News 2018

February 2018

Enigma Machines Among Computing Gems Added to University Libraries Collection

Shannon Riffe

Crucial World War II encryption devices have found a home at the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries thanks to the generosity of author Pamela McCorduck, wife of late Computer Science Department Head Joseph Traub.Totaling more than 50 calculating machines, letters and books, the collection contains important items in the history of computing. Included are two Enigma machines, electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used to encrypt communication. Most notably, they were used by Nazi Germany to protect military communication during World War II. With this gift, which includes one four-rotor machine and one three-rotor machine, CMU becomes one of only a handful of American institutions to own an Enigma machine.The items from the Traub-McCorduck Collection will be added to the University Libraries Special Collections. The University Archives contains the papers of Traub and McCorduck, as well as Allen Newell and Herb Simon, who worked alongside Traub in the department.A pioneering computer scientist who led Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department during a crucial period in its history, Traub, who died in 2015, went on to found the computer science department at Columbia University. McCorduck is an author of influential books on artificial intelligence. Andrew Moore, dean of the School of Computer Science, said the collection will serve as inspiration for a new generation of computer scientists."It's exciting that these artifacts tracing the early history of computation are now here at Carnegie Mellon, where the history of computer science continues to be written every day," Moore said. "Joe Traub was a great educator, so it's only fitting that our students will be studying and be inspired by these devices for years to come."Read the full story on CMU's News page. To learn more about how the Enigma machine worked, watch this episode of Crash Course Computer Science (at the 2:30 mark), written by SCS faculty members Amy Ogan and Chris Harrison. 

Carnegie Mellon Will Help Develop Camera To See Through Skin

Byron Spice

Carnegie Mellon University is part of a five-year, $10 million program sponsored by the National Science Foundation to develop a new type of camera that peers deep beneath the skin to help diagnose and monitor a wide variety of health conditions.The interdisciplinary effort, led by Rice University, will combine advanced optics and sophisticated computation to make sense of light that penetrates the skin but scatters off internal tissues and anatomical structures. This will enable noninvasive bio-optical imaging at a cellular scale — something not possible with ultrasound, X-rays and other medical imaging technologies."Bioimaging today enables us to see just a few millimeters beneath the skin," said Srinivasa Narasimhan, a computer vision researcher and professor in CMU's Robotics Institute who is associate director of the new project. "We'd like to go five to 10 times deeper. With every additional millimeter we go, this technology becomes more useful. We hope that eventually it might reduce or eliminate the need for biopsies."The NSF's newly announced Expeditions in Computing program includes four co-investigators at CMU and another seven at Rice, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell University."Expeditions supports transformative research, and our goal is to create miniaturized, light-based microscopes for use in wearables, point-of-care, bedside diagnostics, ambulances, operating rooms and more," said Ashutosh Sabharwal, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice and the principal investigator on the grant.The key to this effort is development of a technique called "computational scatterography." When light passes through the body, most of that light is scattered. That scattering can cause the tissue to glow, as when a flashlight is pointed at the palm of the hand. Until now, the scattered light was of little use for medical imaging. But new computer vision techniques allow scientists to make more sense of scattered light — essentially descattering the light by tracing the paths that photons took before they reached the camera.Ioannis Gkioulekas, assistant professor of robotics, said CMU researchers have used similar techniques to see through fog, snow and heavy rain and now are applying those lessons to the much more complex task of bioimaging.Narasimhan, Gkioulekas and their fellow CMU investigators — Artur Dubrawski of the Robotics Institute and Aswin Sankaranarayanan of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department — will work with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine to explore possible cardiovascular and critical care applications, and with physicians at the Allegheny Health Network on skin cancer applications.Rice's Sabharwal pointed to white blood cell count (WBC) tests, which require a finger prick or a blood draw, as an example of the project's potential impact. In the U.S., oncologists use millions of WBC tests each week to monitor chemotherapy patients."Imagine a wearable device no larger than a watch that uses sensors to continuously measure white blood cell count and wirelessly communicate with the oncologist's office," Sabharwal said. "The patient could go about their daily life. They'd only have to go to the hospital if there were a problem."Sabharwal said it's crucial to understand that scatterography will not aid in managing just one or two health care problems."If we succeed, this isn't just one product," he said. "It's a platform technology that will be able to spinoff into many products that can be used in the care of nearly 100 health conditions." Co-investigators at Rice include Ashok Veeraraghavan, Richard Baraniuk, Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Lin Zhong. Additional co-investigators include Cornell's Al Molnar, Harvard's Latanya Sweeney (formerly the Career Professor of Computer Science, Technology and Policy at CMU) and MIT's Ramesh Raskar. CMU's Disruptive Health Technology Institute sponsored previous work on bio-optical imaging by Narasimhan and his colleagues.

