Engineering Magazine: Fall 2022

ENGINEERING

Carnegie Mellon University location in Kigali, Rwanda

Africa is home to 54 countries and 1.3 billion people. It covers an area larger than India, China, and Western Europe combined.

Today less than 40% of Africans have steady internet access due to either availability or cost.

The College of Engineering looks forward to contributing to the development of Africa for another 10 years through education and research.

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE

ENGINEERING

MASTERCARD FOUNDATION INVESTS IN CMU-AFRICA

The Mastercard Foundation has made a transformational investment in Carnegie Mellon University Africa to help address the continent’s critical needs and catalyze opportunities for inclusive development. With this new $275.7 million commitment, CMU-Africa will become the anchor institution for the expansion of engineering knowledge creation across Africa. The grant will expand engineering and technology academic programs, research, and entrepreneurship over the next decade. Together, the Mastercard Foundation and CMUAfrica will accelerate digital transformation, increase socio-economic development, and broaden access for marginalized and economically disadvantaged groups.

Africa has the youngest and fastest-growing population in the world. By 2030, there will be 375 million young people in the job market in Africa, and that number is expected to grow to more than a billion people within the next few decades. CMU-Africa is focused on educating and empowering these African leaders and innovators, preparing them to make a transformative impact

in their communities and around the world. Through their strong partnership, CMU-Africa and the Mastercard Foundation will accelerate their shared mission and provide life-changing educational and career experiences for students across the continent.

This commitment will have a specific focus on an inclusive socio-economic transformation in order to ensure that a digital future in Africa extends to historically marginalized communities. CMU-Africa and the Mastercard Foundation have an expansive commitment to broadening access and inclusion for marginalized populations, including women, refugees, and people with disabilities.

A key component of the Mastercard Foundation’s investment is the creation of the African Engineering and Technology Network (Afretec). This pan-African network will include 10 technology-focused universities across the continent working together to collectively catalyze Africa’s digital future. The creation of Afretec is a defining moment for

the digital transformation of Africa. The network will build a strong knowledge creation and educational infrastructure on the continent. It will also provide a platform for its members to engage in deep collaboration that drives inclusive digital growth in Africa.

This new commitment is a deepening of the partnership between CMU-Africa and the Mastercard Foundation, which began in 2016 with a $10.8 million grant to create the Mastercard Foundation Scholars program at Carnegie Mellon. The Foundation has been a critical partner in the growth of CMU-Africa, which has seen an incredible impact across the continent over the past almost 11 years.

Through the strategic collaboration and generous support of the Government of Rwanda and the Rwandan people, CMU-Africa has built a strong educational platform that serves the continent. This new grant from the Mastercard Foundation will expand CMU-Africa’s public-private partnerships and impact the digital future of Africa.

THE GATES FOUNDATION PARTNERS WITH CMU-AFRICA

DRIVING FINANCIAL INCLUSION

A recent investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will support research at Carnegie Mellon University Africa, with the goal of driving financial inclusion on the continent through the creation of more equitable digital financial services.

According to the World Bank, financial inclusion means that people will have access to useful and affordable financial products and services, delivered in a responsible and sustainable way. This will enable Africans to participate in, and benefit from, the growing digital economies.

Africa has been a leader in the mobile money industry for the past decade, which has significantly expanded access to financial services in low-resource areas across the continent. These digital services have changed the way many Africans control their finances, allowing them to quickly transfer money without needing access to the internet or a bank account. However, a major barrier for further growth of Africa’s digital economy is unequal adoption and access to these mobile services.

“A lack of security, privacy, and trust in digital financial services are key obstacles in the adoption of these digital technologies. As CMU-Africa, we have the unique ability to leverage our research in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence to develop

Africa-based solutions to the current challenges of these financial platforms and services,” says Allen Robinson, director of CMU-Africa.

A large part of the population—low-income earners, small-scale entrepreneurs, people with disabilities, women, and rural populations—are

not able to benefit from current digital financial services. Expanding mobile money services to include savings, credit, and insurance is also a goal for furthering financial inclusion.

To tackle the challenges of financial inclusion, CMU-Africa will establish the Upanzi Network which will leverage research and academia across the continent to create a more open and trusted digital infrastructure. The foundation of this initiative will be a laboratory at CMU-Africa that focuses on building expertise, tools, prototypes, and digital public goods that can be rapidly scaled across educational institutions in Africa.

“The Upanzi Network will establish a neutral perspective on digital technologies and become the trusted resource for open-source technologies for digital public goods in Africa,” says Assane Gueye, co-director of the CyLab-Africa initiative and lead researcher for the Upanzi Network.

This new initiative will serve as a collaboration point between governments, digital financial service providers, development agencies, nongovernment agencies, and academia. The Upanzi Network will work with these stakeholders to create, test, and implement secure and costeffective open-source digital technologies that can benefit impoverished and marginalized communities. These technologies, tested at CMUAfrica, will also have an impact on fields such as healthcare and agriculture.

The laboratory will be established at CMU-Africa within the year, and it will be scaled across the continent to other African universities.

CYLAB-AFRICA: IMPROVING CYBERSECURITY OF FINANCIAL SYSTEMS IN EMERGING ECONOMIES

Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Security and Privacy Institute and CMU-Africa have established the CyLab-Africa initiative, which aims to improve the cybersecurity of financial systems in Africa and other emerging economies. This initiative is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“The projected growth in Africa is fragile,” says CyLab’s Giulia Fanti, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-director of CyLab-Africa. “It depends on improving access to financial technologies, as well as building public trust in those technologies. Cybersecurity is a critical requirement for both.”

Major cyberattacks have plagued the African economy. In 2020, a mobile money fraud hack cost Ugandan banks $3.2 million in stolen funds. The year before, security firm Symantec revealed that malicious hackers had been targeting west African banks since mid-2017.

“These major hacks have slowly eroded trust in our financial systems,” says Assane Gueye, an associate teaching professor at CMU-Africa and co-director of CyLabAfrica. “When you compare Africa to other continents, the cybersecurity infrastructure just isn’t there.”

CyLab-Africa researchers are addressing Africa’s unique challenges to enable financial inclusion through access, trust, and resilience. Their plan involves four research thrusts:

Assessing the cybersecurity risk to African financial inclusion

Developing tools for securing financial infrastructure

Developing tools for threat intelligence sharing and and diagnosis

Designing training programs for cybersecurity workforce development

The initiative also leverages the research and educational capabilities of Carnegie Mellon’s Pittsburgh campus, including CyLab and the Software Engineering Institute. While CyLabAfrica currently focuses on the financial sector, the ultimate goal is to advance security and privacy research and education in emerging economies.

CARNEGIE

Funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supports new research initiatives at CMU-Africa to make digital financial services more trusted, accessible and inclusive in Africa.

CARNEGIE

MEL L ON UNIVERSITY

KIGALI, R WANDA

FROM THE DEAN I

’m thrilled to be able to bring you news about the great things that are happening in our college.

As you can see from our opening pages, Carnegie Mellon University and the Mastercard Foundation, in collaboration with the Government of Rwanda, have entered into a truly transformational partnership in education, research, and entrepreneurship at CMU-Africa. The Mastercard Foundation has made a $275.7 million commitment that will catalyze education, research, and entrepreneurship opportunities across the African continent. To be a global leader in engineering, it is essential that we are adept at leading by building bridges across geographies and cultures, and this investment will ensure we are able to do this at CMU-Africa. Some of the new initiatives funded by this investment will be driven by close links between our Pittsburgh faculty and our Africa faculty.

Another exciting initiative for the college is the launch of eight new AI Engineering master’s degrees, 7 in Pittsburgh (in Fall 2022) and 1 in Africa (in Fall 2021). These degrees will teach students how to design engineering systems that function better using AI and how AI can be used in the engineering design process. These degrees are part of a larger initiative in AI Engineering in the college that also includes research. In this issue, you will read about our faculty and students applying AI and machine learning to speed drug discovery, create robots capable of learning, and how we are aiming to transform nanosatellites into distributed computing platforms.

Our innovative research to engineer AI into complex systems exemplifies our long-held belief that engineers are problem solvers and that we must often devise new tools and processes that transform the engineering discipline itself.

This magazine issue contains stories about innovations that range from creating software to advance modern materials development to building technologies that sustain at-home artificial lung support, and more.

We’ve been busy on many fronts as we continue to burnish our path as leading innovators in both education and research. The students have returned for another academic year in full force, and it is great to see the campus alive with their energy. Seeing them reminds me that all that we have accomplished, and all that we have yet to achieve, is driven by a need to educate elite engineers that will become tomorrow’s leaders.

William H. Sanders

Dr. William D. and Nancy W. Strecker Dean, College of Engineering

are the relationships we adecarbonize freightSincerely,

LED BY CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

A pan-African collaboration of technology-focused universities to accelerate the digital transformation of Africa.

Some of the university partners in the network: University of Lagos | Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar University of Rwanda | American University of Cairo | University of Nairobi University of the Witwatersrand

Learn more about the network and our partners: afretec.org

INT R O D U C I N G THE

FALL 2022 / IN THIS ISSUE

You can’t drive a Lamborghini to Mars

Necessity is the mother of invention

Small package, big potential

New metric unveils hidden energy poverty

Discovery uncovers need for ammonia emission regulations

Wet circuits for biology research

Precision rehabilitation to prevent osteoarthritis

Peekaboo! Here’s a system to guarantee smart home privacy

Grant boosts at-home respiratory support for lung disease patients

Test of time awards

NSF awards $3M to for next-gen networking

Did you hear that?

Transforming nanosatellite capabilities

Dynamic brain imaging with AI

AI application to speed drug discovery

Does the brain learn in the same way that machines do?

Robots can learn to navigate warehouses

THE

Tucker appointed to AI commission

Civil and environmental engineering has new leader

Jaramillo on transportation for IPCC report

Blanton accepts NSBE Lifetime Achievement in Academia Award

Women shift the dynamic in materials science leadership

EDITOR:

Sherry Stokes (DC’07)

DESIGNER:

Tim Kelly (A’05, HNZ’14)

CONTRIBUTORS:

Aaron Aupperlee Krista Burns

Dan Carroll

David Cochran (photography)

Hannah Diorio-Toth (DC ‘17) Susan Endres Emily Forney (DC’12) Lisa Kulick Kaitlyn Landram Ryan Noone Emily Schneider Lynn Shea Daniel Tkacik Sara Vaccar Kayla Valentine Debra Vieira

The deciding factor

Learning tricks of the trade from champion Chip Ganassi Engineering Art

Dinosaurs found where art and technology intersect

Turning waste to wellness

Teacher Mwatima, Learner Mwatima

RESEARCH

YOU CAN’T DRIVE A LAMBORGHINI TO MARS

CREATING NEW WAYS OF LEARNING AND RESEARCHING

From neuroscience to nano manufacturing, fields that didn’t exist a century ago evolved from the intersection of different disciplines when scientists collaborated to solve challenges in new ways. With today’s scientific advances and the lightning speed of technology, working together across boundaries has never been more enticing or challenging.

Different disciplines use different methods and theories, and there is no substitute for deep, disciplinary exper tise. It’s possible that combining efforts across disciplines might be less effective for the specific problem needing to be solved. How can researchers encourage the “right” level of multidisciplinarity to identify the best solutions?

A research team is exploring this topic through the lens of engineering design. With findings published in the Special Virtual Issue of the journal De sign Studies, the team has proposed a framework and common language for all multidisciplinary interactions in all research fields.

“The framework can be applied to a variety of fields, providing a lingua franca to further the discussion of mul tidisciplinarity in design research and the creation of new disciplines,” said Chris McComb, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

The framework has a lower to upper spectrum, ranging from pure unidiscipli narity to generative multidisciplinarity. Research in theoretical mathematics is often isolated, unidisciplinary efforts. Design, in contrast, lies toward the upper end.

“Design, by its nature, is multidis ciplinary and ill-defined. It has ‘fuzzy edges,’” McComb said. “It can combine physics, computer science, engineering, and psychology. It ‘plays well’ with a lot of different disciplines—it benefits from higher degrees of multidisciplinarity.”

