Personal Mention

• PopTech, the global social innovation incubator and thought leadership network, has announced that Adrien Treuille, assistant professor of computer science and robotics, is one of its 10 Science and Public Leadership Fellows for 2011. The yearlong fellows program begins with a leadership retreat at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. The fellows then present their work at the annual PopTech conference, Oct. 19-22, in Camden, Maine. For more information about PopTech and the fellows program, visit the PopTech website and blog.
• Schell Games, the creative video game company founded by Entertainment Technology Center Assistant Professor Jesse Schell, will be developing online content to complement "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood," a new animated television series to debut in fall 2012 on PBS, including Pittsburgh's WQED-TV. The show will originate from the "Neighborhood of Make-Believe," made famous during 33 seasons of "Mister Roger's Neighborhood," the popular children's television show.
• Psychology Professor Brian MacWhinney received the inaugural Roger Brown Award from the International Association for the Study of Child Language at its recent meeting in Montreal. He was honored for his role in the development of the Competition Model, which provides a theoretical and empirical integration of the fields of child language learning and second language acquisition, and for establishing the Child Language Data Exchange System and TalkBank databases. These international databases provide the major source of data on spoken language that has stimulated the new wave of data-driven, usage-based models of language learning. For more on MacWhinney, go to http://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/.
• The American Statistical Association (ASA) announced the winners of its annual awards. Anne-Sophie Charest, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Statistics, was awarded the Edward C. Bryant Scholarship Trust Fund Award. The award honors an outstanding graduate student who is studying survey statistics.