Carnegie Mellon University
May 10, 2011

News Brief: CREATE Lab Wins Data Hero Award

Data HeroThe Robotics Institute's CREATE Lab, which recently unveiled its GigaPan Time Machine for exploring high-resolution videos, is the winner in the media category of the 2011 Data Hero Awards. The awards, announced May 9, were created this year by EMC Corp. to honor innovative uses of Big Data to profoundly impact individuals, organizations, industries and the world.
   
Vivek Kundra, the United States' first chief information officer, won the first annual Data Hero Visionary Award, while IBM's Watson question-answering system, LinkedIn and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard were among the categorical winners. In addition to the media category won by the CREATE Lab, awards were presented in the categories of government/public service, energy, consumer services, health care, life sciences, technology: IT infrastructure and technology: applications.
   
The CREATE Lab is directed by Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor of robotics. Among its varied projects is GigaPan, a system developed with NASA to create and share gigapixel panoramas. The CREATE Lab is exploring the uses of GigaPan in scientific disciplines and in an international program to help students communicate with peers in other lands. GigaPan Time Machine is a system that enables viewers to explore gigapixel-scale, high-resolution videos and image sequences by panning or zooming in and out of the images while simultaneously moving back and forth through time.

Byron Spice