CMU School of Computer Science Events

Database Group Industry Affiliates Program - Day 1

09 Jun 2026 13:14:59 GMT

Monday, September 14, 2026, 9am – 6pm

The first day of Carnegie Mellon University's Database Industry Affiliates Program (IAP) Visit Day takes place in the Gates Hillman Centers and is focused on showcasing cutting-edge research in the field of databases. The day is filled with a series of research talks delivered by faculty and students from the university's database group.

These presentations provide an in-depth look at the latest advancements in database technologies, methodologies, and applications. Attendees, including industry partners, gain valuable insights into innovative projects, ongoing research, and potential collaborative opportunities with Carnegie Mellon's renowned database experts.

Additional Information
⇢ In addition to members of our industry affiliates program, all database students, enthusiasts, and connoisseurs at CMU are welcome to join.

Event Type: Colloquium/Forum
Room Number: In Person
Building: Reddy Conference Room, Gates Hillman 4405
Speaker's Name: Showcasing cutting-edge research in the field of databases
For More Information: mstanle2@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: db.cs.cmu.edu…

Machine Learning Ph.D. Thesis Defense - Anna Bair

04 Sep 2026 22:00:14 GMT

Monday, September 14, 2026, 10 – 11:30am

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have grown massively in scale and widespread use. Their power and ubiquity warrants 1) research to improve their efficiency and reliability and 2) development of an understanding of the models' behavior. This thesis addresses components of each of these directions and shows how the interplay between the two is mutually beneficial. The central question that this thesis explores is: How can insights into model behavior better inform methods to solve real-world problems, and how can the solutions to those problems help us learn more about model behavior?

Efficiency is especially important to consider as model size continues to increase. Larger models are slower and more expensive to run, and infeasible in resource-constrained settings. At a high level, reliability refers to models behaving as intended. This becomes increasingly important as AI is used for high-stakes decision-making and as Large Language Models (LLMs) are used more broadly by the general population. We consider various types of reliability, including robustness to input variation and performance preservation under constraints. We observe that the challenges of improving efficiency and reliability are tightly linked in our settings, as performing model compression to improve efficiency requires careful consideration of how to preserve reliability.

We approach these challenges through the lens of understanding model behavior. We utilize insights into model behavior to develop algorithms for efficiency and reliability. In turn, experience with studying efficiency and reliability allows us to develop new insights into model behavior.

Each chapter in this thesis touches on 1) efficiency and reliability and 2) insights into model behavior. In Part 1, we primarily use prior insights into model behavior to design algorithms for efficiency and reliability. We first use insights into the loss landscape of vision models to design a pruning strategy that produces more robust models. Next, we use prior findings about large activations in LLMs to design an efficient pruning strategy for these models. Then, we pivot towards knowledge distillation and develop a pipeline to create extremely small, task-specific vision-language models (VLMs). In Part 2, we focus on characterizing phenomena in model behavior. We identify the phenomenon of task-specific localization within attention heads in LLMs. We develop an efficient algorithm to locate these heads. We then extend this procedure to develop an ablation-based unlearning method that can be more robust to relearning than alternatives. Finally, we extend the topic of localization to experts in MoE models and explore tradeoffs in expert pruning strategies.

Thesis Committee
J. Zico Kolter (Chair)
Tim Dettmers
Andrew Ilyas
Jose Alvarez (Nvidia)

Additional Information

In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.

Event Type: Thesis Orals
Room Number: In Person and VIrtual - ET
Building: ASA Conference Room, Gates Hillman 6115 and Zoom
Speaker's Name: ANNA BAIR
Speaker Website: annaebair.github.io
Speaker's Professional Title: Ph.D. Candidate, Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: Efficient and Reliable AI through Insights into Model Behavior
For More Information: lyonsmuth@cmu.edu
Affiliations: Machine Learning Department (MLD)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

MILWAUKEE TOOL: Lobby Meet Up

27 Aug 2026 17:58:03 GMT

Monday, September 14, 2026, 10:30am – 2:30pm

Milwaukee Tool is Hiring
Come learn how Machine Learning, AI, and Robotics are shaping the next generation of smart tools.

Edge AI & Embedded Intelligence
Computer Vision
Robotics, Planning & Control
SLAM & Localization
Statistics, Optimization & Decision Making
Real-World AI Applications
Building Smarter Tools for Professionals

Stop by to meet engineers from Milwaukee Tool and learn about internship and full-time opportunities.

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: 5th Floor Pausch Bridge Entry, Gates Hillman
For More Information: careers@cs.cmu.edu
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

StartUP PGH: Forging the Future

26 Aug 2026 21:44:10 GMT

Monday, September 14, 11am – Friday, September 18, 2026, 6pm

Pittsburgh is becoming one of the nation's frontier technology hubs, where world-leading research moves into companies, capital and jobs. This September, the region's innovation community is coming together to make that momentum impossible to miss.

The Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University is proud to announce StartUP PGH, a region-wide week running September 14-18, 2026, celebrating Pittsburgh's strength in AI, robotics and life sciences.

Programming will feature events, conversations, experiences, and activations across the Pittsburgh region designed to connect innovators across industries and communities.

Startup Showcases
Founder & Investor Networking
Workshops & Panels
University Research & Commercialization
Product Launches
Community Experiences
Talent & Workshop Development

From the Pittsburgh Robotics Network's Discovery Day to the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Alliance's Health Innovation Symposium to Innovation Works' Venture Expo, the week brings the region's founders, investors, students and corporate partners into one shared moment.

Carnegie Mellon will host four signature events during the week, including Lab to Market, AI Robotics Venture Day in partnership with Innovation Works, the SPARK Startup Job Fair, and the Swartz Student Startup Showcase.

We are grateful to our partners across the region, and to Mayor Corey O'Connor and Allegheny County Chief Executive Sara Innamorato for standing behind the founders and researchers building Pittsburgh's future.

Learn More | REGISTER

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: Various Locations throughout Pittsburgh
Speaker's Name: Join in for a week of innovation, connection, and creative thinking
Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Entrepreneurship, Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship
Event Website Title: SCS Careers - Upcoming Events
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

CyLab Seminar - Zakir Durumeric

04 Sep 2026 20:26:45 GMT

Monday, September 14, 2026, 12 – 1pm

Online hate and harassment shape the day-to-day experiences of many Internet users. Attacks range from anonymous peers breaking into a target's account to leak personal photos and creating non-consensual deepfake sexual imagery to sexual harassment campaigns coordinated across tens of thousands of attackers. In a recent Pew survey, 40% of people worldwide reported personally experiencing harassment and bullying online. In this talk, I argue that there exist parallels between the abuse that users face online and traditional cybersecurity attacks, as well as similarities in how we can build more effective defenses against them. I'll describe these similarities and present several of our recent investigations into understanding attacks online and building tools to protect against them.

—

Zakir Durumeric is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Founder/CEO of Censys. His work considers how to defend against threats on the Internet ranging from cybercrime and nation-state prepositioning to harassment, censorship, and disinformation. Durumeric is a mixed-methods empiricist, but is most drawn to building systems to measure complex networked ecosystems and leveraging the resulting visibility to understand real-world behavior, uncover attacks, architect more resilient defenses, and guide public policy. His work has been recognized with a Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, USENIX Security "Test of Time" award, three IRTF Applied Networking Research Prizes, and Best Paper distinctions from USENIX Security, CCS, CSCW, and IMC. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan.

In Person and Zoom Participation
⇢ CyLab seminar is open only to partners and CMU faculty, students, and staff.

Event Type: Seminars
Room Number: In Person and Virtual - ET
Building: Panther Hollow Conference Room, Mehrabian Collaborative Innovation Center 4105
Speaker's Name: ZAKIR DURUMERIC
Speaker Website: zakird.com
Speaker's Professional Title: Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University
Talk Title: Addressing Online Abuse with Techniques Borrowed from Cybersecurity
For More Information: bethbuch@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, CyLab
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: events.cmu.edu…

Accessibility Lunch Seminar - Valerie Saznov

09 Sep 2026 14:48:39 GMT

Monday, September 14, 2026, 12:30 – 1:30pm

Valerie Sazonov is an HCII REU student who will be presenting her work on Computer Use Agents that can operate assistive technologies such as screen readers, magnification, and voice control, to ultimately collaborate with people with disabilities.

Event Type: Seminars
Room Number: In Person
Building: Newell-Simon 3305
Speaker's Name: VALERIE SAZNOV
Speaker's Professional Title: University of Alabama
Talk Title: Computer Use Agents
For More Information: pmowar@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Statistics and Data Science Seminar - Florian Gunsilius

10 Sep 2026 22:07:25 GMT

Monday, September 14, 2026, 4 – 5pm

Optimal transport has become an increasingly prominent framework in many facets of causal inference. Its applications range from identifying structural causal models and estimating effects through matching on observables to constructing robust causal estimators, analyzing classical reduced-form effects, and addressing questions of external validity. This talk focuses on the most basic application of optimal transport in causal inference, namely, to couple counterfactual distributions. A main theme here is the distinction between imposing restrictions through a structural model with latent heterogeneity and working directly with the set of admissible couplings of counterfactual marginals. This perspective allows one to uncover a common thread behind many sharp identification bounds and clarifies the connection to closely related ideas in distributionally robust formulations of external validity and in instrumental-variables models. I conclude by discussing how entropy-regularized transport connects these identification problems to statistical physics and large-deviation theory. The talk draws on material from my ongoing, unpublished book manuscript on optimal transport in causal inference and joint work with Bruno Nunes Costa (University of Michigan)

—

Florian Gunsilius is an Associate Professor of Economics at Emory University. His research spans statistical optimal transport theory and causal inference, both as distinct areas and at their intersection. His research has appeared in Biometrika, Econometrica, Econometric Theory, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of Econometrics, and the Journal of Machine Learning Research. Before joining Emory, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan and held visiting positions at Princeton and MIT. He received his PhD in Economics from Brown University.

3:30 pm ⇢ Refreshments will be offered prior to the seminar in the Baker Hall 129 suite.

Event Type: Seminars
Room Number: In Person
Building: Posner Hall 151 (updaterd location)
Speaker's Name: FLORIAN GUNSILIUS
Speaker Website: economics.emory.edu…
Speaker's Professional Title: ssociate Professor of Economics, Emory University
Talk Title: Counterfactual couplings: some musings on optimal transport, causal inference, and partial identification
For More Information: jpaschke@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Machine Learning Department (MLD)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, Department of Statistics and Data Science
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: events.cmu.edu…

Lockheed Martin Tech Talk

27 Aug 2026 22:27:13 GMT

Monday, September 14, 2026, 6:30 – 7:30pm

Hosted by ACM@CMU

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Connan Room, Cohon University Center
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

TI (Texas Instruments) Tech Talk

14 Sep 2026 13:46:38 GMT

Monday, September 14, 2026, 7:30 – 8:30pm

Hosted by ACM@CMU

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: PNC Room, Tepper Building (new location)
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

Inaugural Pittsburgh AI Summit

26 Aug 2026 21:50:59 GMT

Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 8:30am – 5pm

An exciting new regional event is coming this fall, and we want to ensure the CMU and AI-SDM communities have a chance to participate!

The summit is organized by Pittsburgh AI, which is bringing together researchers, city officials, engineers, artists, and builders of all kinds for a thoughtful conversation about what it actually means to do AI, not just talk about it. Specifically, they are highlighting real-world work reshaping how we work, create, and learn.

The inaugural Pittsburgh AI Summit has opened its Call for Speakers. Faculty, staff, and students are encouraged to apply.

Core Speaking Themes
If you have a perspective or real work to showcase, consider submitting under one of their key areas:

AI Fundamentals & Public Education
Practical AI Applications
AI in Government & Public Service
AI for Small Business & Startups
Robotics & Physical AI
AI Ethics, Governance & Responsible Innovation
Workforce Development & Future of Work
Healthcare & Life Sciences
Manufacturing & Industry
Cybersecurity & AI
AI & the Environment
Pittsburgh's AI Ecosystem

Learn More | REGISTER

Event Type: Conference/Workshop
Room Number: In Person
Building: Rockwell Park, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15208
For More Information: ngottron@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Partnerships, Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, AI-SDM
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: summit.pgh.ai

Welcome KYOCERA

13 Aug 2026 15:56:51 GMT

Tuesday, September 15, 8:30am – Friday, September 18, 2026, 5pm

Meetings and participation by invitation only.

