|
|
|
June
16, 2006
This internal publication contains information about recent coverage
of Carnegie Mellon that appeared primarily in national newspapers, magazines
and online publications. Please note that some sources may require registration
or a subscription in order to access their information online.
Please send comments and suggestions to thomas@cmu.edu
The media coverage archive is available at www.cmu.edu/clips
From June 9 to June 15,
Carnegie Mellon Media Relations counted 220 references to the university in worldwide
publications. Here is a sample.
Special coverage: RoboCup 2006
BBC News | June 14
PC Pro | June 14
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution | June 14
Scenta | June 13
MSNBC | June 12
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | June 10
National News Stories
The New York Times | June 13
The Wall Street Journal | June 9
Education for Leadership
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | June 15
Arts and Humanities
Boston Globe | June 14
San Jose Mercury News (Knight Ridder Newspapers) | June 13
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | June 13
Information Technology
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | June 14
Baltimore Sun | June 14
India-West | June 9
Regional Impact
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | June 13
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | June 11
Local News Stories
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | June 14
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | June 11
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | June 10
International News Stories
The Globe and Mail | June 14
Malaysia Sun (UPI) | June 13
The Peninsula | June 12
International Herald Tribune (The New York Times) | June 8
-
-
Special coverage: RoboCup 2006
BBC News | June 14
Teams from 36 countries have flocked to Bremen to take part in the tournament. As well as providing a visual spectacle on the pitch, some robots will be helping out in other ways. Live commentary of a number of matches is provided by a pair of robots developed by scientists from Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. Sango and Ami, as the duo are known, will explain the rules of the game and dissect fouls for spectators using synthesized voices. "They don't talk at the same time," said Manuela Veloso, the Herbert Simon Professor of Computer Science and head of Carnegie Mellon's RoboCup teams. More than 400 teams will compete during the five day tournament "But if one is explaining a rule and a nice goal is made, the other has the ability to interrupt."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/
technology/5078952.stm | back to top
PC Pro | June 14
There's an international football tournament going on right now in Germany. But you might not know about it. You see, it's been overshadowed somewhat by the FIFA World Cup. But Bremen is playing host to teams of a nature quite different to the preening brand-sponsored idols striding the pitches of stadiums across the country. That's because Robocup 2006 is strictly limited to robots, whether they are wheeled, humanoid or canine. ... Even the commentators are robots, designed by scientists from Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S., and programmed not to interrupt each other during coverage.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/88495/robots
-seize-control-of-world-cup-in-germany.html | back to top
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution | June 14
The international Robocup kicks off today in Germany—the same country where human soccer players are tangling in the World Cup—and will run until Tuesday at the Bremen Exhibition Center. The Spelman College Robotics team—known as the Spelbots—qualified for a second time in the world championship, which has been held annually in various parts of the world since 1997. About 350 teams representing 40 countries are expected to compete in categories for either two-legged or four-legged robots or various categories for robots with wheels. ... The Spelbots are the only all-female, all-black, undergraduate robotics team in the world. ... The programs enable the robots to maneuver on their own and react to the movements of "players" and the ball appropriately. The team is the first to use an open-source framework, called Tekkotsu, to develop programming designs for the robot codes. Still in its development phase, the framework is overseen by professor David Touretzky at Carnegie Mellon University, an institution known for research in computer science and robotics education. ... "What we're doing here, although it looks fun and cute, is actually serious research," Touretzky said in a statement on Spelman's Web site. "We want to help African-American students see what they can do. Robots have helped us make advances in the area of medicine, search and rescue and assisting the elderly."