In generative multidisciplinarity, the focus is on co-adaptation. Each person learns about the other’s methods, and then changes their own disciplinary methods to create something new. McComb admits that this is not easy but that the end result is worthy of that work.

“As we educate researchers to achieve this level of generative multidis ciplinarity, it’s going to take a fundamen tally different approach,” he said. “We’re going to help them become deep, dis ciplinary experts, but we need to make them aware of the value of this interdis ciplinary effort—putting in the work in an interdisciplinary sense in order to do transformational research.”

Not all problems require the highest level of multidisciplinarity and there is value across the entire framework. For some projects, staying in the middle makes the most sense. An example is one person designing manufacturing parts and a colleague then 3D printing them. Each person is making strides to solve the problem within their discipline but they don’t need to interact much or transform their fields to do it.

“A Lamborghini is great on a flat road, but you can’t drive it to Mars,” McComb

The Degrees of Disciplinarity

Framework for conceptualizing varying degrees of multidisciplinarity in research along a spectrum.

said. “Sometimes research is like a flat road—we’ve solved similar problems before, so we can find success with well-known methods and theories, the Lamborghini. But other projects are like getting to Mars—you can’t take a Lamborghini, so you need to create new ways of discovering and learning and researching. That’s when higher levels of multidisciplinary really shine.”

“The goal is to revolutionize how we solve problems,” he added. “Disciplines rise, fall, and evolve over time. Ideally, if we do it right, we’re evolving disciplines to keep pace with the new problems that we’re facing in the world.”

The paper was co-authored by Kath ryn Jablokow, professor of engineering design, Pennsylvania State University.

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

As we educate researchers to achieve this level of generative multidisciplinarity, it’s going to take a fundamentally different approach.

NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION

SOFTWARE DEVELOPED IN THE COLLEGE AIDS MATERIALS SCIENTISTS WORLDWIDE

Behind the equipment in the Materials Characterization Facility are software programs that can examine thousands of data points to build intricate models, automate routine analysis, and process high-definition images. This enables researchers to make advancements in modern materials development. After using third-party software for decades, Marc De Graef grew frustrated that in certain cases the software couldn’t provide clean and accurate results, so he began to develop his own routines. Today, his software is offered as part of a commercial package through EDAX—a leading provider of materials characterization systems.

Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) is a characterization technique that sends an electron beam onto a material sample and records a Kikuchi diffraction pattern. These patterns are a collection of bands in a 2D configuration that can be used to determine the orientation of a material’s crystal lattice. Software systems can analyze the crystal orientations as a function of position on the sample and create multicolored images, known as orientation maps. These maps give material

scientists new insights into the role of microstructure in materials’ behavior.

To produce high-quality maps using this technique, the material sample must be finely polished in order to locate the bands. Even with careful polishing, De Graef, a professor of materials science and engineering, and his students consistently ran into issues with the existing software “blacking out” areas of the map where both the material was low-quality and the Kikuchi patterns had a low signalto-noise ratio. To improve this, De Graef worked with Al Hero, a signal processing expert and professor at the University of Michigan, to create a new method to index Kikuchi patterns.

As part of the Air Force Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative in 2013, De Graef’s group began developing computational techniques; they further developed the techniques over the last five years with funding from the Office of Naval Research. De Graef and his students realized that by building a dictionary of all possible crystal orientations, they could predict the Kikuchi band patterns without needing to actually locate the

DeGraef’s software (right) compared to existing software (left) displays a clearer image despite high pattern noise.

bands. Therefore, if the material sample was low-quality, their software could still extract the crystal orientation from the pattern and create an accurate orientation map.

Compared to the existing software, De Graef’s algorithms are more robust against pattern noise and create orientation maps that are 80% more accurate. This improvement caught the attention of EDAX, a leading provider of materials characterization systems, and in 2021 they began offering this new approach, now called the dictionary indexing algorithm, as an add on to their existing software.

Stuart Wright, a senior EBSD scientist with EDAX, believes that the software has been very beneficial for their support team that educates customers about the ambiguities that are inherent to EBSD characterization of certain material systems. “Not only is the software from De Graef’s group a benefit to our customers working with difficult to index samples, we have also found the ability to accurately simulate EBSD patterns using De Graef’s dynamic diffraction model extremely useful in testing and refining our existing software capabilities, as well as more quickly evaluating new development ideas.”

Additionally, EDAX is exploring another pattern-recognition algorithm developed by De Graef’s team that uses a cross-correlation approach to detect where an experimental diffraction pattern is located on the Kikuchi diffraction sphere; this approach is known as “spherical indexing” or “SphInx.”

Kikuchi band pattern

SMALL PACKAGE, BIG POTENTIAL

Cell-based therapies have long been thought of as an alter native option for patients with diseases caused by organ and tissue failure, inclusive of heart attack, diabetes, corneal blind ness, and cystic fibrosis. While great in theory, in practice, these therapies show limited clinical success in many appli cations due to low cell viability after injection, as well as poor retention at the injection site and engraftment into damaged tissue. Ongoing research led by biomedical engineering’s Ra chelle Palchesko and Adam Feinberg, is exploring the use of a new cell delivery method to help cells stick and stay where they’re needed most.

More than 50,000 cornea transplant procedures are per formed in the United States annually, an impressive statistic that exceeds the number of transplants of all other solid organs combined. In new research published in Communica tions Materials, CMU and University of Pittsburgh researchers propose using a small package of shrink-wrapped corneal endo thelial cells as a potential alter native to cornea transplant when low endothelial cell density is the cause of corneal blindness.

The corneal endothelium (CE) is a layer of cells that lines the back surface of the cornea and is responsible for main taining proper corneal thickness and clarity. Nearly half of all cornea transplants stem from CE failure, primarily due to a loss of cells that cannot replicate to repair damage or injury.

While some treatments for CE failure exist, chronic re jection and limited donor supply have motivated the devel opment of new methods to inject CE cells to repopulate the corneal endothelium and restore function. Until now, most approaches have required the existing CE to be removed through scraping or cryogenic injury of the cornea to provide a place for the delivered cells to attach.

“You can imagine if you’re trying to take a healthy cell and put it in a hostile tissue, it doesn’t want to stay there,” explained Rachelle Palchesko, assistant teaching professor

of biomedical engineering. “We had a benchmark for effec tive application of shrink-wrapped cells in the cornea based on some work a group in Japan was doing, and we knew we could improve upon it. We’ve been able to show that we can package cells effectively and get them to integrate into high-density tissues, without inducing any injury or removing any cells. Our technology can improve cell therapies and help cells stick and stay where we want them to.”

The group’s technique utilizes shrink-wrapping micro patterned islands of corneal endothelial cells in a basement membrane-like layer of extracellular matrix that enables the cells to maintain their cell-cell junctions and cytoskeletal structure while in suspension. In a series of studies, the small packages of cells exhibited an ability to rapidly engraft into intact, high-density corneal endothelial monolayers in both in vitro and in vivo model systems.

“The bulk of my research has been in treating corneal blindness; however, we believe this technology has strong po tential to be applied to other areas of the body,” said Palches ko. “Our group is investigating how to apply this technology to treat cystic fibrosis or deliver cells after a heart attack.”

“Imagine that organ failure could be prevented with a sim ple injection into the affected tissue instead of waiting for a transplant that may never come,” said Adam Feinberg, a pro fessor of biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering. “This is the truly exciting potential of the tech nology as it is further developed and validated. And we are thankful for the support of the National Institutes of Health and Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in funding this research.”

Palchesko added, “This is an effective technology—it’s not overly engineered; we’re just wrapping up cells in little pack ages. I believe we can take it farther and help a lot of people.”

MELLON UNIVERSITY

Imagine organ failure prevented with a simple injection into the affected tissue instead of waiting for a transplant.

NEW METRIC UNVEILS HIDDEN ENERGY POVERTY

Destenie Nock and Shuchen Cong are unveiling hidden energy poverty and insecurity. Their new metric developed with collaborators at the University of Maryland and the Salt River Project illus trates what they’ve termed the “energy equity gap.”

In industrialized regions, income is often used as a metric for energy pover ty. Yet, income-based metrics fail to cap ture customer behavior that may also provide an indicator for energy poverty (lack of energy services or low consump tion) and energy insecurity (inability to meet household energy needs). Having observed this drawback, Nock, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE) and engineering and public policy (EPP), and Cong, a Ph.D. student in EPP, and their team set out to create an energy equity metric that illustrates the socioeconomic divide in access to energy.

To do this, Nock and her co-authors’ primary data point for each household was its inflection point, or the outdoor temperature at which occupants turned on cooling systems. By separating households by income group, a consis tent pattern begins to appear, with each

increase in income corresponding to a lower inflection point. Measuring the difference in inflection point between the lowest income group and the high est gives us Nock’s energy equity gap. In their study of customers in Arizona, they estimated that the energy equity gap was between 4.7°F and 7.5°F.

This means that when tempera tures rise, low-income customers in this region are forced to endure higher indoor temperatures for longer periods than those in the highest income group. Beyond comfort, heat-related illness is a serious threat in hot, arid regions like Arizona, which saw 2,944 emergency room visits for heat-related illness in 2019. In colder regions, a similar inflec tion point may be found by measuring when households turn on their heating.

“Capturing energy-limiting behaviors is important for addressing and plan ning for energy justice, which hinges on the proper distribution of benefits for a clean energy transition, and an ability to mitigate the effect of heatwaves,” said Nock and co-authors.

Rather than a replacement, the en ergy equity gap is an excellent comple ment to current income-based metrics,

INFLECTION TEMPERATURE (oF)

(Average outdoor temperature that occupants turn on their

conditioning)

capturing a previously unseen group experiencing energy insecurity without much overlap. Of 4,577 households examined from 2015-2016, the energy equity gap showed 86 energy-poor and 214 energy-insecure households. Only three of these were captured in the 141 households identified as energy-poor by existing income-based metrics, revealing significantly more challeng es for energy access than previously known. Data from smart sensors could further enhance models by providing usage data in frequent increments and even from different appliances, helping understand the lived experience for occupants.

A broader view of energy poverty and energy insecurity should motivate policy that creates a more equitable distribution of energy consumption. Currently, a federal program provides direct financial energy assistance to low-income families. This assistance is important, but the energy equity gap suggests other policy measures may also help shrink the energy divide. For

INCOME GROUP

instance, Nock suggests that policy mak ers could institute a demand-response program that reroutes excess energy from elsewhere in the grid, to custom ers whose energy needs are currently unmet. Policy like this requires the type of behavior data provided in Nock and Cong’s research, as well as direct input on temperature preference and comfort from households.

Nock advises that there are still significant challenges to achieving a common understanding of energy equi ty. Adapting to the additional heatwaves spurred by climate change will require us to address inequities in comfort, which has a direct tie to productivity within the home. This has direct impli cations for the remote work practices and policies that have grown since the COVID pandemic.

“I think there’s a need to understand how inequitable the system is,” says Nock. “Energy usage is the inequity that we should be focusing on, and that can’t be found with solely an in come-based measure.”

By separating households by income group, a consistent pattern begins to appear, with each increase in income corresponding to a lower inflection point. Measuring the difference in inflection point between the lowest income group and the highest gives us Nock’s energy equity gap.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (CERN) cloud chamber can recreate temperature conditions anywhere in the atmosphere, enabling researchers to monitor and analyze particle formation in different regions.

DISCOVERY UNCOVERS NEED FOR AMMONIA EMISSION REGULATIONS

A discovery by former Carnegie Mellon student Mingyi Wang sheds light on one way new particles form in the upper troposphere. In a study, published in Nature, Wang reveals an unexpected volatile reaction between nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and ammonia, that synergistically creates new particles at a rapid rate. This suggests that in addition to carbon dioxide, there are other compounds in need of attention and regulation.

The presence of ammonia was first discovered in the upper troposphere in 2016 using the analysis of averaged MIPAS (Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding) infrared limb-emission spectra. Scientists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), University of Colorado Boulder, and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México performed a

“CT Scan” of the atmosphere, moving along latitudes and longitudes, measuring particle concentrations and compositions in the upper troposphere.

Ammonia is primarily derived from agriculture and vehicles in condensed city settings. When scientists detected the compound in the upper troposphere, they were surprised by how far it had traveled into the atmosphere, raising questions about how it’s transported there and its effect on particle mass and creation.

