News 2021

May 2021

Significant Otter Helps Couples Communicate From the Heart

Aaron Aupperlee

Even though people stayed in touch during the pandemic's stay-at-home orders and social distancing, it was easy to feel out of touch with loved ones.Technology and the internet have expanded the way humans communicate and added much to that communication — think emojis, GIFs and memes. But they can still fall short of being physically with someone."Our social cues are limited online," said Fannie Liu, a research scientist at Snap Inc who earned her Ph.D. from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. "We're exploring a new way to support digital connection through a deeper and more internal cue."Liu was part of a team from CMU, Snap and the University of Washington that built Significant Otter, an app designed primarily for smart watches that allows couples to communicate with each other based on their sensed heart rate. The team presented their work this month at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference.As the app's name suggests, it uses otters to communicate. The app allows couples to send animated otters to one another that represent emotions and activities. For example, otters can be sad, excited, calm or angry, or they can be working, exercising, eating or tired. The app senses a person's heartrate and then suggests otters with the emotion or activity that may correspond to it. A fast heartrate could prompt the app to suggest an excited or angry otter, or an otter that is exercising or eating.The partner can then respond with preset reactions. The reactions aren't based on the person's heartrate but are instead designed to give support to the person communicating based on their heartrate. Example reactions include otters hugging, holding each other's hands or even giving an encouraging thumbs up.The team tested the app in April and May 2020 with 20 couples separated by the pandemic and found that the use of biosignals — in this case, heartrate — made for easier and more authentic communication. Liu and the team didn't intend to test the app during the pandemic, but couples who participated in the test said that the app gave them a sense of their partner's physical state even when they couldn't be physically together."It's coming from your heart," Liu said. "It can be a very intimate gesture to see or feel someone's heartbeat. It's a signal that you're living."The app is available to download through Apple's App Store for iPhone and Apple Watch.

Nina Balcan Honored With Cadence Design Systems Professorship

Aaron Aupperlee

Maria Florina "Nina" Balcan recently received the inaugural Cadence Design Systems Chair in Computer Science for the impact her work has had in her departments and across Carnegie Mellon University. Balcan, a professor in the School of Computer Science's Machine Learning and Computer Science Departments, was described as a passionate serial innovator whose work touched many aspects of machine learning. Her research focuses on learning theories, artificial intelligence, algorithmic economics, game theory and optimization. "The most remarkable thing about Nina's professional achievements is her research. It is distinguished by both its breadth and rigor," said Roni Rosenfeld, head of the Machine Learning Department. "She's made contributions to just about all of the disciplines of machine learning." Rosenfeld called Balcan one of CMU's own. After earning bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from the University of Bucharest, Balcan came to CMU and completed her Ph.D. in 2008. She returned to the university six years later to become a professor. Tom Mitchell, founder of the Machine Learning Department, said Balcan repeatedly moves on to new areas and new problems. She has worked to put theoretical foundations under many classical machine learning topics. "But she's gone beyond those areas to, for example, look in economics, at the question of how machine learning can be related to the pricing of items. She's looked at privacy issues recently. She's looked at automatic design of computer algorithms assisted by data," Mitchell said. "She has a kind of fearless energy to go and tackle new problems repeatedly." Balcan said that while machine learning has developed over the past decade into a highly successful discipline that has impacted several fields, it is still growing. "However, as the field of machine learning is evolving, new opportunities await for fundamentally new paradigms that could significantly broaden its impact and applicability across science, engineering and computing," Balcan said. "The Cadence Design Systems Chair will enable me to work on these problems, and I'm very grateful for — and I would like to thank them for — their support." Cadence Design Systems is a leader in electronic design, producing electronic products for the computing, communications, automotive, mobile, aerospace and health care industries. Lip-Bu Tan, the company's CEO, is a member of the CMU Board of Trustees and the School of Engineering Dean's Council. The company and Tan and his wife, Ysa Loo, donated $6 million in 2019 to create the Cadence Design Systems and Tan Family Chairs. Vyas Sekar, a faculty member in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in the College of Engineering, received the inaugural Tan Family Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Sekar has a courtesy appointment in the Computer Science Department and is affiliated with CyLab, where he co-directs the IoT@CyLab initiative.

