When a Carnegie Mellon student decided to count all the robots on campus, she had no idea it was the spark that would start a conflagration.

According to the best estimate of Heather "Marilyn Monrobot" Knight, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, there are almost certainly more robots on campus than there are people working in the university's robotics program.

"Which is insanity," says Knight, referring not to the number of robots--CMU is the only university in the U.S. to specifically offer a degree, rather than a specialization, in robotics--but to the number of people on campus whose entire working existence is devoted to creating them. "There are 599 people [in the robotics program], including 100 or 120 people working in a government lab that's off campus," she adds. "I'm not sure if they're allowed to tell me about their robots--the estimate I've heard is between 100 and 300."

In total, Knight can officially confirm the existence of 547 robots on campus (that number doesn't include the population in the secret government lab) and that's just the beginning: as word spreads through the Maker community and the effort's Twitter feed, she plans to take the world's first robot census as far as it will go, eventually canvassing as wide a swath of the home-brew and university robotics efforts as possible.

Just by asking the keepers of the world's automatons to submit their research subjects, Knight is posing a challenging question: What is a robot?

"Everyone agrees there are 3 minimum requirements." says Knight. "These are the minimum, but not sufficient requirements: They must act in the world, sense the world, and they need to have computation."

The problem with this traditional definition of a robot is that it encompasses almost all forms of automation, including thermostats and washing machines. This has led some thinkers to add to the list of characteristics things like agency, autonomy and embodiment.

The robot census doesn't answer these questions, but it does force its participants to engage with them.

"It's kind of like, [what constitutes a robot] is not really an argument that's worth having--but it is a discussion that's worth having," says Knight.

Knight's inspiration for initiating the census is her own work in integrating robots into people's everyday lives. Westerners, especially, tend to harbor negative associations with robots. "It's hard to compete with the Terminator movie," says Knight.

By showcasing the incredible variety and utility of the robots at Carnegie Mellon and elsewhere, Knight thinks she might be able to punch through people's preconceived notions and pave the way to getting robots into the home, where they can do the most damage once they're activated by SkyNet's central hive mind.

"Every time I give a talk I have people from age 8 to 50 that say they or their child wants to know how to get into robotics," says Knight. "There's so much interest and it's about figuring out where those applications are, not just in theory but in real life."

Here's a selection of the robots indexed in the Robot Census:

Ballbot

Boss, the robotic car

GigaPan

Nao Robots at the Robot World Cup

Scarab

SnackBot

Tractor with perception pod

Article Courtesy of MIT Technology Review

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Project Olympus a show-and-tell of tech talent

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

The Future is Now at Intel

Scratch that—the inventions wheeled themselves out for presentation.

Intel labs, located within the Carnegie Mellon University campus, showcased more than twenty different projects currently in the works.

Imagine the house of the future, with everything controlled by your smart phone and with robots expediently carrying out orders, and you'll be close to the vision that Intel is pursuing.

With the rapid evolution of smart phones, Intel has most recently developed the X-House. This invention allows users with Android-based phones to control almost every aspect of their house from lamps, locks, TVs, speakers and even cameras. The device is tailored to work with only the user's home through a secure login.

Lost in Space?

The first robot on the scene was Cobot2, which looks like something out of the show 'Lost in Space.' Its thin frame supports the computer mounted on top that serves a variety of different purposes. Newly developed this summer, it had already hopped on the Steeler bandwagon with it's terrible towel attached.

"The CoBot2 is a longtime experiment to see what we can get working with humans in an indoor environment," says Joydeep Biswas, a PhD student at CMU and one of its developers.

An example of this would be remotely attending an event through the eyes of the robot, or Telepresence as Biswas aptly called it. With a guided camera sending out 2,700 rays it can detect almost everything surrounding it. What it can't detect, it picks up with the help of clustered dots spread intermittently throughout the ceiling, which serve as a map for it.

Sometimes the CoBot2 roamed freely while other times users directed it elsewhere to peruse the other exhibits.

The bow tie adorning it is appropriate, as it will poliitley offer up phrases such as 'excuse me,' to awed--and charmed--spectators in its way.

The main attraction Tuesday, though, was HERB, the Home Exploring Robot Butler. A much bulkier robot sporting two arms, a Segway frame and small spinning laser head, HERB stopped traffic by delivering drinks to passersby and even recycling the empty bottles. At one point, HERB reacted when someone handed him back a bottle with fluid still in it. Herb informed the befuddled person of the problem, but thankfully HERB was in good spirits, as any good butler should be, and set it back on the table for later consumption. Robots, HERB demonstrates, can be quite cooperative.

Dmitry Berenson, one of HERB's developers, explains its mission. "We created HERB to help people do simple tasks, manipulate objects, open doors and clean up. It does this all automatically, not with someone sitting and pushing a button."

Motivated by their work with the Quality of Life Technology Center for elderly people, Berenson stated that the goal of HERB was to help senior citizens be more independent in their households.

Berenson, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, said it took four years to get to this point. They started with just a robot arm on a table. Eventually HERB gained a stylish Segway, another arm and a spiraling laser for guidance. The laser detects and maps out everything around it, similar to a dolpin's sonar. With one swivel, the laser picked up everyone standing around it, as their frames and surroundings were projected onto a screen.

Other projects included the automatic digital enhancement of photos (coming soon to a computer near you!), Connected Home 2020 (better linking the digital items together within the wireless household), and a machine that performs some ophthalmology tasks "comparable to experts.

Intel Labs Pittsburgh, which opened in 2002, is a national model for industry-university research at Carnegie Mellon University. It's pioneered by Intel to accelerate long-term, cutting-edge research to better benefit everyday life.

"Intel Labs Pittsburgh was proud to host over 700 people at our annual showcase," says Priya Narasimhan, the fourth Director of Intel Labs, a position that rotates among faculty every three years. "We displayed our breakthroughts in computational agriculture, brain-computer interfaces, cloud computing, robotics, computational healthcare, machine learning and more."

Article Courtesy of Pop City

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

CMU highlights faculty start-up ideas

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Business Times

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Carnegie Mellon Spinoff YinzCam to Help Steelers Football Nation Stay Connected

Carnegie Mellon University's Priya Narasimhan is leading the technology game when it comes to creating new smart phone experiences for major sports teams.

Beginning Sunday, Oct. 3, the Pittsburgh Steelers will launch a mobile application for the iPhone, Android and Blackberry smart phone platforms developed by Narasimhan's spinoff company YinzCam, Inc. This groundbreaking mobile application will cater to Steelers fans both inside and outside the stadium.

"The technology provides instant action and real-time action replays from any of four unique camera angles at Heinz Field during a Steelers game, including the NFL's Red Zone Channel," said Narasimhan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon and YinzCam, Inc's founder.

Narasimhan, who developed the idea of YinzCam after teaching a novel sports technology class at Carnegie Mellon, predicted that the NFL's use of technology will continue to benefit the game and its fans. For more than two years, YinzCam, Inc. has focused on mobile live streaming and experiential technologies for live events.

"Because football is a game of inches, it is extremely important that fans get instant visualization of the entire game, and can stay in touch with the real-time game action, anytime, anywhere," said Narasimhan, an avid Steelers fan. "The new technology also gives Steelers fans access to player bios, a depth chart and real-time stats, player by player, drive by drive," she said.

Essentially, YinzCam enables fans at a Steelers home game to experience live video streams from novel camera angles using their Wi-Fi enabled smartphones. Fans also can obtain instant replays for all the game highlights on their smart phones.

YinzCam is being launched for other NFL teams, including the New England Patriots and the San Francisco 49ers, and also for NHL teams, including the Pittsburgh Penguins.

CMU faculty member Rajeev Gandhi is involved with YinzCam, along with CMU alumni Justin Beaver, Nathan Mickulicz, Jeremy Kanter, Max Salley, Brian Finamore, Hao Su, Paul Rubritz and Lou Biancaniello.

Article Courtesy of AScribe

Monday, October 4, 2010

Aiming to Learn as We Do, a Machine Teaches Itself

Give a computer a task that can be crisply defined — win at chess, predict the weather — and the machine bests humans nearly every time. Yet when problems are nuanced or ambiguous, or require combining varied sources of information, computers are no match for human intelligence.

Few challenges in computing loom larger than unraveling semantics, understanding the meaning of language. One reason is that the meaning of words and phrases hinges not only on their context, but also on background knowledge that humans learn over years, day after day.

Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo — has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer — calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week — that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself.

“For all the advances in computer science, we still don’t have a computer that can learn as humans do, cumulatively, over the long term,” said the team’s leader, Tom M. Mitchell, a computer scientist and chairman of the machine learning department.

The Never-Ending Language Learning system, or NELL, has made an impressive showing so far. NELL scans hundreds of millions of Web pages for text patterns that it uses to learn facts, 390,000 to date, with an estimated accuracy of 87 percent. These facts are grouped into semantic categories — cities, companies, sports teams, actors, universities, plants and 274 others. The category facts are things like “San Francisco is a city” and “sunflower is a plant.”

NELL also learns facts that are relations between members of two categories. For example, Peyton Manning is a football player (category). The Indianapolis Colts is a football team (category). By scanning text patterns, NELL can infer with a high probability that Peyton Manning plays for the Indianapolis Colts — even if it has never read that Mr. Manning plays for the Colts. “Plays for” is a relation, and there are 280 kinds of relations. The number of categories and relations has more than doubled since earlier this year, and will steadily expand.

The learned facts are continuously added to NELL’s growing database, which the researchers call a “knowledge base.” A larger pool of facts, Dr. Mitchell says, will help refine NELL’s learning algorithms so that it finds facts on the Web more accurately and more efficiently over time.

NELL is one project in a widening field of research and investment aimed at enabling computers to better understand the meaning of language. Many of these efforts tap the Web as a rich trove of text to assemble structured ontologies — formal descriptions of concepts and relationships — to help computers mimic human understanding. The ideal has been discussed for years, and more than a decade ago Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the underlying software for the World Wide Web, sketched his vision of a “semantic Web.”

Today, ever-faster computers, an explosion of Web data and improved software techniques are opening the door to rapid progress. Scientists at universities, government labs, Google, Microsoft, I.B.M. and elsewhere are pursuing breakthroughs, along somewhat different paths.

For example, I.B.M.’s “question answering” machine, Watson, shows remarkable semantic understanding in fields like history, literature and sports as it plays the quiz show “Jeopardy!” Google Squared, a research project at the Internet search giant, demonstrates ample grasp of semantic categories as it finds and presents information from around the Web on search topics like “U.S. presidents” and “cheeses.”

Still, artificial intelligence experts agree that the Carnegie Mellon approach is innovative. Many semantic learning systems, they note, are more passive learners, largely hand-crafted by human programmers, while NELL is highly automated. “What’s exciting and significant about it is the continuous learning, as if NELL is exercising curiosity on its own, with little human help,” said Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, who leads a project called TextRunner, which reads the Web to extract facts.

Computers that understand language, experts say, promise a big payoff someday. The potential applications range from smarter search (supplying natural-language answers to search queries, not just links to Web pages) to virtual personal assistants that can reply to questions in specific disciplines or activities like health, education, travel and shopping.

“The technology is really maturing, and will increasingly be used to gain understanding,” said Alfred Spector, vice president of research for Google. “We’re on the verge now in this semantic world.”

With NELL, the researchers built a base of knowledge, seeding each kind of category or relation with 10 to 15 examples that are true. In the category for emotions, for example: “Anger is an emotion.” “Bliss is an emotion.” And about a dozen more.

Then NELL gets to work. Its tools include programs that extract and classify text phrases from the Web, programs that look for patterns and correlations, and programs that learn rules. For example, when the computer system reads the phrase “Pikes Peak,” it studies the structure — two words, each beginning with a capital letter, and the last word is Peak. That structure alone might make it probable that Pikes Peak is a mountain. But NELL also reads in several ways. It will mine for text phrases that surround Pikes Peak and similar noun phrases repeatedly. For example, “I climbed XXX.”

NELL, Dr. Mitchell explains, is designed to be able to grapple with words in different contexts, by deploying a hierarchy of rules to resolve ambiguity. This kind of nuanced judgment tends to flummox computers. “But as it turns out, a system like this works much better if you force it to learn many things, hundreds at once,” he said.

For example, the text-phrase structure “I climbed XXX” very often occurs with a mountain. But when NELL reads, “I climbed stairs,” it has previously learned with great certainty that “stairs” belongs to the category “building part.” “It self-corrects when it has more information, as it learns more,” Dr. Mitchell explained.

NELL, he says, is just getting under way, and its growing knowledge base of facts and relations is intended as a foundation for improving machine intelligence. Dr. Mitchell offers an example of the kind of knowledge NELL cannot manage today, but may someday. Take two similar sentences, he said. “The girl caught the butterfly with the spots.” And, “The girl caught the butterfly with the net.”

A human reader, he noted, inherently understands that girls hold nets, and girls are not usually spotted. So, in the first sentence, “spots” is associated with “butterfly,” and in the second, “net” with “girl.”

“That’s obvious to a person, but it’s not obvious to a computer,” Dr. Mitchell said. “So much of human language is background knowledge, knowledge accumulated over time. That’s where NELL is headed, and the challenge is how to get that knowledge.”

A helping hand from humans, occasionally, will be part of the answer. For the first six months, NELL ran unassisted. But the research team noticed that while it did well with most categories and relations, its accuracy on about one-fourth of them trailed well behind. Starting in June, the researchers began scanning each category and relation for about five minutes every two weeks. When they find blatant errors, they label and correct them, putting NELL’s learning engine back on track.

When Dr. Mitchell scanned the “baked goods” category recently, he noticed a clear pattern. NELL was at first quite accurate, easily identifying all kinds of pies, breads, cakes and cookies as baked goods. But things went awry after NELL’s noun-phrase classifier decided “Internet cookies” was a baked good. (Its database related to baked goods or the Internet apparently lacked the knowledge to correct the mistake.)

NELL had read the sentence “I deleted my Internet cookies.” So when it read “I deleted my files,” it decided “files” was probably a baked good, too. “It started this whole avalanche of mistakes,” Dr. Mitchell said. He corrected the Internet cookies error and restarted NELL’s bakery education.

His ideal, Dr. Mitchell said, was a computer system that could learn continuously with no need for human assistance. “We’re not there yet,” he said. “But you and I don’t learn in isolation either.”

Article Courtesy of NYTimes

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Regional Insights: Jump-start job creation through startup businesses

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Thursday, September 30, 2010

NSF funds computer systems research center at New Mexico consortium in Los Alamos

This innovative concept utilizes decommissioned supercomputing systems from the Department of Energy (DOE) facilities to provide a very large-scale systems research capability. Targeted at both high-performance and data-intensive, or cloud, computing, the center will allow systems software researchers to have dedicated access to 1,000 computer clusters and control all application and operating system software down to and including the lowest-level hardware control systems. The PRObE center is the only one of its kind in the United States, and possibly the world.

