Zooming technique makes text entry possible on smartwatches

ANNOUNCEMENTS

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will provide up to $1.6 million to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the University of Notre Dame to develop computers and software for a Vector Ecology and Control Network, part of its global malaria eradication project.

Lenore Blum, professor of computer science, and Project Olympus are featured as the Kauffman Foundation launches its ID8 series, which explores the entrepreneurial ecosystems of U.S. cities. Pittsburgh is the first of eight cities profiled in articles and videos.

Illah Nourbakhsh, professor of robotics and a developer of GigaPan, is one of five agents chosen to explore the rapidly changing field of photography in the Carnegie Museum of Arts' new Hillman Photography Initiative.

PhD alumnus Tom Murphy's submission to this year's SIGBOVIK—essentially a robot for playing Super Mario Brothers on the classic 8-bit Nintendo system—has caught the attention of such news sites as TechCrunch and Wired UK.

The winners of the 2012 Turing Award, MIT's Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali, have significant ties to Carnegie Mellon. Both earned doctorates in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where each was advised by Manuel Blum, now a CMU professor of computer science and himself a Turing laureate. Micali has been frequent lecturer here and maintains close ties to the ALADDIN/Theory Group. Goldwasser earned her bachelor degree in mathematics at CMU in 1979.

New Faculty Interview

You probably know that our new head of the Computer Science Department, Frank Pfenning, is a renowned computer scientist and an accomplished squash player but guess what he might have been if he hadn't become a computer science professor? Read our latest faculty interview with Frank.

Latest PUZZLE! to tickle the grey cells... The Puzzle Toad brings you Puzzle No. 38: "Crush the Rebellion". Check solution to Puzzle No. 37 along with other puzzles and their solutions!

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cs.cmu.edu

John C. Reynolds, 1935-2013
John C. Reynolds, a long-time Computer Science Department professor known for his incisive work on the logical foundations of programs and programming languages and for his mentoring of students and junior faculty members, died April 28 of cancer and congestive heart disease. Read More

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Develop Zooming Technique For Entering Text Into Smartwatches, Ultra-small Computers
Technology blogs have been abuzz that smartwatches may soon be on their way from companies such as Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft. But as capable as these ultra-small computers may be, how will users enter an address, a name, or a search term into them? Read More

Engaging Online Crowds in the Classroom Could Be Important Tool for Teaching Innovation
Online crowds can be an important tool for teaching the ins and outs of innovation, educators at Carnegie Mellon University and Northwestern University say, even when the quality of the feedback provided by online sources doesn't always match the quantity. Read More

NREC's Robotic Paint-stripping System Is Edison Award Winner
A robotic paint-stripping system being developed by Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center and Concurrent Technologies Corporation of Johnstown, Pa., was named a Gold winner in the materials science category of the 2013 Edison Awards, announced April 25 at an awards ceremony in Chicago. Read More

Robotics Grad Student Competes on Discovery Channel's "Big Brain Theory"
It was mid-October, the first day of filming for Discovery's new reality show, "Big Brain Theory: Pure Genius," and Eric Whitman and his fellow contestants were standing in a California desert, not sure what to expect. Read More

With Wave of the Hand, Carnegie Mellon Researchers Create Touch-based Interfaces on Everyday Surfaces
Researchers previously have shown that a depth camera system, such as Kinect, can be combined with a projector to turn almost any surface into a touchscreen. But now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated how these touch-based interfaces can be created almost at will, with the wave of a hand. Read More

David Notkin (SCS '84) Passes Away
David Notkin, a University of Washington professor of computer science and engineering who earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in 1984, died April 22 at the age of 58. Read More

Silly Phone Game Puts Illiterate Pakistanis In Touch With Potential Employers
A silly telephone game that became a viral phenomenon in Pakistan has demonstrated some serious potential for teaching poorly educated people about automated voice services and provided a new tool for them to learn about jobs, say researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Pakistan's Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Read More