CMU, Richard King Mellon Foundation Announce Partnership for New Robotics Center at Hazelwood Green

Aaron Aupperlee

Carnegie Mellon University and the Richard King Mellon Foundation today announced a $150 million investment that will help build the Robotics Innovation Center in addition to funding advancements in the future of manufacturing and science. The $150 million grant to CMU is the largest single grant in the foundation's 74-year history. Half of the grant is the lead gift for a new cutting-edge science building on CMU's Oakland campus. The other half will seed the new Robotics Innovation Center (RIC) and Manufacturing Futures Institute at Hazelwood Green. "The technologies developed at the Robotics Innovation Center will ripple across every part of our society and economy, impacting fields including health care, transportation, national security, education, agriculture and retail," said Martial Hebert, dean of the School of Computer Science. The Robotics Innovation Center will provide CMU robotics researchers with roughly 150,000 square feet for research, integration, iteration and commercialization. Reconfigurable high bays, multiple testing facilities, a unique large-footprint testing area and flexible spaces that address robotics systems at different scales are planned. The facility is expected to include pre-incubator space for the next generation of CMU-affiliated robotics companies. The foundation will provide a $45 million lead grant for the RIC, which is estimated to cost more than $100 million. This is the latest chapter in the decades-long relationship between CMU and the Richard King Mellon Foundation. In 1964, Richard King Mellon and Constance Prosser Mellon provided initial funding for CMU's nascent Computer Science Department, which grew into the world-leading School of Computer Science. Read more about the historic connections between CMU and the foundation and their plans for this transformational next step in the partnership on the CMU News website.

Fang, Pfenning Receive NSF Career Awards

Aaron Aupperlee

Nearly $1 million in recent funding from the National Science Foundation will allow Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science faculty members Fei Fang and Andreas Pfenning to dig deeper into their fields of study. Fang, the Leonardo Assistant Professor in the Institute for Software Research, and Pfenning, an assistant professor in the Computational Biology Department, recently received NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) awards — the foundation's most prestigious for young faculty members. Pfenning's research will explore why vocal learning or mimicry is found in some species and not others. Humans, birds — most famously, parrots — whales, dolphins, and some species of bats and seals can hear a sound and mimic it. It is how humans learn to talk and other species learn to communicate with each other. As head of the Neurogenomics Laboratory, Pfenning will work with his team to examine on a molecular level the cell types that make up a region of the brain associated with mimicry and the regulatory elements within the cells that tell the genes what to do. They intend to build computational methods to better understand how these cell types evolved and develop machine learning approaches to trace both the evolutionary history of the genes and the genome's regulation of them. Pfenning said the work could lead to a better understanding of human speech disorders and further answer the question of why and how humans — or any of the species studied in his research — evolved the way they did. To complete this work, Pfenning and his team will lean heavily on the mapped genomes of the Zoonomia Project. Pfenning's lab is part of the team of scientists that have mapped 240 mammalian genomes as part of the project."We want to know the genomic differences between the species and how those differences lead to differences in behavior," Pfenning said. "Now that we have all these genomes, what can we do with them, and how can we use new computational methods to learn new biology?"

SCS Alum Wins Top SIGMOD Dissertation Award

Aaron Aupperlee

Huanchen Zhang, who earned his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science in 2020, has won the 2021 ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award, which recognizes the previous year's best dissertation in the database field. His thesis, "Memory-Efficient Search Trees for Database Management Systems," developed new methods for reducing the memory overhead of search trees. Huanchen's thesis advisers were Computer Science Department faculty members Andy Pavlo and David Andersen. Pavlo won the same award in 2014 for the dissertation he completed at Brown University. Huanchen's dissertation described a viable key compression method for any tree-based data structure. He developed novel methods for reducing the memory footprint of in-memory index structures without sacrificing performance for the former. His work adapted previously developed methods from information theory and algorithms research and showed how to make them usable in real systems. Now an assistant professor at Tsinghua University, Huanchen is the second CMU Ph.D. student to win the award in the last three years. CMU students or faculty have won the award four times since it was introduced in 2006.