Event Type: Corporate Visit
Room Number: In Person
Building: By Invitation Only
For More Information: ckissell@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Database Group Industry Affiliates Program - Day 2

09 Jun 2026 13:15:29 GMT

Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 8:45am – 5pm

The second day of Carnegie Mellon University's Database Industry Affiliate Program (IAP) Visit Day, held in the Gates Hillman Centers, shifts focus to the industry side, featuring a series of informative sessions presented by member companies. These sessions offer companies the opportunity to showcase their latest innovations, products, and challenges in the database space, while also highlighting potential career opportunities for students.

Attendees, including faculty, students, and other participants, can engage directly with company representatives to learn about real-world applications of database technologies, industry trends, and the skills sought after in the field. This day serves as a valuable networking platform, fostering stronger relationships between academia and industry.

Learn More

Event Type: Colloquium/Forum
Room Number: In Person
Building: Reddy Conference Room, Gates Hillman 4405
Speaker's Name: Where academia and industry will converge to explore the future of database systems
For More Information: mstanle2@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: db.cs.cmu.edu…

CMU Lab to Market

04 Sep 2026 14:35:37 GMT

Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 9am – 3pm

Join us for CMU Lab to Market in Pittsburgh — curated gathering of investors for an exclusive look at Carnegie Mellon University’s most promising research-driven startups. This day-long event spotlights breakthrough ventures emerging from CMU labs, including those led by CMU faculty, PhDs and postdocs—advancing the frontier in AI, robotics, cybersecurity, healthcare, and beyond. Meet the next wave of deep tech founders translating world-class research into transformative companies.

Featured Keynotes

Andrew Moore
Co-Founder and CEO, Lovelace AI, and Former Dean, Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science
— In conversation with Martial Hebert — Dean, Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science

Sujal Shah
Founder, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Juvia Group; Former President and CEO, CymaBay Therapeutics
— In conversation with Laurence Ales — Dean, Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business

Questions | Additional Information

Event Type: Colloquium/Forum
Room Number: In Person
Building: Simmons Auditorium, Tepper Building
Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Entrepreneurship, Partnerships, Technology Transfer
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship
Event Website Title: Program Website
Event Website URL: www.cmu.edu…

Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence Seminar - Andrew Gordon Wilson

09 Sep 2026 16:48:39 GMT

Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 10 – 11am

Can we learn more from data than existed in the generating process itself? Can new and useful information be constructed from merely applying deterministic transformations to existing data? Can the learnable content in data be evaluated without considering a downstream task? On these questions, Shannon information and Kolmogorov complexity come up nearly empty-handed, in part because they assume observers with unlimited computational capacity and fail to target the useful information content. In this talk we identify and exemplify three seeming paradoxes in information theory: (1) information cannot be increased by deterministic transformations; (2) information is independent of the order of data; (3) likelihood modeling is merely distribution matching. To shed light on the tension between these results and modern practice, and to quantify the value of data, we introduce epiplexity, a formalization of information capturing what computationally bounded observers can learn from data. Epiplexity captures the structural content in data while excluding time-bounded entropy, the random unpredictable content exemplified by pseudorandom number generators and chaotic dynamical systems. With these concepts, we demonstrate how information can be created with computation, how it depends on the ordering of the data, and how likelihood modeling can produce more complex programs than present in the data generating process itself. We also present practical procedures to estimate epiplexity which we show capture differences across data sources, track with downstream performance, and highlight dataset interventions that improve out-of-distribution generalization. In contrast to principles of model selection, epiplexity provides a theoretical foundation for data selection, guiding how to select, generate, or transform data for learning systems.

—

Andrew Gordon Wilson is a Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Center for Data Science at New York University, and Research Lead at Perplexity. He aims to develop a prescriptive foundation for intelligent systems. His work includes generalization theory, Bayesian inference, equivariances, time-series forecasting, and scientific applications, particularly in computational biology, physics, and materials. He has received the NSF Career Award, the Heilbronn Distinguished Fellowship from the Isaac Newton Institute, the Amazon Research Award, and several best paper, test of time, dissertation, reviewer, and area chair awards. He has also been tutorial chair, workshop chair, and EXPO chair several times for ICML and NeurIPS, and is an ICML 2027 Program Chair.

Faculty Host: Nihar Shah

The AI-ML Seminar is generously sponsored by the MBZUAI/CMU Institute of Virtual and Programmable Cell

Event Type: Seminars
Room Number: In Person
Building: Newell-Simon 3305
Speaker's Name: ANDREW GORDON WILSON
Speaker Website: cims.nyu.edu…
Speaker's Professional Title: Professor, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Center for Data Science, New York University, and Research Lead, Perplexity
Talk Title: From Entropy to Epiplexity: Rethinking Information for Computationally Bounded Intelligence
For More Information: nihars@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Machine Learning Department (MLD)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Series Website
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

CMU STEM Fair: Day One

13 Aug 2026 18:30:28 GMT

Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 12 – 6pm

Schedule

12:00 - 2:00 pm⇢ All Students
2:00 - 3:00 pm ⇢ Employer Break
3:00 - 4:00 pm ⇢ Undergraduate Students Only
4:00 - 6:00 pm ⇢ All Students

The STEM Career Fair serves as the launchpad for the recruiting season, providing students with an early opportunity to engage with companies. Complementing the fair, numerous networking events and information sessions offer additional avenues for forging valuable connections. Employers can register for one, two or all three days.

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Cohon University Center
Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department (CSD), Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Privacy Seminar - Nuria Ruiz Garcia

09 Sep 2026 15:01:47 GMT

Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 12:30 – 1:50pm

In this session, we will talk about launching your career as a privacy professional, how to communicate the value you bring to the team once you land the role, how to frame privacy tradeoffs, the impact of AI on day-to-day work, and effective strategies for stakeholder management (e.g. getting buy-in from Legal, Product, and other teams). We will offer practical advice for working on large projects and in startups with a strong privacy component. Questions throughout the talk are encouraged; this session is intended to be a co-creation where we spend more time on the topics attendees feel are most relevant.

—

Before curating datasets for the data science team at Netflix, Nuria led the Data Engineering team at Wikipedia where she spent almost a decade building privacy-conscious data infrastructure from scratch and thinking a lot about privacy-respecting metrics. She worked in social, mobile, and web performance at Tuenti, a social network in Spain before those were a thing. Most of her learning in computer science, performance and scale was done hands-on, on the job, while working at Amazon in the early days. Nuria is a physicist by training and started writing software in a Physical Oceanography Lab in Seattle. A long time ago. When Big Data was just called "science".

The Fall 2026 Privacy Seminar Series is co-sponsored by the Carnegie Bosch Institute

In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.

Event Type: Seminars
Room Number: In Person and Virtual - ET
Building: Hamburg Hall 1002 and Zoom
Speaker's Name: NURIA RUIZ GARCIA
Speaker's Professional Title: Data Science Team, Netflix
Talk Title: Working 9 to 5. Practical strategies for aspiring privacy professionals.
For More Information: kcturner@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, CyLab
Event Website Title: Series Website
Event Website URL: privacy.cs.cmu.edu…

Uncanny Valley Fest Pittsburgh: AI Filmmaking Hackathon

11 Sep 2026 13:23:10 GMT

Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 12:30 – 6pm

Uncanny Valley Fest comes to Pittsburgh for CMU Startup Week.

Join Koyal AI for an open, drop-in AI filmmaking hackathon. Filmmakers, developers, designers, artists, and storytellers will form teams, use generative AI tools to create original short films, and compete for a spot in the evening showcase.

Schedule

Part One → REGISTER

12:30 pm — Kickoff and team formation
1:00–4:30 pm — Open creation sprint. Drop in and out between classes.

⇢ Join Koyal and the Swartz Center for an open, drop-in AI filmmaking hackathon. Filmmakers, developers, designers, artists, and storytellers will form teams, use generative AI tools to create original short films, and compete for a spot in the evening showcase.

Part Two → REGISTER (separate registration required)

5:00–6:00 pm — Final film showcase @ McConomy Auditorium

⇢ See the films created at Uncanny Valley Fest Pittsburgh, an AI filmmaking hackathon. Join Koyal, the s Swartz Center, and CMU’s interdisciplinary creative community for a fast-paced screening of original films made earlier that afternoon. Selected teams will present their work on the McConomy screen, followed by recognition for standout films and a short conversation about the future of AI storytelling.

Bring your laptop and your ideas.
Teams can work at the Swartz Center or wherever you do our best work.

Part of CMU Startup Week.

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, Tepper (Event) and McConomy Auditorium, Cohon UniversityCenter (Evening Showcase)
Event Poster Title: Poster
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

Machine Learning Ph.D. Thesis Proposal - Fahim Tajwar

08 Sep 2026 19:51:31 GMT

Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 1 – 2:30pm

Scaling has been central to the progress of foundation models, but the principles that made pretraining scale effectively do not directly transfer to post-training. Here models increasingly learn from their own generated experience, interact with heterogeneous tasks and environments, and rely on sparse feedback that must be converted into useful learning signals. As the computational cost of post-training grows, understanding how to scale these processes in a principled fashion becomes an increasingly important problem. This proposal studies the principles that determine when additional post-training compute leads to better capabilities and when it does not.

Our completed work examines three bottlenecks that arise in this setting. First, we show that scaling post-training introduces a fundamental inference–training compute tradeoff: for a fixed budget, more compute can be spent on inference to generate fresh on-policy experience, or on training to perform additional optimization over existing data, and we find that shifting too far toward the latter can substantially limit learning as the data become stale [38]. Second, we study how to scale training across diverse interactive environments, showing that models can acquire general decision-making strategies from self-generated experience and transfer them to previously unseen tasks [39]. Third, we develop MaxRL, which studies how the choice of learning objective affects scaling with rollout compute and shows how rare successes on difficult problems can be converted into stronger learning signals [40]. Together, these works identify complementary challenges in scaling post-training: how experience is generated, where it is generated, and how that experience is ultimately used for learning.

Building on these results, our proposed work asks how post-training algorithms and training pipelines should evolve as both compute and training complexity continue to scale. We will study how to use increasingly off-policy experience without sacrificing stability as rollout generation and optimization are increasingly decoupled for more effective use of compute; how to replace an increasingly fragmented sequence of pretraining, fine-tuning, and reinforcement-learning stages with a unified learning framework that can incorporate heterogeneous data and feedback within a single objective; and how to preserve a model’s ability to acquire new capabilities as post-training expands across a broader and continually changing set of tasks. Together, these directions address complementary bottlenecks that emerge at scale: stale experience, fragmented training pipelines, and loss of adaptability, with the goal of understanding how additional post-training resources can continue to translate into sustained capability improvement.

Thesis Committee
Ruslan Salakhutdinov (Co-chair)
Jeff Schneider (Co-chair)
Andrea Zanette
John Schulman (Thinking Machines)

Additional Information

In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.

Event Type: Thesis Proposals
Room Number: In Person and Virtual - ET
Building: Traffic21 Classroom, Gates Hillman 6501 and Zoom
Speaker's Name: FAHIM TAJWAR
Speaker Website: tajwarfahim.github.io
Speaker's Professional Title: Ph.D. Student, Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: Principled Scaling of Foundation Model Post-Training
For More Information: lyonsmuth@cmu.edu
Affiliations: Machine Learning Department (MLD)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Graphics Colloquium - Maneesh Agrawala

25 Aug 2026 17:05:37 GMT

Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 3:30 – 5pm

Human creation of high-quality content requires making decisions – from coarse, high-level decisions about content and style, to precise low-level decisions about the color of an individual pixel. Modern generative AI promises to serve a collaborative assistant capable of executing design decisions specified in simple text prompts into high-quality content. Yet today’s AI systems are poor collaborators. They frequently misinterpret user intent, while users lack a predictive conceptual model of how an AI will interpret a prompt or why it produces a particular result. Without shared conceptual grounding, collaboration devolves into trial and error, with users repeatedly rewriting prompts, using the AI to generate a result and then adjusting the prompt to try again, in the hope of obtaining the desired outcome. In this talk I’ll argue that for generative AI to fulfill its promise we must develop techniques and interfaces that enable users and AI models to establish shared conceptual grounding. I’ll outline two complementary research challenges; First, we must identify the concepts that human creators commonly use when reasoning about and communicating within a content creation domain. Here, I’ll show how we might extend methods from cognitive psychology to elicit, represent, and analyze domain-specific conceptual structures. Second, we must develop interfaces for teaching these concepts to AI models. While machine learning is rapidly advancing methods for teaching AI new concepts, I’ll show how adapting these techniques to the diverse domains of human content creation requires new interaction techniques that support the way people think, communicate, and create. Finally I’ll demonstrate a few implementations of these ideas that we have developed in our group at Stanford.