"The need to expand research and educational opportunities for the systems research community is critical," said Garth Gibson, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and respected thought leader in data storage and in data-intensive computing. "No sooner have computer systems such as LANL's Roadrunner achieved sustained petascale performance, capable of a trillion or more floating-point calculations per second, than we have recognized the need for exascale systems, which will be a thousand times faster," he said. "Designing exascale systems will be a tremendous challenge and one that will be difficult for the computer science community to meet without a resource such as PRObE."

"Computing researchers need to be able to test system-level innovations at scale," said Ed Lazowska, chair of the Computing Community Consortium and professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. "This is the big gap. Nothing currently available fills it."

Academic researchers across the field recognize this need. Michael Dahlin, professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, said, "Computer systems researchers need large-scale clusters to have any hope of doing much of the work we should be doing."

"About three years ago, we began to work on a way to re-utilize open/unclassified decommissioned supercomputers," said Gary Grider, co-PI and deputy division leader from LANL's High Performance Computing (HPC) Division. "We noticed that when new supercomputers are installed, there is a mad rush to get them into production with a focus on getting science applications to run quickly and well."

In the early phase of commissioning a new supercomputer a significant amount of work goes into software development. The people that develop software at the systems level only get a chance to try new things out for a relatively short period of time while new large computers are brought online. "This presents an issue," Grider said, "as there is no large-scale resource for these systems-level people to utilize for long periods of time to develop new concepts and functions."

The DOE continually decommissions large supercomputers, some of which are open/unclassified resources. These systems can be used for high-performance and data-intensive computing systems research, however funding is needed to house, power and air condition the systems and to provide systems support people.

"NSF seemed like the natural government sponsor for such a concept," Grider said. "Also, to be flexible enough to be able to support this kind of research, it seemed appropriate to have universities involved."

PRObE builds on an existing partnership between the LANL and the NMC to support educational and research collaborations with universities. Carnegie Mellon provides expertise as a leader in computer systems research. The University of Utah will adapt software developed for its network emulation testbed — Emulab — to PRObE.

The Emulab software has been developed over the past decade by the Flux Research Group, part of the School of Computing at the University of Utah. It is widely used in the systems research community: it powers over three dozen testbeds used around the world by thousands of researchers and educators.

PRObE will be the largest-scale Emulab installation to date. "We are excited to be part of the PRObE effort," said Robert Ricci of the University of Utah, "because we believe it addresses and important gap in the public research infrastructure."

"PRObE may be built from recycled supercomputers, but because the hardware is not exotic, the same hardware will support data-intensive computing," said CMU's Gibson, who led the DOE's Petascale Data Storage Institute. "In CMU's experience this hardware will be excellent at running data analytics for eScience or Internet service applications using open source software such as Hadoop. This will allow PRObE to serve both styles of large-scale computing, high-performance computing and data-intensive computing."

"It's good to see the NSF outsource the construction and support of a flexible large-scale experimental data center to an organization designed to do just that," said Margo Seltzer, a professor of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard University. "Let's not spend university research resources replicating engineering that is better done by others."

In addition to providing the large-scale systems research environment, PRObE will conduct an innovative summer school to train university students in how to build and manage very large high-performance computing environments. Selected top students from the summer school will be invited to intern at the PRObE Center and the LANL.

Article Courtesy of EurekAlert

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Lunar Landing backed by British Investor

Article Courtesy of PRLog

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

GigaPan for iPad

GigaPans are digital images with billions of pixels. They are record-setting panoramas with fascinating detail, ready to be actively explored in real time. Phenomenally large, yet remarkably crisp and vivid, over 40,000 high resolution panoramas from around the world are hosted at gigapan.org, many taken by the world’s leading scientists, journalists and photographers.

GigaPan for iPad brings the best images from gigapan.org to your iPad for the most natural gigapixel browsing experience available.

- Browse the collection of 40,000+ panoramas hosted at gigapan.org
- Learn! See more information about each gigapan
- Explore! Pan and zoom using multitouch gestures
- Share! Send your friends links to your favorite panoramas

Note: this app requires an active Wi-fi connection

Article Courtesy of Mobile App News

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Dynamics' credit card technology wins $1M at DEMOgod

Jeff Mullen, CEO, and his team won $1 million on his three year old brainchild last week at DEMOgod for their Card 2.0 invention. Dynamics was competing with 70 other teams at the conference for new technologies.

A thinner version of a credit card, the Card 2.0 serves many different purposes. The "MultiAccount" allows just what the name implies, two different accounts on the same card. For instance, one account could be used for business expenses and another for personal use. The "Hidden" card conceals a part of the cardholder's account number when not in use and helps protect users from fraud. This is achieved by essentially having the user enter a code to unlock their card.

The card may also feature "the world's first fully card-programmable magnetic stripe," says Mullen, which would allow the card to change information on the fly and provide greater security.

"We have the largest and oldest card acceptance infrastructure in the world and it operates on magnetic stripes. Accordingly, a dynamic stripe would allow issuers to innovate in order to differentiate their products and attract users that gain value from that differentiating functionality," says Mullen.

It was at Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon University where Mullen first presented the idea at Project Olympus. He graduated from CMU in 2001 with a degree in electrical computer engineering.

Dynamics is giving card issuers the option of releasing the new cards on their own schedule, so it is unclear when they will be made available, says Mullen.

Dynamics has won several other major awards including the Rice Business Plan Competition, Carnegie Mellon McGinnis Venture Competition and the University of San Francisco Business Plan Competition.

Article Courtesy of Pop City

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Innovation Works, CMU receive $1M grant for tech commercialization program

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Business Times

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Terry Collins wins $100,000 Heinz Award for groundbreaking green research

Article Courtesy of Pop City

Monday, September 20, 2010

YinzCam Steelers app hits Android marketplace

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Business Times

Monday, September 20, 2010

Dynamics Inc. named DEMOgod and People's Choice

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Business Times

Monday, September 13, 2010

CMU researchers work on Web security, access

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Sunday, September 12, 2010

CMU Engineering Professor Christopher Bettinger Develops New Biomaterials To Improve Drug Delivery for Patients

Article Courtesy of Health Canal

Friday, September 10, 2010

Accelerator: Black Locus readies product

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Business Times

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Carnegie Mellon researchers develop method to help computer vision systems decipher outdoor scenes

In much the same way that a child might use a set of toy building blocks to assemble something that looks like a building depicted on the cover of the toy set, the computer would analyze an outdoor scene by using virtual blocks to build a three-dimensional approximation of the image that makes sense based on volume and mass.

"When people look at a photo, they understand that the scene is geometrically constrained," said Abhinav Gupta, a post-doctoral fellow in CMU's Robotics Institute. "We know that buildings aren't infinitely thin, that most towers do not lean, and that heavy objects require support. It might not be possible to know the three-dimensional size and shape of all the objects in the photo, but we can narrow the possibilities. In the same way, if a computer can replicate an image, block by block, it can better understand the scene."

This novel approach to automated scene analysis could eventually be used to understand not only the objects in a scene, but the spaces in between them and what might lie behind areas obscured by objects in the foreground, said Alexei A. Efros, associate professor of robotics and computer science at CMU. That level of detail would be important, for instance, if a robot needed to plan a route where it might walk, he noted.

Gupta presented the research, which he conducted with Efros and Robotics Professor Martial Hebert, at the European Conference on Computer Vision, Sept. 5-11 in Crete, Greece.

Understanding outdoor scenes remains one of the great challenges of artificial intelligence. One approach has been to identify features of a scene, such as buildings, roads and cars, but this provides no understanding of the geometry of the scene, such as the location of walkable surfaces. Another approach, which Hebert and Efros pioneered with former student Derek Hoiem, now of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has been to map the planar surfaces of an image to create a rough 3-D depiction of an image, similar to a pop-up book. But that approach can lead to depictions that are highly unlikely and sometimes physically impossible.

In the new method devised by Gupta, Efros and Hebert, the image is first broken into various segments corresponding to objects in the image. Once the ground and sky are identified, other segments are assigned potential geometric shapes. The shapes also are categorized as light or heavy, depending on appearance; a surface that appears to be a brick wall, for instance, would be classified as heavy.

The computer then attempts to reconstruct the image using the virtual blocks. If a heavy block appears unsupported, the computer must substitute an appropriately shaped block, or make assumptions that the original block was obscured in the original image.

Gupta said because this qualitative volumetric approach to scene understanding is so new, no established datasets or evaluation methodologies exist for it. He said in estimating the layout of surfaces, other than sky and ground, the method is better than 70 percent accurate, and its performance is almost as good when comparing its segmentation to ground truth. Overall, Gupta assesses the analysis as very good for 30 to 40 percent of the images and adequate for another 20 to 30 percent.

Article Courtesy of Science Codex

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Houston ISD and Carnegie Learning Partner to Prepare Middle School Students for Algebra Success

Article Courtesy of Centre Daily Times

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Cardiorobotics collects $500K of planned $5M round

Less than one year after raising a $5 million funding round, Cardiorobotics Inc. has started another $5 million round with a $500,000 tranche, according to federal documents.

In the document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Cardiorobotics lists its headquarters as Raynham, the site of the new facility it established in January. The company was previously based in Newport, R.I., which is where it established its headquarters after being founded in Pittsburgh as a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. No one was available to comment on the story this morning.

Cardiorobotics, which makes the cardioARM, a snake-like robotic probe controlled remotely that is designed to enable surgeries to be done with minimal or no incisions, initially raised $11.6 million in a Series A round in August of 2009. Backers in the Series A round included lead investor Eagle Ventures of Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse and the R.I.-focused Slater Technology Fund. The company followed that up with $5 million in January.

Founded in 2005 as Innovention Technologies, Cardiorobotics moved to R.I. in 2007.

Article Courtesy of Mass High Tech

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

CMU Professor Uses Robotics to Help the Poor

Bernardine Dias has a big goal - she wants to connect the people of the world using technology - all of the people of the world, especially the poor and the underserved. As a result, this Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Robotics professor, a woman of action, created a research group called, appropriately, "TechBridgeWorld," to help communities in some of the most underserved locations in the world.

Professor Dias has good reasons for wanting to bridge the world. She grew up inSri Lanka, where her family started at the base of the economic pyramid, and saw, first-hand, the devastation and division wrought by misunderstanding, prejudice and war. Dias remembers July 23, 1983, when she was eight years old, as a day that changed her. That day civil riots broke out in Colombo, beginning a period of violence that affected her family and friends. "My life definitely shifted from that moment; I began to think about what I might do to change things."

Dias applied herself to her studies and earned the highest distinctions in high school. Her parents encouraged her to apply to universities outside of Sri Lanka to avoid the political violence and hazing that was ongoing at local universities. Dias applied to small schools in the United States, choosing Hamilton College in upstate New York.

While at Hamilton, Dias excelled in her studies and became the only woman in her class to major in computer science and physics. When it came time for her senior research project, she chose robotics. Dias graduated second in her class of 400.

"Upon graduation I had graduate school offers in physics and computer science, as well as robotics," she said. "I chose CMU because I realized that they played a big role in changing the future, and that's what I desperately wanted to do."

After earning her Ph.D. degree in robotics, she took a research faculty position at CMU and negotiated the opportunity to create TechBridgeWorld as a way to connect her research with her passion to change the world. "At TechBridgeWorld, we look at how computing technology can be applied innovatively to address needs that are most meaningful to the communities we work with."

Dias elaborated, "Partnerships are crucial. We go into a community with exploratory technology and nothing else. We don't try to tell people, 'here's what your vision should be.' The goal is to help them to achieve their vision by creating relevant technology solutions that address their needs and challenges."

TechBridgeWorld's research efforts are driven by students at CMU. Graduate and undergraduate students from across the university participate and come from departments as diverse as business, engineering, information systems, and public policy. Unlike other organizations of its kind, TechBridgeWorld offers courses, a summer internship program, seminars and other opportunities for students to learn about the growing field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development.

"I want to have true impact in 20 years, to change the relevance and accessibility of computing technology. The best way I can do that is to get students involved, because they are the future," Dias said.

TechBridgeWorld has been innovating computing technologies since 2004, with projects in literacy, social work, education, and assistive technology. One form of technology involves the blind.

"More than 87% of the world's 314 million blind and visually impaired people live in developing communities, according to the World Health Organization," Dias said. "Despite the importance of literacy to employment, social well-being, and health, experts from the United Nations Development Programme estimate 97% to be illiterate."

In 2006, TechBridgeWorld partnered with a blind school in India to learn about their challenges. What resulted was a low-cost, low-power Braille writing tutor that helps visually impaired students write Braille. As the student writes each letter, the tutor provides immediate audio feedback by repeating the written letters and words. It also guides writing and corrects mistakes through audio cues. Students can learn how to write, practice writing and be quizzed on letters and words through the tutor's many modes.

Since then, many researchers at CMU have worked on the project and the tutor has been introduced and expanded to blind schools and institutions in the U.S., Bangladesh, China, Qatar, Tanzania and Zambia. It is now available in several Braille languages and educational games.

"This research takes time and money," Dias said. And, she spends time trying to educate people about TechBridgeWorld and to find funding support.

Additional funding will take TechBridgeWorld to an entirely different level," she said. "We would be able to impact so many more students and communities around the world. Right now, we get emails and calls from around the world asking for partnerships that we simply don't have the resources to explore."

Article Courtesy of PRNewswire

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Carnegie Mellon receives funding to create new program studying environmental impact of nanotechnology

Funding comes from a new NSF program called the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT), which enables the creation of interdisciplinary programs educating U.S. Ph.D.s in science and engineering.

"The IGERT program at Carnegie Mellon and Howard will operate at the interface of science and environmental policy to produce an environmentally and policy literate generation of nanoscience professionals with the skills needed to create novel nanotechnologies and to assess and manage environmental risks associated with nanomaterials," said Jeanne M. VanBriesen, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon who will lead the program.

Graduate students from multiple disciplines will participate in a two-year training program to learn the fundamentals of their core disciplines and gain proficiency in the analysis of environmental issues pertaining to nanotechnology, decision science and policy analysis in new nanotechnology-themed courses. Following this foundation, students will conduct research at the interface of policy and nanotechnology. Students also will participate in international laboratory exchange projects as well as internships at corporations active in nanotechnology.

VanBriesen will be joined in the program development and implementation by a cadre of professors including: Gregory Lowry, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon and associate director of the Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology CEINT; Elizabeth Casman, associate research professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon; and Kimberly L. Jones and Lorraine Fleming, both professors in civil and environmental engineering at Howard University.

Additional Carnegie Mellon faculty participants in this NSF-funded project include: Allen Robinson, professor of mechanical engineering; Kelvin Gregory, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering; Kris Dahl, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and chemical engineering; Michael Bockstaller, associate professor of materials science; Mohammad Islam, assistant professor of materials science and chemical engineering; and Paul Fischbeck, professor of social and decision sciences and engineering and public policy. Additional Howard faculty participants include Gary Harris, professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Article Courtesy of EurekAlert

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

CMU lands $7.1M to develop the future of the Internet

Article Courtesy of Pop City

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

And for the kids, here come the Cubelets by Modular Robotics

Article Courtesy of Pop City

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Carnegie Robotics opens manufacturing center in Pittsburgh

Article Courtesy of Pop City

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

UPMC HTI Grant Program to advance new areas of research in healthcare information technology

The objective of the UPMC Healthcare Technology Innovation Grant program is to advance new areas of research in healthcare information technology. Underway as of September 1, 2010, the HTI Grant program is a strategic collaboration between UPMC and Carnegie Mellon University. The HTI program is funded by UPMC and is managed by UPMC‟s Technology Development Center. It is the goal of the HTI Grant program to support research and create pathways to solutions that will attract further investment in related research and commercialization.