Morency Receives Finmeccanica Chair

Byron Spice

Louis-Philippe Morency of the Language Technologies Institute received a three-year Finmeccanica Career Development Professorship in Computer Science during a Feb. 19 ceremony.Morency joined the LTI in 2015 as an assistant professor and director of the Multimodal Communication and Machine Learning Laboratory. His research focuses on enabling computers to analyze, recognize and predict subtle human communicative behaviors, such as facial expressions, during social interactions.Morency previously was on the research faculty of the University of Southern California Computer Science Department. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2006.The Italian conglomerate Finmeccanica has endowed the chair to support outstanding young faculty members in the School of Computer Science since 1989.

Morency Receives Finmeccanica Chair

Byron Spice

Louis-Philippe Morency of the Language Technologies Institute received a three-year Finmeccanica Career Development Professorship in Computer Science during a Feb. 19 ceremony.Morency joined the LTI in 2015 as an assistant professor and director of the Multimodal Communication and Machine Learning Laboratory. His research focuses on enabling computers to analyze, recognize and predict subtle human communicative behaviors, such as facial expressions, during social interactions.Morency previously was on the research faculty of the University of Southern California Computer Science Department. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2006.The Italian conglomerate Finmeccanica has endowed the chair to support outstanding young faculty members in the School of Computer Science since 1989.

Gupta Wins Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award

Byron Spice

Abhinav Gupta, an associate professor in the Robotics Institute who specializes in computer vision and large-scale visual learning, is one of just 31 scientists selected by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for its 2018 Young Investigators Program.The three-year award will fund Gupta's efforts to enable computers to use common sense knowledge for purposes of planning and perception, much as people do. The hope is that this can improve tasks such as image classification, navigation and manipulation.The ONR's Young Investigator Program is one of the nation's oldest and most selective science and technology basic research programs. This year's winners were selected from more than 340 highly qualified applicants. Since 1985, the program has sponsored early career academic researchers whose scientific pursuits show outstanding promise for supporting the Department of Defense, while also promoting their professional development."To meet the demand signal from the 2018 National Defense Strategy, we must attract the best and brightest minds to work on naval warfighting challenges," said Rear Adm. David Hahn, chief of naval research. "The Young Investigator Program does just that."Gupta, who joined the Robotics Institute as a post-doctoral researcher in 2009 and as a faculty member in 2011, has received a number of awards, including the Sloan Research Fellowship, Bosch Young Faculty Fellowship and the Okawa Foundation Research Grant.

Cranor and Former Student Win Top SIGCHI Awards

Daniel Tkacik

Lorrie Cranor, a professor in the Institute for Software Research and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, has received the Social Impact Award from the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI). Cranor's former societal computing Ph.D. student Blase Ur won the group's Outstanding Dissertation Award."Lorrie's work has had a huge impact on the ability of nontechnical users to protect their security and privacy through her user-centered approach to security and privacy research, and development of numerous tools and technologies," said Ur, who prepared Cranor’s nomination and is now an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.The Social Impact Award is given to mid- or senior-level individuals who promote the application of human-computer interaction research to pressing social needs. The award includes a $5,000 honorarium, the opportunity to give a talk about the awarded work at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2018), and lifetime invitations to the annual SIGCHI awards banquet.

