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 25, 2008 # No Comment Yet
John Foley, Editor of InformationWeek, did a piece on the Gates-Hillman Center, set to open in July 2009. The piece is based entirely on an interview with Manuela Veloso, the Herbert A. Simon Chair of Computer Science, creator of robosoccer, and a key member of the Gates-Hillman Center building committee.
Check out the interview on […]
Peter Lee @ June 22, 2008 # No Comment Yet
I’m on my way back from San Francisco, where a large contingent of CMU faculty and students (and assorted friends and family members) was attending the gala ACM awards banquet. The ACM does a very nice job with this black-tie affair, and last night was a particularly nice one for CMU.
The main attraction was the […]
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 @ June 21, 2008 # No Comment Yet
The month of June provides a welcome break from the hectic end-of-semester activities that take place in April and May. And two weeks without any travel! The department is quieter, with most of the undergraduates gone, some of the graduate students away on internships, and lots of faculty traveling to conferences and other meetings.
But now […]
Peter Lee @ June 10, 2008 # 2 Comments
This week’s Time Magazine (the June 16, 2008 issue) has a full-page article on CAPTCHAs (”completely automated public turing test to tell computers and humans apart”). You can see the article on Time’s online edition. Congratulations to Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, and the whole team!
Interesting factoid: Luis tells me that over 750 million distinct […]
Peter Lee @ June 10, 2008 # One Comment
We haven’t quite wrapped up our faculty recruiting for the year, but we already know that we’ll have at least two new faculty members joining the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Department in the fall of 2008.
This year’s hiring season was extremely busy. The CS Department interviewed 10 candidates at the fresh Ph.D. level. In addition, […]
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 […]