News 2018

March 2018

Girls of Steel Bring Home Awards From FIRST Pittsburgh Regional

Byron Spice

The Girls of Steel and their robot, Clyde, made it to the semifinals of the FIRST® Robotics Competition Greater Pittsburgh Regional March 22–24 and took home several awards, including the prestigious Chairman's Award.The team, sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University's Field Robotics Center, had already qualified for the FIRST Championship April 25–28 in Detroit, based on its performance at the Miami Valley FIRST Robotics Regional competition in Dayton, Ohio. The team includes ninth through 12th grade girls from the Pittsburgh area.The Chairman's Award honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the purpose and goals of FIRST. One of the team's mentors, Thomas Pope, systems manager for the Institute for Software Research, won the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award, which recognizes the mentor who best leads, inspires and empowers their teams using excellent communication skills in the art and science of engineering and design.Team member Kristina Hilko, a junior at Penn Hills High School, won the Dean's List Finalist award that is given to a student whose passion for and effectiveness at attaining FIRST ideals is exemplary.The Pittsburgh regional was at California University of Pennsylvania.

Group Says Computer Scientists Need To Remove "Rose-Colored Glasses"

Byron Spice

Computer scientists too often view their work through rose-colored glasses and must give greater consideration to technology's potential negative impact when they publish their findings, says a new group that hopes to chart the future for computing professionals.A blog post today by the Association for Computing Machinery's Future of Computing Academy (FCA) suggests that the peer-review process for research papers in computing needs to be more rigorous, with authors required to seriously assess not only the potential benefits of the research, but also the possible pitfalls.Jeff Bigham, associate professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute and a member of the FCA, said the blog post has been in the works for months, but is particularly relevant now in light of controversies surrounding the use of personal data obtained through Facebook."Machine learning over social media data can be used to make organizations function better and to improve how people feel about themselves and others," he said. "Unfortunately, as the recent news about Cambridge Analytica shows, some of the same technical approaches can be used to manipulate people."We aren't saying that this work shouldn't be done just because it could have negative consequences," added Bigham, a co-signator of the blog post. "We are simply advocating for the potential negative outcomes to be stated explicitly, so they can be balanced with the positive ones, potentially guiding our decisions about what to work on, where society should focus its resources and, ultimately, the direction we want our science to go in."A research paper on automating home care for older adults, for instance, might now highlight how technology could reduce costs and eliminate time-consuming tasks for workers, the group's blog post said. But it also should address potential large-scale job loss that would occur if technology development is successful."There clearly is a massive gap between the real-world impacts of computing research and the positivity with which we in the computing community view our work," the FCA stated in the post. "We believe that this gap represents a serious and embarrassing intellectual lapse.""What's more, the public has definitely caught on to our community-wide blind spot and is understandably suspicious of it," the blog said.Insisting that authors take a more balanced view of their work would increase the intellectual vigor of computing research and would give researchers an incentive to change the technologies they create to have more positive outcomes, the group said. Mitigating the downsides of existing and new technologies would also increase public support for the computing community.The FCA is a new initiative created by ACM, the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, to support and foster the next generation of computing professionals. The ACM describes the academy as a platform that enables the next generation of researchers, practitioners, educators and entrepreneurs to develop a coherent and influential voice that addresses challenging issues facing the field and society in general."Computer science has enjoyed several decades of time in which its impacts have been viewed almost entirely positively, and for good reasons," Bigham said. "But, like other fields that have matured, we believe we are now at the point where computing technology can have real impact on the world, and that impact won't always be positive. We believe we are now at a point where it is especially vital that we start paying attention, in advance, to the net broader impacts of what we choose to work on."

