As intractable problems accrue and grow, artificial intelligence is increasingly being called upon as part of the solution. Carnegie Mellon University AI researchers have stepped up to help surmount these obstacles where large data sets must be analyzed and patterns discovered to find answers. Last year, the National Science Foundation teamed up with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as well as corporate sponsors Accenture, Amazon, Google and Intel to provide $220 million in grants to create 11 new institutes specifically dedicated to AI research across a wide range of sectors. CMU's School of Computer Science and College of Engineering faculty will work with four of these new institutes: the AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture, the AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups, the AI Institute for Future Edge Networks and Distributed Intelligence, and the USDA-NIFA Institute for Agricultural AI for Transforming the Workforce and Decision Support. Learn more about these institutes and meet the researchers leading the work in our magazine, The Link.

As the countdown started, a boxy robot with four big wheels carrying a host of cameras, sensors, communication equipment, autonomy software and the computing power to make it all work together rolled down a ramp into a dark tunnel. It did not know where it was, what was ahead of it or where it was going. It was there to explore. Over the next hour, more robots followed: wheeled robots, drones and a dog-like quadruped. Team Explorer deployed eight robots for the final round of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Subterranean, or SubT, Challenge -- a three-year competition during which teams from around the world raced to develop robotic systems that could autonomously operate in underground environments like caves, mines or subway stations for search and rescue missions.

The Computer Science Department's new course focusing on issues of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion in computer science and society got its start when a group of graduate students decided to create the training they wished they had received. And after hundreds of hours of work by 15 Ph.D. students --pilot programs, countless conversations with faculty and students, data gathering, and developing and tweaking course material -- CS-JEDI: Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion is now a required part of the curriculum for incoming Ph.D. students in computer science. It's also being looked at as a model by both other departments in the School of Computer Science and universities elsewhere. The course was created and taught by Abhinav Adduri, Valerie Chen, Judeth Choi, Bailey Flanigan, Paul Göelz, Anson Kahng, Pallavi Koppol, Ananya Joshi, Tabitha Lee, Sara McAllister, Samantha Reig, Ziv Scully, Catalina Vajiac, Alex Wang and Josh Williams -- all doctoral candidates in SCS who represent nearly every department in the school. The team received Carnegie Mellon University's 2022 Graduate Student Service Award and will be honored during the Celebration of Education Award Ceremony on Thursday, April 28.

Alex Waibel, a professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute, has been elected a fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). The ISCA recognized Waibel for his pioneering contributions in multilingual and multimodal spoken language processing and translation. Waibel, also faculty at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, has worked on speech and machine translation for decades, developing systems that now can translate speech in real time. Waibel demonstrated the first speech translation systems in the 1990s and 2000s. By 2020, he had developed a system that outperformed humans in recognizing conversational speech on a public benchmark.

Howie Choset is a Professor of Robotics where he serves as the co-director, along with Matt Travers, of the Biorobotics Lab. Choset's research program has made contributions to strategically significant problems in surgery, manufacturing, on-orbit maintenance, recycling and search and rescue. His work is most famous for its snake robots and other biologically inspired systems and recently his group has been contributing to robotic modularity, multi-agent planning, information-based search, and skill learning. Currently, Choset's projects include: medical support in the field, expeditionary robotics, on-orbit maintenance and construction of structures in space, rapidly carrying heavy objects up several flights of stairs, recycling of E-waste, food preparation, "edge"-sensing, and aerospace painting. Choset has led multi-PI projects centered on manufacturing: (1) automating the programming of robots for auto-body painting; (2) the development of mobile manipulators for agile and flexible fixture-free manufacturing of large structures in aerospace, and (3) the creation of a data-robot ecosystem for rapid manufacturing in the commercial electronics industry.

When Henny Admoni tells people she's a roboticist who primarily studies humans, she gets strange looks. "It might seem a little weird," Admoni says, "but the goal of my research is to understand how to make robots good for people." Admoni leads the Human and Robot Partners Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, where, along with a team of researchers, she studies the ways robots and AI can improve people's lives. The lab has worked on robotic arms that assist people in eating food and preparing meals; they've observed robots that encourage artists to think outside the box, and they've looked at how robots can help search and rescue teams collaborate more effectively. With a library of published papers, awards, and international speaking engagements under her belt, one might think that, for Admoni, robotics has been a lifelong passion.

It's two weeks until the competition, and 17-year-old Ella Maier is ecstatic her robot can finally do a pull-up. "Oh, that's so exciting," the Girls of Steel member said, as her robot latched on to a bar at the team's practice facility and hoisted itself to the second rung. "I'm in charge of that subsystem, and I'm really pleased it works. There's always a fear that it might not perform. There are no guarantees on this stuff, ever."

Four Carnegie Mellon University researchers in the School of Computer Science recently received Faculty Early Career Development Program awards from the National Science Foundation. The nearly $2.5 million will further research in deep learning, the safety of robots and autonomous systems, software engineering, and machine learning for healthcare. The NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program, commonly known as CAREER awards, is the foundation's most prestigious for young faculty members. Changliu Liu, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute, was awarded nearly $745,000 for research to improve the safety of autonomous systems operating closely with humans. The work will develop a new algorithmic framework to assure the safety of robotic systems that optimizes performance when safety can be managed, anticipates and compensates for inevitable failures when it cannot, and learns from past mistakes.

Hinton's lecture on fast weights explored the interesting computational properties that can be implemented by adding an overlay of weights that adapt and decay rapidly. These weights, both fast and slow, allow neural networks to more closely mimic properties of the brain, where neural activities change rapidly but the connections between neurons change slowly. His talk incorporated research he undertook at CMU in the 1980s and concluded with the limitations of current hardware that does not store weights in memory.

Researchers sorted through 38 million tweets from more than 7 million users to better understand how climate change disinformation forms and spreads. Meeting a deaf woman while volunteering at a homeless shelter inspired a student to advocate for including sign language in language technology research. And subterranean search-and-rescue efforts could get a boost from the lessons of a fleet of robots and drones exploring the most remote corners of caves, tunnels and the underground world. The latest issue of The Link, the magazine of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, is now online and features these stories and more. The magazine highlights the work of faculty and students from across the school.