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/
atlanta/stories/0614spelmanrobots.html | back to top
Scenta | June 13
U.S. scientists have developed two small bipedal robots to provide commentary for the RoboCup 2006, which kicks off this week in Bremen, Germany. The humanoids are walking and talking robots that have been created by scientists from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. They say that the robots will provide commentary for the games between teams of four-legged robots developed by the Sony Corporation. Named Ami and Sango, the silver two-and-a-half foot tall robots will receive wireless input from the same system that communicates the referee’s rulings to the robot players.
http://www.scenta.co.uk/scenta/news.cfm
?cit_id=864066&FAArea1=
widgets.content_view_1 | back to top
MSNBC | June 12
The World Cup isn't the only game in town: This year's international RoboCup finals are also getting their kickoff this week in Germany, and even the commentators are of the robotic persuasion. But that's no easy feat: It turns out that programming a play-by-play robot is just as hard as programming a robo-soccer player. "We have been working on robot soccer for a while, and we have seen the robots autonomously playing each other, but all the other functions around the robots have been done by humans," Manuela Veloso, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and head of the school's RoboCup teams, told me today. "It occurred to us to try to think about making the commentators and the referees and the coaches be robots, which would be interesting."
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/
archive/2006/06/12/376.aspx | back to top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | June 10
They are little Sony robots known as QRIOs, but one could swear they're little people wearing gray plastic armor. They move with swaying motions and flexible joints that make them humanlike. They dance, lie down, stand, walk and gesture in ways that amaze us real bipeds. But the two humanoid robots are certain to draw international attention next week for another reason. Ami and Sango, programmed with software developed at Carnegie Mellon University, will provide color commentary for spectators during the RoboCup 2006 World Championship that begins Wednesday in Bremen, Germany. ... Dr. Manuela Veloso, the Herbert Simon Professor of Computer Science and head of Carnegie Mellon's RoboCup teams, and crew provided a demonstration Thursday at Carnegie Mellon, where the robots performed almost flawlessly--as long as they had enough battery power.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/
06161/697224-96.stm | back to top
National News Stories
No one knows why it is so darned costly to run a data center, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University hope to find out. Last month Carnegie Mellon unveiled its $1.2-million Data Center Observatory, a computer center packed with instruments that will help researchers track aspects of its costs of operation. Eventually the project could lead to techniques to rein in some of those costs. "We'd really like to tackle some of those challenges and do something about them," says Gregory R. Ganger, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who is leading the project. "But it's really hard as an academic to tackle a problem that you can't define."
http://chronicle.com/weekly/
v52/i41/41a03303.htm | back to top
The New York Times | June 13
Violent crime increased in the United States for the first time in four years, up 2.5 percent in 2005 from the year before, with the biggest increases in murder coming in medium-size cities and in the Midwest. ... Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said an increase in crime in the last couple of years in some places could be a result of police efforts' being diverted to fighting terrorism, budget cuts that have reduced social services and prisons, and fewer job opportunities for young people in poorer communities. "I want to be careful to not overstate a one-year trend as the start of something much bigger, because it could well go in the other direction next year," Mr. Blumstein said. "In places that had a good rise in crime, the chances are good that they could see a good fall next year as they pay more attention to the issue."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/
us/13crime.html?_r=1&oref=slogin | back to top
The Wall Street Journal | June 9
Starting a new job is hard. Nobody knows that better than Ben Bernanke. The fresh Federal Reserve Chairman faced an uphill battle before he even got started riding herd on the world's biggest economy, replacing a man often called, fairly or not, "The Maestro." Mr. Bernanke, on the other hand, has often been called, fairly or not, "Helicopter Ben," in mockery of a speech in which he suggested the Fed could dump money from helicopters to fight deflation. ... This week, however, Mr. Bernanke put his foot down. In a speech on Monday, he left no doubt he planned to kill inflation dead, and a bevy of Fed speakers has followed to reinforce the message, which the market seems to have gotten loud and clear. So has Mr. Bernanke finally gained elusive market credibility, or will his earlier stumbles dog him for some time to come? We asked three Fed watchers and market participants for their views. What follows are compilations of their comments in interviews. Allan Meltzer: I think the best measure of Mr. Bernanke's credibility is the bond market, and there is no sign there that traders expect big inflation or even much inflation. ***Allan Meltzer is a Carnegie Mellon professor of political economy and public policy.
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB114978702606575101-search.html?
