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October 30, 2019

Personal Mention

Anita Williams Woolley is the lead investigator of an interdisciplinary CMU team that has received a $2.8 million DARPA grant to explore how AI can help humans work together better. Woolley, an associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at the Tepper School of Business, believes the award is an important achievement not only for her and her co-investigators, but also for Carnegie Mellon. "As leaders in both teams research and technology, it's an important acknowledgement of the role we have played and continue to play in pushing the frontiers of these disciplines," she said. The research team includes Cleotilde Gonzalez, a research professor in the Dietrich College, and Henny Admoni, an assistant professor at the Robotics Institute. The researchers will study team collective intelligence and the theory of mind involving human and machine interactions. Team collective intelligence relates to the ability of a team to work together across a range of tasks. Theory of the mind explores how a person can understand what others are thinking, and how they may react to something, based on subtle nonverbal cues. Find out more.

portrait of Shawn BrownShawn Brown has been selected as the next director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint research center of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Brown, whose work uses high performance computing, informatics and computational modeling to advance research in scientific fields, including neuroscience and public health, will join the PSC on Nov. 27. Brown joins the PSC from McGill University in Montreal, where he served as chief technology officer of the Neurohub Project and associate director of research software development at the McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience. While at McGill, he led the development of the infrastructure of two large-scale platforms, Neurohub and CBRAIN, which use high performance computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze diverse datasets to advance neuroscience and mental health research. This marks Brown's second stop at the PSC, having previously served as director of public health applications. While at the PSC from 2005-2017, he developed six computational platforms for public health research and published research on obesity prevention, infectious disease and vaccine strategies. Find out more

portrait of Ricky LawA new book authored by Associate History Professor Ricky Law, “Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations,” examines the partnership between Nazi Germany and Japan that culminated in the Tokyo-Berlin Axis. The study of interwar German-Japanese relations offers an incisive look at how the seemingly narrow Nazi ideology gained broad prominence and popularity beyond its obvious core demographics. The book explains interwar German-Japanese rapprochement from ideological and cultural perspectives and the role of the national media in both countries. Law will host a symposium at 4 p.m., Friday, Nov. 1 in the Baker Hall Adamson Wing (136A) to discuss the book. Sheldon Garon of Princeton University and John Eicher of Penn State Altoona will offer comments. Law has received grants and fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Japan Foundation and the Royster Society of Fellows. Find out more.