Software Automatically Generates Knitting Instructions for 3-D Shapes

Byron Spice

Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists have developed a system that can translate a wide variety of 3-D shapes into stitch-by-stitch instructions that enable a computer-controlled knitting machine to automatically produce those shapes.Researchers in the Carnegie Mellon Textiles Lab have used the system to produce a variety of plush toys and garments. What's more, this ability to generate knitting instructions without need of human expertise could make on-demand machine knitting possible, according to James McCann, assistant professor in the Robotics Institute and leader of the lab.McCann's vision is to use the same machines that routinely crank out thousands of knitted hats, gloves and other apparel to produce customized pieces one at a time or in small quantities. Gloves, for instance, might be designed to precisely fit a customer's hands. Athletic shoe uppers, sweaters and hats might have unique color patterns or ornamentation."Knitting machines could become as easy to use as 3-D printers," McCann said.That's in stark contrast to the world of knitting today.

SCS Junior Gives Back to Computer Science

Aisha Rashid

From building transportation devices with the CMU Hyperloop team to organizing hackathons with CMU MellonHeads, School of Computer Science junior Hima Tammineedi is busy. But the computer science major — who's also pursuing a machine learning minor —  knows that he's been incredibly fortunate to have the chance to expand his computer science interests and participate in meaningful activities with his friends. And because of that, he's made it a personal goal to give back to his community — and to encourage his peers to do the same.As a member of CMU's Student Giving Committee, Tammineedi helps the Office of Annual Giving encourage more students to give back and donate to the university through events, fundraisers and other activities."If you compare CMU's endowment to other peer institutions of our caliber, you'll notice that we have a much smaller endowment — around one-seventh or less of the size of our peer institutions," Tammineedi said. "CMU has already done so much even with this smaller endowment, but we could probably do more if we had even more support from alumni, and especially from students."One of the committee's most successful events was a casino night fundraising event for seniors graduating this spring. In addition to competing in games, raffles and prizes, students attending the event could also donate to CMU. The committee also encourages students to donate within their departments, through funds like the Mark Stehlik SCS Alumni Undergraduate Impact Scholarship. This year, in honor of Stehlik graduating his 3,000th CMU student, a group of SCS alumni has pledged to donate $4,000 to the fund if more than a third of the Class of 2018 donates to CMU."It doesn't matter how much you give, it only matters whether you give," Tammineedi said. "The strength of an institution is not measured by the amount it earns, but from what it produces. That production comes from people who make up the institutions. If students gave even $5, if that's within their means, over time that adds up and contributes to the power of people donating."Tammineedi's passion for giving back to his community, especially to SCS, stems from the opportunities he says he was fortunate to receive. "As I become an upperclassman, I feel like my time here is ending soon. It's made me more aware of what I want my time here to be like and what I've gotten out of CMU," he said.While Tammineedi acknowledges that it is not within everyone's means to donate, he still encourages students to give back to their communities in any way they can."College is a transcendent moment in our lives, because here is where we have the greatest upward learning trends and the greatest amount of peers open to friendship and collaboration," he said. "It's a slingshot that brings us into the rest of our lives. CMU specifically has given me a lot of opportunities, and I'm sure it's been great for others as well. I want to preserve that, and make it better for others."

CMU Names Seshan New Head of Computer Science Department

Byron Spice

Andrew Moore, dean of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, has appointed Srinivasan Seshan head of the Computer Science Department, the school's oldest and largest department, effective July 1.He succeeds Frank Pfenning, who will return to full-time teaching and research."I'm sorry that Frank has decided to step down, because he's done an excellent job leading the Computer Science Department for the past five years," Moore said. "It's great that he will be able to spend more time teaching and doing research."Likewise, we are all excited about Srini Seshan's new role as head of CSD," he added. "He is an outstanding researcher and teacher, and I'm confident that his expanded role in leadership will help the department reach even greater heights."Seshan joined the CSD faculty in 2000. He served as the department's associate head for graduate education from 2011 through 2015.His research focuses on improving the design, performance and security of computer networks, including wireless and mobile networks. He and his research group have developed ways to more efficiently transfer video content over the internet, and have worked on new architectures that would make the internet more trustworthy and better able to evolve as technology changes.His most recent project — Elastic Placement, Posture and Performance (EP3) — explores a flexible approach to securing our computing and networking infrastructure. EP3 enhances network security by enabling firewalls, intrusion detection and other security components to be deployed in ways that can change over time, making our networks less vulnerable to attack.Seshan earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He worked as a research staff member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center for five years before joining Carnegie Mellon.In addition to a number of best paper awards at professional conferences, his honors include the three-year Finmeccanica Career Development Professorship in Computer Science, which supports outstanding young SCS faculty members; two IBM Faculty Partnership Awards; and the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award — the agency's most prestigious award for junior faculty.  The Computer Science Department, founded in 1965, is one of seven SCS departments. It has a broad set of research programs including theory, programming languages, systems, networks and security. Initially, CSD educated only Ph.D. students, but now has master's degree programs and has performed the bulk of the teaching for undergraduate computer science majors since that program was begun in 1989.In U.S. News and World Report's latest rankings of graduate schools, SCS tied at number one overall and was the top-rated program in artificial intelligence.

