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College of Engineering  ›  Electrical and Computer Engineering  ›  News and events  ›  Story  ›  2017  ›  2017
Tuesday, December 19, 2017

CyLab study mentioned as facial detection finds its challengers

Last year, ECE/CyLab’s Lujo Bauer, Sruti Bhagavatula, and Mahmood Sharif were part of a research study that developed facial-recognition-fooling eyeglasses.
Monday, December 18, 2017

Datta’s 2015 algorithm bias study referenced by HuffPost UK

Embrace an android. That’s the rallying cry of the UK’s deputy Labour leader, Tom Watson. His party’s Future of Work Commission recently released a study finding, in part, that the “increasing use of hi-tech machines could create as many jobs as it destroys,” but only if the government invests in training low-skilled workers to fill those jobs. With the rise of automation in the workplace, the Commission also recommended the establishment of ethics and algorithm training to prohibit discrimination by algorithm.
Monday, December 18, 2017

Students mentor teens in hackathons

Students and faculty from Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley are working to support the next generation of technologists by mentoring high school students competing in community hackathons.
Friday, December 15, 2017

Datta’s research referenced in story addressing AI liability

In 2015, Anupam Datta co-authored a study that revealed digital ads for high-paying jobs were shown to significantly more men than women.
Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Bhagavatula named Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors

Vijayakumar Bhagavatula of Carnegie Mellon University has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the organization announced Tuesday.
Monday, December 11, 2017

Kumar comments on the use of aluminum foil to enhance Wi-Fi Signals

Every day, we use devices like iPhones, computers, and tablets to complete tasks at work or finish school projects. These devices, as we know, require Wi-Fi signals to function properly. Without a strong Wi-Fi connection, we can’t access the internet, email our co-workers, or conduct online research for a school project.
Monday, December 04, 2017

Rajkumar quoted on semi-autonomous big rigs in city and highway settings

With the recent announcement of Tesla's electric 18-wheeler, the conversation on autonomous vehicles is moving toward applications for trucking companies.
Friday, December 01, 2017

Koopman provides voice of reason on safety for self-driving car development

The first self-driving cars are finally operating on real streets, but doubts about their safety continue to plague passengers and pedestrians.
Thursday, November 30, 2017

Franchetti quoted on AI chip startups

As companies continue to invest heavily in hardware to run deep-learning systems, the limitations of existing chips, such as Nvidia’s graphic chips, are being exposed. Despite having been tweaked to adapt, they soak up a lot of energy when working in parallel. CMU has had to ask its researchers to throttle back their chip use due to the strain they placed on the university’s power system.
Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Datta study cited in article about fairness in AI

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have revealed the presence of bias within the learning processes of neural networks. Anupam Datta conducted a study in 2015 that offers proof: in certain settings, Google ads that promised help for applicants in getting jobs with salaries greater than $200,000 were shown to significantly fewer women than men.
Monday, November 27, 2017

CMU and KMITL to launch research & education collaboration

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL), a leading engineering university in Thailand, today announced a long-term collaboration to significantly expand research and education in the areas of information, computing, and autonomous technologies.
Monday, November 20, 2017

Powerful storage, tiny space

Imagine a building the size of the entire city of Chicago, filled with rows and rows of hard disk drives. That’s what a big data storage center would have looked like twenty years ago. Thanks to improvements in storage technology, data centers have scaled down to the size of a football field. But there’s still a great need to shrink the size of storage technology while the amount of data increases.
Friday, November 17, 2017

Zhang receives Test of Time Award 2017

ECE/INI associate research professor Pei Zhang recently received the ACM SenSys Test of Time Award (ToTA) 2017 for his 2004 research paper, “Hardware design experiences in ZebraNet.”
Monday, November 13, 2017

Rajkumar quoted on self-driving car lidar tech

Self-driving car companies are expanding their testing locations to cities with narrow, bumpy roads, bad weather, and culturally-specific driving conventions. Using a combination of radar, lidar, laser scanners, and cameras, self-driving vehicles are gearing up to work in the worst conditions possible.
Thursday, November 09, 2017

Veteran Ph.D. student tackles robots in space
Tuesday, November 07, 2017

Fedder discusses robotics hub at Hazelwood Green steel mill

Gary Fedder is in the process of turning Hazelwood Green steel mill into a CMU robotics hub. With the space available, Fedder intends to focus more on manufacturing than on just one type of product.
Wednesday, November 01, 2017