AI Pioneer Tuomas Sandholm Receives Angel Jordan Professorship

Byron Spice

Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist whose innovative algorithms have paired donors of life-saving kidneys with recipients and have also defeated top professionals in a poker contest, will be the first recipient of Carnegie Mellon University's Angel Jordan Professorship in Computer Science.Sandholm, a professor in the Computer Science Department (CSD) and a leader of the CMU AI initiative to promote artificial intelligence research, is the founder and director of the Electronic Marketplaces Laboratory, founder of Optimized Markets Inc., and founder of Strategic Machine Inc."I love the approach to computer science taken by CMU: it's about finding deep new mathematical ideas and showing how they improve the human condition," said Andrew Moore, dean of the School of Computer Science (SCS). "Tuomas' amazing career has done exactly that, and has impacted medicine, transportation and manufacturing supply chains while doing so."The newly endowed chair honors the late Angel Jordan, who played a pivotal role in establishing Carnegie Mellon as one of the leading computer science, engineering and robotics institutions in the world. As dean of engineering, Jordan worked with Raj Reddy of CSD and President Tom Murrin of Westinghouse Electric Corp. to form the pioneering Robotics Institute in 1979. As provost, he championed the elevation of computer science from a department to the college level, creating SCS in 1989.In 2001, Sandholm joined CMU, where he works at the convergence of AI, economics and operations research. His algorithms run the nationwide kidney exchange for the United Network for Organ Sharing, autonomously making the kidney exchange transplant plan for 69 percent of U.S. transplant centers each week. Through a prior startup he founded, he fielded 800 combinatorial electronic auctions for business sourcing, totaling $60 billion.Sandholm developed the leading algorithms for strategic reasoning and created the first and only superhuman AI for no-limit poker, defeating four poker pros in a 20-day, 120,000-hand poker competition in January 2017. His latest startup, Strategic Machine, seeks to apply that technology and his related technologies to a broad range of challenges in business, finance, the military, cybersecurity and medicine.His startup, Optimized Markets, is bringing a new optimization-powered paradigm to advertising campaign sales and scheduling in television, internet display, streaming video and audio, mobile, game, radio and cross-media advertising.His many honors include a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the inaugural Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Autonomous Agents Research Award, a Sloan Fellowship, an Edelman Laureateship, and the Computers and Thought Award. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich.Sandholm will be honored at an upcoming ceremony.

Choset Among Recipients of New Kavčić-Moura Professorships

Abby Simmons

Robotics Institute faculty member Howie Choset is among four Carnegie Mellon University faculty members appointed to new Kavčić-Moura Professorships — designed to provide sustained, long-term support for scholars across the university whose breakthroughs and discoveries have the potential to impact the world where human life and technology meet.Choset joins Irene Fonseca, Radu Marculescu and Michael J. Tarr as the first recipients of this recognition. The professorships honor inventors José M. F. Moura and Aleksandar Kavčić, whose scientific research and technological innovations have had a transformative impact on the computing industry for more than a decade and a half."We are delighted to honor José and Alek for their groundbreaking work and passionate commitment to advancing research and education at Carnegie Mellon," said Interim President Farnam Jahanian. "The Kavčić-Moura Professorships will allow us to attract and retain outstanding scholars across a broad spectrum of disciplines, providing the funds for brilliant minds to make innovative advances in their research."Moura, the Philip L. and Marsha Dowd University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Kavčić, a former doctoral student of Moura who is an adjunct faculty member at CMU, developed and patented systems and methods that fundamentally increased the accuracy with which hard disk drive circuits read data from high-speed magnetic disks. The four faculty members are among the recipients of a series of professorships funded by the university's proceeds from the 2016 settlement of the patent infringement lawsuit against Marvell Technology Group Ltd. and Marvell Semiconductor Inc. As outlined in 2016, the majority of those proceeds were put into endowment, for the perpetual support of undergraduate financial aid, graduate student fellowships, endowed faculty chairs and cross-campus research initiatives.A separate set of professorships created by the Kavčić-Moura Endowment Fund set up with funding provided by Moura; Kavčić; Manuela Veloso, the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Computer Science and head of the Machine Learning Department at CMU; and Sofia Kavčić will be announced in months to come.Howie Choset, Kavčić-Moura Professor of Computer ScienceChoset is a faculty member in the School of Computer Science's Robotics Institute, where he serves as co-director of the Biorobotics Lab and director of the undergraduate robotics major. He also holds courtesy appointments in electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering. Choset has made significant contributions to solving challenging and strategic problems in areas such as surgery, manufacturing, infrastructureinspection, and search and rescue with his research program in modular, high degree-of-freedom and multirobot systems. Choset holds 15 patents and launched several companies with his students, including Medrobotics, Hebi Robotics and Bito Robotics. He also co-led the formation of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute, a $250 million public-private collaborative catalyzed by CMU that puts new technologies to work for industry, and serves as its chief technology officer.

