Monday, June 22, 2009

Inspire Innovation: Cohon Proclaims “2nd Age of Carnegie Mellon in Silicon Valley,” Khosla Envisions “Crown Jewel” for College of Engineering


In a way we are looking at the second age of Carnegie Mellon in Silicon Valley. Dr. Jared Cohon, President of Carnegie Mellon

There is something about this air out here, once you start breathing it you don’t want a real job anymore, you want to be an entrepreneur." Dr. Pradeep Khosla. Dean of School of Engineering

Cohon Proclaims “Second Age of Carnegie Mellon in Silicon Valley,” Khosla Envisions Campus as “Crown Jewel” for College of Engineering

By Richard Power

The history of Silicon Valley is one of daring, luck, and ceaseless endeavor.

It is a narrative rife with the thrills and chills of boom and bust. For every icon that has emerged to illuminate the digital sky, there are countless wrecks that did not make it, as well as other story lines that end abruptly when some or another entity is devoured by some larger, hungrier entity. There are also many fascinating sub-plots interwoven throughout the timeline, and one of them just took a fascinating twist.

Under an azure blue sky, in an open air tent, speaking to an audience of hundreds of Bay Area alumni, trustees, donors, parents and students, Dr. Jared L. Cohon, President of Carnegie Mellon, declared, that having “soldiered on” through challenging economic conditions in the Valley since its founding in 2002, “in a way we are looking at the second age of Carnegie Mellon in Silicon Valley.”

Held at the Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley campus, on the grounds of NASA Ames Research Center (a.k.a. Moffett Field) in Mountain View, California, the event was part of “Inspire Innovation – The Campaign for Carnegie Mellon University.”

Following Dr. Cohon to the podium, Pradeep Khosla, Dean of the College of Engineering and founder of Carnegie Mellon CyLab, elaborated on the “re-visioning” of the Silicon Valley Campus, as “the crown jewel for the College of Engineering.”

Emphasizing the work of recently established CyLab Mobility Research Center (MRC), Dean Khosla extolled the virtues of the bi-coastal program which calls for students to spend two semesters in Pittsburgh and two semesters in Silicon Valley.

“Don’t get me wrong. Pittsburgh also has a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, but there is something about this air out here, once you start breathing it you don’t want a real job anymore, you want to be an entrepreneur,” Khosla remarked wryly, “You want to use somebody else’s money to create something, and maybe it becomes something big, or maybe you lose it. But as we know, more often than not it has become something big.”

“We have several masters programs; we have also decided that this campus will be involved in research. We have a PhD. program. Many students from our international programs will also rotate through Silicon Valley.”


Khosla also cited the significant investment made in the building of a state of the art distance education class room. “And we are building two more,” he added.

After the opening remarks of Cohon, Khosla and Martin Griss, Director of the CyLab Mobility Research Center, Associate Dean in the College of Engineering and recently named Director of Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, the crowds of hundreds broke up into smaller groups to rotate through four brief presentations meant to convey the scope and spirit of the work being undertaken at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley:

Jason Lohn, a Senior Research Scientist at the Silicon Valley campus, spoke on “Space and Beyond: Creating the Next Generation Antenna through Evolutionary Computing.”

Khalid Al-Ali, Director of Research and the Carnegie Mellon Innovation Lab, spoke on “Carnegie Mellon Innovation Lab: An Overview of Cutting-Edge Research in Ground, Air and Space Technologies.”

Ray Bareiss, Director of Educational Programs and Professor of Practice of Software Engineering and Software Management, spoke on “Transformative Professional Education for Silicon Valley.”

Griss, along with two more faculty members, spoke on “Mobility: Enhancing Our Lives through Mobile Technology.”

Here are links to other CyBlog posts documenting the weekend's highlights:

Inspire Innovation: Anywhere Anytime Computing -- The Future is Now

Inspire Innovation: No Ivory Tower at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley

Inspire Innovation: From the Caves to the Stars: Art and Technology Define What It Means to be Human

Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Celebrates its Founder Jim Morris

Inspire Innovation: Anywhere Anytime Computing -- The Future is Now



“Smart phones are becoming more popular and more powerful. Sensors are getting to be more powerful, cheaper and more ubiquitous. All of this changes the way you interact with other people and your environment. At CyLab MRC, we are ... conducting holistic multidisciplinary research into how people work, what would make their lives easier and how technology can help.” Martin Griss

Anywhere, Anytime Computing -- The Future is Now

By Richard Power

In articulating CyLab’s goals and mission, I often say that CyLab harnesses the future to secure the present. Well, CyLab Mibility Research Center (MRC) harnesses the future to usher the present into it.

