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Google Robot Car Project Involves Large CMU Contingent:

And two years later, Carnegie Mellon's robotic SUV, Boss, won DARPA's followup race, the $2 million Urban Challenge.

As a graduate student and then a faculty member of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, Urmson played key roles on the groundbreaking "Challenge" teams led by William "Red" Whittaker, director of the Field Robotics Center. Now, on leave from the institute, Urmson again has contributed to a milestone for self-driving vehicles as a member of Google Inc.'s autonomous vehicle project. Its eight cars have logged more than 1,000 miles on public roads with no human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only the slightest human help, an unprecedented achievement.

"The work we're doing out here is very exciting," Urmson said. It's an achievement he shares with a large Carnegie Mellon contingent on the roughly 15-member Google team. Eight members have current or past ties to CMU, a pioneer in autonomous navigation.

They include James Kuffner, an adjunct faculty member in the Robotics Institute; Don Burnette, a PhD robotics student on leave; Matthew McNaughton, a Google intern who has returned to finish his PhD in robotics; Nathaniel Fairfield and Michael Montemerlo, who earned PhDs in robotics in 2009 and 2003, respectively, and Philip Nemec, a 1995 computer science graduate. Sebastian Thrun, a former associate professor at Carnegie Mellon now at Stanford University, heads up Google's robot car project.

I don't see too many details in this article, but there was something that sounds awful similar from Carnegie Mellon University a little while back called MULE (Mobile User Location-specific Encryption). http://sparrow.ece.cmu.edu/group/pub/studer_wisec10.pdf [pdf warning]

Reminds me of another bright star that burnt out recently:

http://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/

Condolences to Jobs' family, and to all of those that will miss him.

a set of the AI researchers:
http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/actr6/

I develop web applications every day with PostgreSQL and Python, both very popular projects which originated in universities. I also depend on the ubiquitous Apache HTTP server which was originally a derivative of a university project. Both my development and production environments are GNU/Linux. GNU and Linux were not projects at universities, but they were non-commercial and inspired by experiences in universities.

Though Unix originated at AT&T, the additions from BSD have profound and lasting effects on all modern operating systems, especially Unix-like ones. The Internet was developed at universities and TCP/IP was originally implemented on BSD Unix.

If the hardware exists, there's a 'C' compiler for it or an assembler.

I doubt there is a C compiler for this chip, possibly not even an assembler, given that the chip was designed to implement Forth.
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/sec4_5.html

It's nice that they finally got the standard done. But there's so much junk in there. The C++ committee was dominated by people who wanted to do cool things with templates.

Some years ago, someone figured out that it was possible to abuse the C++ template system into doing arbitrary computations at compile time. This developed a fan club. That fan club has dominated the C++ standards committee, because nobody else cared. So now we have a standard for C++ which supports template-based programming a little better.

Current thinking seems to be that,while template programming is too hard for ordinary programmers, the templates will be written by l33t programmers and then be used by the lower classes. Unfortunately, if anything goes wrong, the end user has to look at the innards of the template to find the problem. We went through this with LISP decades ago. Check out the MIT Loop Macro, That finally became stable about the time LISP died out.

Note what isn't in the new C++. There's no more memory safety than in the old one. (Fans will say that it's safer if you only use the new features. Now try to call some library that doesn't use them.) So the buffer overflow attacks and crashes will continue.

C++ is the only language to offer hiding without memory safety. Hard-compiled languages from Pascal through Go have hiding with safety, as do all the major scripting languages. C has neither hiding nor safety; the pointer manipulations are right there in the source. There have been safe, hard-compiled languages without garbage collection, most notably Ada and the Modula family. Safety and speed are not incompatible.

Try http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ Coda first it's a derivative of AFS2

It's referring to a paper by Bianca Schroeder, presented at the FAST conference in 2007. In the paper, she takes data from several models of drives, the exact names of which are not revealed. So, this chart is referring to data from some of those drives.

Disclosure: I've worked with the other author of the paper, and provided the authors with some of the raw data they used. Therefore, posting anonymously.

Did they reach the "Mad Tea Party" yet?