Le Goues Receives NSF CAREER Award

Byron Spice

Claire Le Goues, an assistant professor in the Institute for Software Research, is the latest School of Computer Science faculty member to receive the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award — the agency's most prestigious award for junior faculty.The five-year, $525,000 award will support Le Goues' work on automatic program repair, an emerging area of research that ultimately could reduce the cost of software defects, improve software quality and increase the productivity of programmers. Le Goues is exploring a number of repair techniques and strategies. These include methods for searching for and composing diverse solutions to bug repair problems, as well as using formal reasoning to construct verified patches for previously undetected bugs.Le Goues joined the CMU faculty in 2013 after completing her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Virginia. Her research interests, which she says are informed by a stint as a software engineer before her graduate studies, span software engineering and applied programming languages."I study software from the worlds of open source and desktop all the way to embedded and robotics systems," she said. In addition to her work on automatic program repair and improvement, she studies a variety of methods for testing and assuring today's increasingly large and complex software systems.She previously received a Google Faculty Research Award, and her other honors include both a Gold and a Bronze "Humie," awarded annually by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation for the best human competitive results produced by evolutionary computation.

Roboticists Share Prestigious Award for Autonomous Helicopter Technology

Byron Spice

AHS International, The Vertical Flight Technical Society, has announced that the winner of its 2018 Howard Hughes Award is an Office of Naval Research (ONR) autonomous helicopter project team that included researchers from both the Robotics Institute and the RI spinoff Near Earth Autonomy.The award recognizes an outstanding improvement in fundamental helicopter technology that has been brought to fruition in the previous 18 months.The ONR's Autonomous Aerial Cargo/Utility System (AACUS) team developed and successfully demonstrated a fully autonomous helicopter flight capability. Over the course of the five-year project, the AACUS team designed a hardware and software applique "kit" that enables the host helicopter platform to interpret and execute high-level logistics mission tasks.ONR has said such a system could perform automated military resupply missions in the field. Sanjiv Singh, professor of robotics and Near Earth Autonomy CEO, foresees broader applications that will transform the way people and goods are transported.A Robotics Institute team headed by Systems Scientist Sebastian Scherer led development of AACUS motion-planning software that determines flight trajectories and landing approaches. Singh led a second group at Near Earth Autonomy that developed the sensor package and perception software, and played a key role in field deployment and testing.The chief engineer for the prime contractor, Aurora Flight Sciences, is 2011 CMU mechanical engineering alumnus Fritz Langford.The AACUS project also has been nominated for the prestigious Collier Trophy, which is awarded for the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America in the previous year. That award will be announced March 23.

