Sylvie Sherman, who designed the backend system for the course using the Unity game engine as a platform for the projects. Sherman is a graduate student in the School of Drama’s video and media design program and earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and arts from CMU in 2012.

Davey Steinman’s project, “Conversation Bench,” chronicles the repairs of a bench at the corner Broad Street and Larimar Avenue through photos and relays information about how the neighborhood’s use of energy and building materials have changed over time.

“It’s not just about the past, but also about the current social fabric of the neighborhood,” said Steinman, also a graduate student in video and media design program. “I really appreciate that the program does not just limit theater to the stage because design fits into a larger framework.”

Jessica Medenbach echoed the sentiment. Her project uses an existing mural at 6123 Penn Ave. created by Citiparks. If the app is aimed at certain figures in the image, a floating gramophone appears and music from musicians, such as Billy Strayhorn, Gene Kelly and the East Liberty Boys Choir will play.

“I didn’t want to make something where people just stare at their phones,” Medenbach said. “I wanted to engage with them and the community and to use the devices as a portal for education.”

Shea has worked on other augmented reality projects. With The Builders Association in New York City, he created an app for the company’s show “Elements of Oz.” Audience members are encouraged to use their smartphones during the performance for interactive experiences like flying monkeys and to see a transparent layer of poppy fields.

This is the second time Shea has taught Mediated Reality, which was first offered in 2015. His work is part of the three-year initiative by CMU’s Center for the Arts in Society, focusing on the theme “Performance.”

In addition to the course, Shea is working on a project called “Ghosts in the Machine” that explores the complicated relationships between technological development, labor history and population migration that create Pittsburgh’s contemporary landscape. Working with students from the previous two classes, Shea is working to create mediated live performance events at relevant locations across the city using a new smartphone-based app.

“The goal is to bring together small local sites so that people can learn more about the city,” he said.

One hundred balloons recently helped float the idea of random acts of kindness at Carnegie Mellon University.

Students from the Asian Student Association and SPIRIT handed out the balloons with instructions on clothespins suggested that recipients pass them along to someone with a smile or “someone in a building you normally don’t go into.”

“Our goal for this project was to provide a catalyst for people to break out of their comfort zones to talk to more people they normally would not talk to, and to bring positivity to others with a kind message and a balloon,” said SPIRIT’s Vanessa Kalu, a senior majoring in business administration and human-computer interaction, and Asian Student Association’s Jason Deng, a sophomore mechanical engineering major.

The concept won the two organizations first place and $1,000 to share in the 2-4-1k Grand Challenge, a weeklong competition that paired a multicultural student organization with another club or team.

Seven teams of 14 student organizations participated in the university-wide competition funded by a ProSEED/Crosswalk grant. Chrystal Thomas, a senior majoring in biological sciences, established the 2-4-1k Grand Challenge in 2016 through Colors@CMU.

“With the campus being home to many different organizations, we wanted to create a program that would promote collaboration between them, in a way that would be fun,” said Thomas, who will be this year’s student speaker at commencement, May 21.

CMU Plaid Dog Divers and the Tepper Black Business Association won second place and a $400 award for their Postcards for the Children project. Students engaged the campus community in writing 246 cards with words of encouragement for children in war-torn Syria. The Arab Student Organization translated the messages into Arabic.

A third team earned an honorable mention and a $200 special category award for reflecting the identities of both organizations. Camp Kesem, a group giving free summer camp to children of parents with cancer, and CMU Bhangra, a competitive Indian folk dance troop, hosted a field day for students to compete in games to win prizes.

“CMU needs events like the 2-4-1k Challenge because it can be used as a platform for students from all backgrounds to connect for causes that everyone can relate to,” said Jassum Gloster, a graduate student who participated with the Tepper Black Business Association. “This challenge allowed all of us to connect and gave a way for people to give back.”

Juliann Reineke works on her exhibit in the Posner Center.

Juliann Reineke is bringing her thesis to life.

Last year, the Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. student in English celebrated a second-place finish in the university’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Championship, a competition hosted by University Libraries that challenges doctoral candidates to explain their research to a general audience in three minutes or less.

This year, the Posner Center intern is hoping individuals will spend much more than three minutes viewing her work on display at the Posner Center. “Three Sheets to the Wind: Sailors Disrupting Society” opens May 4 and runs through Nov. 30.