CyLab MRC was founded in April 2008, and as already mentioned, it is a bi-coastal program. Priya Narasimhan, an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Pittsburgh, is Griss’ CyLab MRC Co-Director.

The program is dedicated to “enriching anywhere anytime computing.”

In his remarks at the Silicon Valley campus event, Griss provided some context and outlined the scope of CyLab MRC’s activities:

“Smart phones are becoming more popular and more powerful. Sensors are getting to be more powerful, cheaper and more ubiquitous. All of this changes the way you interact with other people and your environment. At CyLab MRC, we are looking broadly at novel applications, devices and systems. We are conducting holistic multidisciplinary research into how people work, what would make their lives easier and how technology can help. We want to do large-scale pilots. We are involved in education research and entrepreneurship. We have focuses in the areas of mobile health, transportation, manufacturing and the enterprise.”

Griss also shared his personal vision of the “Mobile Companion.”

“The mobile companion the thing you carry with you all the time, it knows where you are who you are what you are doing and ideally what you are about to do, and adjusts itself to support you, in your style, in the way you want whether you are working, collaborating or playing it will leverage your schedule, preferences and history if you are in the car and someone sends you a message should you read it? Not if you are driving. So if you are driving it will read it to you. On the other hand if you have someone with you maybe it should not read it to you a decision has to be made unless it is urgent if traffic is backed up and it will say to you traffic is backed up maybe we should stop and shop at Costco, it has your favorite beer on sale.”

Two faculty members presented current CyLab MRC research projects.

Pei Zhang, an assistant research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Institute for Information Networking (INI) and Electrical Computing and Engineering (ECE) demonstrated “SensorFly.”

“What if one day there was an earthquake or a fire, and the building was failing down, but there could be people trapped inside, how do you decide whether or not to send rescuers inside or not? Sensor Fly aims to have a swarm of flying sensors that will enter the building and see if there are any survivors and guide the rescuers to them.”



The goal of the research, according to Zhang, is to create something that is very cheap, but at the same time hard to destroy and capable of mapping and recognition.

Joy Zhang, also an assistant research professor, demonstrated some of his research into speech translation for mobile devices, translating English into Spanish on his laptop.

“We all say that the world is flat, but we are still separated by language barriers. Carnegie Mellon is a world leader in speech translation. On this campus, we are doing speech translation particularly for mobile devices. In you are traveling in China, and you do not speak Chinese, in the near future, you will be able to use your mobile device, you will speak your English into the device, it will translate the English into Chinese, and then translate the Chinese back to English, so that, for example, you where to find the restaurant that you are looking for.”

He is also working on adding the speech translation system to the virtual world, Second Life.

Inspire Innovation: No Ivory Tower at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley



"At work, my colleagues began to see very vivid changes in me almost immedi- ately, at work I was manifest- ing what I learned ..." Alok Rishi, Class of 2009

No Ivory Tower at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley

By Richard Power

In his presentation on “Transformative Professional Education for Silicon Valley,”
Ray Bareiss, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley’s Director of Educational Programs and Professor of Practice of Software Engineering and Software Management, shared some outcomes on Silicon Valley’s 375 graduates:

87% of alumni believe their Carnegie Mellon education has provided a competitive advantage
Virtually all have received salary increases; 45% of those were greater than 20%
65% were promoted during the program or after immediately graduation

In articulating the Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley program’s approach, Bareiss stressed lessons learned from cognitive science research:

Active problem solving promotes acquisition of “knowledge to be used”
Realistic learning contexts promote transfer
Knowledge and skills should be taught holistically
Teaching should be “just in time”

Bareiss’ Software Product Definition course exemplifies the approach.

Students are divided into faculty-coached teams, given a half-baked idea from “management” and tasked to develop it, using real-world techniques and processes, including:

Conduct Contextual Inquiry interviews
Model user and customer behavior
Perform persona- and scenario-based design
Derive high-level requirements and define the “whole product’
Document the result in a product vision document

To provide the audience with flesh and blood testimony to the strengths of the program, Bareiss turned the microphone over to one of campus’ 144 current students Alok Rishi, who will soon be graduating with an M.S. in Software Management.

