News 2019

January 2019

Nourbakhsh Elected as Hastings Fellow

Byron Spice

Illah Nourbakhsh, the K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies, is one of 18 newly elected Hastings Center Fellows, The Hastings Center announced today. The Hastings Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit bioethics research institution founded in 1969, addresses fundamental ethical and social issues in health care, science and technology. The people it selects as fellows are individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed scholarship and/or public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, life sciences research and the environment. Nourbakhsh is director of the Robotics Institute's CREATE Lab. His current research projects explore community-based robotics, including educational and social robotics and ways to use robotic technology to empower individuals and communities. He is the author of "Robot Futures" and "Parenting for Technology Futures," and co-author of the textbook "Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots." He is a World Economic Forum Global Steward and a member of the Global Future Council on the Future of AI and Robotics and the IEEE Global Initiative for the Ethical Considerations in the Design of Autonomous Systems. In addition to Nourbakhsh, the new fellows include J. Paul Kelleher, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin; Robert Cook-Deegan of Arizona State University's School for the Future of Innovation in Society; and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a disability justice and culture thought leader who teaches English and bioethics at Emory University. To learn more, visit The Hastings Center website.

Kim and Ye Win 2019 Microsoft Ph.D. Fellowships

Byron Spice

Computer Science Department Ph.D. students Daehyeok Kim and Katherine Ye are among 10 students nationwide who have been awarded two-year Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowships for 2019. "These are the best Ph.D. students in North America," Neel Joshi, a senior researcher at Microsoft's research lab in Redmond, Wash., and chair of the Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship, said in a blog post announcing the winners. "They are incredibly talented and it is really an honor to support them at this important and exciting stage of their careers." Kim is a third-year Ph.D. student, advised by Srinivasan Seshan and Vyas Sekar. His research interests lie in the intersection of systems and networking. His current focus is on making data centers faster and more efficient by designing novel network primitives with advanced networking hardware such as programmable switches and remote direct memory access network interface controllers (RDMA NICs). He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science and engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea. Ye, also a third-year Ph.D. student, is advised by Keenan Crane and Jonathan Aldrich. Her work focuses on information visualization and on creating personal tools that use computational techniques for modeling, search and synthesis to augment the human ability to think and create. She leads the CMU team that is building Penrose, a platform that enables people to create beautiful diagrams just by typing mathematical notation in plain text. She earned a bachelor's degree in computer science at Princeton University. The fellowships provide tuition and fees for two consecutive years and include a $42,000 annual stipend to help with living and travel expenses. Applicants are nominated by their university.  

Cranor Named Director of Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab

Daniel Tkacik

Lorrie Faith Cranor has been named the next director of CyLab, Carnegie Mellon University's security and privacy institute, effective Tuesday, Jan 15. CyLab, founded in 2003, unites security and privacy experts from all schools across Carnegie Mellon with the vision of creating a world in which technology can be trusted. "I'm honored and thrilled to serve as CyLab's next director," Cranor said. "I look forward to supporting CyLab's ongoing success and bolstering research aimed at making our increasingly digital world safe and trustworthy." Cranor is the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy, and directs the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security (CUPS) Laboratory. She is a co-director of Carnegie Mellon's Privacy Engineering master's program, and served as chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2016. An internal committee conducted a rigorous international search for director candidates. Cranor was selected for her leadership in the field and her vision for the next phase of CyLab's growth. "Lorrie's extensive leadership experience and background, as well as her recent government experience as the FTC's chief technologist, make her an exceptional choice as CyLab's new director," said Jon Cagan, interim dean of the university's College of Engineering. Having played a key role in building the usable privacy and security research community, Cranor co-edited the seminal book "Security and Usability" and founded the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). She is a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies Inc., a security awareness training company. Cranor has authored more than 150 research papers on online privacy, usable privacy and security, and other topics. Her current research projects include password usability and security, privacy for the internet of things, and development of meaningful and usable privacy notices and consent experiences. Before joining the Carnegie Mellon faculty, Cranor received her doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis and was a member of the secure systems research group at AT&T Labs-Research. She is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and is a member of the ACM CHI Academy. Cranor's appointment follows that of Douglas Sicker, head of Carnegie Mellon's Engineering and Public Policy department, who has served as CyLab's interim director since Sept. 1, 2017. Sicker stepped in after the previous director, Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor David Brumley, took a leave of absence to help grow his startup company, ForAllSecure.