“Three Sheets to the Wind” investigates how the common British sailor, popularly known as the Jolly Jack Tar, reflects 18th and 19th century Britons’ concerns over the expanding empire and Britain’s place in the world. It’s a topic that has modern day relevance as well, illustrating how current perceptions of sailors and veterans developed in the 18th century.

As this semester’s Posner Center Intern, Reineke spent 15 weeks working with Special Collections Librarian Mary Catharine Johnsen to identify materials from the Posner Collection and the University Libraries’ Special Collections for her exhibition. The internship program, established in 2004, is sponsored by the Posner Fine Arts Foundation in association with University Libraries.

Interns have curated exhibitions over the years ranging in topics from robots to “Das Kapital.” As the 23rd intern, Reineke’s prior experience with 3MT gives her a bit of an edge.

“Participating in the 3MT competition helped me distill my ideas and focus on narrating my dissertation to a non-expert audience, which are vital skills for curating my exhibit,” Reineke said. “Furthermore, both the Posner Internship and the 3MT competition improved my ability to communicate the relevance of my work.”

Reineke said she strongly recommends other students consider the Posner internship.

“It is a great opportunity to delve more deeply into your research area and think critically about your audience. Ultimately, sharing one's research with interested audiences from across the CMU community is a joy and an honor,” she said.

By Laura Kelly

• CMU Embraces Special Olympics

By Byron Spice 

Touch sensing is most common on small, flat surfaces such as smartphone or tablet screens. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, however, turn surfaces of a wide variety of shapes and sizes into touchpads using tools as simple as a can of spray paint.

Walls, furniture, steering wheels, toys and even Jell-O can be turned into touch sensors with the technology, dubbed Electrick.

The "trick" is to apply electrically conductive coatings or materials to objects or surfaces or to craft objects using conductive materials. By attaching a series of electrodes to the conductive materials, researchers showed they could use a well-known technique called electric field tomography to sense the position of a finger touch.

"For the first time, we've been able to take a can of spray paint and put a touch screen on almost anything," said Chris Harrison, assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and head of the Future Interfaces Group. The group will present Electrick at CHI 2017, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, this week in Denver, Colo.

Until now, large touch surfaces have been expensive and irregularly shaped or flexible touch surfaces have been largely available only in research labs. Some methods have relied on computer vision, which can be disrupted if a camera's view of a surface is blocked. The presence of cameras also raises privacy concerns.

With Electrick, conductive touch surfaces can be created by applying conductive paints, bulk plastics or carbon-loaded films, such as Desco's Velostat, among other materials.

Yang Zhang, a Ph.D. student in HCII, said Electrick is both accessible to the hobbyists and compatible with common manufacturing methods, such as spray coating, vacuum forming and casting/molding, as well as 3-D printing.

Like many touchscreens, Electrick relies on the shunting effect — when a finger touches the touchpad, it shunts a bit of electric current to ground. By attaching multiple electrodes to the periphery of an object or conductive coating, Zhang and his colleagues showed they could localize where and when such shunting occurs. They did this by using electric field tomography — sequentially running small amounts of current through the electrodes in pairs and noting any voltage differences.

The tradeoff, in comparison to other touch input devices, is accuracy. Even so, Electrick can detect the location of a finger touch to an accuracy of one centimeter, which is sufficient for using the touch surface as a button, slider or other control, Zhang said.

Zhang, Harrison and Gierad Laput, another HCII Ph.D. student, used Electrick to add touch sensing to surfaces as large as a 4-by-8-foot sheet of drywall, as well as objects as varied as a steering wheel, the surface of a guitar and a Jell-O mold of a brain. Even Play-Doh can be made interactive with Electrick.

The technology was used to make an interactive smartphone case — opening applications such as a camera based on how the user holds the phone - and a game controller that can change the position and combinations of buttons and sliders based on the game being played or the player's preferences.

Zhang said the Electrick surfaces proved durable. Adding a protective coating atop the conductive paints and sheeting also is possible.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation supported this research. More information, including photos, are available on the project website.

By Jocelyn Duffy

A flourescent image of the exernal globus pallidus

Researchers working in the lab of Carnegie Mellon University neuroscientist Aryn Gittis have identified two groups of neurons that can be turned on and off to alleviate the movement-related symptoms of Parkinson's disease. The activation of these cells in the basal ganglia relieves symptoms much longer than current therapies, like deep brain stimulation and pharmaceuticals.