After learning about the former study, Wang, a Ph.D. student in CMU’s Department of Chemistry, became interested in the reaction between ammonia, nitric acid, and sulfuric acid in the atmosphere. In a 2020 study, also published in Nature, Wang discovered that in cold conditions, like the winter climate in Beijing, the mixture of these

These droplets then freeze, becoming ice cr ystals, re -releasing portions of the ammonia into the atmosphere, which produce particles that can spread across the mid-latitude Nor thern Hemisphere.

conditions and observed reactions in real-time. When he added ammonia to the chamber, Wang expected to see the mixture of acids and base condense onto existing particles and increase their mass, as he had previously discovered. However, surprisingly, he saw a burst of new particles forming rapidly.

that can spread across the mid-latitude Northern Hemisphere.

“This finding leads us to question whether or not other species, such as organic compounds, can also be transported to the upper troposphere through this process,” said Wang.

Being that ammonia is very soluble, as it passes through clouds, it begins dissolving into cloud droplets

“What we found is that the nitric acid and ammonia are susceptible to temperature changes. When the temperature gets colder, they can go through the gas to particle conversion process, creating new particles and increasing the overall particle number concentration,” said Wang.

Wang’s advisor, co-author, and world-class climate scientist, Neil Donahue, explained the importance of understanding the possible array of compounds that could be convected and their potential impact.

During events like the Asian monsoon, the ammonia is convected upward.

three agents contributes and condenses onto nanometer particles, increasing their mass quickly.

With this finding, Wang became curious about what this reaction would look like in colder, more extreme regions, so he designed an experiment to test it in upper troposphere-like conditions.

“There are a limited number of instruments available to identify the processes that create particles in the upper troposphere,” said Wang. “We must rely on lab experiments to understand what can occur in those conditions.”

Wang headed to Switzerland as a member of the CLOUD collaboration to test his experiment at the European Council for Research Nuclear (CERN). Using their chamber facility, Wang created controlled atmospheric

“This is important, especially in the relatively clean upper troposphere. The emission sources are limited up there. There are no factories or farms, and planes are thought to make up most of the pollutants in this area. Any pollutants in the upper troposphere will play a very different role than they do in the boundary layer (the lowest part of the troposphere, directly impacted by the presence of the earth’s surface). The temperature and the interplay between species in each are also very different.”

Collaborating with a number of world-renowned climate scientists, including Hamish Gordon, assistant research professor at Carnegie Mellon’s College of Engineering, Wang and his fellow researchers conducted global modeling simulations, demonstrating how ammonia is transported to the upper troposphere and later dispersed.

Additionally, co-author Brandon Lopez, a Ph.D. student in chemical engineering, found that even a tiny amount of sulfuric acid could turn particles into formidable ice nuclei.

The group uncovered that ammonia is convected upward during events like the Asian monsoon. Being that ammonia is very soluble, as it passes through clouds, it begins dissolves into cloud droplets. These droplets then freeze, becoming ice crystals, rereleasing portions of ammonia into the atmosphere, producing particles

“All of the scientific uncertainty around climate change relates to clouds in one way or another,” said Donahue, professor in chemistry, chemical engineering, and engineering and public policy at CMU. “To make clouds, you need water to nucleate or freeze.”

“In polluted parts of the atmosphere closer to the ground, such as that over big cities, the agents and particles that act as cloud nuclei (seeds) are abundant, but they are quite rare in the vast areas of the upper atmosphere. The nature of clouds can change a lot depending on the type and amount of particles present, so having these particles making and changing cloud composition in the upper atmosphere could significantly impact climate.”

Reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continues to be a major focus of climate scientists and lawmakers. While Wang says reducing CO2 by decreasing fossil fuel combustion will help lower several other pollutants, Wang believes it’s imperative to start developing regulations focused specifically on ammonia emissions.

“We know we have to reduce sulfur and nitrogen oxide emissions from coal power plants and vehicles, but now it’s evident we should be thinking about reducing ammonia emissions from vehicles and agriculture too.”

Wang, now a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology, says the next step is to design additional studies to uncover whether other compounds are making it to the upper troposphere in a similar fashion.

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

WET CIRCUITS FOR BIOLOGY RESEARCH

You don’t have to be an engineer to know that water and electronics don’t mix. But if you want to use a sensing circuit to study small-scale features in a community of cells, the electronics must find a way to accommodate the cell’s aqueous environment. The circuit also cannot affect the cells in a way that invalidates the data.

Marc Dandin, an assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, is researching ways to make circuits that are able to function in wet environments for cell research. He is working with N. Luisa Hiller, an associate professor in the biological sciences department, who will use the circuits to explore how immune cells are affected by particles released from Streptococcus pneumoniae cells. The work is funded by a recent twoyear DSF Charitable Foundation award through the Mellon College of Science.

“The project fits into a greater theme which centers on interfacing electronics with biological species,” Dandin said. “Dr. Hiller’s work and my work merge as we are both interested in studying cellular and bacterial processes and how they take part in disease progression.”

The bacteria, Streptococcus pneumoniae, can cause a variety of diseases, including pneumonia. This bacterium is a particularly exciting model because it is relevant to common health issues, tackles fundamental questions about microbial life, and the results can be generalized

and used to guide similar research about other bacteria.

Most cells release extracellular vesicles (EV), a cell-to-cell mailing system that enables communication between cells. The goal of Dandin’s and Hiller’s project is to expand our knowledge on how bacterial EVs affect the immune system of a host, specifically how they activate or inhibit immune defenses.

For this research project, immune cells are grown on a circuit chip in an incubator that simulates the environment inside a host. The electronics are designed to collect data about an entire population of cells overlying the circuit while also preserving single cell resolution in the measurements.

“With our technology, you can also look at things at a very fine level, almost at single-cell level,” Dandin said. “It allows us to understand what’s happening with much more fine spatial and temporal resolution.”

The unique challenges associated with using circuits in incubators and other wet environments allow ECE students to push their expectations of electronics’ applications. The students also learn about biology, even without formal coursework.

“We found that multidisciplinary research really helps make giant leaps instead of tiny, little pushes in each of these fields,” Dandin said. “CMU is a great institution for this kind of multidisciplinary research.”

To achieve such high precision sensing, bacteria are cultured on an electronic chip.

Source: Lydia Eutsey

PRECISION REHABILITATION TO PREVENT OSTEOARTHRITIS

Athletes know that a torn ACL knocks a player out of the game, requires surgical repair, and involves a long recovery. But for many injured athletes, being sidelined is only the beginning of what can become a lifelong struggle.

According to Eni Halilaj, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering and biomechanist who specializes in orthopaedic rehabilitation, 60% of those who suffer this knee injury develop osteoarthritis early in life. The degenerative joint disease, which affects an estimated 32.5 million individuals in the U.S., is especially problematic for younger patients because of the longer time span during which the chronic condition can cause pain and limited mobility.

Halilaj is working to understand the difference between those who do and those who do not develop osteoarthritis following knee trauma.

Halilaj and her team of mechanical engineers, bioengineers, and computer scientists are working to integrate insights from their work to develop effective rehabilitation strategies aimed at restoring and preserving pain-free mobility throughout the lifespan.

Experiments in her motion capture laboratory identify mechanical risk factors for diseases like osteoarthritis. The 1,000-square-foot lab is outfitted with 20 cameras positioned along the ceiling throughout the room, which visualize highly reflective spherical markers that are strategically placed on a human subject’s body to track their motion and analyze their gait. A split-

belt treadmill analyzes the subject’s motion by measuring the force exerted by each step, while electromyography (EMG) sensors evaluate muscle activations by measuring electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles.

While data gathered in this type of research lab is critical for identifying mechanical risk factors, patient access to such facilities is limited.

However, the key to better insights may lie in monitoring how patients move in natural environments as opposed to specialized laboratories like Halilaj’s Musculoskeletal Biomechanics Lab.

“Using wearable sensors that look like Band-Aids, we monitor movement outside of the lab, where patients are not on their best behavior and may be adopting pain-avoidance walking strategies that damage their joints in the long run,” says Halilaj.

Her group is pairing wearable sensing data with advanced magnetic resonance imaging of the knee to discover the problematic walking strategies that are associated with early osteoarthritis— what she calls “digital biomarkers of osteoarthritis.”

In addition to gait adaptation following surgery, physical therapy plays

an important role in recovery. Advances in computer vision offer untapped potential for movement analysis from video, enabling real-time tracking and feedback to improve physical therapy. Halilaj and her team are also developing open-source software that fuses computer vision algorithms with biomechanical modeling to allow accurate motion tracking from cameras, like those in smartphones.

Studies that monitor patients in physical therapy and natural environments will help researchers discover digital biomarkers of future disease, which can be targeted with preventative technologies in the future. Together with experts in haptics, Halilaj’s team is developing wearable haptic systems to train patients to change the way they move.

“In a not-too-distant future, we envision clinicians using data from these minimal wearables sensors and smartphone videos to isolate patients who are likely to suffer from debilitating osteoarthritis, personalize their therapy, and prescribe a wearable haptic device that helps them correct their gait before it is too late,” concludes Halilaj.

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

Researchers aim to restore pain-free mobility after injury.

PEEKABOO!

HERE’S A SYSTEM TO GUARANTEE SMART HOME PRIVACY

Many internet-connected devices—let’s use smart speakers as an example—share data to the cloud when you interact with them. How do you know your speaker isn’t always listening? How do you know it’s not sharing more information than is necessary to fulfill your request?

There’s currently no way to check, but CyLab researchers are close to a solution.

“People are concerned that their devices are capturing and sharing too much data,” says CyLab’s Haojian Jin, a Ph.D. stu dent in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, in collab oration with faculty members Swarun Kumar, Yuvraj Agarwal, and Jason Hong. “Companies want to tell users that they only collect certain pieces of information, but they currently have no way to actually prove it.”

INTRODUCING: PEEKABOO!

Jin and a team of researchers have developed a new priva cy-sensitive architecture for developers to build smart home apps, which the team refers to as “Peekaboo.” The system

takes requests from developers to share certain pieces of data and ensures only the essential pieces of data to fulfill their re quest are shared with them.

The system, described in a paper titled, “Peekaboo: A HubBased Approach to Enable Transparency in Data Processing within Smart Homes,” was presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2022.

“In the privacy world, we have a principle called ‘data minimiza tion,’” says Jin. “The companies that collect the data should only be collecting the minimum amount of data to fulfill their objectives.”

This concept is even written into the EU’s General Data Protec tion Regulation (GDPR), Jin points out. Article 5 (1) (c) of the GDPR reads, “Personal data shall be limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed.”

Under the Peekaboo architecture, developers first declare all the data they intend to collect and under what conditions, where that data is being sent, and the granularity of the data itself—for example, whether they’d like to collect the number of hours watched on a smart TV per week, per month, per quarter, etc.

Then, an in-home hub mediates between all devices in the home and the outside Internet.

“The hub enforces the sharing of only data declared by the developer,” says Jin. “And users and third-party auditors can inspect the incoming data requests as well as the outgoing data flows.”

GIVING USERS MORE CONTROL OF THEIR PRIVACY IN SMART HOMES

The essence of the Peekaboo architecture, Jin says, is that users can have more control over their data. If a developer sends in a request to collect a piece of information—let’s pretend they want to know the number of hours of spent watching a smart TV in a single day—the user can modify the request on the hub to only share the number of hours spent watching their smart TV over a whole month, if they’re more comfortable with that.

In addition, Peekaboo in the future could help make pri vacy nutrition labels—which are now being deployed by both

Apple and Google—more accurate. Right now, there is no way to enforce and verify that apps are behaving consistently with their privacy nutrition labels, which are produced manually by developers and have been found to be inaccurate at times But since Peekaboo both enforces and verifies data sharing in accordance with developers’ requests, privacy nutrition labels could be automatically generated and updated to accurately portray data collection and use.

Lastly, as the Internet of Things continues to grow and people accumulate hundreds of IoT devices in their homes, Peekaboo can help manage the smart home holistically.

