Carnegie Mellon University

The Piper

CMU Community News

Piper Logo
March 28, 2013

Personal Mention

George Loewenstein, the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Psychology and Economics, wrote an opinion piece for the NY Daily News about NYC Mayor Bloomberg's proposed plan to ban the display of cigarettes in stores. Loewenstein writes that the proposal shows that the "mayor is not only a business whiz, but an astute student of human psychology." Read "Bloomberg, champion of choice" at http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/bloomberg-champion-choice-article-1.1293096.

Kiron Skinner, associate professor of social and decision sciences and director of CMU's Center for International Relations and Politics, wrote an op-ed for the NY Times Room for Debate section that marked the 10th anniversary of the war in Iraq. Skinner, a foreign policy and political strategy expert, argues that "a serious bipartisan consensus on U.S. military power appears in the making." Read "One Bright Spot in All This" at http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/03/19/the-iraq-war-was-it-worth-it/ten-years-after-iraq-bipartisan-consensus-on-defense-spending.

Kevin Zollman has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his project “Incentives, Diversity and Scientific Problem Choice.” Zollman, an associate professor of philosophy in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, will use the five-year, $400,000 award to investigate the economics of science to further understand the relationship between scientists and the incentives they face to secure funding, publish papers and receive promotions. He will connect existing studies that use an economic methodology to understand problem choice in order to explore the effects of incentives in science. The results of his work will include tools developed to help scientific policymakers evaluate the effect of different incentive systems. Read the full story.

Radu Marculescu has won the 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award from the Asia and South Pacific Conference for being the first to formally address the problem of energy-aware mapping of IP cores onto multicore platforms, where communication happens via the network-on-chip architecture. Marculescu, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), is a pioneer in developing networks-on-chips and low-power systems, and has revolutionized the design process of portable information devices. His current research interests span power management and software for multicore systems to drug delivery systems using bacteria-based micro-robots and social network analysis. Read the full story.

Carmel Majidi was awarded a three-year, $360,000 grant through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young (AFOSR) Investigator Program for his work to improve electronic power sources and sensors for air vehicles and flight suits. Majidi, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and a principal researcher in CMU's Soft Machines Lab, works in the area of soft robotics, which focuses on creating new robotic structures, blending together organic chemistry, soft materials science and robotics. He reports that the next generation of autonomous robots, medical devices and electronics will include systems that are not rigid and can adapt their functions to the changing demands of their operator and the environment. Read more.

John Paul Ito, assistant professor of music theory, had his paper “Repetition without Repetition: Bersteinian Perspectives on Motor Learning for Musicians” published online in College Music Symposium, the official journal of the College Music Society. Ito also has recently had book chapters accepted for a volume on music in the Springer series Lecture Notes in Computer Science and for the eleventh volume of the series Bonner Beethoven-Studien. He will be at the University of Cambridge (UK) in early April to present a paper at the second international conference of the Performance Studies Network.

Mark Kryder and Philip R. LeDuc joined international engineers, policymakers and global innovators including Bill Gates earlier this month at the Grand Challenges Summit at Savoy Place in London to share ideas about solving the world’s most critical problems. LeDuc is a professor of mechanical engineering with courtesy appointments in the Biomedical Engineering, Biological Sciences and Computational Biology departments. Kryder is the former director of CMU’s Data Storage Systems Center and a University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Read what they had to say.