Students Illuminate Pausch Bridge in CS, Drama Minicourse

Heidi Opdyke

On a chilly May night, snowflakes sparkled on the Randy Pausch Memorial Bridge near the heart of Carnegie Mellon University's campus. The wintry scene wasn't caused by unseasonably cool weather. Rather, Victor Huang, a sophomore in computer science and human-computer interaction, digitally created the effect in the minicourse "Interaction and Expression Using the Pausch Bridge Lighting." Huang first learned about Pausch — the late professor of computer science, author of "The Last Lecture" and co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center — as a high school student in Singapore. "I knew about CMU because of Randy Pausch," said Huang, "I wrote about it in my admission essay. I had an amazing school counselor who showed 'The Last Lecture.'" Pausch encouraged computer scientists and artists to work together, and the 230-foot-long bridge, which connects the Gates Center for Computer Science and the Purnell Center for the Arts, is a monument to his legacy. The bridge is lit by more than 7,000 programmable LED lights. Cindy Limauro, a University Professor of Lighting Design, has worked on the bridge since its beginning. She and her husband, Christopher Popowich, designed the lighting system and created the first light show, which was inspired by visual metaphors from Pausch's lecture and book. She's been involved in all of the bridge lighting courses. This year's course was co-taught with Garth Zeglin, an IDeATe Network instructor based in the Robotics Institute. This was the 10th time a bridge lighting course was taught. Working on cross-disciplinary teams, students explored light as art, interactive design and programming using a Pharos lighting control system — the type employed on the Pausch Bridge. "I had heard about this magical class that allows you to program the bridge," Huang said. "There is a huge interdisciplinary culture here where computer science can be melded together with aspects of the arts. I came to CMU for experiences like this." Read more about the course, its students and professors, and the lighting designs they produced on the CMU News website.

CMU-Designed App Showcases Privacy Control Recommendations

Daniel Tkacik

A new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University intends to improve the privacy regulations that often determine who has access to what data and how. Privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act have created a path toward empowering people to control their privacy, but more work must be done, the researchers found. "In many real-world systems today, privacy choices are difficult to find, overly simplified and even manipulative," said Yuanyuan Feng, a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for Software Research (ISR). "Part of the reason for this is that regulations offer very little guidance on how to actually implement privacy requirements." In a study presented at this week's Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference, Feng and her colleagues introduce the notion of "meaningful privacy control." For privacy choices to be meaningful — to be desirable to users and in compliance with regulations — they need five attributes: they should not only be (1) effective and (2) efficient by traditional usability standards, but should also (3) support user awareness, (4) accommodate a comprehensive set of privacy rights, and (5) be presented to users in a neutral, nonmanipulative manner. Because little concrete guidance for designing privacy controls exists, the team developed a privacy control "design space" — a map of all dimensions one should consider when designing privacy controls — based on a comprehensive review of internet, mobile and internet of things technologies; the privacy choices they offer; and how users interact with those choices. "We hope this framework and taxonomy will help guide practitioners to design and implement more meaningful privacy controls, empowering consumers to actually take advantage of those choices mandated by privacy regulations," said CyLab's Norman Sadeh, a computer science professor in the ISR and the principal investigator of the Personalized Privacy Assistant Project. Read more about the team's suggestions for better privacy regulations and how they demonstrated them using an app designed to detect devices that may be collecting data.

A black and white photograph of prison cells in dramatic lighting.

CyLab Study Explores Surveillance of Prison Communications

Daniel Tkacik

People serving time in prison or jail in the United States are almost constantly monitored, with surveillance stretching into conversations between inmates and their relatives. A new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Cylab Security and Privacy Institute explored people's understanding, attitudes and reactions to such surveillance. "You gotta be careful what you say," a relative of an incarcerated person said during an interview for the study. The researchers found that participants generally knew that their communications with their incarcerated family members were not private. However, they had a more limited understanding of technologically advanced surveillance methods, such as identifying a call recipient by their voice or tracking locations for calls received on a cell phone. Lorrie Cranor, CyLab director, Bosch Distinguished Professor in Security and Privacy Technologies and the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy, worked on the study with Kentrell Owens, who was a master's student in electrical and computer engineering, and Camille Cobb, a postdoctoral researcher in Cylab. "Family members of incarcerated people are forced to make a choice between being surveilled or not communicating with their loved ones at all," said Owens, now a Ph.D. candidate in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. "We wanted to investigate if and how this surveillance affected their communication." The research received an Honorable Mention award at this week's Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer-Human Interaction conference (CHI 2021). Learn more about the authors' research and the recommendations for policymakers.