Purpose of Request
The purpose of this request for proposals is to elicit definitive expressions of interest from CMU faculty in pursuing projects requiring funding from the UPMC Healthcare Technology Innovation Grant Program.

Pre-proposal project submissions will be evaluated and the HTI project team will work with select applicants to prepare and submit a proposal for HTI funding by UPMC (for Phase 1). Pre-proposal submissions are due by October 6, 2010. Early submissions are welcomed. Awards will be announced by October 15, 2010.
This RFP is for Phase 1 funding only. Candidates for Phase 2 funding will be selected primarily from Phase 1 participants.

Summary of HTI Program Phases
• Phase 1 (Proof of Concept) is a feasibility study that determines the scientific, technical, and commercial merit of a selected concept. Phase 1 projects are competitively selected from proposals submitted against this general RFP. The Phase 1 proposal selection process will consist of two parts. First, proposals submitted against this RFP will be considered and tentatively accepted (by October 15). Second, the HTI team will work with those selected to further define the project as well as identify any resources necessary from within UPMC. Average Funding: $50,000-$125,000
• Phase 2 (Prototype) represents a significant research and development effort, culminating in a well defined deliverable (i.e., a technology, product, or service). The Phase 2 selection process is also highly competitive. Successful Phase 1 projects are invited to submit Phase 2 proposals as there will be no separate Phase 2 solicitations. Average Funding: $125,000-$325,000
• Phase 3 (Commercialization), it is expected that the research and development effort will be ready for licensing consideration and transition to commercial development. Funding for this phase will be determined on a case-by-case basis. Average Funding: TBD

Evaluation of Pre-Proposal Submissions
Phase 1 proposal submissions will be evaluated by the HTI program team. In doing so, consideration will be given to the factors below.
Project concepts must be responsive to these characteristics:
1. The project will utilize UPMC for deployment and/or has the potential to positively impact the operation of UPMC and/or other healthcare systems in a meaningful way.
2. The project responds to one or more of the types of problems and challenges listed in the HTI description (see Appendix A).

In addition, project concepts responsive to one or more of the following characteristics will be viewed more favorably:
1. The project outcome has the potential to be applied or deployed in UPMC within the next two to three years.
2. An interdisciplinary faculty team will be involved in the project.
3. Students will be involved in the project.
4. The project is likely to lay the groundwork for Phase 2 HTI funding.

An additional consideration necessary for HTI research projects to be considered a success is the need to make new technologies work with the way medicine is practiced. That means that the researched technology needs to be consistent with the stakeholder„s workflow, to be easy to use right from the start, and, where applicable, to not get in the way of the relationship with the patient.
The HTI team will be doing substantial outreach to establish interest and support on the part of potential collaborators within UPMC and/or other healthcare industry partners.

Feel free to contact the HTI Program Director, Henry Clement (clementhl@upmc.edu), if you wish to know more about the findings of this outreach or to discuss potential collaborators.

Contents of Pre-Proposal Submissions
While the format may be customized, a pre-proposal should have the following contents in no more than five pages (though appendices, web links and references should be utilized as desired):
1. Provide a project summary.
2. Define the problem(s) that will be addressed and the desired results.
3. Outline the major tasks and rough timetable.
4. Identify the likely CMU project team.
5. Discuss actual need for or potential for involvement of UPMC resources (including access to data, people, infrastructure, and places).
6. Provide a cost estimate.
7. Identify any potential sources of financial support other than HTI funding.
8. Speculate as to how the project could lay the groundwork for Phase 2 HTI funding.

Method of Submission
Phase 1 proposals following the guidelines above should be submitted electronically to Henry Clement at clementhl@upmc.edu by October 6, 2010. Earlier submissions are welcome.

Contact for Questions/Issues
Informational Workshop: An informational workshop will be held on or about Thursday, September 23, 2010 (specific details will be announced). The purpose of the workshop is to meet CMU faculty and students interested in healthcare technology, further introduce the UPMC Healthcare Innovation Grant Program, and answer questions about it.
Contact: Inquiries regarding the process, guidelines or other matters should be directed to Henry Clement at clementhl@upmc.edu.

Article Courtesy of UPMC Technology Development Center

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

CMU robotics spinoff to create products

Carnegie Mellon University plans to turn its research prototypes into marketplace products with the creation of Carnegie Robotics LLC, a spinoff of the university's National Robotics Engineering Center in Lawrenceville.

Carnegie Robotics is the latest example of a university initiative turning professors into entrepreneurs and nonprofit university research into for-profit products.

John Bares, who oversaw growth at the robotics engineering center from 20 to 120 employees in the past 13 years, will head the four-employee startup.

Anthony Stentz, the robotics engineering center's associate director since 1997, will take over as director.

Dr. Bares said on Monday that the new venture was a departure from the isolation of the research lab - this effort requires a crash course in entrepreneurial skills such as marketing and customer care.

The new venture is "exercising in a different direction" for him, although some of it may feel like deja vu from the early days of building the robotics engineering center.

He said the robotics engineering center and Carnegie Robotics partnership could offer a "part one, part two" package to prospective clients: the National Robotics Engineering Center researches and builds a prototype, which Carnegie Robotics turns into a saleable product.

Carnegie Robotics will also pursue independent contracts with outside clients, said Dr. Bares, and assemble robots at the Lawrenceville site.

Dr. Stentz sees the partnership working better with commercial contracts than with governmental work, which is usually completed without an eye on the marketplace.

"Typically [the National Robotics Engineering Center] will go as far as develop a prototype," he said. "But the question immediately rises: 'Who's going to make it?' "

One such National Robotics Engineering Center project that could work well with the new firm, he said, is a robotics system that sorts young strawberry plants based on quality.

Dr. Bares is now working to expand his payroll from four workers. "The company is a brand-new legal entity," he said. "It attracts a different brand of person."

Carnegie Robotics plans to move out of the Lawrenceville facility in about two years, he said.

In fiscal 2010, the robotics engineering center saw $24.8 million in sponsored research, with $8.7 million coming from commercial industry work.

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Miami-Dade Adopts Carnegie Learning(R) Math Programs for All 42 High Schools $2.3 Million in Curricula and Professional Development to Deliver Comprehensive Math Intervention

Miami-Dade County Public Schools is investing in improved math achievement for all high school students with the purchase of Carnegie Learning(R) Math programs for the district's 42 high schools. The $2.3 million implementation provides comprehensive math intervention, software as supplemental curricula, and initial training and ongoing job-embedded support for teachers.

The implementation delivers two models of instruction: Carnegie Learning(R) Bridge to Algebra Textbooks and Cognitive Tutor(R) software as an algebra readiness intervention; and, unlimited access by all high school students to the Cognitive Tutor(R) Bridge to Algebra and Algebra I software as a supplement to the district's existing textbooks.

"We are committed to a vital partnership with Miami-Dade to meet the individual learning needs of a highly diverse group of students," said Dennis Ciccone, chief executive officer of Carnegie Learning, Inc. "We will work closely with teachers and administrators to provide math content and innovative technology to provide differentiated instruction that engages and inspires both students and teachers to achieve more." Carnegie Learning(R) Math programs are adopted in 15 states including Florida where Carnegie Learning(R) Florida Edition Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II Textbooks and ancillary software are adopted as core mathematics instructional materials through June 2016. Carnegie Learning(R) Florida Edition Textbooks feature customized content designed to support the goals of the Next Generation Sunshine State Standards.

Miami-Dade first purchased Carnegie Learning(R) Math programs in 2002 and implemented the programs in nine schools in the secondary school-reform initiative and three corrective action schools. During the 2002-03 school year, the district commissioned an independent research study examining the effectiveness of Cognitive Tutor(R) software compared with conventional curricula. The Cognitive Tutor students scored significantly better than conventional curricula students on the FCAT and the improvement was pronounced for Exceptional Student Education (ESE) participants, including those with learning and behavioral difficulties, and for Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the fourth largest district in the United States, is among the most diverse with 62% of its students of Hispanic origin, 26% African American, 9% Non-Hispanic White, and 1% Asian or Pacific Islander.

About Carnegie Learning, Inc. (www.carnegielearning.com) Carnegie Learning, Inc. is a leading publisher of innovative, research-based math curricula for middle school, high school, and post-secondary students.

Article Courtesy of CNBC Business Wire

Monday, August 23, 2010

Astrobotic Technology Announces Caterpillar Inc. Sponsorship of Robotic Mission to the Moon

Astrobotic Technology, a Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) spin-off company has announced that Caterpillar Inc. will be a sponsor its first robotic expedition to the lunar surface. The initial Astrobotic mission will revisit the Apollo 11 site in April 2013 with a five-foot tall, 160-lb. robot broadcasting 3D high-definition video. The mission will carry payloads to the Moon and convey the experience to the world via Internet video access.

The expedition also will claim a financial trifecta: up to $24 million in the Google Lunar X Prize, a $10 million data sale to NASA, and Florida’s $2 million bonus for launching from that state.

In 2007 Caterpillar sponsored Carnegie Mellon’s winning machine in the Urban Challenge, a competition for autonomous vehicles conducted by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The sensors and code base developed for this race of driverless cars through city traffic are evolving into the guidance and control for the spacecraft that will take Astrobotic’s robot to the lunar surface.

“Caterpillar has enjoyed a successful relationship with Carnegie Mellon University over the last two decades. Our sponsorship of CMU’s winning machine in the 2007 Urban Challenge has served as a technology foundation for further work to automate our large mining trucks,” said Eric Reiners, Caterpillar Automation Systems Manager. “Our customers are moving to more remote and harsh environments. This drives the need for further development of autonomous and remote operation of equipment. We look forward to applying the technology developed and lessons learned from the Astrobotic expedition toward our own Cat equipment.”

Carnegie Mellon and Astrobotic have expended more than $3 million creating mission designs and prototype Moon robots engineered to operate during extreme heat -- soil temperatures at the lunar equator hit 224 degrees F at noon.

“Operating during the Moon’s daytime heat is the central engineering challenge for lunar robots, and we will take advantage of Caterpillar’s experience with rugged electronics for harsh environments,” said Dr. Red Whittaker, director of CMU’s Field Robotics Center and founder of Astrobotic Technology.

Caterpillar’s experience in autonomous mining and construction machinery also will assist with learning how to “live off the land” using lunar resources. For example, polar ice deposits can be transformed into propellant to refuel spacecraft for their return to Earth, doubling their productivity. New NASA research shows that some of the polar ice (a mix of water, methane and other compounds) is covered by an insulating layer of dry soil that robotic excavators can remove to access the volatiles.

“Caterpillar makes sustainable progress possible by enabling infrastructure development and resource utilization on every continent on Earth. It only makes sense we would be involved expanding our efforts to the 8th continent, the Moon,” said Reiners.

Astrobotic has just completed the first phase of a NASA contract to design lightweight robotic excavators for this task (see http://astrobotic.net/activities/lunar-construction-research-completed).

Article Courtesy of PR Web

Monday, August 23, 2010

CMU master's degree to blend robotics, business

A Carnegie Mellon University master's degree program set to start in fall 2011 has the potential to churn out Pittsburgh-based robotics companies at an unprecedented rate, said Todd Jochem, CEO of SkEyes Unlimited Corp. in Harmony in Butler County.

The program is designed to teach students how to bring a robotic product to market, lead a team at a robotics company or found or lead a company. Two semesters of classes, plus a seven-month internship with a robotics- or autonomous systems-related company, are involved.

"Most roboticists don't know how to run a business," said Jochem, who earned a doctorate in robotics from CMU in 1996. His firm specializes in aerial robotic systems such as unmanned helicopters.

"This program will help graduates take companies to the next level," said Jochem, 42, of Pine. "So, instead of generating one or two legitimate ventures every decade, we could get one or two every year."

That's the general idea, said Hagen Schempf, a principal systems scientist at CMU's Robotics Institute who will direct the new robotic systems development degree program.

"Our goal is to give students the skills to run a team and a project, to become the CEO or (chief technology officer) of an existing company -- or found and oversee a new one," Schempf said.

"We're basically giving them booster rockets to become candidates I'd immediately want to hire," said Schempf, who founded the robot research, development and production firm Automatika Inc., now owned by Virginia-based QinetiQ.

Graduates will build on the technical knowledge of mechanical, electrical and software systems they gained during their undergraduate years, he said. The curriculum will include robotic sciences and technologies, hands-on project classes and seminar-style business and management courses.

"I want to make sure they learn how to think about the market for their products, how much it will cost to manufacture, whether they'll be able to sell them for a profit and what the customer wants," he said. "You're always going to have a boss, and that boss has to be won over by those kinds of numbers."

What's different about CMU's program is that it will require students to complete a seven-month internship before they can earn the master's degree, said Dan Kara, president of Robotics Trends, a media company based in Framingham, Mass., that covers the robotics industry.

"Essentially what this program will offer is applied robotics vs. theoretical robotics," Kara said. "It will help the robotics industry as a whole because it offers hands-on training."

Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts is the only other school in the country with a comparable program, Kara said. But at WPI, an internship is an option, not mandatory.

CMU will accept applications for the program this fall, said Byron Spice, spokesman for the university's School of Computer Science. Candidates must have an undergraduate degree in engineering, computer science, physical science or applied mathematics, and one to three years of practical experience in industry or in a research laboratory is preferred, Spice said.

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Carnegie Mellon joins NSF research consortium to develop tools for analyzing autism, other behaviors

Researchers in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University will join a five-year, $10 million initiative funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create novel tools for evaluating social interactions and other behaviors that can be used in diagnosing or treating behavioral disorders such as autism.

The Computational Behavioral Science Project, part of the Expeditions in Computing Program of the NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), includes collaborators from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the University of Southern California and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the Georgia Institute of Technology serving as the lead institution.

"Using technologies such as computer vision and machine learning programs, we will develop new methods for gathering clues about a child's behavior that could lead to a diagnosis of autism at an early age, when therapy is most effective," said Anind Dey, associate professor in Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. "Some of this information can be collected in clinics, but we hope some can be gleaned from as-yet untapped sources, such as the home videos that parents make all the time."

Takeo Kanade, the U.A. and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Robotics and Computer Science, will lead an effort at Carnegie Mellon using computer vision to automatically analyze videos, amateur or otherwise, for early signs of autistic behavior, such as the rocking, clapping and other repetitive stereotypical behaviors known collectively as stimming. Eye gaze, facial expressions and body posture are additional visual aspects of social engagement that could be analyzed.

"We aim at developing a new suite of technologies for imaging and understanding human behaviors, or behavior imaging," Kanade said. "Just as medical imaging revolutionalized medicine and science for the body and its actions, behavior imaging will revolutionalize medicine and science for the mind and its activities."

