Personal Mention

Four CMU faculty members — M. Bernardine Dias, Jessica Hodgins, Katia Sycara and Manuela Veloso — and two alumnae — Ayorkor Korsah (CS'06,'11) and Sonia Chernova (CS'03,'09) — have been selected to serve on the organizing committee for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, or ICRA, the world’s largest robotics conference, May 26–30 in Seattle. “My goal with this all-female organizing team is to raise the visibility of women in robotics around the world,” said Lynne Parker of the University of Tennessee, the ICRA 2015 general chair. Nearly all previous committees have had only one or two women from a small group of senior women in the field, and often the same women served over and over. The concern for diversity extends beyond gender, Dias noted. For the first time, the conference will have a developing countries forum, which Dias is chairing. Korsah, an assistant professor of computer science and robotics at Ashesi University in Ghana, is a co-chair of the forum. “The whole organizing committee is doing our best to increase the diversity at the conference and in the robotics community at large,” Dias said. Learn more.

Dolly Hsu, a senior majoring in civil and environmental engineering and engineering and public policy, received Carnegie Mellon's George Washington Prize for Outstanding Achievement at the annual Engineering Awards Banquet at the Engineers' Society of Western Pa. Catherine Groschner, a senior majoring in materials science and engineering, and Rachel Shaffer, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering, were finalists. Groschner recently received the prestigious Churchill Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge in England. "Dolly's service and leadership have been exemplary at both the college and community level," said College of Engineering Dean James Garrett Jr. "Dolly is actively involved in the Society of Women Engineers and is dedicated to outreach to young prospective engineering students as demonstrated by her tutoring of students at the Leonard Gelfand Center." Hsu, who ranks consistently among the top students in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, has traveled to the University of Melbourne to take advanced coursework in sustainable infrastructure.  Learn more.

Pictured above are (l-r): James Garrett Jr., Dolly Hsu, Rachel Shaffer and Catherine Groschner.

University Libraries' Senior Librarian Matt Marsteller has been selected for a three-year position on the Governing Council of SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), effective immediately. He joins three other representatives in the U.S. delegation to the 45-member council, which meets at CERN, and directs the actions of the international consortium. Marsteller is a liaison for Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mathematical Sciences and Physics at the Sorrells Engineering & Science Library. He has been an enthusiastic contributor to the work of the consortium since its founding in 2014, when CMU joined with other U.S. libraries to support worldwide open access publishing in particle physics. "It is my hope that SCOAP3 will open up communication lines between particle physicists and the world at large, overcoming the impact of paywalls that historically have prevented equitable or even reasonable access to the literature in this discipline," Marsteller said.

Joel Greenhouse, professor of statistics, was elected to the Executive Board of the International Biometric Society, an international society promoting the development and application of statistical and mathematical theory and methods in the biosciences, including agriculture, biomedical science and public health, ecology, environmental sciences, forestry and allied disciplines.

Robert Siegler, the Teresa Heinz Professor of Cognitive Psychology, presented an engaging look at numerical development and cognition in the 2015 Robbie Case Memorial Lecture hosted by the Dr. R.G.N. Laidlaw Centre at the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study (ICS). Siegler’s visit attracted a full house of interested researchers, graduate students, teachers and academics from across the province and as far away as California. Siegler was a close friend and colleague of Robbie Case, a world-renowned leader of research into children’s mathematical development and former ICS director, who died in 2000. Siegler’s talk, "An Integrated Theory of Numerical Development: Following in the Footsteps of Robbie Case," highlighted some of Case's lifelong contributions to numerical cognition research, including “integrating Piagetian and information processing insights into a classic theory of cognitive development,” while being a “devoted mentor” and “setting the standard as a gentleman and a scholar.” Learn more.

Commemorating Bill Cooper

Elsevier has partnered with Carnegie Mellon to create a Virtual Special Issue celebrating the life and work of "the father of management science," the late Professor William W. Cooper (1914-2012). The tribute showcases highlights from the research that Cooper published with Elsevier over his illustrious career, including the seminal paper that launched the field of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) as a subset of Operations Research in 1978.

The virtual special issue is freely available through March 31. 

"A key element of Cooper's work was that it was motivated by real problems. His interest in improving the performance of organizations in all sectors of society and the economy under a variety of operating policies and constraints led to his developing a new modeling approach to solve problems he encountered,” wrote Heinz College Dean Ramayya Krishnan and University Professor Al Blumstein in the Forward to the special issue.

“These models demanded new solution algorithms. The resulting models and solution methods were stress tested on a variety of new applications that in turn posed new challenges, thereby resulting in additional modeling innovations and associated new solution techniques. Cooper perfected this approach and the range of journals he published in bear testament to the multiple disciplines he drew from and contributed to, and variety of audiences he influenced as a result,” they said.

University Archives is nearing completion of a multi-year project to digitize the William W. Cooper Collection, documenting his 30 years at CMU and nearly seven decades in academia. The archive-in-progress is available at http://tinyurl.com/mrwv7kb. For more information, contact University Archivist Julia Corrin at jcorrin@andrew.cmu.edu or 412-268-7402.