BOA ASBESTOS REMOVAL ROBOT TAKES ON PENTAGON RENOVATION...The DOE's Federal Energy Technology Center (FETC) and the DoD's Pentagon Renovation Office will jointly test the BOA automated asbestos removal robot at the Pentagon, where a major renovation is underway, beginning July 6. Developed by researchers in robotics under the direction of Hagen Schempf, BOA represents a faster, cheaper and safer alternative to the "glovebag" technology currently used in asbestos removal. Using the glovebag system, abatement workers manually labor with their arms inside glovebags while sporting respirators and disposable suits. BOA automatically removes the asbestos insulation inside a cylinder using high-pressure water jets. The robot wets the insulation, cuts it into chunks, and moves the removed insulation via a strong vacuum to a bagging operation. BOA then encapsulates the pipe and "crawls" down the pipe to continue the process. The team heads to Washington on June 28-29, beginning with tests on "benign substances" on July 6-7, and engaging in the "real thing" on July 8-9, where they will be monitored by the National Institute of Buildings Sciences and the Operating Engineers National Hazmat Program. With an estimated 2 million feet of asbestos pipe insulation in DoE facilities, and comparable amounts in defense facilities, including the Pentagon, BOA could have its "cylinders" full for a long time!

CNBC HOSTS CNS*99 IN PITTSBURGH...The Eighth Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting (CNS*99) will be held July 18-22 at the Pittsburgh Hilton and Towers. This year's meeting, officially co-sponsored by the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), is co-chaired by David Touretzky and James Bower at Caltech. Among the featured speakers are Nathaniel Daw (CMU CS), Bard Ermentrout (Pitt Math), and Carol Colby (Pitt Neuroscience). Over four hundred researchers from the U.S., Europe, and Asia are scheduled to attend this 5-day meeting -- representing the world's leading laboratories in computational neuroscience research. Details are available at http://cns.numedeon.com/cns99/

IMMIGRATION UPDATE...One more date for your immigration calendar. The LTI IC is scheduled for August 20. Contact ref@cs for all particulars.

SCS INVITED TALKS...
ANDREW MOORE was the invited speaker for the Classification Society of North America 1999 Conference on June 10-13, where he spoke on "New data structures and algorithms for very fast mixture model clustering of massive data."
WILLIAM SCHERLIS was keynote speaker at the "Electronic Commerce: Foundations for the Future" Conference hosted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst Interdisciplinary Center for Electronic Enterprise (ICEE) and IBM on June 16-18 in Boston. He presented "Case Studies in Digital Government: Crisis Management and Federal Statistics," which draws from a current study on "digital government" he has been chairing for the National Research Council. The conference, aimed at decision-makers and strategic-planning executives from academic, government and institutional organizations, including human resource and management training consultants; enterprise process re-engineering consultants and researchers; traditional, multimedia, software and entertainment publishers; internet infrastructure developers and technology providers; and bank, financial-service and payment-technology organizations.

CSD FACULTY MEETING...on Thursday, June 24. Lunch begins at 11:45 am in Wean 4623. The meeting starts promptly at noon.

YET ANOTHER PERL CONFERENCE...YAPC 99 takes place Thursday and Friday, June 24-25, in the University Center. Visit www.cs.cmu.edu/~lenzo/yapc for scheduling information.

AP TEACHERS ARRIVE JUNE 26...The first session of the annual Summer Institute for Computer Science Advanced Placement Teachers (6APT), begins Saturday, June 26 and runs through July 2. The 6-day programs offers AP Computer Science teachers the opportunity "to learn two critical sets of skills: how to use and teach the C++ language, which will be introduced in the 1999 Computer Science Advanced Placement Exam; and how to establish and maintain gender equity in the classroom and computer lab." Leading the studies are Allan Fisher, Jo Sanders, Jane Margolis, and Mark Stehlik. See www.cs.cmu.edu/6apt/6apt.html

MASTERS DEGREE IN CALD...Tom Mitchell recently announced the formation of a new MS program in Data Mining. Beginning fall 1999, the program will be co-directed by Teddy Seidenfeld and Sebastian Thrun. As noted, "the extraordinary spread of computers and online data is changing forever the way that important decisions are made in many organizations. Hospitals now analyze online medical records to decide which treatments to apply to future patients. Banks analyze past financial records to learn to spot future fraud, while factories analyze past operations to learn to produce higher quality goods. The availability of online data has led many organizations to emphasize evidence-based decision making based on concrete historical data, in place of earlier anecdote-based methods for decision making...today's demand for data mining expertise far exceeds the supply, and this imbalance will become more severe over the coming decade." The MS program is aimed at training students who will assume leadership roles in this growing field. Read up on the curriculum at: www.cs.cmu.edu/~cald/curriculum.html

WORDS FOR THOUGHT:
FRIDAY, JUNE 25
**CIRCLE SEMINAR: Yoneo Tano and Hiroaki Ogata, Tokushima University, Japan, "Systems Design and Development of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning/Work", 2:30 Glaser Auditorium, LRDC/Pitt campus.

Return to School of Computer Science homepage

This page maintained by copetas@cs.cmu.edu