News Flash

There is a sense of anticipation in the air as the exhibitions open. Researchers, developers, filmmakers, gaming experts, and academics have come from all over the world, spanning 74 countries and six continents, to participate in one of the year’s most buzzed-about conferences: SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques).

For nearly 40 years, it has attracted the top brains in computer graphics and interactive techniques who wow one another with the latest developments. Of the thousands of presenter submissions for the 2011 conference, three Carnegie Mellon/Disney teams are among a select contingent chosen to present. So, with representatives from the major motion picture studios and gaming industry looking on, the teams reveal their respective research breakthroughs in the areas of three-dimensional face modeling, motion capture, and surround haptics:

3D face modeling: gives animators more control to make facial expressions seem lifelike
Motion capture: makes the motion of animated characters more realistic
Surround haptics: enhanced technology for providing real sensations such as bugs crawling on your skin or the perception of falling or flying.

Their presentations helped make the conference “an inspirational and incredibly fulfilling week,” says Peter Braccio, the conference chair.?
—Lisa Kay Davis (DC’09)

Welcome Aboard

One afternoon in 2007, Andrew Shaindlin walked into a library to conduct some “tedious” graduate school research. Perhaps subconsciously looking to get sidetracked, he created Alumni Futures, the first blog devoted to the profession of alumni relations. The higher-education executive, with more than 20 years of experience in alumni relations, communications, and fundraising, has used the blog to explore ideas, trends, and new directions in education, communication, community engagement, and online interaction.

He is bringing his fresh ideas to Carnegie Mellon, where he was recently named associate vice president for advancement and associate vice president for alumni relations and annual giving. “Andy is one of the top experts, internationally, on alumni engagement, and his emphasis on the role of technology makes him a particularly good match for Carnegie Mellon,” says Robbee Baker Kosak, the university’s vice president of advancement. “We are pleased to have him lead our alumni relations efforts.”
—Elizabeth May

Girl Power

The youngster is often told stories about her great-grandmother, a suffragette. The stories come from her grandmother. But those aren’t the only stories Heather Arnet hears. It’s the 1970s, and she is being raised by a single mom who comes home from work full of frustration from the difficulties for a woman in the workplace.

It’s not a coincidence there is always a copy of Ms. magazine on the coffee table. It’s also not a coincidence that Arnet’s favorite book is a collection of Wonder Woman comics, its introduction written by Gloria Steinem, the decade’s most prominent women’s rights activist.

During her teenage years, Arnet develops a passion for theater, making Carnegie Mellon a natural choice. After graduating in 1997 with a degree in English and drama, she heads to New York and works by day in advertising, by night directing plays off-off-Broadway, often drawn to those with a feminist slant. She eventually returns to Pittsburgh as director of development for a local theater company, marries Carnegie Mellon English professor David Shumway, and has a baby boy. But as the years pass, she continues to be an advocate for women’s rights, volunteering for events and rallies whenever she can.

In 2004, her activism leads to her becoming CEO of the Women and Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania. Its founder is Catherine Raphael, who sits on the board of New York based Ms. Foundation, the nation’s oldest women’s fund, cofounded by Steinem and actress Marlo Thomas.

Recently, the Ms. Foundation’s board had an opening; it’s once again no coincidence that Arnet filled the vacancy. And it’s no coincidence she still keeps her Wonder Woman book in her Pittsburgh office.
—Elizabeth Shestak (DC’03)

Cloudy

With computers in nearly every workplace, even small and medium offices need to store large amounts of data. The conventional way is to guess how much storage is needed and then pour money into onsite data storage. Nicos Vekiarides (E’95), cofounder and CEO of Boston’s TwinStrata, offers a more efficient solution by storing clients’ data securely in the cloud through TwinStrata’s CloudArray software data centers. For its cloud-based storage innovation and solid finances, TwinStrata was recently named by Red Herring, a respected online business publication, as one of North America’s 100 most innovative companies.
—Lorelei Laird (DC’01)

Winning Scores

Carnegie Mellon student-athletes perform as well in the classroom as they do in competitions, if recent reports are any indication—162 were named to the University Athletic Association’s 2011 All-Academic Recognition list: 75 from the fall teams, 34 from the spring teams, and 53 from the winter teams. The recognition is awarded to those who have completed at least one full year of college study and carry a minimum GPA of 3.3.
—Elizabeth May

