Jessica Hodgins is a professor of computer science and robotics in the School of Computer Science and also directs the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research laboratory in Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on computer graphics, animation and robotics with an emphasis on generating and analyzing human motion. She is the former vice president for research at Disney Research. Hodkins received her Ph.D. in computer science at CMU in 1989 and served as an associate professor and assistant dean in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology before joining the CMU faculty in 2000. She served as associate director of faculty in the Robotics Institute from 2005 to 2015.

The digital age, like the age of the printing press, has transformed our modes of social interaction -- our reading and writing habits and methods of communication and consumption. It is also disrupting long-standing institutions, threatening old hierarchies of knowledge and power. The benefits of this transformation are manifest. But the near universal availability of information also brings certain dangers. One is the prevalence of disinformation online, and the attendant challenge of discriminating between reliable and unreliable information.

Artificial intelligence caught Shashank Ojha's imagination while he was a student at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia. He took the few AI courses the school offered and soon set his sights on attending Carnegie Mellon University. "I knew that CMU was the place to be for AI," he explained. His plan when he entered CMU in 2016 was to pursue a bachelor's degree in computer science, with minors in machine learning and robotics. What he hadn't counted on was the School of Computer Science's 2018 decision to launch the nation's first undergraduate AI degree program.

Carnegie Mellon University students who designed and built a small, boxy robot, called Iris, have achieved a major milestone: their robot passed its critical design review by NASA and is on track to land on the moon in the fall of 2021. "We are moving forward … we're going to the moon," a triumphant project manager, Raewyn Duvall, told Iris team members during a Zoom meeting following the review. Officials at NASA and Astrobotic Inc., whose Peregrine lander will deliver the robot to the lunar surface, performed the review. Duvall, a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, said the process resulted in a few small design revisions, which the team is now incorporating. The team will replace prototype parts with flight components this summer, as they test the robot to prove that it can withstand the trip to the moon without causing problems for Peregrine or other payloads aboard the lunar lander.

Since AI is a branch of Computer Science, I think we face the same issues regarding math as other areas of CS. On the one hand, mathematical concepts are foundational to CS. On the other hand, we want to make the material accessible to as broad a range of students as possible, including those with weak math backgrounds and those who are disinclined toward mathematical thinking but might still find other aspects of computer science attractive. Probability and statistics are two topics that are seen as increasingly important for K-12 students. In AI, they form the basis of probabilistic reasoning (part of our Big Idea #2).