The Peekaboo protocol will allow users to manage privacy preferences for all of their devices in a centralized manner through the hub,” Jin says. “Imagine not just a privacy nutri tion label for an individual device, but a privacy nutrition label for an entire home.”

This work was funded in part by Cisco, Infineon, the National Science Foundation, and CyLab’s Secure and Private IoT Initiative

GRANT BOOSTS AT-HOME RESPIRATORY SUPPORT FOR LUNG DISEASE PATIENTS

An interdisciplinary team led by Keith Cook, biomedical engineering professor and department head, has been awarded $8.7 million dollars from the U.S. Army CDMRP program to create and integrate new technologies to sustain permanent at-home artificial lung support. Such advances will allow chronic lung disease patients to lead more normal lives in which they feel comfortable engaging in every-day activities, such as walking or driving.

More than 16 million Americans suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), with veterans being 1.5 to 3 times more likely to develop COPD versus the general population. Across the board, COPD patients experience a gradual decline in respiratory function along with acute exacerbations that lead to a transient, but dangerous, worsening of their disease state. Each year in the U.S. alone, COPD patients account for two million emergency room visits, 700,000 hospital discharges, and 156,000 deaths.

Cook and his collaborators are building a novel Pulmonary Assist System (PAS) that will enable longterm, ambulatory respiratory support for COPD patients. The PAS weighs in under three pounds and consists of a small, lightweight axial flow pump coupled with a compact, highly biocompatible gas exchanger. To date, long-term respiratory support has not been performed outside the intensive care unit (ICU), however, the group is focused on developing supporting

technologies that will allow for safe, uncomplicated support for COPD patients outside of the ICU.

“Respiratory support requires a means of drug delivery and patient and artificial lung monitoring that are not possible on a regular hospital floor, and definitely not possible at home,” explained Cook. “We are developing different drug regimens, new drugs, and new monitoring systems to enhance patient care and overall quality of life.”

As part of the funded work, there are four interconnected projects. They include the development of more stable anticoagulation strategies to support the PAS outside of the ICU, new surgical methods that allow a patient freedom of movement on the artificial lung, and enhanced remote monitoring technologies.

“Monitoring of device performance is crucial for at-home artificial lung support to enable early intervention in case of device failure,” said Jana Kainerstorfer, associate professor of biomedical engineering. “We are developing the technology to monitor for instance blood oxygenation, a crucial parameter of device performance.”

Fruit from these efforts stand to offer hope and practical solutions for chronic lung patients, explained Cook. “The reality is that there just aren’t enough lung transplants for all the people who need them. Even if someone does receive a transplant,

the chances are that within five years that lung transplant will fail. Our work in developing alternative treatment technologies that allow chronic lung patients to maintain their quality of life is a huge win.”

Additional collaborators include Howie Choset and Lu Li of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science; David Skoog of Advanced Respiratory Technologies; Matthew Bacchetta and Rei Ukita of Vanderbilt University; Shaoyi Jiang of Cornell University; and Jessica Bon of UPMC.

TEST OF TIME AWARDS

David Brumley

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) presented ECE/CyLab’s David Brumley its Test of Time Award for his paper, “Unleashing Mayhem on binary code,” published in 2012.

Brumley outlined a new approach to automatically find exploits in software. The effect of the paper, say Brumley and others in the field, is that it led to the creation of the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge, a $60 million effort to prove fully autonomous cybersecurity was possible. Brumley’s team won that challenge. Today, the tech behind Mayhem protects everything from Roblox games to Department of Defense weapons systems.

Vyas Sekar

Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Vyas Sekar and fellow researchers received the 2022 SIGCOMM Test of Time Award for their 2011 paper

“Understanding the impact of video quality on user engagement,” which motivated streaming giants like Netflix and YouTube, among others, to develop new technical solutions such as better pro-active bitrate selection, rate switching and buffering techniques, to capture and retain audiences using their platforms.

NSF AWARDS $3M FOR NEXT-GEN NETWORKING

CyLab researchers will use nearly $3 million in funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help de velop intelligent, resilient, and reliable next-generation (NextG) networks.

The NSF awarded $37 million to 37 different projects at universities across the country.

The investment, called RINGS—short for Resilient and Intelligent Next-Gen eration Systems—is a public-private partnership that focuses on accelerating research to increase U.S. competitive ness in NextG networking and comput ing technologies, and ensure the securi ty and resilience of NextG technologies and infrastructure.

CyLab’s Giulia Fanti and Vyas Sekar, both faculty in the Department of Electri cal and Computer Engineering (ECE), will receive $1 million for RINGS: Enabling Data-Driven Innovation for Next Gener ation Networks via Synthetic Data. The project aims to address the shortage of data needed to drive research and development of NextG systems through the use of synthetic data. The team will explore how to extend recent advances in an area of machine learning called generative modeling to create synthetic models of networking datasets.

CyLab’s Anthony Rowe, a professor in ECE, will team up with Jeffrey Bilmes at the University of Washington on RINGS: Bumblebee: A Neural Network Trans former Architecture for Summarization and Prediction in Interactive XR Appli cations. The team will receive $1 million to develop a fast, resilient and adaptive general neural network transform er-based architecture for interactive extended reality applications using machine learning. Extended reality (XR)

couples virtual content with the physical world through technologies such as virtual and augmented reality.

The project will result in a system that will improve XR applications like augmented-reality-guided surgery, search and rescue, digital telepresence and automotive heads-up displays.

Heather Miller, an affiliate member of CyLab, as well as Claire Le Goues and Ben Titzer, all faculty in the Institute for Software Research, will receive $930,000 for RINGS: Language-Agnostic Resilience Engineering at the Edge With WebAs sembly. They aim to make applications running at the edge more resilient. The team will develop an approach to fullstack resilience engineering that will en able secure, effective, and performant

edge computation in NextG systems. The research will focus and build on WebAssembly, which is emerging as the common underlying language-agnostic execution platform in new edge com puting environments.

The RINGS program is NSF’s single largest effort to date to engage public and private partners to jointly support a research program. Private sector part ners include Apple, Ericsson, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Qualcomm, and VMware. Government partners include the U.S. Department of De fense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

DID YOU HEAR THAT?

Approximately 15% of American adults (37.5 million) age 18 and over report some trouble hearing. While hearing aids have been the common solution to hearing loss, insurance coverage and cost prevent the majority of the population from wearing aids. If only there was a company that made hearing aids accessible—enter Audition Technology.

Located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Audition Technology creates ready-to-use hearing devices that do not require a prescription or fitting. One of the first companies to make over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids, Audition Technology’s mission is to integrate user voice and preferences with quality technology for self-managed hearing healthcare.

“The 2017 OTC hearing aid legislation was the driver to form the company,” explains Shayan Gupta, chief advisor and investor of Audition Technology. “Our OTC hearing aids and education portals are designed for hearing related qual ity of life.”

Gupta earned his undergraduate degree in electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering at Car negie Mellon University in 2021, and his master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon Uni versity in 2022. While focusing on machine learning, advanced signal processing techniques, and medical devices, Gupta was an innovation scholar in Carnegie Mellon’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship.

“My degree in electrical and computer engineering, with a focus on signal processing, gave me the knowledge to understand the core technologies in hearing aids to devel op aids of our own,” says Gupta. “While attending Carnegie Mellon, I met Professor Shawn Kelly, who eventually joined Audition Technology as CTO and is now CEO. Additionally, Professor Rich Stern taught and mentored me. He guided me through conducting my own research in the space as part of my Senior Honors Research.” Stern, professor of electrical

and computer engineering, currently advises the company’s research and development.

For the most part, hearing aids are not covered by medi cal insurance since they are not an essential medical device. Insurance companies often consider hearing aids elective, thus preventing many from hearing clearly. According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Dis orders (NIDCD) Epidemiology and Statistics Program, about 28.8 million U.S. adults could benefit from using hearing aids.

The Food and Drug Administration recently proposed a rule to establish a new category for OTC hearing aids for people 18 and older with mild to moderate hearing loss. Ac cording to the FDA, the rule would allow hearing aids within this category to be sold directly to consumers in stores or online without a medical exam or a fitting by an audiologist. The proposed rule is designed to help increase competition in the market while ensuring the safety and effectiveness of OTC and prescription hearing aids.

“We have been waiting for this rule since our founding,” says Gupta. “This ruling lays the groundwork on how OTC aids will be regulated and marketed, so without it, we cannot sell such products in the United States.”

Audition Technology’s hearing aid prototype, Atlas, is an innovative digital technology with a sophisticated microchip to amplify sounds for listening needs. Following FDA specified standards, Atlas boasts a friendly design to make it easy to use and maintain in everyday life.

“We have been vigilant on FDA actions for years now, even having met with the agency four times and commented on the draft rule released last year,” says Gupta.

In addition to fabricating cost-friendly hearing aids, the company also provides education services, like learning about hearing essentials risks and hazards, a self-assessment for hearing loss, and advice on when to see a doctor.

MELLON

Life is made better through AI Engineering

New products and services with AI-orchestrated systems will bring remarkable performance and value into our lives.

Many of the most important real-world impacts will come from figuring out how to employ AI algorithms into physical systems. This integration challenge is immense, and the innovative systems we design must prove to be resilient, trustworthy and secure.

Through research in AI Engineering at Carnegie Mellon, we are enabling the world to build products and services with significantly better functionality to run better and faster. The field of engineering is changing, and so are we.

The most complex problems. The most diverse experts.

Exquisite performance.

AI ENGINEERING / TRANSFORMING NANOSATELLITE CAPABILITIES

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are setting out to reimagine the capabilities of nanosatellites in low-Earth orbit. Backed by a $7 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Frontiers Program, the CMU initiative aims to transform constellations of nanosatellites into sophisticated distributed computing platforms, building the foundation for a wide range of innova tive applications.

Today’s nanosatellites collect enormous amounts of raw data, so much that it’s impossible to downlink all of it to earth. The long loop required to beam just a portion of the data to the ground and then make sense of it also creates latency issues.

“It can take days or even a week to extract the information you’re looking for,” says Brandon Lucia, a professor in Carne gie Mellon’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the project’s principal investigator.

With the team’s new approach, called orbital edge comput ing, researchers will work to develop computationally capable constellations of nanosatellites, equipped with machine learn ing techniques that extract valuable insights from the data while still in orbit. This technology will reduce the amount of information being sent to earth and create the foundation for a wide array of possible responsive applications that operate entirely from space.

“There is a huge opportunity in getting sensor-enabled computer systems in orbit to provide applications like public safety, defense and intelligence, traffic management, preci sion agriculture, and weather modeling, among others.”

Researchers say this new technology will provide the ability to detect the initial signs of problems before they occur. The group points to examples like monitoring suspicious activity at large-scale events such as the upcoming 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, or detecting early signs of wildfires,

enabling response teams to make mitigation efforts before forests are set ablaze.

Carbon mapping is another potential application for the new sophisticated distributed computing platforms. Current technology and ground infrastructure cannot handle the amounts of data this type of work requires. However, by pro cessing the data in orbit and extracting only relevant informa tion, scientists could be looking at a new tool to help combat climate change.

The project’s team, made up of CMU Associate Profes sor Gauri Joshi, Associate Professor Swarun Kumar, Assistant Professor Zac Manchester, Professor Vyas Sekar, and Lucia, is comprised of world-leading experts in areas like federated learning, wireless communications, security and networking, and nanosatellite design.

“This group has a long track record of success in the con stituent areas of this project, and CMU has the best graduate students in the world,” says Lucia. “Together, we will combine theory and technologies to realize this new era of computa tional nanosatellites constellations.”

The grant from NSF’s CPS Frontiers Program will fund a large team of graduate students who will be working to define the field of computational nanosatellite systems. It will also provide the resources to build and launch satellites into orbit as part of a test deployment that will showcase the new tech nology’s capabilities.

Additionally, the program will include outreach initiatives, one of which will involve high school students who will work on applications that will run on these satellites. Another is an artist in residence program, which will help illustrate the work to make it more accessible and provide insight into the value of the research. The outreach effort aims to broaden partici pation in computer and cyber-physical systems research.

