News 2019

March 2019

Girls of Steel Preparing for FIRST Robotics Finals Competition

Byron Spice

The Girls of Steel, a robotics team sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University's Field Robotics Center, won two awards at the FIRST Robotics Competition Greater Pittsburgh Regional, qualifying the team and its robot, Laika, for the finals in Detroit. The team was part of an alliance that made it to the final match of the regional competition, which was March 21–23 at California University of Pennsylvania. Earlier this month, the team also competed at the Miami Valley FIRST Robotics Regional competition in Dayton, Ohio. At the Pittsburgh regional, the Girls of Steel won the Gracious Professionalism Award sponsored by Johnson & Johnson. The award recognized the team for an outstanding demonstration of FIRST core values, such as working together both on and off the playing field. The team also won a Regional Finalist award for reaching the final match and a Wildcard, qualifying them for the finals, April 24–27. This will be the team's ninth consecutive trip to the finals of FIRST Robotics. The team includes ninth through 12th grade girls from more than 20 Pittsburgh-area schools.

CMU's Smell PGH Air Pollution Reporting App Goes National

Byron Spice

Smell PGH, the smartphone app developed by Carnegie Mellon University's CREATE Lab that helps Pittsburghers report foul odors to health authorities, is going national with the help of Seventh Generation, an environmentally conscious household and personal care products company. The Smell MyCity app is being rolled out today in Louisville, Kentucky, with plans to do the same in Portland, Oregon, later this year. The free app is available from Apple's App Store and from Google Play. The idea is that if the air smells bad, there's a good chance it's not healthy to breathe. By reporting stinky air via the app, users can alert local health authorities while collectively tracking its spread across a community, helping to pinpoint its origins. In Pittsburgh, where the app has been used since 2016, smell reports are forwarded immediately to the Allegheny County Health Department. "Human noses are the sensors for Smell MyCity, which prioritizes and highlights citizens' concerns regarding local air pollution issues," said Illah Nourbakhsh, professor in the Robotics Institute and director of the CREATE Lab. "In Pittsburgh, app users have helped build awareness about rapidly changing air events and provided the local regulatory agency with a higher resolution of air pollution data." Last year, the CREATE Lab expanded its Breathe Cam network of cameras — which provide 24-hour monitoring of visible air pollution in Pittsburgh — to include several industrial sources in the Monongahela Valley, based on a history of citizen reports via Smell PGH. The Heinz Endowments sponsored the development of Smell PGH and Smell MyCity, and also underwrites Breathe Cam. Any community in the U.S. now can use the Smell MyCity app to document and monitor pollution odors in their neighborhoods. Community-sourced smell report data can be easily accessed through the Smell MyCity website. With the support of Seventh Generation, CMU's CREATE Lab is exploring additional partnerships with grassroots organizations across the country to ensure that local smell report data shared in the app is sent to the appropriate local regulatory agencies and decisionmakers. Both Seventh Generation and the CREATE Lab hope that Smell MyCity helps people in every community join together as a nationwide network that actively works toward cleaner air for all. "We believe that everyone deserves access to clean, healthy air," said Ashley Orgain, global director of advocacy and sustainability for Seventh Generation. "Seventh Generation has long been an advocate for people and planet health, and this partnership helps give the power back to people across the country and enable them to be the catalyst for creating change that can have an immediate, positive impact on the health of their community."

