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June 22, 2006 Vol. 16, No. 48
The "8 1/2 x 11 News" is published each week by the University Advancement Division. News of campus interest should be sent to one of the following editors:
Ed Delaney, 412-268-1609
(ed47@andrew.cmu.edu) 2001 Editions are available online. 2002 Editions are available online. 2003 Editions are available online. 2004 Editions are available online. 2005 Editions are available online. Previous editions are available online.
ROBOCUP SOCCER TEAM WINS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP A small, wheeled robot designed and built at Carnegie Mellon powered the school's robot soccer team, CMDragons'06, to victory last Sunday in the small robot league at the RoboCup 2006 World Championship in Bremen, Germany. The team's five robots, cube-shaped machines with 7-inch sides, outscored opponents by a combined 53-3 margin in the six games played at the international competition. The small robot league is one of six leagues that compete in the games. —Team advisor Manuela Veloso said the superior speed of the new robots built by research engineer Michael Licitra gave the CMDragons a big advantage over other teams. "These great robots, combined with accurate path and control software algorithms for attacking and defending by graduate students James Bruce and Stefan Zickler, produced an exceptional robot team," said Veloso, the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science. —Carnegie Mellon also demonstrated two small humanoid robots, named Ami and Sango, which provided commentary during some of the RoboCup matches last week. The bipedal robots were developed by Sony Corp., but were programmed by Veloso and her students to make comments on the movement of the soccer ball, explain fouls and rules, and announce goals. They also entertained the crowds by dancing at halftimes. The commentator robot team, CMCast, included computer science graduate students Sonia Chernovab>, Colin McMillen, Douglas Vail and Elisabeth Crawford, and Robotics Institute graduate students Nick Armstrong-Crews and Maayan Roth. —A third team, CMAssist'06, participated in a new RoboCup event called RoboCup@Home, in which robots work with people to perform household chores. The team came in second in the exhibition. Systems scientist Paul Rybski headed the team, which included Robotics Institute graduate students Jeremy Stolarz and Kevin Yoon. —Further information: http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060620_robocup.html. CARNEGIE MELLON TO LAUNCH CENTER FOR INNOVATIVE ROBOTICS Researchers at the Robotics Institute are creating the Center for Innovative Robotics, a resource that will help make robotics accessible to a broader range of individuals and businesses. "One of the goals of the center will be to promote interoperability between many types of robots and a variety of software, including use of the Internet for controlling robots," said Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor of robotics and director of the center. —The center, established with financial support from the Microsoft Robotics Group, will operate a Web site, www.cir.ri.cmu.edu, where academics, students, commercial inventors and enthusiasts can share the ideas, technologies and software that are critical to robot development. It will utilize Microsoft's new Robotics Studio, a set of software tools designed to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware and scenarios. The center will be housed in the Collaborative Innovation Center and will help create a virtual robotics community to share ideas and drive collaboration to future robotic development through the use of its Web site. Nourbakhsh said he hopes the center will begin full operations by late 2006. —Further information: http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060620_cir.html. GRAD STUDENT HELPS DISCOVER MASSIVE GALAXY CLUSTER An international team of astronomers, including Carnegie Mellon graduate student Kivanc Sabirli, has announced the discovery of the most distant cluster of galaxies ever found. According to the team, which presented its findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Calgary, the cluster may be the most massive one yet seen at such an early era in the universe. —Almost 10 billion light-years from Earth, cluster XMM-XCS 2215-1734 contains hundreds of galaxies surrounded by superheated, X-ray-emitting gas at more than 10 million degrees. The XMM Cluster Survey (XCS) team used observations from the European X-ray Multi Mirror (XMM) Newton satellite to discover this new cluster and then determined its distance using the 10-meter W. M. Keck telescope in Hawaii. —XMM-XCS 2215-1734 is surprisingly massive. Using the temperature of the X-ray emitting gas, Sabirli, a graduate student in Carnegie Mellon's Physics Department, determined that the cluster is approximately 500 trillion times the mass of our sun. Most of the mass is "dark matter," a mysterious form of matter that dominates the mass of all galaxies and clusters in the universe but cannot be seen by telescopes. —Further information: http://www.cmu.edu/cmnews/extra/060615_galaxy.html. SUMMER COURSE EXPLORES COUNTERCULTURE, PAST AND PRESENT Pittsburgh-area high school students will learn about the past 50 years of American counterculture in an innovative course taught this summer at Carnegie Mellon by Michael D. Rectenwald, a postdoctoral teaching associate in the Department of English. "Counter/Mass Culture: The Beats to Hip-Hop" will explore radical or countercultural forms from the mid-20th century to the present, including the Beats, punk rock and hip-hop. Through readings, recordings and performances, the class will consider the subversive themes of counterculture, as well as how those themes are appropriated and commercialized by the mainstream. Rectenwald offers the unique perspective of having studied under the late Allen Ginsberg at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo. "I grew up in the era of punk and my children grew up in the age of hip-hop. My oldest son, John-Michael, is a hip-hop artist. I wanted to understand what my kid and his friends and others saw in hip-hop rap," Rectenwald said. —Further information: http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060616_culture.html NEWS BRIEFS —Voting for Staff Council representatives has begun at http://www.cmu.edu/staff-council/vote.html. A valid Andrew ID is required to vote, but votes will remain anonymous. Paper ballots are available for those who cannot access the system. Polls close at 4 p.m. on Friday, June 30. PERSONAL MENTION —Professor David A. Dzombak has been named associate dean for graduate and faculty affairs in the College of Engineering. Dzombak, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, succeeds James H. Garrett Jr., who was recently named head of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. "Dave brings significant administrative and leadership experience to this position, and I look forward to working with him as we continue to remain at the forefront of education reform and technology leadership," said Pradeep K. Khosla, dean of the College of Engineering. For more than two decades, Dzombak has conducted leading-edge research in the areas of aquatic chemistry, water and wastewater treatment, abandoned mine drainage remediation, river and watershed restoration, and hazardous waste site remediation. —Physics and Mathematics Librarian Matt Marsteller has been appointed head of Carnegie Mellon Science Libraries for a three-year term, effective July 1. Marsteller, a library faculty member since 1999, succeeds Lynn Berard, who is stepping down to pursue other scholarly interests. Berard will be on sabbatical this fall semester to prepare a text on science librarianship. She will return in January, when she will assume selector, liaison and reference duties at the Engineering and Science Library. —Carnegie Mellon vision researchers dominated the award ceremony at the 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR06). For their paper "Neural Network-Based Face Detection" that was published 10 years ago, Henry Rowley, Shumeet Baluja and Takeo Kanade received the Longuet-Higgins Prize for "a contribution that has stood the test of time." Derek Hoiem, Alexei Efros and Martial Hebert received the best paper award for their paper "Putting Objects in Perspective." CALENDAR HIGHLIGHTS
—June 29 - 30: Kennywood Ticket Sale. 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m., University Center. Tickets will also be on sale in the UC from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m., July 5, and 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., July 6. This year's Kennywood Picnic, sponsored by Staff Council, is Saturday, July 8. Each employee must purchase his or her own ticket(s) and present a valid Carnegie Mellon ID. One ride-all-day ticket, valid only on July 8, is $5. Four additional tickets can be purchased for $12 each, and five additional tickets are $17 each.
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