Pipe-Crawling Robot Will Help Decommission DOE Nuclear Facility

Byron Spice

A pair of autonomous robots developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute will soon drive through miles of pipes at the U.S. Department of Energy's former uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio, to identify uranium deposits on pipe walls.The CMU robot has demonstrated it can measure radiation levels more accurately from inside the pipe than is possible with external techniques. In addition to savings in labor costs, its use significantly reduces hazards to workers who otherwise must perform external measurements by hand, garbed in protective gear and using lifts or scaffolding to reach elevated pipes.DOE officials estimate the robots could save tens of millions of dollars in completing the characterization of uranium deposits at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, and perhaps another $50 million at a similar uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Ky."This will transform the way measurements of uranium deposits are made from now on," said William "Red" Whittaker, robotics professor and director of the Field Robotics Center.Senior Project Scientist Heather Jones will present two technical papers about the robot on Wednesday, March 21, at the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix. CMU also will demonstrate a prototype of the robot during the conference.CMU is building two of the robots, called RadPiper, and will deliver the production prototype units to DOE's sprawling 3,778-acre Portsmouth site in May. RadPiper employs a new "disc-collimated" radiation sensor invented at CMU. Led by Whittaker, the team began the project last year and worked closely with DOE and Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth — the decommissioning contractor — to build a prototype on a tight schedule and test it at Portsmouth last fall.Shuttered since 2000, the plant began operations in 1954 and produced enriched uranium, including weapons-grade uranium. With 10.6 million square feet of floor space, it is DOE's largest facility under roof, with three large buildings containing enrichment process equipment that span the size of 158 football fields. The process buildings contain more than 75 miles of process pipe.Finding the uranium deposits, necessary before DOE decontaminates, decommissions and demolishes the facility, is a herculean task. In the first process building, human crews over the past three years have performed more than 1.4 million measurements of process piping and components manually, and are close to declaring the building "cold and dark.""With more than 15 miles of piping to characterize in the next process building, there is a need to seek a smarter method," said Rodrigo V. Rimando Jr., director of technology development for DOE's Office of Environmental Management. "We anticipate a labor savings on the order of an eight-to-one ratio for the piping accomplished by RadPiper." Even with RadPiper, nuclear deposits must be identified manually in some components.RadPiper will operate initially in pipes measuring 30 inches and 42 inches in diameter and will characterize radiation levels in each foot-long segment of pipe. Those segments with potentially hazardous amounts of uranium-235, the fissile isotope of uranium used in nuclear reactors and weapons, will be removed and decontaminated. The vast majority of the plant's piping will remain in place and will be demolished safely along with the rest of the facility.The tetherless robot moves through the pipe at a steady pace atop a pair of flexible tracks. Though the pipe is in straight sections, the autonomous robot is equipped with lidar and a fisheye camera to detect obstructions ahead, such as closed valves, Jones said. After completing a run of pipe, the robot automatically returns to its launch point. Integrated data analysis and report generation frees nuclear analysts from time-consuming calculations and makes reports available the same day.The robot's disc-collimated sensing instrument uses a standard sodium iodide sensor to count gamma rays. The sensor is positioned between two large lead discs. The lead discs block gamma rays from uranium deposits that lie beyond the one-foot section of pipe being characterized at any given time. Whittaker said CMU is seeking a patent on the instrument.The Robotics Institute and Whittaker have extensive experience with robots in nuclear facilities, including the design and construction of robots to aid with the cleanup of the damaged Three Mile Island reactor building in Pennsylvania and the crippled Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine.DOE has paid CMU $1.4 million to develop the robots as part of what CMU calls the Pipe Crawling Activity Measurement System.In addition to the Portsmouth and Paducah plants, robots could be useful elsewhere in DOE's defense nuclear cleanup program, which is not even half complete, Rimando said. Other sites where robots might be used are the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., and the Hanford Site in Richland, Wash."With at least 50 more years of nuclear cleanup to be performed, the Robotics Institute could serve as a major pipeline of roboticists for DOE's next several workforce generations," Rimando said.

The Shape of Pasta

Susie Cribbs

Lining Yao came of age in a small village in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Like most families in her town, she didn't have a computer. She didn't even have a television. On the eve of Chinese New Year, friends gathered at the only local home with a small black and white TV to watch China Central Television's New Year's Gala. When a car drove through her village — which happened only a few times a year — people would line the street and wave to welcome it. Her family grew most of their own food, and foraged for mushrooms in the forest.Today, Yao directs the Morphing Matter Lab in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where she studies how to design and fabricate materials that use nano- and microscale technologies to alter their own shape. Examples? Clothing that self-ventilates in response to human sweat. Furniture that arrives in a flat package and self-assembles when exposed to a stimulus like heat or water. Flat pasta that takes its characteristic shape when boiled.