“I had Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, I wasn’t particularly looking to get an MBA, but I heard about this program, which is to me like an accelerated BA tailored for Silicon Valley, and more specifically for the software industry. It gives you a complete end to end view of conceiving a software product or technology idea, innovating it, bringing that innovation to the market, building a company out of it, and running and growing that company, with all the people dynamics and technology dynamics around it. But the ongoing experience was not, ‘Wait until I graduate and then apply it.’

"At work, my colleagues began to see very vivid changes in me almost immediately, at work I was manifesting what I learned, in two forms: I was assuming more of a leadership role, being much more comfortable in a larger people dynamics type of way, and also I had moved away from being sort of being in a silo and spreading out to harness innovation more broadly within Sun and from the industry. So it lead to profound transformative changes within, but it also resulted in my career taking off like a hockey puck. So I progressed from Software Engineer to Senior Engineer in the last year and a half to Principle Engineer, Chief Technologist and Director at Sun. A couple of months ago, I left Sun and started my own company.”

Rishi’s company, Megha Software, is an early stage software technology start-up that accelerates the adoption of cloud computing by Enterprises. It enables thousands of existing enterprise applications to move seamlessly into private/public clouds as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), radically changing software distribution, use, management, and economics for the Enterprise.

Inspire Innovation: From the Caves to the Stars: Art and Technology Define What It Means to be Human



From the Caves to the Stars: Art and Tech- nology Define What It Means to be Human

By Richard Power

At the conclusion of the afternoon program, attendees rode on buses to the Computer Science Museum for “An Evening of Impact and Imagination.”

In a compelling talk, Raymond J. Lane, Managing Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufeld & Byers and University Life Trustee and Campaign Chair for Carnegie Mellon offered poignant insight on Carnegie Mellon’s national impact from his own life story.

When Lane was a boy, his father, an executive in the steel industry back in Pittsburgh, attended night school at Carnegie Mellon.

“He would work all day, then he would have dinner with us, and then he would go upstairs and study all night … And he would explain to me that what was going on at Carnegie Mellon was possibly the development of a whole new industry that would be more exciting, higher growth and might be an industry that would attract me more than the steel industry.”

And indeed, throughout Lane’s information age career, he has drawn on the university’s wellspring of talent.

“After leaving IBM and EDS, I spent twelve years with Booz Allen, I spent eight years with Oracle and I have spent eight years with Kleiner Perkins. The most important thing that I have done in all three of these endeavors is to find talent, to have a pipeline of talent. And in all three of them, a management consulting company, a software company and a venture capital company, Carnegie Mellon has been my number one source of talent … So much more analytical, so much more practical …”



Apple Inc. Vice President Edward H. Frank (S’85), also a University Life Trustee, underscored Lane’s message with an observation from his own experience.

“Many of you who are at these companies have heard the expression ‘Carnegie Mellon Mafia.’ Microsoft has one, Apple has one, Sun has certainly has one, Google … The talent level is so extreme that we kind of all congregate together, smart people like to talk to other smart people.”

Frank moderated a panel of experts on the inter-relationship of Art and Technology:

Ralph Guggenheim (HS’74, S’79), CEO of Alligator Planet and Founding Member of Pixar Animation Studios

Richard Hilleman, Creative Director of Electronic Arts, Inc.

Golan Levin, Director of Carnegie Mellon’s Studio for Creative Inquiry and an Associate Professor of Electronic Arts

Jessica Trybus (MET’04), Edutainment Director of Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center and CEO of Etcetera Edutainment.

In framing the evening’s theme, Frank said, “If you look back millions of years ago at how humanity evolved, it seems that there are two things that human beings did that make us uniquely human, we develop technology, to help us hunt and help us eat, and that makes a lot of sense; but then we does this other thing … we make art … Carnegie Mellon is a unique institution, because it has great strengths in both of these areas. The crossover between Art and Technology is stronger than ever.”

At the end of the panel session, Beverly Wheeler, Executive Director of the Washington, D.C. State Board of Education, and President-elect of the Carnegie Mellon Alumni Association, surprised Ralph Guggenheim by presenting him with the Alumni Award.

The evening’s discussion was a reminder that although there is more to life than advancing technology, e.g., the fine art, even in the pursuit of these other riches, technology has become a vital element of success, and furthermore, that Carnegie Mellon is at the forefront of both pursuits.

Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Celebrates its Founder Jim Morris



“Part of existing is being known, and that sign is really important to us.” Pradeep Khosla, Dean of Engineer- ing School

Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Celebrates its Founder Jim Morris

By Richard Power

In conjunction with events related to "Inspire Innovation -- The Campaign for Carnegie Mellon," the university announced that Martin L. Griss has been named director of the Silicon Valley campus, effective July 1. Griss succeeds James Morris, founding director of Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley and former dean of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science.

