News In and Around CSD
Artur Dubrawski will receive the Alumni Research Professorship of Computer Science and Carleton Kingsford will receive the Herbert A. Simon Professorship of Computer Science in a virtual ceremony at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 4.
The usual ceremonies for these and other new professorships were delayed last year by the pandemic... Read More
Xinyu Wu, a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department who studies the theoretical foundations of quantum computing, is one of five recipients of 2021 Ada Lovelace Fellowships, presented by Microsoft Research.
The three-year fellowships are awarded to second-year Ph.D. students who are pursuing research aligned with Microsoft Research. To... Read More
In 2013, a Pennsylvania man became the richest person on Earth… for about two minutes. PayPal had accidentally credited his account $92 quadrillion dollars. That’s a 92 with 15 zeros behind it. But within minutes, PayPal realized their mistake, and took it all back. Too bad.
Mistakes like this—big, small, and humongous—happen all too often, and typically they come down to bugs in “smart contracts”—computer programs that facilitate digital transactions online. In the case of... Read More
Brothers Andrew and Henry DeYoung have accomplished something very few siblings do: They defended their doctoral theses at Carnegie Mellon University within a few weeks of each other. Henry defended in December, and Andrew defended Jan. 22.
https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2021/january/deyoung-brothers-...
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School of Computer Science faculty members Manuel Blum and Jodi Forlizzi are among 95 distinguished computer scientists named 2020 fellows by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
The ACM Fellows program recognizes the top 1% of the association's membership for outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding... Read More
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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
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
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