—

Maneesh Agrawala is the Forest Baskett Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University. He is also a consulting AI Scientist at Roblox. He works on computer graphics, human computer interaction and visualization. His focus is on investigating how cognitive design principles can be used to improve the effectiveness of audio/visual media. The goals of this work are to discover the design principles and then instantiate them in both interactive and automated design tools. Honors include an Okawa Foundation Research Grant (2006), an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2007), an NSF CAREER Award (2007), a SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award (2008), a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), an Allen Distinguished Investigator Award (2014) and induction into the SIGCHI Academy (2021). He was named an ACM Fellow in 2022.

Faculty Host: Jun-Yan Zhu

Event Type: Colloquium
Room Number: In Person
Building: Rashid Auditorium, Gates Hillman 4401
Speaker's Name: MANEESH AGRAWALA
Speaker Website: graphics.stanford.edu…
Speaker's Professional Title: Forest Baskett Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Stanford University
Talk Title: Making is Decision Making
Event Poster Title: Poster
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
For More Information: junyanz@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Robotics Institute (RI)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Series Website
Event Website URL: graphics.cs.cmu.edu…

South Park Commons: Researcher to Founder: Building from -1 to 0

21 Aug 2026 16:49:58 GMT

Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 4 – 6:30pm

South Park Commons is excited to host a panel discussion on building from -1 to 0, making the transition from academia to startups, and the future of robotics.

Moderator
⇒ Dylan Itzikowitz, South Park Commons Partner

Panelists
⇒ Damion Shelton is the Associate Vice President & Executive Director of Swartz Center, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder/chairman of Agility Robotics, the pioneer and leading provider of humanoid robots for warehouse and logistics work. He was CEO of Agility from 2015-2024, raising in excess of $200M over multiple funding rounds, and leading commercialization of one of the first humanoid robots to ever be sold for non-research use. In 2024, he stepped down as CEO to focus on public policy and engagement, dusting off his credentials in Philosophy of Science to contribute to the national dialog on robot ethics and the nature of work in a post-AI world.

⇒ Deva Ramanan is a Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and the former director of the CMU Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research. His research interests span computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. He was awarded the Longuet-Higgins Prize for fundamental contributions in computer vision in 2024 and 2018, was recognized for best paper finalist / honorable mention awards in ICCV 2021, ECCV 2020, and CVPR 2019.

Additionally, he was named a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow in 2013, named one of Popular Science's Brilliant 10 researchers in 2012, was awarded the IEEE PAMI Young Researcher Award in 2012, and won the PASCAL VOC Lifetime Achievement Prize in 2010, and the David Marr Prize in 2009. His work is supported by NSF, ONR, DARPA, as well as industrial collaborations with Intel, Google, and Microsoft.

⇒ Howie Choset is the Kavčić–Moura Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a leading robotics educator, researcher, and entrepreneur. He has co-founded six startups spanning medical robotics, manufacturing, infrastructure, and autonomous systems, including Medrobotics, whose surgical robot has been used in more than 1,500 procedures. Recently, he led a team deploying snake robots for earthquake search and rescue in Venezuela and developed algorithms for a robot launched into space. This fall, Choset will serve as the general chair for IROS, the largest robotics conference to be held in the US this year. His broader mission is the democratization of robotics—making robotic capabilities accessible so anyone can accomplish tasks otherwise beyond their reach.

Agenda:

4:00 pm ⇢ Doors Open
4:30 pm - 5:15 pm ⇢ Panel Discussion
5:30 pm ⇢ Mixer

Learn More | REGISTER

SPC is a technical community and venture fund dedicated to helping founders, researchers, and technologists figure out what to work on next—what we call the -1 to 0 stage of your career. We believe this is best accomplished in the most talent-dense community possible.

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Location Upon Registration
Speaker's Name: AUDIENCE: Faculty, PIs
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

GARNER HEALTH - Info Session

03 Sep 2026 19:01:21 GMT

Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 6 – 7pm

Garner is a fast-growing healthcare tech company on a mission to fix how patients find great doctors. We use 320M+ patient claims to surface the highest-quality providers and remove out-of-pocket costs for employees when they see them. We’re trusted by 800+ companies including Apple and Tesla.

Engineers at Garner work on real problems at scale, analyzing billions of medical records, building patient-facing products, and shipping fast. It’s an engineering culture that actively embraces new technologies, where AI tools are part of how the team moves faster, writes better code, and stays focused on the problems that actually matter.

Learn more | REGISTER

Positions

Software Engineering Interns: 10-week summer internship in our NYC office for rising seniors (Fall 2027/Spring 2028 grads)
Associate Software Engineers: 18-month rotational program in our NYC office for graduating students or recent grads (Spring 2026 – Spring 2027 grads)
and more ....

Hosted by ACM@CMU

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Gates Hillman 4307
Event Poster Title: Poster
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

Cyber Innovators Connect

01 Sep 2026 21:44:01 GMT

Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 9am – 2pm

Cyber Innovators Connect during CMU Startup Week and StartUP PGH brings together high-impact cybersecurity corporate leaders, startups, and investors in Pittsburgh - the birthplace of cyber defense and a current hotbed for elite talent - to spark breakthroughs, collaboration, and investment opportunities.

Hosted by CyLab, the event will feature conversations on AI and cybersecurity, startup showcases, and a “Cyber Shark Tank” connecting emerging companies with CISOs, along with opportunities for networking and collaboration.

REGISTRATION and Additional Information

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

PRN Robotics & AI Discovery Day

26 Aug 2026 21:46:59 GMT

Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 9am – 6pm

Explore robotics, artificial intelligence, and advanced manufacturing through live demos, interactive exhibits, and conversations with the companies and organizations shaping the future of technology in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh Robotics & AI Discovery Day offers a full day of discovery, inspiration, and connection at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. This event brings together robotics, AI, and advanced manufacturing companies, along with career and training pathway providers, community organizations, startup support programs, and industry partners for a hands-on look at the technologies shaping our future.

Attendees can explore live technology demonstrations, interactive exhibits, and real world applications of robotics and AI across multiple industries. Whether you are a business leader, investor, jobseeker, student, educator, family member, or simply curious about the future of technology, this event is designed to help you engage directly with the region’s innovation ecosystem. Pittsburgh is home to more than 125 robotics businesses, and Robotics & AI Discovery Day is designed to make that ecosystem visible and accessible to the public in one place.

Be part of the action, engage with industry influencers, and witness firsthand the power of robotics and advanced technology in the heart of Western Pennsylvania. Your journey into the future starts here.

REGISTRATION and additional information
⇢ FREE and Open to the Public (all ages)

Event Type: Conference/Workshop
Room Number: In Person
Building: David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgy
Speaker's Name: Presented by the The Pittsburgh Robotics Network
Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Community Outreach, Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, Pittsburgh Robotics Network
Event Website Title: Event Website and Registration
Event Website URL: robopgh.org…

CMU STEM Fair: Day Two

13 Aug 2026 18:31:00 GMT

Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 12 – 6pm

Schedule

12:00 - 2:00 pm⇢ All Students
2:00 - 3:00 pm ⇢ Employer Break
3:00 - 4:00 pm ⇢ Undergraduate Students Only
4:00 - 6:00 pm ⇢ All Students

The STEM Career Fair serves as the launchpad for the recruiting season, providing students with an early opportunity to engage with companies. Complementing the fair, numerous networking events and information sessions offer additional avenues for forging valuable connections. Employers can register for one, two or all three days.

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Cohon University Center
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department (CBD), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Software and Societal Systems Department Distinguished Speaker - André van der Hoek

11 Sep 2026 19:21:46 GMT

Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 12 – 1:15pm

Much has been said about the advent of generative and agentic AI and its impact on software development, particularly in terms of how it has rapidly transformed the act of writing code. More goes into shaping what functionality some software is to offer and how it does so, however, than just writing code – the software needs to be designed and doing so is an inherently creative activity. Here too AI can and is having an impact, but to date this impact is much less understood compared to its impact on writing code.

In this talk, I will discuss the interplay of software design, creativity, and AI in software development. Grounded in a deep empirical understanding of how professional software designers work, I will discuss several studies on creativity and AI: (1) an interview study with software professionals on everyday creativity, (2) a laboratory study with software professionals who had available to them an LLM while they designed a software system, and (3) an artifact analysis study of students’ use of an LLM while working on a software design project. I will contextualize our findings from these studies within the emerging research on creativity and AI, to end the talk with key research questions needing to be addressed moving forward.

—

André van der Hoek is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, where he heads the Software Design and Collaboration Laboratory (SDCL), which focuses on understanding and advancing the roles of design, collaboration, and education in software engineering. He is co-author of Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think and co-editor of Studying Professional Software Design: a Human-Centric Look at Design Work, two books that detail the expert practices of professional software designers.

He has authored and co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications and has served the research community in many different roles, including as PC Chair of FSE 2010, PC Co-Chair of ICSE 2014, and member of the Editorial Board of TOSEM (2008-2014). He was recognized as an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2013 and in 2009 received the Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware.

André holds a joint B.S. and M.S. degree in Business-Oriented Computer Science from Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.

Event Type: Lecture
Room Number: In Person and Virtual - ET
Building: TCS Hall 358 and Zoom
Speaker's Name: ANDRÉ VAN DER HOEK
Speaker Website: www.andrevanderhoek.com
Speaker's Professional Title: Professor, Department of Informatics, University of California
Talk Title: Software Design and Creativity in the Age of AI
Event Poster Title: Poster
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
For More Information: lv2c@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

AI & Robotics Venture Day 2026

29 Jun 2026 15:04:55 GMT

Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 4 – 6pm

Venture Day offers a showcase of CMU's most investment-ready startups building at the frontier of AI and Robotics. Presented in partnership between the CMU Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation Works, the event brings together investors, founders, university leaders, and the regional startup community to spotlight high-potential companies building in AI, robotics, autonomy, and embodied intelligence.

The event will feature a select group of startups, including VentureBridge companies, and is one of the flagship events of CMU Startup Week 2026 and StartUP PGH.

REGISTER to attend | APPLY to Pitch by July 15

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: McConomy Auditorium, Cohon University Center
Event Poster Title: Poster
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Entrepreneurship, Robotics Institute (RI), Technology Transfer
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship

University Lecture - Eli Merritt

03 Sep 2026 15:59:53 GMT

Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 5 – 6:30pm

We live in a quick-fix consumer society saturated with happiness hacks that offer only temporary relief rather than lasting fulfillment. In this fascinating talk, Professor Eli Merritt of Vanderbilt University, a psychiatrist, historian and popular political commentator, argues for a new model of happiness grounded in a neglected but essential dimension of human flourishing: political happiness. America in the 2020s is ripe for this new enlightenment — one that will not only increase the personal happiness of citizens but also rekindle the civic spirit necessary for renewing and sustaining our constitutional republic.

—

Eli Merritt is a political historian and psychiatrist at Vanderbilt University, an award-winning author, and a frequent public speaker on the American Revolution and the 250th anniversary of the United States. In essays and talks, he presses a simple thesis: Ethical leadership is the glue that holds a constitutional republic together. Other areas of academic expertise include the U.S. Constitution, civic virtue, patriotism and happiness.
At Vanderbilt, Merritt teaches a course, "The American Pursuit of Happiness," which traces the political philosophy of happiness from the early Enlightenment to the modern era, probing multiple meanings of this pursuit as well as posing a vital civic-personal question: What should the pursuit of happiness mean for us today as we commemorate the nation's 250th anniversary?

His book, "Disunion Among Ourselves"winner of the 2024 American Revolution Institute Prize—reveals how the founders held a fragile nation together through decorum and principled compromise amid extreme division, a lesson that resonates powerfully today.

Merritt has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today and Chicago Tribune, among other publications, and he has been featured on more than 40 podcasts as well as on programs like "Washington Journal" on C-SPAN and "The Briefing with Steve Scully."

He received two degrees from Yale University—a B.A. in history (magna cum laude) and an M.A. in ethics—and his M.D. from Case Western Reserve University, where he received the Humanism in Medicine Award. He trained in psychiatry at Stanford University, receiving the Humanistic Medicine Award. Additionally, at Vanderbilt, he has served as a visiting scholar in three departments: history, psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and the center for Biomedical Ethics and Society.

