News 2019

September 2019

HCII's McLaren Will Promote Educational Technology in Chile

Byron Spice

Bruce McLaren believes the moment is right to raise the status of educational technologies in Chile. The South American nation is an advanced country with a solid educational system. Its Ministry of Education has focused on providing internet access and digital devices. But it hasn't fully embraced the science of learning and has yet to take advantage of the type of educational technologies that McLaren and his colleagues in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute and Simon Initiative have pioneered. "I think Chile is positioned to make that next step," said McLaren, an associate research professor in the HCII. With support from the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, he will spend the next three months in Valparaiso, Chile. There, he will jointly teach a graduate-level course on educational technology at the Federico Santa María Technical University and initiate research collaborations with Chilean academics. The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government's flagship international educational exchange program. McLaren is one of more than 800 U.S. citizens who will share their expertise this academic year through the program. McLaren's interest in Chile began when Rosta Farzan, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, introduced him to Claudia Lopez, a former Ph.D. advisee of Farzan's at Pitt. McLaren and Farzan subsequently visited Chile, where Lopez is now on the faculty at Federico Santa María Tech. Lopez then arranged for McLaren and a colleague of hers, Andrea Vásquez, to jointly teach a course at the university. During his stay, McLaren will introduce intelligent tutoring systems, originally developed by CMU's John Anderson and Ken Koedinger, as well as educational games and massive open online courses (MOOCs). He'll also encourage academic researchers to begin their own research on these and other types of educational technology. Eventually, these technologies will need to be introduced to classroom teachers, but getting the Chilean academic community engaged in this discipline is a necessary first step, he said. "I think it's important to lay the groundwork," he added.

SCS Students Named 2020 Siebel Scholars

Virginia Alvino Young

Six Carnegie Mellon University students — five of them from the School of Computer Science — have been named 2020 Siebel Scholars, a highly competitive award that supports top graduate students in the fields of business, computer science, energy science and bioengineering. Established in 2000 by the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation, the Siebel Scholars program awards grants to 16 universities in the United States, China, France, Italy and Japan. The top graduate students from 27 partner programs are selected each year as Siebel Scholars and receive a $35,000 award for their final year of studies. On average, Siebel Scholars rank in the top five percent of their class, many within the top one percent. Among the 93 total scholars are School of Computer Science students Michael Madaio, Eric Wong, Ken Holstein, Junpei Zhou and Amadou Latyr Ngom. They're joined by Elizabeth Reed, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy. Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) Ph.D. candidate Michael Madaio researches the design of algorithmic systems in the public sector, focusing on literacy education in developing countries. He was a research intern at the United Nations Institute for Computing and Society, and Microsoft Research's Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics in Artificial Intelligence group. He completed his master's degree in digital media studies at Georgia Institute of Technology, and a master's in education and a bachelor's in English literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. Eric Wong is pursuing his Ph.D. in machine learning. In 2012 he began researching the problem of molecular energy optimization, developing specialized kernels for geometrically structured data. He is currently interning at Bosch to bring advancements into the automotive industry with work on real sensor systems, both visual and physical. Ken Holstein, a fifth-year HCII Ph.D. student, is also a fellow of the Program in Interdisciplinary Educational Research (PIER). He has interned at Microsoft Research and holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and master's in human–computer interaction from CMU. Language Technologies Institute master's student Junpei Zhou researches social good by using natural language processing and computer vision techniques. He has worked on flu forecasting and a public safety project to automatically pick up tweets to help police officers better handle emergency events. He has interned at Google and Alibaba, and holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Zhejiang University. Amadou Latyr Ngom is pursuing his master's degree in the Computer Science Department at CMU. His research interests include applying compiler techniques to accelerate query execution for in-memory database management systems. He has interned at Zillow and Pure Storage, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in computer science from CMU. "Every year, the Siebel Scholars continue to impress me with their commitment to academics and influencing future society. This year's class is exceptional, and once again represents the best and brightest minds from around the globe who are advancing innovations in healthcare, artificial intelligence, the environment and more," said Thomas M. Siebel, chair of the Siebel Scholars Foundation. "It is my distinct pleasure to welcome these students into this ever-growing, lifelong community, and I personally look forward to seeing their impact and contributions unfold."