Henny Admoni, Fei Fang Honored With Endowed Professorships

Aaron Aupperlee

School of Computer Science assistant professors Henny Admoni and Fei Fang were among eight faculty members across Carnegie Mellon University who recently received Career Development Chairs to support their continued research and teaching. SCS Dean Martial Hebert said that while Admoni and Fang focus on different research areas, they both share a passion for scholarly research with real-world impact. Admoni was named the A. Nico Habermann Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute. She joined CMU in 2017 and leads the Human and Robot Partners Lab, where she studies human-robot interaction and works on designing models of human mental states, like intentions, so robots can better understand them. If robots can better understand humans, they can work with and assist them more effectively in fields like health care and home robotics. "My work is about making the science fiction dream of your favorite robot a reality," Admoni said, adding that this only applies if the favorite robot is a helpful one. "The key factor to my research is that we can build better human-robot interaction by studying the human in the equation." The A. Nico Habermann Professorship in Computer Science was established in memory of Nico Habermann, a professor, first director of the Software Engineering Institute, and founding dean of the School of Computer Science. Habermann died in 1993. Fang was named the Leonardo Assistant Professor in the Institute for Software Research. She joined the CMU faculty in 2017, and studies the integration of machine learning with game theory to tackle real-world problems in artificial intelligence. Her work has been used by the U.S. Coast Guard to protect the Staten Island Ferry and led to the development of the Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS), a tool that assists with antipoaching efforts. "My work looks at how AI techniques can be leveraged for societal good in areas like security, sustainability and food insecurity," Fang said. CMU President Farnam Jahanian said the professorships are tributes to the outstanding faculty members who make the university an exciting place to create, innovate and push the envelope. They also underscore the importance of philanthropy in educating and changing the world. "The talent of our faculty is truly the lifeblood of our university," Jahanian said.

Delphi Research Group, Collaborators Honored for COVIDcast

Stacy Kish

The American Statistical Association (ASA) presented the 2021 Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry, and Government (SPAIG) Award to Roni Rosenfeld and Ryan Tibshirani of Carnegie Mellon University's Delphi Research Group and their COVIDcast partners for their "commitment to the theory and practice of epidemic tracking and forecasting through building and modeling unique public health data streams." The Delphi Research Group was assembled to make epidemiological tools to improve forecasting efforts that help healthcare organizations. While originally focused on seasonal influenza, the team shifted its approach to focus on tracking COVID-19 in early 2020. The group worked with industry partners to evaluate large databases to track illness, monitor mask wearing and explore vaccine hesitancy across the country. The group shared its findings on its COVIDcast website. "We grew from a prepandemic team of seven or eight to more than 50 members, who are mostly volunteers," said Tibshirani, associate professor in the Statistics & Data Science and Machine Learning departments at CMU. "They are giving us time from their normal 'day jobs' throughout the pandemic, so it is extremely rewarding to receive recognition for everyone's contribution to these efforts." Rosenfeld, the head of the Machine Learning Department in the School of Computer Science, said that 2020 was an opening salvo in the war against viruses and disease. While tragic and unnerving, it provided the world a window of clarity to understand the risk and danger inherent in these microscopic threats and the opportunity to prepare so the world can manage the next battle more effectively. "The general consensus is that this is not a once in a hundred years pandemic, but something like it will happen again sooner," Rosenfeld said. "We are likely to encounter something as challenging again in the next decade, so I feel a sense of urgency. We need to leverage this and other partnerships to improve how we handle public health emergencies moving forward." This SPAIG Award also honors Carrie Reed, Matt Biggerstaff, Michael Johansson, Rachel Slayton, Velma Lopez, Jo Walker and the CDC COVID-19 Modeling Team; Hal Varian, Brett Slatkin, the Google Surveys Team and Google.org's CMU-Delphi Fellows; Kang-Xing Jin, Curtiss Cobb and the Demography and Survey Science, Data for Good and Health teams at Facebook; Swami Sivasubramanian, Alex Smola and Amazon AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS); Tim Suther, Craig Midgett, Andrew Harris, Mina Atia, Anil Konda and Jaydeep Kulkarni at Change Healthcare; John Santelli, Paul Nielsen, Danita Kiser and the Optum data team at Optum; and John Tamerius, Jhobe Steadman and Torsten Auhorn at Quidel Inc. The Delphi Group has worked with the CDC since 2012, but most of the partnerships with industry and healthcare are new. Quidel Corp shared de-identified antigen test data. Change Healthcare and Optum shared de-identified medical insurance claims. Facebook offered its platform and access to large membership to run anonymous surveys to gain insight in the spread of symptoms, concerns about personal finances, and mask-wearing and vaccine hesitancy — to name only a few. To date, the team has gathered more than 20 million survey results. Google also ran surveys for Delphi toward the beginning of the pandemic, and more recently helped to track search inquiries for COVID symptoms, like loss of the sense of smell or taste, and provided 13 full-time fellows for six months. Google also donated $1 million to the project. Finally, AWS provided COVIDcast cloud computing support. "There are very few good things about a pandemic, but the one thing that was uplifting was the large number of people and organizations that were moved by it to operate in a way that you don't often see," Rosenfeld said. "In a sense, it was like we are fighting a war together, and in a war you discover your shared humanity. That made me feel good." The Delphi approach has been unprecedented. While most governmental information is targeted at the state level, few datasets offer the local perspective needed for public health. The endeavors of Delphi and its partners made it possible to dig into the granularity of data at the county level and lower, allowing them to view changes that could be impactful for public health. "A silver lining of this whole experience is that it provides the blueprint on what to do next," said Tibshirani. "Everyone is now keenly aware of the importance of the long-game of epidemic and pandemic tracking, moving it to an operational science to understand the importance of auxiliary data streams." The annual ASA SPAIG Award, which was established in 2002, highlights outstanding partnerships between academe, industry and government organizations and promotes new partnerships. The Delphi Group was joined this year by the Intermediate Clinical Endpoints of Cancer of the Prostate (ICECaP) Working Group at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in receiving this honor. The award is sponsored by the SPAIG committee of the ASA and is distinct from other ASA awards in that it recognizes outstanding collaborations between organizations, while recognizing key individual contributors.