REGISTER

Event Type: Lecture
Room Number: In Person
Building: Simmons Auditorium, Tepper Building
Speaker's Name: ELI MERRITT
Speaker Website: as.vanderbilt.edu…
Speaker's Professional Title: Political Historian • Democracy Scholar • Author, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University
Talk Title: The Pursuit of Happiness: Happiness as a Social, Political and Personal Force
For More Information: ULS@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Series Website
Event Website URL: www.cmu.edu…

AI Horizons 2026

24 Jun 2026 14:17:14 GMT

Thursday, September 17, 8am – Friday, September 18, 2026, 6pm

The race for AI adoption, commercialization, and market leadership is on. Join the world’s leading researchers, innovators, and adopters as we explore how AI is transforming healthcare, manufacturing, defense, finance, robotics, and beyond.

Learn more | Watch for all updates.

Event Type: Conference/Workshop
Room Number: In Person
Building: Bakery Square, Pittsburgh
Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Entrepreneurship, Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: aihorizonspgh.com

CMU STEM Fair: Day Three

13 Aug 2026 18:32:26 GMT

Thursday, September 17, 2026, 12 – 6pm

Schedule

12:00 - 2:00 pm⇢ All Students
2:00 - 3:00 pm ⇢ Employer Break
3:00 - 4:00 pm ⇢ Undergraduate Students Only
4:00 - 6:00 pm ⇢ All Students

The STEM Career Fair serves as the launchpad for the recruiting season, providing students with an early opportunity to engage with companies. Complementing the fair, numerous networking events and information sessions offer additional avenues for forging valuable connections. Employers can register for one, two or all three days.

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Cohon University Center
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department (CBD), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

CMU SPARK 2026 - Keynote Speaker - Boris Sofman

07 Aug 2026 17:26:52 GMT

Thursday, September 17, 2026, 5:30 – 6pm

SPARK 2026 will open with a keynote from Boris Sofman, Co-Founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics and former leader at Waymo and Anki. Boris will share lessons from building ambitious robotics and autonomy companies and offer students a firsthand look at what it takes to create and scale frontier technology.

REGISTER

The talk will be followed by

6:00 - 7:00 pm — Startup Tech Talks → Hear from select CMU-founded startups as they talk about what they're building and the roles they're hiring for.
7:00 - 9:00 pm — Startup Career Fair & Networking → Meet founders and hiring teams from CMU startups and emerging companies in Rangos Ballroom

CMU SPARK 2026 is a high-energy evening connecting CMU students with startups and emerging companies hiring across technology, design, product and business.

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Speaker's Name: BORIS SOFMAN
Speaker Website: bedrockrobotics.com…
Speaker's Professional Title: Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Bedrock Robotics
Event Poster Title: Poster
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Entrepreneurship
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

Goldman Sachs Tech Talk

03 Sep 2026 17:35:06 GMT

Thursday, September 17, 2026, 6 – 7:30pm

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Gates Hillman 4405
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

SPARK - Startup and Student Networking

18 Aug 2026 19:20:08 GMT

Thursday, September 17, 2026, 7 – 9pm

SPARK 2026, CMU's largest annual student networking event for startups and emerging companies, is a high-energy evening where startups founded by CMU alumni deliver rapid-fire lightning tech talks about what they’re building and the roles they’re hiring for. Taking place during CMU Startup Week, the evening kicks off with a special keynote, flows into tech talks, and wraps up with a networking mixer.

From robotics and AI infrastructure to intelligent agents, productivity tools, cleantech innovations, and breakthrough medical devices, these startups are taking on some of today’s boldest challenges. They’re hiring hardware engineers, software engineers, designers, storytellers and business minds.

CMU SPARK is the university’s largest startup job fair, bringing the entire CMU community together for one powerful evening of insights, access and opportunities.

Students ⇢ REGISTER

Agenda

5:00 pm — Doors open
5:30 - 6:00 pm — Keynote with Boris Sofman, Co-Founder & CEO, Bedrock Robotics
6:00 - 7:00 pm — Startup Tech Talks ⇢ Hear from select CMU-founded startups as they talk about what they're building and the roles they're hiring for.
7:00 - 9:00 pm — Startup Career Fair & Networking ⇢ Meet founders and hiring teams from CMU startups and emerging companies in Rangos BallroomC

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Cohon University Center
Speaker's Name: In Conjunction with Start Up Week
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

Welcome FUJITSU

13 Aug 2026 15:55:12 GMT

Friday, September 18, 2026, 8:30am – 5pm

Meetings and participation by invitation only.

Event Type: Corporate Visit
Room Number: In Person
Building: By Invitation Only
For More Information: ckissell@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Robotics Ph.D. Thesis Defense - Ingrid Navarro Anaya

08 Sep 2026 19:30:11 GMT

Friday, September 18, 2026, 10 – 11:30am

Autonomous robots are increasingly expected to operate in dynamic, human-centered environments. To do so safely and efficiently, they must reason about how people move and interact. In domains like driving, social navigation, and aviation, a common approach is to learn models of human motion directly from recorded data and use the resulting priors to inform downstream systems like simulators and planning stacks.

Despite the growing availability of datasets, benchmarks, and modeling techniques, state-of-the-art methods remain unreliable for real-world deployment, often generalizing poorly to novel environments and rare events. Much of this stems from recorded datasets covering few environments and few safety-relevant events relative to what a deployed system will ultimately encounter. Broadly, the field has addressed this in four main ways: validating autonomy stacks on the road, collecting more data, synthesizing relevant scenarios, and adapting at test time. These are all valuable and necessary strategies, but each is bounded by risk, cost, the sim-to-real gap, or the difficulty of reliably detecting and adapting to a shift, respectively.

These strategies share the premise that the data we hold is insufficient. This dissertation argues that such data is also underexploited and thus pursues a complementary direction, asking how much actionable signal existing datasets already contain but current practice overlooks. We do so through a recurring paradigm we call scenario characterization: describing a scenario in terms of a property of interest and acting on that description downstream. We use this paradigm in three ways. The first is for guidance and abstraction, shaping what a model trains or optimizes. The second is for mining and benchmarking, determining what a model trains on and what is withheld to test it. The third is for analysis, fixing the basis on which results are studied. We apply these uses across two settings: in-distribution generalization, which draws mainly on guidance and abstraction, and generalization under distribution shift, which draws on all three and is where the main contributions concentrate.

We further argue that evidence for generalization is typically gathered only within a single domain, so a claim that holds there is rarely challenged elsewhere. This is largely because, outside autonomous driving, no motion domain offers comparable infrastructure and scale. This dissertation therefore contributes aviation as a testbed, introducing a large-scale framework and dataset for airport surface movement forecasting.

Through this framework and our experimental settings, we expose generalization failures that would otherwise have remained hidden in aggregate metrics. We also enable reading aviation and driving on a common basis, hinting at what transfers and what does not. Finally, we also provide early evidence that the signal recovered through our framework may help systems gain the risk awareness needed to handle real-world critical events.

Thesis Committee
Jean Oh (Co-chair)
Jonathan Francis (Co-chair)
Sebastian Scherer
Andrea Bajcsy
Alexandre Alahi (EPFL)

In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.

Event Type: Thesis Orals
Room Number: In Person and Virtual - ET
Building: Newell-Simon 4305 and Zoom
Speaker's Name: INGRID NAVARRO ANAYA
Speaker Website: navars.xyz
Speaker's Professional Title: Ph.D. Candidate, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: Towards Generalizable Motion Prediction under Distribution Shifts
For More Information: beckyw@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Robotics Institute (RI)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: www.ri.cmu.edu…

SCS Let's Talk (Again)! V.F26

11 Sep 2026 23:03:50 GMT

Friday, September 18, 2026, 10am – 3:30pm

SCS and companies/organizations connect through the computer and the critical engineering sciences involved. We approach the machine and the sciences of computing and hardware from our various and unique perspectives and needs. But our faculty and students work and study across divisions, as computing has no singular master. Our best ideas and projects come from working together and with those beyond our campus.

We invite our corporate and professional liaisons to join us again: to meet our students where we can share our experiences into meaningful outcomes. We would like to introduce you to our SCS undergraduates, to help you understand more about their backgrounds, research interests, and how they evolving into scientists, professionals and individuals - in a casual, relaxed and more conversational way. SCS offers undergraduate degrees in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Computational Biology, Human-Computer Interaction and Robotics. They all welcome discussion and your insights!

There is no fee to participate!
The event is intentionally very informal.

Interested? Would you like to participate?
Reach out to us at lets-talk@cs.cmu.edu

⇒ Please include: the names, titles and email address of those who will be attending.
⇒ If any registrant is an alum of CMU, this is great to know and can be included in your email.
⇒ Recommended "team" size is 1 to 3 guests per company (based on your needs).
⇒ We will provide refreshments and casual lunch.
⇒ Set-up begins at 9:00 am

Need to pre-ship any materials?

Address - UPS/Fedex (this comes to our building)

School of Computer Science
Attn (Let's Talk - Your Company Name)
Carnegie Mellon University
SCS Receiving / WEAN Hall 3613
311 Hamerschlag Drive
Pittsburgh PA 15213

Address - USPS

Same Address as above, but allow 4-5 extra days for delivery.
The package will be delivered, but may be routed through our Campus Post Office and more difficult to retrieve.

More questions? 412.268.8525
Campus Maps | Printable Map
Note: Parking on Campus is very limited. Please plan accordingly.

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: 6th Floor, Gates Hillman
Speaker's Name: SCS Undergraduate Students
For More Information: careers@cs.cmu.edu
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

STAtistical Methods for the Physical Sciences Research Center - Kelly Moran

11 Sep 2026 21:02:34 GMT

Friday, September 18, 2026, 1:30 – 2:30pm

In this talk, I will present three vignettes from collaborative work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The first uses Bayesian modeling to characterize source temperature and emission profiles from inertial-confinement-fusion diagnostics. The second develops a statistical pipeline to turn measurements from a compact sensor flown on the International Space Station into meaningful ionospheric signal. The third builds statistical emulators to learn about the universe from computationally expensive cosmological simulations. Across the examples, I will focus on the interplay between scientific objectives, statistical modeling, uncertainty, and close collaboration with domain experts.

—

Kelly R. Moran is a staff scientist in the Statistics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she develops statistical methods for scientific problems ranging from space physics to public health. Her work focuses on using tools such as Gaussian processes, emulation and calibration, and uncertainty quantification to learn from complex experiments, noisy observations, and large-scale simulations. She earned her Ph.D. in Statistical Science from Duke University as a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow. During the 2026–27 academic year, she is a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is particularly interested in building new collaborations and working with and supporting students.

In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.
⇢ See website for information on participating remotely.

Event Type: Seminars
Room Number: In Person and Virtua - ET
Building: Baher Hall 232M and Zoom
Speaker's Name: KELLY MORAN
Speaker Website: scholar.google.com…
Speaker's Professional Title: Staff Scientist, Statistics Group, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Visiting Professor 2026-2027, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: From Fusion to the Ionosphere to the Universe: Statistical Vignettes from Los Alamos National Laboratory
For More Information: ebensen@stat.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Machine Learning Department (MLD)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, Department of Statistics and Data Science
Event Website Title: Series Website
Event Website URL: www.cmu.edu…

Human-Computer Interaction Ph.D. Thesis Defense - Noor Hammad

10 Sep 2026 20:17:58 GMT

Friday, September 18, 2026, 2:30 – 4pm

Digital media creators, including video editors, live streamers, and game developers, rely on diverse creativity tools such as game engines, video editing software, and live streaming platforms to produce their work. These ecosystems are powerful; however they often impose constraints on their users, leading to rigid interfaces that fail to adapt to how creators want to work. Existing tools can limit a creator’s ability to realize ambitious ideas, offer inadequate mechanisms for communication between creators and their audiences, and provide interfaces that do not align with how creators naturally express their preferences. The first half of this thesis explores these misalignments through the development of data-driven tools, resulting in three systems that expand the design possibilities in mobile augmented reality, create novel mechanisms for streamer–audience engagement on live streaming platforms, and support video creators in expressing musical preferences through a vibe-based creative assistant. Taken together, my work on these projects revealed that the content creation process produces a wealth of valuable data, yet this data is often leveraged ad hoc to power isolated features, as opposed to being treated as a foundational resource for designing creator-aligned systems.