Former CMU Professor Shares 2018 Turing Award for Deep Learning

Byron Spice

Geoffrey Hinton, a former Computer Science Department faculty member and now a vice president and Engineering Fellow at Google, will receive the Association for Computing Machinery's 2018 A.M. Turing Award along with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for their revolutionary work on deep neural networks. "Artificial intelligence is now one of the fastest-growing areas in all of science and one of the most talked-about topics in society," said ACM President Cherri M. Pancake. "The growth of and interest in AI is due, in no small part, to the recent advances in deep learning for which Bengio, Hinton and LeCun laid the foundation. "Anyone who has a smartphone in their pocket can tangibly experience advances in natural language processing and computer vision that were not possible just 10 years ago. In addition to the products we use every day, new advances in deep learning have given scientists powerful new tools — in areas ranging from medicine to astronomy to materials science," she said. Hinton served on the CSD faculty from 1982 to 1987. During that time, he co-authored an influential paper on the backpropagation algorithm, which allows neural nets to discover their own internal representations of data. He demonstrated that the algorithm enabled neural networks to solve problems previously thought to be beyond their reach. The algorithm is now standard in most neural networks. Also during that time, Hinton and Terrence Sejnowksi, then at the Johns Hopkins University, invented Boltzmann machines — one of the first neural networks capable of learning internal representations in neurons that were not part of the input or output. Later, at the University of Toronto, Hinton and his students made improvements to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that cut error rates for object recognition in half, reshaping the field of computer vision. "I can't imagine a better choice for this year's Turing Award than Geoff, Jan and Yoshua for their fundamental research on deep neural networks," said Tom Mitchell, interim dean of the School of Computer Science. "I first got to know Geoff Hinton well in 1986 when I co-taught a CMU course with Geoff and Allen Newell on 'Architectures for Intelligence.' Geoff was in the early years of his work on neural networks, but even then he was pretty sure he was on the right track. Over the next four decades, he never really wavered!" LeCun, chief AI scientist at Facebook, did postdoctoral work under Hinton and also worked independently to improve CNNs and backpropagation algorithms, and to develop a broader vision for neural networks as a computational model for a wide range of tasks. Last year, LeCun announced the Facebook AI Research lab in Pittsburgh, which is led by Jessica Hodgins, professor of robotics and computer science. Bengio, professor at the University of Montreal, worked with LeCun at Bell Labs. His contributions to deep learning include work on generative adversarial networks (GANs) that have spawned a revolution in computer vision and computer graphics. In addition to his duties at Google, Hinton is chief scientific adviser of The Vector Institute and University Professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. Russ Salakhutdinov, associate professor in the Machine Learning Department and director of AI research at Apple, was one of Hinton's students at Toronto. Learn more about this year's Turing winners on the ACM website.

Former Stehlik Scholars: Where Are They Now?

Aisha Rashid (DC 2019)

Rachel Holladay (CS 2017), Ananya Kumar (CS 2017) and Eric Zhu (CS 2018) were a few of the earliest recipients of the Mark Stehlik SCS Alumni Undergraduate Impact Scholarship. The award — now in its fourth year — recognizes undergraduate students for their commitment and dedication to the field of computer science both in and beyond the classroom.While receiving the scholarship was an incredible milestone for these three alumni, their pursuits to advance their interests in computer science didn't stop at CMU. Well after their time in SCS, they're still making groundbreaking strides in research, industry and academia.Rachel HolladayHolladay started her CMU journey in 2013. Along with researching human-robot interaction and motion planning in the Personal Robotics Lab, she also dedicated her time to SCS student organizations, from mentoring an all-girls, high school FIRST Robotics team, the Girls of Steel, to being an active member in SCS4All, Women @ SCS and SCS Day.A week before her final exams her senior year, Holladay remembers being called into an urgent meeting. Initially thinking she was in trouble, she learned that three of her faculty mentors had nominated her for the Stehlik Scholarship. "To find out that the faculty you know and work with would put you up for [the scholarship] was very humbling," Holladay said. "Several of those faculty went on to graciously write me letters of recommendation for graduate school or graduate fellowships."Now in the second year of her Ph.D. in computer science at MIT, Holladay is researching the intersection of robotic manipulation and motion planning. She primarily works on developing algorithms that enable robots to perform dexterous manipulation tasks. She also served as the co-president of the Graduate Women in Course 6 (GW6), a student group that focuses on the personal and professional development of graduate women in the electrical engineering and computer science program at MIT.

Faculty Profile: SCS Interim Dean Tom Mitchell Has the "Ideal Life"

