Author Archives: kjschaef@andrew.cmu.edu

Robotics Institute Startup Supports Computer Science Education Week

BirdBrain Technologies, a Carnegie Mellon University startup, has released a flock of its Finch robots for Computer Science Education Week, Dec. 9–15. Developed at the Robotics Institute, the low-cost, tabletop robots are on loan to educators across the U.S. who are using them to help get kids excited about computer programming.

Designed for an engaging introduction to the art of programming, the Finch can support more than a dozen programming languages and environments, and are appropriate for students as young as eight years old.

With on-board features such as sensors, motors, accelerometers, a buzzer, a full-color beak LED and a USB port, the Finch allows for students to write richly interactive programs.

Tom Lauwers (E’03, CS’06, CS’10), who founded BirdBrain in 2010, said the loan program is meant to introduce computer science and programming to fourth through ninth graders.

CHIMP Robot Prepares For DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials

It’s only been a few weeks since Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) completed assembly of its four-limbed CHIMP robot, but the Tartan Rescue Team has high hopes for the robot’s performance at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials Dec. 20-21. “We’ve been on a fast track for the past year, doing detailed design and development of CHIMP at the same time as we were writing and testing its software on surrogate hardware,” said Tony Stentz, NREC director and leader of the Tartan Rescue Team. “That’s an aggressive approach to producing a robot unlike any we have built and not without risk, but it appears to be paying off.

“The software allowed us to investigate a number of issues that influenced the design of the hardware and improved the robot,” he continued. “Even though we would love to have more time to practice with CHIMP prior to the trials, we’ve been pleased so far with its performance.”

Tartan Rescue is one of 17 teams competing at the DRC Trials at the Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla. Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DRC is intended to spur development of advanced robots that can mitigate disasters while working in environments engineered for people. Based on performance at the trials, up to eight teams will receive DARPA funding to help prepare for the DRC Finals next December.

Robotics Institute Computer Teaches Itself Common Sense

A computer program called the Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) is running 24 hours a day at Carnegie Mellon University, searching the Web for images, doing its best to understand them on its own and, as it builds a growing visual database, gathering common sense on a massive scale.

NEIL leverages recent advances in computer vision that enable computer programs to identify and label objects in images, to characterize scenes and to recognize attributes, such as colors, lighting and materials, all with a minimum of human supervision. In turn, the data it generates will further enhance the ability of computers to understand the visual world.

But NEIL also makes associations between these things to obtain common sense information that people just seem to know without ever saying — that cars often are found on roads, that buildings tend to be vertical and that ducks look sort of like geese. Based on text references, it might seem that the color associated with sheep is black, but people — and NEIL — nevertheless know that sheep typically are white.

“Images are the best way to learn visual properties,” said Abhinav Gupta, assistant research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. “Images also include a lot of common sense information about the world. People learn this by themselves and, with NEIL, we hope that computers will do so as well.”

Curiosity Completes Drive Using CMU Navigation Software

Using autonomous navigation software first developed at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity this week completed its first two-day autonomous drive, a new technique that enables the mobile laboratory to cover ground faster.

Since July, Curiosity has been on a 5.3-mile trek from where it worked for the first half of 2013 to the lower reaches of Mount Sharp, a 3.4-mile-high peak within the Gale Crater that is the rover’s next major science destination. Autonomous navigation software can quicken the pace by allowing the rover to safely drive itself across terrain not previously evaluated by human rover drivers on Earth.

“Autonomous navigation already has made it possible for the rover to extend its range each day, continuing to operate beyond the area we have been able to evaluate in advance,” said Maimone, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science at CMU and worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Robotics Institute before joining JPL. “But what really matters is how far we can drive between planning cycles. Autonomous drives over multiple days will allow Curiosity to keep moving, even on weekends and holidays when staff members aren’t available.”

CMU Robotics Kits To Be Integrated Into Local Schools

An innovative program that introduces robotic technology into non-technical middle school classes will be used by suburban Pittsburgh and rural West Virginia schools in a federally funded research project to identify and nurture students with an affinity for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

All 7th and 8th grade students at Springdale Junior-Senior High School and all 6th, 7th and 8th grade students in the Mingo County (WV) Schools — a total of 900 children annually — will use robotic kits developed at Carnegie Mellon University. They will use the kits to complete at least one project or assignment each year in required courses such as health, earth science and language arts.