Building upon this realization, I argue that the future of creativity tools relies on the deliberate use of Creative Activity Traces as a primary design material. The term Creative Activity Traces refers to the process-related data generated by the creator during their practice, including evolving records of ideas, intermediate artifacts, and metadata yielded during creative work. These traces are often multi-modal, distributed across tools, and deeply personalized. To understand how the HCI community currently works with traces, I conducted a systematic review of 133 creativity tools and developed a preliminary design framework for trace awareness. This review revealed that modern creativity tools either treat activity traces as atemporal raw material, or utilize them only as needed as input to a specific feature, thereby limiting both the temporal scope and design opportunities possible with traces. Rather than continuing to use traces in this way, my thesis instead calls for traces to be treated as a design material to be engaged with at every stage of the research and development process. This approach in turn leads to adaptive systems that stay aligned with how creators work and how and their processes unfold,

The final phase of this research builds upon my theory of creative activity traces and trace-aware tools through the study of video content creators' practices for creating, maintaining, and evolving a recognizable brand across video projects. Through a formative study with seven video creators, I cataloged the traces their practice accumulates over time, the behaviors associated with their accumulated traces across projects, and the frictions they face as a result of their cross-project practices. This work showed that traces share temporal characteristics but are not a uniform material a designer can treat the same way throughout, so much as a single material with differing grains and textures. As traces accumulate across projects, they weave into a whole with a shape of its own, and the individual traces that produced it can be difficult to disentangle into constituent parts.

This thesis contributes to HCI and creativity tool research by framing creative practice as an inherently data-rich process that requires more intentional engagement from the HCI research community. I formalize the definitions of creative activity traces and trace-aware tools, and I offer a design framework for trace-awareness. I show what it means to treat traces as a critical building block for designing creativity tools rather than as a byproduct of creative work. Taken together, these contributions set forth a trace-aware agenda for the next generation of creativity tools, one that keeps creators and their evolving practices in view as digital creative production grows more automated and uncertain.

Thesis Committee
Jessica Hammer (Co-chair)
Erik Harpstead (Co-chair)
Nikolas Martelaro
Bryan Wang (Adobe)
Max Kreminski (Cornell University)

Additional Information

In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.

Event Type: Thesis Orals
Room Number: In Person and Virtual - ET
Building: Traffic21 Classroom, Gates Hillman 6121 and Zoom
Speaker's Name: NOOR HAMMAD
Speaker Website: www.nhammad.me
Speaker's Professional Title: Ph.D. Candidate, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: Trace-Aware Creativity Tools
For More Information: kschaich@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Women@SCS LeetCode Night

24 Aug 2026 19:59:09 GMT

Friday, September 18, 2026, 6 – 7pm

Join Women@SCS for an evening of coding, problem-solving, and community! Work through LeetCode questions with friends, grab some refreshments, and sharpen your skills for interviews and careers in tech.
Whether you’re prepping for the next big internship or just want to practice in a supportive environment, feel free to drop by.

All are welcome to attend.

RSVP

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Reddy Conference Room, Gates Hillman 4405
Speaker's Name: Hosted by Women@SCS
For More Information: michelle@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Community Engagement, Community Outreach
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Smiley's 44th Birthday!

27 Aug 2026 17:21:53 GMT

Saturday, September 19, 2026

Event Type: Fun
Affiliations: Traditions
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Smiley @ CMU
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

13th Annual SteelHacks

24 Aug 2026 13:59:41 GMT

Saturday, September 19, 8:30am – Sunday, September 20, 2026, 1:15pm

SteelHacks - a collegiate hackathon - is hosted annually at the University of Pittsburgh. This year marks their 13th anniversary.

The event is a hub of creativity and technical exploration, bringing together hundreds of passionate hackers who collaboratively solve multi-disciplinary problems. Sponsor-driven tracks challenge participants to tackle real-world problems crafted by the companies shaping the future of tech. The event offers workshops, mentorship, networking opportunities, and other activities beyond coding.

Join them in Pittsburgh for a weekend of building, learning, and innovation!
Questions? | REGISTER

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Wesley W. Posvar Hall, 230 S. Bouquet Street
Speaker's Name: Hosted by the Computer Science Club at the University of Pittsburgh
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

MSCF Trading Competition

26 Aug 2026 18:19:01 GMT

Saturday, September 19, 2026, 9am – 4pm

The Master of Science in Computational Finance (MSCF) 2026 Trading Competition, open to all CMU students, is happening again! This exciting one-day, in-person event is inspired by the prestigious Rotman International Trading Competition.

How to get involved:

Form a team of two, ideally pairing someone with strong algo/coding skills and someone who excels in financial strategy.
Once you’ve got your dream team, have each team member complete this application to express your interest
On the application page, you will find the application under "Apply Today"

Deadline for Application ⇢ Submit your application by September 4
⇢ Every participant needs to apply as an individual, listing their teammate.

To keep up with the latest details and tips on forming teams, visit the MSCF Trading Competition website often.

Exciting details:

Prizes await the top 3 teams, and we’ll also provide a light breakfast and lunch to keep you energized throughout the day.
There will be time to meet our sponsors and learn about their organizations and potential internship or full-time opportunities.

Got questions?

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Rangos Hall, Cohon University Center
Event Poster Title: Poster with QR code
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

CMU Night with the Pittsburgh Pirates

21 Aug 2026 17:50:04 GMT

Saturday, September 19, 2026, 6:40pm

Join your fellow Tartans at the Pittsburgh Pirates vs. the Kansas City Royals game!
All CMU students, staff, faculty, alumni, friends and families are welcome.

Tickets include a co-branded Pirates x CMU long-sleeve shirt and $10 in loaded value to use for concessions or merchandise at the game.

Also! Fans have the option to add a pregame happy hour in the Left Field Lounge, which begins once gates open and runs until the top of the third inning, where you can mingle with fellow alumni, students and fans. Space is limited.

Event Type: Fun
Room Number: In Person
Building: PNC Park at North Shore, 115 Federal Street, Pittsburgh 15212 (downtown)
Event Poster Title: Poster with QR Code
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department (CSD), Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department (CBD), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website and Tickets
Event Website URL: www.mlb.com…

Welcome Back KYOCERA

13 Aug 2026 15:58:20 GMT

Monday, September 21, 8:30am – Friday, September 25, 2026, 5pm

Meetings and participation by invitation only.

Event Type: Corporate Visit
Room Number: In Person
Building: By Invitation Only
For More Information: ckissell@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Software Engineering Ph.D. Thesis Defense - Hao He

09 Sep 2026 14:02:51 GMT

Monday, September 21, 2026, 2 – 3:30pm

Software engineering practice is filled with myths---beliefs derived from intuition, experience, and conventional wisdom---that lack empirical foundations. Many of these myths are causal in nature, concerning the consequences of decisions, interventions, and changes to practice. While empirical software engineering research frequently investigates these myths through descriptive, correlational, and qualitative evidence, it rarely engages with the challenging question of whether the evidence can actually support the causal claims beneath these myths. In this thesis, I argue that causal credibility assessments are feasible in empirical software engineering research through explicit articulations of causal theory and assumptions.

To demonstrate this argument, this thesis starts with an accessible introduction to the modern causal inference toolkit for software engineering researchers. Then, across three empirical studies, I demonstrate how causal credibility assessments can reveal systematic gaps between practitioner beliefs and empirical reality. First, using counterfactual analysis and simulations on npm dependency data, I challenge the myth that pinning dependency versions improves project security, showing that it paradoxically increases attack exposure unless upstream packages pin their own dependencies. Second, through a longitudinal analysis of GitHub starring patterns with panel regression models, I challenge the myth that fake GitHub stars provide sustainable promotional benefits, showing instead that these artificial signals become long-term liabilities. Finally, using a difference-in-differences design with staggered adoption, I challenge the myth that AI coding tools unambiguously improve developer productivity, finding that Cursor's initial velocity gains are offset by sustained accumulation of technical debt. In each study, I assess the credibility of causal claims through the following four-step framework: (1) deriving an explicit causal theory from software engineering domain knowledge, (2) defining the causal estimate of interest and specifying the assumption under which the estimate carries a causal interpretation, (3) honestly acknowledging and mitigating limitations and known caveats, and (4) thoughtfully navigating alternative explanations. Collectively, this thesis provides a methodological blueprint for future empirical software engineering research, illustrating how to balance rigor with practicality to generate actionable, trustworthy evidence for software engineering myths.

Thesis Committee
Bogdan Vasilescu (Co-Chair)
Christian Kästner (Co-Chair)
Rohan Padhye
Narayan Ramasubbu (University of Pittsburgh)

Additional Information

In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.

Event Type: Thesis Orals
Room Number: In Person
Building: TCS Hall 360
Speaker's Name: HAO HE
Speaker Website: hehao98.github.io
Speaker's Professional Title: Ph.D. Candidate, Ph.D. Program in Software Engineering, Software and Societal Systems Department, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: Dispelling Software Engineering Myths: A Pragmatic Causal Inference Approach
Event Poster Title: Poster
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
For More Information: aroudebu@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Vision and Autonomous Systems Seminar - Tal Daniel

08 Sep 2026 20:15:56 GMT

Monday, September 21, 2026, 3:30 – 4:30pm

Robots must often make decisions in scenes containing many objects: they need to identify what is present, understand where objects are, predict how they will interact, and choose actions accordingly. Learning these capabilities directly from pixels is challenging, especially when the number and arrangement of objects can change from one scene to another.

In this talk, I will present Deep Latent Particles (DLP), a self-supervised object-centric representation that describes a visual scene as a set of compact latent particles. Each particle captures the location and visual properties of a discovered object or object part, providing an interpretable bridge between raw images and multi-object decision-making.

I will show how DLP can serve as a representation for learning robotic policies from online reinforcement learning, offline data, and demonstrations. In particular, policies built on these representations can generalize compositionally to scenes containing more objects than were present during training.

I will then introduce Latent Particle World Models (ICLR 2026 Oral), which learn to predict how collections of latent particles evolve over time. These object-centric world models support multi-view observations and flexible conditioning, enabling prediction and decision-making in rich visual environments. I will discuss how this perspective connects to diffusion-based policies and world action models (WAMs), and conclude with a look toward self-supervised 3D object-centric learning for robots that can perceive, predict, and act in three-dimensional worlds. and which will be quietly subsumed by the next scale-up.

—

Tal Daniel is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, working with Prof. Deepak Pathak and Prof. David Held. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Technion, advised by Prof. Aviv Tamar. His research spans self-supervised and object-centric representation learning, generative modeling, reinforcement learning, and robotics, with a focus on learning representations and world models.

The VASC Seminar is generously sponsored by HeyGen

Event Type: Seminars
Room Number: In Person
Building: Newell-Simon 3305
Speaker's Name: TAL DANIEL
Speaker Website: taldatech.github.io
Speaker's Professional Title: Postdoctoral Fellow, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: Decision-Making in a World of Latent Particles
Event Poster Title: Poster
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
For More Information: cdowney@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Robotics Institute (RI)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: www.ri.cmu.edu…

TWG AI - Info Session

10 Sep 2026 18:51:16 GMT

Tuesday, September 22, 2026, 12 – 2pm

TWG AI is actively recruiting for 2027 summer interns and hosting an information session to share. Internships are paid and located in Santa Monica, CA. Come hear from past interns, TWG AI leaders, & the HR team.

TWG AI is at the cutting edge of innovation, using data and AI to transform businesses. Our portfolio includes a vast range of financial services, tech and AI, sports, media and energy companies—including Guggenheim Investments, the Los Angeles Dodgers, Chelsea Football Club, Shield AI, Group 1001 Insurance, and Acrisure, just to name a few. And we’re rapidly building a Data and AI Solutions Group to turbocharge our entire spectrum of businesses.

If you plan to attend, please RSVP
⇢ Food will be provided at the info session.