CMU Research Forms Basis for Automatic Database Tuning Service

Aaron Aupperlee

A School of Computer Science grad student's dissertation has been transformed into a service aimed at improving the databases that power popular websites. OtterTune, a play on the once ubiquitous Auto-Tune, uses machine learning to automatically optimize databases, improving performance and efficiency and potentially saving companies time and money. Users could see faster loading times and improved services with a database humming along in the background. "There are hundreds of settings to consider when optimizing a database, too many for humans to properly tune," said Dana Van Aken, one of the company's co-founders. "OtterTune takes human trial and error out of the mix." The company is based on Van Aken's dissertation. She founded the company with her advisor, Andy Pavlo, an associate professor in the Computer Science Department; and Bohan Zhang, who earned his master of computational data science from CMU and worked with Van Aken and Pavlo as a research assistant. The company announced a commercial version of its service Wednesday and $2.5 million in seed funding, led by venture capital firm Accel. OtterTune is based in Pittsburgh and full of Carnegie Mellon talent. Seven of its 12 employees are either CMU faculty or alumni. "Database management systems now exceed the administrator's ability to optimize them," said Pavlo, the CEO of OtterTune. "We've put years of research into solving this problem, which we know will lead to significant increases in efficiencies and cost savings for customers." Don't let the company's playful name or DJing otters wearing headphones fool you. It is serious about tuning a database for optimal performance. In case studies, the OtterTune improved efficiency by 33% to 50%, cut one company's costs in half, and saved another tens of thousands of dollars. "It turns out, otters are actually vicious animals," Pavlo said.

Research by CMU, Twitter Could Improve Cache Efficiency by 60%

Aaron Aupperlee

Research from Carnegie Mellon University may soon help Twitter run faster and more efficiently. Juncheng Yang, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science, and Rashmi Vinayak, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, worked with Yao Yue from Twitter to develop Segcache to make better use of DRAM cache. "We performed a large-scale study on how items were stored and accessed in the cache, and based on our research, we developed a system to make better use of the precious cache space," Yang said. "This could potentially allow Twitter to reduce the largest cache cluster size by 60%." The team's research won the Community Award for being one of the best papers at last month's USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. Most computers, from personal laptops to servers housing millions of tweets, store items in one of two systems: hard drives or dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). Hard drives store items permanently, while DRAM houses on-demand items, like files stored in the cache. Items in the DRAM can be retrieved quickly, but DRAM is relatively small, expensive and energy-consuming. How to better use that limited space has always been a hard problem to solve. When you open Twitter, the tweets displayed immediately in the feed come from the cache. Without it, loading the homepage requires retrieving tweets from everyone you follow from the hard drive — which takes a long time and consumes system resources. Segcache applies two techniques to better use cache space. First, it groups items to allow metadata sharing between them. Items in the cache are usually small — the most common length of a tweet is 33 characters. However, existing systems store large amounts of metadata with each item, wasting precious cache space. Grouping similar items and sharing their metadata reduces this overhead and uses the cache more efficiently. The second technique is redesigning the system to identify and remove expired items more effectively. Cached items typically have a short lifetime, and when expired items linger in the cache they waste valuable space. The new design removes these items more quickly and with fewer scans than existing approaches, which need to scan all items periodically. Yang and Vinayak said the collaboration with Twitter was crucial to their work, as the company allowed them to study the social media network's production system. Twitter is now working to incorporate the team's research into its production system. "We and our collaborators at Twitter are very excited about this work," Vinayak said. "Changing a production system is cumbersome, and companies rarely do it to incorporate the latest research. When the research that we do is used in the real world, it is very exciting."