AI ENGINEERING / DYNAMIC BRAIN IMAGING WITH AI

MRI, electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencepha lography have long served as the tools to study brain activity, but new research from Carnegie Mellon University introduces a novel, AI-based dynamic brain imaging technology which could map out rapidly changing electrical activity in the brain with high speed, high resolution, and low cost. The advance ment comes on the heels of more than 30 years of research that Bin He has undertaken, focused on ways to improve non-invasive dynamic brain imaging technology.

Brain electrical activity is distributed over the three-dimen sional brain and rapidly changes over time. Many efforts have been made to image brain function and dysfunction, and each method bears pros and cons. For example, MRI has common ly been used to study brain activity, but is not fast enough to capture brain dynamics. EEG is a favorable alternative to MRI technology; however, its less-than-optimal spatial resolution has been a major hindrance in its wide utility for imaging.

Electrophysiological source imaging has also been pursued, in which scalp EEG recordings are translated back to the brain using signal processing and machine learning to reconstruct dynamic pictures of brain activity over time. While EEG source imaging is generally cheaper and faster, specific training and expertise is needed for users to select and tune parameters for every recording. In new published work, He and his group introduce a first of its kind AI-based dynamic brain imaging methodology, that has the potential of imaging dynamics of neural circuits with precision and speed.

“As part of a decades-long effort to develop innovative, non-invasive functional neuroimaging solutions, I have been working on a dynamic brain imaging technology that can pro vide precision, be effective and easy to use, and better serve clinicians and researchers,” said Bin He, professor of biomedi cal engineering at CMU.

He continues, “Our group is the first to reach the goal by introducing AI and multi-scale brain models. Using biophys ically inspired neural networks, we are innovating this deep learning approach to train a neural network that can precisely translate scalp EEG signals back to neural circuit activity in the brain without human intervention.”

In He’s study, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the performance of this new approach was evaluated by imaging sensory and cog nitive brain responses in 20 healthy human subjects. It was also rigorously validated in identifying epileptogenic tissue in a cohort of 20 drug-resistant epilepsy patients by comparing AI based noninvasive imaging results with invasive measure ments and surgical resection outcomes.

Results wise, the novel AI approach outperformed conven tional source imaging methods when precision and computa tional efficiency are considered.

“With this new approach, you only need a centralized location to perform brain modeling and training deep neural network,” explained He. “After collecting data in a clinical or research setting, clinicians and researchers could remotely submit the data to the centralized well trained deep neural networks and quickly receive accurate analysis results. This technology could speed up diagnosis and assist neurologists and neurosurgeons for better and faster surgical planning.”

As a next step, the group plans to conduct larger clinical trials in efforts to bring the research closer to clinical imple mentation.

Collaborators on the PNAS paper include Rui Sun, a BME Ph.D. student in He’s lab; Abbas Sohrabpour, a former BME postdoctor al associate in He’s lab; and clinical collaborator Gregory Worrell of the Mayo Clinic.

AI ENGINEERING / AI APPLICATION TO SPEED DRUG DISCOVERY

is labeled with the name of its species. In the other set, no labels accompany the images. To a human, the difference between the two types of animals might be obvious. But to a machine learning model, the difference isn’t clear. The unlabeled data is therefore not reliably useful. Applying this analogy to the millions of unlabeled molecules that could take humans decades to manually identify, the need for smarter machine learning tools becomes obvious.

The research team sought to teach its MolCLR framework how to use unlabeled data by contrasting positive and negative pairs of augmented molecule graph representations. Graphs transformed from the same molecule are considered a positive pair, while those from different molecules are negative pairs. By this means, representations of similar molecules stay close to each other, while distinct ones are pushed far apart.

Predicting molecular properties quickly and accurately is important to advancing scientific discovery and application in areas ranging from materials science to pharmaceuticals. Because experiments and simulations to explore potential options are timeconsuming and costly, scientists have investigated using machine learning (ML) methods to aid in computational chemistry research. But, most ML models can only make use of known, or labeled, data. This makes it nearly impossible to predict with accuracy the properties of novel compounds.

In an industry like drug discovery, there are millions of molecules to select from for use in a potential drug candidate. A prediction error as small as 1% can lead to the misidentification of more than 10,000 molecules. Improving the accuracy of ML models with limited data is critical for developing new treatments for disease.

While the amount of labeled molecule data is limited, there is a

rapidly growing amount of feasible, but unlabeled, data. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering pondered if they could use this large volume of unlabeled molecules to build ML models that could perform better on property predictions than other models.

Their work culminated in the development of a self-supervised learning framework named MolCLR, short for Molecular Contrastive Learning of Representations with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The findings were published in Nature Machine Intelligence.

“MolCLR significantly boosts the performance of ML models by leveraging approximately 10 million unlabeled molecule data,” said Amir Barati Farimani, assistant professor of mechanical engineering

For a simple explanation of labeled vs. unlabeled data, mechanical engineering Ph.D. student Yuyang Wang suggested thinking of two sets of images of dogs and cats. In one set, each animal

The researchers had applied three graph augmentations to remove small amounts of information from the unknown molecules: atom masking, bond deletion, and subgraph removal. In atom masking, a piece of information about a molecule is eliminated. In bond deletion, a chemical bond between atoms is erased. A combination of both augmentations results in subgraph removal. Through these changes, the MolCLR was forced to learn intrinsic information and make correlations.

When the team applied MolCLR to ClinTox, a database used to predict drug toxicity, MolCLR significantly outperformed other ML baseline models. On another database, Tox21, MolCLR stood out from the other ML models with the potential to distinguish which environmental chemicals posed the most severe threats to human health.

“We’ve demonstrated that MolCLR bears promise for efficient molecule design,” said Barati Farimani. “It can be applied to a wide variety of applications, including drug discovery, energy storage, and environmental protection.”

AI ENGINEERING / DOES THE BRAIN LEARN IN THE SAME WAY THAT MACHINES DO?

Pinpointing how neural activity changes with learning is anything but black and white. Recently, some have posited that learning in the brain, or biological learning, can be thought of in terms of optimization, which is how learning occurs in artificial networks like computers or robots. A new perspectives piece co-authored by Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh researchers relates machine learning to biological learning, showing that the two approaches aren’t interchangeable, yet can be harnessed to offer valuable insights into how the brain works.

“How we quantify the changes we see in the brain and in a subject’s behavior during learning is ever-evolving,” says Byron Yu, professor of biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering. “It turns out that in machine learning and artificial intelligence, there is a well-developed framework in which something learns, known as optimization. We and others in the field have been thinking about how the brain learns in comparison to this framework, which was developed to train artificial agents to learn.”

The optimization viewpoint suggests that brain activity should change during learning in a mathematically prescribed way, akin to how the activity of artificial neurons changes in a specific way when they’re trained to drive robots or play chess.

“One thing we are interested in understanding is how the learning process unfolds over time, not just looking at a snapshot of before and after learning occurs,” explains Jay Hennig, a recent Ph.D. graduate in neural computation and machine learning at CMU. “In this perspectives piece, we offer three main takeaways that would be important for people to consider in the context of thinking about why neural activity might change throughout learning that cannot be readily explained in terms of optimization.”

The takeaways include i) the inflexibility of neural variability throughout learning, ii) the use of multiple learning processes even during simple tasks, and iii) the presence of large tasknonspecific activity changes.

“It’s tempting to draw from successful examples of artificial learning agents and assume the brain must do whatever they do,” suggests Aaron Batista, professor of bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. “However, one specific difference between artificial and biological learning systems is the artificial system usually does just one thing and does it

really well. Activity in the brain is quite different, with many processes happening at the same time. We and others have observed that there are things happening in the brain that machine learning models cannot yet account for.”

Steve Chase, professor of biomedical engineering at CMU and the Neuroscience Institute adds, “We see a theme building and a direction for the future. By drawing attention to these areas where neuroscience can inform machine learning and vice versa, we aim to connect them to the optimization view to ultimately understand, on a deeper level, how learning unfolds in the brain.”

This work is co-authored with Emily Oby, research faculty in bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh, and Darby Losey, Ph.D. student in neural computation and machine learning at CMU. The group’s work is done in collaboration with the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, a cross-university research and educational program between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh that investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms that give rise to biological intelligence and behavior.

There are things happening in the brain that machine learning models cannot yet account for.

AI ENGINEERING / ROBOTS CAN LEARN TO NAVIGATE WAREHOUSES

Robots have been working in factories for many years, but most of them operate inside cages or behind safety glass to limit or prevent interaction with humans.

In warehouse operations, where goods are continuously moved, robots can be neither caged nor stationary. And while corporations like Amazon have already incorporated robots into their warehouses, these customized and costly systems are designed to work within one particular facility on welldefined pathways under the guidance of specific centralized programming that carefully directs their activity.

“For robots to be most useful in a warehouse, they will need to be smart enough to deploy in any facility easily and quickly; able to train themselves to navigate in new dynamic environments; and most importantly, be able to safely work with humans, as well as sizeable fleets of other robots,” said Ding Zhao, the principal investigator and assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

In the Manufacturing Future’s

Institute (MFI) at Carnegie Mellon University, a team of engineers and computer scientists have employed their expertise in advanced manufacturing, robotics, and artificial intelligence to develop the warehouse robots of the future.

Zhao and Martial Hebert, the dean of the School of Computer Science and a professor at the Robotics Institute, are leading the warehouse robot project. They have investigated multiple reinforcement learning techniques that have shown measurable improvements over previous methods in simulated motion planning experiments. The software used in their test robot has also performed well in path planning experiments at Mill 19, MFI’s collaborative workspace for advanced manufacturing.

“Thanks to the advance in chips, sensors, and advanced AI algorithms, we are at the cusp of revolutionizing manufacturing robots,” said Zhao. The team leverages previous work in self-driving cars to the development of

warehouse robots that can learn multitask path planning via safe reinforced learning, and quickly adapt to new environments and operate safely with workers and human-operated vehicles.

MAPPER: LEARNING TO PLAN PATHWAYS

The group first developed a method that could enable robots to continuously learn to plan routes in large dynamic environments. The MultiAgent Path Planning with Evolutionary Reinforcement (MAPPER) learning method will allow the robots to explore by themselves and learn by trial and error in a manner similar to the way human babies accumulate experience to handle various situations over time.

The method eliminates the need to program the robots from a powerful central command computer. Instead, the robots make independent decisions based on their own observations. The robots’ capabilities will enable their onboard sensors to observe dynamic obstacles within a 10–30-meter range. With reinforced learning, robots will continually train themselves how to handle unknown obstacles.

Such smart robots can enable warehouses to employ large fleets of robots more easily and quickly. Energy consumption could also be reduced when robots travel shorter distances because they plan their own efficient paths.

RCE: PRIORITIZING SAFETY IN PURSUIT OF GOALS

Another study applied the use of a constrained model-based reinforcement learning with Robust CrossEntropy (RCE) method. Researchers

must consider safety constraints for a learned robot so that it does not sacrifice safety in order to finish tasks. For example, the robot needs to avoid colliding with other robots, damaging goods or interfering with equipment in order to reach its goal.

“Although reinforcement learning methods have achieved great success in virtual applications, such as computer games, there are still a number of difficulties in applying them to real world robotic applications. Among them, safety is premium,” said Zhao.

Creating safety constraints that are factored at all times and in all conditions, goes beyond traditional reinforcement learning methods and into the increasingly important area of safe reinforcement learning, which is essential to deploying such new technologies.

The team evaluated their new RCE method in the Safety Gym, a set of virtual environments and tools for measuring progress towards reinforcement learning agents that respect safety constraints while training. The results showed that their approach enabled the robot to learn to complete

its tasks with a much smaller number of violations than state-of-the-art baselines.

CASRL: ADAPTING TO CONDITIONS BY LEARNING

To further address how robots can navigate safely in warehouses where people and other robots move freely— or what researchers call non-stationary disturbances, the group employed a Context-Aware Safe Reinforcement Learning (CASRL) method, a meta-

Left: Assistant professor of mechanical engineering Ding Zhao (right) demonstrates a warehouse robot’s capabilities to Pennsylvanian legislators.

Below: Zuxin Liu, an engineering doctoral student at CMU’s Safe AI Lab, operates the intelligent manufacturing logistic robot.

learning framework in which the robots learn how to safely adapt to nonstationary disturbances as they occur.