Siewiorek Honored With IEEE's Booth Education Award

Byron Spice

Daniel P. Siewiorek, the Buhl University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), has been named the 2018 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Taylor L. Booth Education Award.  The award recognizes Siewiorek, who has held a number of key leadership positions in both the School of Computer Science and the College of Engineering during his 46 years at Carnegie Mellon University, "for contributions to computer architecture, wearable computing, and human-computer interaction education through his pioneering textbooks, mentoring and leadership."The Booth Award commemorates individuals who have an outstanding record in computer science and engineering education. The award is named after the late Taylor L. Booth, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Connecticut who was instrumental in defining computer science and engineering curricula for program accreditation."I feel very honored to receive this award," Siewiorek said. "When I was beginning as an assistant professor, I looked to Taylor Booth as a role model in computer engineering education. We were all using his textbook in the classroom."An author of nine textbooks and more than 475 papers, Siewiorek leads an interdisciplinary team that has designed and constructed more than 20 mobile computing systems. He has designed or been involved with the design of nine multiprocessor systems, including the pioneering Cm* in 1974, and has been a key contributor to the dependability design of over two dozen commercial computing systems.  Siewiorek is the former director of the Quality of Life Technology NSF Engineering Research Center, former HCII director, and co-founder and former associate director of the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems.A fellow of IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Siewiorek has received the American Association of Engineering Education's Terman Award, the IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, and the ACM SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contributions Award.The award consists of a bronze medal and $5,000 honorarium, and will be presented at a June 6 dinner and ceremony in Phoenix. Further information about the award, including a list of past recipients, is available on the IEEE Computer Society website.

NASA Awards Contract to Continue Development of CubeRover

Byron Spice

NASA has awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research contract to Carnegie Mellon University and lunar logistics company and CMU spinoff Astrobotic Technology to continue development of a new class of small, lightweight extraterrestrial robots, called CubeRovers.In the first phase, more than 30 Astrobotic and CMU researchers collaborated on system-wide development of a 2-kilogram rover prototype that could explore the surface of the Moon. The team performed engineering studies to determine the architecture of a novel chassis, body type, power system, and computing system, and produced novel flight software and navigational techniques for small rovers.In Phase II, the team will further build and deliver a flight-ready rover to NASA. The team intends to fly the first CubeRover on Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander to the Moon in 2020.''CubeRover stands to give more people access to the Moon than ever before,'' said Andrew Horchler, principal investigator at Astrobotic. ''Countries and organizations without multi-billion-dollar budgets now have a means of exploring other worlds for the first time. We are thrilled NASA is supporting our vision to innovate lunar surface mobility.''At CMU, William ''Red'' Whittaker, professor of robotics and chairman of Astrobotic, leads the CubeRover team. Whittaker envisions teams of CubeRovers taking the place of single, larger rovers for surveys and other lunar missions.

Lee Earns Inaugural Edmund M. Clarke Doctoral Dissertation Award

Jenn Landefeld

Recent Computer Science Department Ph.D. graduate Euiwoong Lee is the first recipient of the newly established Edmund M. Clarke Dissertation Award. The award, endowed through a generous contribution from University Professor Emeritus Edmund M. Clarke and his wife, Martha, will annually be awarded to an outstanding Computer Science Department doctoral student.Advised by Computer Science Professor Venkat Guruswami, Lee successfully defended his thesis, "Optimal Approximabilities Beyond CSPs" in 2017." His work expanded the frontiers of approximation algorithms with respect to the range of optimization problems, as well as mathematical tools for algorithms and hardness. He's currently engaged in postdoctoral work at New York University."Whether it was helping our three sons with science projects or supervising his Ph.D. students at Carnegie Mellon, Ed’s passion has always been research," said Martha, who was CSD's graduate admissions coordinator until her retirement in 2014. "He had a leading role in the conception and development of techniques for verification of computer systems, and was particularly proud of the many accomplishments of his students. The Computer Science Department has always fostered a tradition of research excellence, which provided Ed with the perfect environment to pursue his passion. With this award, we want to recognize and encourage the outstanding CSD doctoral students in their research endeavors. We are delighted to sponsor the Edmund M. Clarke Dissertation Award."