To improve smartphone privacy, control access to third-party libraries

Smartphone apps that share users’ locations, contacts and other sensitive information with third parties often do so through a relative handful of services called third-party libraries, suggesting a new strategy for protecting privacy, Carnegie Mellon University researchers say.
Wednesday, November 01, 2017

Koopman comments on software bugs in autonomous vehicles

While the idea of a fully self-driving car is exciting, it’s important to note just how large a role software plays in autonomous capability. And how big of a stumbling block it can be. ECE’s Philip Koopman recently told The Register that the majority of software-induced vehicle accidents should never happen.
Monday, October 30, 2017

Rutenbar honored with 2017 Phil Kaufman Award

Dr. Rob A. Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for Research at the University of Pittsburgh, has been selected as the recipient of the 2017 Phil Kaufman Award for Distinguished Contributions to Electronic System Design.
Friday, October 27, 2017

Rajkumar quoted on future of automotive electronic architecture

A recent feature tackled the outlook of the auto industry in 2018, predicting the future of topics such as electric cars, government regulation, and technological developments. On the topic of electronic architecture Car and Driver turned to ECE’s Raj Rajkumar, who believes that 12-volt batteries will be phased out of the industry in around twenty years.
Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Zhu quoted on MAMR use enabling HDD growth for data centers

For years companies have been projecting that heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) would allow data centers to achieve new hard disk drive (HDD) storage capabilities. However, progress in density growth (bits of storage per square inch) has slowed recently, dropping this year below 10%, and the high temperatures required by HAMR present major challenges in implementation of the technology.
Wednesday, October 25, 2017

2017-2018 Dowd Fellowship recipients announced
Monday, October 23, 2017

Rajkumar awarded for innovation

The Pittsburgh Business Times honored two College of Engineering faculty members with their 2017 Innovation Awards. They each founded or led companies that made great advances in their fields. CEE’s Burcu Akinci developed, through LeanFM Technologies, systems to more predictably manage facilities. The technology provides “a clear picture” of a facility by integrating its variousdata, from autonomous systems to blueprints. ECE’s Raj Rajkumar led Ottomatika to ensure “safety, efficiency and affordability of [autonomous] transportation.” The company conducted a “3,400 mile-trip” for an almost entirely autonomous vehicle.
Thursday, October 19, 2017

ALA names Peha OITP senior fellow

Jon Peha has been named a senior fellow in the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy.
Thursday, October 19, 2017

Radio City

Iannucci is the director of the CyLab Mobility Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University, and resident at CMU’s Silicon Valley campus. His cell phone exemplifies how prevalent radio technology is in our daily lives. If it weren’t for radios, we wouldn’t type on Bluetooth keyboards, wouldn’t engage in wireless video chats, wouldn’t be guided safely to our destinations by GPS mapping. These technologies illustrate what radios do for us now. But what will they do for us in the future?
Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Savvides on iPhone X's facial recognition technology

Apple unveiled its new iPhone X and the world watched in awe as senior vice president Craig Federighi accessed the device using facial recognition by simply looking at it. Rest assured, this is a big deal, but what Apple missed that this kind of facial recognition is already possible without all of the high-technology sensors in the iPhone X’s “TrueDepth” camera system. In fact, it can be done with a very low-cost webcam and some advanced machine-learning algorithms.
Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Humanitarian mission to Puerto Rico

On September 20th, 2017, Puerto Rico was hit by a category five hurricane, leaving the island and its inhabitants devastated. A team of Carnegie Mellon University students has raised money to charter a plane carrying vital medical supplies to the island, and to evacuate patients in need of immediate medical attention.
Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Moura named 2018 IEEE President-Elect

José M. F. Moura, Philip L. and Marsha Dowd University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and IEEE Life Fellow, has been elected to serve as the 2018 IEEE President-Elect. Moura will begin serving as IEEE President on January 1, 2019.
Thursday, October 05, 2017

Neural network developed by CyLab researchers mentioned

A neural network developed by CyLab researchers Lorrie Cranor, Lujo Bauer, and Nicolas Christin was mentioned in Science Magazine in relation to new GAN technology that guesses users’ passwords in an effort to beat cyber criminals at their own game.
Monday, October 02, 2017