Paper Chase

Last fall, all over the world, suitcases and duffel bags zipped and snapped. Packing up to go to college sounds the same on every continent. This year’s Pittsburgh freshman class of 1,463 members was selected from a record applicant pool of 16,572. International students make up 9% of the incoming class, which is also the most diverse in the university’s history: 17% of the new students are African American, Hispanic, or Native American. On the Qatar campus, 107 freshman students started classes last fall, which also received a record number of applications from 65 nations.
—Shannon Deep (CMU’10, HNZ’11)

Tiny Dreams

A warm Mediterranean nighttime breeze wafts across nine-year-old Metin Sitti as he watches a gecko cling to the ceiling above his bed. Innately inquisitive about how insects, birds, and small animals fly and stick to ceilings, he has a dream about the two-inch-long lizard losing its grip and falling into his mouth.

Years later, the Carnegie Mellon researcher and roboticist keeps geckos as pets in his office. Through his work on robot mobility, he discovers that geckos defy gravity, not by means of adhesive on their feet, but by barely detectable molecular attractions—called van der Waals forces—between the animal’s foot hairs and any surface.

For scientific inspiration, Sitti often hearkens back to memories of his Turkish childhood, when he first witnessed the magical gyrations of the gecko, one of nature’s tiny creatures. In his lab, he has developed several gecko-inspired creations: a robot that climbs walls, a robotic water strider that scampers across liquid surfaces, and a robotic hummingbird. He wants to make all of his creations insect-scale and then even smaller, so they can perform miraculous feats. Along with colleagues in his laboratory, he is developing bacteriobots, benign bacteria tethered to molecular substances that will travel to specific sites inside the body with a medical payload for treatment of disease.

For his work in manipulating objects on a molecular level, Sitti recently received the annual Nanoengineering Pioneer Award from SPIE, the international society of optics and photonics.?
—Tom Imerito

Full of Energy

Daydreaming of owning an electric car may temporarily soothe the ache in your wallet when you’re filling up at the pump, but the nation’s dependence on gas continues, and it’s hurting more than your bank account. Fossil-fuel emissions contribute to environmental decay, and the U.S. government’s energy department has an entire branch dedicated to researching and regulating such emissions. It’s led by Charles McConnell (E’77), a COO at the U.S. Department of Energy, following a nomination this past summer by President Barack Obama.?
—Shannon Deep (CMU’10, HNZ’11)

Greetings Rwanda!

The Emmy Goes To...

What weighs 5 1/2 pounds, is shiny and gold, and looks good on a desk or mantle? A paperweight is a good guess, but the answer we’re looking for is the Emmy Award, which recognizes television excellence in news, sports, daytime, primetime, documentary, and international programming. Carnegie Mellon alumni have received 97 Emmy Awards to date. The two most recent winners of a primetime Emmy are:

Douglas Huszti (A’94): Outstanding Art Direction for a Single-Camera Series, 2011, for Boardwalk Empire
Robert Dickinson (DC’05): Outstanding Lighting Design or Lighting Direction for a Variety, Music, or Comedy Special, 2011, for the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards.

—Shannon Deep (CMU’10, HNZ’11)

Swiss Stake

Successful international investment managers look for a good return on investment. Now there’s good news for managers looking to add an asset to their educational portfolios. A unique international dual-degree executive MBA curriculum was recently announced. It’s a joint effort of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and the Swiss Finance Institute. The curriculum includes executive-level management courses and covers advanced asset and wealth management.
—Elizabeth May

In His Element

The “Transfermium Wars” were possibly the least-known front of the Cold War, with Russian and Western scientists battling over who had discovered several “ultraheavy” elements at the bottom of the periodic table of elements. From the 1960s into the 1990s, the periodic table—the grand chart that shows the order of the chemical building blocks of the known universe—showed different names for these manmade elements, depending on which country it was printed in.

A bystander in the Transfermium Wars, Carnegie Mellon nuclear chemist Paul Karol, believed that the physics establishment had badly bungled the controversy, and he said so in letters he sent to 40 different national scientific unions. “I was ticked,” Karol recalls. “They succumbed to political pressure.”

For his trouble, Karol in 1999 was given the chair of a new body, the Joint Working Party on the Discovery of New Elements.

