Randy Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science, accepted the award during the conference’s opening session June 2. The Duke’s Choice Awards program recognizes the year’s most influential Java technology-based applications submitted by developers and companies around the world. The winners are chosen by Sun Fellow and Vice President James Gosling, along with a panel of Java technology experts at Sun.

Alice is a teaching tool that engages novice programmers in the creation of 3D animations using a drag-and-drop interface. The key research project of the late Randy Pausch, Alice is used in about 15 percent of U.S. colleges and universities, as well as a growing number of secondary schools. The project team now is headed by Associate Teaching Professor Wanda P. Dann and by lead developer and Project Scientist Dennis Cosgrove.

The latest version, Alice 3, will include a standard Java language interface so students can create programs either by using the drag-and-drop editor or by typing on a keyboard. Alice 3 will be released later this summer.

Last year, Sun announced it was teaming with Carnegie Mellon to support Alice’s continued development. Over the next three years, Sun will work with the university to globalize Alice, providing tools to translate it into different languages and develop drag-and-drop artifacts unique to a variety of cultures. Sun will work with the Alice development team to bring the system to a worldwide audience of educators and students.

Check out the video.

Watch Schmidt's speech at Carnegie Mellon on YouTube. You can also download Schmidt's speech and find other commencement-related speeches at Carnegie Mellon on iTunes U.

In the photo, Eric Schmidt receives his hood before being awarded an honorary doctorate in science and technology.

Ellen DeGeneres used Twitter to capture the attention of Carnegie Mellon students on May 6. And she kept Pittsburghers intrigued for the next few hours with several more tweets alluding to big happenings at the university.

At 7:05, students got another tweet:

@TheEllenShow: Pittsburghians, rush to The Fence at Carnegie Mellon University. But you have to bring a melon. The first 8 win a HUGE prize! 

The retweets were a-fluttering — including loyal @CarnegieMellon followers. And, despite the pouring rain, more than 100 enthusiastic students and fans descended on the fence — many with melons in tow.

The first eight people in line with their melon won a set of round-trip plane tickets to anywhere in the United States. They also talked to Ellen live from campus via a remote hookup. The show was taped and aired May 21.

As for everybody else who returned to the taping with a full melon (chunks of fruit didn’t “cut it”) in 40 minutes or less got more than rain-soaked. Many of them also scored gifts from Ellen, including iPods, Flip cameras (developed by a Carnegie Mellon alum Jonathan Kaplan), Sony readers, Nintendo Wiis, Xbox systems, gift cards and t-shirts.

Check out more photos, visit Carnegie Mellon on TwitPic. And be sure to follow Carnegie Mellon on Twitter!

• Missed the show? Watch it on The Ellen Show’s website.

. . . And he'll appear on Oprah, Again

On May 12, "The Oprah Winfrey Show" will include a segment on Randy Pausch. Randy originally appeared with Dr. Mehmet Oz on "Oprah" in October 2007 as his fame from the Last Lecture was beginning to grow. The May 12 show serves as a sendoff for Dr. Oz, a frequent "Oprah" Show contributor who will host his own daily TV show starting this September, and features some of his memorable interviews with inspirational people such as Randy. Jai Pausch also was interviewed for this latest program, providing an update on how she and her family are doing today. Locally, Oprah airs at 4 p.m. daily on WTAE-TV.

Above is the Carnegie Mellon men's golf team. At right is junior Christopher Lee.

Check out the billboards and their locations here.

Above is Leslie McAhren's creation.

The University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will join Carnegie Mellon in using the M45 cluster, which has approximately 4,000 processor cores and 1.5 petabytes of disk memory. Academic researchers previously have had limited access to such a computing resource. The Yahoo! research partnership thus enables large-scale systems software research and allows academic researchers to explore new applications that analyze Internet-scale data sets, ranging from voting records to online news sources.

“We have been using the Yahoo! cluster for more than a year now and have made significant progress in a number of key research areas, resulting in the publication of more than two dozen academic papers,” said Randal E. Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science. “Our researchers were able to extract and process documents from the Web in a way that was not possible before, changing the way we think about research problems. We were also able to conduct research over a corpus of 200 million Web pages, processing two orders of magnitude more data.  We conducted systems software research, comparing, for example, the performance of the Hadoop file system and other parallel file systems.

Hadoop is an open source distributed file system and parallel execution environment that runs on the M45 cluster, enabling its users to process massive amounts of data.

“Hadoop powers many of our most broadly used and complex systems at Yahoo!, from Web search to optimizing content for the home page,” said Shelton Shugar, senior vice president of cloud computing at Yahoo!. “Continuing to invest in the open source community and in technologies like Hadoop is an important element in our efforts to drive breakthroughs in Internet-scale computing and ultimately to continually improve the quality of the consumer experience of Yahoo!. By partnering with these top educational institutions to share our M45 cluster and our technical expertise, we hope to further key insights into the next generation of systems software research and development.” 

“The simultaneous access to applications and systems software has been a real benefit,” Bryant said, “and we look forward to our continued partnership with Yahoo! and joint contributions to the cloud computing community.”

For the complete Yahoo! news release, see http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=376331.

Panoramas created with GigaPan, a technology developed by Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and NASA, are featured on a new city Web site. The imagery of iconic Chicago locations can be explored in detail with 50 HP TouchSmart PCs installed throughout the airport by HP and the Chicago Department of Aviation and Office of Tourism.

GigaPan is a robotic camera mount and software package that allows anyone to create explorable panoramas using almost any digital camera. The technology is now being marketed by a spinoff, GigaPan Systems Inc.

The O’Hare installation includes two “Explore Chicago” technology lounges in  Terminal 2. In addition to HP computer kiosks and comfortable seating, the high-tech lounges feature 30-foot-by-10-foot prints of GigaPan panoramas of the skyline, Millenium Park and the Chicago trading floor of the world’s largest derivatives exchange, among other sights.  The computer terminals feature the city’s new Web site, where the panoramas can be explored in detail.

Many of the Chicago GigaPans were created last summer by Mary Jo Knelly, project assistant, and colleagues from the CREATE Lab of Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor of robotics. Knelly was on hand to demonstrate GigaPan during the media unveiling of the high-tech lounges and computers March 30.

"We have researchers developing advanced software-based tools to make the electric power grid more efficient, reliable and economical to operate, and we currently offer and are developing unique courses essential for future concepts in electric energy systems by identifying links across physical systems and embedded intelligence necessary to make those systems secure, robust and efficient," Schlesinger said.

More than 50 representatives from 11 other colleges and development organizations statewide also received awards during the event.

Carnegie Mellon's Ed Schlesinger and Gov. Ed Rendell are pictured.

The chain of transplants from living donors, initiated by a Michigan man who donated a kidney to a stranger, is detailed in the March 12 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science, is a co-author of the journal article. The first generation of Carnegie Mellon’s kidney-matching algorithm was developed by Sandholm, Avrim Blum, professor of computer science, and graduate assistant David J. Abraham.

The algorithm was devised to increase the number of kidney transplants by aiding so-called “paired donations.” In these cases, a person who is willing to donate a kidney to a loved one, but is incompatible, is matched with another donor-recipient pair. The Carnegie Mellon algorithm made three- and four-way matches possible, as well as increasing the length of donor chains initiated by altruistic donors. It also is scalable so that it could be used for a national pool of donors and recipients.

The United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees U.S. organ transplants, has announced it is developing a national system for pairing living donors and recipients. For more information, see the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Carnegie MellonToday and this Carnegie Mellon news release.

Pictured is Tuomas Sandholm.