Optimizing the 21st century radio network

Because of the large amount of data that is constantly moving back and forth across communication networks, latency optimization isn’t the only barrier. The sheer wealth of data can overload a network, rendering it unusable. Many of us routinely experience this—you look down at your phone and it appears you have service, yet you can’t make a call or access the internet. Midnight rolls around on New Year’s Eve and your texts won’t go through, thanks to the vast number of texts being sent at that exact moment.
Friday, September 29, 2017

Savvides quoted on Apple’s facial recognition technology

Recently, Apple released its newest device, the iPhone X, with a price tag of nearly $1,000. The new iPhone uses facial recognition technology instead of fingerprint detection to help customers secure their data. But is there something even more reliable we could be using?
Friday, September 29, 2017

Garba selected as Next Einstein Forum Fellow

CMU-Africa/ECE’s Aminata Garba was recently selected as a 2017-2019 Next Einstein Forum (NEF) Fellow. The fellowship recognizes Africa’s best young scientists and technologists with a demonstrated track record of innovative research and findings. The Fellows Class is comprised of 16 scientists, all under 42 years of age, who are solving Africa’s and the world’s challenges.
Friday, September 29, 2017

Datta quoted on machine bias

CyLab/ECE’s Anupam Datta was quoted in Science News on machine bias. With increased dependence on machine-learning, algorithms also pick up biases along the way. But is it possible to get a completely unbiased algorithm?
Friday, September 29, 2017

11 engineering students named ACS Scholars

Congratulations to the 11 College of Engineering Andrew Carnegie Society (ACS) Scholars for 2017-2018! ACS Scholars are undergraduate seniors who exemplify the standards of academic excellence, volunteerism, leadership, and involvement on campus.
Monday, September 25, 2017

Tayur featured in Huffington Post on VC investments

CE Courtesy Professor Sridhar Tayur was featured in the Huffington Post in an interview on his career and venture capitalist investments. Also a professor of business, he has founded a startup called "SmartOps" to commercialize his research on supply chain planning algorithms and worked with numerous other startup ventures.
Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Tracking firefighters through heat and smoke

Tracking firefighters in burning buildings is fraught with challenges. Smoke renders laser- and vision-based tracking technologies useless, while heat and flames will obliterate pre-installed monitoring devices. GPS isn’t an option either, because it doesn’t work indoors. Another constraint is the need for speed—when firefighters arrive on the scene, they don’t have time to operate complex technology.
Tuesday, September 19, 2017

CyLab faculty write article about password security

Cranor, Bauer, Christin, and their colleagues from the University of Maryland and the University of Chicago say that users need to go beyond creating passwords that are merely “hard to guess.” To defend themselves against hackers, they must now create passwords that are difficult for computers to figure out.
Thursday, September 14, 2017

Peha offers insight on postponed net neutrality hearing

Will the internet remain open? That wait continues. A recently scheduled hearing to discuss rules surrounding net neutrality was postponed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee after no response from any of the eight tech companies invited to testify.
Thursday, September 14, 2017

CMU-SV students and faculty mentor teens in hackathon

This summer, students and faculty from Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley (CMU-SV) collaborated with the Santa Clara County Library District (SCCLD) and Cupertino Library on the third annual Teen Hackathon (CU Hacks 3) in the Cupertino community.
Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Kumar quoted about RFID tracking drones

Swarun Kumar was recently quoted in TechXplore about RFID tracking drones that are being developed to optimize supply chain management, especially in large warehouses. The drones are intended to read RFID tags from tens of meters away; as of now, researchers are working to account for phase shifts that occur as the drone is moving, which might interfere with a proper RFID detection.
Friday, September 08, 2017

Rajkumar comments on challenges faced by new Uber CEO

Raj Rajkumar was quoted in The Verge regarding Uber’s hiring of Dara Khosrowshahi as the replacement for former CEO Travis Kalanick. Khosrowshahi finds himself in a challenging situation with the tech and ride-sharing giant, a company that, under Kalanick, fostered a culture of toxicity and hostility towards women.
Thursday, September 07, 2017

Improving web security without sacrificing performance

Chances are, you’re reading this article on a web browser that uses HTTPS, the protocol over which data is sent between a web browser and the website users are connected to. In fact, nearly half of all web traffic passes through HTTPS. Despite the “S” for security in “HTTPS,” this protocol is far from perfectly secure.
Tuesday, September 05, 2017

Moura and Kottur win Best Short Paper award at the 2017 EMNLP Conference

ECE Professor José Moura and Ph.D. student Satwik Kottur were recently recognized with the Best Short Paper award for their paper, "Natural Language Does Not Emerge 'Naturally' in Multi-Agent Dialog," at the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).
Thursday, August 31, 2017