Morris is responsible for putting Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley on the map, literally and symbolically. After all, he got the "Carnegie Mellon University" sign posted on Highay 101, the main route in and out of the heart of Silicon Valley.

In his remarks on Saturday, Pradeep Khosla, Dean of the Engineering School, remarked, “Part of existing is being known, and that sign is really important to us.”

SafeRide, a research project championed by Morris, is "a combination of ideas from Orbitz, 511.org, Google/Mapquest maps, Facebook/MySpace, eBay, Zipcar and GoLoco, that exploits GPS and cell phones."

Saferide is intended to "overcome American's seeming awkwardness or dislike of communal driving, such as carpooling," and offers "an alternative by creating a vetted registry of all participants."

In a luncheon honoring Morris, he was presented with gifts highlighting his contributions and reflecting the good will he inspired among his colleagues, including a framed caricature featuring a smiling Morris in a Pittsburgh Steelers uniform, behind him are the Highway 101 Carnegie Mellon University sign and (with a dash of prophecy) a "Morris Rideshare Pickup" sign.

In return, Morris playfully presented his successor Martin Griss with three envelopes which provided guidance, based on his own experience, in overcoming challenges and triumphing in times of adversity.

Griss opened them one by one and shared them with the gathering.

The message contained in the first envelope read: "Blame it on your predecessor."

The message contained in the second enveloped read: "Reorganize."

The message contained in the third envelope read: "Prepare three envelopes."



Photos in this post courtesy of Susan Morris

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

HP Innovation Research Award to CyLab’s Greg Ganger Award for Work on Intelligent Infrastructure



“Our goal with this program is to collaborate with the brightest minds from around the world to tackle the industry’s most complex problems and push the frontiers of fundamental science,” said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president, Research, HP and director, HP Labs. “Carnegie Mellon University has demonstrated outstanding achievement and a vision that will help inspire technological innovation and address the most complex challenges and opportunities facing the industry in the next decade.”

HP Innovation Research Award to CyLab’s Greg Ganger Award for Work on Intelligent Infrastructure

HP has named Greg Ganger, Carnegie Mellon CyLab researcher and Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and School of Computer Science, as one of the recipients of its second annual Innovation Research Awards for the Intelligent Infrastructure project titled “Toward Scalable Self-* Storage.”

Ganger’s is one of sixty projects from forty-six universities in twelve countries that will receive awards from HP Labs, the company's central research arm. The program is designed to create opportunities for colleges, universities and research institutes to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP.

Awardees will work with HP Labs researchers on fundamental research in areas such as intelligent infrastructure, immersive interaction and cloud computing, which includes social computing.

"The Innovation Research Program is a core pillar of HP's advanced research strategy. It allows the company to tap the brightest minds all over the world to tackle the most challenging issues facing the technical community," said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president, Research, HP, and director, HP Labs. "Fostering this type of collaboration between industry and academia breeds a long-term partnership that is more important now than ever before."

HP Labs Innovation Research Awards provide project funding of up to $100,000 for one year to each academic institution and are renewable for a total of three years based on research progress and HP business requirements. The next request for proposals is planned for spring 2010.

Another Carnegie Mellon researcher, Dr. Noah Smith (Language Technologies Institute, Machine Learning Department, School of Computer Science) was also named as a recipient for his Cloud-related project titled “Understanding Political Discourse through Probabilistic Models.”

HP reviewed nearly 300 proposals from more than 140 universities in 29 countries on a range of topics within the eight high-impact research themes at HP Labs – analytics, cloud, content transformation, digital commercial print, immersive interaction, information management, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability.

More details about the HP Labs Innovation Research Program and worldwide award recipients are available at http://www.hpl.hp.com/open_innovation/irp/2009_results.html.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

CyLab Researcher Wins Best Paper @ ICCS 2009


"This technology is expected to have an impact on visual real-time data mining for network security, sensor networks and many other multivariable real-time monitoring systems." Yang Cai and Rafael de M. Franco, Interactive Visualization of Network Anomalous Events

CyLab Researcher Wins Best Paper @ ICCS 2009

At the ninth annual International Conference on Computational Science(ICCS 2009), recently hosted by Louisiana State University's Center for Computation & Technology in Baton Rouge, CyLab researcher, Yang Cai, PhD., along with Rafael de M. Franco, won best for "Interactive Visualization of Network Anomalous Events."

