“Cyber security involves more than small barriers, such as anti-virus software and knowing to delete spam,” said Wiam Younes, training and awareness coordinator with CMU’s Information Security Office, who presented the cross-state videoconference from PSC. “It requires a wall of defenses. Cyber-security education must be thorough to help students and teachers keep themselves safe from the wide range of threats and dangers online.”

“The K-12 community, understandably, is particularly sensitive to security threats and this session was very helpful in fostering safe Internet practices,” said Greg Palmer, executive director of MAGPI, which is part of the central Information Systems and Computing division at Penn.  “With a growing emphasis on incorporating Web sites and virtual tours into the curriculum, it’s important to have sessions like this, and videoconferencing allows the widest possible distribution without tapping into already strained budgets. We’re looking forward to collaborating with PSC and 3ROX to offer additional program sessions, the next being on February 26.”

Wendy Huntoon, PSC director of networking, helped to arrange the collaboration with MAGPI, an eastern Pennsylvania counterpart to 3ROX (Three Rivers Optical Exchange), a high-performance network hub for education and research in southwest-central Pennsylvania and West Virginia.  “This PSC and 3ROX collaboration with MAGPI,” said Huntoon, “leveraged their expertise in K-12 education with videoconferencing to deliver services in K-12 school districts. With SAFE-Net as a pilot program, we demonstrated that we can use video as a content delivery method, as MAGPI has done for years, as an effective way to reach educators within the school environment, with the convenience and economy of not having to gather at a central location.”

Through SAFE-Net, PSC presents workshops that train educators and provide materials for classroom learning — developed in collaboration with the CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) Program at CMU’s Software Engineering Institute. These materials address cyber threats, measures of protection, and questions of cyber ethics that arise as a result of social networking and other wide uses of the Internet.

Carnegie Mellon University today announced the beta release of Alice 3, the latest version of an innovative software environment designed to take something challenging — learning about computer programming — and make it as fun as creating an animated movie or a video game.

This new version, which Carnegie Mellon makes available as a free download at www.alice.org, includes animated characters and scenes donated by Electronic Arts (EA) from its bestselling PC game, The Sims2™. Like earlier Alice versions, Alice 3 allows novices to use a simple drag-and-drop interface to create 3D computer animations. But this latest version also includes an interface that allows advanced students to use a keyboard to create programs written in standard Java, the world’s most popular programming language. It also includes an export feature that helps users post their creations on YouTube.

Though still in the beta test stage, Alice 3 is suitable for use in classrooms for the 2009-10 academic year.

Alice is the brainchild of the late Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor who became famous for his life-affirming “Last Lecture,” an Internet video phenomenon that subsequently became a best-selling book. Pausch loved football almost as much as he loved teaching and considered Alice the educational equivalent of a “head fake,” the head movement football players use to misdirect an opponent. “The best way to teach somebody something is to have them think they’re learning something else,” he explained. With Alice, “the head fake is that they’re learning to program, but they just think they’re making movies and video games.”

The current version, Alice 2.2, has been downloaded millions of times. More than 15 percent of U.S. colleges and universities use Alice and an increasing number of middle and high schools are using the software to teach their students. To date, 10 textbooks have been written for Alice.

“Alice has the potential to draw young people into computer science who otherwise would never consider it a possible career path,” said Randal E. Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science. “It dispels the impression that computer programming is all about arcane notations and requires years of training before it becomes possible to create interesting results. Alice 3 will not only draw students in — especially with the Sims characters — but will also help them move on to more advanced programming.”

Pausch initiated work on Alice 3 in 2006 before being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He saw a rough version of it just before he died July 25, 2008. “To the extent that you can live on in something,” he said during his final lecture at Carnegie Mellon, “I will live on in Alice.”

Alice is an open-source, object-oriented system. Alice 2.2 uses a Java-like programming language, but the Alice Project team opted to give Alice 3 a full Java interface in response to feedback from educators. To accomplish this, lead developer Dennis Cosgrove, an HCII project scientist, took the Sims2 animation assets, which were written in a programming language called C, and rewrote them using Java code. Moreover, he developed a method to protect EA’s proprietary characters while preserving Alice’s open source status and the ability for students to manipulate those characters.

Users of Alice 3 will initially choose from hundreds of character objects and dozens of scenes from The Sims to populate the virtual worlds they create, with hundreds of motions and behaviors they can use to animate their characters. More animation choices will be added as Alice 3 is refined.

A Carnegie Mellon alumnus and member of the CIT faculty since 1986, Khosla has invested enormous energy in the success of Carnegie Mellon and its engineering college and has demonstrated his leadership in research and education initiatives both within the university and internationally. Khosla has been CIT dean since 2004.

“Pradeep Khosla has been an outstanding dean who has worked tirelessly to advance the college and its units. During the past five years the number and quality of undergraduate applications has risen to record highs,” said Mark S. Kamlet, Carnegie Mellon provost. “There has also been a 25 percent increase in the number of Ph.D. students in CIT, and an increase of more than 50 percent in the number of women and underrepresented minorities among the graduate student population.”

Under his leadership, CIT was recently ranked sixth in the nation for graduate programs and three of the college’s departments were ranked in the top 10 by U.S. News & World Report. CIT was also ranked sixth in the world by the 2008 London Times Higher Education Supplement. He was instrumental in developing a novel fellowship program that pays for the tuition of first-year Ph.D. students and has reduced the cost for Ph.D. students by 20 percent. He also spearheaded the initiative that brought $29 million into renovating and creating state-of-the-art labs in the Chemical Engineering Department.