Computational Biology Department Celebrates 10th Anniversary

Byron Spice

Current and former students, faculty and staff members gathered this past weekend to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Computational Biology Department becoming the first of its kind in the country to be part of a computer science school. Established as the Ray and Stephanie Lane Center for Computational Biology in 2007, it became an academic unit within the School of Computer Science in 2009, coinciding with its move into the then brand-new Hillman Center for Future Generation Technologies. The Lane Center changed its name to the Computational Biology Department in 2015. The celebration centered on a full day of talks and panel discussions on Saturday in the Rashid Auditorium. Speakers included alumni such as Aaron Wise, a bioinformatics scientist at Illumina, a company that develops integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation and biological function; Saha Kadri, director of bioinformatics at the University of Chicago’s Genomic and Molecular Pathology Division; Greg Johnson, a scientist in the Animated Cell Group at the Allen Institute; and Darya Flippova, senior data scientist at Grail, a company developing cancer-detection technology . Other speakers included Xin He, a former post-doctoral researcher who is now an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Department of Human Genetics; Karen Thickman, formerly the assistant director of master’s programs at the Lane Center and now a lecturer at the University of Washington School of Medicine; and Cheemeng Tan, a former Lane Fellow and Branco-Weiss Fellow who is now associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California Davis. CMU President Farnam Jahanian and Robert Murphy, department director and Lane Professor of Computational Biology, also shared remarks. Though the Lane Center was founded in 2007, the origins of computational biology at CMU go back to 1989, when the first degrees in a computational biology program were awarded. Master's and doctoral programs, including a joint program with the University of Pittsburgh, were later established. Since becoming a department within SCS, the department has launched an undergraduate major in computational biology — the first new major since SCS was established in 1989 — and a new master's degree in automated science.

Cranor Joins New ACM Technology Policy Council

Byron Spice

Lorrie Cranor, the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy, has joined 11 other distinguished computer scientists on the Technology Policy Council, newly formed by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The ACM, the world's largest association of computing professionals, created the council to coordinate the agenda for its policy activities around the globe. It also will serve as the ACM's contact point for its interaction with government organizations, the computing community and the public in matters of public policy related to information technology and computing. In addition to Cranor, the council includes Vint Cerf, vice president of Google; and former SCS faculty member Latanya Sweeney, now at Harvard University. Cranor is the director and Bosch Distinguished Professor in Security and Privacy Technologies at the CyLab Security and Privacy Institute. She also directs the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory and co-directs the privacy engineering master's program. In 2016, she served as the chief technologist of the Federal Trade Commission. "The digital revolution is an international phenomenon, and the leading tech companies, whose services are used by billions every day, have facilities and customers in countries all over the world," said ACM President Cherri Pancake. "So the pressing issues we hear about in the media ― such as online privacy, data breaches, algorithmic bias and the future of the internet ― go beyond national borders. ACM's new Technology Policy Council will provide a space in which computing professionals come together to offer global perspectives on global challenges." One of the Technology Policy Council's first initiatives will be to publish a bimonthly series of short technical bulletins that summarize emerging technologies and research, and present nonpartisan perspectives on their policy implications. The ACM Tech Briefs series is intended to inform policy decision makers, the media and the general public.

CMU Computer Science Academy Releases New Curriculum

Byron Spice

Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Academy has released a new version of its free online curriculum for teaching high school computer programming that's tailored for use in after-school programs, summer camps or middle schools. "The new curriculum, called CS0 (CS Zero), covers the same topics as our original curriculum, CS1, and serves as an introduction to programming," said Erin Cawley, program manager for CMU CS Academy. "But it requires less instructional time and, therefore, explores the subject in less depth. This makes CS0 suitable for more informal and occasional learning contexts." Also, like CS1, the new CS0 curriculum is entirely free of charge — including student and teacher accounts, as well as teacher training. CMU's top-ranked School of Computer Science (SCS) launched CS1 this past January. The curriculum, intended for students in ninth grade and above, is already used by more than 5,000 students and more than 300 schools nationwide. The coursework, which makes extensive use of computer graphics and animations, fills a gap between introductory computer science materials available for grades K-8 and the rigorous Advanced Placement (AP) courses that students usually take later in high school. In addition to CS0, CMU CS Academy also is announcing additional coursework that will be available as a pilot in schools next fall. This coursework includes replacements for the programming chapters now taught in AP Computer Science Principles. The replacement chapters are geared to three levels — students who haven't completed CS1, students who have taken a half-year of CS1 and students who have completed an entire year of CS1. The CS Principles course targets students in 10th grade and above. Also available as a pilot next fall is a new CS2 curriculum, which applies the lessons of CS1 to a wide variety of subjects, such as art, music, math and science. Cawley said teachers and administrators planning their course offerings for next school year are invited to contact CMU CS Academy for more details. CMU CS Academy is co-directed by two celebrated computer science educators: David Kosbie, associate teaching professor; and Mark Stehlik, SCS assistant dean for outreach. A key part of the course development effort, however, has been shouldered by a group of about 30 undergraduate students majoring in computer science and related fields. While the professors designed the course and wrote the interactive course notes, the student team devised many of the exercises for each chapter and provides important support for teachers and schools that use CMU CS Academy. "We're here to support teachers so they can do their jobs to the best of their ability," Cawley said, noting that the study materials are designed for teachers to use in formal classrooms, not for independent study. "Our students have allowed us to provide a level of support to teachers that you typically don't get with other free curricula." The CMU CS Academy is supported by SCS, and from gifts from both former Pittsburgh Steeler Franco Harris and Seth Merrin, philanthropist and CEO of the institutional equities marketplace Liquidnet. More information about CMU CS Academy, CS0 and the rest of the curricula is available on the project's web site.