SCS Community Leaves Mark on Mars

Jason Maderer

While there aren’t any human footprints on Mars yet, Carnegie Mellon University has left plenty of tracks.School of Computer Science alumni and faculty have been part of NASA’s rover expeditions to Mars for decades, and the current Perseverance mission is no exception. In addition to being driven by Vandi Verma, who earned her Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute, the rover boasts wheels that were tested in the institute’s Planetary Robotics Lab under the keen eye of Research Professor David Wettergreen.Meet the CMU alumni and faculty working on Mars, whether they’re at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena or the high bay on campus. And learn more about Verma's work in the video below.

Three SCS Faculty Selected for Provost's Inclusive Teaching Fellowships

Aaron Aupperlee

Three School of Computer Science faculty members will participate in the 2021-2022 Provost's Inclusive Teaching Fellowship program in the university's Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation. The program works with a small cohort of faculty to integrate inclusive teaching practices in their classes. The fellows work closely with the Eberly Center to redesign their courses. The SCS faculty members selected are Scott Pavetti, an assistant teacher professor in the Institute for Software Research; Lining Yao, an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII); and Kelly Rivers, an assistant teaching professor in the Computer Science Department. This is the second year of the fellowship program. The Provost's Office supports the Inclusive Teaching Fellowships, which include a faculty stipend, and the Eberly Center administers the program. Geoff Kaufman, an assistant professor in HCII, was selected as part of the inaugural program.

Overcoming Tab Overload

Aaron Aupperlee

If you are reading this, chances are you have several other tabs open in your browser that you mean to get to eventually. Internet browser tabs are a major source of friction on the internet. People love them. People hate them. For some users, tabs bring order and efficiency to their web browsing. For others, they spiral out of control, shrinking at the top of the screen as their numbers expand. A research team at Carnegie Mellon University recently completed the first in-depth study of browser tabs in more than a decade. They found that many people struggle with tab overload, an underlying reason being that while tabs serve a variety of functions, they often do so poorly. "Browser tabs are sort of the most basic tools that you use on the internet," said Joseph Chee Chang, a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Computer Science's Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and a member of the research team. "Despite being so ubiquitous, we noticed that people were having all sorts of issues with them." The team will present their paper, "When the Tab Comes Due: Challenges in the Cost Structure of Browser Tab Usage," at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021), May 8-13. For the study, the team conducted surveys and interviews with people about their tab use. The study details why people kept tabs open, including using them as reminders or fearing they would have to search for the information again. It also looked at why people closed tabs, knowing that tab overload can strain a person's attention and computer resources. About 25% of the participants in one aspect of the study reported that their browser or computer crashed because they had too many tabs open. The researchers found that people felt invested in the tabs they had open, making it difficult for them to close the tabs even as they started to feel overwhelmed or ashamed by how many they had open. Tabs first showed up in web browsers in 2001 and haven't changed much since. The internet, however, has. There is about a billion times more information on the web now than there was 20 years ago. Today, one tab could house an email inbox. Another could be used for a music or video player. Articles stashed away to read later could be in other tabs, as could restaurant reviews or information for an upcoming trip. Add in social media sites, news or other pages used for work or play, and it is easy to have a dozen or more tabs or windows open at any given time. Tabs, it turns out, aren't the best tool for assisting with complex work and life tasks that people perform on the internet. Their simple list structure makes it difficult for users to jump between sets of tasks throughout the day. And despite people using tabs as an external form of memory, they do not capture the rich structure of their thoughts. Researchers found that while users complained about being overwhelmed by the number of tabs they queued up to work on later, they also didn't want to move them out of sight, as they worried about never going back to them. "People feared that as soon as something went out of sight, it was gone," said Aniket Kittur, a professor in the HCII and head of the research team. "Fear of this black hole effect was so strong that it compelled people to keep tabs open even as the number became unmanageable." Tab overload also arises from sense-making and decision tasks that require a person to absorb information from many sources, stitch it together and come to a conclusion. For instance, if someone is researching what camera to buy, that person may search several different reviews, how-to guides and shopping sites to compare models. "Managing this sort of task is really one of the most important aspects of productivity in our lives," Kittur said. "And the number one tool that everyone uses for it is tabs, even though they don't do a good job." The team believes that today's browsers do not offer a good tool for managing all the information and tasks people head to the internet for. To fix this, they created Skeema, an extension for the Google Chrome browser that reimagines tabs as tasks. The extension helps users group their tabs into tasks and then organize, prioritize and switch between them. Skeema uses machine learning to make suggestions for grouping open tabs into tasks and supports nested tasks and complex decision-making. Users of an early version of the tool significantly reduced the number of tabs and windows they kept open, reported much less stress connected to tabs, and remained more focused on the task at hand. Many of the early beta testers started using the tool daily to manage the tabs and tasks in their lives. "Our task-centric approach allowed users to manage their browser tabs more efficiently, enabling them to better switch between tasks, reduce tab clutter and create task structures that better reflected their mental models," Chang said. "As our online tasks become increasingly complex, new interfaces and interactions that can merge tab management and task management in a browser will become increasingly important. After 20 years of little innovation, Skeema is a first step toward making tabs work better for users."