Susie Cribbs

Tom Mitchell has 65 first cousins. His mother, with her 14 siblings, grew up on a farm near a town whose population hasn't topped 2,000 since the 1930s. Mitchell was born there, and never visited a city — technically a "large town" — with more than 25,000 people until he went to college. And while only a few hundred miles separate Blossburg, Pa., from Pittsburgh, Mitchell's trip between the two took a few decades, with some stops along the way. Mitchell, the E. Fredkin University Professor of Machine Learning and Computer Science and interim dean of the School of Computer Science, was born to a family of readers and educators. At age five, his family relocated from Blossburg just north into New York State, where his father was an IBM engineer. Though the location was rural, his parents lived in an excellent school district and when he graduated, Mitchell went on to study electrical engineering at MIT. As might be expected, Boston was a bit of a shock after spending most of his life in a small town. "Growing up, if I was walking down the road and someone was walking up the road, I at least acknowledged them. I probably knew them! If I did, I said hi. If I didn't, I nodded or something," Mitchell said. "I got to Boston and there were so many people coming at me on the sidewalk and I was trying to acknowledge all of them. They must have thought I was a crazy man. I just did not know how to behave." He must have worked out the kinks, though, because Mitchell met his wife, Joan (who he calls the "Associate Dean for Sanity"), while he was still at MIT. After earning his bachelor's degree, he moved to Stanford, where he completed a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and a minor in computer science. Faced with the decision between joining Bell Labs or taking a stab at university life, he opted for academia. Rutgers, specifically. He stayed there for six years — and really had no intention of leaving — until opportunity came knocking, in the form of John McDermott, then head of CMU's Computer Science Department. "John was an artificial intelligence guy. He invited me to spend a year in Pittsburgh and CMU would pay for it, some kind of visiting position," Mitchell said. "So I came. And it was AMAZING." That amazing experience stemmed in large part from the fact that Mitchell met Allen Newell, one of the founders of computer science at CMU, who asked him to team-teach a class that fall. And oh, Newell noted: They'd be joined by a third instructor — Geoff Hinton, a noted neural networks expert who would go on to create the technology that enables today's pervasive deep learning technology. "The three of us taught this course, Architectures for Intelligence, that was just the most interesting and stimulating thing. And the end of the year, I didn't go back to Rutgers. I stayed," Mitchell said. In the following decades, the computer science landscape at CMU changed dramatically — and Mitchell played a large role in its evolution. In 1997, he co-founded the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, which in 2006 became the world's first Machine Learning Department. He ran the department until 2016, helped launch the first machine learning Ph.D. program in the country and published one of the first machine learning textbooks. All the while, Mitchell's research was altering how we think about machines and what they can do. In typical CMU form, he collaborated with colleagues in the Psychology Department to produce a computational model to predict brain activation patterns associated with nouns — work that's evolved to other word types, word sequences and emotions. His Never Ending Language Learner searches the web and teaches itself to read. In a 2014 study, he and his colleagues, including then Ph.D. student (now Assistant Professor) Leila Wehbe, used fMRI technology to track peoples' brain activity as they read a chapter of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." The result? The first computational model of reading. His research doesn't stop there, though. He's also interested in the future of work, and was co-chair of a study from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine on what automation means for the workforce. (Hint: policymakers need more data to help figure that out.) While SCS expects to have a new dean in place by this coming fall, Mitchell is clearly not one to merely keep the seat warm until a new full-time dean shows up. He hopes to explore a way to partner with local industry to jointly recruit faculty members, for example, and to bolster the university's presence in Washington, D.C., where it can influence technology policy. He also envisions an environment where SCS partners with other CMU colleges on artificial intelligence initiatives, exploring issues like how AI might change the face of business in a decade, and how CMU can be an innovator in the area. While being interim dean may seem stressful to some, Mitchell takes the experience in stride. "We have so much going on in the school that's really being done by The School, and not The Dean. Almost everything that happens in this school is done from the bottom up, by people who came up with the idea. They're doing it. And they're doing it well," Mitchell said. "It's what I love about this school, really. If it didn't have a dean for a while, people wouldn't really notice. But it's fun. I'm enjoying it." Mitchell also has big plans for future research, including using conversational AI to program smart phones. He notes that we think of having conversations with Siri or Alexa like we used to think of keyboards: say (or type) a certain command and the AI will respond appropriately. "But that's so retro," he said. He imagines, instead, a world where we can have normal conversations with our phones, but they need to be programmed to do it. He wants to program them through speech. "If we can do this, it would change the nature of how people and computers interact," Mitchell said. "If we can do this, I see no reason why we can't, over the next decade, turn conversation into an opportunity to teach the phone what you want it to do." With all of his experience and awards — the university granted him its highest honor of University Professor in 2009 and he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016, to name just a few — it might be tempting to leave CMU behind. But Mitchell can't imagine that. "For me, I really think the rules of the game are you can do whatever you want to do as long as you can find a way to pay for it. That's the deal here. I love the feeling that I'm in a community where it's easy to intellectually engage with people all across campus. And I love the attitude, especially in computer science, that we're not only going to write theories about stuff, but that we're going to make it work. We're going to make it happen," Mitchell said. "I feel like I have the ideal life. I talked to my wife, and she said 'Well, if you retired, what would you do?' And this is what I'd do. THIS would be my hobby. It's kind of like a miracle that I get to do my hobby and get paid for it."