• Message from Me— from the CREATE Lab at CMU—Is a communication system that allows children and parents to share daily experiences using new communication technologies. These include cell phones, the internet, and digital photography. ($15,000).
• Geocaching Curriculum—from Venture Outdoors—An innovative classroom atmosphere that trains teachers and child workers to operate GPS units. The hope is for more outdoor activities and real-life treasure hunts. ($7,330).
• Story Box Project—from SLB Radio Productions, Inc.—A classroom project that work with pre-kindergarten children at two Pittsburgh Public Schools to create interactive story telling. Story Box Project will allow students to tell original stories with electronic devices. The electronic devices will allow students’ narrative audio recordings and original artwork to play along with their personal story. ($7,600).
• Light Education—at the Mattress Factory—This project is yearlong that uses the museum’s James Turrell light installations to teach elementary school students the concept and properties of light with scientific inquiry and experimentation.  The museum will entice the kids to learn about science through the light show’s artistic expression. ($7,500).

Spark will offer three more funding cycles in 2009, investing a total of $200,000. These projects are in hope that they will transform our region into one of the best places to raise children with a great environment for kids to live, learn, and play.

For more information on Spark and their projects please visit www.spark.sproutfund.org.

Pinar Donmez of the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) and Yi Zhang of the Machine Learning Department (MLD) were cited in the Machine Learning and Statistics category, while Jaime Arguello of LTI and Polo Chau of MLD won recognition in the Search Technologies category.

No other university had as many winners in the program as Carnegie Mellon.

Each recipient receives $5,000 in unrestricted seed funding for their research, exclusive access to certain Yahoo! data sets and the opportunity to collaborate directly with Yahoo! scientists. This summer, they will attend a Yahoo! Graduate Student Summit where they can present and discuss their work with some of the top minds in academia and industry.

The Russian Academy of Science’s Sobolev Institute of Mathematics

Scott has made fundamental contributions to contemporary logic and is best known for his creation of domain theory, a branch of mathematics that is essential for analyzing advanced computer programming languages. His previous honors include the Association for Computing Machinery’s Turing Award in 1976 and the Royal Swedish Academy of Science’s Schock Prize in logic and philosophy in 1997, both considered Nobel-level awards.

Scott will receive the Sobolev Gold Medal at the Malt’sev Meeting, an international conference on algebra, mathematical logic and applications, Aug. 24–28 in Novosibirsk, Russia. Also receiving the Gold Medal this year is Igor R. Shafarevich, a Russian mathematician who was a dissident figure under the Soviet regime.

The Gold Medal was established in 2007 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics in Novosibirsk. Two medals are awarded each year — one to a Russian mathematician and one to a non-Russian. Part of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science, the institute includes about 500 researchers who carry on fundamental investigations in mathematics, mathematical physics and informatics.

Scott has taught at some of the world’s most prestigious universities, including Oxford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, Stanford University and the universities of Chicago, Amsterdam and Linz. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the British Academy. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton.

Carnegie Mellon University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), known for their leading-edge work in computer science and technology, are to establish collaborative labs with Disney in Pittsburgh and Zurich.

“Creating the next generation of sophisticated technologies requires long-term vision and collaboration with world-class innovators,” said Ed Catmull, president, Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, who made the announcement Monday at SIGGRAPH, the world’s largest computer graphics conference. “We are strengthening our commitment to R&D throughout Disney by establishing labs with Carnegie Mellon University and ETH Zurich,” he said.

The labs will connect Disney with renowned academic partners with world class science and technology talent. The labs will engage in R&D on computer animation, computational cinematography, autonomous interactive characters, robotics, data mining and user interfaces, among other initiatives. They will be located at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and ETH Zurich. Each lab represents a five-year commitment from Disney to fund a director and seven to eight principal investigators. Additional staff will include professors, academic interns, scientific consultants and collaborators.

Carnegie Mellon is home to some of the world’s leading researchers in computer science and engineering, entertainment technology and robotics, areas of particular interest to Disney.  Jessica Hodgins, professor of computer science and robotics and director of Disney Research, Pittsburgh, said one of the lab’s first projects will be developing methods for people to interact with autonomous characters, either virtual or robotic. “We’ll be looking for ways to sense what a person is doing or thinking so that the character can respond appropriately,” she said. “Whether the character is a robot or a virtual creation, the interaction issues are the same. We need to figure out what sensors to build and how to interpret and respond to human behavior.” 

ETH Zurich has a strong tradition of research in computational methods and computer systems. It is one of the most renowned locations for research in computer science, and as such, a strong partner for Disney. Professor Markus Gross, head of ETH Zurich’s Computer Graphics Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science, calls the collaboration with Disney “on the cusp of the cutting-edge.”

The Disney Research lab in Zurich will work with faculty members from the Department of Computer Science, specifically with Visual Computing and the Computer Graphics Laboratory, to conduct the highest level applied research in areas including computer animation, image synthesis, computational photography and artificial intelligence.

Joint Ph.D. projects and research contracts, as well as teaching services from senior Disney researchers, are part of the advantages and synergies to be drawn from the collaboration. Professor Markus Gross will head Disney Research in Zurich. 

The individual R&D programs at Disney Parks & Resorts, Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, Interactive Games, Disney‘s television and motion picture studios, and ImageMovers Digital and their existing university alliances with schools throughout the globe will continue. The Pittsburgh and Zurich labs will focus on areas of research that span multiple business units across the company.

Company: Carnegie Mellon University Web Site: www.cmu.edu Location: Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Description: Carnegie Mellon is a national research university of about 7,500 students and 3,000 faculty, research and administrative staff. Carnegie Technical School was founded in 1900 in Pittsburgh by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. The school was renamed Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912, when it became a degree-granting institution. In 1967, Carnegie Tech merged with the Mellon Institute to form Carnegie Mellon University. Read more.