News In and Around CSD
Download the Fall/Winter 2020 issue. (PDF reader required.)
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The image from the videotape is blurry, deteriorated from the passage of time, but the professor is razor-sharp as he talks about the future. Herb Simon stands in front of a class at Carnegie Mellon University, musing about the difference between artificial and natural intelligence.
"So I suppose there are some respects in which it makes a difference whether we're talking about artificial or natural intelligence. When I'm in an airplane during a bad rainstorm, I always wonder which I'm being landed by," says Simon. The class laughs, and Simon, bespectacled and wearing a suit and tie... Read More
Edmund M. Clarke, University Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University and co-recipient of the 2007 Turing Award – computer science's equivalent of the Nobel Prize – died Dec. 22 of COVID-19, following a long illness.
Clarke, together with his Harvard University graduate student, E. Allen Emerson, and, working separately, Joseph Sifakis of the University of Grenoble, developed an automated method for detecting design errors in computer hardware and software. Called model checking, it is widely used and has helped to improve the reliability of complex computer chips, systems... Read More
This past January, you may have noticed the phrase "Do not sell my personal information" at the bottom of many webpages. If you didn't, it could be because there's no icon next to it — even though the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) suggests using one.
After a year without guidance on what that icon should look like, California has proposed an official icon to include with the opt-out text — one developed by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab and the University of Michigan's School of Information.
... Read More
Nidhi Jain has never had much luck growing plants.
"I've tried to work with plants, but they didn't want to work with me," said the senior computer science major from California. "So I've stuck to succulents."
Green thumb or no, this fall Jain and her classmates in the School of Computer Science's Autonomous Agents course applied their knowledge of artificial intelligence, including machine learning and computer vision, to grow lettuces and radishes in small, automated greenhouses. Without ever seeing or touching... Read More
Justine Sherry, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department (CSD), has won the 2020 VMWare Systems Research Award, in recognition of her seminal contributions to the networking field.
VMWare presents the award each year to a faculty member who is within the first five years of their first tenure-track appointment. It includes a $125,000 award to support her research.
"Justine... Read More
A 2010 paper by a trio of School of Computer Science researchers that described an algorithm for detecting spammers, faulty equipment, credit card fraud and other anomalous behavior won the Most Influential Paper Award at the 2020 Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD).
The paper was authored by Christos Faloutsos, the Fredkin Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Computer Science... Read More
Luis von Ahn, a consulting professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department and co-founder and CEO of the language-learning platform Duolingo, is among 175 academic inventors elected as 2020 fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).
As a CMU graduate student and later faculty member, von Ahn helped develop the modern CAPTCHA, a tool that enables websites to distinguish between bots and real people. He also invented reCAPTCHA, a variation... Read More
Tuomas Sandholm, the Angel Jordan University Professor of Computer Science, has received the 2021 Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for his AI research and service to the AI community.
Specifically, the award cites Sandholm for his outstanding research contributions in AI, its application to electronic marketplaces, his... Read More
Lorrie Cranor and David S. Touretzky, both faculty members in the School of Computer Science, are among almost 500 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to be named 2020 AAAS fellows.
The lifetime distinction recognizes important contributions to STEM disciplines, including pioneering research, leadership within a given field, teaching and mentoring, fostering collaborations, and advancing public understanding of science. Previous notable... Read More