The three-year Creative Robotics project, supported by a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant, seeks to increase the number and diversity of students in the STEM education pipeline.

CMU Motion Tracking Technology Is Precise, Inexpensive, Fast

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research Pittsburgh have devised a motion tracking technology that could eliminate much of the annoying lag that occurs in existing video game systems that use motion tracking, while also being extremely precise and highly affordable.

Called Lumitrack, the technology has two components — projectors and sensors. A structured pattern, which looks something like a very large barcode, is projected over the area to be tracked. Sensor units, either near the projector or on the person or object being tracked, can then quickly and precisely locate movements anywhere in that area.

“What Lumitrack brings to the table is, first, low latency,” said Robert Xiao, a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). “Motion tracking has added a compelling dimension to popular game systems, but there’s always a lag between the player’s movements and the movements of the avatar in the game. Lumitrack is substantially faster than these consumer systems, with near real-time response.”

Former Robotics Faculty Member Doug James Wins Katayanagi Prize

Former Robotics Institute faculty member Doug L. James and Stanford University’s Pat Hanrahan, computer scientists whose innovations in computer graphics have enhanced such movies as “Avatar,” “Hugo,” “The Dark Knight,” “Finding Nemo” and “Star Trek,” are each recipients this year of Katayanagi Prizes in Computer Science.

The individual prizes honor the best and the brightest in the field of computer science and are presented by Carnegie Mellon University in cooperation with the Tokyo University of Technology (TUT). The prizes are endowed by Japanese entrepreneur and education advocate Koh Katayanagi, who founded TUT and several technical institutions in Japan.

BirdBrain Offers to Loan 1,000 Robots to K-12 Students

BirdBrain Technologies, a Pittsburgh startup that commercializes projects developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, will loan 1,000 of its Finch robots to school districts or educational groups during Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek), Dec. 8-14.

“We want to support Computer Science Education Week’s Hour of Code initiative, which seeks to demystify computer code with a one-hour introductory activity for 10 million students,” said Tom Lauwers, a Ph.D. graduate of the Robotics Institute and the founder of BirdBrain. “Finch was developed at the Robotics Institute specifically to make computer programming more compelling for novices, so we want to make the robots available to as many students as possible that week.”

BirdBrain will loan the robots to up to 20 school districts or educational organizations.

Myers Once Again Wins “Most Influential” Award

Brad A. Myers, professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, will be honored for the second year in a row as the author of a Most Influential Paper at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, (VL/HCC). He is the first person to win the award twice since it was established in 2008.

Myers and his co-authors — former students Andrew Ko, the first author, is now an assistant professor at the University of Washington, and Htet Htet Aung, now a principal user experience designer at Harris Healthcare Solutions in the Washington, D.C., area — will receive the Most Influential Paper award at VL/HCC 2013, Sept. 15–19 in San Jose, Calif. The symposium is the premier international forum for research on how computation can be made easier to express, manipulate, and understand.

Study Finds Most Internet Users Seek Anonymity Online

A new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project and Carnegie Mellon University finds that most Internet users would like to be anonymous online, but many think it is not possible to be completely anonymous online. Some of the key findings:

-86% of Internet users have taken steps online to remove or mask their digital footprints—ranging from clearing cookies to encrypting their email.

-55% of Internet users have taken steps to avoid observation by specific people, organizations, or the government.

The representative survey of 792 Internet users also finds that notable numbers of Internet users say they have experienced problems because others stole their personal information or otherwise took advantage of their visibility online. Specifically:

-21% of Internet users have had an email or social networking account compromised or taken over by someone else without permission.

-12% have been stalked or harassed online.

-10% have had important personal information stolen such as their Social Security Number, credit card, or bank account information.

-6% have been the victim of an online scam and lost money.

-6% have had their reputation damaged because of something that happened online.

-4% have been led into physical danger because of something that happened online.