Seventeen Magazine Names CMU "2018 Cool School"

Byron Spice

Seventeen magazine has named Carnegie Mellon University one of its 2018 "Cool Schools," citing the large number of women enrolled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs.The editors noted CMU's "strong community of female coders," and mentioned that the School of Computer Science class of 2020 is almost 50 percent female. Women@SCS, the pioneering group that has helped SCS adopt a more inclusive and diverse culture, is recognized for its Big Sister/Little Sister program for undergraduates and its efforts to help women find fellowships and grants."Job and internship prospects aren't too shabby either," they noted. "Recent CS students have ended up at Google, Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, Squarespace and Disney."The 2018 Cool Schools List is in the March/April issue of Seventeen, on newsstands this week.

SCS Scientists Receive Sloan Research Fellowships

Byron Spice

School of Computer Science faculty members Chris Harrison, Bryan Parno, Andrew Pavlo and Andreas Pfenning have received 2018 Sloan Research Fellowships, which honor early career scholars whose achievements put them among the very best scientific minds working today. They, along with CMU mechanical engineer Venkat Viswanathan, are among 126 outstanding North American researchers honored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.Winners receive a two-year, $65,000 fellowship to further their research."The Sloan Research Fellows represent the very best science has to offer," said Sloan President Adam Falk. "The brightest minds, tackling the hardest problems and succeeding brilliantly — fellows are quite literally the future of 21st century science."

SCS Alum, CMU Trustee Named to National Academy of Engineering

Carnegie Mellon News

Carnegie Mellon University alumnus and trustee Edward Frank, who led the development of four generations of Macintosh computers, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering — one of the highest professional distinctions an engineer can receive.Frank earned his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science in 1985 and has been a member of CMU's Board of Trustees since 2000. He was elected to the NAE for his "contributions to the development and commercialization of wireless networking products.""Carnegie Mellon benefits from some of the finest minds in the nation — on our faculty and among our students, to be sure, but just as important, on our board of trustees, as illustrated by this national recognition for Ed Frank," said CMU Interim President Farnam Jahanian. "Ed's distinction in his field allows him to bring an important lens to some of the university's most critical work, even as his provocative insights and deep commitment to CMU make him a leader in our shared stewardship for this great institution."For more on Frank, read the full story on the Carnegie Mellon News website.

Crowd Workers, AI Make Conversational Agents Smarter

Byron Spice

Conversational agents such as Siri, Alexa and Cortana are great at giving you the weather, but flummoxed when asked for unusual information or follow-up questions. By adding humans to the loop, Carnegie Mellon University researchers have created a conversational agent that is tough to stump.The chatbot system, Evorus, is not the first to use human brainpower to answer a broad range of questions. What sets it apart, says Jeff Bigham, associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, is that humans are simultaneously training the system's artificial intelligence — making it gradually less dependent on people.Like an earlier CMU agent called Chorus, Evorus recruits crowd workers on demand from Amazon Mechanical Turk to answer questions from users, with the crowd workers voting on the best answer. Evorus also keeps track of questions asked and answered and, over time, begins to suggest these answers for subsequent questions. The researchers also have developed a process by which the AI can help to approve a message with less crowd worker involvement."Companies have put a lot of effort into teaching people how to talk to conversational agents, given the devices' limited command of speech and topics," Bigham said. "Now, we're letting people speak more freely and it's the agent that must learn to accommodate them."The system isn't in its final form, but is available for download and use by anyone willing to be part of the research effort.A research paper on Evorus will be presented by Bigham's research team later this year at CHI 2018, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Montreal.Totally automated conversational agents can do well answering simple, common questions and commands, and can converse in depth when the subject is relatively narrow, such as advising on bus schedules. Systems with people in the loop can answer a wide variety of questions, Bigham said. But with the exception of concierge or travel services, for which users are willing to pay, agents that depend on humans are too expensive to be scaled up for wide use. A session on Chorus costs an average of $2.48."With Evorus, we've hit a sweet spot in the collaboration between the machine and the crowd," Bigham said. The hope is that as the system grows, the AI can handle an increasing percentage of questions, while the number of crowd workers necessary to respond to "long tail" questions will remain relatively constant.Keeping humans in the loop also reduces the risk that malicious users will manipulate the conversational agent inappropriately, as occurred when Microsoft briefly deployed its Tay chatbot in 2016, said Ting-Hao Huang, a Ph.D. student in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI). Huang developed Evorus with Bigham and Joseph Chee Chang, also a Ph.D. student in the LTI.During Evorus' five-month deployment with 80 users and 181 conversations, automated responses to questions were chosen 12 percent of the time, crowd voting was reduced by almost 14 percent and the cost of crowd work for each reply to a user's message dropped by 33 percent.Evorus is a text chatbot, but is deployed via Google Hangouts, which can accommodate voice input, as well as access from computers, phones and smartwatches. To enhance its scalability, Evorus uses a software architecture that can accept automated question-answering components developed by third parties.This research is supported by Project InMind, a Carnegie Mellon effort sponsored by Yahoo!/Oath to develop advanced technologies for personalized digital assistants.

