Peter Lee @ May 20, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Whew! We’ve finished the school year, culminating in our commencement weekend. I’ve always enjoyed the celebrations, even if it is all a bit tiring. This year, commencement was exceptionally action-packed.
The commencement activities started (for me) with a meeting with six of our new graduates from the Qatar campus. Wow, what a great group! Bright, energetic, […]
Peter Lee @ May 15, 2008 # No Comment Yet
One of our media relations people, Byron Spice, just sent me a list of media outlets that have already done stories on gwap.com, the new set of “games with a purpose“:
Slashdot
AP
BBC
MSNBC.com
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
New Scientist
Hope the site holds up under all the load! ;-)
The best Luis quote in these articles? “That is my […]
Peter Lee @ May 14, 2008 # One Comment
William Gibson, the well-known science-fiction author, is famous for saying, “The ‘Net is a waste of time, and that’s exactly what’s right about it.” Well, I always thought this was a great way to describe Luis von Ahn’s idea of “games with a purpose” — capturing the unique capabilities of people when they play games […]
Peter Lee @ May 13, 2008 # No Comment Yet
A new blog of interest to the computer science community has been launched, called the CCC Blog (http://www.cccblog.org). This blog, by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), has the goal of creating a forum for discussion of “longer range, audacious research challenges” in the computing field.
Check it out! The plan, initially, is to have about two articles […]
Peter Lee @ May 8, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Manuela Veloso sent the following photo of the first steel to be erected for our new building, the Gates Center for Computer Science (and attached to the Hillman Center for Future Generation Technologies).
May 7, at 4pm. Guy Blelloch, the faculty project leader, tells me that the entire steel structure should be up in just […]
Peter Lee @ May 6, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Yesterday we held the commencement ceremony for the very first graduating class at CMU Qatar. 28 students graduated, 10 of them in computer science. This is a major milestone for our operation in Qatar. These 10 students (plus 3 more scheduled to graduate in the fall) completed all of the requirements for a bona fide […]
Peter Lee @ May 6, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Last week I noticed a spike in traffic on this blog. The server logs show significant amounts of new traffic coming from India. According to Google Analytics, the primary search term leading to the blog is “alice project”. Apparently, Randy Pausch’s “last lecture” has hit Asia.
The media frenzy surrounding Randy Pausch continues unabated. Last week […]
Peter Lee @ May 4, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990
Last Friday I had the great honor of being the official Randomness Provider for the annual Random Distance Run (RDR). What this meant, basically, is that I got to roll a pair of big […]
Peter Lee @ May 3, 2008 # No Comment Yet
On the subject of Ph.D. student recruiting, I really hesitate to give too many “trade secrets” away, but a few additional thoughts on this subject:
My previous article was specific to the Ph.D. program in the Computer Science Department. In addition to this program, the School of Computer has 6 interdisciplinary Ph.D. programs: Robotics, Language Technologies, […]
Peter Lee @ May 2, 2008 # One Comment
We’ve finally wrapped up our recruiting for next year’s incoming class of new Ph.D. students. This is a very, very serious business for us. The strength of our research programs depends in large part on the quality of our doctoral students, and so it’s probably no surprise to you that the entire process is extremely […]