Girls of Steel Headed to FIRST Championship

Byron Spice

The Girls of Steel, the all-female FIRST robotics team sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University's Field Robotics Center, placed third among 61 teams and won the FIRST Team Spirit Award at the Miami Valley FIRST Robotics Regional Competition in Dayton, Ohio, Feb. 28–March 3.It was the first time in eight years of competition that the FRC team, composed of ninth through 12th grade girls from the Pittsburgh area, made it to the final round. Though its alliance of three teams lost to the opposing alliance in the final match, the Girls of Steel team, as the second alliance captain, received a wildcard, enabling them to compete in the FIRST Championship in Detroit April 25–28.

Back to Makukuulu

Byron Spice

Last month, Robotics Institute Research Associates Josh Schapiro and Mike Taylor made good on a promise to villagers in Uganda, returning to the African nation with solar-powered ventilation systems designed to exhaust unhealthy cooking smoke from homes.They delivered 30 of the systems that they designed and built based on an idea that emerged seven years ago as part of Toyota’s Ideas for Good marketing campaign. They also trained villagers from Makukuulu parish to install, repair and service the devices.“I didn’t actually install a single one,” Schapiro said, noting the three village men quickly grasped the mechanics of how to set up the system. “We’d walk into a kitchen, the three of them would talk to each other a bit and, before you knew it, the youngest would jump on the roof and they’d start installing it.”The ventilation systems are compact, consisting of a solar array the size of a tablet computer, a small fan/light assembly that hangs above the cooking area and some flexible plastic tubing to vent the smoke outside.

Autonomous Rotorcraft System Nominated for Top Aerospace Award

Byron Spice

An Office of Naval Research project to develop fully autonomous helicopters, which included significant contributions by Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, has been nominated for the aerospace industry's most hallowed award — the Collier Trophy.The ONR's Autonomous Aerial Cargo/Utility System, or AACUS, is a package of sensors and software that can be integrated into any existing rotary-wing aircraft to provide autonomous capabilities, including obstacle avoidance, approaches, landings and takeoffs.ONR said such a system could be used to perform automated military resupply missions in the field, even in contested environments. The technology, however, could have much broader applications."AACUS was an open-ended program that did for autonomous flight what the DARPA challenges did for self-driving cars," said Sanjiv Singh, research professor of robotics. The project leveraged decades of research in perception and planning for autonomous flight, and prompted Singh and his colleagues to spin off their own company, Near Earth Autonomy, to help accomplish the project's goals."This technology will revolutionize the way we move people and goods," he added.The 105-year-old Collier Trophy, which resides in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., is presented by the National Aeronautic Association "for the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America, with respect to improving the performance, efficiency, and safety of air or space vehicles, the value of which has been thoroughly demonstrated by actual use during the preceding year." Previous winners include Orville Wright, and the crews of both Apollo 11 and Mercury 7. Projects and programs that have received the trophy include the B-52, the Boeing 747 and the International Space Station.A Robotics Institute team headed by Systems Scientist Sebastian Scherer led development of AACUS motion-planning software that determines flight trajectories and landing approaches. A second group at Near Earth Autonomy, led by Singh, developed the sensor package and perception software, and played a key role in field deployment and testing.The AACUS project culminated this past December with a successful demonstration at Marine Corps Base Quantico, VA. This demonstration allowed a Marine, with no prior experience, to program a resupply mission involving a UH-1 "Huey" helicopter after only 15 minutes of training."We at ONR are very excited and proud of the AACUS team that was selected as a finalist for this very prestigious Collier Trophy. When you consider that previous winners include the Apollo 11 and the Boeing 747 teams, you realize what a truly outstanding achievement this is," said Knox Millsaps, director of the division of Aerospace Sciences in ONR's Naval Air Warfare and Weapons Department. "But our greatest sense of excitement and pride comes knowing we've provided a technology that could help the Marine Corps warfighter stay out of harm's way during resupply missions."Other nominees for the 2017 Collier Trophy include the NASA/JPL Cassini Project Team, the Boeing 737 MAX and the Vanilla Aircraft VA001, which last year set an endurance record for unmanned aircraft systems with internal combustion engines with a flight of 121 hours, 24 minutes.The winner of the award will be announced March 23.The AACUS project, now complete, is being transitioned to the Marine Corps for further experimentation and development.