Open Roles
3 open internship opportunities and are looking to hire ~10 interns for summer 2027

TWG AI can sponsor CPT/OPT

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person - RSVP Requested
Building: Reddy Conference Room, Gates Hillman 4405
For More Information: careers@cs.cmu.edu
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

Joint Neural Computation and Machine Learning Ph.D. Thesis Defense - Joel Ye

09 Sep 2026 22:00:07 GMT

Tuesday, September 22, 2026, 3 – 4:30pm

The increasing ambition of neuroscience and neurotechnology both supplies and demands vast new quantities of neural data, creating a need for methods that can operate effectively at scale. This thesis examines how deep learning can meet that need for intracortical brain-computer interfaces, which aim to restore movement and sensation to people with impaired sensorimotor function. We develop models that learn across recording sessions, individuals, and tasks, establish a benchmark for consistent neural decoding, and evaluate the benefits and limitations of large-scale pretraining. These studies demonstrate the promise of shared neural data models while identifying obstacles to translating scale into improved performance. We also develop a method to recover neural activity obscured by electrical stimulation artifacts, expanding access to the signals needed to study and control sensory interfaces. Together, this work provides tools and an empirical foundation for building neural interfaces that can accommodate the texture and scale of everyday use.

Thesis Committee
Robert Gaunt (Co-chair)
Leila Wehbe (Co-chair)
Jennifer Collinger
Aran Nayebi
Chethan Pandarinath (Emory University)

Additional Information

In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.

Event Type: Thesis Orals
Room Number: In Person and Virtual - ET
Building: Mellon Institute 328 and Zoom
Speaker's Name: JOEL YE
Speaker Website: joel99.github.io
Speaker's Professional Title: Ph.D. Candidate, Joint Ph.D. Program in Neural Computation and Machine Learning, Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: Deep learning for scalable neural interfaces
Affiliations: Machine Learning Department (MLD)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, Neural Science Institute

Special Guest Talk with Exponent Talk and Discussions (PhD)

08 Sep 2026 23:15:34 GMT

Wednesday, September 23, 2026, 12 – 1:20pm

This talk shares practical lessons from eight years of securing automated driving systems, including robotaxis and autonomous freight trucks. It highlights the realities cybersecurity teams face in research-driven, fast-changing companies with short funding horizons, small security teams, emerging product lifecycles, and limited supplier influence. Drawing on experience building cybersecurity programs and embedding them into engineering workflows, it focuses on what works: mastering basic software security practices, relying on OEM and Tier 1 partners for traditional automotive supply chain management, reusing proven automotive and cloud security mechanisms, keeping cybersecurity teams focused on cyber risks, and shaping standards and regulations. The core message is to focus limited resources on autonomy-specific security challenges while avoiding unnecessary reinvention. The talk will close with a brief introduction to Exponent as a place where SCS PhD graduates can use deep technical expertise to tackle consequential, interdisciplinary problems at the intersection of research, industry, policy, and real-world impact.

REGISTER

—

Michael Maass is a Senior Cybersecurity Consultant at Exponent in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science practice. He founded one of the first product cybersecurity teams dedicated to securing SAE Level 4 automated driving systems. Over eight years in the automotive cybersecurity space, he led teams in implementing and executing standards- and regulatory-compliant cybersecurity development lifecycles and management systems for robotaxi and automated freight truck products. His experience spans every aspect of securing a product from concept through field maintenance, with hands-on expertise in defining requirements, building threat analyses and risk assessments, writing secure code, hardening build systems, and performing cybersecurity verification and validation, including static and dynamic analysis and managing penetration testing teams. Prior to his work in the automotive industry, he spent a decade securing Internet of Things and aerospace products. Michael is a 2016 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Ph.D. program.

Hard Questions. Tough Challenges. Bring It.
In an era of accelerating change, Exponent is the only premium engineering and scientific consulting firm with the depth and breadth of expertise to solve our clients’ most profoundly unique, unprecedented, and urgent challenges.

Exponent brings together 90+ technical disciplines and 950+ consultants to help our clients navigate the increasing complexity of more than a dozen industries, connecting decades of pioneering work in failure analysis to develop solutions for a safer, healthier, more sustainable world.

Our consultants deliver the highest value by leveraging multidisciplinary expertise and resources from across Exponent's offices in North America, Asia, and Europe. Exponent's consultants, laboratories, databases, and computing resources work seamlessly together around the globe, enabling us to produce the breakthrough insights needed to help multinational companies, startups, law firms, insurance companies, government, and society respond to incidents and push their products and processes forward.

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Reddy Conference Room, Gates HIllman 4405
Speaker's Name: MICHAEL MAASS
Speaker's Professional Title: Senior Cybersecurity Consultant, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science practice, Exponent
Talk Title: Practical Lessons from Eight Years of Securing Automated Driving Systems
For More Information: careers@cs.cmu.edu
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

Software Engineering Institute Webcast: How 3D Gaussian Splatting is Transforming Digital Twins

25 Aug 2026 16:55:01 GMT

Wednesday, September 23, 2026, 1 – 2pm

Creating high-fidelity digital twins has traditionally been costly and time consuming. A new class of volumetric modeling techniques is changing this paradigm by enabling the creation of photorealistic visual models and geometrically accurate 3D meshes from real-world data. In this webcast, we will explore one emerging approach—3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)—and discuss how organizations can leverage these models for applications such as simulation, training, visualization, autonomous systems, and digital engineering.

What Will Attendees Learn

how contemporary approaches are enabling faster, more scalable creation of digital twins
the fundamentals of 3D Gaussian Splatting and practical considerations for using the technology
how organizations can apply 3DGS-based models to support mission, engineering, and operational needs

Who Should Attend?

Researchers and engineers working in computer vision, AI, simulation, and digital engineering
Digital transformation leaders interested in applying digital twin technologies
Program managers and decision-makers evaluating new approaches for modeling real-world environments

REGISTER
About the Speakers

Matthew Walsh is a Senior Data Scientist within the CERT Division of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI). His research centers on leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance cyber security and to usher in novel organizational capabilities. Among his recent undertakings, Matthew has explored extensions of system theory to ensure the safety and security of AI systems. Matthew earned a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University, and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the Pennsylvania State University.

Dominic Ross is an Autonomy Engineer at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI) with over 15 years of expertise in media research and development. His work focuses on generative AI, particularly in the areas of digital twinning, virtual production, and extended reality (XR). Dominic has applied these technologies in modeling and simulation (M&S) environments to develop training capabilities for both human warfighters and autonomous systems.

Event Type: Seminars
Room Number: Virtual Presentation - ET
Building: Remote Access - Zoom
Talk Title: How 3D Gaussian Splatting is Transforming Digital Twins
For More Information: info@sei.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Government, Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D), Software Engineering Institute (SEI)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website and Registration
Event Website URL: mail.google.com…

2026 Human-AI Complementarity Workshop: Dynamic Alignment

26 Aug 2026 19:39:10 GMT

Thursday, September 24, 8:15am – Friday, September 25, 2026, 5pm

The NSF AI Institute for Societal Decision Making (NSF AI-SDM) sponsors the participation of selected speakers and students in an annual workshop of Human-AI Complementarity for Decision Making. Human-AI Complementarity, defined as the condition in which Humans + AI working together results in better decisions than humans or AI working alone, is a broad goal pursued in several projects of the NSF AI-SDM.

The interdisciplinary workshop will focus on designing and deploying AI systems that are dynamically aligned with human values, robust to unexpected behaviors, and safe even under failure conditions. Key topics will include the role of AI agents in influencing human decision confidence and calibration, AI’s impact on trust, coordination, and collaboration in decision-making, and addressing undesirable AI behaviors.

Participants from diverse fields such as decision science, cognitive science, computer science, and machine learning will engage actively through tutorials, interactive poster sessions, presentations, and collaborative “AIdea” generation to identify pressing research challenges and propose concrete solutions for achieving complementarity in flexible Human-AI teams. The goal is to advance the state of the art in human-AI interaction for the benefit of society.

The goals of the workshop are:

To deliver state of the art instruction on desirable ideas to achieve dynamic and complementary human-AI alignment
To generate common knowledge about pressing research challenges
To generate new shared ideas to address these challenges in future research

Additional Information (with details and deadlines)

Submission Tracks
Applicants can submit abstracts to one of three tracks:

Research Talks & Posters: Highlight ongoing, completed, or proposed research related to the workshop theme. Selected abstracts will be featured as oral presentations or during poster sessions.
Tutorials: Propose educational sessions designed to deliver state-of-the-art instruction on theories, methodologies, or tools that achieve dynamic and complementary human-AI alignment. You may also use the submission form to nominate expert tutorial leaders.
Industry Demos: Showcase real-world applications, tools, or platforms that emphasize longitudinal human-AI interaction, collaborative decision-making, or dynamic system evaluation.

Funding for travel and lodging is available to support accepted speakers and student presenters.

Event Type: Conference/Workshop
Room Number: In Person
Building: Rivers Club, 201 Grant Street, Pittsburgh PA
Speaker's Name: Sponsored by the NSF AI Institute for Societal Decision Making (NSF AI-SDM)
For More Information: ngottron@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department (CSD), Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Partnerships, Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: www.cmu.edu…

Welcome KEIO UNIVERSITY

13 Jul 2026 14:54:38 GMT

Thursday, September 24, 8:30am – Friday, September 25, 2026, 5pm

Meetings and participation by invitation only.

Event Type: Corporate Visit
Room Number: In Person
Building: By Invitation Only
For More Information: gdarakos@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

The Block Center Research Talk

03 Sep 2026 20:25:14 GMT

Thursday, September 24, 2026, 12:30 – 1:30pm

How can health systems expand access to hospital-level care beyond traditional hospital walls? Join us for a lunchtime conversation with Block Center Fellows Holly Wiberg, Assistant Professor of Operation Research and Public Policy, and Peter Zhang, Assistant Professor of Operations Research, who will share new research on the opportunities and challenges of Hospital at Home care, particularly in rural and underserved communities.

Their research examines how to determine when Hospital at Home and other distributed healthcare systems are logistically and economically viable, and how these models can be designed to work across geographically dispersed communities. The conversation will also explore how engagement with rural health providers can help translate these models into practical approaches for healthcare delivery, infrastructure investment, and reimbursement policy.

Discover how AI and optimization can help health systems rethink where and how hospital-level care is delivered and build more accessible, resilient, and equitable healthcare systems.

Audience: Primarily geared towards Master’s students, but open to faculty, staff, and other members of the CMU community
Food: Coffee and Pastries!

REGISTER

Event Type: Talks
Room Number: In Person
Building: Hamburg Hall Executive Education Suite, 1214
Speaker's Name: Scaling Distributed Healthcare Systems - Operational Innovations for Equity, Access, and Robustness
Event Poster Title: Poster with QR Code
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
For More Information: coleg@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Heinz College
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: events.cmu.edu…

SCS TechNights

24 Aug 2026 17:46:18 GMT

Thursday, September 24, 6pm – Thursday, October 29, 2026, 7:30pm

We are excited to announce the return of TechNights in the School of Computer Science at CMU this fall.

TechNights is a free youth outreach program that aims to encourage the next generation of women to pursue education and careers in STEM fields. The program is open to middle school students Grades 6-8 in the Pittsburgh area, who will learn through creative technologies, covering diverse topics including computer animation, web design, machine learning, computational biology, origami, robotics, and more.

Attendance is open to all.

Learn More | REGISTER!

Event Type: Meeting
Room Number: In Person
Building: Gates Hillman Center
Speaker's Name: Hosted by the SCS Office of Community Engagement
Speaker Website: www.cs.cmu.edu…
For More Information: michelle@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Community Engagement, Community Outreach
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Vision and Autonomous Systems Seminar - Sanjeev J. Koppal

11 Sep 2026 17:50:54 GMT

Friday, September 25, 2026, 11am – 12pm

Most cameras on robots today capture images without considering scene content. In contrast, animal eyes have fast mechanical movements that control how the scene is imaged in detail by the fovea, where visual acuity is highest. The prevalence of active vision during biological imaging, and the wide variety of it, makes it very clear that this is an effective visual design strategy for robot vision. In this talk, I will cover our recent work on creating both new camera designs and novel robot perception algorithms to enable adaptive and selective active vision and imaging inside cameras and sensors.

—

Sanjeev J. Koppal is an Associate Professor at the University of Florida’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and is a Kent and Linda Fuchs Faculty Fellow. He also held a UF Term Professorship for 2021-23. Sanjeev is the Director of the FOCUS Lab at UF. Since 2022, Sanjeev has been an Amazon Scholar with Amazon Robotics. Prior to joining UF, he was a researcher at the Texas Instruments Imaging R&D lab. Sanjeev obtained his Masters and Ph.D. degrees from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. After CMU, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Southern California in 2003 as a Trustee Scholar. He is a co-author on best student paper awards for ECCV 2016 and NEMS 2018, and work from his FOCUS lab was a CVPR 2019 best-paper finalist. Sanjeev won an NSF CAREER award in 2020 and is an IEEE Senior Member and an Optica Senior Member. He won a UF ECE Department Teaching Award in 2024. His interests span computer vision, computational photography and optics, novel cameras and sensors, 3D reconstruction, physics-based vision, and active illumination.