The JWP, staffed with physicists and nuclear chemists worldwide, determines whether an element has been discovered, and if so, who got there first.

In June 2011, Karol’s JWP announced it had confirmed the discovery of two new elements, temporarily named ununquadium 114 and ununhexium 116, by a joint team of former rivals from Russia and the United States. Why the team effort from once-bitter foes? “These [experiments] have gotten so fancy and expensive,” Karol notes, “that no single research group is able to convince its government to fund the whole thing.”

Although you shouldn’t expect to see these new elements in your home anytime soon, their creation advances not only chemistry and physics, but also computer science and engineering as well. The useful outcomes of this research are often not so much in the discovery (which Karol likens to finding new planets) as they are in the new techniques developed for the chase.
—William Abernathy

Confidential

You respond to a phone survey. You sign up for a free membership to a Web site. Or, maybe you purchase something online. Your personal information is entered into a database, but it could fall into the wrong hands. Not if Anne-Sophie Charest (DC’08,’12) has her way. She studies differential privacy—an innovative way to protect individual confidentiality with statistical databases using algorithms. She recently won the Edward C. Bryant Scholarship Trust Fund Award—a certificate and monetary prize of $2,500 given annually by the American Statistical Association to an “outstanding graduate student.”
—Elizabeth May

Urban Legend

In a small town east of Rome, a Fulbright scholar architect presents a city landscape drawing to a local woman. He pauses, waits. She studies it, then explodes, “Well, this place just doesn’t exist!” The reaction surprises him; the drawing is of her community—but with one significant building removed.

The architect is Ray Gindroz (A’63, ’65) during his time abroad in 1966, when he began his career of understanding how people perceive their cities and how to utilize that information to rebuild and renew communities. The reaction to the absent Italian building, for example, taught him that this structure was a vital element. Today, he remarks, “That’s just like the process we have continued to do.”

The “we” is Urban Design Associates, a Pittsburgh-based company where Gindroz is Principal Emeritus. Through UDA, he has reconstructed cities by correcting fundamental social problems with a design that fosters community appreciation. Simply put, his goal has always been to design places of lasting value. Gindroz also spearheads numerous pattern books (architectural development guidelines); and, with his wife, Marilyn Miltenberger Gindroz (A’73), has established a foundation that supports study-abroad programs in architecture, urbanism, and music.

His achievements have recently been recognized with Traditional Building’s Clem Labine Award, named after the longtime publisher, author, and traditionalist. It honors a professional for “fostering humane values in the built environment” and describes Gindroz as a “humane urbanist, educator, and philanthropist.”
—Courtney Kochuba (DC’07)

Well Tested

Pencils tap, fingers drum, a foot bounces—typical exam jitters for aspiring MBA students taking the GMAT. But test-takers who studied at Carnegie Mellon can breathe easier knowing the average for the university’s undergraduates who take the test is 720.9, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. That ranks the CMU test-takers #10 from all undergraduate institutions and ahead of half of the Ivy Leagues: Dartmouth (#12 on the list), Columbia (#17), University of Pennsylvania (#18), and Cornell (#26).
—Shannon Deep (CMU’10, HNZ’11)

Presidential

A third-grader catches her teacher swigging a soda and cries, “You’re a Nitwit!” Her classmates join in, wiggling their fingers as part of a game about nutrition. The scene plays out in an obesity-prevention project, Nitwit!, one of more than 75 such programs sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University’s Leonard Gelfand Center for Service Learning and Outreach. Students, faculty, and staff volunteered more than 110,000 hours at the center last year alone. The result? The university was honored with inclusion in the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for “exemplary, innovative, and effective community service programs.” Very sweet, indeed.
—Janet Jay (DC’07)

Watch Out

The student from Ireland is in the United Kingdom working toward her PhD in atomic and molecular physics. She learns about an upcoming public forum that will discuss where to locate Diamond Light Source, the United Kingdom’s national synchrotron science facility. Her interest is piqued, and she marks her calendar.

At the forum, the experts are at odds: Scientists marshal evidence about the need to locate it near a skilled workforce, but policymakers are more concerned about where the facility would best stimulate the economy. It’s clear to the student, Anita Sands, that the two groups are “speaking completely different languages,” and she is bewildered that the experts don’t comprehend their common ground.