In their paper, Cai and his colleague presented an "interactive visualization and clustering algorithm that reveals real-time network anomalous events."

"In the model, glyphs are defined with multiple network attributes and clustered with a recursive optimization algorithm for dimensional reduction. The user's visual latency time is incorporated into the recursive process so that it updates the display and the optimization model according to a human-based delay factor and maximizes the capacity of real-time computation. The interactive search interface is developed to enable the display of similar data points according to the degree of their similarity of attributes. Finally, typical network anomalous events are analyzed and visualized such as password guessing, etc."

ICCS is an "interdisciplinary conference" that brings together thought leaders in diverse subject areas in the sciences and arts, together with computer scientists who are "designing and building the cyberinfrastructure necessary for next-generation computing," and the conference's content focuses on "new applications for high-performance computing, including petascale algorithms, tools and applications, high-speed optical networks ... and new software programs for biomedical, science and humanities research.'

Previously, the ICCS has been held in Krakow, Poland, Beijing, China, Reading, UK, Atlanta, Georgia, Melbourne, Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia, Amsterdam, Netherlands and San Francisco, California.

For more information about Yang Cai, the Instinctive Computing Lab, read Instinctive Computing Workshop to Explore Transformational Developments and CyLab Research Update: Basic Instincts in the Virtual World.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Thru CyLab, US Gov Designates Carnegie Mellon as a CAE in Research, & also Re-Designates University as CAE in Information Assurance Education


“This is an outstanding honor for the university as Carnegie Mellon CyLab pioneers development of cutting-edge cybersecurity tools, and we continue to shape information security leaders through our competitive programs at the Information Networking Institute (INI),” said Mark S. Kamlet, Carnegie Mellon provost and senior vice president.


Thru CyLab, US Gov Designates Carnegie Mellon as a CAE in Research, & also Re-Designates University as CAE in Information Assurance Education

Through the university-wide efforts of its cybersecurity education and research center, Carnegie Mellon CyLab, Carnegie Mellon University has been re-designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education and designated for the first time as a Center for Academic Excellence in Research. The National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security awarded the designation through 2014.

“This is an outstanding honor for the university as Carnegie Mellon CyLab pioneers development of cutting-edge cybersecurity tools, and we continue to shape information security leaders through our competitive programs at the Information Networking Institute (INI),” said Mark S. Kamlet, Carnegie Mellon provost and senior vice president.

Presentations will be made to new and re-designated centers June 3 during an awards ceremony at the Red Lion Hotel in Seattle, Wash.

“I am honored to represent Carnegie Mellon at this prestigious award ceremony, which recognizes our strength in fostering outstanding educational programs that support the nation’s cybersecurity needs,” said Dena Haritos Tsamitis, INI director and director of education, training and outreach for Carnegie Mellon CyLab.

Dena Haritos Tsamitis

The National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security jointly sponsor the National Centers of Academic Excellence programs. This partnership was formed in April 2004 to protect the nation’s critical infrastructures, which are essential to maintaining a strong economy and our national security.

Through the university’s designation as a National Center for Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education, Carnegie Mellon graduate students in information security may be eligible to participate in the Federal Cyber Service Scholarship for Service Program (SFS), which offers a full scholarship and stipend in exchange for a commitment to work for the government after graduation.

“I’m very confident that my INI degree in information security, technology and management will expand my career as I continue to find new challenges in the information security field,” said John Truelove, who attended Carnegie Mellon through the SFS program.

Truelove, who must spend two years working for a government agency or federally funded research center under the program, begins work at MIT’s Lincoln Lab later this summer. In the past six years, the SFS Program has provided $12 million in stipends and tuition to 124 students at Carnegie Mellon.

The Information Assurance Capacity Building Program is another program at Carnegie Mellon designed to educate tomorrow’s information security leaders and faculty. Since 2002, more than $1.1 million has gone towards the Information Assurance Capacity Building Program, which is designed to guide faculty at minority-serving institutions, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Hispanic-Serving Institutions, to develop curricula with academic enrichment from the INI and Carnegie Mellon CyLab.

Three participating institutions, California State Polytechnic University Pomona, California State University San Bernardino and Texas A&M University, have consequently earned designations as Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance.

“This latest designation and these programs are an excellent example of the broad commitment by Carnegie Mellon CyLab and the College of Engineering to support the nation’s cybersecurity needs,” said Pradeep K. Khosla, dean of Carnegie Mellon’s College of Engineering and founder of Carnegie Mellon CyLab.