The VASC seminar is generously sponsored by HeyGen

Event Type: Seminars
Room Number: In Person
Building: Newell-Simon 4305
Speaker's Name: SANJEEV J. KOPPAL
Speaker Website: focus.ece.ufl.edu
Speaker's Professional Title: Associate Professor and Kent and Linda Fuchs Faculty Fellow, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida
Talk Title: Adaptive Cameras: Bridging Novel Sensors and Robot Perception
Event Poster Title: Poster
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
For More Information: cdowney@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Robotics Institute (RI)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, VASC
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: www.ri.cmu.edu…

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

11 Feb 2026 16:16:19 GMT

Sunday, September 27, 8:30am – Thursday, October 1, 2026, 5:30pm

The IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) is one of the largest and most impactful robotics research conferences worldwide.

IROS 2026 will bring together researchers, engineers, and industry leaders in Pittsburgh, a city at the forefront of robotics innovation, home to world-renowned institutions and cutting-edge autonomous vehicle companies.

Join in for a week of groundbreaking presentations, workshops, tutorials, and networking opportunities that will shape the future of intelligent systems.

—

Pittsburgh, long-known as the “Steel City,” has transformed into a global hub for robotics and artificial intelligence and now has earned the name “Roboburgh.” Home to world-renowned research institutions and a thriving tech ecosystem, Pittsburgh provides the perfect backdrop for IROS 2026 as we explore the frontiers of intelligent robotics.

This year’s conference will feature an exceptional technical program, including keynote speeches from leading experts, workshops, tutorials, competitions, and special sessions covering the latest advances in robot perception, learning, control, and human-robot interaction.

We look forward to welcoming researchers, practitioners, and innovators from around the world to Pittsburgh for what promises to be an unforgettable week of scientific exchange and collaboration.

Event Type: Conference/Workshop
Room Number: In Person
Building: David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh PA 15222
Affiliations: Entrepreneurship, Government, Partnerships, Robotics Institute (RI), Technology Transfer
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Conference Website
Event Website URL: 2026.ieee-iros.org

NVIDIA Ph.D. Tech Talk

09 Sep 2026 23:03:05 GMT

Thursday, October 1, 2026, 12 – 1pm

Watch for details and registration information.

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: ASA Conference Room, Gates Hillman 6115
For More Information: careers@cs.cmu.edu
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

46th Annual SCS Pretty Good 5K Race & Coach Tomayko 5K Race-Walk

25 Aug 2026 15:04:15 GMT

Friday, October 2, 2026, 4:30 – 5:30pm

Our version of the Pittsburgh Great Race, the Pretty Good Race, is held every year in Schenley Park.

Watch for details and registration!
Open to the SCS Community.

Event Type: Introductory Course/Orientation
Room Number: In Person
Building: Assemble under the Panther Hollow Bridge (behind Schenley Park Nature Center)
Speaker's Name: Hosted annually by the Computer Science Department as part of the IC
For More Information: pgr-race@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department (CBD), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

2026-28 James R. Swartz Entrepreneurial Fellows

20 Aug 2026 19:54:26 GMT

Sunday, October 4, 2026, 11:55am – 11:55pm

This initiative fast-tracks the careers of Carnegie Mellon University's first year graduate students who are passionate about entrepreneurship in the technology arena.

The highly selective program develops each Fellow's entrepreneurial potential and leadership skills through hands-on experiences, networking, mentoring and courses in entrepreneurship. The program's core is a mentored summer internship with a top-tier VC-backed startup within the high-tech, high-growth environment of California's Silicon Valley and San Francisco (encouraged but not required) or another area of preference.

Attend the Zoom Information Session: Wednesday, September 9 @ 12:30 pm 🔜 REGISTER

Swartz Fellows Program Activities include

Summer internship: Committed to and working toward completing a summer internship anywhere in the U.S. (California’s Bay Area encouraged but not required).
Networking opportunities that include unique access to investors and business leaders
Speaker Series Roundtables that bring together Swartz Fellows with prominent entrepreneurial leaders such as Matt Rogers (Nest Labs), Lila Ibrahim (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Coursera), Andrew Mason (Groupon), Scott Griffith (ZipCar) and Jonathan Kaplan (The Melt; Pure Digital/TheFlip).
Mentoring and guidance from entrepreneurial faculty and staff, business community members, investors, and C-level executives
Cohort and community building with current and alumni Swartz Fellows
Entrepreneurship coursework
Stipend for networking trips to the California Bay Area

Learn More | Apply

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: Applications are Open
Building: APPLICATION DEADLINE: 4 October 2026 @ 11:59 pm
Speaker's Name: For CMU Graduate Students
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

Welcome BOBYARD

13 Aug 2026 16:00:22 GMT

Monday, October 5, 2026, 8:30am – 5pm

Meetings and participation by invitation only.

Event Type: Corporate Visit
Room Number: In Person
For More Information: ckissell@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

SCS Distinguished Lecture - David Blei

10 Sep 2026 22:59:32 GMT

Tuesday, October 6, 2026, 4:30pm

TBA

Event Type: SCS Distinguished Lectures
Room Number: In Person
Building: Rashid Auditorium, Gates Hillman 4401
Speaker's Name: DAVID BLEI
Speaker Website: www.cs.columbia.edu…
Speaker's Professional Title: Professor, Departments of Statistics and Computer Science, Columbia University
For More Information: scs-dls@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Machine Learning Department (MLD)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

SCS Graduate Programs Fair

11 Sep 2026 16:09:14 GMT

Wednesday, October 7, 2026, 12 – 4pm

Representatives from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science (SCS) masters and PhD programs will be available to discuss academic offerings, research opportunities, admissions, and application planning. Students interested in graduate study in computer science, artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, software engineering, human-computer interaction, language technologies, computational biology, and related fields are invited to attend.

The event is free and open to all interested students, regardless of undergraduate institution.

REGISTER

Event Type: Career Presentation
Room Number: In Person
Building: TCS Hall Atrium, 4665 Forbes Avenue
Event Poster Title: Poster with QR Code and Registration
Event Poster URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department (CBD), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: SCS Careers
Event Website URL: www.cs.cmu.edu…

AI Institute for Societal Decision Making Seminar - Tomer Ullman

26 Aug 2026 19:46:29 GMT

Thursday, October 8, 2026, 12 – 1:30pm

NOTE: This event is taking place at Harvard University and is accessible via Zoom

Tomer Ullman is a cognitive scientist interested in common-sense reasoning, and building computational models for explaining high-level cognitive processes and the acquisition of new knowledge by children and adults. In particular, he is focused on how children and adults come to form intuitive theories of agents and objects, and providing both a functional and algorithmic account of how these theories are learned. Such an account would go a long way towards explaining the basics cogs and springs of human intelligence, and support the building of more human-like artificial intelligence. Dr. Ullman received in B.Sc in Cognitive Science and Physics from Hebrew University in 2008, and his Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT in 2015. From 2015-2018 he was a post-doctoral associate at the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.

REGISTER to attend in-person or on Zoom (watch for coordinates)

Event Type: Seminars
Room Number: Virtual Presentation - ET
Building: Remote Access - Zoom
Speaker's Name: TOMER D. ULLMAN
Speaker Website: www.tomerullman.org
Speaker's Professional Title: Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology, Harvard University
Talk Title: TBA
For More Information: pwerns@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department (CBD), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: events.cmu.edu…

2026 Annual IDeaS Conference

18 Aug 2026 17:31:17 GMT

Monday, October 12, 8:30am – Wednesday, October 14, 2026, 5:30pm

Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Information Democracy & Social – cybersecurity (IDeaS) is hosting a conference focused on policy challenges emerging from the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence and digital platforms. Advances in AI systems, shifts in platform governance, and the scale and speed of online communication are transforming how information is produced, distributed, and consumed. At the same time, online harms – including illegal, abusive, and deceptively manipulated content – are increasingly linked to offline social and economic outcomes, with significant implications for democratic institutions and communities.

Natural disasters, elections, climate change, insurrections, pandemics, and new technologies are rocking the world. Social media platforms, search engines and websites have become the window through which these events are viewed and interpreted as people increasingly talk about events, both these massive ones and much smaller ones, online. Those on social media seek and shape information, build and join communities, often with impacts in the physical world. One consequence of having these discussions on these platforms is that it creates an online breeding ground for growing and disseminating misleading information of varying levels of credibility and the spread of hate speech and extremism. In this conference we ask: How is this done? Who is doing it? Why is it being done? What are the social consequences? How can it be countered?

The IDeaS Center is hosting this hybrid conference to advance the science of social-cybersecurity through research and applications in this field of study. We invite papers that address these questions and are particularly interested in papers that touch on the role that non-credible information, hate speech and extremism are playing in events related to health, medicine, elections, conflict, diplomacy, and community resilience.

2026 IDeaS Panels

Governing Generative AI: Accountability, Liability, and Public Trust — Generative AI systems are quickly changing the information environment, introducing systemic risks related to privacy, online harms, and the concentration of economic and political power among a few major players. This panel will assess current liability frameworks, and panelists will discuss topics such as who is responsible when AI systems cause harm, how governance models can address public mistrust, and how to confront the broader concentration of AI infrastructure and capital.

Katie Kinsey (NYU School of Law)
Maurice Turner (TikTok)
Prof. Sarah Cen (Carnegie Mellon University

Governing AI Companions for Minor Users — AI companions are becoming increasingly advanced and are sometimes deliberately marketed to children and adolescents, and unlike traditional social media platforms, they can develop parasocial relationships with users, raising urgent concerns about child mental health, social development, and data collection on minors. This panel will tackle what we know about how kids and teens engage with AI companions, what the potential harms are, and how policymakers should respond to these products.

Prof. Clare Huntington (Columbia Law School)
Prof. Marie Bragg (NYU School of Medicine)
Prof. Hoda Heidari (Carnegie Mellon University)

Governing Human-AI Teams in the Workplace — As AI agents move from narrow task automation into more complex tasks involving or managed by humans, organizations face new governance questions about managing teams where key tasks are performed not only by people but also by AI agents or tools. This panel will discuss how accountability, credit, and liability should be assigned in hybrid teams, how workers are adapting to AI tools, and the risks of deskilling or job displacement.

Prof. Brandy Aven (Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University)
Dr. David Mortimore (U.S. Navy)

Technology, Elections, and Democratic Resilience — As AI-generated content becomes more advanced and accessible, democratic societies face increasing challenges to election integrity and public trust, as synthetic media, deepfakes, and algorithmically amplified misinformation change how political information spreads and how voters understand candidates and institutions. This panel will evaluate what we know about AI's impact on elections, whether current legal frameworks are enough, which interventions effectively reduce deceptive content, and how democratic societies can build resilience without compromising free expression.'

Prof. Jennifer Golbeck (University of Maryland)
Dr. Todd Helmus (Meridian Influence Group)
Prof. Michael Shamos (Carnegie Mellon University)

Policy, empirical, qualitative, data science and simulation papers are of equal interest. The conference seeks to be a broad look at online harms: thus issues such as platform regulation, new technologies (e.g. deep fakes), human psychological and social response, links between online and offline behavior, are all relevant.

The conference will include:

Invited panels
Research presentations
Poster sessions
Technology demonstrations

Learn More | REGISTER

The IDeaS Conference is co-located with the annual SBP-BRiMS Conference.
Conference registration allows participants to attend sessions from both conferences.

There will also be an opportunity for those interested in demoing their technologies or proposed policies. Teams are invited to submit their proposed solutions to a timely policy challenge concerning AI overviews in web search results.

The Challenge Problem this year — Addressing Accuracy, Misinformation, and User Understanding in Synthesized Search Results Overview. Teams are invited to submit proposed solutions to a timely policy challenge concerning AI overviews in web search results, focusing on developing user-centric disclosure criteria for AI overviews. What are users' perspectives on AI overviews, and how might changes in design and disclosure requirements enhance users' evaluation of search results?

Submissions should be uploaded via EasyChair by August 21, 2026.