Other collaborators in the project will develop methods for analyzing speech and will develop wearable sensors and toys-as-sensors that can further enhance data gathering.

Meanwhile, Dey will work with colleagues in human-computer interaction at Georgia Tech and UIUC to develop methods for making sense of the data being generated by these new tools. "Educators, family members and clinicians all have different needs and interests and will want to have this data interpreted in a way that makes sense to them," Dey said.

Outreach activities will include ongoing collaborations with the Center for Excellence in Autism Research at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as major autism research centers in Atlanta, Boston, Urbana-Champaign, Ill., and Los Angeles.

Autism, which affects one out of every 110 children in the United States, represents a particularly compelling need for new methods of gathering behavioral data. But the long-term goal of the NSF-sponsored project is to develop a new discipline of computational behavioral science, which will draw equally from computer science and psychology to transform the study of human behavior.

The technologies being developed for the project will make it possible to automatically measure behavior over a long period of time for large numbers of individuals in a wide range of settings. Many disciplines, such as education, advertising and customer relations, could benefit from a more objective data-driven approach to behavioral assessment.

"There is a great deal of creativity in the computer science research community," said Deborah Crawford, acting assistant director for CISE at the NSF. "Our intentions with the Expeditions in Computing Program is to stimulate and use that creativity to expand the possibilities of computing," she said. "The researchers and collaborators we're supporting with these awards will also be exploring new computational approaches to some of the most vexing problems we face in science and the broader world."

The Expeditions in Computing Program include some of the largest single investments made by the directorate and the NSF in basic computer science research. Carnegie Mellon is the lead institution in an Expedition grant issued last year on Computational Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems, made possible with stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

Article Courtesy of EurekAlert

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

SensaBot debuts in Kashagan field

Carnegie Mellon has yet another cool robot in the making.

This time it's SensaBot, a human-sized robot that will inspect oil and gas facilities. Remotely controlled, the robot will contain audio, visual, temperature and gas detection sensors. A human operator can direct SensaBot to perform inspection tasks without compromising his own safety.

Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) and Shell Development Kashagan B.V. agreed to collaborate on the SensaBot project in July. The robot is being developed for use in the Kashagan field, a high pressure oil and gas reservoir in the Kazakhstani sector of the Caspian Sea.

"This is an exciting opportunity for us to get some of our research into real commercial use," Bill Ross, project manager at NREC, said. SensaBot is currently in the planning stage, Ross added. Only about two months into the design stage, they are hoping to start real testing this coming spring.

"We hope that this is part of Carnegie Mellon setting up successful commercial ventures and in the future companies in Pittsburgh are manufacturing robots like this," Ross said.

Article Courtesy of Pop City

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Aquion Energy Inc. in Lawrenceville has built the better battery

With a $5 million grant from the Department of Energy, Lawrenceville's Aquion Energy Inc. will begin commercialization of a cheaper, longer-lasting, and more environmentally friendly battery this month.

Carnegie Mellon University engineer, and Aquion co-founder, Jay Whitacre developed the technology for a sodium powered alternative to traditional lithium ion batteries in 2008. The technology offers a slew of large-scale applications, such as mitigating the overload of power grids and providing a safer and cheaper alternative to the lead acid batteries often used in developing countries.

"The power grid is not stable," explains Whitacre. "This is an issue when we talk about putting many sources of renewable energy on the grid, like wind or solar. They're not constant or steady, and you need something to buffer that out. You're better off hybridizing your solar energy with some kind of energy storage solution."

In layman's terms, that means Aquion's sodium battery could potentially provide a cheap alternative to large gas powered plants, help institute broader use of sustainable energy sources, and better protect cities and municipalities from power loss.

Whitacre and his Harvard MBA co-founder, Jay Wiley, are working out of a 42,500 square foot warehouse space on 39th Street, where they will soon add 15 new employees to their roster of 17 full-time employees and four interns. Aquion plans to develop a prototype manufacturing facility in the space, and begin producing batteries the size of a refrigerator within the next year. Those units will then be sent to a third party tester, AES Corp, in Virginia for validation.

Article Courtesy of Pop City

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Racing to the moon turning lucrative for Oakland's Astrobotic Technologies

Carnegie Mellon spinoff Astrobotic Technology plans to get to the moon first, capture the $24 million Google Lunar X Prize and generate revenues though a moon shuttle enterprise. Now NASA has stepped in to help make the enterprise more lucrative.

NASA has announced that it will buy up to $10 million in data from a commercial lunar lander mission through its Innovation Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) program, with a budget of $30 million. If it all goes according to plan, earnings could translate to $36 million; that's $10 million from NASA, $24 million for the prize and another $2 million for launching in the state of Florida.

That's good news for Astrobotics, a top contender in the Google Lunar X pursuit. NASA would deposit $2 million in the company's bank account before the launch, which is planned for December 2012.The company and Carnegie Mellon have spent about $3 million to date building prototypes and designing the mission. The plan is to raise about $37 million from investors; the rest of the $90 million cost will come from progress payments from customers, which should be equal to about 50% of the final price, says Gump.

Article Courtesy of Pop City

Friday, August 13, 2010

Robots to Help Children With Autism

Interbots, Inc., a high-tech spin-off company associated with the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center has teamed up with the Autism Center of Pittsburgh to provide innovative robot-based therapy for children with autism.

The program, "Character Therapy," through the use of the Interbot robot "Popchilla" will test the ability of children with autism with limited or no verbal skills.

According to Seema Patel, CEO and co-founder of Interbots, "We've had numerous individuals tell us our robots could be tremendous tools for Autism therapy. We're excited to be working with the Autism Center of Pittsburgh and the Sprout Foundation to take this first step. We're going to learn a lot from the next few months."

"The premise behind the program is that children with autism are sometimes more likely to communicate with a non-human entity," said Cindy Waeltermann, Founder and Director of the Autism Centers of Pittsburgh. "When you have a child with autism, you use whatever interests them to gain access into their world. The idea is to bridge the gap between their word and ours.

Popchilla will be used in the first phase of the program with a trained therapist. Programmers and developers at Interbots have created an iPad application that will allow the therapist to direct sessions, which will eventually be transitioned to allow the child to control the robot through an iPad application to identify emotions.

According to Waeltermann, "By using Popchilla as an intermediary, we hope to increase the understanding of the child's internal feelings, thus reducing behavioral frustrations. If they are able to identify that they are 'angry' and what 'angry' means, it can significantly help them understand what they are feeling, reducing behavioral ramifications."

The program is funded by Spark. Spark is an initiative of The Sprout Fund catalyzing projects and programs that engage children ages birth to eight through the creative use of technology and media. Spark challenges individuals, organizations, and communities to generate inventive technology-based solutions to the issues and opportunities facing today's young child. Through its funding opportunities and extensive network of support, Spark is unleashing the innovative potential of Southwestern Pennsylvania and transforming our region into one of the best places on earth to be a kid.

"Our emphasis has always been making the use and control of our robots as simple and flexible as possible. You don't need to have a technical background to control our characters. You can control them with a variety of other familiar devices. So that opens a lot of interesting applications - like having a therapist or a parent use our robots as a tool to interact with children - even the possibility of kids using the robot to express themselves and explore emotions on their own," according to Sabrina Haskell, Interbots, Designer & Co-Founder.

The iPad application is currently in production and the program is slated to begin this fall.

"Nobody is more excited than the parents of the children with autism who have the potential to gain great strides from this program," said Cindy Waeltermann. "That's what this is all about -- thinking outside the box to reach these kids."

Article Courtesy of PRNewswire

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Keep showing us the money - Avere, ASSET, Ciespace and PSC rake in $46.1M

Good news in funding for the region for four: Avere, Asset, Ciespace and the Pittsburgh Computer Center.

Avere Systems picked up some additional funds this month, a windfall of $17 million that will fuel the production and expansion of its "game changing" network-attached solution (NAS) that will accelerate the performance and reduce the costs of data storage.

The Series B round was led by a new investor, Tenaya Capital of Menlo Park, Calif. and Boston, Mass, along with Menlo Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. The company has grown to 40 employees.

"While we were not actively looking for additional funding in the company, we jumped at the opportunity to bring on a partner like Tenaya Capital," said Ron Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Avere Systems in a statement. "We're very pleased that we can continue to expand our efforts to introduce dynamic tiering to enterprise storage customers."

In other funding news, Pittsburgh-based ASSET Inc. has received $22.3 million in federal funds to improve STEM education and learning across the state. The non-profit was among 49 school districts, universities and non-profits to be selected for the grant for science, technology, engineering and mathematics teaching.

Carnegie Mellon startup Ciespace Corp. has raised $4 million with the help of a Chicago firm, ARCH Venture Partners, a group that funds university and government research, and University of Tokyo-Edge Capital. Founded in 2004 by Dr. Kenji Shimada, director of the Computer-Integrated Engineering Lab at Carnegie Mellon, Ciespace, with 10 employees, will continue development of its software technology in Pittsburgh.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center $2.8 million toward the purchase of the world's largest coherent shared-memory computing system. PSC will integrate the system into the cyberinfrastructure of the NSF, giving scientists and engineers across the country a major tool for research.

Article Courtesy of Pop City

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Digital modeling firm Ciespace Corp. lands $4 million in funding

Carnegie Mellon University spinoff Ciespace Corp. has secured $4 million that will be used to hire workers and expand the company into more commercial sectors, the company announced Monday.

Founded by CMU engineering professor Kenji Shimada, the digital modeling firm in Oakland markets technology that helps companies build virtual prototypes. Chicago-based Arch Venture Partners and Tokyo-based University of Tokyo Edge Capital led the Series A funding round.

Ciespace plans to use the money for work on the company's 3-D digital modeling platform. It also will push the technology into additional commercial marketplaces such as computer animation, medical imaging and metrology, or the study of measurement.

Ciespace already works with the automotive, aerospace and computer-aided design sectors. Its BubbleMesh simulation technology has been used by companies such as IBM and NASA.

Kevin Kerns, a former consultant and entrepreneur-in-residence at Arch Venture Partners, replaces Dr. Shimada as Ciespace's CEO. He was CEO of communications software firm Apropos Technology Inc. of Chicago from 1996 to 2004.

Dr. Shimada will stay on with Ciespace as the chief science officer while teaching at CMU. Company research and development will remain in Pittsburgh while a finance and marketing site opens in Chicago. Mr. Kerns said a headquarters location had not been decided.

Ciespace's roster of 10 employees is expected to grow by about 25 workers per year over the next several years.

"We hope to bring our first end-user product to market within 12 months," Mr. Kerns said.

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Ball Tracking Technology Headed for the NFL

Article Courtesy of International Business Times

Friday, August 6, 2010

CMU's accelerator program preps student-led startups

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Business Times

Thursday, August 5, 2010

CMU lands $1.26M for biothermal research

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Business Times

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Geckos Provide Pittsburgh Tech Company with Marketable Idea Beyond Car Insurance

An early stage spinout from Carnegie Mellon University has taken a good, long close-up look at the humble gecko, of which there are, more than 800 species worldwide, and discovered that it has something to offer us beyond competitive car insurance rates.

In late summer of 2009, the Pennsylvania NanoMaterials Commercialization Center awarded $200,000 in Air Force Research Laboratories (AFRL) funding to nanoGriptech, LLC for the commercialization of a fibrous adhesive material, inspired by the foot hairs of the popular reptile made famous in television commercials.

Dr. Metin Sitti, a professor and director of Carnegie Mellon’s nanorobotics laboratory, founded nanoGriptech after 10 years of research on adhesives. As a result of observing the natural climbing ability of the gecko, he plans to mass produce repeatable polymer-based micro fiber adhesives for a wide range of product applications.

The material mimics the millions of nano- and micro-fibers on the toes of geckos, insects and other animals that provide them with their ability to grip strongly and repeatedly to smooth and rough vertical surfaces, even in wet and dirty outdoors conditions. The scientific principle that allows geckos to stick to surfaces are known as van der Waals forces, and in theory a boot made of synthetic gecko fibers could adhere just as easily to the surface of a living room wall. Sitti’s technology uses polymers and microscopic manufacturing techniques to recreate the gecko’s fibers. Not technically glue, Sitti calls this sticky phenomenon the “one-sided Velcro” effect.

Funding from the Center has assisted the company in the design, manufacturing and testing of first-generation materials for new commercial sportswear applications. Other targeted applications for this technology will include those in the robotics, medical and personal protective equipment industries. The U.S. Department of Defense, for instance, is working with nanoGriptech to develop a sealant for the army’s protective face masks.

The company plans to design, develop prototypes, customize and fabricate its products cost effectively and in high volumes in their own local facility. With about five employees, the company’s current operations are two blocks from CMU’s campus, but they will need an additional 5,000 square feet, once full-scale manufacturing begins in about two years.

Beyond the funding award, Sitti said that the Center also provided a number of other valuable services that were instrumental in building the company.

“The Center helped nanoGriptech to formalize a closer collaboration with our current corporate partner, Bayer MaterialScience, which will supply us with the polymer used to manufacture our adhesive fibers,” said Sitti. “In addition, the Center assisted by helping us to define specific product goals for our initial customer, a major sportswear manufacturer, and by providing valuable feedback for improving relationships with them.” “Beyond that,” said Sitti, “the Center also introduced us to a very robust network of other nanomaterials companies in the region, and through these forged relationships we ultimately were able to find the space where we currently operate.”

The Center’s AFRL grant also cemented a closer relationship with the Air Force labs, which put nanoGriptech on the short list for a phase two grant or other additional funding possibilities in the future.

The Center’s total package of assistance also has enabled nanoGriptech to hire and retain two of their current employees.

“We view this project as a key example of the vision for the Center,” said its Executive Director Dr. Alan Brown. “This project perfectly illustrates that through key partnerships between university researchers, entrepreneurs and large companies, we can accelerate the transition of new nano-based products to market and grow start-up companies more quickly.”

As a result of the expertise and deep networks that have been established by the Pennsylvania NanoMaterials Commercialization Center, Sitti plans to design, manufacture and market nanoGriptech products from the Pittsburgh region. He wants to stick close to where the critical mass is, not unlike a gecko that will stick to a pane of window glass on a sunny day.

Article Courtesy of PA Nanomaterials Commercialization Center

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

CMU Start-up mSpoke Acquired by LinkedIn

Major social networking site LinkedIn announced Wednesday morning it had purchased mSpoke, a Carnegie Mellon startup that works with recommendation technology designed to hold users on certain sites for longer periods of time.

This is the Mountain View, Calif-based company's first acquisition since rising to become a leading website for users looking to network and land jobs through posting resumes and recommendations online.

MSpoke technology analyzes a person's site history to recommend other pages or links.

More than 75 million users are registered on LinkedIn since its founding in 2003. The details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

MSpoke is based Downtown and was founded by chief executive officer Sean Ammirati, chairman of the board Dave Mawhinney and chief technology officer Dean Thompson. The company counts several CMU professors as advisors, and received seed funding from Pittsburgh venture capitalist Ed Engler.

