CMU Part of DoE Grant to Clean Up Curbside Emissions

Carnegie Mellon's Metro21: Smart Cities Institute will be working on a project to clean up curbside emissions in busy business districts.

Pittsburgh’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure (DOMI) has announced the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded a three-year, $3.8 million grant to advance zero emissions delivery, study curb use in business districts and implement technologies and policies that accelerate electric vehicle (EV) adoption by commercial fleets. Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Santa Monica were the only three cities awarded the inaugural grant to conduct research and create models that other cities can use. 

The proposal, led by the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator in partnership with the Pittsburgh Parking Authority, Automotus, Carnegie Mellon, DOMI and others, will expand Pittsburgh’s curbside parking pilot. It will deploy around 150 additional “smart loading zone” cameras in areas with high concentrations of vehicle traffic, restaurants and small businesses, starting with Downtown, Lawrenceville and Oakland. The cameras will gather data on the types of activities happening curbside like parcel delivery, food delivery, ride-hailing, patron parking, bus riding or other activities and measure which of these vehicles are electric or combustion engines.  

Newly collected data will be analyzed to see what vehicles are using the curbside for what purpose to determine policies that can enhance the safety and efficiency of parking, traffic flow and incentivize the use of electric vehicles.

Find out more.  

Reminder for All Students: COVID-19 Requirements for Fall

All undergraduate and graduate students are reminded to follow these six important steps this fall.

• Tartan Test On Arrival: Complete 2 Tartan Tests within your first 2 weeks on campus (regardless of vaccination status).
• Complete the Vaccination Process: Upload your vaccination documentation to HealthConnect. If you are not fully vaccinated, register for a free clinic.
• Report Symptoms: Notify University Health Services when experiencing symptoms or when you may have been in close contact with the virus.
• Comply with Contact Tracing: Respond to contact tracing and other related requests as necessary.
• Wear a Facial Covering: Facial coverings are required outdoors when less than six feet from others and indoors at all times except when eating or drinking.
• Six Feet Apart, Please: If you are not fully vaccinated, you must maintain six feet between you and others when eating or drinking.

Read more about A Tartan's Responsibility.

Carnegie Mellon Named Top 10 Employer in Pennsylvania

For the second consecutive year, Carnegie Mellon has been recognized by Forbes as a top employer in Pennsylvania, ranking 8^th in the Commonwealth this year. 

Forbes’ third annual list of America’s Best Employers includes rankings for each state, plus the District of Columbia. The lists were compiled by surveying 80,000 Americans working for businesses with at least 500 employees. Surveys were conducted from October 2020 to June 2021 and were anonymous, allowing participants to freely share their opinions. Surveys considered every aspect of an employees’ experience such as working conditions, salary, potential for growth and diversity.

Carnegie Mellon employs more than 6,300 faculty and staff on its Pittsburgh campus. The Office of Human Resources is committed to making CMU a great place to work, and has received honors and awards for its employee benefits programs and support services.

See Forbes’ top employers in Pennsylvania.

New Algorithm to Revolutionize the Study of Behavior

A new machine learning algorithm developed by Eric Yttri and Alex Hsu, a biological sciences Ph.D. candidate in his lab, makes studying behavior much easier and more accurate. The researchers published a paper on the new tool, B-SOiD (Behavioral segmentation of open field in DeepLabCut), in Nature Communications. 

As a behavioral neuroscientist, Yttri studies what happens in the brain when animals walk, eat, sniff or do any action. This kind of research could help answer questions about neurological diseases or disorders like Parkinson's disease or stroke. But identifying and predicting animal behavior is extremely difficult.

Previously, the standard method to capture animal behavior was to track very simple actions, like whether a trained mouse pressed a lever or whether an animal was eating food or not. Alternatively, the experimenter could spend hours and hours manually identifying behavior, usually frame by frame on a video, a process prone to human error and bias.

Hsu realized he could let an unsupervised learning algorithm do the time-consuming work. B-SOiD discovers behaviors by identifying patterns in the position of an animal's body. The algorithm works with computer vision software and can tell researchers what behavior is happening at every frame in a video.

Yttri said B-SOiD provides a huge improvement and opens up several avenues for new research.

"It removes user bias and, more importantly, removes the time cost and arduous work," he said. "We can accurately process hours of data in a matter of minutes." 

Learn more about B-SOiD. 

You’re Invited to Attend the 9/11 Observance in Shanksville

SLICE is inviting Carnegie Mellon community members to the 9/11 20^th anniversary observance on the Flight 93 Memorial Plaza in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Saturday, September. 11. Transportation and a boxed lunch will be provided. The bus will depart at 8 a.m. from the Margaret Morrison Rotunda at the corner of Margaret Morrison and Tech streets, and return around 1 p.m. The observance in Shanksville will begin at 9:45 a.m. Free tickets can be reserved at CarnegieMellonTickets.com.. Find out more about the observance.