Xing Wins 2019 Carnegie Science Award

Byron Spice

Eric Xing, a professor in the Machine Learning Department and Language Technologies Institute, has been named the winner of the 2019 Carnegie Science Award for Startup Entrepreneurs, recognizing his leadership of Petuum Inc., which developed and markets an AI software platform for a wide range of industries. Established in 1997 by the Carnegie Science Center, the awards honor individuals and organizations whose contributions in the fields of science, technology and education significantly benefit Western Pennsylvania. Also among the winners is Remake Learning, a network dedicated to education innovation and equity that will receive this year's Chairman's Award. Carnegie Mellon University is among the network's members, as are the Robotics Institute, the Robotics Academy, the CREATE Lab and members of LearnLab. Xing is founder and CEO of Petuum. Its software platform makes it easy for a wide range of users, from healthcare to manufacturing industries, to build virtually any type of AI application and deploy it on a variety of computing hardware. Since its establishment in July 2016, the company has raised $108 million in financing. Xing earned a bachelor's degree in physics at Tshinghua University in Beijing, a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry at Rutgers University, and then a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the CMU faculty in 2004 and was named a full professor in 2014. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and a recipient of the NSF Career Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the U.S. Air Force Young Investigator Award and the IBM Open Collaborative Research Faculty Award. View the complete list of Carnegie Science Award winners on the organization's website.

Jones Wins Young Professional Award at WM 2019 Symposia

Byron Spice

Heather Jones, a senior project scientist in the Robotics Institute, received the Young Professional Award at the 2019 Waste Management Symposia (WMS) in Phoenix in recognition of her work developing robots to detect residual uranium in nuclear weapons complex piping. Jones, who earned her Ph.D. in robotics in 2016, made significant contributions to the design, development and deployment of the Pipe Crawling Activity Measurements System for the U.S. Department of Energy. That system includes RadPiper, which the Robotics Institute delivered to DOE last year to aid in decommissioning its former uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio. The WMS Young Professional Award recognizes a professional under age 36 for distinguished contributions to the advancement of radioactive waste and radioactive material management. It was presented to Jones at the symposia March 5. The RadPiper robots crawl autonomously through pipes, where they can measure radiation levels more accurately than is possible with external methods. Sections of pipe containing hazardous levels of uranium can then be removed for special handling. The robots significantly reduce 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 estimates the robots could save $50 million in decommissioning the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon and a similar plant in Paducah, Kentucky.

SCS Takes Show on the Road at SXSW

Laura Kelly

Carnegie Mellon University students, faculty and alumni will be among the thousands descending onto Austin, Texas, for South by Southwest (SXSW), and the School of Computer Science will be well represented among its cohort. John Zimmerman, the Tang Family Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Human Computer Interaction, will discuss efforts to improve accessibility to public transit for persons with disabilities as part of the panel on "Accessible Transportation for All" from on Tuesday, March 12. "Technology is making it more and more possible," Zimmerman said. "There's particularly a lot of work in the space of universal design. Can you make designs that privilege people who have higher needs, but the solutions benefit all riders?" Lining Yao, an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, will demonstrate her research during the session "Morphing Into the Future: 'Shapeshifter' Materials," also on March 12. Yao's research produces programmable materials that change shapes. Yao gave the example of pasta that can ship flat and takes its shape in boiling water. "You can save almost 62 percent of packaging space for macaroni if you pack them flat," Yao said. "You can imagine that food could not only be sold in supermarkets, but also could be rapidly deployed to disaster sites and even in the future go on space travel. Space saving becomes an even more important issue when we talk about eating in a space ship that has to travel three years going to Mars." Christoph Mertz, a principal project scientist in the Robotics Institute, also serves as the chief scientist of RoadBotics, a company that uses artificial intelligence and smartphones to monitor roads to help governments and engineering firms make data-driven decisions. RoadBotics is a finalist in the SXSW Pitch competition, taking place Sunday, March 10. Founded in 1987, SXSW is best known for its conference and festivals that celebrate the convergence of the interactive, film and music industries. The event also features sessions, showcases, screenings, exhibitions and a variety of networking opportunities. For more about CMU's participation in SXSW, read the full news story. You can also follow #CMUatSXSW on social media for the latest updates.

