Personal Mention

Chadi Aoun, associate teaching professor of information systems, received the Meritorious Teaching Award at Carnegie Mellon in Qatar during the graduation ceremony for the Class of 2018. Aoun, who joined the CMU-Q campus in 2015, is an internationally recognized expert in sustainability and green information systems. He has been a co-organizer for two multidisciplinary academic trips in which students explored sustainable living in Sydney, Australia, and Singapore. Aoun holds a Ph.D. in information systems from the University of New South Wales, along with academic qualifications in business, education and environmental science. Before coming to CMU-Q, he held academic positions at the University of Technology Sydney, Macquarie University and the University of Sydney.

Diana Marculescu, professor and associate department head for Academic Affairs in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is discovering efficient and accurate ways to run machine learning applications on mobile devices instead of relying solely on the cloud. Most machine learning applications require computing power, data storage and runtime costs that don't allow for easy computing on a mobile device. Marculescu studies the energy efficiency of neural networks, or a type of machine learning where the configuration consists of many densely interconnected nodes. A neural network learns to perform a function, such as classifying images, by identifying correlations within a set of training data. "Many people are looking at ways to represent everything that happens in neural networks, in terms of computation, with fewer precision bits," Marculescu said. "If you quantize the values, rather than use continuous values, you don't lose a lot of precision or accuracy in the results, but save runtime, storage and improve energy efficiency. Storage efficiency is a big deal because all of these applications require massive amounts of data," she said. Find out more.

Sharon Carver, director of the Children’s School, is featured on the cover of the current issue of Exchange, an early childhood education magazine. Carver wrote the cover story, “Campus Learning Laboratory,” in which she outlined the school’s 50-year history, and what makes it a gem on Carnegie Mellon’s campus, in Pittsburgh and for researchers and students worldwide. Carver's research bridges the domains of cognitive development and educational psychology. Her primary interests involve combining cognitive task analysis, instructional design based on cognitive principles, and focused assessment to explore how children's progress can be enhanced to promote deep learning and broad transfer. Find out more. 

Mathematical Sciences’ student April Li is the recipient of this year’s Dr. J. Paul Fugassi and Linda E. Monteverde Award, which recognizes the graduating female in the Mellon College of Science with the greatest academic achievement and professional promise. Li is part of the Department of Mathematical Sciences’ Computational Finance program. She is a dedicated student leader who has enriched the experiences and opportunities for students in the program and across campus through her passion for computational finance. In 2016, Li co-founded the Quant Club, which has been an invaluable resource for students interested in quantitative finance. Li also is president of the Sales and Trading Academy at Carnegie Mellon, and she is a member of the Mortar Board Society of Scholars. This past April, she helped organize and was a panelist in the Department of Mathematical Sciences' inaugural “Women and Mathematics at CMU Conference," which included a mini-course on connections between partial differential equations and mathematical finance. Find out more.