June 14, 2007
Vol. 17, No. 46
In this issue:
"Boss" To Strut Its Stuff During DARPA Site Visit
Tartan Racing's self-driving SUV, named Boss, will demonstrate its street savvy during a site visit and inspection by representatives of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at 9:30 a.m., Monday, June 18 at the team's Robot City headquarters in Hazelwood. Tartan Racing is one of 53 teams contending for a spot in DARPA's Urban Challenge, a Nov. 3 race that will pit autonomous vehicles against each other on a course that simulates an urban driving environment. The top prize is $2 million.
Boss will perform four demonstrations designated by DARPA to test its ability to navigate and to handle traffic in a setting similar to the competition. The vehicle's performance will determine whether Tartan Racing is named one of 30 semi-finalists invited to a DARPA qualification event this fall.
Spectators are welcome. To reach Robot City, take Bates Street to Second Avenue and turn left. Go south on Second Avenue past the Hot Metal Bridge and enter the former LTV site by continuing straight where the street veers to the left. (Do not go through the underpass.) Follow the signs to the parking area.
Further information: http://www.tartanracing.org
Scientists Devise New Method To Link Kidney Donors With Patients
Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon have developed a new computerized method for matching living kidney donors with kidney disease patients that can increase the number of kidney transplants -- and save lives. This step-by-step method, or algorithm, could significantly boost the efficiency of kidney exchanges, a mechanism for matching live donors with unrelated recipients. Kidney exchanges are now considered the best chance for increasing the number of kidney transplants in the United States. More than 70,000 Americans are on the waiting list for kidney transplants and about 4,000 die waiting each year.
The matching algorithm makes it possible to create matches for three- and four-way exchanges -- that is, three or four donors matched to three or four recipients -- as well as two-way exchanges. It is the first that is scalable so it can be used for a national pool of donors and recipients, said
Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science. The Alliance for Paired Donation, a kidney exchange program for 50 transplant centers in 15 states, began using the matching algorithm in December.
A paper detailing the algorithm, developed by Sandholm, Computer Science Professor
Avrim Blum and graduate assistant
David J. Abraham, will be presented June 15 at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Electronic Commerce in San Diego.
Further information:
http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/June/june11_kidney.shtml
Diplomas Awarded to Fourth Graduating Class in Greece
Carnegie Mellon, in collaboration with Athens Information Technology (AIT), awarded diplomas June 11 in Greece to the fourth graduating class of its Master of Science in Information Networking degree program.
Konstantinos Gkoutzis, one of 13 graduates, said the program gives students an excellent mix of practical and theoretical expertise on a variety of subjects like computer networks, algorithms and databases.
Carnegie Mellon and AIT began offering the four-semester program in September 2002. The program culminates with a master's degree in information networking from Carnegie Mellon's Information Networking Institute (INI). Classes ranging from managerial economics to software engineering are taught by Carnegie Mellon and AIT faculty in a 100,000-square-foot building in Peania, a few miles from downtown Athens.
Further information:
http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/June/june11_greece.shtml
Save a Life: Learn CPR and How To Use Automated Defibrillators
Environmental Health and Safety and Student Health Services are sponsoring a free three-hour training session to teach members of the campus community CPR and how to use an Automated External Defibrillator (AED) to help someone suffering from a cardiac arrest. AEDs are in all University Police cars and in 300 South Craig St., the SEI, Baker Hall, NREC, the University Center, Posner Center, Student Health Services, New House, Morewood Gardens, Carnegie Café and Donner Hall. By the end of the summer, AEDs will also be in Skibo Gym, Mellon Institute, the Purnell Center, the PTC, CFA, Warner Hall, Hamburg Hall and Wean Hall. Additional units will also be placed in the University Center.
Training sessions will be held from 1 to 4 p.m., Thursday, June 21, and from 9 a.m. to noon, Monday, June 25. Both sessions will be held in Rangos Hall 1 & 2. You must register online at
http://www.cmu.edu/ehs or by contacting
Ahren Cotton at 412-268-8182.
News Briefs
Carnegie Mellon's French Online course, part of the university's Open Learning Initiative (OLI), has been given the 2007 Access to Language Education Award, which is presented annually by the Esperantic Society and CALICO (the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium) to the best publicly available Web site for language instruction. Named in the award are project director and co-author
Christopher Jones, co-authors
Sophie Queuniet and
Bonnie Youngs, and technical lead
Marc Siskin -- all in the Department of Modern Languages. The public version of the course can be reached through the OLI portal at
http://www.cmu.edu/oli.
Personal Mention
- Catherine Davidson, senior writer for Marketing Communications, has been named associate director of Foundation Relations and special assistant to the Office of the President. Davidson succeeds Alan Friedman in the Office of Foundation Relations. Friedman was recently named director of the Institute for Social Innovation at the Heinz School.
- Roye Werner has accepted the position of business and economics librarian, effective July 1. Early in her career, Werner worked at Hunt Library as a reference librarian before moving on to a distinguished career at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Werner has been serving as interim business and economics librarian at Carnegie Mellon since September 2006.
- Pamela Jennings, assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the School of Art, is the curator of a digital media art exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Titled "Speculative Data and the Creative Imaginary: Shared Visions Between Art and Technology," the exhibit includes the work of 15 prominent digital media artists and researchers, including SCS Associate Professor Roger Dannenberg, who is exhibiting "Trumpet Fanfares" and "McBlare," the robotic bagpiper. The exhibit, on display through Aug. 24, is dedicated to faculty member William A.Wulf, outgoing president of the National Academy of Engineering, in recognition of his many years of support for the arts.
- Fred Gilman, head of the Department of Physics, was a co-organizer of a conference in Beijing, June 11 - 12, along with Chen Hesheng, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The meeting focused on the question of whether parity (mirror reflection) -- a symmetry that does not hold in the subatomic world as we know it up to now -- could be a symmetry at the energies that will be observable in the next generation of accelerators.
- Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department Head T.E. (Ed) Schlesinger and ECE Professor Vijayakumar Bhagavatula presented invited talks last month at the Optical Data Storage Topical Meeting in Portland, Ore. Schlesinger spoke on "Application-Driven Optical Storage," while Bhagavatula's talk was on "Channels Strategies for Handling Low Signal-to-Noise Ratios in Holographic Data Storage Systems." ECE alumnus Tim Rausch (Ph.D., 2003) was a program committee co-chair.
Calendar Highlights