New AI Helps Make Sense of Privacy Policies

Daniel Tkacik

If you're anything like the average internet user, you probably didn't spend the estimated 244 hours it would take to read every privacy policy for every website you visited last year. That's exactly why a team led by Carnegie Mellon University just launched an interactive website aimed at helping users make sense of their privacy on the web."We've combined crowdsourcing, machine learning and natural language processing techniques to extract annotations from privacy policies that help answer key questions that users often care about," says Norman Sadeh, the lead principal investigator on the Usable Privacy Policy Project. Sadeh is also a professor in the School of Computer Science's Institute for Software Research, and a faculty member in the CyLab Security and Privacy Institute.The team used artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to crawl 7,000 of the most popular websites' privacy policies and identify those that contain language about data collection and use, third-party sharing, data retention, and user choice — among other privacy issues. The project website enables people to navigate machine-annotated privacy policies and jump directly to statements of interest to them, including those often buried deep in the text of privacy policies.The researchers' AI also evaluated each privacy policy for readability. For example, ABC News topped the rankings with a privacy policy written at a "college graduate" reading level (grade 26). Google's privacy policy was found to be written at a college reading level (grade 14), the same as those of YouTube, Reddit and Amazon. Facebook's privacy policy was found to be a tad friendlier, written at a grade 12 reading level."We found that the text of the policies is often vague and ambiguous, and people tend to struggle to interpret and determine what personal information is collected, how it's used, and what other entities it's shared with," Sadeh says. "From a legal standpoint, this is problematic."To "train" their AI, the team asked a group of law students to manually annotate 115 privacy policies. The AI learned from those annotations and then crawled the policies from over 7,000 of the most popular sites on the web."While not perfect, our techniques are capable of automatically extracting a large number of privacy statements from the text of privacy policies," says Sadeh. "Eventually, the goal is to make this information available to users via a simple and intuitive browser plug-in that would provide users with personalized summaries highlighting those issues they are most likely to care about."Other collaborating institutions in the Usable Privacy Policy Project include Fordham University, Stanford University, University of Cincinnati, and the University of Michigan. Key contributors in the effort to automatically annotate privacy policies include undergraduate computer science student Sushain Cherivirala; graduate students Peter Story, Frederic Liu and Kanthashree Sathyendra; post-doctoral fellow Sebastian Zimmeck; CMU professors Alessandro Acquisti and Lorrie Cranor; Fordham University Law Professor Joel Reidenberg; Fordham Adjunct Professor of Law N. Cameron Russell; University of Michigan Professor Florian Schaub; and University of Cincinnati Professor Shomir Wilson.The Usable Privacy Policy project is funded by the National Science Foundation under its Secure and Trustworthy Computing (SaTC) program.