Oracle and Curriki Release Curriculum for Alice
The Oracle Academy, an educational initiative of Oracle, and Curriki, a non-profit, global community for sharing educational resources, are working to make a curriculum for Carnegie Mellon University’s Alice software widely available to secondary school teachers and students. Read More

Aarti Singh Receives NSF CAREER Award
Aarti Singh, assistant professor of machine learning, has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation to develop computationally efficient and principled methods of extracting clusters and graphs from "big and dirty" data sets. Read More

Technique Finds Software Bugs in Surgical Robots And Helps Developers Fix Flaws, Ensure Safety
Surgical robots could make some types of surgery safer and more effective, but proving that the software controlling these machines works as intended is problematic. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory have demonstrated that methods for reliably detecting software bugs and ultimately verifying software safety can be applied successfully to this breed of robot. Read More

McGinnis Venture Competition Spotlights Student Innovations at Carnegie Mellon
Two of the three companies receiving top honors in the 2013 McGinnis Venture Competition are led by School of Computer Science students and all three companies received early support from SCS's Project Olympus. Read More

Carnegie Mellon Student Startup Places Payments at Users' Fingertips
It may take two to tango, but payments now are as easy as one touch. Four Carnegie Mellon University seniors tired of digging through backpacks, pockets and purses for their student identification and debit cards have developed PayTango, a fingerprint-based identification and payment system. Read More

Cranshaw, Shun Named Facebook Graduate Fellows
Justin Cranshaw, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Institute for Software Research's Computation, Organizations and Society program, and Julian Shun, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department (CSD), are among a dozen Facebook Graduate Fellowship winners for 2013-2014. Four CMU students were finalists. Read More

Girls of Steel Qualify for FIRST® Championship
The Girls of Steel, a robotics team composed of high-school-age girls, and the team's robot, E.V.E., competed at the Pittsburgh Regional FIRST® Robotics Competition, March 14-16, at the University of Pittsburgh's Petersen Events Center. The team qualified to advance to the FIRST Championship, April 24-27 in St. Louis. Read More

HERB Debuts in Oreo "Cookie vs. Creme" Video
The Robotics Institute's Home Exploring Robot Butler, better known as HERB, is featured in a YouTube video that is part of Oreo's ongoing "Cookie vs. Creme" campaign. The video, shot Feb. 12 in the Personal Robotics Lab in Newell-Simon Hall, debuted March 8. Read More

Carnegie Mellon University Students Host Computer Security Competition for High School Students
Two Carnegie Mellon University student-run teams will host the first picoCTF, a computer security competition running April 26 to May 6 that challenges high school students to learn the basics of hacking in the context of a story-driven game. Read More

Project Olympus Partners with the Don Jones Center Boosting Entrepreneurship Efforts at Carnegie Mellon
Carnegie Mellon University is bolstering its leadership in turning university research and ideas into commercial enterprises by establishing the Carnegie Mellon Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE), which merges the strengths of Project Olympus and the Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship. Read More

Carnegie Mellon's Human-Scale CHIMP Robot Has Four Limbs, But Moves on Treads Like a Tank
A team from Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center is building a new class of robot to compete in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Robotics Challenge — a human-size robot that moves, not by walking, but on rubberized tracks on the extremities of each of its four limbs. Read More

Carnegie Mellon's John Anderson Earns Highest Honor From Association for Psychological Science
Carnegie Mellon University's John R. Anderson—whose human thought and cognition research has revolutionized how we learn—has been selected to receive the Association for Psychological Science's (APS) William James Lifetime Achievement Award for Basic Research. Read More

Camera Inside Spiraling Football Provides Ball’s-Eye View of Field
Football fans have become accustomed to viewing televised games from a dozen or more camera angles, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Electro-Communications (UEC) in Tokyo suggest another possible camera position: inside the ball itself. Read More

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