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Monday, August 2, 2010

Carnegie Learning Math Curricula Align with Common Core State Standards

Since the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers announced the new standards last month, 29 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the CCSS, which provide a consistent understanding of what K-12 students are expected to learn in English/language arts and mathematics. The CCSS are designed to address disparate standards across states, student mobility, global competition, and the changing skills required in the 21st century workplace.

"At the core of Carnegie Learning is 20 years of research to develop a rigorous math curriculum that sets high expectation for students and teachers that are consistent with the key objectives of the Core Common State Standards,” said Dennis Ciccone, chief executive officer of Carnegie Learning, Inc. “Our programs require that students apply knowledge through high-order thinking skills and emphasize the value of collaborative problem-solving in a real-world context. We welcome the new standards as an option for states re-evaluating the rigor and effectiveness of their math teaching and learning.”

Carnegie Learning math courses for middle and high school provide instruction to meet the Standards for Mathematical Content and the Standards for Mathematical Practice, and meet 100% of the established Common Core State Standards for High School mathematics.

Alignment to the Standards for Mathematical Content and Standards for Mathematical Practice are available at www.carnegielearning.com/commoncore. Once the CCSS model high school pathways for mathematics are released, further information on specific Carnegie Learning course correlation will be available.

“We believe the majority of states that have indicated support for Common Core State Standards will adopt the common standards giving impetus to the drive for more rigorous standards in reading and math,” said Kathy Mickey, senior analyst/managing editor, Simba Information Education Group. “Coupled with a nation-wide emphasis on strengthening STEM education, the market landscape offers robust opportunities for rigorous instructional materials and tools that promote individual learning and growth in student achievement.”

Article Courtesy of Centre Daily Times

Thursday, July 29, 2010

CMU lab refines infrastructure

Knowing where energy is being wasted inside a building, where a pipe leak is developing or where a crack is forming underneath a bridge would help government officials save taxpayer money, say Carnegie Mellon University researchers and IBM executives.

"The guy on the street is paying for those kinds of things with his taxes and utility bills," said Matthew Sanfilippo, executive director of CMU's new Pennsylvania Smart Infrastructure Incubator. "Policymakers are trying to spend that money more wisely."

CMU and IBM officials announced Wednesday the founding of the IBM Smarter Infrastructure Lab. It is one component of the incubator, along with the Bombardier Collaborative Center announced last month.

Incubator research will focus on developing more efficient civil infrastructure and transit operations.

IBM Corp. and Bombardier Inc. are the primary founding partners of the incubator, said James H. Garrett Jr., the CMU Thomas Lord professor and chairman of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

"Research activities have already begun," he said.

Garrett cited a collaboration between CMU and a local water authority. He and his colleagues signed nondisclosure agreements, so he could not name the authority. But the entity is sharing data on the condition of its infrastructure, so CMU researchers may analyze it and show what they find.

"At CMU, we'll be finding more efficient ways to manage and more efficient ways of doing business," said Wayne Balta, an IBM vice president in Somers, N.Y.

That means collecting data from sensors placed in locations that can monitor such things as how much chlorine exists at a water-supply intake valve, he said.

"If we can take the data we get and apply software analysis to it, we can then at blazing speeds detect patterns and see trends we wouldn't be able to otherwise process," Balta said.

Construction of the $2.2 million incubator offices began last month, Sanfilippo said. The state Department of Community and Economic Development awarded a grant of about $1 million for the project. Building should be completed by the end of the year.

Balta declined to specify how much IBM is contributing, but he said the company is supporting the effort with computer hardware, software and personnel.

Bombardier Transportation in West Mifflin originally considered building a testing facility on a 178-acre site in Hazelwood, but the company decided to let CMU take the lead on the project, said Bombardier spokeswoman Maryanne Roberts last month.

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Carnegie Mellon researchers create fluorescent biosensor to aid in drug development

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new fluorescent biosensor that could aid in the development of an important class of drugs that target a crucial class of proteins called G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs).

“Drugs that target GPCRs make up approximately 30 percent of all pharmaceuticals currently on the market, including some of the most prescribed drugs,” said Jonathan Jarvik, the Carnegie Mellon professor who led the effort to develop the GPCR biosensor. “This prevalence makes assays for the receptors a billion dollar industry.”

GPCRs are popular drug targets because of the pivotal role they play in cells’ chemical communication circuits that are responsible for regulating functions critical to health, including circuits involved in heart and lung function, mood, cognition and memory, digestion and the inflammatory response. Found in the cell membrane, GPCRs interact with molecules responsible for cellular communication such as neurotransmitters and hormones. When one of the receptors encounters such a molecule, it relays a signal across the cell membrane that, in turn, initiates a response. After the response is triggered, the receptor retreats from the membrane into the cell’s interior.

To create the GPCR biosensor, the research team used a new technology called fluoromodules. Invented by Carnegie Mellon’s Molecular and Biosensor Imaging Center (MBIC), fluoromodules are probes that allow scientists to monitor the activities of individual proteins found in living cells in real-time. The probes are made up of two components: a fluorogen-activating protein (FAP) and a non-fluorescent dye called a fluorogen. The FAP is attached to the protein that is being studied, and the fluorogen is engineered to bind to the FAP. When the two meet, they cast off a glow that can be detected using a variety of methods, alerting researchers to the protein’s location and activity. The FAP’s fluorescence can be turned on and off by adding or removing the fluorogen, a characteristic that makes the fluoromodules more useful than other fluorescent proteins.

In the current study, which is published in the July issue of the Journal of Biomolecular Screening, Jarvik and colleagues engineered a fluoromodule that would readily determine when GPCR retreats from the cell membrane. The researchers genetically expressed a FAP fused to the beta2 adrenergic receptor (β2AR), a well-studied GPCR that is present in brain, heart, lung and other tissues. When the researchers introduced its associated membrane-impermeant fluorogen, it bound to the FAP-tagged GPCR on the cell surface, emitting a bright fluorescent glow. When the receptor was activated and had retreated into the cell, the fluorescence dimmed.

The new biosensor is notable, Jarvik said, because it looks directly at the receptor and provides what is known as a homogeneous, or mix-and-read, assay that can be scaled to screen large numbers of molecules to identify new drug leads.

The researchers are hopeful that this technology can be generalized across other receptors and cell-surface proteins, and are currently researching its broader applications.

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). MBIC is one of the NIH’s National Technology Centers for Networks and Pathways. For more information, visit: http://www.mbic.cmu.edu/.

Article Courtesy of Science Blog

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Michigan Department of Education Names Carnegie Learning External Service Provider for School Improvement

All eligible Michigan school districts or public school academies applying for SIG funding may contract with Carnegie Learning as an approved external service provider to assist in meeting the goals and objectives of their selected intervention model. Six Michigan school districts have already committed to supporting their School Improvement programs with Carnegie Learning® Math Curricula and Professional Development.

Carnegie Learning® Math Curricula align to the High School Content Expectations, and the Michigan Grade Level Content Expectations, as well as to the newly adopted Common Core State Standards.

Michigan received $119 million in SIG funds for local schools to improve teaching and learning for all students. Each eligible school can apply for up to $2 million each year, over a three-year period.

Carnegie Learning is also an approved SIG partner in the states of West Virginia and Hawaii, and the company’s curricula and professional development programs are implemented in school improvement models in districts in Indiana, North Carolina, and Washington State.

The Carnegie Learning® School Improvement Plan creates a partnership with districts that places evidence-based math instruction and job-embedded professional development at the center of transformational efforts. Information can be found at www.carnegielearning.com/guarantee or by calling 888.851.7094.

Article Courtesy of Business Wire

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Deeplocal streams messages across a skyscraper at the World Cup, expanding and hiring

Article Courtesy of Pop City

Friday, July 23, 2010

ATRP Solutions, raising money and preparing product

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Business Times

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Pittsburgh venture capital makes a comeback in 2Q with $84.5M

Article Courtesy of Pop City

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Google's growth in city puts Pittsburgh in top tier of regional sites

Google's influence can affect everything from a congressional bill to a restaurant decision. So imagine working across the street from a Google office.

"They're all over the place," said Howard Anderson, a business professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

He sees representatives of the company, which has a major operation in Cambridge, out there recruiting students and professors, inspiring competitors to compete for real estate and energizing a city ecosystem with talk of spinoffs and acquisitions.

It's a scene that could play out in Pittsburgh as the Mountain View, Calif.-based search company prepares for a summer expansion into a 40,000-square-foot office in Larimer's Bakery Square development.

The expansion elevates the Pittsburgh region to a top tier of satellites that includes Boston, New York City and Waterloo, Ontario, in Canada. Google has said the Pittsburgh site will be comparable in size to its Boston counterpart, but the offices mirror each other in more ways than just a tendency to label themselves the City of Champions.

As in Pittsburgh, the Cambridge site began as a small operation near a major university that soon outgrew its space, turning into a name-brand presence designed to retain bright graduates who might have set their sights on Silicon Valley.

The Google Boston site -- sometimes referred to as Google Cambridge, with its address in Boston's brainy neighbor -- relies on a proximity to MIT. The school is a powerhouse supplier of Google candidates and plays the role that many experts say Carnegie Mellon will take here as graduates jockey to get an interview with one of the country's most distinctive employers.

The Google aesthetic knows no borders: Regional offices are colored in the vibrant hues that mark its signature website and the perks combine fraternity (foosball! free food!) with functional (401(k)s, stock options).

Months after Google announced plans to expand its Boston presence to a 60,000-square-foot space along the Charles River, competitor Microsoft said it would lease 136,000 square feet in a building that shares a subway stop with the Google office.

"One comes and then the other comes," said Mr. Anderson, who as a venture capitalist backed Pittsburgh-based ForeSystems, a tech business later acquired by Marconi.

But Google welcomed the new neighbor, said Steve Vinter, engineering director at Google Boston.

"I'm not worried about losing a candidate to Microsoft," he said. "I'm worried about the three candidates who leave for Silicon Valley."

It's a similar quandary in Pittsburgh -- a 2009 survey of electrical and computer engineering graduates of CMU found that while 49 percent of graduates found work in the Mid-Atlantic region, 24 percent moved to California, Hawaii or Nevada.

As a burgeoning tech presence, Pittsburgh still allows affordable real estate and traffic accessibility, said Mark Muro, a fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Muro said the city has reason to be optimistic about the stepped-up Google presence.

"For quite a long time, Pittsburgh will be overwhelmed by the positive benefit of being in this milieu of talent," he said.

About half of the current Google employees in Pittsburgh are graduates of local schools. The company plans to maintain a similar ratio as it expands. Job openings in software engineering and engineering operations are posted at www.google.com/jobs/.

But Google's applicant pool has widened to include students who specialize in subjects such as biology, artificial intelligence and business.

"Students might have looked at Goldman Sachs in the past years, but they now see Google as being first tier," Mr. Muro said.

The search engine operator's name recognition has forced lesser-known firms to revamp their recruiting pitch, said Laura Wilkinson, assistant director of employer relations at MIT's Career Office.

"You've got Google and Microsoft coming in and recruiting," she said. "It made it very difficult for the smaller boutique firms. They started concentrating on how you could climb the ranks more quickly at their firm than at a place like Google."

Google Boston started as a small sales office in 2003, had a stint at the Cambridge Innovation Center in 2007 and expanded to more than 200 employees at its current location. It's a trajectory shared by the Pittsburgh office.

Kamul Nigam was working at a Pittsburgh company called Intelliseek Inc. in 2006 when he got "The Call": Google wanted him to help lead a Pittsburgh office. He would compose 50 percent of the staff. His partner-in-crime, former CMU professor Andrew Moore, is now set to head the Bakery Square office.

The duo moved into CMU's Collaborative Innovation Center in 2006, expanding as Google grew to control 65 percent of the search market. The Boston and Pittsburgh sites currently have about 100 engineers, and though the local office will double in size, Google has not set a quota on the number of employees expected to join the site.

The Pittsburgh site has focused on three areas of work: the Google Product Search, which presents items available for online purchase; work that determines which ads to display based on a search query; and search infrastructure, which handles the computer systems fueling every result page.

The regional hubs have a level of autonomy that displays a "very healthy balance of bottom-up innovation and top-down strategy," said Dr. Nigam.

At the CMU location, Google is a roommate with the Apple Pittsburgh office and the local Intel Research Lab, among others. The space left vacant when Google moves on will be filled by a tech company expected to move in September, said Donald Smith Jr., president of real estate operator RIDC.

The Boston move was treated with the same fanfare seen in Pittsburgh and the ripple effect of Google's move -- things such as new restaurants around the new office -- were immediately seen, said Erin Murphy, a vice president at the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.

Surrounding businesses are breathless in their enthusiasm for Google, she said, calling the company "wildly successful, wildly innovative" and a "great corporate citizen" who, they hope, could be a "potential co-collaborator."

The Google Boston office hosts events for special interest groups, serves as a tour stop on conference itineraries and dedicates a work week to volunteerism in the community. Google also is getting them young: The Boston office is now running a computer science program for high school freshmen.

Today's tech companies treat brain power as the commodity and internal projects follow a Socratic-circle, coffeehouse model: "Team development that can easily lead to the spin out of new products or new ideas," said Mr. Muro.

When, instead of developing an idea internally, Google buys a company based elsewhere, the search company has been known to let the acquired business stay where it is.

Google bought the CMU startup Recaptcha last year and maintained the smaller company's city office, an anomaly in a year that has seen Pittsburgh companies that have received funding move closer to West Coast investors.

When Google chief executive Eric Schmidt announced in Pittsburgh last November that his company had begun acquiring companies again, many saw the shift as a signal the overall economy was recovering.

But the search engine operator's actions serve as more than an arbiter -- they're an accelerator, said Mr. Anderson.

"When Google makes acquisitions, there is a leverage effect," he said. "Other people say, 'I'm just as bright as that guy. Why don't I start a company?'"

An expanded Google presence here could help prevent the "intellectual erosion" of students leaving after graduation for positions on the West Coast, said Mr. Anderson.

He has words for students who find the postcard-pretty weather of California a better alternative to Boston winters.

"Are you a professional volleyball player?" he asked. If not, then: "Who cares? Go invent something."

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Carnegie Mellon University launches $7 million initiative to boost computer science majors

PITTSBURGH—A new four-year, $7 million educational initiative by Carnegie Mellon University will leverage students' innate interest in robots and other forms of "hard fun" to increase U.S. enrollments in computer science and steer more young people into scientific and technological careers.

The initiative, called Fostering Innovation through Robotics Exploration (FIRE), is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and designed to reverse a significant national decline in the number of college students majoring in computer science, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (CS-STEM).

FIRE will develop new tools that enable middle and high school students to expand upon their interest in robots, leading them from one CS-STEM activity to the next. Examples are programming tools that create game-like virtual worlds where robot programs can be tested, as well as computerized tutors that teach mathematics and computer science in the context of robotics.

The initiative will target robotic competitions such as FIRST, VEX and Robofest that already are popular among secondary school students, but also will create new competitions for autonomous, multi-robot teams and for computer animations that will attract a broader array of students and offer new challenges.

