This story was published in partnership with The Moonshot Catalog. In the late 1960s, Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon posed the following thought exercise: Imagine you are an alien from Mars visiting a college on Earth, and you spend a day observing how professors teach their students. Simon argued that you would describe the process as "outrageous." "If we visited an organization responsible for designing, building and maintaining large bridges, we would expect to find employed there a number of trained and experienced professional engineers, thoroughly educated in mechanics and the other laws of nature that determine whether a bridge will stand or fall," he wrote in a 1967 issue of Education Record. "We find no one with a professional knowledge in the laws of learning, or the techniques for applying them," he wrote. Teaching at colleges is often done without any formal training. Mimicry of others who are equally untrained, instinct, and what feels right tend to provide the guidance. Reading back over a textbook or taking lecture notes with a highlighter at the ready is often done by students, for instance, but these practices have proven of limited merit, and in some cases even counterproductive in aiding recall. And while many educators believe that word problems in math class are tougher for students to grasp than ones with mathematical notation, research shows that the opposite is true.

In December 2019, Facebook launched the Towards On-Device AI request for proposals (RFP). The purpose of this RFP was to support the academic community in addressing fundamental challenges in this research area, to accelerate the transition toward a truly "smart" world where AI capabilities permeate all devices and sensors. "We've seen strong progress in moving AI workloads from the cloud to on-device. Running models locally has already helped drive new capabilities like speech assistants, night modes on cameras, and an entirely new class of intelligent devices like smartwatches and smart thermostats," says Vikas Chandra, Director of AI Research. "This is important to push further to preserve privacy, latency, and compute power, and to help create even more experiences that can be useful to us in everyday life."

Zeynep Temel, a robotics researcher who uses inspiration from nature to design novel means of motion and locomotion for tiny robots, has been named by the World Economic Forum to its Young Scientists Class of 2020. Temel, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute, and Stephanie Sydlik, an assistant professor of chemistry, are the latest Carnegie Mellon University faculty members to join the WEF's Young Scientists community. The distinction recognizes scientific rising stars under the age of 40 who are pursuing high-impact research. "I am very excited to be a part of the WEF Young Scientists community and incredibly honored to be representing CMU," Temel said. "It will be a great adventure to learn from amazing scientists and develop projects that will improve the state of the world.

A student team from Carnegie Mellon University is joining the upcoming season of Roborace, an international competition involving autonomous, electrically powered vehicles. CMU's Roborace team includes students and alumni from the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) and Robotics Institute, as well as the Information Networking Institute. It will be the first U.S. team to join Roborace and anticipates competing in a Roborace event later this year. "Having the opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects such as this is what attracted me to Carnegie Mellon," said Jimmy Herman, an ex-NFL athlete now enrolled in the LTI's Master of Computational Data Science (MCDS) program. "We are pushing to innovate and create technology with impact potential beyond the racing domain," he added.

There is a growing consensus that artificial intelligence ethics instruction is critical, and must extend beyond computer sciences courses. Ethics and technology have always been tightly interwoven, but as artificial intelligence (AI) marches forward and impacts society in new and novel ways, the stakes--and repercussions--are growing. "There is potential for (AI) to be used in ways that society disapproves of," observes David S. Touretzky, a research professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University. One idea that's gaining momentum is AI ethics instruction in schools. Groups such as AI4K12 and the MIT Media Lab have begun to study the issue and develop AI learning frameworks for K-12 students.

What do you picture when you think of a robot? That's the first question asked by "The Robot Doctor" -- a new series created by Carnegie Mellon University educators, RobotWits, the Pennsylvania Rural Robotics Initiative and WQED. Airing on PBS stations across Pennsylvania, the eight-episode program is geared toward high school students who may lack access to a computer during school closures, and who live in underresourced areas with limited STEM opportunities. "We're going to explore how robots solve the problems that allow them to be useful in the world. We'll do this with nothing more than the math concepts you may already know: geometry, trigonometry, basic algebra and a few concepts from physics," Jonathan Butzke says in the first episode.

The Association for Computing Machinery has announced that Carnegie Mellon University's Phillip Gibbons, professor in the Computer Science and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments, will receive the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award. Gibbons will share the award with Noga Alon of Princeton University and Tel Aviv University, Yossi Matias of Google and Tel Aviv University and Mario Szegedy of Rutgers University. The award recognizes them for their seminal work on the foundations of streaming algorithms and their application to large-scale analytics. In a series of papers published in the late 1990s, Gibbons and his colleagues pioneered a framework for algorithmic treatment of streaming massive datasets, the ACM said. Their algorithms remain the core approach for streaming big data and constitute an entire subarea of the field of algorithms.

The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation announced today that Maxwell Wang is one of the recipients of the 2020 Hertz Fellowship. Wang, a M.D./Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, is one of 16 researchers to receive the prestigious award, chosen from more than 800 applicants from 24 universities across the nation. Hertz Fellows receive up to five years of research funding, giving them the freedom to pursue innovative ideas. At CMU, Wang is studying machine learning and neuroscience, working with mentors Avniel Ghuman, Max G'Sell and Rob Kass. He is conducting research to understand how brain networks change during neuro-interventions, such as deep brain stimulation, and to link these changes to endpoints such as symptom improvement and adverse side-effect profiles.

Leqi Liu, a Ph.D. student in the School of Computer Science's Machine Learning Department, has been chosen as a 2020 Open Phil AI fellow. She is one of 10 students across the U.S. to receive a fellowship. The Open Phil AI Fellowship, organized by the Open Philanthropy Project, supports the research of a small group of promising machine learning researchers over five years, and fosters that community with a culture of trust, debate, excitement and intellectual excellence. Liu's research, advised by Assistant Professor Zachary Lipton, aims to develop learning systems that can infer human preferences from their behaviors and help humans achieve their goals. In particular, she is interested in bringing theory from social sciences into algorithmic design.

One expects a Green Beret medic to readily respond to calls for help, so it's not that surprising that Luke Sciulli packed his bags in early April and left Pittsburgh for New York City, an epicenter for the COVID-19 pandemic, to volunteer in a field hospital. Sciulli, a senior research analyst in the School of Computer Science's Auton Lab, explains his motivations more humbly: his house had burned down and he was living in a camping trailer. When he heard that former Special Forces medics and medical personnel were opening an ad hoc hospital in New York, he figured, why not? Whatever his motivation, Sciulli began work April 16 at the NewYork-Presbyterian Ryan F. Larkin Field Hospital, named for a Navy SEAL and medic who took his own life three years ago after suffering traumatic brain injury. Located in an indoor soccer stadium at Columbia University, the temporary hospital served as a step-down unit for COVID-19 patients, providing a place for the recovering patients to convalesce a few more days before heading home.