Monthly Archives: September 2013

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.