Proofpoint Acquires CMU Spinoff Wombat Security for $225 Million

Byron Spice

Proofpoint Inc., a leading cybersecurity company, has completed its acquisition of a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff, Wombat Security Technologies Inc., for $225 million. The deal was announced by Proofpoint last month.''Because threat actors target employees as the weakest link, companies need to continuously train employees and arm them with real-time threat data,'' said Gary Steele, CEO of Proofpoint in Sunnyvale, Calif. ''The acquisition of Wombat gives us greater ability to help protect our customers from today’s people-centric cyberattacks, as cybercriminals look for new ways to exploit the human factor.''Wombat, founded 10 years ago by three CMU computer science professors to leverage innovative university research on preventing cyber attacks, is widely recognized as a leader in cybersecurity awareness training.''Carnegie Mellon consistently produces world leaders in cybersecurity, whose work protects all of us from cyber threats. Their mastery of both the technology and the human elements of computing make us all safer, as individuals, as organizations, and as a nation,'' said Farnam Jahanian, interim president of CMU. ''This sale is a tribute to the faculty who created Wombat, as well as to the alumni who are key leaders at Proofpoint, and to all those who are helping to ensure CMU expertise benefits society more broadly.'' ''You always have high expectations when you start a company, but there’s nothing more rewarding than to see results of your research having an impact on this scale. Our research at CMU has effectively created an entirely new segment in the cybersecurity industry, one that focuses on the human element,'' said Norman Sadeh, professor of computer science and chairman and chief scientist of Wombat.Sadeh co-founded the company with Lorrie Faith Cranor, FORE Systems Professor of computer science and engineering and public policy, and Jason Hong, associate professor of computer science. Sadeh and Cranor teach in the Institute for Software Research and Hong is a faculty member of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. All three are members of CMU’s CyLab Security and Privacy Institute.The company, headquartered in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, initially focused on leveraging learning science principles to help organizations train their employees to recognize and avoid email ''phishing'' attacks.Phishing attacks trick people into divulging sensitive information, such as usernames and passwords, or into installing malware by sending them emails that appear to come from legitimate, trusted sources. It is estimated that over 90% of cyber attacks today involve phishing emails.''Wombat is a good example of why we at Carnegie Mellon talk about computer science primarily as problem solving, not programming,'' said Andrew Moore, dean of the School of Computer Science. ''Phishing and cybersecurity in general are more than technical problems; they are people problems. In typical CMU fashion, Norman, Lorrie and Jason were able to solve the problem because they understood that people and technology are inextricably linked.''The founders’ approach – sending simulated phishing emails to employee inboxes – was a major departure from traditional training methods, but has since become the de facto industry standard. They showed this approach was significantly more likely to get an employee’s attention and, with follow-up training, could drastically reduce susceptibility to these attacks.''It became obvious that cybersecurity threats weren’t limited to phishing,'' Sadeh said, and Wombat expanded its training modules to address issues related to a wide range of practices, including use of smartphones, USB drives, social networks and more. Other key products include machine learning technology to prioritize the processing of phishing emails reported by employees.All of Wombat’s training modules focus on practical, concise advice and information that employees need to know, rather than lectures about practices and policies they don’t care about, Sadeh said. The modules are interactive in nature and include quick quizzes centered around practical, everyday situations that help reinforce practical learning.Wombat has long benefited from recruiting CMU alumni, Sadeh said – so much so that some investors worried in the early years about an overabundance of CMU-related employees. But as the company expanded – including offices in Denver and London – and after Joe Ferrara, a veteran tech executive, succeeded Sadeh as CEO in 2011, both the number and diversity of employees has grown.Several key leaders of Wombat continue to boast CMU connections. These include Wombat chief architect Kurt Wescoe, an alumnus and former faculty member in the master’s program in e-Business, and Tom Sands, vice president of engineering and an alumnus of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Proofpoint’s senior leadership team also includes two CMU alumni connections. Marcel DePaolis, Proofpoint co-founder and CTO, earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering from the university, and David Knight, executive vice president and general manager of Proofpoint's Threat Systems Products Group, holds a master’s degree in industrial administration and a bachelor’s degree in information systems and industrial management from CMU. ''The university was very supportive of our efforts from the beginning,'' Sadeh said, noting CMU made it easy to negotiate for intellectual property.CMU’s Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation and Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship help to facilitate and accelerate the movement of research and technology out of the university and into the global marketplace.In addition to Sadeh, Cranor and Hong, Alessandro Acquisti, professor of information technology and public policy, Anthony Tomasic, senior systems scientist in the Language Technologies Institute, and former PhD students Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Steve Sheng, Justin Cranshaw, Patrick Gage Kelley, Ian Fette and Guang Xiang contributed to the initial CMU technology licensed by Wombat.''We all recognized there was demand for solutions that we had developed at CMU,'' Sadeh added, ''and we’ve been gratified with the success the company has achieved.''       

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