Blockchain Course Challenges Students to Create Apps for the Launch of CMU Cryptocurrency

Mara Falk

Faculty from the Tepper School of Business, School of Computer Science, and Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy are launching a course in which student groups address issues that can be brokered by blockchain technology, including the design of the university's own cryptocurrency. Developing Blockchain Use Cases — co-taught by Vipul Goyal, associate professor of computer science; Michael McCarthy, associate teaching professor of information systems at Heinz; and Ariel Zetlin-Jones, associate professor of economics at Tepper — is a half-semester course taking place during Mini 4, beginning March 18. "Faculty from three different schools will teach this course, and we expect our student body will be similarly diverse," Goyal said. "This promises to be a one-of-a-kind course where great ideas from finance, technology and policy will come together and lead to new frontiers in blockchains." The end goal of the new course is for students to propose applications that could function on CMU Coin — an initiative driven by the PNC Center for Financial Services Innovation — and create value for the digital token. "For this to be a success, we need the coin to be used among students on campus," Zetlin-Jones said. "We really want students to directly innovate in how CMU Coin can be useful to resolve problems that they face on campus. CMU students have already been engaged in several pursuits in the development of CMU Coin over the last year, from a capstone course at the Tepper School to a university-wide case challenge proposing potential use cases for a university-specific proprietary blockchain. The curriculum highlights the economics underlying the growth in blockchain solutions as well as practical knowledge in how to implement blockchain solutions. "Something like this could only happen at Carnegie Mellon," McCarthy said. "The interdisciplinary nature of the university coupled with the expertise of our faculty will provide students with this exceptional opportunity to be at the forefront of creating a new cryptocurrency." The course will include opportunities for students to engage with blockchain technologies, such as the decentralized application development platform Ethereum. To attract a wide range of students' perspectives, the course has no formal prerequisites, but the syllabus notes, "We expect students to have a background in economics, cryptography or computer science, and all students should have some basic comfortability with programming." Applications that the students propose would be coded into CMU Coin as the initiative develops. The faculty are seeking creative solutions to real concerns from students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels that implement blockchain in ways only a CMU student could develop. The course joins a number of recent activities at Carnegie Mellon surrounding blockchain's potential. The first INTERSECT@CMU conference, concerning "The Future of Business, Technology, and Society," featured a panel on "Decentralizing Trust: Blockchain's Radical Potential," which featured Zetlin-Jones as a panelist. In addition, the Tepper School launched a Blockchain Initiative, which consolidates research and educational pursuits surrounding blockchain and cryptocurrency to foster collaborative partnerships.

Choset To Receive Engelberger Robotics Award

Byron Spice

Howie Choset, the Kavčić-Moura Professor of Computer Science, will receive the prestigious 2019 Engelberger Robotics Award for Education. The award recognizes his leadership of Carnegie Mellon University's undergraduate robotics degree program and his robotics research in areas such as multirobot collaboration, surgery, manufacturing, infrastructure inspection, and search and rescue. "A key feature of Howie's work is the ability to convert fundamental research into real-world applications with far-reaching societal impact," said Martial Hebert, director of CMU's Robotics Institute. He has made significant contributions to the design of bio-inspired robots and to multirobot systems, while creating several successful companies. He is an innovative educator, Hebert added, who is dedicated to his students. The award is presented by the Robotics Industries Association (RIA) and is named for Joseph F. Engelberger, the so-called "father of robotics" who founded Unimation Inc., the world's first industrial robot manufacturer. Previous CMU winners are Takeo Kanade, the U.A. and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Robotics and Computer Science; and William "Red" Whittaker, the Fredkin University Research Professor of Robotics. In addition to Choset's award, an Engelberger Award for leadership is being presented this year to Catherine Morris, group leader and director of automotive sales at ATI Industrial Automation and a long-time RIA board member and former chairperson. "Catherine and Howie have both played highly influential roles in creating the thriving robotics industry we see today," said Jeff Burnstein, RIA president. "They have each made outstanding contributions in their respective fields, from leading tremendous growth at RIA to educating the next generation of robotic engineers while creating robotic solutions that are currently advancing automation in manufacturing." Choset is best known for building snake-like robots and devising innovative methods for controlling the multijointed devices. He and his research team have studied how these robots, with their unique ability to move through difficult environments, can be deployed for urban search and rescue, for mapping and inspecting caves, pipes and other confined spaces, and for manufacturing. Choset is a founding editor of the journal Science Robotics. In April 2017, Choset appeared on NBC's Tonight Show, where one of his snake robots crawled up host Jimmy Fallon's leg. Five months later, Choset deployed the same robot in Mexico City to search for earthquake victims. His work on bio-inspired robots led Choset to develop a surgical device now approved for use in the U.S. and Europe and, more recently, a modular approach to robotics that enables people to build functional, customized robots quickly. He founded MedRobotics to build and market the surgical robot and Hebi Robotics to produce robot modules. A third company, Bito Robotics, leverages Choset's work in multirobot planning and collaboration to produce automated guided vehicles for material handling. Choset created CMU's second major in robotics and a minor in robotics. He developed the curriculum for both programs, which he continues to lead, as well as innovative approaches to hands-on robotics education, Hebert said. He has mentored a number of Ph.D. students who have started their own companies. Hebert said Choset has a knack for pulling together industrial firms, governmental resources and academic researchers to address important research and development initiatives. "He has developed the skill to listen to what industry needs, predict where it could go, and then recruit the talent to solve these problems," Hebert said. One example is his role in the Advanced Robotics Manufacturing (ARM) Institute, an organization funded by the Department of Defense that includes a consortium of private firms. The RIA will present the Engelberger Awards on Wednesday, April 10, at an awards dinner scheduled in conjunction with the Automate 2019 Show and Conference in Chicago.