The study, completed in a mouse model of Parkinson's, used optogenetics to better understand the neural circuitry involved in Parkinson's disease, and could provide the basis for new experimental treatment protocols. The findings, published by researchers from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh and the joint CMU/Pitt Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) are available as an Advance Online Publication on Nature Neuroscience's website.

Parkinson's disease is caused when the dopamine neurons that feed into the brain's basal ganglia die and cause the basal ganglia to stop working, preventing the body from initiating voluntary movement. The basal ganglia is the main clinical target for treating Parkinson's disease, but currently used therapies do not offer long-term solutions.

"A major limitation of Parkinson's disease treatments is that they provide transient relief of symptoms. Symptoms can return rapidly if a drug dose is missed or if deep brain stimulation is discontinued," said Gittis, assistant professor of biological sciences in the Mellon College of Science and member of Carnegie Mellon's BrainHub neuroscience initiative and the CNBC. "There is no existing therapeutic strategy for long lasting relief of movement disorders associated with Parkinson's."

To better understand how the neurons in the basal ganglia behave in Parkinson's, Gittis and colleagues looked at the inner circuitry of the basal ganglia. They chose to study one of the structures that makes up that region of the brain, a nucleus called the external globus pallidus (GPe). The GPe is known to contribute to suppressing motor pathways in the basal ganglia, but little is known about the individual types of neurons present in the GPe, their role in Parkinson's disease or their therapeutic potential.

The research group used optogenetics, a technique that turns genetically tagged cells on and off with light. They targeted two cell types in a mouse model for Parkinson's disease: PV-GPe neurons and Lhx6-GPe neurons. They found that by elevating the activity of PV-GPe neurons over the activity of the Lhx6-GPe neurons, they were able to stop aberrant neuronal behavior in the basal ganglia and restore movement in the mouse model for at least four hours — significantly longer than current treatments.

While optogenetics is used only in animal models, Gittis said she believes their findings could create a new, more effective deep brain stimulation protocol.

Co-authors of the study include: Kevin Mastro, University of Pittsburgh Center for Neuroscience; Kevin Zitelli and Amanda Willard, Carnegie Mellon Department of Biological Sciences and CNBC; and Kimberly Leblanc and Alexxai Kravitz, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (NS090745-01, NS093944-01, NS076524), the National Science Foundation (DMS 1516288), the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (formerly NARSAD), the Parkinson's Disease Foundation and the NIH Intramural Research Program. The authors also acknowledge the support of Carnegie Mellon's Disruptive Health Technology Institute.

By Emily Payne

A chemistry major and Japanese minor in Carnegie Mellon University's Science and Humanities Scholars (SHS) program, Zak is a familiar face on campus through his involvement in a number of student service organizations. He is an active member of Fringe, an independent social and service organization, and Carnegie Mellon's UNICEF chapter and president of the honor society Mortar Board. Zak also served as head counselor during First-Year Orientation and led Spring Carnival's booth committee. The Andrew Carnegie Society Scholar and member of Phi Kappa Phi traveled to CMU's Qatar campus with the IMPAQT program as part of the 2016 student team to help bridge the Pittsburgh and Doha campuses.

Josh Zak has figured out one of life's greatest secrets. Giving to others is easy if you love what you do.

"All of the service I do is to honor the services that have already been rendered onto me," Zak said. "I think it's important to acknowledge what your community has done for you and at least give that much back to it, and that's what I try to do every day."

His dedication to the university community has earned him the Carnegie Mellon Alumni Association's 2017 Student Service Award to be presented May 19 at the 67th annual Alumni Awards.

"It's great when people recognize the work that you're putting in, and it's nice to know that what I'm doing is being felt across the community because that's always been the goal," Zak said.

The trick to balancing all of his responsibilities, Zak said, is remembering that it's never truly work if you love what you do.

Loving what you do is what first led Zak to Carnegie Mellon. When he was accepted to the university, Zak was able to take advantage of a broader scientific- and humanities-based education through the SHS program. For Zak, who plans to pursue a Ph.D. in inorganic materials chemistry, the two go hand in hand. Or rather brain in brain.

"If I have a day with a lot of science and engineering courses in a row, I get stuck in this logical left-brain mindset. The humanities' courses I've taken, especially for my minor, take me out of that mind space and let me be creative and do more reasoning style, right-brain thinking, which has helped me balance myself academically," Zak said.

His Japanese courses are helping him adopt a more global perspective while his science courses allow him to apply the fundamentals of chemistry and engineering to his interest in renewable energy research.