The CARSL method would also enable the robots to safely navigate in a variety of situations that could include inaccurate sensor measurements, broken robot parts, or obstructions such as trash in the environment.

“Non-stationary disturbances are everywhere in real-world applications, providing infinite variations of scenarios. An intelligent robot should be able to generalize to unseen cases rather than just memorize the examples provided by humans. This is one of the ultimate challenges in trustworthy AI.” said Zuxin Liu, a third year Ph.D. student at the Safe AI Lab at CMU, supported by the MFI award.

In each of the above studies, the new models and methods improved upon prior ways of training robots. Such successful incremental steps are essential to achieving the ultimate goal of a verifiable level of trustworthiness required for better warehouse robots.

Zhao’s robotic research was also funded by the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance.

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

AI Engineering

8 DEGREES

The three things you need to know about our AI Engineering degree:

1. In our Master’s program you will learn to integrate AI into the constraints of the engineering problem and view the challenge from a new perspective.

2. The impact of AI being combined throughout the entire engineering process will help you to discover both enhanced and breakthrough solutions.

3. At Carnegie Mellon we are known for our technical virtuosity in building breakthrough systems in engineering, and by deepening your AI skills within the engineering construct you will propel your career.

FOR

Kigali, Rwanda

Engineering AI

INSIDE THE COLLEGE / TUCKER APPOINTED TO AI COMMISSION

Conrad Tucker, a professor of mechanical engineer ing at Carnegie Mellon University, will serve on the U.S. Chamber of Com merce’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence Competition, Inclusion, and Innovation

Tucker joins other artificial intelli gence (AI) experts and thought leaders from academia and the public and pri vate sectors. Together, they will work to advance U.S. leadership in the use and regulation of AI technology.

“The establishment of this commis sion is extremely timely, as AI becomes more integrated into our lives. It is therefore critical that the voices and input from people across society be reflected in the U.S. vision and strategy for AI,” said Tucker. “The involvement

of academia, industry, and government in this effort highlights the multidisci plinary perspectives that are needed to advance AI strategies that maintain U.S. leadership in this domain.”

Co-chaired by former Rep. John Delaney (D-MD) and Rep. Mike Ferguson (R-NJ), the AI Commission will research and recommend artificial intelligence policies as they relate to regulation, international research and development competitiveness, and future jobs.

The Commission plans to seek input from all relevant stakeholders, meet with top researchers, and conduct field hearings before recommending AI policy solutions. The goal is to ensure that the United States continues to lead in innovation while fostering fairness in deploying this revolutionary technology.

Tucker directs the Artificial Intel

ligence in Products Engineered for X (AiPEX) Lab in Carnegie Mellon’s College of Engineering. His research explores the use of machine learning methods that predictively improve the outcome of engineered systems through the acquisition, fusion, and mining of large-scale, disparate data.

A former member of the Advisory Committee for the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Frontiers of Engineer ing Education Symposium, Tucker has served as a principal and co-principal investigator on funded grants from organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

As the AI commission’s work gets underway, Tucker says he is excited and honored to serve.

CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING HAS NEW LEADER

Burcu Akinci, the Paul Christiano Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is the new head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at Carnegie Mellon University, effective July 1, 2022. Akinci succeeds Dave Dzombak, Hamerschlag University Professor of CEE.

Akinci is an outstanding leader and researcher whose guidance as associate dean for research of the college for six years fostered a strong collaborative research environment

and saw significant increases in the value of new research awards. As co-chair of her department’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee and founding chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers Taskforce on Fostering Inclusive Academic Communities, she is committed to building a learning community where everyone feels welcome and has equal opportunity to thrive and succeed.

Akinci joined the CEE faculty 21 years ago, where today her lab is creating new models and tools to modernize construction and infrastructure management.

She integrates building information models with data capture technologies, like 3D imaging and embedded sensors, to create digital twins of construction projects and infrastructure operations, and she develops approaches that support proactive and predictive operations and management. Akinci is also part of a team working on NASA’s Habitats Optimized for Missions of Exploration (HOME) project, where they’re creating a smart habitat that can process its own data and pass recommendations on to robotic systems or astronauts.

She has two patents, one provisional patent, more than 75 refereed journal publications, and more than 100 conference publications in this area. Akinci has also served as PI or co-PI for more than $16 million in research grants from state and federal agencies, as well as from industry.

During her time as associate dean for research, Akinci led the development of the college’s strategic research vision. Under her leadership, the Engineering Research Accelerator was created to provide a college-wide set of services for research incubation, acceleration, and support. She also helped create the moonshot initiative, funding faculty to create capabilities within the college that can lead to large, innovative, externally funded projects, and fostering interdisciplinary research in key areas. Over just four years, Akinci helped foster growth in the value of new research awards in the college by more than 65 percent, from $64 million in 2016 to $107 million in 2020.

Akinci is a member of the National Academy of Construction, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Engineering Educators, and American Association for Advancement of Science, and is a board member of the International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction and of the National Academies’ Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment. She is also co-founder and chief innovation officer of the start-up Lean-FM The company develops and demonstrates the feasibility of using big data analytics and machine learning to transform facilities operations and maintenance.

JARAMILLO ON TRANSPORTATION FOR IPCC REPORT

In the U.S., the transportation sector represents the largest source of green house gas emissions (GHG).  There are many different segments in our modern transportation systems, and they face different challenges in mitigating GHG emissions. Assessment reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gathers scientists from across the globe to assess available in formation about climate change based on published research. Paulina Jaramillo served as a coordinating lead author for the transportation chapter of the report released from Working Group III, part of the sixth climate assessment report.

The IPCC has existed for over 30 years to provide its 195 member-coun tries with scientific information to inform climate policy development. The assessment from Working Group III was prepared by 239 experts from around the world and provides a com prehensive summary of opportunities for mitigating the greenhouse gas emis sions that contribute to climate change.

As one of three coordinating lead authors for Chapter 10, Transportation, Jaramillo, a professor of and public policy fellow experts in evaluating the state of knowledge about mitigation options for the sector.

Strategies that reduce demand for transport services could support mitiga tion efforts for the sector, but low-car bon technologies are also needed. Many authorities are already taking action with light-duty vehicles, personal vehi cles, and public transportation systems by pushing for vehicle electrification.

Jaramillo believes that this is important and will only continue growing as our primary means for reducing emissions from these sources.

Other segments of transportation may require different low-carbon fuels. For example, low carbon hydrogen could drive emission reductions from heavy-duty and long-distance transport.

Finally, Jaramillo highlights that reducing emissions from shipping and

chemistry and carbon dioxide removal. Researchers like Shawn Litster, professor of mechanical engineering, are advanc ing the electrochemistry of producing hydrogen and its use in transportation and stationary power with fuel cells.

While Jaramillo and her co-authors fo cused on emissions from transportation, she noted that transportation overlaps with many other domains, as reflected in the full summary for policymakers. “Our chapter includes several cross-cutting boxes. For instance, there’s a cross-cutting box about urban form and how changes in urban form would affect transporta tion.” Jaramillo said. “Similarly, low-carbon power generation and hydrogen produc tion fall within the scope of the energy chapter, chapter 6, which highlights the interdependencies of the systems.”

BLANTON ACCEPTS NSBE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN ACADEMIA AWARD

The National Society of Black Engi neers (NSBE) hosted its 48th annual convention in late March in Anaheim, California. As part of the event, Shawn Blanton, professor of electrical and computer engineering, received the 2022 NSBE Golden Torch Award for Life time Achievement in Academia during a black-tie ceremony on March 26.

NSBE’s Golden Torch Awards honor individuals, companies, and institutions that have produced a consistent body of highly distinguished work, served as role models for others, and advanced opportunities for African Americans within the STEM industry. The festive, high-profile event recognizes accom plishments that have enriched both en gineers and the world with intelligence, talent, and vision.

Blanton is a long-time NSBE advocate and decorated researcher in his field. He is the founder and director of the Advanced Chip Test Laboratory (ACTL), which focuses on developing and im plementing design methodologies and

Over 30 CMU students joined faculty and staff at the 2022 NSBE annual convention in Anaheim, California.

associated data-mining techniques for improving the fabrication, operation, security, and testing of integrated sys tems. His work has yielded more than 200 publications and patents.

In 2006 Blanton spearheaded planning efforts for the NSBE national convention in Pittsburgh and accept ed an Emerald Award for outstanding leadership in recruiting and mentoring minorities for advanced degrees in sci ence and technology. He has served in many key roles at Carnegie Mellon Uni

versity, including interim vice provost for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and, within the College of Engineering, acting associate dean for diversity and inclu sion and chair of the diversity, inclusion, and outreach committee.

“I am very honored to receive this award, but none of the accomplishments accredited to me would have been possi ble without the backing of the university in general, and the College of Engineer ing in particular,” said Blanton, as part of his award acceptance remarks.

Shawn Blanton (center) is joined, from left, by Bill Sanders, dean of the College of Engineering, M. Shernell Smith, executive director of the Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion, Alaine Allen, associate dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the College of Engineering, and Carnegie Mellon Provost James H. Garrett, Jr. to celebrate his 2022 NSBE Golden Torch Award.

CARNEGIE

WOMEN SHIFT THE DYNAMIC IN MATERIALS SCIENCE LEADERSHIP

With less than 30% of researchers in sci ence being female, it is no surprise that women in the field must overcome their own unique set of challenges. Elizabeth Dickey, materials science and engineer ing (MSE) department head, alumnae Carolyn Duran (MSE ’92), and Ellen Cer reta (MSE  ’01) are breaking down bar riers, increasing female representation in materials, and working to impact and encourage future generations through their executive roles in professional societies for scientists and engineers.

Carolyn Duran was introduced to materials science at Carnegie Mellon University the summer before her first year where her work with MSE Professor Alan Cramb would become so influential that she would stay within his research group for the next four years and later carry the passion for MSE and education into her career. Duran was named the

2022 president of the Materials Re search Society and has made it her goal to increase engagement between the society and industry.

“During my time at CMU, the gradu ate students took me under their wing in a very positive way,” she remem bered.  “At the time I thought, ‘Wow, I want to be just like them.’ This field is relatively small, and I’ve been able to stay connected with scientists from different parts of my life and continue to find sources of inspiration.”

Over the last 20 years, Duran has served in various positions at Intel Cor poration, and is currently transitioning back into a role focused on materials science in the Components Research organization, which focuses on semicon ductor research to advance Moore’s Law.

“When you have a vision of where you want to go, you have to come to the

Ellen Cerreta

realization that your steps might not be straight, and that’s okay. You can keep your vision, and step sideways or back wards and still end up where you want to go,” Duran advises.

Ellen Cerreta was named president of The Minerals, Metals, & Materials Society (TMS) in April 2021. She has been involved with TMS since early in her career where she met her postdoc mentor and was connected with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she still works today as a division lead er. Cerreta’s research focuses on the relationship between microstructure and dynamic material properties and provides innovative and agile materials

ARYAKA BECOMES STRATEGIC PARTNER

Aryaka, a company dedicated to pioneering solutions for wide-area networks, has announced a strategic partnership with Carnegie Mellon University CyLab. The company hopes the partnership will help identify, prioritize, and develop threat mitigation techniques that will then be made available as open source to help enterprises and security vendors to better defend against cyberattacks.

“We share the same vision as CyLab,” says Renuka Nadkar ni, chief product officer at Aryaka. “That vision is the future of enterprise security to innovate and make available sophisticat ed security techniques to cope with the ever-evolving threat landscape.”

Nadkarni says that unlike tech giants, large banks, and federal entities who have large pools of security resources, most common enterprises lack the skill set and sophistication

science and technology solutions for national security missions.

“I could be the poster child for why joining a professional society is benefi cial,” Cerreta laughed. “Not only is it a great networking opportunity to find a job, but it’s also a place where you can have a really honest look at your work and make sure that you’re going in the right direction by leveraging all the know-how within the profession.”

Cerreta is passionate about making TMS a society that promotes equity and inclusion. Throughout her ca reer, it has been helpful for her to see women at all levels of leadership succeed so that as she found her own

path, she could be guided by theirs. “I feel strongly that we’re going to be able to solve the really tough challeng es that are in front of the materials community, but these are all-hands-on deck-problems. There can’t be parts of the profession that don’t feel like they have a seat at the table.”