CMU Spin-Off Sale Prompts Donation to School of Computer Science

Byron Spice

The sale of Wombat Security Technologies to Proofpoint Inc. for $225 million last year presented an opportunity for Jason Hong, one of Wombat's co-founders, to give back to the School of Computer Science and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where he has been a faculty member since 2004. And he did so in a big way. Hong and his wife, Shelley Zhang, chose to endow not one, but two professorships for junior faculty — one named for Dan Siewiorek, the other for Robert Kraut, both prominent, longtime faculty members at CMU. "We thought that honoring people who had mentored so many students and faculty — including me — was a good way to use some of the proceeds," Hong said. "Helping junior faculty members get their careers started is important to them and to the university. It's a win-win across the board." Another motivation for Hong was that he had benefited from a faculty fellowship, which he later learned had been funded by Sara Kiesler, Hillman Chair Emerita of Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction. Like other professorships for faculty in the early stages of their career's tenure, the Daniel P. Siewiorek Endowed Computer Science Career Development Professorship and the Robert E. Kraut Endowed Computer Science Career Development Professorship will rotate among junior faculty about every three years. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think anyone would make such a donation in my honor," said Siewiorek, the Buhl University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science. "People who give back usually give back in their own name." When Hong announced the professorships at a faculty meeting, "I was floored," he recalled. "This was incredibly generous." Siewiorek said he not only is flattered to be the namesake of one of the professorships, but also appreciates how important junior professorships are to the school for retaining talented faculty. Siewiorek was HCII director when he recruited Hong. "Jason's generous gift of two endowed professorships expresses confidence in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and CMU more generally," said Kraut, Herbert A. Simon Professor Emeritus of Human-Computer Interaction. "I am deeply honored and personally moved that one of them will be in my name." Hong, a professor in the HCII, heads the Computer-Human Interaction: Mobility, Privacy, Security (CHIMPS) research group, and is a leading researcher on privacy and security and on how smartphone data can be used to improve lives. He co-founded Wombat 11 years ago with Lorrie Faith Cranor, the FORE Systems Professor of computer science and engineering and public policy; and Norman Sadeh, professor of computer science. The company initially leveraged their work on training employees to recognize email phishing attacks by sending them simulated phishing emails. Wombat later expanded its training modules to address issues related to the use of smartphones, USB drives, social networks and more. By the time of its sale last year, the company was widely recognized as a leader in cybersecurity awareness training. "Jason's generosity is an affirmation of the values of the HCI Institute: collaboration, support and mentorship," said Jodi Forlizzi, HCII director. "We are extremely honored to work with Jason and to receive this award." Hong said teaching and performing research in the HCII has been personally and professionally rewarding. "There's a lot of camaraderie here, a lot of collaboration," he said. "A lot of fun — and a lot of hard work, too."

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