"The idea is that these programs must be rigorous, but fun — what we call 'hard fun,'" said Robin Shoop, director of FIRE and of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Academy, an international leader in the development of K-12 robotic education curriculum. "Robots provide a great teaching tool. Kids like robots and are innately curious about how they work and how they make decisions. Finding answers to their questions is fun, but technically challenging, and that makes robotics uniquely suited to teaching students computer science, engineering and mathematics."

For more information and to register to receive updates for this project visit www.fire.cs.cmu.edu.

The number of U.S. college graduates with CS-STEM degrees is declining, raising concerns about national competitiveness. The trend is particularly pronounced in computer science, where the number of graduates dropped 43 percent from 2004 to 2007 and where women and minorities remain underrepresented.

"We have a significant decline in the number of students signing up for computer science, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors at the college level," said Melanie Dumas, DARPA's program manager for its CS-STEM Education Program. "The CS-STEM Education Program will help fill the talent pipeline and enable our nation to compete on the international stage."

Since 2000, the Robotics Academy, part of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, has developed techniques and tools to help K-12 teachers use robots to teach science and mathematics and has trained thousands of teachers on how to incorporate robotics into their lessons. The academy will play a central role in FIRE, but the project also will draw on expertise from across Carnegie Mellon's renowned School of Computer Science.

Ken Koedinger, Albert Corbett and their colleagues in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), for instance, will develop automated tutoring systems for teaching Robotics Academy courses. "Cognitive tutors" developed at Carnegie Mellon already are used by hundreds of thousands of students each year to learn algebra and other traditional subjects. The computerized tutors present lessons and problem sets, provide step-by-step guidance with complex problem-solving and adjust the lessons to each student's comprehension level. FIRE's cognitive tutors will assist teachers and mentors who coach in robot competitions but may lack the mathematics and programming background necessary to help students tackle increasingly harder challenges.

Likewise, Wanda Dann and her colleagues in HCII's Alice Project will work with FIRE to create an Alice Animation Competition designed to increase the number of girls engaged in computer science. Alice (www.alice.org) is a software environment that enables novices to create 3-D computer animations and, in the process, teaches basic programming principles. Animation contests that use Alice or other types of animation software can appeal to students of both sexes who might not be interested in robots.

The Alice team will collaborate with the Robotics Academy to add virtual worlds to ROBOTC, a programming language developed by the academy that works with many of the educational robotic platforms used in robot competitions. "This new ROBOTC capability will allow students to design and test robots in a virtual environment when it would be impractical to do so with a physical robot. We plan to add other programming languages as the project evolves," Shoop said.

Manuela Veloso, professor of computer science and president-elect of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and Howie Choset, associate professor of robotics, will develop new teaching tools and a new competition for teams of robots working cooperatively. "In the future, robots will work in teams, not as single robots," Veloso said. "If we want to drive future innovation, then we need to begin to challenge students to solve multi-robot problems today."

To further expand the potential pool of CS-STEM students, Lori Levin, associate research professor in the Language Technologies Institute, will work with FIRE to increase participation in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO), www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/. The International Linguistics Olympiad is very popular in Europe; FIRE's goal is to make it accessible to thousands of students across the U.S.

In addition to creating new competitions, FIRE will reach out to national organizations such as the Girl and Boy Scouts, 4H, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America to engage more students in activities that prepare them to be future innovators.

"Tens of thousands of students nationwide participate in robotic activities every year, but these activities do not always translate into increases in academic preparation or sustained engagement with CS-STEM," Shoop said. "FIRE will provide the infrastructure, the tools, and the resources to significantly engage students for the long term."

Christopher Schunn and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center will provide a key component for the project, evaluating the educational effectiveness of FIRE's tools and methods and monitor outreach efforts to communities across the country.

Article Courtesy of EurekAlert

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

CMU to collaborate with Semiconductor Research Corporation to help bring more energy efficient technologies to the marketplace

PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University will host a new Smart Grid Research Center as part of a $5 million industry-academic partnership with the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world's leading university-industry research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies.

The new partnership, dubbed the Energy Research Initiative (ERI), will team companies from across the energy-related spectrum with university researchers to address the world's need for smart alternative energy sources and prepare students with the technical skills required for the new burgeoning industry. The ERI, managed by SRC subsidiary The Energy Research Corp. (TERC), will initially address two critical areas for efficient generation and distribution of renewable energy resources: photovoltaics and systems engineering and technologies to enable and optimize smart grids. It is the latter, "Smart Grid Research Center,'' that will be housed at Carnegie Mellon.

Pradeep K. Khosla, university professor and dean of Carnegie Mellon's College of Engineering, said the new initiative is designed to develop reliable, affordable, secure, clean and efficient energy systems and help provide students with the expertise and skills needed to move these new technologies into the marketplace.

"The Smart Grid Research Center at Carnegie Mellon will support the incorporation of renewable energy resources and provide modeling, simulation and control tools needed to manage, optimize and secure the power grid,'' said Ed Schlesinger, head of Carnegie Mellon's top-ranked Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Marija Ilic, a professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon and director of the university's Electric Energy Systems Group, will be the director of the Smart Grid Research Center.

Ilic said the Smart Grid Center is driven by the vision that it is critical to transform today's operating and planning industry practices to serve much more complex objectives than in the past.

"Smart Grids are needed to enhance sustainability, which is a careful tradeoff between reliability (lights staying on), short-and-long term efficiency (cost of electricity), greenhouse gas emissions reduction (clean world) , and financially sound innovation, and deployment of unconventional technologies that will help create employment opportunities,'' said Ilic. "For these objectives to co-exist, it is critical to engage in multidisciplinary engineering systems of smart grids.''

Instead of relying on worst- case designs, much can be achieved by transforming electricity service into just-in-time (JIT) and just-in-place (JIP) services, according to Ilic.

Ilic also reports that a smart grid could eliminate some of the widespread problems like blackouts that have plagued many of the nation's aging systems and caused economic hardship for users. "There's a lot of talk about upgrading equipment, but what we really need is to upgrade other things, like computer programs and communications that make it all work,'' said Ilic. "The timing is right since utilities are pursuing major pilot projects to deploy sensor and measurement technologies necessary to implement new types of electricity services."

Carnegie Mellon researchers are already working toward Dynamic Monitoring and Decision Systems (DYMONDS) as a means of embedding increased intelligence into different component groups and their interactions with system operators.

"The Smart Grid Research Center is dedicated to galvanizing the role of soft technologies for sustainable energy services and continued progress will require close collaboration between industry, government and academia,'' said Ilic.

Mark S. Kamlet, executive vice president and university provost, said the industry-university partnership is another outstanding example of Carnegie Mellon's innovative drive to help develop technologies and systems to improve industry sector operations and meet the demands of increasingly energy conscious consumers.

"The pervasive use of simulation in semiconductor process development, device design and system analysis has been called a critical factor in the success of the electronics industry,''said SRC Executive Vice President Steven Hillenius. "Similar capabilities do not exist for technologies in support of solar-powered systems. Likewise, today's smart grid simulation capabilities are also limited, and new transformational approaches are required to enable significant integration of renewable energy resources into the grid.''

Research will be undertaken by a global network of companies partnering with Carnegie Mellon's Smart Grid Research Center. Industry members will dedicate engineering and other resources and participate in the selection of appropriate research projects. Carnegie Mellon's Smart Grid Research Center founding members from industry include ABB, Bosch, IBM and Nexans.

Article Courtesy of EurekAlert

Thursday, July 1, 2010

CMU spin-out Bueda receives financing to create social media smart tags

A Google search of the word ‘Pittsburgh’ brings over 76 million results. But as anyone who has ever used a search engine knows, specificity is the only way to get anywhere. That’s why social media organizers writing about Pittsburgh include tags, or listings of complimentary words and phrases to tie the knot between the target audience and the content. But, as any publicist or marketing exec will tell you, word choice means everything when targeting your message. Bloggers and business owners can use online tools and the frustrations of trial and error. Or they can hire a forward-thinking PR agency to take over search engine optimization efforts.

For DIY-loving social media mavens, neither option is too appealing. So the computer scientists at Bueda have introduced a third option: a tag generator and arsenal of social media search tools for flummoxed online business owners to find their customers anywhere they may be. With its two products--one a tag-refining API and the other a social media lead generator adept at analyzing user-generated content--ready for distribution, Bueda recently received $100,000 in financing from Pittsburgh business incubator Innovation Works to expand their sales efforts.

“With traditional online advertising, you have the theme of standing on the side of the road hoping that the right car drives by or in social media, you can just talk about what you do, post and blog and hope eventually people will come,” says Buedo CEO Vasco Pedro. “We take a proactive stance by analyzing what people are saying and matching that with certain topics that the company would like to interact with.”

So if a Pittsburgh copy store wanted to target customers better, they could blog and utilize social media, hoping someone comes to them, or they could wait until someone on Twitter in the Pittsburgh area tweets a complaint about the terrible service at Kinkos. Suddenly, the Pittsburgh copy shop is there to join in the conversation. Better tags and search tools help businesses hit the target where they are.

But this concept is not what drew Innovation Works to believe in Bueda. When Bueda first formed as a spin-out from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, their social media tools had to be programmed into existing software. Before Bueda could introduce its product to the world, it had to do some re-targeting of their own, revamping their built-in business software to a user-friendly search solution that anyone can use. And Pedro believes this time, his company hit the bulls-eye.

“We started with a technological platform and this is really our first consumer-faced application that allows direct use of the platform without one line of code,” says Pedro. “Before, it was more targeted to businesses looking to enhance user-generated content but this is more the consumer-based version.”

Article Courtesy of Keystone Edge

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

DoD funding renewed for Software Engineering Institute

The Department of Defense has extended its contract with the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University through June 2015, in an agreement valued at $584 million.

The institute works to improve software development and the quality of systems that depend on software. Previous contract renewals were in 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005. The 2005 five-year contract was valued at $411 million.

In a public announcement on the extension, Paul Nielsen, SEI director and CEO, said, "We are pleased to have the opportunity to continue to carry out the SEI's mission. Our purpose is to advance the state of the art in software engineering and transition these advancements to the community so that organizations may develop and acquire software that is more reliable, more secure, and more dependable."

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Pozt-Gazette

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Bombardier and CMU Join Forces to Launch the New Pennsylvania Smart Infrastructure Incubator

Bombardier is one of the primary founding partners of the new Pennsylvania Smart Infrastructure Incubator (PSII), and will be joined by other partners from a variety of industries in the near future. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is also providing a significant economic development grant through the Redevelopment Assistant Capital Program (RACP) to help establish the incubator.

"This is a wonderful opportunity for both industry and the state as we move forward to highlight this region as a hotbed for advanced infrastructure technology and the jobs these technologies will create," said State Senator Jay Costa, (D-43rd District) a primary sponsor of the RACP grant.

Matthew Sanfilippo, executive director of the PSII, said: "Tomorrow's infrastructure will blend traditional concrete-and-steel physical infrastructure systems with cyber-infrastructure systems such as computers, networks and sensors in ways that are just emerging. Pennsylvania has a wealth of companies, universities and institutions that are inventing many of these emerging technologies that will build or re-build the world's infrastructure. We intend to bring these organizations together to leverage and highlight this new resource to help make Pennsylvania a visible leader in these critical emerging technologies."

A key component of the PSII will be the new Bombardier Collaborative Center that will be housed at the University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) where it will bring together international industry, economic development organizations, government and academic players in smart infrastructure to make western Pennsylvania a major hub for this infrastructure revolution.

"The development of Smart Infrastructure is an example of how, today, application domains cut across disciplinary boundaries. At Carnegie Mellon University, we have always embraced this approach to advancing technology and we look forward to working with our partners to put Pennsylvania at the forefront of Smart Infrastructure research, development and education," said Ed Schlesinger, head of ECE.

The PSII also will include a soon-to-be-announced corporate sponsored smarter infrastructure analytics laboratory in the ECE, as well as projects and resources in several other research departments and locations.

"Creation of the Bombardier Collaboration Center at Carnegie Mellon will enable joint research in fields such as smart guidance systems, rail control solutions, sensing robotics and so much more," said Romuald Ponte, vice president of engineering at Bombardier's Systems Division and the Centre of Competence. "We will also work with the university to explore creation of a master's level degree program in transportation systems," said Ponte, who pointed out that the new collaboration will enable Bombardier's global workforce to feed real-time information to researchers about operating conditions and performance dynamics from various parts of the world.

A world-leading manufacturer of innovative transportation solutions from commercial aircraft and business jets to rail transportation systems and equipment, this new collaboration with Carnegie Mellon also will help us to provide a path for students to enter the rail industry with skill sets and collaborative experience geared toward the future, according to Ponte.

The world's trillion-dollar network of rails, roads, bridges, water distribution systems and power networks have varying amounts of automated management and monitoring, but the new Carnegie Mellon/Bombardier collaboration will improve these critical emerging technologies and train a new generation of employees to design and operate them.

Article Courtesy of PR Newswire

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Here Come the Toybots! Bossa Nova Launches in Pittsburgh

The region was selected as the test market for the official U.S. sale of Penbo, the cute dewy-eyed robot that waddles, sings, has a magic heart and lays an egg. Penbo is available at select Toys R Us locations for $59.99 from now through June 27 as long as supplies last.

It will be available at major retail and consumer electronic outlets in August and anyone can sign up on the i-loverobots website to win one or find more information.

"Our goal is to increase the awareness of Penbo and have a good showing in this test market," says David Palmer, co-founder and COO. "We'll also be running ads on TV so we can see how parents and children respond to it."

A Carnegie Mellon spinout, Bossa Nova launched two intelligent, interactive robotic toys in Europe last year, Penbo and Prime-8, a fast-moving gorilla with swinging arms; both were sellouts overseas. A third toy, a speedy dinosaur named Blazor, will also be released this year at a lower price point, Palmer says.

Both bots were sold on QVC for a brief spell last year. The toymakers hope the battery-operated bots will generate an interest in science and technology at a young age.

"Pittsburgh was viewed as a representative middle market city," says Palmer. "Plus it's our homebase and we can work with local groups to promote it. We always felt we had something unique and different, but the real test is the market."

This Saturday Penbo will be at the Carnegie Science Center where children can see it firsthand and play with it.

Article Courtesy of Pop City

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

ChargeCar - Steel City Project Puts Electric Cars in Charge of the Commute

For the team at Carnegie Mellon University, which is designing cars to get residents to work without burning a pint of gas or even wasting an electron, the future of electric cars is Pittsburgh.

Designers of the ChargeCar project say that instead of selling pricey new vehicles, they want to create a kit that makes it easy for local auto shops like Wichrowski's to convert a gasoline car to run on electricity.

"There's a bunch of machine shops running idle in Pittsburgh," said Illah Nourbakhsh, a robotics professor at CMU and a co-director of ChargeCar. "There's a ton of shops that can do that kind of thing. There's mechanical know-how in this town like no other that I've seen."

