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October 11, 2012

Personal Mention

Provost and Executive Vice President Mark S. Kamlet has announced that Lynn Young will serve as interim director of the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) while a search is conducted for a successor to Susan Burkett, who retired as associate vice president for research in June. Young joined the OSP as a contracts officer in 1998 and was promoted to contracts manager in 2002.  Also, Patty Clark, an attorney with years of experience in contracts, was hired as a contracts officer in September to fill one of two existing vacancies in the OSP.  A search committee of faculty and staff is being formed to seek a new OSP director. Carnegie Mellon has hired the firm of Isaacson Miller to assist in the search.

Aisling Kelliher has joined the full-time faculty of the School of Design as an associate professor. She comes to CMU from Arizona State University, where she was an assistant professor in media communication systems and media theory. Kelliher’s research primarily focuses on the development of tools and online environments for sharing, annotating and creating media stories about our everyday lives. Read more about Kelliher.

Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman, a professor of software management practice at CMU Silicon Valley and executive director of the Center for Open Source Investigation, was awarded the prestigious Distinguished Educator Award from the Technical Council on Software Engineering of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He was honored for outstanding and sustained contributions to the design of individual software engineering courses, curricula for degree programs and curriculum recommendations. Read more about Wasserman.

David A. Dzombak recently chaired a National Research Council Committee (NRC) report that recommended that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expand revenues and strengthen partnerships with the public sectors and local and state governments to help manage the corps’ aging water infrastructure. “The country’s water resources infrastructure is largely built-out and there are limited sites to construct new projects,” said Dzombak, the Walter J. Blenko, Sr. University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research. “Today the corps focuses mainly on sustaining its existing structure, some of which are in a state of significant deterioration. We now have a scenario where the water infrastructure is wearing out faster than it can be replaced,” Dzombak said. Read the full story.

Carnegie Mellon artists John Peña (MFA '08), Scott Andrew (MFA '13) + Jonathan Armistead (MFA '12), Jeremy Boyle + Kevin Clancy, and Will Schlough (BFA '07) are part of the "Tough Art" project at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum, which is on view through Jan. 13. Their interactive artworks are "tough" enough to withstand kid handling and include a robotic "drum", a giant ball of yarn, oil drums cascading and an imaginative way to make clouds, birds and planes "fly" across the sky.

Scott Hudson, professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and Karl D.D. Willis, a Ph.D. student in the School of Architecture’s Computational Design Lab who is co-advised by Hudson, have worked with Disney Research, Pittsburgh, to adapt 3D printing to create customized, interactive devices that have optical sensors, display and illumination elements embedded directly in their structure. The technology is being presented this week at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Cambridge, Mass. Read about it in Gizmag and check out the project website.

Also at this week's ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and his collegues at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, are demonstrating capacitive fingerprinting, a technique they developed that enables touchscreens or other objects to tell the difference between users based just on their touch. Read about the technology at on Fast Company's Co.DESIGN website and check out the project team’s video.