GymCam Tracks Exercises That Wearable Monitors Can't

Byron Spice

Wearable sensors such as smartwatches have become a popular motivational tool for fitness enthusiasts, but gadgets don't sense all exercises equally. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found that a stationary camera is a better choice for gym exercises.The vision-based system, called GymCam, detects repetitive motions. By doing so, Rushil Khurana and Karan Ahuja, both Ph.D. students in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), found that they could detect exercises in a gym. Moreover, they could recognize the type of exercise and reliably count repetitions."In a gym, the repetitive motion almost always is an exercise," said Mayank Goel, assistant professor in the HCII and Institute for Software Research. "If you are moving both your arms, you tend to move them together in time. However, if two people are exercising next to each other and performing the same exercise, they are usually not in sync, and we can tell the difference between them."Because the system only needs motion information, the camera feed can be reduced to pixel-by-pixel changes and eliminate identifiable faces that would intrude on privacy.Khurana said that reliance on motion information also addresses a problem for single-camera systems in a crowded gym environment — the inability to see a person's whole body. Gym equipment or other people can often obscure the camera's view. GymCam, however, can detect exercise as long as its camera can see any body part moving repetitively.Khurana and Ahuja will present their findings Thursday, Sept. 12, at the International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2019) in London.Ahuja said smartwatches and other wearables do a reasonable job of tracking many cardio exercises and some strength-training exercises. But their effectiveness depends on where the wearables are worn. A smartwatch might sense a dumbbell lift, but is useless for leg presses. Moreover, it is hard for a watch to differentiate between several body motions. Instrumenting the exercise machines is an option, but an expensive one. A camera, however, is relatively cheap and provides spatial as well as motion information.The system can also learn the location of types of exercise machines or certain exercise stations in a gym. It can then use an individual's location, in addition to their movements, to determine the exercise they're doing.The researchers tested their algorithm in a crowded gym. But Goel said that the same algorithm works perfectly on a smartphone as well, so a person can use their phone to record and track their workouts at home. Some companies have already expressed interest in using the system for tracking in-home exercises.The system also might have uses beyond physical exercise. Goel said the camera system, combined with smartwatches worn by individuals, might help people with visual disabilities navigate shopping malls, airports and other public spaces. Instead of using the person's face as their identity, the system will use their motion as their signature. It allows people to easily opt-out of being tracked or located.For more information, see the project web site. In addition to Khurana, Ahuja and Goel, the research team included Chris Harrison, associate professor in the HCII; former HCII faculty member Jennifer Mankoff, now at the University of Washington; and Zac Yu, a former visiting researcher in Goel's lab who is now at Google. The Carnegie Bosch Institute sponsored part of this work.

Beckmann Earns NSF Early CAREER Award

Virginia Alvino Young

Nathan Beckmann, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, has received a five-year, roughly $500,000 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award for young faculty members. Beckmann's research interests include computer architecture and performance modeling. The NSF grant will support his work crafting and evaluating a new computer system design that makes accessing data faster and cheaper. Beckmann said more energy efficiency is needed to sustain growth in computing power for machine learning, social networking and robotics. Applications currently have no control over how data is managed because memory hierarchy is fixed in hardware and hidden from software, resulting in unnecessary data movement. Beckmann's project will develop a new hardware-software co-design, wherein the operating system and hardware will collaboratively schedule tasks and data to improve efficiency. Beckmann will involve high school, undergraduate and graduate students in research. He will also organize research workshops for undergraduate women and a summer internship program for underrepresented minorities. Beckman earned his master's degree and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he spent one year post-doc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.    