Elizabeth Dickey thanks her mentors, particularly her parents, for enabling her to claim her seat at the engineering table.

“They always gave me the chance to fail,” Dickey explained. “Failure is such an important part of learning and my parents never stopped encouraging me to try again. It made me feel capable to take chances in my career and has led me to where I am today.”

Dickey is the 2021-2022 president of The American Ceramic Society and wants to focus her term on increasing membership and membership engage ment. During her career, she benefitted from a network of academic and indus try partners, and she wants to continue to strengthen the connection of these two groups to play a role in mentoring students and young professionals.

“I’d encourage all students interested in engineering to consider materials sci

ence. Our work spans many industries, and as new materials are developed, new jobs are created. We really make our own opportunities,” said Dickey.

As more and more women, like Elizabeth Dickey, Carolyn Duran, and Ellen Cerreta, become leaders in science and engineering, the representation dynamic will shift, and perhaps more people will think the same way as Du ran’s son.

“Many years ago,” she says, “I remem ber saying to him, ‘Maybe you’ll become an engineer.’ And without hesitation he responded, ‘But, girls do that.’”

Girls do, do that, and the world is advancing every day because of it.

to defend against the emerging attacks and immediate risks to their business via attacks such as ransomware.

Aryaka was attracted to a CyLab partnership because of CMU’s leadership in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as its breadth of disciplines like humanities, psychology, and policy which enables its researchers to look at problems not just from the technology point of view, but holistically as a bigger problem to address attacker motiva tions and intent, according to Nadkarni.

“Aryaka believes that we need to topple our approach to security,” says Nadkarni. “In the past, all the decisions on secu rity processing assumed that applications live in datacenters and users live in the offices. This is far from true in the new world of digital transformation where applications are any where, and users can access them from any place. This means we need to re-evaluate security in an application-centric way vs. a network.”

The company’s belief in rethinking security is perfectly in line with their decision to be a founding sponsor of the Future

Enterprise Security Initiative (FutureEnterprise@CyLab), which has a mission of rethinking security across enterprise ecosys tems through innovations in artificial intelligence, computer science, engineering, and human factors research.

“We are thrilled to have Aryaka on board as a founding sponsor of our initiative,” says CyLab’s Lujo Bauer, a professor in the Institute for Software Research and the electrical and computer engineering (ECE) department and a co-director of the initiative.

Bauer will co-direct FutureEnterprise@CyLab along with Vyas Sekar, a professor of ECE.

“Aryaka decided to join FutureEnterprise@CyLab because of the shared vision of democratizing sophisticated security techniques and making security controls easy to configure and manage by integrating them,” says Nadkarni.

To learn more about partnering with CMU CyLab and the Future Enterprise Security initiative, contact Michael Lisanti, di rector of partnerships. His email is mlisanti@andrew.cmu.edu.

CARNEGIE

Elizabeth Dickey Carolyn Duran

STUDENTS / THE DECIDING FACTOR W

hen Gabe Blanco was applying to colleges, he knew he wanted to pursue some kind of engineering based on his positive experiences in math and science courses. By the end of his applica tion process, Blanco had a final list of around seven schools to choose from. All of them ranked highly in engineering programs, so he looked to other factors to make his choice.

One factor in the back of his mind was his rekindled passion for juggling, a skill he had learned in grade school and picked back up in high school on a whim. Blanco explained that, “when you’re juggling, the whole goal is not to think,” which can be a welcome break from academic rigor. During his search for the perfect college, he noticed that

Carnegie Mellon University has a jug gling community called Masters of Flying Objects. Now a junior studying mechan ical engineering and engineering public policy, he has been an active member since he was a first-year student.

But for Blanco the biggest factor when deciding where to attend college was cost—not just the final amount loaned out and paid, but also the value offered by the institution. Blanco is one of three triplets, all of whom were applying to attend college at the same time, which could put a huge financial weight on the family’s shoulders. So when he was invited to join a program aimed at high-achieving students who come from limited resources, he knew his decision was made.

The Tartan Scholars Program finds students like Blanco by consulting with staff in admissions and financial aid. They identify applicants from limited-re source backgrounds, which can have various definitions: the family is in a low socio-economic bracket, the high school does not offer AP or advanced courses, they live in a rural or urban area where resources are scarce or spread too thin, they are the first individual in their family to attend college, or other factors. Once identified, the student gets an invitation to join Tartan Scholars in their first year.

“Tartan Scholars is a retention pro gram at the heart of it,” explains Bran den Ballard, the program manager for the Tartan Scholars Program. An assess ment of student performance keyed in on Pell-eligible students at CMU and dis covered that students from limited-re source backgrounds typically earned a full letter grade lower than peers from more affluent backgrounds and were graduating at rates 10-15% lower after six years. Those who initiated the Tartan Scholars Program, including Ballard, asked “What is causing this to happen?

Because, clearly, all these students got here based off their own merit. What is it about our ecosystem that is causing this discrepancy that we’re seeing? What supports should we be providing to

students that we currently aren’t?”

The program began in August 2019 as a response to this data. In the pro gram, students are encouraged to see themselves as belonging at CMU, to develop a growth mindset to help them overcome obstacles, and to use their voices and experiences to affect their campus environment via self-authorship and leadership.

In Blanco’s own words, the Tartan Scholars Program is “focused toward people in a lower socioeconomic class, to connect us to resources and op portunities that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.” Students can receive help to secure resources such as laptops, calculators, medications, and travel assistance.

“The program also connected us to each other, which was kind of the most important thing,” says Blanco. Taking foundational classes as a group, receiv ing mentorship from faculty and staff, eating meals together, and socializing all give the Tartan Scholars a network of peers that they can turn to if they have problems students often face.

“There are people who clearly see that it’s working;,” says Ballard. “When the Posner Family Foundation gave their significant gift to the university, $10 mil lion came to my program, which placed Tartan Scholars into perpetuity. And so, clearly people believe that the program’s working, and I believe it is as well.”

Gabe Blanco (right) practices his juggling with another student on The Cut.

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE

LEARNING TRICKS OF THE TRADE FROM CHAMPION CHIP GANASSI

Pittsburgh native Chip Ganassi had a newborn daughter around the same time he started working with Carnegie Mellon University’s then fledgling auto motive racing team.

The former racecar driver and owner of Chip Ganassi Racing said he didn’t know much at the time about CMU Racing nor the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), which holds competi tions for collegiate teams like CMU’s.

Encouraged by a CMU administra tor, he became involved with the team, answering questions, offering tips, and serving as a mentor. Team members—to his surprise—named the car they built after his then newborn daughter, Tessa.

“I felt very honored that they wanted to do that,” he said, adding that the gesture impacted both him and the team. Ganassi compared it to his own

childhood experience of meeting Mario Andretti, alongside whom Ganassi raced roughly a decade later in the Indianapolis 500.

“I don’t know that meeting him that day when I was 12 years old ... was a positive in getting me to the Indianapo lis 500, but I know one thing: It wasn’t a negative,” Ganassi said. “So, you never know what a little thing like naming a car could mean for a team or my daugh ter, but that was a very nice accolade that I’m very proud of.”

Now about 25 years later, CMU Rac ing has several impressive wins under its belt and a strong relationship with Ganassi. He visited the team on campus earlier this year and flew six of its mem bers to Indianapolis to tour Ganassi Racing headquarters in late 2021.

The CMU Racing team, consisting

largely of undergraduates from the College of Engineering, won first place in the electric vehicle category at the 2022 Formula Hybrid competition hosted by Dartmouth, where it also netted awards for “excellence in project management” and “engineering the future.” Each year, its members collaborate to design, man ufacture, and race a new Formula-style electric race car.

“To see how that team has grown to the performance level they’re at today is … very exciting for me,” Ganassi said, “I like to think I had a little something to do with that at the start that sparked them to have the performance they have today.”

Mason Sanfilippo, one of the stu dents Ganassi flew to Indianapolis, was a senior in mechanical engineering and president of CMU Racing during the 2021-22 academic year. He and his teammates gave Ganassi a tour of their workshop in late February, eagerly answering his questions and grabbing prototypes and parts to show him.

BENEFITS OF CMU RACING

Participating in CMU Racing allows stu dents to learn a process from beginning to end, Ganassi said, from conceiving an idea to designing and building a car to racing it and eventually racing well enough to win championships.

“For me, I found racing to be a micro cosm of life, if you will. It has all the ups and downs of life, maybe compacted into a weekend, or compacted into a season, or compacted into a year,” he said, adding that racing teaches the value of every part, every job, and every team member.

Ganassi said members of a racing team have as much to learn from their wins as their losses. Chip Ganassi Rac ing, which fields teams in IndyCar, the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, and the Extreme E off-road series, has

won 20 championships and more than 225 races.

“Chip’s a big fan of winning and continuing to push yourself even when you are the leader in your own division,” Sanfilippo said.

But Ganassi didn’t always know he’d be able to have a career in motorsports. The lifelong Pittsburgher said he’s been racing “one thing or another”—from go-carts, snowmobiles, and dirt bikes to cars—since he was five years old. He al ways dreamed of racing as a career but relegated the idea to wishful thinking until his early 20s.

“It was mere happenstance and just being in the right place at the right time,” Ganassi said. “I think if there’s one thing I could say to young people today, it would be: ‘Don’t ever count yourself out, because you have to put yourself in a position for luck to strike you.”

Though his racing career was cut short by a crash, he won his first auto race at age 18 and competed in the Indy 500 five times, with a best finish of eighth in 1983. That year, he was voted the Most Improved Driver and took ninth position in the Championship Auto Racing Teams standings.

He was inducted into the Motor sports Hall of Fame of America in 2016 and received an honorary Doctor of Science and Technology degree from CMU in 2011.

“It’s really important to the team to make these connections because it gives students the experience of being with an industry leader,” Sanfilippo said.

FUTURE OF THE INDUSTRY

Ganassi has shared with CMU Racing his expectations for the future of the automotive industry and the field of racing, noting how things have changed since his generation was young: He grew up with mostly one option—the internal combustion engine—whereas young people today will have many options as they continue to develop electric, natural gas, and multiple types of hybrid engines.

With progress being made in pro pulsion technology and autonomous vehicles, Ganassi said it’s “a very, very interesting time in the transportation business.” In five or 10 years, “a lot’s going to be the same, and a lot’s going to be different,” he added.

One thing Ganassi hopes CMU stu dents learn from him is that many peo ple still enjoy the simple act of driving a car, despite many in the auto industry shifting to focus on self-driving cars.

“There’s so much more to the industry that doesn’t get talked about, and I think there’s a wide open area of opportunity outside of going from Point A to Point B when it comes to vehicles. I think that’s important to point out to students.”

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE

CMU Racing members examining a battery pack.

ENGINEERING ART

Sophie Paul is among the hundreds of students who graduated from the College of Engineering this spring. In addition to earning a bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering, she was one of the first students to also have completed the addi tional major in Engineering and Arts

The St. Louis, Missouri native has long been into art. She’s been making pottery for 10 years. So, when a professor in a first-year sculpture course told her about the additional major, she decided to pursue it.

“I was already pretty creative, and the Engineering and Arts additional major seemed like a great way to fill my general education requirements,” said Paul.

As a materials science and engineering major, she found many ways to incorporate the science with the art. In her capstone course, she created 3D printed pop-up textiles for modular interlocking wearable fashion.

She had to study materials research papers, as well as art blogs, to develop the novel approach she came up with: 3D printing filament onto stretch jersey fabric. The process involved a lot of trial and error. She had to study and test the properties of the filaments to prevent warping and get the fabrics to pop up in just the right way.

“It’s pretty frustrating when it doesn’t work. There’s a lot of trouble-shooting working with ma terials. But it’s so rewarding when you finally get it right,” said Paul.

Sophia Paul’s 3D printed pop-up textiles for modular interlocking wearable fashion was displayed at the All for Love: CMU Senior Art 2022 exhibit, where visitors were invited to “please touch” the modular fabric creations.

Such hands-on experimentation not only deepened her understanding of the kirigami, or self-folding, cut origami craft she was learning, but the process was also very relevant to learning the chemistry and geometry used in materi als science.