Working as an undergraduate researcher in the lab of Professor of Chemistry Stefan Bernhard, Zak's research relates to synthesizing molecules and characterizing their photophysics for use in various photoredox catalysis processes. The goal is to shine visible light on the synthesized molecules to facilitate chemical reactions that can be of use in other applications like splitting water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, the latter of which can be used as a clean fuel source, for example.

Internationally renowned economist and Carnegie Mellon University Professor Allan H. Meltzer, author of the seminal text "Why Capitalism?" and a magisterial two-volume history of the Federal Reserve, died on May 8. He was 89.

Meltzer, The Allan H. Meltzer University Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, was an important, globally recognized voice for reason in the increasingly politicized arena of monetary policy. He was the author of more than 10 books and 400 papers during his distinguished career.

He served as a consultant for several congressional committees, the President's Council of Economic Advisers, the U.S. Treasury Department, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, foreign governments and various central banks. He was also a member of the President's Economic Policy Advisory Board from 1988-90.

From 1986 to 2002, he was an honorary adviser to the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies of the Bank of Japan. In 1999-2000, he served as chairman of the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission, known as the Meltzer Commission, which proposed major reforms of the International Monetary Fund and the development banks.

"Allan Meltzer had enormous influence on the political economy of the United States over a long and distinguished career," said Jim Rohr, chairman of the Carnegie Mellon Board of Trustees and former executive chairman and chief executive officer of The PNC Financial Services Group. "His deep understanding of monetary policy and close examination of the Federal Reserve contributed to policies that supported one of the nation's longest unbroken periods of prosperity."

"In his willingness to draw from different disciplines, his focus on practical questions of great importance, and his impact on society, Professor Meltzer embodied the spirit of CMU," said CMU President Subra Suresh. "His scholarship provides another compelling example of Carnegie Mellon's extraordinary contributions to modern economics."

Born in Boston, Meltzer attended Duke University with a law career in mind, but he took a course in economics and was forever changed and thus began an academic career that spanned nearly 60 years at Carnegie Mellon. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Duke in 1948 and moved to California, where he did graduate work at UCLA and worked as a teaching assistant.

Meltzer was active in civil rights while attending Duke University as an undergraduate. He also worked with the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and was involved in getting Henry A. Wallace on the ballot in the U.S. Presidential election of 1948.

He completed UCLA's economics program and won a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and a Fulbright Scholarship that allowed him to travel to France in 1955-1956 to write his thesis on French inflation during World War II. That work fueled his interest in macroeconomics, economic growth, inflation and employment, issues that remained of interest to him throughout his career.

After spending a year as a lecturer in the department of economics at The Wharton School, Meltzer joined Carnegie Mellon in 1957 as an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA), later to be named The Tepper School of Business.

While at Carnegie Mellon, Meltzer began work on what is now considered the definitive history of the Federal Reserve in two volumes. During that period, he also ran a Congressional committee on the International Monetary Fund and authored many papers. But as it evolved, he worked almost exclusively on the book about the Federal Reserve, which took him 14 years to complete.

"Professor Meltzer stands as one of Carnegie Mellon University's most remarkable professors and most prominent scholars," said Robert Dammon, dean of the Tepper School. "He has educated generations of business students, and his impact and contributions to the field of economics, the Tepper School, and Carnegie Mellon University are significant and will be long-lasting. Along with the global community, Carnegie Mellon was fortunate to have Allan's brilliant mind and talents. He will be deeply missed."

In 1973, along with Karl Brunner of the University of Rochester, Meltzer co-founded the Shadow Open Market Committee, and from 1973-1999 served as the chair of the organization. Its objective is to evaluate the policy choices and actions of the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee and to improve policy discussions among policymakers, journalists and the general public with the hope that wiser policy decisions will result.

During the financial crisis of 2008, Meltzer testified four times at the Dodd-Frank hearings on Capitol Hill. After the crisis hit in September 2008, he and Henry Paulson and his team at the Treasury went to work to try and save the economy. For a time, Meltzer also worked with the American Enterprise Institute.

In 1983, Meltzer received a medal for distinguished professional achievement from UCLA. He was named the distinguished fellow for 2011 by the American Council for Capital Formation and is a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. In 2003, he received the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute and the Adam Smith Award from the National Association for Business Economics. In 2009, he received the Distinguished Teacher Award from the International Mensa Foundation. In 2011, Meltzer received the Bradley Award, the Harry Truman Medal for Public Policy and the Truman Medal for Economic Policy.