Carnegie Mellon Launches High School Computer Science Curriculum

Byron Spice

Carnegie Mellon University, world-renowned for computer science and artificial intelligence, has launched a free, online curriculum for high school students that helps instructors teach programming skills using engaging graphics and animations.The curriculum fills a gap between introductory computer science educational materials available for grades K-8 and the rigorous Advanced Placement courses that the most advanced students might take later in high school, said David Kosbie, an associate teaching professor and co-director of the School of Computer Science's new Computer Science Academy."This isn't 'drag and drop' programming," Kosbie said. "We're teaching them to use Python, a text-based programming language that is the most widely taught language at the university level."Python also is one of the most popular programming languages in industry, used by such organizations as Google, Amazon and Facebook.The CS Academy was established and its CS1 curriculum developed in response to requests from secondary school teachers and principals, who face growing demands from parents for computer science education but must cope with a lack of educational standards for computer science, a paucity of trained teachers and limited teaching materials.Now being piloted in 40 schools, CS1 will be available for general use this fall, free of charge. It is designed for use by classroom teachers, not as a self-guided online course.One of CS1's distinctive features is graphics and animation exercises for each unit that were developed by dozens of Carnegie Mellon computer science students."Most of the students involved in the project are just a few years older than the high school students who will be using CS1," said Erin Cawley, program manager for the CS Academy and a former K-12 computer science educator. The idea, she explained, was to make the exercises as engaging and fresh as possible.Focusing the exercises on graphics also pays dividends in the educational process."The hardest part of programming for many novices is debugging" — finding errors in programs and fixing them, Kosbie said. "With graphics, it's easy for students to see what went wrong. 'Oh, the ear shouldn't be on the forehead, it should be over here.'"CS1 includes a number of tools to aid teachers, including an image inspector tool that can show the teacher where in an exercise a student is having trouble. Exercises also are graded automatically, freeing up the teacher's time for instruction.Cawley said the curriculum is useful to teachers regardless of whether they have experience in computer science. Extensive teacher training and online support is available through the CS Academy.Though appropriate for any level of high school, CS1 is the first in a planned four-year sequence of coursework and ultimately is envisioned as a ninth-grade course.CS1 was initially piloted in 14 high schools with 400 students in 2017-2018. The pilot program was expanded by 26 schools and another 1,300 students during the current school year. Most of the schools are in western Pennsylvania, but others are in such states as Texas, New Jersey and Washington.Mark Stehlik, SCS assistant dean for outreach and co-director of the CS Academy, said the curriculum isn't easy, but students in the pilot schools have had notable success, including those who attend under-resourced schools.The CS Academy is supported by SCS and by gifts from Seth Merrin, philanthropist and the CEO of the institutional equities marketplace Liquidnet; and from former Pittsburgh Steeler Franco Harris. Merrin established Rwanda's Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village for students orphaned during or after the Rwandan genocide, which is one of the schools now using CS Academy. You can support the CS Academy by making an online donation.

