Innovation and entrepreneurship took center stage at Carnegie Mellon University’s 2014 McGinnis Venture Competition, a cross-campus entrepreneurial challenge in which students compete for $60,000 in investments for their startup companies.Three teams that included School of Computer Science students and alumni were among the five winners announced March 5 at the conclusion of the multi-round competition.

Katie Correll (MET'14) has worked with puppets on Broadway and Sesame Street. Now she's helping Carnegie Mellon University's HERB perfect his acting skills for the robot's stage debut. She also recently made her game show debut on TBS' "King of the Nerds." HERB — the Home Exploring Robot Butler from the Robotics Institute (RI) — is no thespian. He's a mobile, two-armed robot that serves as a testbed for software and technologies that will someday enable robots to assist people in their homes.

Kumar Avinava Dubey, a Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning Department, has been awarded an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award for the 2014-15 academic year.The IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Awards Program is an intensely competitive worldwide program, which honors exceptional Ph.D. students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study. Dubey’s research interests include statistical machine learning, non-parametric Bayesian methods, information retrieval and clustering.

Jack Mostow, research professor in robotics, plays Scaphio in the Pittsburgh Savoyards production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic operetta “Utopia, Limited,” at the Carnegie Library & Music Hall in Carnegie, March 7-16.