“It was then and there,” she says, “that I realized my calling.” She would bridge the gap between people who understand science and technology and people who make business and economic decisions.

With that in mind, she decides to pursue an education in public policy after she earns her PhD from Queens University of Belfast. Heinz College seems like a perfect fit; soon after enrolling as a Fulbright scholar, she knows she made the right decision. “Carnegie Mellon was one of the few places where they didn’t think it was weird that someone with a PhD in physics was walking around in the public policy department,” says Sands.

Today, she is group managing director and chief operating officer of UBS Wealth Management Americas, where she directs 2,000 technology and operations professionals. Her leadership has helped make the company’s technology readily accessible.

Registered Rep magazine recognized her “upbeat, practical leadership” by including her among its 2012 “Ten to Watch” list of retail investment professionals for her success in “orchestrating the massive undertaking of transforming, upgrading, and generally reshaping the technology platform at UBS Wealth Management Americas.”
—Janet Jay (DC’07)

Tweetable

Lamia Ben Hiba’s days are full. The software engineer for Morocco’s water utility is also working toward her PhD, studying social network analysis at the National School of Computer Science and Systems Analysis. When she learns about TechWomen—a U.S. State Department exchange program that connects women working in technology in Muslim countries with American counterparts—she jumps at the opportunity, even if it means further juggling her schedule.

She finds out she will spend her time in the States at Carnegie Mellon in Silicon Valley, under the tutelage of faculty members Jeannie Stamberger, the associate director of the Disaster Management Initiative; and Patricia Collins, whose research includes investigation into communication tools for emergency responders.

Ben Hiba will share an office with Collins during her stay. On her first day, small talk quickly evolves into a brainstorming session for a research project. By the next morning, Ben Hiba has a list of ideas, and they choose one. “Off she went!” says Collins.

Their research examines whether Twitter was useful in disseminating information within the first 24 hours of the 2010 San Bruno, Calif., gas explosion that killed eight people. Preliminary results are affirmative. Five weeks later, at the end of TechWomen, all 37 Muslim country participants and their mentors gather at the State Department, where they meet with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Six are selected to present their research, including Ben Hiba. The program culminates, in part, with July 4 fireworks viewed from the State Department balcony, an honor typically reserved for diplomats.

Ben Hiba has returned to Morocco, but she continues to collaborate, via Skype, with Stamberger and Collins; they plan to publish their research in an academic journal.
—Lorelei Laird (DC’01)

Now Hear This

When Brian MacWhinney hears voices in his head, it’s not a bad thing. The psychiatry professor is an expert in children’s language development and has listened to countless transcripts over the course of his 40-plus-year career in linguistic study. MacWhinney has also helped develop several major tools to improve psychological and linguistic research, including the Child Language Data Exchange System and TalkBank databases, international databases that provide the major source of data on spoken language. MacWhinney was honored for those contributions with the inaugural Roger Brown Award from the International Association for the Study of Child Language.
—Elizabeth May

Hall of Famers

At an awards luncheon in New York City, two distinguished-looking men stand side by side. At one time, the men were competitors. Another time, they hoped to merge their companies. And today, they stand as equals as inductees into the Market Research Council Hall of Fame.

John Dimling (TPR’62) (left), former chair, president, and CEO of Nielsen Media Research, and Tod Johnson (AM’66, TPR’67, Trustee), chair and CEO of The NPD Group, have worked in the same industry for years. However, their focuses have been vastly different.

Dimling’s path led him to work in media at the National Association of Broadcasters (where he led projects such as the study of non-response error in television diaries), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (where he completed the first five-year plan in public telecommunications), and Nielsen (where he focused on audience measurement studies).

Meanwhile, Johnson’s (right) past includes working at a Tepper professor’s marketing research consulting company upon graduation, then publishing art posters (a family printing business) before he ended up at The NPD Group, a leader in analytical technique and new data collection technology. There, Johnson helped to create the first online surveys and digital scanning devices.

With such established careers, both inductees speak confidently about their passion for market research. Dimling remarks that the field is ultimately about providing answers. Johnson concurs, “I love the intellectual stimulation of working on problems. And that’s what market research is.”

Each alumnus is also quick to congratulate the other on the shared Hall of Fame induction, which recognizes outstanding members of the market, media, and survey research professions.
—Courtney Kochuba (DC’07)

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