"Allan Meltzer was one of the greatest economists of the 20th century. His path-breaking scientific work and effective advocacy revolutionized the theory and practice of central banking, and helped bring an end to the Great Inflation in the United States and around the world in the 1980s," said Marvin Goodfriend, The Friends of Allan H. Meltzer Professor of Economics in the Tepper School. "Allan's work has guided and motivated me ever since graduate school. It has been the greatest professional and personal privilege of my life to be Allan's colleague at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School since 2005."

“Allan was a great friend and mentor. He was the reason I stayed at CMU to finish my education and we have remained good friends for over 60 years. I consider that an extraordinary result between teacher and student," said Henry Gailliot, Life Trustee at Carnegie Mellon and retired executive from Federated Investors. "I will miss him personally in terms of his ability to take current information and integrate and summarize it as part of the long sweep of economic history. That is a talent very few people have."

In the last eight years of his life Meltzer was studying constitutional law. Before his death he was working on the book "Regulation and the Rule of Law" with colleagues from Stanford University.

He is survived by his wife Marilyn Meltzer, sons Bruce Meltzer (Nancy Cooper) and Eric Meltzer (Ann King), daughter Beth MacIsaac, grandchildren Jamie O’Brien, Kate O’Brien, Avery Meltzer, Jonah Meltzer, Sophie Meltzer, Scott Meltzer, George Meltzer and Eleanor Meltzer.

Post a tribute in memory of Professor Meltzer on the Tepper School’s Alumni Relations website at http://alumnihub.tepper.cmu.edu/Meltzer

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Chicago have unveiled a new, state-of-the-art password meter that offers real-time feedback and advice to help people create better passwords. To evaluate its performance, the team conducted an online study in which they asked 4,509 people to use it to create a password.

“Instead of just having a meter say, ‘Your password is bad,’ we thought it would be useful for the meter to say, ‘Here’s why it’s bad and here’s how you could do better,’” says CyLab Security and Privacy Institute’s Nicolas Christin, a professor in CMU’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy and the Institute for Software Research and a co-author of the study.

The study will be presented at this week’s CHI 2017 conference in Denver, where it also will receive a Best Paper Award.

“The key result is that providing the data-driven feedback actually makes a huge difference in security compared to just having a password labeled as weak or strong,” said lead author Blase Ur, formerly a graduate student in CyLab and an assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Computer Science. “Our new meter led users to create stronger passwords that were no harder to remember than passwords created without the feedback.”

The meter works by employing an artificial neural network: a large, complex map of information that resembles the way neurons behave in the brain. The team conducted a study about this neural network approach that received a Best Paper Award at the USENIX Security conference in August 2016. The network “learns” by scanning millions of existing passwords and identifying trends. If the meter detects a characteristic in your password that it knows attackers may guess, it will tell you.

“The way attackers guess passwords is by exploiting the patterns that they observe in large datasets of breached passwords,” Ur said. “For example, if you change Es to 3s in your password, that’s not going to fool an attacker. The meter will explain about how prevalent that substitution is and offer advice on what to do instead.”

This data-driven feedback is presented in real-time, as a user types a password letter-by-letter.

The team has open-sourced the meter on GitHub.

“There’s a lot of different tweaking that one could imagine doing for a specific application of the meter,” Ur said. “We’re hoping to do some of that ourselves and also engage other members of the security and privacy community to help contribute to the meter.”

Other authors on the study included CMU students Jessica Colnago, Henry Dixon, Pardis Emami Naeini, Hana Habib, Noah Johnson and William Melicher; former CMU students Felicia Alfieri and Maung Aung; and Carnegie Mellon faculty Lujo Bauer and Lorrie Faith Cranor.

By Jocelyn Duffy

At the J-Lab Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, Curtis Meyer stands on the GlueX platform.

Scientists are one step closer to understanding the strong force that binds quarks together forever.

Researchers working with the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at the U.S. Department of Energy's Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (J-Lab) have published their first scientific results since the accelerator's energy level was increased from six billion electron volts (GeV) to 12 billion GeV.

The upgrade was commissioned to usher in the next generation of physics experiments that will allow scientists to see smaller bits of matter than have ever been seen before.

The first publication from the upgraded CEBAF was published by the Gluonic Excitation Project (GlueX) in the April issue of Physical Review C.