On campus that day, a lone bagpiper will play at the 9/11 Memorial Tree on the Cut. The Memorial Tree was planted in memory of the seven alumni who perished that day. The piper will play at the moments of impact: 8:46 a.m., 9:03 a.m., 9:37 a.m. and 10:03 a.m., marking the times four airliners crashed into the World Trade Center Towers, the Pentagon and an open field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

VentureBridge Showcases 16 CMU Startups, Sept. 15

VentureBridge Demo Day is the culmination of the 12-week summer VentureBridge Accelerator program and is intended to showcase the incredible amount of progress the CMU startups have made. This year, 16 startups are participating in the 2021 cohort. 

The VentureBridge is an initiative of the Swartz Center to help early stage Carnegie Mellon alumni founders develop their startups into fundable seed stage ventures. The cornerstone of the VentureBridge program is the summer accelerator. The summer 2021 cohort was composed of 16 Carnegie Mellon startups across all disciplines and verticals.

See the schedule and meet the summer 2021 cohort.

Care@Work Offers a Backup Child Care Solution

As the school year begins and your family’s schedule changes, you may have concerns about possible gaps in child care, such as during school closures or holidays. Carnegie Mellon can help.

CMU is offering eligible faculty, staff and graduate students access to a unique benefit that can help during these challenging situations.

Care@Work Backup Care provides subsidized in-home or in-center care for when your regular care arrangement is not available. In-home care is $4/hour, in-center care is $10/day per child. You can request Backup Care as much as 90 days in advance or with as little as 24 hours’ notice, making it perfect for either planned or unexpected needs. Eligible individuals have 15 Backup Care days to use during this benefit year (April 22, 2021 – April 21, 2022).

The next time you get a call from your child’s school about a closure or have a gap in your care plan, remember that Care@Work Backup Care can be a great solution. This benefit can provide much-needed peace of mind and support as your family navigates this upcoming school year.  

Visit the Care@Work website to learn more. If you would like personalized assistance with child care or any dependent-care related topic, please reach out to the Family Care Specialists at hrfamilycare@andrew.cmu.edu. 

Swartz Center Seeking Teams for Fall 2021 I-Corps Training Program

The Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship is currently recruiting teams for its fall 2021 NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) customer discovery training program. CMU faculty, staff, students and alumni graduated within the past year are eligible to participate in the program. Teams can be reimbursed up to $3,000 for eligible customer discovery expenses to assess the commercialization potential for their STEM technology. 

Further details on the I-Corps program and eligibility can be found on its website. There have been 195 teams in the program since fall 2014 and they have received more than $66 million in additional funding for their ideas. The deadline for teams to apply is Monday, September 13 at https://bit.ly/fall2021NSF

Learn a New Skill through the University Libraries' Workshops

Have you ever wanted to learn a skill, but haven’t found the time? Interested to learn more about library resources, straight from a librarian? The Libraries' workshops, which are offered by the Libraries each semester on a variety of topics, are designed to help attendees learn a new skill, deepen their understanding of a specific topic, or gain exposure to an unfamiliar technology, tool or technique.

All workshops are available at no charge and are open to Carnegie Mellon students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends. Seating is limited and registration is required.

If you’re not able to attend a specific workshop, but would like to learn more about the topic, please contact University Libraries. Librarians and subject specialists are also available to schedule additional workshops for classes, or facilitate one-on-one meetings.

Explore the workshops calendar.

Who's New at CMU?

Carnegie Mellon welcomes the following new staff members this week.

• Antonio Freiria, WSP Project Administrator, Institute for Politics and Strategy;
• Brittany Eltman, Temporary Employment Service, HR Operations;
• Christopher Morrish, Part-Time Goalkeeper Coach, Men's Soccer, Campus Engagement;
• Michael Puharic, FMS Supervisor/Zone Manager, Fms Operations;
• Ryan Cummings, Assistant Scientist/Engineer, Mechanical Engineering;
• Sage Levy, Temporary Employment Service, HR Operations;
• Rita Caldwell, Financial Assistant - Division of Student Affairs, Dean of Student Affairs; and
• Olivia Cerniglia, Project Coordinator - Dining Services and Student Affairs IT, Campus Engagement.

Did You Know?

In the mid 1990s, Alex Hills, a Distinguished Service Professor of Engineering and Public Policy and Electrical and Computer Engineering and founding director of Carnegie Mellon's Information Networking Institute, began a wireless research initiative that ultimately helped lay the foundation for today's Wi-Fi computing environment.

The university began building the first such network anywhere in 1994, long before the Wi-Fi standard was adopted. It's called "Wireless Andrew,'' named for university benefactors Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon.

Started as a National Science Foundation-funded research network to support Carnegie Mellon's wireless research initiative, Wireless Andrew originally provided coverage in seven campus buildings. It was expanded in 1999 to serve all 65 residential, academic and administrative buildings on the campus — covering approximately 3 million square feet as well as outside areas.

"What was the vision of information networking in 1989 is actually a reality in today's world," Hills said.