Some of the highlights we've already pointed out include public offerings, new office openings, changes in city politics and more -- and it seems like our readers agree. Taking a look at our best-read stories out of Pittsburgh in 2021, we see a range from in-depth features to news summaries to short pieces about major company announcements. Dominating the list is one of the city's favorite tech sectors -- autonomous vehicles -- followed by interests in the growth of life sciences as well as equitable initiatives around the tech industry. Note: To formulate our best-read roundups each year, we remove our curated RealLISTs, as they're often our most read stories but don't tell us a ton about trends. But it is notable that readers love to know who won in our inaugural Techncial.ly

Faculty and staff from several schools at Carnegie Mellon University are joining forces in an effort to accelerate the science of Artificial Intelligence. University leaders said they hope that by pulling together more than 100 faculty through the creation of CMU AI, it will maintain the university's role as a leader in the field. CMU School of Computer Science dean Andrew Moore said the "confederation" of faculty and students from various disciplines, which will allow the school to offer what he calls "full stack" education and research. "That means [the students] need to be able to hang out and work on projects in labs not just with the technology experts on specific parts of AI, like machine learning or computer vision, but they have seen examples of putting everything together," Moore said. Moore said the university has been able to build great AI systems that combine technologies from several different disciplines.