KEYWORDS=Does+Ben+Bernanke+have+
street+cred%3F&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month | back to top
Education for Leadership
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | June 15
Mark Rockwell drew a lot of stares driving through downtown Pittsburgh with a hand-built, solar-powered motor boat strapped to the roof of a 1981 Mercedes. One rubbernecking motorist even pulled out a camera to get a picture of the unusual vessel on its way to a test run in a Butler County lake. This weekend Rockwell and an enterprising band of fellow students from Carnegie Mellon University will embark on an even longer journey with the boat they designed and built from scratch in a Squirrel Hill garage. They will drive almost 1,000 miles to Fayetteville, Ark., to become the first team from Carnegie Mellon to compete in the 13th annual Solar Splash 2006 World Championship of Solar/Electric Boating.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib
/news/cityregion/s_458086.html | back to top
Arts and Humanities
Boston Globe | June 14
New findings from researchers at Harvard and elsewhere suggest that a surprising number of people are face-blind, so bad at recognizing faces that they routinely snub acquaintances and have trouble following movie plots. In extreme cases, they may greet siblings as strangers and struggle to discern which child is theirs at school pick-up time. The syndrome, known medically as prosopagnosia, was long thought to be a rare neurological curiosity that resulted from brain damage. ... What goes wrong in the brains of face-blind people is largely a mystery, said Dr. Marlene Behrmann, a brain scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. The phenomenon plays into a major debate in neuroscience, she said, whether the brain is made up of a bunch of separate little modules that each perform a different function or whether all parts of the brain are potentially capable of performing any function. "The truth will be somewhere in the middle, which is why it's a vigorous debate," she said.
http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/diseases
/articles/2006/06/14/when_faces_
have_no_name/?page=2 | back to top
San Jose Mercury News (Knight Ridder Newspapers) | June 13
Having "love-hate relationships" with people is a sign of low self-esteem, according to a prize-winning series of studies appearing in this month's issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The findings could help couples and families in relationships in which attitudes toward loved ones swing wildly, said Yale psychologist Margaret Clark, the lead researcher in the study. ... To investigate love-hate relationships, Clark and her research team asked participants to take a widely used psychological measure called the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Some time later, participants were asked to answer some structured questions about their feelings toward people they were close to - lovers, friends or parents. ... Clark theorized that people with higher self-esteem were better at integrating positive and negative feelings about people in their minds. People with lower self-esteem, she thought, were more likely to store positive and negative feelings separately in their heads and more likely to get caught in the love-hate trap. To explore that theory, Clark and Steven Graham, a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, came up with a test. They asked subjects to answer yes or no, as quickly as they could, to whether each of 10 adjectives applied to the intimate in question. Among the adjectives were choices such as forgiving, obnoxious, loyal, self-centered, greedy, understanding and cruel.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/
mercurynews/news/politics/14809380.htm | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | June 13
Fear of the dark--and the imaginary monsters under the bed, and boogeyman in the closet--naturally plagues most tots to some degree, experts say. Between the ages of 3 and 6, children's imaginations blossom without the logic and ability to distinguish reality versus fantasy that come at a later age. "Basically, their minds are expanding, and there's a good side and a bad side," Sharon Carver, Ph.D., says. She is the director of The Children's School and a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Oakland. "Children gain what's called symbolic thought, and things become able to be more than they appear," she says. "They can see a shape and see it as a monster, and hear a breath and interpret it as a monster's breath, because their minds are starting into all this imagination stuff."