Carnegie Mellon University Professor of Physics Curtis Meyer leads the GlueX experiment and is the experiment's spokesperson. He has been involved in the experiment since its inception nearly 20 years ago.

"It is really exciting to see all of our hard work start to pay off in published physics results. While our first publication is a huge milestone, it more importantly opens the door to many more publications in the coming years," Meyer said.

GlueX is hoping to use the CEBAF to produce exotic hybrid mesons, a subatomic particle made up of quarks that have been theorized but never captured experimentally. By producing a hybrid meson, researchers hope to be able to tease apart information about gluons - the particle that holds together the quarks in the meson. Hybrid mesons are of particular interest to the research group because they exist in an excited state. Understanding this state could reveal information about how subatomic particles are built and why quarks are never found alone.

In this new paper, the GlueX team describes how they produced two ordinary mesons, the neutral pion and eta. While creating these two particles is fairly simple for an accelerator of the CEBAF's magnitude, what was interesting to the researchers is that they were able to show that the linear polarization of the accelerator's photon beam can provide enough information about how the meson was formed. They can use that information to narrow down theories about how the mesons were produced.

"This result is both scientifically interesting, as it can put strong constraints on models of how these mesons are produced, and technically important as it demonstrates the ability of GlueX to use linear polarized photons to study meson production - something that most of our research program is based upon," Meyer said.

The research team plans to continue to analyze the data the accelerator has produced since it was commissioned a year ago, and they will begin to collect new data this fall. 

By Byron Spice

Ubiquitous sensors seem almost synonymous with the internet of things (IoT), but some Carnegie Mellon University researchers say ubiquitous sensing — with a single, general purpose sensor for each room — may be better.

The plug-in sensor package they have developed monitors multiple phenomena — sounds, vibration, light, heat, electromagnetic noise, temperature, etc. — in a room. With some help from machine-learning techniques, this suite of sensors can determine whether a faucet's left or right spigot is running, if the microwave door is open or how many paper towels have been dispensed.

"The idea is you can plug this in and immediately turn a room into a smart environment," said Gierad Laput, a Ph.D. student in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). "You don't have to go out and buy expensive smart appliances, which probably can't talk to each other anyway, or attach sensors to everything you want to monitor, which can be hard to maintain as well as ugly. You just plug it into an outlet."

It is an approach that Laput and his co-investigators in HCII's Future Interfaces Group call "Synthetic Sensors," because the raw feeds from the unit's nine sensors can be combined and interpreted in ways that can sense dozens of phenomena of interest. They presented their findings May 10 at CHI 2017, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Denver.

Laput, along with Chris Harrison, an HCII assistant professor, and Yang Zhang, a Ph.D. student, built their platforms using sensors used in other commonly available smart home devices — with the exception of a camera, which raises privacy concerns.

Machine-learning algorithms can combine these raw feeds into powerful synthetic sensors that can identify a wide range of events and objects — for instance, distinguishing between a blender, a coffee grinder and mixer based on sounds and vibrations. Even soft, more subtle sounds, such as writing or erasing on a whiteboard, can be detected. More than just recording whether a device is in use or not, synthetic sensors can track the state of a device — whether a microwave door is open or closed, if cooking is interrupted, and whether the microwave has completed its cooking cycle.

"It can tell you not only if a towel dispenser is working, but can keep track of how many towels have been dispensed and even order a replacement roll when necessary," Laput said. A faucet left running when a room is unoccupied for a long time might prompt a warning message to the user's smartphone.

Even more advanced sensing can infer human activity, such as when someone is sleeping, showering, watching streaming video or has left home for work. Most of this processing occurs on the sensor platform itself, so detailed and sensitive data need not be transmitted or recorded, he added.

The sensor platform can be manually trained to recognize various phenomena, such as the cycling of water heaters or heating and air conditioning units. It also would be possible to pre-train the sensors to detect many popular devices and brands of home or office products, making it possible for the sensor platform to begin functioning as soon as it is plugged in, Laput said.

Plugging the units into a regular electric socket eliminates the need for batteries or special wiring. As a practical matter, each room likely will need its own sensor platform, though it would be possible to have each sensor platform communicate with other nearby sensors to create a home-wide sensing environment with just a few sensors, not hundreds.

Google, through the GIoTTo Expedition Project, supported this research, as did the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. For more information, please visit the project website.