Electric-car conversions have been available for decades, whether through small, independent companies or engineers tinkering in their garages. But ChargeCar is likely the first effort to gut a gasoline car and redesign it for a single purpose: the perfect commute.

When Nourbakhsh and his colleagues looked at how Pittsburghers drive, they found that most trips are about half a dozen miles. Some zoom along the highway, while others plod past stop signs and red lights. Some drive on flat roads; others climb or coast down the city's hilly terrain.

The team reckoned a battery, combined with a gadget called a supercapacitor and controlled by software, could make most of these miles electric-powered, at a price Pittsburghers could afford.

Fiddling and fact-finding

ChargeCar's latest projects sit in a former gas station across the street from Carnegie Mellon. One is a 2006 Honda Civic: Over the next month, the team will convert it into a short-range, all-electric car. Wichrowski's mechanic will lend a hand and advise on how to make such conversions as simple as possible for other auto repairers in Pittsburgh.

The other car in the garage feels more like an airplane. From the outside, it looks like a common Scion xB; surrounding the cockpit, though, are scores of dials and gauges.

The car is an experiment.

As Nourbakhsh pulls onto the road, he points to wobbling needles and flashing numbers on the computer screen. This car is powered by a battery and a supercapacitor, and these gauges are constantly crunching numbers: how much juice is left, how much power is flowing, how hot the battery is.

He switches between using the supercapacitor and the battery. He tries each one on hills, up and down. When he slows at a red light, he can choose which device he wants to charge up.

As the professor fiddles, the team is learning important facts about the most efficient way to power an electric car.

The reason has to do with how batteries work -- and a major technical challenge for automakers.

Custom-designed batteries?

Batteries are good at storing energy, but they degrade if they have to take on, or release, too much power too quickly. To deal with that degradation, automakers stuff cars with larger batteries, but that adds cost and weight.

Unlike batteries, supercapacitors are built for abuse: They can take a huge charge and discharge, thousands of times, without losing a step.

They're not so good at holding a charge, Nourbakhsh says, so the team decided to pair one with a battery.

Those Pittsburgh hills and traffic lights? They become energy savers.

"When you're stopping, all the current gets dumped into the capacitor, therefore saving the energy so that you can reuse it, rather than going into the battery, because putting it into the battery costs battery life," he says.

As the argument goes, if one knows exactly how someone drives, it's possible to come up with the perfect-size battery and supercapacitor for that driver.

A $10,000 price tag

Nourbakhsh and his team are at work on a computer program that can predict where a driver speeds up, hits traffic and pauses for doughnuts -- all to make a battery system that's the perfect size.

Over time, this program could even learn more about the driver, firing up the capacitor or battery at precisely the right times to get her to work.

Nourbakhsh says a regular battery may cost $8,000, but adding a $1,000 capacitor to handle the sudden charges means the battery doesn't need to be as big, so the combo may cost only $2,000.

The total price of conversion? ChargeCar is targeting a $10,000 tag.

Article Courtesy of NYTimes

Monday, May 24, 2010

State of Florida Adopts Carnegie Learning Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II

The Florida Department of Education has adopted Carnegie Learning® Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II Textbooks and ancillary software as core mathematics instructional materials for use in Florida school districts through June 2016.

Carnegie Learning® Florida Edition Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II textbooks provide content customized to support the rigorous Next Generation Sunshine State Standards. The pedagogy of Carnegie Learning’s research-based textbooks focuses on structuring a collaborative environment, engaging students, fostering communication, and promoting critical thinking and problem solving.

“Carnegie Learning has a long history of strong results in Florida, including the Miami-Dade County Public Schools and various charter schools,” said Dennis Ciccone, chief executive officer of Carnegie Learning, Inc. “It is gratifying to receive the Florida Department of Education’s assessment that our programs are appropriate and desirable for use in districts throughout the state.”

In 2008, data from four Miami-Dade charter high schools implementing three years of Carnegie Learning solutions as their exclusive math curriculum indicated that students in schools using Carnegie Learning programs scored higher on the math portion of the FCAT than students in schools in the County with comparable demographics. Schools implementing Carnegie Learning® Math Curricula for three consecutive years showed more pronounced improvement, indicating that implementations improve over time.

Carnegie Learning® Math Curricula are aligned to all state and most district standards and to the five content strands of the standards set by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Carnegie Learning® Math Curricula are adopted in 15 states: Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.

Carnegie Learning® Florida Edition Textbooks and software are available for immediate purchase. For information, contactedsales@carnegielearning.comor 888-851-7094 X116.

Article Courtesy of Carnegie Learning

Monday, May 10, 2010

New Training Game Makes Anti-Phishing Education Fun and Effective

Today, Wombat Security Technologies announced the release of Anti-Phishing Phyllis, a fun and effective training game to teach employees and customers how to spot fraudulent emails. Phyllis builds on the success of Wombat’s Anti-Phishing Phil game, which trains people to recognize fraudulent URLs. Wombat’s unique approach to cyber security training in the form of engaging games builds on learning science principles and has been featured inScientific Americanfor its novelty and effectiveness. With its training solutions now licensed for use by millions of users around the world, Wombat security has established itself as a global leader in the fight against online scams.

With Anti-Phishing Phyllis, we now have a complete line of products to help government and private sector organizations combat phishing attacks,” said Dr. Norman Sadeh, co-founder and CEO of Wombat Security Technologies. “With these attacks on the rise, Anti-Phishing Phil and Anti-Phishing Phyllis are training games that every employee and customer should play.”

In the Anti-Phishing Phyllis training game, users help a fun fish character named Phyllis teach her school of fish how to avoid phishing traps in fraudulent emails. Traps covered in the game include fake links, malicious attachments, cash prizes, “respond-to” emails asking for sensitive information and much more. Users are given a limited amount of time to analyze each email and spot traps. As they play the game, they are given feedback on the phishing traps they miss and learn to better protect themselves. The game comes with an extensive collection of randomized legitimate and fraudulent emails, so users can play the game multiple times without seeing the same messages. In just a little over 10 minutes, users proceed through a succession of three rounds, with each round introducing new tips and teaching them how to fend off dangerous email attacks.

Phyllis has been built to support easy deployment and customization. Training emails can also be customized to reflect the types of phishing attacks an organization’s employees or customers are most likely to receive.These emails may pretend to be from the IT department asking for verification of employees’ passwords, a co-worker tempting them to download a picture of an animated singing hamster, or perhaps the IRS asking for their account information to issue a tax refund.

With Anti-Phishing Phyllis, users learn to verify the information presented to them, rather than trust easily forged email features such as logos or URLs to decide if the message is fraudulent or not,” said Dr. Jason Hong, Wombat’s co-founder and CTO. “Our games are not just effective, but also have a minimal impact on an employee’s productivity.Just like Anti-Phishing Phil, the Phyllis game can be played as often as you like from the convenience of a laptop or desktop computer,” said Hong.

Article Courtesy of Wombat Security Technologies

Friday, May 7, 2010

Startup Zipano sells privacy software to control who can find you

Ziv Baum often uses the term "space" as a synonym for "market"; he says that mobile technology is "the space that I live in."

The space you're in - and who knows you're there - has been Mr. Baum's specialty since he co-founded Zipano Technologies one year ago as a project looking to make on-the-go Internet users more comfortable with sharing their location.

Now, the South Side company is on the verge of securing major contracts as location-based social media networks grow in popularity - and privacy concerns rise with them.

Location-based networks such as FourSquare or Google Latitude allow users to "check in" and let friends know when they're at a certain place, sort of like Facebook with GPS.

Zipano specializes in privacy software that customizes who can find your location and when they can see it. For example: Maybe some friends can find you only when you're at Point State Park, or colleagues can see your location only during work hours on a Wednesday afternoon.

Zipano software also lets you check to see who has looked up your location and whether the request was denied. When such customizing is offered, user activity doubles - a major selling point for this company as location-based networks see clientele expand from easygoing early adopters to a more skeptical general public.

Already, the FourSquare site has seen opposition in the form of PleaseRobMe.com, a website that publishes when a user "checks in" somewhere and presumably leaves his home susceptible to thieves.

Mr. Baum's response to that site?

"Great," he said.

After serving a stint in the Israeli army and earning a degree in computer science, Mr. Baum headed to Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business three years ago, choosing a prestigious program in an unknown city.

"It's not the America you want to find when you come to America," he said.

Pittsburgh didn't offer the famous landmarks of New York or the cinematic glamour of Los Angeles, and Mr. Baum thought he'd leave after school and "get a job at the Googles or the Microsofts of the world."

But at Carnegie Mellon, Mr. Baum took a class with Norman Sadeh, a professor in the school of computer science. As a research tool, they developed a Facebook application called Locaccino.

The Locaccino app is added to Facebook profiles and allows users to locate friends using a computer or cell phone's internal GPS system - but only after completing a personalized survey that establishes strict user preferences.

Dr. Sadeh said the Zipano technology was designed for everyday, harmless scenarios - like the mother checking to see if her son has left school, or the student trying to find a study group.

"People tend to get many phone calls, and many of these calls are just 'Where are you?'" said Dr. Sadeh.

Locaccino has been downloaded by more than 10,000 users, and a Google Android phone version had more than 1,000 users in its first month.

But it wasn't making any money.

Following a trend becoming more common at Pittsburgh's incubating universities, the two decided to commercialize their research.

Zipano was formed in April 2009 with funding from Carnegie Mellon and Innovation Works, the South Side nonprofit venture capital firm.

Zipano specializes in software development, and Mr. Baum describes his product as "sitting" atop the location-based network as a self-regulated censor or guard - as though the cell phone company bought the house but Zipano installed the locks.

Regulating who can find your location keeps stalker concerns at bay but also helps manage the personas we create for different groups, said C. Matthew Curtin, co-author of "Developing Trust: Online Privacy and Security."

Mr. Curtin said the critical concern with online privacy was keeping your social circles - work, family, friends - separate.

Products like Zipano's "make a lot of sense for being able to try and assert some of that control over how you manage information about you," he said.

The Zipano software isn't a "one size fits all" model, which means the company can seek contracts with various industries - from popular websites to GPS manufacturers to cell phone carriers.

Mr. Baum heads the company full time, and Dr. Sadeh's official title is chairman and chief scientist.

He described himself as more of a consigliere to the young company, helping with business strategy and access to his Rolodex.

The company expects a contract to be secured with a major European carrier within two to three months, and also is in talks with a domestic GPS manufacturer.

Mr. Baum said Zipano could charge providers for every user who signs up, or charge every time a location request is processed through a Zipano server. The company also is considering licensing its technology and selling it to major carriers for further development.

As a young company, Zipano is preparing test runs with potential clients who want to make sure the technology scales well and can accommodate an audience that numbers in the millions.

"The proof is in the pudding," said Dr. Sadeh. "And we believe our pudding tastes pretty good."

It's too early to speculate on Zipano's long-term future, he said, such as whether the company will expand or seek acquisition from the Googles or Microsofts of the world.

But like for any young startup, it doesn't take much for Zipano to dream big.

Zipano wants to tailor its user settings to other location-tracking applications, such as a program that lets you choose when you see certain ads.

You could walk right by the Gap and - buzz - your phone lights up with a 20 percent off denim coupon.

Mr. Baum also sees possibilities in sharing your personal calendar with select people, or even customizing who can see your medical records as those move online.

Helping to prepare all of this are four part-time employees: three developers and a business manager. True to form, two are in Pittsburgh, one is in Boston and another works in Miami.

And you can check on that.

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

The First Gigapanorama of Pittsburgh

Behold! It's a vista that no one has ever seen, even though it has been here for 40 years.

Yes, that's the new ConSol Energy Center on both the right and left ends of the picture. In between is Pittsburgh's entire circle on Earth.

This first Pittsburgh Gigapanoramais an interactive, 360-degree portrait of southwest Pennsylvania as seen from the roof of the U. S. Steel Tower. Assembled from over 4000 individual pictures taken on the morning of October 19, 2009, this photograph contains 31.3 gigabytes (10.5 gigapixels) of information, ranking it among the largest digital images ever created. What you see online is a small window onto the overall image, just like the Gigabanner which measures 48 inches high by 23 feet long. Yes, that's feet. In truth, if this image could be displayed in its full glory, the dimensions would be 50 feet by 285 feet long, far bigger than any screen could accommodate.

What you see on-line is a much reduced version of the total image, as is the printed Gigabanner which is 48 inches high by 23 feet long. If this image could be displayed in its full glory, its dimensions would be 50 feet high by 285 feet long, far bigger than any screen could accommodate!

While only a fraction of the full image, this virtual version has some amazing advantages. Yes, that's The Point in the foreground, but try zooming in on any distant point, for example up the Monongahela to the horizon. We think that might be Laurel Ridge out there to the East, silhouetted by the rising sun.

As vast as its vistas and impressive its vital statistics are, how this image came to be is equally interesting.

The story starts with a standout structure.

Rising 841 above Grant Street, the one-acre rooftop of the U. S. Steel Tower is both the high center point in a broad circumference of southwestern Pennsylvania and the largest, highest space on top of any building on Earth!

Its flat rooftop is so large, that even though a few people have been up there for a variety of reasons since the building opened in August of 1970, no one has ever had this complete, 360-degree view that includes so much of the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela River valleys in a single glance.

Nor have they been able to focus in on sights as detailed, distinct and distant as the airport and the Cathedral of Learning.

The High Point Park Investigation
The Pittsburgh Gigapanorama is one outgrowth of an idea that began three years ago, during my tenure as Post-Gazette travel editor.

Looking at a satellite image of downtown Pittsburgh, I noticed that the U. S. Steel Tower closely mimics the Point in both outline and orientation. Realizing the roof also measured an acre, I began to wonder what use could be made of that flat, empty area.

That question started a process that led me to The STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a center for experimental enterprises across academic disciplines at Carnegie Mellon University. I was invited to explore realistic options for transforming this singular platform into a high-visibility, publicly accessible, sustainable facility we now call High Point Park.

Initial analysis indicates such a facility could become an important civic asset, a unique, downtown first-day attraction that could earn a regional, national, even international reputation for the Pittsburgh area as a leader in green innovation and foster a reevaluation of the uses of high rooftops everywhere.

The project has already received letters of support from VisitPittsburgh.com and The Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy and more recently, financial support from the Heinz Endowments and The Sprout Fund.

More importantly, the Investigation has engaged myriad creative minds in the Carnegie Mellon Universe. The past January, more than 350 CMU architecture and business students took part in competitions to imagine the creation of a publicly-accessible, sustainable facility on the U. S. Steel Tower's roof. On Earth Day, we will be previewing "The Roof of the World"an independently produced documentary video shot during those competitions.

Creating the Pittsburgh Gigapanorama
In a very real sense, this vista captures the essence of the Investigation, the incomparable view available from the rooftop that towers over any other point of perspective.

For the uninitiated, a Gigapan is a photographic system developed at CMU for NASA's Mars Rover program for the shooting, processing, and presentation of large composite digital images.

A camera is attached to a robotic mount that rotates horizontally and vertically, automatically snapping a picture at preset stops to create a matrix of images, which are then "stitched" by a computer into a single picture. As the inexpensive, easily available technology spreads, thousands of images are being archived on at www.gigapan.org. Numerous magnificent Gigapans of the Golden Triangle have already been produced from the usual vantage points, such as Mount Washington and the West End Overlook.