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribunereview
/living/family/s_457709.html | back to top
Information Technology
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | June 14
Oshkosh Truck, one of the U.S. military's biggest truck providers, has spent millions of dollars developing an autonomous vehicle. It already has tested one of the vehicles in what's called "Baby Baghdad," a scaled-down mock city in Arizona that resembles the real thing in Iraq. In those tests, garbage cans were thrown out in front of the truck, simulating people running in front of it. Some of the technology used in the urban competition will differ from what was used in the desert. The latter was more of a "road following exercise," said Sanjiv Singh, associate research professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Radar wasn't very useful in the desert, but it could be appropriate in an urban environment filled with moving, metal vehicles. "It works well with metallic objects, such as other cars," Singh said.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/
index.aspx?id=435963 | back to top
Baltimore Sun | June 14
A legislative proposal to partially defer a BGE electric rate increase for 11 months will allow the utility to recover its costs over a decade, but leaves unanswered questions about how much the utility and its customers will be paying once the clock runs out next year. Though negotiations continue, the plan should allow the company to avoid financial peril by requiring customers to repay the deferred amount - something BGE said was essential to avoid a legal challenge on constitutional grounds. ... A credit downgrade falls more heavily on utilities than other types of industry because utilities must borrow huge amounts of money to fund improvements to power lines and other infrastructure. On average, labor costs account for about a third of the cost of the goods people buy. But for utilities, only about 7 percent is spent on labor, said Jay Apt, a utility expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "So, an increase in the cost of capital for somebody in the electric power business drives up the cost of power to consumers," he said.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business
/bal-te.bz.constellation14jun14,0,7266798
.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines | back to top
India-West | June 9
Hundred-dollar laptop computers are not going to be the panacea for India's education ills. But a team of thoughtful, resourceful and motivated entrepreneurs and activists is making headway nonetheless with a well-organized program to bring India's schools into the 21st century. The program is called Digital Equalizer, and over the past five years it's already trained over 100,000 children and 6,000 teachers in over 170 underprivileged schools in India. ... Key to getting DE's ideas into the schools is improved infrastructure, which means money, and so the relationships with Indian government at the national and state level are of the utmost importance, said Srikanth Nadhamuni of eGovernments. ... But despite panel moderator Moira Gunn's assertion that 50 percent of all human beings are techophobic (Gunn hosts the popular NPR show "Tech Nation"), people can be persuaded to embrace new technologies, said Raj Reddy of Carnegie Mellon University. Reddy, a world-renowned researcher in the field of human-computer interaction, said that bringing technology to India's interiors, even to illiterate populations, should not be that hard. "It's no big secret," he said. "A car, or a mobile phone, is probably a lot more complicated to use than a computer. The trick is to hide its complexity."
http://www.indiawest.com/view.php?subaction
=showfull&id=1149790230&archive=
&start_from=&ucat=3 | back to top
Regional Impact
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | June 13
To critics, the state General Assembly's obscure budget surplus is a slush fund that costs about $15 for every man, woman and child in Pennsylvania. The surplus, which financed last year's attempt to circumvent constitutional prohibitions against midterm pay raises, ballooned from $135 million in 2004 to $187 million in 2005, budget documents show. Lawmakers insist the surplus ensures their independence from any governor looking to hold the Legislature hostage. The General Assembly awards itself about $340 million to pay for operations. ... Carnegie Mellon University economist Robert Strauss, an expert in public finance, said any legislative surplus should be viewed as a one-time windfall. "You could use it as seed money for property tax reform. Put it in a revolving fund and use it to offset taxes for low-income elderly people who aren't getting enough of a break from lottery money," he said.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib
/news/cityregion/s_457744.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | June 11
At least 14 states, including Pennsylvania, are rewriting rules that for decades have given local governments control over who provides cable television in their areas. The changes would give New York-based phone giant Verizon Communications Corp. what it has long coveted--a big enough opening that would let it jump into the paid-TV market full throttle. ... The franchise agreements, in which municipalities effectively bestowed local monopoly rights to a cable company, were required to ensure that the young companies in the then-fledgling cable industry offered their service everywhere, not just in affluent areas. Moreover, observers note it's not as if Verizon is starting from scratch. Thanks to its "Baby Bell'' roots, the company has the advantage of already being the largest phone provider in most of the markets where its seeking to offer paid TV, noted Marvin Sirbu, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. "Yes, they are having to spend a lot of money'' to put in fiber optic lines for DSL and video service, he said. "But then, they are in the position to benefit" because of the marketing advantage of already having a relationship with many customers.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg
/06162/697133-96.stm | back to top
Local News Stories
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | June 14
Plextronics said Richard McCullough, founder, chief scientist and dean of the Mellon College of Science at Carnegie Mellon University, has received the 2006 Carnegie Science Center Awards for Excellence: Start-up Entrepreneur of the Year.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg
/06165/698136-318.stm | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | June 11
Gone is the heyday of steelmaking that made this city and region what it is today, but the memory lives on. It's sparked yet again, this time by a most magnificent exhibition, "Born of Fire," that opens today at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg. ... Pittsburgh: A City and Region Born of Fire: Dr. Edward Muller, professor of history and director of urban studies, University of Pittsburgh; and Dr. Joel Tarr, professor of history and policy, Carnegie Mellon University--both contributors to the museum's publication "Born of Fire: The Valley of Work"--will discuss how the industrial revolution affected Pittsburgh, followed by a book signing. 7 p.m. Thursday. Free.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib
/living/arts/museums/s_457404.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | June 10
Craig Perry of Club 4 Life in Monroeville was named the 2005 tennis professional of the year by the Allegheny Mountain District, which includes Western Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia. Martin Sturgess of the Fox Chapel Racquet Club is tournament director of the year and Carnegie Mellon's Andrew Girard coach of the year.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/
06161/697127-139.stm | back to top
International News Stories
The Globe and Mail | June 14
When I was starting out, no one told me that working life from here on in was going to be a series of negotiations, and it would be helpful if I learned some skills in that regard. No doubt, many young men and women have trouble negotiating when they first start their careers. But one expert says women have more trouble than men. In fact, says Linda Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, when it comes to negotiating, women graduates are four times less likely than men to negotiate their starting salary. That failure might seem like an oversight that can be remedied as a woman gains confidence, but Prof. Babcock and her researchers have estimated that an initial decision not to negotiate her first salary can permanently affect a woman's earning power. In her book, "Women Don't Ask", Prof. Babcock laid out this scenario: Suppose that, at age 22, an equally qualified man and woman receive a job offer of $25,000. The man negotiates his offer up to $30,000; the woman accepts $25,000.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story
/LAC.20060614.CATIMSON14/TPStory/Business | back to top
Malaysia Sun (UPI) | June 13
U.S. researchers say new machine learning techniques are allowing them to teach computers to perceive three dimensions in 2-D images. The Carnegie Mellon University scientists say it is now possible for computers to learn how to discern the geometric context of natural scenes, which, previously, has been a major roadblock for computer vision. The scientists note we live in a three-dimensional world but, for the most part, we view it in two dimensions. Discerning how objects and surfaces are juxtaposed in an image is automatic for people, but it's something that has long flummoxed computer vision systems. But now the researchers at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute have found a way to help computers understand the geometric context of outdoor scenes and, thus, better comprehend what they see.
http://story.malaysiasun.com/p.x/ct/9/cid/
d805653303cbbba8/id/6e646e48702799e6/ | back to top
The Peninsula | June 12
ictQatar, the Supreme Council of Information and Communications Technology, will host a workshop for GCC states on building national information security incident response capability at the Sheraton Doha today and tomorrow. The workshop will focus on building national computer security incident management capabilities in each GCC member-nation and establishing a regional framework for cooperation among the national Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) of the GCC countries, a release said. ... Established here in 2005 by ictQatar, Q-CERT was formed in collaboration with the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.
http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display
_news.asp?section=Local_News&subsection=
Qatar+News&month=June2006&file=
Local_News2006061235214.xml | back to top
International Herald Tribune (The New York Times) | June 8
At first blush, the PicoCricket Kit resembles a plastic box of arts and crafts supplies, crammed with colored felt, pipe cleaners, cotton and Styrofoam balls. But this is a craft kit for the digital age. It also includes electronic sensors, motors, sound boxes, connecting cables and a battery-powered palm-sized, programmable computer. ... Other developers, too, are producing more open-ended building kits designed to permit young people to create and program their own computerized designs. The Vex Robotics Design System, developed by Innovations First and Radio Shack last year, was created to spur young people to have fun while being inventive. ... Carter pointed out that Carnegie Mellon University had developed a curriculum that uses Vex robotics to teach math and sciences.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/
07/business/ptcricket08.php | back to top
|