For years now, I've been meaning to view those video lectures of Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science from CMU. But all I get is a wall asking for my WedISO login. Btw if u have it, post it here! :)

I'm thinking there are several other problems that will not be solved entirely by expoential bandwidth expansion;

- Bufferbloat is crippling streaming for a lot of us. Read up. This could be solved with a few clicks, unless it actually won't solve it, and then of course we have to reconsider network design

- Some ISP systems, for instance, cable and DSL (woops, that pretty much includes ALL U.S. systems, my bad), can't be scaled up exponentially. So the solution is either Gigabit Ethernet or fiber. Vint has essentially stated that the solution is for the incumbents to discard their entire physical plants and rebuild all the way to the home. That's bound to be a big hit with the boards of several companies.

- And then the advantages of streaming are lost. For instance, DRM. Well, to the providers, DRM is an advantage.

- Further advantages of streaming would include multicasting, which isn't done because of several technical problems that I don't think an exponential bandwidth increase solves. Routing is the problem.

- Storage is an issue that raises the DRM question as well as finding a use for the copious capacity we have now. But this is just shifting the burden to local storage, and well, I betcha we find out we need to manage multi-terabyte astorage to keep all the shows we want to watch 'someday' until we do watch them. As a previous poster pointed out, we will want our 4320p/8.1 audio with concurrent Twitter and IMDb feeds, which raises bandwidth nmeeds and storage needs, and well, we've used up all our copious capacities, everywhere.

- FTTH is not without problems. Hack down the cable and see how fun it is to splice. And then the adapter, since you won't be plugging fiber into your laptop. The bottlenecks just move.

Still, I'm all for an ISP to start building a next-gen network, delivering Gigabit speed to users. This will need the support of the backbone providers, since they will have to support capacity increases as well, and that requires more than just changing the PHY layer.

Right now, solving bufferbloat would nice

Its been many years since I listened in on the dev groups so perhaps someone else knows how stable it is. The dev website still says that the development group had been using it for a long time with absolutely no data loss.

http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ljpaper/lj.html

In addition to MIT and CMU, which have already been mentioned, Berkeley and Stanford have their introductory CS courses on youtube (and iTunes.) I particularly like Stanford's CS106 with Mehran Sahami. If you want something more middle-school-ish (or scheme-ish) and connected to algebra and functions, check out http://www.bootstrapworld.org/ (founded by a professor at Brown) (Seeing all of those parentheses reminds me of the book that taught me Lisp, David Touretzky's Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation, PDF at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/, which should really be brought back and updated for DrScheme!)

and the first part of his book contained a proof that the human brain could do something a turing machine cannot.

His proof is wrong. [Postscript file]

I know that they would never open source this but I'd love to see a tear down of the Scientologist e-meter

Not really. Carnegie Mellon is the one that put the first Coke machine on the internet.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt

And there are more (old page)
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/bsy/coke.html

As some readers may have guessed, "anti-modular," "anti-parallel," and "unsuitable for a modern CS curriculum" are one person's opinions, and do not represent the majority view of the CMU faculty. The introductory curriculum was changed away from Java for different reasons: primarily to focus on a language (Python) with simpler syntax and dynamic types, and to supplement with material on C that is closer to the machine. For more details, see a report by the SCS Deans:

http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2010/CMU-CS-10-140.pdf

Whatever you may think about delaying OO--and opinions are mixed at CMU as everywhere--one advantage of the new curriculum is that the sophomore-level course can do OO design more justice than we were ever able to do in the prior intro sequence, since the students already know how to program. Modularity and parallelism are in fact major emphases of that course, which I and other CMU faculty are currently developing.

You are right. If you read the formal report from CMU, they explain that while Java is a great tool, it was too complicated for beginners, and abstracted out a lot of things they need to learn (like stacks or linked lists or hash tables, see p 13). Object oriented programming is a great organizational tool, but if you are only writing programs 50 or 100 lines long (like beginner programmers), it's sometimes hard to see how adding a class to something simplifies it, because it doesn't simply your hello world program. OOP is a more advanced topic, which is why CMU is moving it to a second year class.