Findings from her honors thesis will be submitted at an upcoming human computer interaction conference. She applied kirigami methods of cutting and folding paper to design shutters that use sensors to automatically open and retract efficiently and conserve energy. She completed the research under the direction of Lining Yao in the Morphing Matter lab

The intersection of disciplines, innova tion, and curiosity is exactly the type of learning and discovery the BXA Intercol lege Degree programs sought to create when it was developed in 2018. The BXA programs also combine arts curriculum with humanities, science, and comput er science. Students, like Paul, whose primary major is in engineering, choose their arts concentration from the College of Fine Arts’ Schools of Architecture, Art, Drama, or Music.

Paul says that she relied upon the ad ditional support she got from academic advisors who served as liaisons between CFA and engineering. In addition to her primary advisor in the College of

Engineering, she had a CFA academic advisor to guide her focus in the arts.

“They really helped me with the scheduling challenges. Other than two art history courses, all of my other arts requirements were three-hour long studio courses that were sometimes hard to coordinate with my engineering courses,” explained Paul.

She says the extra effort to pursue the additional major was a good invest ment that will serve her well in her new pursuit of a mechanical engineering Ph.D. in soft materials at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

CARNEGIE

Dimensional fabric from 3D printing process.

ALUMNI / DINOSAURS FOUND WHERE ART AND TECHNOLOGY INTERSECT

Memorable stories and acting give life to great movies, but many of our favorite films are en shrined in cinema history thanks to the people be hind the screen, like John Schlag (ECE, ’83). An engineer and artist, Schlag created reality-defying graphics for some of the most famous movies of our time, includ ing Jurassic Park and Terminator 2

When Schlag attended Carnegie Mellon, his first engineering job was in the Robotics Institute, where he connected a TV camera to a computer. He digitized frames and wrote software, and in essence, he taught the computer to make sense of what it was seeing. “This is computer vision. In doing this in reverse, to check my work, I became entranced with computer graphics,” he says.

John Schlag was CG Supervisor, and an extra, for Star Trek Generations. John (left) is playing ping-pong while waiting for shooting to start.

After graduation, Schlag lived on Long Island for several years, working for NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, one of the preeminent computer graphics facilities of its time. Around that time, Lucasfilm CG created graphics for Young Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Drawn by that work, I left NYIT and headed west,” says Schlag.

His first job in California was with a small graphics house named Island Graphics. Previously, he turned down a position with Pacific Data Images (now part of DreamWorks), as he intended to only accept short-term jobs. In fact, when interviewing with Island Graphics, they told him, “Short term, long term, no problem, we’re just going to put you on the payroll and see how long you stay.”

“It was a vote of confidence in me, and instead of being there two or three months, I stayed 11 months. Island Graphics was a great place to do concept development and prototyping.”

Moving on, he then led a team at MicroMind that created 3-D animation software. (The company became MicroMedia and was bought by Adobe.) After three years, he went to Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), where he earned a number of accolades. He was hired to work on Terminator 2, but he was also instrumental in making Death Becomes Her, Jurassic Park, and Forrest Gump. All four were Oscar winners for visual effects.

“I worked my hindquarters off to help get each of those into theaters, and it was quite an amazing ride,” he says, as he describes working on those technically innovative films. Take Jurassic Park, for example. There aren’t many

people who can claim that they created dinosaurs. “You have this living, halting, breathing, moving thing,” Schlag says, “How do you put texture on the skin?”

According to Schlag, there weren’t many options when he worked on the film. Luckily, new technology was on the horizon. Pat Hanrahan and Paul Haeberli had written a paper for SIGGRAPH, which is the Association for Computing Machinery’s yearly conference on computer graphics. Their paper put forth the idea that a graphics model could be painted on in three dimensions. Schlag’s job was to figure out how to make this happen—and he did!

Schlag and three colleagues created Viewpaint. It allowed an artist to see 3D models, dinosaurs in this case, and spin them around, paint them, press a button, and the applied paint creates textures on the creatures. The program won them the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences, Scientific and Engineering Award, of which there are three grades. The first level is a certificate, the second level is the statuette (which Schlag and his team received), and the third level is an Oscar.

“It was a team effort,” he said. “There’s a lesson for students: most of the things you’re going to be involved in will be team efforts. If you interview for

a job, you need to be specific about your contributions to group projects.”

While the movie business stoked Schlag’s creativity, it was not family friendly. Schlag’s daughter Indira was born between Death Becomes Her and Jurassic Park. When she turned two, Schlag left ILM, because his demanding work didn’t allow him much time to spend with his family. He opened a graphics consulting practice out of his home.

Eventually, Schlag strayed from the visual effects industry to pursue the “more civilized and remunerative” world of high tech. He worked with Nvidia for a couple of years, Sony for four years in their visual effects office, Adobe for three years in their research division, and Google for four years.

Today, Schlag is pursuing his next career as a screenwriter. “I’m from the film world. I am interested in stories— how good stories are crafted, how they’re told,” says Schlag. He’s finished his fourth screenplay and is evaluating the indie filmmaking model.

“Squeezing blood from the stone of the arts over one’s entire career is very, very difficult. I’m an artist who happens to be reasonably good at technology, and I’ve been able to make a living off it.

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE

TURNING WASTE TO WELLNESS

Family get-togethers often center around sharing a meal. Like many, eating with one another felt like a bonding opportunity for  Michelle Ruiz  and her family, but a few years ago, something changed.

“Family dinners became stressful. My mom was pre-diabetic, my broth er-in-law just had surgery and my husband was dealing with inflamma tion, so everyone’s dietary needs were changing,” said Ruiz. “They all needed low-inflammatory foods, and I started to realize how difficult it was to find and prepare healthy options that didn’t make us feel like we were on a restric tive diet.”

With a BS in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon and 10-plus years of experience working for ExxonMobil, Ruiz began contemplating the proper ties of wasted side streams from the food industry and fungi, and the differ ent ways she could leverage them to create healthy and sustainable food.

“When people think about food that is wasted during manufacturing, they think of solid waste, like peels or “ugly” fruit, but there is a source of food waste that is unknown to most, water. Food processors are the third-largest gener ators of wastewater in the world, and a good portion is simply sugar water, which is safe to eat.”

Chemical engineering alumna and co-founder of Hyfé Foods, Michelle Ruiz, works on prototypes at her lab in Chicago. Source: Hyfé Foods

Ruiz explained that when this sugary water gets sent to the wastewater treatment plant, it is cleaned through a biological process, where bacteria and fungi consume contaminants dissolved in the water. The result is clean water and a large quantity of biomass. While this is a seemingly natural process, companies must discard the biomass to maintain hydraulic stability within their water treatment plants, resulting in tons of organic waste being sent to landfills,

Hyfé controls its fermentation process to grow mushroom roots in the form of spheres. The roots are then ground into flour, which can be made into pasta and tortillas. The foods shown here are made with unused sugary water from a brewery that would have otherwise been dumped down the drain. Fungi is used to extract nutrients from the water, cleaning it as it grows.

Source: Hyfé Foods

eventually producing large amounts of methane gas.

“I was bothered by the inefficiency of the wastewater processes,” said Ruiz. “At CMU, we learned about efficiency and optimization, and I kept thinking there has to be a better way to do this.”

“Then I had my ah-ha moment. Why don’t we take those sugar water side streams from the food industry, clean that water with an edible source of fungi, like a portabella mushroom, and make low-carb, high-protein foods?”

Ruiz began growing the root net work of mushrooms in fermentation tanks, using these sugary side streams as an input.

“The nutritional properties of the root network of fungi are extremely healthy; there are zero refined carbs, high fiber, they have plenty of protein and don’t need to be processed. If you put them in a bioreactor, you can control every aspect of their material properties and growth rate.”

With this idea, Ruiz decided to start her own business, and Hyfé Foods was born.

Since the Chicago-based compa ny’s inception, Ruiz has brought on co-founder Andrea Schoen, who has over 10 years of experience in biotech, innovation and sustainability, most recently with carbon recycling compa ny, LanzaTech. Schoen was part of the

startup responsible for the world’s first commercial-scale gas fermentation plant and the spinoff of a sustainable aviation fuel company.

While Ruiz and Schoen have many ideas for foods to create using this method, Hyfé will first develop flour and protein powders that will help food brands capitalize on rising consumer demand for better-for-you, better-forthe-planet ingredients.

“For every pound of flour we create, we’ll prevent five pounds of carbon dioxide equivalents from being generat ed. It’s a food production platform that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by rerouting streams that currently end up

in landfills,” said Ruiz.

In the future, the technology could lead them into the materials or oil in dustries as the root network of mush rooms can be used to create a variety of sustainable products. However, for now, Ruiz says Hyfé will continue to focus on what drove her to start the business in the first place.

“You have to attach your vision and mission to something that will make a personal difference for you and maybe even make you emotional thinking about it. For now, that’s healthier and more sustainable food.”

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE

TEACHER MWATIMA, LEARNER MWATIMA

As a member of the CMU-Africa community, Ramadhan Juma Mwatima (MSIT 2017) has many different titles: alumnus, IT engineer, full stack developer, entrepreneur, and staff mem ber. But in the rural Tanzanian town where Mwatima grew up, he is known by only one name: teacher. ‘Even my mom calls me ‘Teacher Mwatima,’” he smiles.

An IT professional, Mwatima has a passion for the future of the field and is focused on using his skills to excite and empower young Africans to consider a career in technology. He is a founder of TEHAMA Academy, an organization that helps primary school students in Tanzania to gain IT and programming skills.

“One of the big challenges I had in school was that I didn’t have anyone to guide me on what it meant to pursue a career in engineering. So, I want to help kids know what they can do in the future and how they can choose their career path.”

Mwatima’s inspiration for TEHAMA Academy came from one of Carnegie Mellon University’s founders, Andrew Carne gie. After reading a book about the history of Carnegie Mellon, Mwatima was struck by Carnegie’s philanthropy and his ambitious goals to establish educational opportunities where few existed.

“I thought to myself, ‘Okay, so this means that even I can make a difference. I can do something to help the kids in my hometown,’” says Mwatima.

Mwatima started TEHAMA Academy in 2019 with just one class of 10 students. Now, the organization has graduated several cohorts and has worked with 120 students. There is no cost for students to participate in the program. Mwatima spends his free time creating teaching modules and remotely

working with the academy’s three instructors. He hopes to grow the academy and find sponsors and partners who share his vision.

As a student, Mwatima always enjoyed science and mathe matics. His technical curiosity steadily grew into an interest in engineering. His educational path took him from the Univer sity of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where he earned a BS in computer engineering and information technology, to the Master of Science in Information Technology (MSIT) degree program at CMU-Africa.

After graduation from CMU-Africa, he began working at his new alma mater, where he is the central point of contact for technical systems support to all users, primarily new appli cants and current students.

In the next few years, he plans to continue advancing his skills in different technical areas. He also hopes to manage people in the future, which would allow him to be a teacher and mentor in a whole new way.

“CMU gave me the foundation to tackle anything,” says Mwatima. “It taught me that we need to continue to be learn ers and be ready for opportunities that arise.”

Carnegie Mellon in the 1960’s

FELLOWSHIPS HELP SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE THE BURDEN OF STUDENT DEBT.

Maggie has generously created two fellowships in the College of Engineering to support graduate students in financial need. Her philanthropy is inspired by her late husband and proud electrical and computer engineering alumnus, Bob Lee Gregory (’60, ’61, ’64). The two met as undergraduate students. She’s working to endow her second fellowship to specifically help underrepresented students after seeing the incredible impact of her first. Since 2013, the Bob Lee Gregory Fellowship in Electrical and Computer Engineering has supported six students’ graduate education.

"When my husband graduated from Carnegie Mellon, there was one—count them—one woman getting her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering. We need more women in engineering."

–Maggie Gregory (MM ’61)

Learn how you can achieve your philanthropic vision by visiting engineering.cmu.edu/giving.

CARNEGIE

GIVING THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST STUDENTS ACCESS TO CARNEGIE MELLON’S UNIQUE EDUCATIONAL AND RESEARCH OFFERINGS.

First-year students gather to bowl, play games, and make new friends.