Tartan Team Competes for 2018 Amazon Alexa Prize

Byron Spice

Amazon has selected a Carnegie Mellon University team as one of eight worldwide to compete for its Alexa Prize by developing a socialbot to converse coherently and engagingly with people on a range of popular topics and current events, from sports to technology.Each team, including CMU's 11-member group, will receive $250,000 to develop technology for conversational artificial intelligence. They are competing for a $500,000 top prize. The winning team's university will receive a $1 million research grant if its socialbot can sustain a conversation for 20 minutes with a rating of 4.0 or higher (last year's winning team had an average rating of 3.17).Alex Rudnicky, emeritus faculty and project scientist in the Language Technologies Institute, will mentor the Tartan team, and George Larionov, an LTI Ph.D. student, will manage it. Zhou Yu, who earned her Ph.D. in the LTI last year, is mentoring Gunrock, a team from the University of California, Davis, where she is an assistant professor of computer science.Amazon received applications for the competition from leading universities from more than 15 countries, said Ashwin Ram, senior manager for AI Science, Alexa Machine Learning."We congratulate CMU as one of eight teams selected for the 2018 Alexa Prize," Ram said, "and look forward to the contributions of this year's participants as they help advance conversational AI."Rudnicky led one of two CMU teams that competed in the inaugural Alexa Prize contest last year. He noted Amazon has chosen eight teams rather than the 12 sponsored teams that competed last time, and has dramatically increased the funding for each. That's a recognition, he said, of the technical challenges involved in conversational AI."This isn't a 'spare time' kind of thing, an extracurricular activity," Rudnicky said. "You have to have some real research going on. What you really need is a couple of Ph.D. students working full time."One area of intense research, and one of Larionov's research interests, is creating an awareness of context and continuity."A weakness of these systems — one of the reasons they can't sustain a conversation well — is that they fundamentally are not good at context tracking," Rudnicky said.Sustaining a conversation requires a host of skills and strategies, from monitoring the state of the conversation and recognizing when engagement is flagging, to having an ensemble of techniques for extending what a person just said, he added.The competition will include a semifinal round this summer in which an Amazon panel and Amazon Alexa customers will evaluate all the socialbots. Two socialbots selected by Amazon Alexa customers and at least one selected by the Amazon panel will advance to the finals. In November, the finalist teams will compete head-to-head in front of judges.

Widdowson Earns Alumni Award

Susie Cribbs

School of Computer Science alumnus Andrew Widdowson will receive Carnegie Mellon University's 2018 Alumni Service Award, which recognizes alumni for their dedication to serving CMU and the impact of that service on the university and its alumni.First presented in 1950, the Alumni Awards pay tribute to individuals distinguished by their service to the university and outstanding accomplishments in the arts, humanities, sciences, technology and business. To date, the awards have honored nearly 900 alumni, faculty and students.Widdowson, who graduated from SCS in 2005, is a staff software engineer in Google's Site Reliability Engineering group. He works on Google Search, and trains engineers in large-scale systems engineering. He also serves as chair of the SCS Alumni Advisory Board, and is the lead donor on the WRCT Forever Fund."Andrew is 100 percent committed to Carnegie Mellon and its success, both now and in the future," wrote Mark Stehlik, assistant dean for outreach and engagement, in a nomination letter. "I can think of no better SCS alum than Andrew to be recognized for his long record of service to WRCT, the School of Computer Science and Carnegie Mellon University."Widdowson will receive his award at CMU's Alumni Awards ceremony on Friday, May 18.

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