Bringing harmony to discord in the IoT world

Billions of devices are connected to wireless networks all over the globe, and because of the Internet of Things (IoT), they’re starting to communicate with each other and the cloud now more than ever. Today, some of our devices can ‘talk’ with other applications to make our lives more manageable and stress-free: our smart phones can track our movements to help us navigate, and our Fitbits can count our steps to monitor our health, but what if every device in our homes, or in our cities, could be connected to the Internet?
Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Yu receives NSF grant for brain research

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded BME/ECE’s Byron Yu and Professor Matthew Smith from the University of Pittsburgh nearly $500,000 to conduct a research project, titled “Volitional Modulation of neural activity in the visual cortex.” For their project, Yu and Smith will use a brain-computer interface (BCI) to identify which aspects of the brain’s activity are sensory versus cognitive.
Monday, August 21, 2017

Protecting the power grid with circuit simulation methods

In December 2015, Russian hackers allegedly pummeled Ukraine’s power grid, disrupting the flow of electricity for nearly a quarter-million Ukrainians. Then, in December 2016, roughly a year after the first attack, the hackers struck again. But this time, they targeted an electric transmission station in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Each cyberattack lasted no more than six hours, but security experts were still alarmed: hackers had just demonstrated their ability to infiltrate the grid and drastically alter the flow of society.
Monday, August 14, 2017

Rowe featured in NPR for research on bicycle safety and autonomous vehicles

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, in 2015, nearly 1,000 cyclists were killed in car crashes. Some people say that self-driving vehicles will make our roadways safer, but before this can happen, researchers argue that these vehicles must be able to recognize bicyclists.
Monday, August 14, 2017

Datta leads NSF project on accountable decision systems

Increasingly, decisions and actions affecting people's lives are determined by automated systems processing personal data. Excitement about these systems has been accompanied by serious concerns about their opacity and threats they pose to privacy, fairness, and other values.
Wednesday, August 09, 2017

Tague comments on the benefits of BitClave in MediaPost

Recently, a team at BitClave built a decentralized search advertising platform that eliminates the need for intermediaries like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Instead of paying “middlemen” to promote their advertisements online, businesses can now make offers directly to consumers who have chosen to participate in the program.
Wednesday, August 09, 2017

Interview with Moura featured in The Institute

An interview with José M.F. Moura was recently published in The Institute, a newspaper for the members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Moura is a candidate for 2018 IEEE president-elect.
Sunday, August 06, 2017

Jordan helped lead CMU’s rise to prominence

Angel Jordan, who played a pivotal role in establishing Carnegie Mellon University as one of the leading engineering, computer science and robotics institutions in the world, died Friday. He was 86.
Monday, July 31, 2017

CMU hacking team emerges as strongest in DefCon history with 4th win

Carnegie Mellon University’s hacking team won its fourth “World Series of Hacking” title this weekend at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas.
Thursday, July 27, 2017

CMU hacking team eyes big win

Carnegie Mellon’s competitive hacking team, the Plaid Parliament of Pwning, is looking to win an unprecedented fourth title at this year’s DefCon cybersecurity conference. Never before has a team ever won more than three times in DefCon’s 21-year history of what many refer to as the “World Series of Hacking.”
Thursday, July 20, 2017

Pileggi and students receive Best Paper Award at IEEE PES

A team of ECE researchers recently received the Prize Paper Award in the Best Conference Papers Session on Power System Planning, Operation, and Electricity Markets at the 2017 IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting.
Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Morgan to lead National Research Committee on nation's electric transmission and distribution system

An ad hoc National Research Committee (NRC), headed by Granger Morgan, will address the technical, policy, and institutional factors that may affect the implementation of technology during the evolution of electric transmission and distribution (T&D) in the United States.
Tuesday, July 18, 2017

ECE works with NSBE to recruit grad students in engineering

Faculty members and students from Carnegie Mellon’s College of Engineering attended the most recent convention in Kansas City to invite students to pursue a graduate degree in engineering at Carnegie Mellon.
Wednesday, July 05, 2017

Moura and Kottur paper on non-human robot languages cited in The Atlantic

In a 2017 research paper, Kottur, Moura,and their colleagues from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Virginia Tech describe their experience with two robots that eventually formed their own language by assigning values to colors and shapes.
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