CMU Lab Leads Development of Pasta That Morphs Into Shape When Cooked

Aaron Aupperlee

People love pasta for its shapes — from tubes of penne and rigatoni to spirals of fusilli and rotini.But what makes farfalle different from conchiglie also makes the staple a bear to package, requiring large bags and boxes to accommodate the iconic shapes of pastas around the world.A research team led by the Morphing Matter Lab at Carnegie Mellon University is developing flat pasta that forms into familiar shapes when cooked. The team impresses tiny grooves into flat pasta dough — made of only semolina flour and water — in patterns that cause it to morph into tubes, spirals, twists and waves when cooked.The morphed pasta looks, feels and, most importantly, tastes like traditional pasta, while opening new possibilities for food design and allowing for flat-packed pasta that would cut back on packaging, save space in storage and transportation, and possibly reduce the time and energy needed for cooking."We were inspired by flat-packed furniture and how it saved space, made storage easier and reduced the carbon footprint associated with transportation," said Lining Yao, director of the Morphing Matter Lab in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at CMU's School of Computer Science. "We decided to look at how the morphing matter technology we were developing in the lab could create flat-packed pastas that offered similar sustainability outcomes."The team published their understanding of the morphing mechanism and design principles in the paper "Morphing Pasta and Beyond," which is the cover story of the May 2021 issue of Science Advances. Authors include 17 researchers from CMU, Syracuse University and Zhejiang University, specializing in fields including material science, mechanical engineering, computational fabrication and design.The grooves stamped into the flat pasta sheets increase the time it takes water to cook that area of the pasta. By carefully planning where and how to place the grooves, the researchers can control what shape of pasta forms when it is cooked."The groove side expands less than the smooth side, leading the pasta to morph into shape," said Teng Zhang, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who led the modeling analysis in this project.Grooves can be used to control the morphed shape of any swellable material. The team has demonstrated that it can morph silicon sheets using the same groove technique."This could potentially be used in soft robotics and biomedical devices", said Wen Wang, a former researcher affiliated with the Morphing Matter Lab.The plastic material used in food packaging contributes greatly to landfills worldwide, and packaging litters the world's oceans. Creating effective food packaging is crucial to reducing waste and shaping a sustainable future. Flat-packed pasta would cut back on the packaging required while saving space in shipping and storage.The team also envisioned that their flat-packed pasta may lower the carbon footprint of cooking. In Italy, about 1% of greenhouse gas emissions come from cooking pasta. Flat pasta may cook faster than tubular pasta, which could possibly reduce emissions during the cooking process.Ye Tao, a former visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Morphing Matter Lab and the study's lead author, tested the flat-packed pasta in the wild by packing it for a hiking trip. The pasta took up less room in her bag, did not break while hiking and cooked successfully on a portable camp stove."The morphed pasta mimicked the mouthfeel, taste and appearance of traditional pasta," she said.Traditional pasta already morphs when cooked, expanding and softening when boiled. The team harnessed these natural properties to create its flat-packed product.The morphing pasta builds on years of research by Yao and the Morphing Matter Lab on morphing mechanisms and applications with different materials ranging from plastic and rubber to fabric and food.The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the CMU Manufacturing Futures Initiative and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Prithvi Okade Awarded Krulcik Scholarship

