Personal Mention

Raj Reddy, a pioneer in robotics, artificial intelligence and speech recognition, has been inducted as a fellow into the Computer History Museum (CHM), recognizing his lifetime of achievement in computing and technology. Reddy, the Moza Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, was the founding director of CMU’s Robotics Institute and a former dean of the School of Computer Science. He developed the first system capable of recognizing continuous speech, initiated CMU's autonomous vehicle program and created The Universal Digital Library, which now includes more than 1.5 million volumes and book digitization centers in China, India, Egypt and the U.S. On June 24, colleagues and contemporaries paid tribute to Reddy during the CHM’s induction ceremony, titled “Empowering Humanity Through Technology.” Speakers included CMU President Farnam Jahanian, CHM CEO Dan'l Lewin, Tata Chair Natarajan Chandrasekaran; Microsoft AI Azure CTO Xuedong Huang, and AI experts and pioneers Kai-Fu Lee, Yunhe Pan and Ed Feigenbaum. Learn more about Reddy.

Diana Parno, an assistant professor of physics, was awarded a five-year Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Research Award in High Energy Physics to build a neutrino detector that will help to make more accurate measurements of neutrinos, one of the fundamental particles that make up the universe. Neutrino particles rarely interact with other matter, which has made it hard for scientists to study or understand them. The COHERENT Collaboration, working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), was the first to detect and measure one such interaction — the coherent elastic scattering of neutrinos off nuclei. Accurate measurements of this and other interactions could help physicists reveal new information about neutrinos, the dynamics of neutron star formation and supernovae explosions, and dark matter. Parno, a longtime member of the COHERENT Collaboration, will use her Early Career Research Award to build a module for a heavy-water neutrino detector that will precisely count the number of neutrinos that are produced by the SNS. Having an accurate tally will make the measurements from all the COHERENT detectors more precise, significantly improving the accuracy of the collaboration's results. "This award means that we'll be able to tackle the biggest source of error in COHERENT's groundbreaking neutrino measurements," said Parno, who earned her Ph.D. at CMU in 2011. "It also gives us the opportunity to train Carnegie Mellon students in an intriguing type of detector technology. I'm tremendously excited to get to work." Learn more about Parno’s work.  

Stan Waddell has been named Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Year in the Large University Division by the Pittsburgh Technology Council and Greater Pittsburgh CIO Group. “Honoring the accomplishments and contributions of these often-unsung heroes of business is particularly poignant as we look back on a year full of unexpected challenges,” said Tech Council President and CEO Audrey Russo. Waddell was promoted to vice president for information technology and chief information officer at CMU this past January after serving as associate vice president for Computing Services since joining the university in 2019. Under Waddell's leadership, Computing Services was instrumental in the university's ongoing pandemic response, supporting the quick transition of more than 4,900 courses to online learning and engineering creative solutions to support student success. Two-hundred classrooms were equipped with technology to support the hybrid model of education, and Computing Services continues to deliver robust IT infrastructure and capabilities to meet the needs of distance learning and remote work. Waddell joined the university after serving in leading technology roles, including chief information officer, at the University of New Hampshire, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.  Learn more about Waddell and the CIO of the Year awards.