Personal Mention

Shipbreakers, a documentary written, directed and produced by Entertainment Technology Center faculty member Ralph Vituccio, Tom Clancy and the late CMU Professor Paul Goodman, will be featured at the Global Cinema Film Festival of Boston this April. The documentary tells the story of 40,000 migrant workers in Alang, India, who make $1-$2 per day dismantling ships that are no longer seaworthy. They cut the ships apart by hand, working in extremely dangerous conditions and without any safety or labor regulations. The award-winning documentary has been screened in several film festivals in the United States and abroad. Shipbreakers won the Best Feature Award in the Documentary Category at The World International Film Festival in San Francisco. It also has appeared on several PBS stations, including WQED in Pittsburgh. Find out more about the film.

Angela Ng, a senior majoring in civil and environmental engineering and biomedical engineering, was awarded the George Washington Prize at the 2016 Engineering Society of Western Pennsylvania awards banquet. Her award was in recognition of her strength in academics, service and leadership throughout her studies at Carnegie Mellon. In her CMU career, she has created a cereal drive, book drive and clothing drive and joined Habitat for Humanity, leading service trips to Mississippi and Alabama. Ng is the co-founder of Project Smile, which improves the quality of life for CMU students through random acts of kindness, and was a leader in establishing and raising funds for the Mindfulness Room as a place for students to relax, decompress and meditate. She has traveled to Guatemala and Kenya to teach English to elementary school children, to Rwanda to update computer systems and teach computer skills, and to Bangladesh to introduce and test the paper water filtration system known as the Drinkable Book. Find out more. 

Arnav Tayal, a sophomore business administration major at the Tepper School, is leading the effort to revive TEDxCMU. To be held this March 26, TEDxCMU aims to foster innovation by uniting some of the most innovative, curious and fascinating people from the university. The TEDx program was designed by TED, a nonprofit devoted to "Ideas Worth Spreading," to help communities, organizations and individuals coordinate TED-like experiences. TEDx events involve screenings of TED talk videos and/or live presenters who foster intensive conversations and connect in true TED fashion, but at the local level. Speakers at TEDxCMU this spring will include CMU faculty members Scott Sandage, Cameron Tonkinwise, Christopher Olivola and Louis-Philippe Morency. “From its famous computer science program to its world-class drama school, Carnegie Mellon promises to offer the best in everything … in a sense, the university has become synonymous with innovation and creation,” Tayal said. “Seeing this creativity and diversity, I knew that I wanted to get involved and help foster innovation on campus. So I decided to revive TEDx at Carnegie Mellon.” Find out more. 

Alumnus Ivan Sutherland, known as the father of computer graphics, will be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame on May 6 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Sutherland, who earned his bachelor’s degree in science at Carnegie Tech in 1959, will be among 16 new inductees into the hall, which was founded in 1973 and is located on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office campus in Alexandria, Va. In 1963, Sutherland created the interactive program Sketchpad that enabled users to draw in real-time on a computer display using a light pen. It was the forerunner of today’s graphical user interfaces used in a wide variety of devices. In 1967, while teaching at Harvard University, he and a student devised the first virtual reality head-mounted display system. He was awarded the prestigious A.M. Turing Award in 1988 for his pioneering work on computer graphics. Sutherland and one of his mechanical creations, the six-legged walking robot known as the Trojan Cockroach, are the subjects of an exhibit by Daniel Pillis, a graduate student in the College of Fine Arts, that is open weekday afternoons in CMU’s Posner Center. Sutherland built the computer-controlled walking machine at CMU in the early 1980s.

Scott Wasserman, a 2010 graduate of the School of Music, recently won a Grammy Award for his involvement with the musical “Hamilton.” Wasserman worked as the Ableton Programmer, programming the electronic music elements for the Broadway production. Currently, he is working on his own musical, “Thicker Than Water,” with lyricist Shannon Deep, which tackles the complications of mother-son relationships and the foster care system. Since graduating he has worked in many shows on and off Broadway in New York City. At CMU, Wasserman studied music composition with Nancy Galbraith and Reza Vali.