Peter Lee @ June 26, 2008 # 2 Comments
“What do we need to do to make STEM (science, technology, engineering and technology) education sexy again?”
This was one of the questions posed by Senator Barack Obama this morning to a remarkably high-powered group of panelists at an economic summit, held in the Weigand gymnasium at Carnegie Mellon University this morning. The 2-hour summit focused […]
Peter Lee @ June 21, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Chuck Thorpe, Dean of CMU-Qatar, and Majd Sakr, Associate Teaching Professor at CMU-Qatar, completed the Race Across America yesterday. This means they rode bicycles, relay-style, from the Oceanside, California to Annapolis, Maryland. Joining Chuck and Majd were Doug Thorpe (Chuck’s brother) and Doug Leamon. Together, they formed Team2600. The team completed the feat in just […]
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 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 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 @ April 23, 2008 # No Comment Yet
This is an incredibly hectic week. Every day we have new faculty candidates visiting for their job interviews, and then on top of that there are a slew of invited speakers and special events.
Tuesday was especially busy. There was a faculty candidate talk plus two seminar speakers. One of the speakers was Charles Leiserson, from […]
Peter Lee @ April 15, 2008 # No Comment Yet
I’m writing today from Newport Beach, where I am attending a DARPA ISAT meeting. I may write about that in a future article, but for today I’d like to give a rundown on our department’s faculty retreat, which was held this past Friday and Saturday (April 11-12).
Retreats, for us, are a pretty big deal, and […]
Peter Lee @ March 26, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Something very big is happening. Interest in data-intensive scalable computing (DISC), in both research and industry practice, is taking off. The first Hadoop Summit was hosted yesterday by Yahoo! Research in Santa Clara. (Hadoop is the open-source suite of software packages for “map-reduce” style distributed computing.) The Summit had been planned originally as a workshop […]
Peter Lee @ March 14, 2008 # No Comment Yet
The Sheep Vortex premiere last night was a nice affair. Seeing Spot (or, um, his avatar) there and having a chance to chat was really great. Wandering around in the swirling “vortex” of broken shards of electric sheep was pleasant, even if the performance and resolution of SecondLife’s rendering processes left much to be desired. […]