When Waymo opens its office in Pittsburgh, it will do so partly with the team and expertise of a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff company. Waymo announced last month it would open an engineering office in Pittsburgh and bring on board RobotWits, a robotics company focusing on autonomous vehicles that was founded by Maxim Likhachev, an associate professor in the School of Computer Science's Robotics Institute. "Pittsburgh is one of the main hubs for autonomous driving technology development in the U.S.," said Tushar Chandra, head of Waymo's Behavior team, noting the city's top academic institutions and long history of autonomous vehicle innovation. "You can see why we'd be excited about Pittsburgh's engineering and technology talent and world-class expertise in robotics." Waymo was Google's self-driving car project before it branched off as an independent company in 2016.

Universities have been ramping up their data science education initiatives ever since 2012, when Tom Davenport and DJ Patil declared data scientist "the sexiest job of the 21st century" in the Harvard Business Review. According to the website Data Science Programs, there are more than 500 universities across the United States with data science degree programs. All told, there are more than 980 individual programs, with Master of Data Science being the most popular. This number has increased substantially in recent years, according to past numbers shared by this website. While the supply of data scientists emerging from universitites is up, strong demand for data scientists at American companies continues to outstrip supply, according to Martial Hebert, the dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Chirag Gupta, a Ph.D. candidate in the Machine Learning Department, has received a Bloomberg Data Science Ph.D. Fellowship. The fellowship will fund Gupta's dissertation research for the 2021-2022 academic year, provide a stipend of $35,000 and offer $5,000 to cover travel to professional conferences. Gupta can renew the fellowship for up to three years. He will also have a Bloomberg mentor and complete a 14-week paid summer internship at Bloomberg next summer. Gupta, in his fourth year of Ph.D. studies and advised by Aaditya Ramdas, is working on uncertainty quantification for classification and regression problems.

In a grainy video shot in the early 1980s on Carnegie Mellon University's campus, Ivan Sutherland rides on top of the Trojan Cockroach, a six-legged machine considered the first controlled by a computer and capable of carrying a person. Sutherland puts the machine through its paces, slowly walking forward, backward and sideways and turning 180 degrees in the video. At one point, he attempts to balance the massive machine on only two legs. "We believe that a mastery of balance will be important to future walking machines," Sutherland narrates over the footage. That Trojan Cockroach video, complete with Sutherland's prophetic comments on the importance of balance to the future of legged robots, is part of a new interactive, virtual exhibit from University Libraries and the School of Computer Science at CMU that explores the beginnings of and contributions to the field of robotics.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are working with Apple to develop new ways to disassemble old technology. This work builds on Apple's existing recycling innovations, including its recycling robots Daisy and Dave. As Apple sought to support research initiatives that reimagine disassembly of devices and recovery of materials, the company worked with CMU's Biorobotics Lab in the Robotics Institute. Matt Travers and Howie Choset, co-directors of the lab, and their team are designing machine learning models that will enable robots to teach themselves how to disassemble a device they have never seen before. "We're building robots, and we're building AI so the machine can see any piece of electronics and figure out how to take it apart," Travers said.

India and Pakistan have fought four wars in the past few decades, but when India faced an oxygen shortage in its hospitals during its recent COVID-19 surge, Pakistan offered to help. Finding these positive tweets, however, was not as easy as simply browsing the supportive hashtags or looking at the most popular posts. And Twitter's algorithm isn't tuned to surface the most positive tweets during a crisis. Ashique KhudaBukhsh of Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute led a team of researchers who used machine learning to identify supportive tweets from Pakistan during India's COVID crisis. In the throes of a public health crisis, words of hope can be welcome medicine.

This week, TechCrunch is turning its spotlight on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with interviews, profiles, and an event featuring the outgoing mayor, CMU's President, and local startups. The Rust Belt city has spent much of the past decade working to shed the image that arrived in the wake of the deindustrialization of the 1970s and 80s. Courtesy of world class universities like Carnegie Melon and the University of Pittsburgh, the Steel City has transformed itself into a vibrant startup ecosystem and a world class environment for robotics, AI, autonomous driving and other high-tech companies. Ahead of tomorrow's event, TechCrunch spoke to Bill Peduto, who has served as Pittsburgh's Mayor since 2014, a role that has involved overseeing much of that transformation. The Mayor spoke on his efforts over the past half-dozen years, which will culminate in January when he leaves office.

A machine learning technology company co-founded by Ameet Talwalkar, an assistant professor in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, will join Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Determined AI, a San Francisco-based startup, builds software that trains artificial intelligence models more quickly and at scale using its open-source machine learning platform. Talwalkar is chief scientist at Determined AI, which he co-founded in 2017 with Neil Conway and Evan Sparks. "We are thrilled about the opportunity to partner with HPE to deliver co-designed software and hardware and tackle some of society's most pressing challenges," the founders wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition. "HPE shares our vision that driving an open standard for AI software infrastructure is the fastest way for the industry to realize the potential of AI."

A team at Apple analyzed nearly 78,000 screenshots from more than 4,000 apps to improve the screen reader function on its mobile devices. The result was Screen Recognition, a tool that uses machine learning and computer vision to automatically detect and provide content readable by VoiceOver for apps that would otherwise not be accessible. Jason Wu, a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), was part of the team, whose work, "Screen Recognition: Creating Accessibility Metadata for Mobile Applications From Pixels," won a Best Paper award at the recent Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference. His advisor, Jeffrey Bigham, an associate professor in HCII and the Language Technologies Institute and head of the Human-Centered Machine Learning Group at Apple, was also among the paper's authors. Apple's VoiceOver uses metadata supplied by ad developers that describes user interface components.

Showcasing America's most promising young scientists and engineers, the Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences today named 31 finalists for the world's largest unrestricted prize honoring early-career scientists and engineers. Three winners of the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists – in life sciences, chemistry, and physical sciences and engineering – will be announced on July 20, each receiving $250,000 as a Blavatnik National Awards Laureate. The finalists, culled from 298 nominations by 157 United States research institutions across 38 states, have made trailblazing discoveries in wide-ranging fields, from the neuroscience of addiction to the development of gene-editing technologies, from designing next-generation battery storage to understanding the origins of photosynthesis, from making improvements in computer vision to pioneering new frontiers in polymer chemistry. Descriptions of the honorees' research are listed below. "Each day, young scientists tirelessly seek solutions to humanity's greatest challenges," said Len Blavatnik, founder and chairman of Access Industries, and head of the Blavatnik Family Foundation. "The Blavatnik Awards recognize this scientific brilliance and tenacity as we honor these 31 finalists. We congratulate them on their accomplishments and look forward to their continued, future discoveries and success." President and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences Nicholas B. Dirks said: "Each year, it is a complete joy to see the very'best of the best' of American science represented by the Blavatnik National Awards Finalists."