NREC Building What Will Be Its Largest Robot

Byron Spice

A yellow, steel structure built this fall in front of Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) will be the largest robot ever constructed in the 22-year history of the organization. Its 45-foot-tall gantry, visible from Pittsburgh's 40th Street Bridge, was built as part of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers prototyping project to automate its annual mat-sinking operations on the Mississippi River. The massive mats, which consist of concrete blocks wired together, shield riverbanks from erosion, helping to protect levees and ensure safe river navigation. As big as it is, the prototype robot being built on NREC's front lawn will serve only to test and further develop systems that will become part of the final, much larger robot — a floating factory called ARMOR 1 — that eventually will be deployed on barges on the Mississippi. The NREC gantry supports a 55-foot-long, 24-ton arm that is about 20 feet above the ground. A carriage suspended from the arm will have two hoists for picking up, transporting and positioning concrete blocks so they can be tied together with wire to create the mats. Each concrete "square" is 25 feet long, four feet wide, three inches thick, and weighs 3,600 pounds. A deck has been installed for moving four rows of concrete blocks as they are tied together. In the final, deployed robot, the conveyance system also will launch the completed mats into the river. An automated mat-tying system, being built and tested inside the NREC building in Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville section, will be added to the outdoor assemblage in mid-2019. The test system is an unconventional robot and bigger than any previous NREC projects, including a system developed for the U.S. Air Force to remove coatings from aircraft using three-story-high, laser-equipped mobile robots, and an autonomous mine truck for Caterpillar. The Corps of Engineers' ARMOR 1 final prototype robot will dwarf this current test system. It will have six of the 55-foot arms for moving concrete squares. The assembly barge will measure 180 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high, said Gabriel Goldman, technical lead for the project at NREC. It will produce mats with 35 rows of concrete squares. "And that's just the barge with the arms," he added, noting the system will include several barges. "When you zoom out, this thing is massive — and it's all floating." Mat sinking takes place during the low-water months of August through December and is very labor intensive. Four gantry cranes are used to move concrete blocks from supply barges to a work barge, where workers wire the mat together using pneumatic tools. As the mat is being assembled, the work barge inches away from shore to launch the mat along the sloping river banks. The Mat Sinking Unit, which has been in operation for 70 years, is crucial in preventing erosion to the riverbank of the Mississippi River, a vital commercial waterway that drains 41 percent of the nation's water and is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy. The automated system aims to increase the amount of mat that can be assembled and launched each day, while improving worker safety and reducing operating costs. The new system will add technical skilled jobs such as robotic control operators to the ARMOR 1 workforce. NREC is a subcontractor to SIA Solutions, and is working with Bristol Harbor Group on the ARMOR 1 project. NREC is responsible for designing the robotic system to automate the entire mat assembly and launching process. NREC Director Herman Herman is the principal investigator and Jim Arthur is the project manager. In the latest phase of the project, NREC researchers will use the newly built robot to test each part of the process. That includes automatically picking up, moving and positioning the concrete blocks, as well as detecting when blocks are broken or otherwise defective. They also will be testing methods for automatically tying the mats together. NREC is scheduled to finish its work by spring of 2020. The full-scale robotic system, to be deployed in 2021, will be built by another contractor. NREC is part of CMU's Robotics Institute and performs contract research and development for a variety of governmental and industrial clients.

Asakawa Named to National Inventors Hall of Fame

Byron Spice

Chieko Asakawa, the IBM Distinguished Service Professor in the Robotics Institute and an IBM Fellow at IBM Research, is among 19 innovators who will be inducted this year into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Asakawa, who came to Carnegie Mellon in 2014, is being honored for her invention of the Home Page Reader (HPR), the first practical voice browser providing internet access for blind and visually impaired computer users. The HPR debuted in 1997, enabling users to surf the internet and navigate webpages through a computer's numeric keypad instead of a mouse. The HPR soon was widely used around the world and its interface technology has been adopted by many other voice browsers. Asakawa and the rest of the 2019 class will be honored and inducted May 1–2 at a celebration in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Inventors Hall of Fame and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The Inventors Hall of Fame, a Smithsonian affiliate, has a museum at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office headquarters in Alexandria, Va. "The National Inventors Hall of Fame honors the innovation game-changers who have transformed our world," said Michael Oister, CEO of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. "Through inventions as diverse as life-saving medicines and web browsers for the visually impaired, these superhero innovators have made significant advances in our daily lives and well-being." The new inductees include David Walt of Harvard University, the inventor of microwell arrays, which revolutionized genetic analysis by making it possible to analyze thousands of genes simultaneously; Turing Award winners Ken Thompson and the late Dennis Ritchie, who created the UNIX operating system and the C programming language; and Jeff Kodosky and James Truchard of National Instruments, who introduced the graphical programming language LabView™. Posthumous inductees include Joseph Muhler and William Nebergall, who developed stannous fluoride toothpaste for reducing cavities; and Andrew Higgins, who invented the landing craft known as Higgins Boats used to land U.S. troops on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day in 1944. Asakawa, who has been blind since a swimming accident at age 14, has been instrumental in developing a number of technologies to aid people with visual impairments or other disabilities. These include technologies to help the blind community in Japan access digital Braille books, a disability simulator to help web designers make sites user-friendly to all, and standardized design and programming interfaces that help developers create accessibility tools and applications. At Carnegie Mellon, Asakawa has worked with her students, Assistant Research Professor of Robotics Kris Kitani and IBM Research to create NavCog, a smartphone app that analyzes signals from Bluetooth beacons to help people with visual disabilities navigate their surroundings. The system has been deployed on the CMU campus, in a Japanese shopping mall and, most recently, at Pittsburgh International Airport. Asakawa now is working on an "AI suitcase," a lightweight, motorized device that could guide people with visual impairments through airports or other public spaces.

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