Event Type: Conference/Workshop
Room Number: In Person and Virtual - ET
Building: Gates Hillman Center and Remote
Speaker's Name: Governing the Digital Age: AI, Platforms, and Online Harms Policy
For More Information: centerforideas@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website and Registration
Event Website URL: www.cmu.edu…

SBP-BRIMS 2026: 19th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation

08 Jul 2026 14:15:05 GMT

Monday, October 12, 8:30am – Wednesday, October 14, 2026, 5pm

Social Computing harnesses the power of computational methods to study social behavior, such as during team collaboration. Cultural Behavioral Modeling refers to representing behavior and culture in the abstract, and is a convenient and powerful way to conduct virtual experiments and scenario analysis. Both social computing and cultural behavioral modeling are techniques designed to achieve a better understanding of complex behaviors, patterns, and associated outcomes of interest. Moreover, these approaches are inherently interdisciplinary; subsystems and system components exist at multiple levels of analysis (i.e., “cells to societies”) and across multiple disciplines, from engineering and the computational sciences to the social and health sciences.

The SBP-BRiMS conference seeks to build a community of social cyber scholars by fostering interaction among members of the scientific, corporate, government and military communities interested in understanding, forecasting, and impacting human socio-cultural behavior in our quickly evolving social world of today. The conference values diverse disciplinary participation from the social, behavioral, physical, computational sciences and digital humanities. SBP-BRiMS welcomes a broad range of methodological approaches (agent-based models, online experiments, network science and social network analysis, and machine learning). All computational social science papers and panels are welcome.

Important Dates

Full Paper Submission: 22-Jun-2026
Author Notification: 15-Jul-2026
Final Files Due: 22-Jul-2026
Submission of Panels, Challenge Problem Solutions & Working Papers: 21-Aug-2026
Author Notification: 4-Sep-2026
Final Files Due: 1-Oct-2026

Learn More | Conference Registration

SBP-BRiMS is co-located with the Annual Center for Informed Democracy & Social - cybersecurity (IDeaS) Conference.

Event Type: Conference/Workshop
Room Number: In Person and Virtual
Building: Gates Hillman and Remote
For More Information: sbpbrims@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Foundations, Government, Heinz College, Partnerships, Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: sbp-brims.org…

Meaningful Play 2026

01 Jul 2026 15:08:21 GMT

Tuesday, October 13, 8:30am – Thursday, October 15, 2026, 5pm

Watch for Details

Event Type: Conference/Workshop
Room Number: In Person
Building: On Campus
Affiliations: Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, Entertainment Technology Center

2026 Andy Awards

26 Aug 2026 20:47:00 GMT

Wednesday, October 14, 2026, 12 – 1pm

Join colleagues from across the university as we recognize 53 staff members and 19 teams for their exceptional contributions to Carnegie Mellon University. A lunch reception will immediately follow the ceremony in Wiegand Gymnasium.

Learn More about this year's nominees.

No Registration Required.

Event Type: Special Events
Room Number: In Person
Building: Rangos Ballroom, Cohon University Center
For More Information: AndyAwards@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department (CSD), Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department (CBD), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: www.cmu.edu…

CyLab Partners Conference

14 Jan 2026 16:20:44 GMT

Tuesday, October 20, 2026, 8:30am – 6pm

CyLab Partners Conference will be held on October 20 and 21 in person at Carnegie Mellon University. Attendees can look forward to brief talks, poster sessions, and ample opportunities for networking with faculty, students, and partners.

Watch for additional details as the date approaches.

Event Type: Conference/Workshop
Room Number: In Person
Building: Rangos Ballroom, Cohon University Center
For More Information: partnerships@cylab.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science, CyLab, ECE

Welcome MICROSOFT AZURE

13 Jul 2026 14:56:56 GMT

Monday, October 26, 8:30am – Tuesday, October 27, 2026, 5pm

Meetings and participation by invitation only.

Event Type: Corporate Visit
Room Number: In Person
Building: By Invitation Only
For More Information: danjenkins@cmu.edu
Affiliations: Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

SCS Distinguished Industry Lecture - Mark Russinovich

21 Aug 2026 15:23:48 GMT

Monday, October 26, 2026, 5 – 6:30pm

Watch for details.
CMU community welcomed.

Event Type: SCS Distinguished Lectures
Room Number: In Person
Building: Rashid Auditorium, Gates Hillman 4401
Speaker's Name: MARK RUSSINOVICH
Speaker Website: azure.microsoft.com…
Speaker's Professional Title: Chief Technical Officer, Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, and Technical Fellow, Microsoft Azure
For More Information: scs-dls@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department (CBD), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Welcome TOYOTA RESEARCH INSTITUTE

13 Aug 2026 16:50:08 GMT

Tuesday, October 27 – Thursday, October 29, 2026

Meetings and participation by invitation only.

Event Type: Corporate Visit
Room Number: In Person
Building: By Invitation Only
For More Information: danjenkins@cmu.edu
Affiliations: Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Welcome PANASONIC

13 Aug 2026 16:52:56 GMT

Thursday, October 29, 2026, 8:30am – 5pm

Meetings and participation by invitation only.

Event Type: Corporate Visit
Room Number: In Person
Building: By Invitation Only
For More Information: gdarakos@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Democracy Day at Carnegie Mellon University

24 Aug 2026 15:51:52 GMT

Tuesday, November 3, 2026, 8am – 5pm

Democracy Day is Carnegie Mellon University's annual university-wide initiative that encourages informed participation in democratic and community life through learning, well-being, and community and democratic engagement.

The Democracy Day programming reflects CMU's commitment to fostering an engaged campus by creating opportunities for meaningful participation. All members of the CMU community are welcome, regardless of citizenship status or voting eligibility, and to encourage engagement across a broad range of experiences and perspectives.

To support participation, the university does not hold classes prior to 5:00 pm on General Election Day. Members of the CMU community are encouraged to use the day in ways that are meaningful to them, whether by voting, serving as a poll worker, volunteering, or participating in opportunities for learning, dialogue, and reflection. The annual Democracy Day Celebration, held on Election Day, serves as the culmination of these efforts while connecting participants to opportunities for continued engagement beyond Election Day.

Learn More

Event Type: Special Events
Room Number: No Classes prior to 5:00 pm
Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department (CSD), Government, Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department (CBD), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: www.cmu.edu…

Welcome Back FUJITSU

13 Aug 2026 16:54:59 GMT

Friday, November 6, 2026, 8:30am – 5pm

Meetings and participation by invitation only.

Event Type: Corporate Visit
Room Number: In Person
Building: By Invitation Only
For More Information: ckissell@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Partnerships
Organization(s): School of Computer Science

Safety21 Deployment Partner Consortium Symposium

18 Aug 2026 18:48:15 GMT

Thursday, November 12, 2026, 8:30am – 4:30pm

Join in at the 2026 Safety21 Deployment Partner Consortium Symposium at CMU.

Now in its 14th year, this annual event has become a cornerstone of transportation technology innovation and collaboration. With autonomous vehicles and connected infrastructure advancing at a remarkable pace, this year’s event comes at a pivotal moment for the industry.

The Safety21 Deployment Partner Consortium is utilized for identifying real-world transportation needs, research project development and deployment, technology licensing and commercialization, student recruitment for jobs and internships, as well as class and capstone projects.

Putting research, development and deployment approach into action, the annual Deployment Partner Consortium Symposium provides an opportunity for interaction and discussion among researchers, students and deployment partners. Conversations are held not only during the formal program, panels and poster sessions, but also during breaks and over lunch.

RSVP ⇢ reserve your spot, as space is limited

Event Type: Conference/Workshop
Room Number: In Person
Building: Carnegie Mellon Campus
Speaker's Name: Scaling Safe Mobility – Advancing Safety, Digital Infrastructure, and Innovation for Real-World Impact
Affiliations: College of Engineering, Heinz College, Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Robotics Institute (RI)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: safety21.cmu.edu…

President's Lecture Series

24 Aug 2026 15:45:58 GMT

Monday, November 16, 2026

Rahm I. Emanuel most recently served as the United States Ambassador to Japan. As Ambassador, Emanuel helped deepen the U.S.-Japan alliance, including support for Japan's increased defense spending and expanded military cooperation. He promoted Japan's leadership in Indo-Pacific key security initiatives and participated in the historic trilateral summit at Camp David that reaffirmed that cooperation between the United States, Japan, and the Republic of Korea.

Previously, Emanuel was the 55th Mayor of the City of Chicago, a position he held until May 2019. During that time, he made the critical choices necessary to secure Chicago's future as a global capital. As Mayor, Emanuel added four years to a student’s education. He increased the school day by 75 minutes and added more than 200 hours to the school year, marking the largest single increase in educational time by any city and taking Chicago from having the least educational time of any large school district in the country to being on par with its peers. He implemented universal pre-kindergarten and full-day kindergarten for every Chicago child, and made Chicago the first city in America to provide free community college.

The Mayor's comprehensive public safety strategy focused on expanded prevention programs for at-risk youth, smarter policing strategies, and empowering parents and communities to reduce violence. The Ambassador made it a priority to bring global companies to the city, helping Chicago to lead the U.S. in corporate relocations and foreign direct investment for seven consecutive years. His administration invested in infrastructure, public transportation, open space, and cultural attractions. From the $8.5 billion O'Hare International Airport modernization program that is cementing Chicago's status as a global leader in travel, tourism, and trade to the development of the iconic 1.25-mile Chicago Riverwalk, the City's investments are creating thousands of good-paying jobs and making Chicago a better place to live, work, and play.
Prior to becoming Mayor, from November 2008 until October 2010, Emanuel served as President Barack Obama's Chief of Staff. In addition to being the President's top advisor, Emanuel helped the Obama administration secure the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Before serving as Chief of Staff, Emanuel was elected four times as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois's 5th Congressional District (2002-2008). As Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Emanuel helped pass legislation to raise the minimum wage and authored the Great Lakes Restoration Act.

From 1993 to 1998, Ambassador Emanuel was a key member of President Bill Clinton's administration, rising to serve as Senior Advisor to the President for Policy and Politics. During this time, Emanuel served as a legislative liaison to Congress and spearheaded efforts to pass several of President Clinton's signature achievements, most notably the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, and the historic Balanced Budget Act, which created the Children's Health Insurance Program that expanded health care coverage to 10 million children. Emanuel also worked closely with President Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a U.S. Senator, to shepherd the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 through Congress.

Emanuel graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1981 and received a Master's Degree in Speech and Communication from Northwestern University in 1985. He is married to Amy Rule, and they have three children.

Event Type: Distinguished Lecture Series
Room Number: In Person
Speaker's Name: Ambassador RAHM EMANUAL
Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department (CSD), Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department (CBD), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: www.cmu.edu…

Demosplash 2026

31 Aug 2026 15:37:46 GMT

Saturday, November 21, 2026, 10am – 10:30pm

Demosplash is one of the largest and longest-running demoparties in North America, catering both to newcomers to the demoscene as well as established artists. We show demos live on original hardware as much as humanly possible, offering a viewing experience that can't be matched by emulators or recordings. In addition to screenings, we feature a variety of events, including tech talks, workshops, and celebrations of retro gaming.

Stay tuned for this year's talk and events lineup. We will of course have a whole roomful of retro gaming computers (Sharp X68000, Apple ][, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, NES, and much much more) for anyone who wants to take a break from the demos or talks and play some video games!

Location has changed: different rooms in the same building as recent years' events.

Event Type: Special Events
Room Number: In Person and Virtual
Building: Danforth Conference Room and Lounge, Cohon University Center
Speaker's Name: Presented by the CMU Computer Club
For More Information: organizers@demosplash.org
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D), Student Groups and Organizations
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: www.demosplash.org

Innovating Pittsburgh: The Business Value of Neurodiversity

01 Sep 2026 18:03:28 GMT

Thursday, March 4, 2027, 8:30am – 2pm

Learn together. Plan with purpose. Move your workplace forward.

Focus Areas

The Business Value of Neurodiversity
Recruitment Strategies & Talent Pipelines
Retention, Advancement, & Leadership
Strategic Action Planning & Partnership Development

Who Should Attend

Managers and Supervisors
Human Resource Professionals
Executive and Senior Leaders
Workplace Allies

REGISTER | Learn More

Host by: Olitzky Program, Software and Societal Systems Department, Career and Professional Development Center, School of Computer Science

Event Type: Conference/Workshop
Room Number: In Person
Event Website Title: Event Website
Event Website URL: sites.google.com…