Do As I Say: Translating Language Into Movement

Byron Spice

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a computer model that can translate text describing physical movements directly into simple computer-generated animations, a first step toward someday generating movies directly from scripts.Scientists have made tremendous leaps in getting computers to understand natural language, as well as in generating a series of physical poses to create realistic animations. These capabilities might as well exist in separate worlds, however, because the link between natural language and physical poses has been missing.Louis-Philippe Morency, associate professor in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI), and LTI Ph.D. student Chaitanya Ahuja are working to bring those worlds together using a neural architecture they call Joint Language-to-Pose, or JL2P. The JL2P model enables sentences and physical motions to be jointly embedded, so it can learn how language is related to action, gestures and movement."I think we're in an early stage of this research, but from a modeling, artificial intelligence and theory perspective, it's a very exciting moment," Morency said. "Right now, we're talking about animating virtual characters. Eventually, this link between language and gestures could be applied to robots; we might be able to simply tell a personal assistant robot what we want it to do."We also could eventually go the other way — using this link between language and animation so a computer could describe what is happening in a video," he added.Ahuja will present JL2P at the International Conference on 3D Vision, Sept. 16–19 in Quebec City, Canada.To create JL2P, Ahuja used a curriculum-learning approach that focuses on the model first learning short, easy sequences — "A person walks forward" — and then longer, harder sequences – "A person steps forward, then turns around and steps forward again," or "A person jumps over an obstacle while running."Verbs and adverbs describe the action and speed/acceleration of the action, while nouns and adjectives describe locations and directions. The ultimate goal is to animate complex sequences with multiple actions happening either simultaneously or in sequence, Ahuja said.For now, the animations are for stick figures.Making it more complicated is the fact that lots of things are happening at the same time, even in simple sequences, Morency explained."Synchrony between body parts is very important," Morency said. "Every time you move your legs, you also move your arms, your torso and possibly your head. The body animations need to coordinate these different components, while at the same time achieving complex actions. Bringing language narrative within this complex animation environment is both challenging and exciting. This is a path toward better understanding of speech and gestures."

Robotics Institute Post-Doc Named Innovation Fellow

Susie Cribbs

Joe Bartels, a postdoctoral researcher in the Robotics Institute, was named one of three Innovation Fellows by Carnegie Mellon University's Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. Founded in 2015, the Swartz Center works with the CMU community to accelerate the process of bringing research innovations and promising ideas to the global marketplace and to help all CMU entrepreneurs tap into the innovation ecosystem. The Innovation Fellows program specifically aims to foster entrepreneurship among graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and research assistants — the people who work directly with faculty investigators to conduct scientific experiments, solve problems and innovate. Bartels earned his master's degree and Ph.D. in robotics at CMU, and worked with colleagues in the Illumination and Imaging Lab to create novel depth-imaging systems for use in robotics and automation. These imaging systems include a long-range outdoor depth camera and a fully programmable 3D light curtain device. As a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow, he applied this research to 3D sensing for planetary rovers. Bartels now hopes to commercialize this technology for broad use in robotics, including self-driving cars, industrial manufacturing and mobile robots. Other 2019 Innovation Fellows include Jooli Han, a Ph.D. candidate in the Biomedical Engineering Department; and Bruce Wu, a research scientist in the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. The Innovation Fellows program was created in 2014 and has awarded 25 fellowships to date. For more on the program and its recipients, visit the Swartz Center website.

Al-Shedivat Receives Google Ph.D. Fellowship

Virginia Alvino Young

Maruan Al-Shedivat, a Ph.D. student in the School of Computer Science's Machine Learning Department, has been chosen as a 2019 Google Ph.D. fellow. He is one of 54 students from around the globe to receive a fellowship. Google has identified this international group for its exceptional work on computer science and related disciplines. The two-year fellowship includes tuition, fees and a yearly stipend, as well as a Google Research mentor. Al-Shedivat will join the other fellows at Google's Mountain View, California, campus to learn more about Google's research and connect with the company's research community. Al-Shedivat's research interests include sequential decision making, multitask learning, deep learning and graphic models. His work has explored applications in healthcare, natural language, and multi-agent systems. Before coming to CMU, Al-Shedivat received his M.Sc. in computer science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

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