I don't think it's continuous math that is the hard part of CS... http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15251-f07/Site/

I am just going to jailbreak my PS3 to say fuck Sony. I don't even on one game for PS3. Yeah prove that I jail broke my circumvent copy protections , when there hasn't been one game played on it. Also anyone looking for the jailbreak CMU is hosting a mirror http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/GeoHot/ . I think it should be a Day of JailBreaking soon . National Jailbreak Your PS3 March 5 2011 anyone up for it?

No one checks to see if the cert is actually the one that the domain normally uses...

I do! Via Perspectives. I've very, very rarely had it alert me to anything, but it could be extremely useful the one time it does.

Doesn't perspectives only check certificates that aren't signed by a trusted CA?

No one checks to see if the cert is actually the one that the domain normally uses...

I do! Via Perspectives. I've very, very rarely had it alert me to anything, but it could be extremely useful the one time it does.

The Federal Government gave Scientology religious/tax exempt status through some shady backroom deals.

The full story could fill a book, but this timeline gives you the rough outline
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Cowen/essays/timeline.html

Dave Touretzky, of the "Gallery of DeCSS Descramblers" fame, is already on it - although he seems to be taking a more cautious approach while he's out of town right now.

Dave Touretzky, of the "Gallery of DeCSS Descramblers" fame, is already on it - although he seems to be taking a more cautious approach while he's out of town right now.

Dave Touretzky, of the "Gallery of DeCSS Descramblers" fame, is already on it - although he seems to be taking a more cautious approach while he's out of town right now.

So whatever you do, don't go to this CS professor's university page; there's a directory link on it that makes Sony unhappy.

Just use some steganography software to embed a version of the DeCSS code into your pictures. I prefer the haiku version myself...

Then I spent part of the afternoon, along with some others, watching the video replays of it and the unfolding tragedy in a conference room by Hans Moravec's Mobile Robot Lab, all the time hoping it was just a misunderstanding, and the astronauts were all right or something.

One of the hopes of some at the Robotics Institute was that robots could do more of the space exploration more safely, including preparing the way for humans. Was that really a quarter century ago? :-) Well, the robots are finally starting to be here:
http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/pr2/overview
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

Or in some cases, even come and gone, sadly:
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research_center_detail.html?type=publications&center_id=7&menu_id=262
"Space Robotics Initiative (SRI)
This center is no longer active."

Always wanted to work there and make Hewey, Dewey, and Louie from Silent Running, and the space habitat biospheres they maintain. :-) But that was not exactly their focus.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

That Challenger tragedy was doubly sad with a school teacher on board, considering all the school kids who had been encouraged to watch it. I can wonder if that was part of the further collapse of the US space program?

Still, as much as such tragedies are awful, I later wrote that a big problem with the US space program is that not enough people are taking risks and dying from the consequences. If you think of how many people have died in ocean voyages in the early day of sailing, an active space program seriously oriented to extending human life into the cosmos should be willing to accept hundreds or thousands of deaths a year by astronauts taking calculated and reasonable risks (as in, a 80% chance of success).

The obsession with perfection and zero risk by NASA ultimately seems to have grounded the US space program. That, and an acceptance of overly complicated designs. If astronauts are willing to accept a 20% chance of disaster so they can fly more often (or at all), I say let them. If current astronauts don't want those odds, find new astronauts.

I'm not saying take foolish risks, or 99% risks of death, or risks not worth risking death for. I'm just saying, we probably could be launching 100X as many cheaper rockets and having a lot more success, and having thousands of people going into space every year, if we accepted more causalties (on the order of 20% of launches failing like this shuttle did 25 years ago). Obviously, such a program should be voluntary and people should understand the risks as best as they can. Ideally, over time, the risks would be reduced by better engineering to that of the current risks for air travel in commercial aircraft. But it is just too early to have that expectation.

Besides, and maybe I should not say this, but TV ratings would go up for the space program if NASA did not go out of its way to make everything look so boring with astronauts who have been training for years because there are so few launches and they are so expensive. The most interesting thing I ever saw on NASA TV was when that NASA astronaut lost her bag of tools while fiddling with a grease gun. :-)
http://www.space.com/6131-astronaut-laments

Yep, and autonomous driving in mixed traffic was done for No Hands Across America in 1995. Also, SARTRE is very similar to the CHAUFFEUR I and II European Commission projects in the 90's and early 00's.