Matthew Wein

Prithvi Okade is a pretty familiar face around the School of Computer Science. Some know her as the head teaching assistant for 15-112, Fundamentals of Programming. Some recognize her from the SCS tours they took as prospective students. And to some she was the orientation counselor who helped them get acclimated in their first semesters on campus. "Every once in a while, I'll meet someone who'll tell me that I was all three for them," Okade said. "I'm glad that if there's a first-year who's seeing me, it's going to be in at least one of those settings because I really love talking with them, being able to give them advice or even just tell them little anecdotes from my time here that might help them along in some way." Routinely going above and beyond to help her fellow students is just one of the reasons Okade received the 2021 Scott Robert Krulcik Scholarship in Computer Science. Named in honor of Scott Krulcik (SCS 2018), the scholarship honors an SCS student or students in their junior or senior years who have clearly demonstrated the qualities that made Scott so beloved during his time at CMU: a leader with a positive attitude, an insightful and compassionate scholar, an innovative contributor to the SCS community, and an inspiring peer mentor. Okade, a junior from New Jersey, remembers hearing of Scott's sudden passing during her first year at SCS. "People talk about how kind he was and what a leader he was, so for the faculty to say that they see some of those qualities in me, that's something I'm grateful for," she said. "Doing college in a pandemic is a lot about 'what's next?' You're jumping between meetings, you're clearing out your inbox, you're finishing a homework assignment and looking at the next homework assignment. You don't get a lot of time to stop and think about what you're actually accomplishing or the impact you might be having, but it's really nice that the faculty see it." Talk to Okade and you'll have a hard time not seeing it, too. In high school, she drifted toward science, and considered studying biology and medicine in college. Before she came to CMU, she had never taken a computer science course or written a single line of code. But she did know one thing. "I knew I was going to like it here," she said. "I visited, I loved everyone I met and I loved their outlook on their major and what they wanted to do. I knew I wanted to go here. My parents said I was crazy but they were very supportive of me." In addition to her work as a TA and an orientation counselor, Okade also does research on an intelligent tutoring system with Kenneth Koedinger and Yun Huang in SCS's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Before the pandemic, she volunteered with TechNights, a Women @ SCS program that teaches hands-on problem-solving skills to middle school students. Still, Okade insists that her work as a 15-112 TA is the most important thing she does. "Having those moments where you see students understand the material for the first time, it's so fulfilling and surprising," she said. "The more I work here, the more I want to try to find somewhere in the real world where I can teach, reach more students and expose them to computer science. I feel like no matter what I do here, I can't believe it's happening."

SCS Doctoral Students Selected for Facebook Fellowships

Aaron Aupperlee

Two Ph.D. candidates in the School of Computer Science received Facebook Fellowships to support their ongoing research. Now in its 10th year, the fellowship program supports research on important computer science and engineering topics, such as computer vision, programming languages, computational social science and more. Paul Pu Liang, a doctoral student in the Machine Learning Department, and Misha Khodak, a doctoral student in the Computer Science Department, will receive two years of paid tuition and fees and a $42,000 annual stipend to cover living and conference travel costs. Liang earned a fellowship for spoken language processing and audio classification. His research seeks to create socially intelligent agents that can comprehend social cues, intents and affective states; engage in conversation; and understand social commonsense to better interact with humans. Khodak's fellowship will support his research on modern metalearning and automation methods. He aims to democratize machine learning with a new, principled set of tools that enable the consistent, predictable and robust application of diverse data domains, expertise levels and computational resources. About 2,100 people applied for the fellowship from more than 100 universities worldwide. Facebook selected 26 fellows this year from 19 universities. Xinshuo Weng in the Robotics Institute, Jenna Wise in the Institute for Software Research and Karan Ahuja in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute were finalists for fellowships.

SCS alum Neil Batlivala, beside the logo for Pair Team

SCS Grad, Nurse Team Up To Fix Broken Primary Care System

Elizabeth Speed

Neil Batlivala has blended his expertise in computer science with his interest in medicine to help design a platform that allows doctors to concentrate on their patients. Batlivala, who earned his bachelor's degree in computer science with a minor in computational biology in 2014, collaborated with nurse Cassie Choi to found Pair Team, a health-tech startup that frees doctors to focus on patient conversations. Designed for independent doctor's offices — especially those with high numbers of Medicaid patients — Pair Team gives doctors easy access to care recommendations while they're meeting with patients. It also provides additional administrative support in the form of automated clinical operations and help from a team of care navigators, who are akin to customer service representatives, engineers and operations experts. By simplifying workflow and removing the stress of administrative tasks, clinicians can focus on patients in the clinic. The interest in health care started early for Batlivala, who flirted with the idea of becoming a doctor before realizing he could make a larger impact with his technological talents. "I knew I wanted to work in health care, but I didn't know that I wanted to be a computer scientist. I thought about medical school before I realized that I'm actually better at computer science than I am on the biology side. It's where work becomes play for me, so I stuck with technology," Batlivala said. Batlivala said CMU gave him the technical skills and taught him how to think. "They teach students to approach the world, look at problems and make an impact. Health care is a very complex system, and CMU taught me how to reduce problems to a handful of organizing principles," he said. "There are a lot of surface-level problems that I see people trying to solve, but to make real impact, you have to ask more broadly 'why does the system work the way it does.'" Read more about Batlivala and Pair Team in this alumni profile.

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