Personal Mention

Takeo Kanade, the U.A. and Helen Whitaker Professor of Robotics and Computer Science, has been named the 2017 recipient of the IEEE Founder's Medal, one of IEEE's highest honors. The medal, which will be presented at the annual IEEE Honors Ceremony on Thursday, May 25, in San Francisco, recognizes Kanade "for pioneering and seminal contributions to computer vision and robotics for automotive safety, facial recognition, virtual reality and medical robotics." The Founder's Medal, established in 1952, is presented for outstanding contributions in the leadership, planning and administration of the electrical and electronics engineering profession. Previous winners include Google's Eric Schmidt, Intel's Gordon E. Moore and MIT's Jerome Wiesner. Kanade is the first winner from Carnegie Mellon. Learn more.

School of Computer Science Ph.D. students Anuj Kalia, Kirthevasan Kandasamy and Diyi Yang are among this year's class of Facebook Fellows. Founded in 2010, the Facebook Fellowship program is designed to help foster ties with the academic community, encourage and support promising Ph.D. students engaged in research across computer science and engineering, and provide those students with opportunities to work with Facebook on problems relevant to their research. Since its inception, the program has supported more than 50 Ph.D. candidates, whose research covers topics that range from power systems and microgrids to the intersection of computer vision, machine learning and cognitive science. Facebook Fellows receive full payment for two years of tuition and fees, a stipend of $37,000 each year and up to $5,000 in conference travel support. More than 800 students applied for this year's program, and 13 fellows were selected. Read more about about the 2017 fellows and the Facebook Fellowship program on Facebook Research.

A book titled “Handbook of Collective Intelligence” that includes a chapter co-authored by Anita Williams Woolley, associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at the Tepper School of Business, and Tepper School Ph.D. alumna Ishani Aggarwal, has been selected for inclusion in the Outstanding Academic Title list by Choice Magazine, which appeared in the magazine’s January edition. The book was co-edited by MIT’s Thomas Malone and Stanford’s Michael Bernstein and includes a chapter written by Woolley, Malone and Aggarwal titled “Collective Intelligence in Teams and Organizations.” The chapter reviews frameworks and findings from existing team and organizational performance research to address what components of a team help foster the group’s capability to collaborate and coordinate effectively, otherwise known as collective intelligence. Each year Choice Magazine publishes a list of Outstanding Academic Titles, which reflects the best in scholarly work and provides authors with extraordinary recognition from the academic library community.

The National Science Foundation has awarded Hae Young Noh a $500,000 Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant to study how sensor technology can be used to enable "smart buildings" to locate and identify people and what they are doing through the vibrations of their movements. The project, titled "Structures as sensors: elder activity level monitoring through structural vibrations," aims to use buildings as sensors to pick up vibration waves that pass through the floor when someone takes a step. By examining these waves, Noh said she can figure out how fast someone is moving, how much they weigh and their shoe type. The project focuses primarily on the application of this technology in elder care. Learn more.

Lorrie Cranor from CMU’s CyLab will be attending an event Feb. 15 in Washington, D.C., on behalf of the National Science Foundation. "The Arc of Science: Research to Results" will feature NSF-funded researchers who have made real-world impacts with their discoveries, demonstrating their science with hands-on activities. Attending alongside the researchers are their community partners who have benefitted from and use the research results on a daily basis. Cranor’s community partner is the Federal Trade Commission. Invitees will have the opportunity to speak directly with members of Congress and their staffs.

Rémi Adam van Compernolle, assistant professor of second language acquisition and French & Francophone Studies, has won the 2017 First Book Award from the American Association for Applied Linguistics. "Sociocultural Theory and L2 Instructional Pragmatics" was published by Multilingual Matters and was immediately well received, with one reviewer calling it "remarkable.” Van Compernolle has written two books and numerous journal articles on the subject of second language acquisition. Learn more.