However, producing this 360-degree image involved special challenges presented by trying to capture such an encompassing sweep. While even greater Gigapixel photos have been created, all are single files. This is the only one that involved the melding and extensive photo-processing of four such large files.

In addition to getting access to the building's roof, it meant having to take separate Gigapans facing in different directions, then figuring out how to adjust the resulting files for differing illumination and angles, and finally how to photographically join them together. While these might be relatively simple manipulations in Photoshop, these huge files overwhelmed even the most powerful computers and the standard software they run. The vertical banding that is most evident in the sky is a consequence of having to cut the images into right byte-sized vertical strips so they could be processed.

Shooting and producing this first Pittsburgh Gigapanorama required nearly six months of involvement, expertise, dedication, and innovation from many talented volunteers. We all learned so much in the process.

The closer you get, the more you can see
What can you find in the Gigapanorama? In addition to familiar landmarks and personal places, close examination will reveal so many details it's easy to get lost in the landscape and sky. For example, can you find the plane approaching the airport?

If you do spot something special, it's easy and free to register on the site and take snapshots. You can even write a few lines about what it means to you. We'll be gathering suggestions into a YouTube video tour of the Gigapanorama that will be produced and posted in the coming months.

Yet inevitably, such a vast and complex image also contains myriad anomalies, mostly from processing limitations and the stretching and parallax distortions that result from trying to puzzle so many crazy pieces together again.
And as dramatic as this image is, it is only a first effort, replete with all its flaws. We have learned a lot and are already considering how both the process and the product can be improved for the second edition.

We believe urban portraits like this one have a bright future, and we hope to let everyone know when we go up to shoot the next Pittsburgh Gigapanorama. That way, anyone who can see the U. S. Steel Tower from where they are can stand outside and wave, "Hello, World."

For more about the Pittsburgh Gigapanorama and or purchasing a printed, more poster-sized version of the image, visitwww.highpointpark.org

Article Courtesy of Pop City Media

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Start your thrusters, Astrobotic Technology is delivering to the moon

Need to get a payload to the moon?Astrobotic Technology Inc.is delivering.

The Carnegie Mellon spinoff is on track to land the world's first privately-funded lunar robot on the moon, a feat that it hopes will capture the $20 millionGoogle Lunar X Prizein 2012. To get there, the company is purchasing the Falcon 9, a reliable, larger and less expensive launcher made by SpaceX, a company founded by Elon Musk, the Henry Ford of future space travel.

The Falcon 9 will give Astrobotic shipping space, says David Gump, president. "This is really a race for contracts and money. This is a great revenue source for us."

So far the company has raised $3 million of the $60 million cost of the venture. Astrobotic is offering the space to technologists, academic researchers and marketers for $700,000 per pound plus a $250,000 fee per payload. The first company to reserve space is Houston-based Celestis Inc., which operates a space burial service for cremated remains.

Astrobotic, with 20 to 25 full- and part-time employees, has also landed several contracts with NASA. The company hopes to continue charting robotic missions to the moon long after the "Tranquility Trek."

The lightweight excavation robots, currently in development, will play a key role in later missions, prospecting for water ice at the Moon's poles and seeking out volcanic caves as low-cost shelters for both robots and astronauts so future researchers can "live off the land" rather than haul supplies from the Earth, which is very expensive.

"We keep close tabs on our competitors. We're confident that we've got an approach that will turn into a long term business," says Gump.

Article Courtesy of Pop City Media

Monday, April 19, 2010

RE2, Inc. to Design a Modular Intelligent Manipulation System for the U.S. Army

RE2, Inc., a leading developer of modular manipulation systems, announced today that it has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to research and design a Modular Intelligent Manipulation system with Intuitive Control (MIMIC) for the U.S. Army’s Tank and Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC).

RE2’s proposed innovative design is expected to significantly increase the effectiveness of robotic manipulators on unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) by giving the robot operator the sensation that his or her arm is actually manipulating an object. As the operator moves his or her hand, the robot arm will mimic the operator’s arm/hand movements. As resistance is experienced at the end-effector, the operator will “feel” that resistance on his or her own hand. MIMIC’s intuitive control system, coupled with RE2’s dexterous end-effector solutions, will enable more advanced manipulation capabilities, such as using common hand tools or cutting wires.

“The comprehensive approach that we’ve proposed for MIMIC is well-suited for integration onto next-generation robotic systems. Additionally, the modularity and interoperability of MIMIC allow it to be integrated onto currently fielded UGVs as an upgrade kit, providing a low-cost, improved teleoperation solution for the existing fleet of fielded robots,” stated Jorgen Pedersen, president and CEO of RE2, Inc.

During the six-month Phase I SBIR, RE2 will conduct research to determine viable and intuitive control methods and devices to manipulate robotic arms. RE2 will also design a dexterous end-effector with force feedback and conduct a camera study to ensure that the system will have improved visual feedback over existing manipulation systems.

Article Courtesy of Re2

Monday, April 19, 2010

Carnegie Learning® Geometry Second Edition Delivers Conceptual Understanding, Differentiated Instruction

The K12 education industry’s leading research-based math publisher introduces Carnegie Learning® Geometry Second Edition Textbooks and Cognitive Tutor® Software this week at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Annual Meeting in San Diego. Carnegie Learning® Geometry Second Edition is designed to strengthen students’ conceptual understanding of geometric concepts in preparation for higher-level math courses.

This revised edition of Carnegie Learning’s current Geometry program offers a new set of software enhancements including a proof tool and interactive diagrams, as well as content aligned with the van Hiele model of how children learn geometry. Consistent with the Carnegie Learning pedagogy of differentiated instruction and individualized learning, these tools help students visualize geometric concepts in both the textbook and software through hands-on activities. Cognitive Tutor® Geometry Software allows students to progress at their own pace and experience the math through multiple representations including symbolic, visual, and real-world contexts, all with immediate feedback and individualized tutored help as they learn and master critical skills.

“I am frequently asked whether geometry has changed enough to warrant writing a new book," said Jaclyn Baker Snyder, a member of the authoring team and an education researcher and frequent national speaker on closing the student achievement gap, cognitive science research, and artificial intelligence in education. “Over time, geometry hasn't changed but research and access to technology has. We know much more about how people think and make decisions, so we can better communicate the relevancy of math to our students. By asking high-level questions, offering stronger tools, and requiring students to do the math, concepts that were once abstract become meaningful, logical, intuitive, and less of a mystery."

Carnegie Learning Geometry solutions can be flexibly implemented to support a variety of key academic programs within and outside of the regular school day, including core and supplemental instruction plans. Carnegie Learning® Geometry Textbooks are adopted in eleven states: Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia.

Carnegie Learning® Geometry Second Edition Textbooks and Cognitive Tutor® Geometry Software are available to ship in June.

Article Courtesy of Carnegie Learning

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Tech to put hockey fans in action at Consol Energy Center

Cheers echo through Mellon Arena as Sidney Crosby scores a backhander. But it takes nine seconds for the concourse video screens to catch up with the action.

The experience can leave fans buying a soft pretzel or scouring the halls for Iceburgh the mascot feeling detached from what's happening on the ice.

It won't happen in the new Consol Energy Center. Workers this week were installing the $321 million arena's technological backbone to support a high-speed video network, and 200 WiFi transmitters that will link 800 high-def screens and thousands of hockey fan smartphones.

"There's nowhere that you're going to walk in the arena and feel out of touch," said Chris DeVivo, director of media technology for the Penguins. "You're really connected to everyone in the building."

Locally based companies are equipping the arena with many of its high-tech marvels.

AEC Group of McKeesport won a $2.8 million contract to install the arena's Cisco Systems "data lifeline," which will be completed by August, said Marty Connelly, a managing partner at the 110-employee firm. It's installing the computer servers, routers, Ethernet cables, telephones and touch screens that will run ticket windows, instant replay systems and even the escalators and elevators. The company is setting up the systems for the Penguins executive office, which is relocating to Consol Center, Connelly said.

"It's the same system that's in the Dallas Cowboys stadium," he said. "It's the top of the line."

The WiFi transmitters will expand the number of fans who can use YinzCam, a free smart phone application that allows users to download live video, replays and player info. And an in-house cell phone signal transmitter will ensure strong reception for surfing the Web.

Priya Narasimhan, a Carnegie Mellon University computer engineering professor and creator of YinzCam, expects the new system to handle up to 30 percent of the 18,087-seat arena's capacity.

Narasimhan said there are plans to use the WiFi network in unique ways, including a beacon that could be attached to Iceburgh.

"I have a 3-year-old, and I spend half my life hunting the mascot down. A beacon could show you where he is," she said.

Hockey fans watching the games at home will notice differences as well, DeVivo said.

The Penguins are working on plans to cut two holes on either end of the boards, cover them in Plexiglas and install robotically controlled cameras to get more player close-ups. The Igloo's cameras are forced to almost always shoot down onto players against the white ice.

"The NFL can catch the expressions on the guys' faces on camera," DeVivo said. "That's what we want: to catch the emotion of the game, to put fans right there on the ice."

Article Courtesy of Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Monday, April 12, 2010

Robotics Toy to Teach Computational Thinking about Complex Systems

Modular Robotics is pleased to announce the award of a $486,906 grant from the US National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR Phase II) program, for the project, “Learning About Complexity through Programming Modular Robots”.

Modular Robotics has developed Cubelets, a toy that fosters computational thinking about complex systems. Cubelets is a modular construction kit for learning how local behaviors can produce global effects. The kit is simple to use: Children design and build robots by snapping together blocks. No explicit programming is needed because the robot’s behavior is a direct result of the way the blocks are assembled. What’s unique about Cubelets is that no central “brain” controls the robot; rather, control is distributed throughout its blocks. As children gain sophistication designing robots they can reprogram individual block behaviors using a screen based programming environment on a personal computer or mobile phone. By designing and building complex systems children will experience a variety of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) concepts.

Modular Robotics is a spin-off company founded in 2008 by Carnegie Mellon University professor Mark D Gross and his former PhD student Eric Schweikardt, based on Schweikardt’s doctoral work. The project began under an NSF grant to investigate construction kit toys and craft activities enabled by new computational technologies. The company received seed funding from CMU’s Office of Technology Transfer, as well as an earlier Phase I grant from the National Science Foundation. Modular Robotics intends to release Cubelets in three phases: first to science centers and children’s museums, then to a core community of tech-savvy enthusiasts, and finally to the public through retail channels. The first kits are scheduled to come to market later this year.

Article Courtesy of Modular Robotics

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Adobe Teams up with Conviva for Better Flash Delivery

Adobe is announcing a strategic partnership with Conviva today that aims to improve Flash video streaming through advanced analytics and CDN optimization.

Conviva’s technology works by offering a real-time view into how certain video streams are performing and adjusts those streams as necessary, enabling media companies to balance delivery across multiple CDNs based on cost and performance. As a result, its customers can provide a better user experience at a lower cost than if they just used a single CDN without Conviva’s help. By integrating Adobe’s Flash with the Conviva media control platform, media companies will better be able to support large, highly scalable live and on-demand online video deployments.

The announcement comes just a few months after Conviva named former NBC CTO Darren Feher as its new chief executive. Feher had extensive experience with Conviva during his time at NBC, as the broadcasterused Conviva’s media delivery platformto enhance live and on-demand streaming for a number of sporting events, including the2009 Masters Tournament,Wimbledon,NFL Sunday Night Footballand most recently, the2010 Vancouver Olympic games.

Importantly, however, those events all used Microsoft’s Flash rival Silverlight for video delivery. So improving Flash video could help increase market opportunities for both firms. By collaborating with Adobe, Conviva will be able to offer up an improved experience for Flash, which is used for delivery about about 75 percent of all online video. The integrated solution will work with Adobe’s proprietary RTMP streaming protocol, as well as its HTTP multibitrate streaming solution, and will also support Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) for building video players based on the Flash platform.

Conviva was founded in 2006 and has raised a total of $29 million, including a $20 million funding round in August 2008 that was led by UV Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Foundation Capital.

Article Courtesy of NewTeeVee

Friday, March 26, 2010

Imaging toolbox now filled with a rainbow of fluorescent probes

Fluoromodules, which consist of dye-protein complexes, provide alternatives to common fluorescent proteins, such as Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), but with a wider selection of colors and the potential for significantly greater photostability, which allows scientists to image the dye for longer periods of time. This is made possible by the fact that the dye is noncovalently bound to the protein, which allows fresh dye to replace bleached dye.

"We initially isolated and characterized fluoromodules that generate fluorescence from the fluorogenic dyes thiazole orange and malachite green. We are now expanding our repertoire by synthesizing new dyes that emit in the orange and violet regions of the spectrum, and engineering proteins that bind to the new dyes with great affinity," said Chemistry Professor Bruce Armitage, co-director of theCenter for Nucleic Acid Science and Technologyat Carnegie Mellon and a member of the MBIC team developing the fluoromodules.

Fluoromodules are made of a fluorogen-activating protein (FAP) and a non-fluorescent dye called a fluorogen. The FAP, which is genetically expressed in a cell and tagged to a protein of interest, does not become fluorescent until it binds with its fluorogen. With the novel FAPs and associated fluorogens created by the MBIC team, the researchers can control when a target protein lights up, allowing them to track proteins on the cell surface and within living cells in very simple and direct ways, eliminating cumbersome experimental steps.

Recent advances in the MBIC fluoromodule technology being presented at the ACS meeting include:

Working with a FAP that had a low affinity for the fluorogenic dye dimethlindole red (DIR), graduate student Hayriye Özhalici-Ünal used PCR mutagenesis to introduce mutations into the FAP's genetic sequence. A small number of mutations increased several-fold the protein's affinity for DIR, enabling very specific and selective binding of the FAP to its dye partner (DIR). Özhalici-Ünal will present this work at 9:50 a.m., Thursday, March 25 during the Follow-on Biologics: Protein Engineering session located in room 201 West Bldg. in the Moscone Center.

Graduate student Nathaniel Shank synthesized a modified DIR, making it eight-times more photostable. This significant improvement could have an impact on single molecule imaging. Additionally, the modified DIR emits in the orange range of the spectrum, adding another color to the fluoromodule toolkit being developed at MBIC. Shank will present this work at 8 p.m., Tuesday, March 23 during the Total Synthesis of Complex Molecules, Material Devices & Switches, Physical Organic Chemistry poster session located in Hall D of the Moscone Center.

By synthesizing a new dye and identifying FAPs that bind to it, research chemist Gloria Silva and graduate student Kim Zanotti developed a fluoromodule that emits fluorescence in the violet, which is a welcome addition to a very limited number of probes able to emit in the violet portion of the spectrum. Zanotti will present this work a 6 p.m., Tuesday, March 23 during the poster session located in room 3009/3011 West Bldg. in the Moscone Center.

Article Courtesy of R&D Magazine

Friday, March 26, 2010

CMU researchers aim for the moon by developing lunar roverprobes