The AHS History 1939 - 1997 movie (RealPlayer) is awesome.

I had the same thought as RJHelms below - the paper (PDF) is great, but I do think it was meant only as a proof of concept/warning. I guess this is how rumors get started...

This issue was already brought to bear by a university professor who made a very eloquent case for the DE-CSS algorithm and key to be treated as free speech.

While the case was lost, the judge did rule that object code and source code are forms of speech, so sharing the programs needed to crack the PS3 would naturally follow.

From the person behind the "Gallery of CSS descramblers"

George Hotz's work has been mirrored by Carnegie Mellon professor David Touretzky, known for his excellent work towards freedom of speech on the Internet through his publication of The Secrets of Scientology. Dave Touretzky has repeatedly shown himself willing to accept whatever the MAFIAA et al will throw at him.

George Hotz's work has been mirrored by Carnegie Mellon professor David Touretzky, known for his excellent work towards freedom of speech on the Internet through his publication of The Secrets of Scientology. Dave Touretzky has repeatedly shown himself willing to accept whatever the MAFIAA et al will throw at him.

It's not bullshit, the rules are fine. You don't understand them yet or you're being intentionally obstinate.

I've already explained a couple of times why your explanation is bullshit, yet you completely ignore all the details. You are the one being obstinate.

The game is fine and it's survived thousands of years, hundreds with the rules they use now and few have problems with it.

Maybe you can explain why the Go associations for the United States, Britain, New Zealand, and France all moved away from Japanese rules. If you want the answer, look here:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wjh/go/rules/AGA.commentary.html

See the section under "Transmittal letter". In particular:

"the American Go Association has for several years been working toward a "simplified" set of rules for use among amateurs--a set of rules at once simple enough to be understood by beginners, clear and comprehensive enough to guide tournament play among amateurs--when the tournament director (and the strongest players present) may not even be of dan level"

"For amateur players in the West, where professionals are few and far between, and entire cities and regions may lack even dan-level amateur players, however, such rules present difficulties. We believe that our "simplified" rules are more appropriate for use with amateurs, especially where no very strong players are available as arbiters or referees."

"The status of disputed groups is to be settled by playing out the full-board situation.

Playing out the situation allows players of varying levels to resolve complex life-and-death situations according to their abilities, without depending on outside authorities or exhaustive analysis, and hence is most suitable for amateur play. While the new Nihon Ki-in rules are carefully crafted to resolve most of the difficult cases which used to require exccptional handling, and are probably very appropriate for professional play, they depend on a high level of sophistication in analyzing each position based on rules which are slightly different from normal play (due to the special handling of kos). In principle, resolving such end-of-game disputes requires the players--or some competent authority in attendance--to have the capacity to resolve life-and-death problems of arbitrary complexity! Rather than attempt to resolve each local situation "in principle" in the ideal fashion through extensive analysis, playing the position out achieves a fair result (it is based on the relative reading strengths of the players themselves) in potentially bounded time without the need to appeal to outside authorities or make use of special rules."

Panda dung is the noun phrase modifying the noun statue
Go to http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/submit-sentence-4.html
and enter "Panda dung statue sold for $45,000" or other English sentences

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Terrorism/form-letter.html

http://www.chillingeffects.org/question.cgi?QuestionID=132

http://www.crucialp.com/resources/tutorials/web-hosting/how-to-file-dmca-counter-claim.php

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/06/03/7-common-questions-about-dmca-counter-notices/

Jagatic and others saw this in 2007 in their work on social phishing at Indiana University.

We saw the same in our PhishGuru work at Carnegie Mellon, on training people not to fall for phishing scams in 2009.

As an aside, I know many slashdotters don't believe you can train people to protect themselves from phishing. That is the standard conventional wisdom in computer security. However, we've actually demonstrated that you can, if you make it fun, timely, and relevant. We're commercializing some micro games for security training and a service for simulated phishing attacks based on research we did at Carnegie Mellon.

Here's a way of handling certs which doesn't rely on those organizations: Perspectives

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~perspectives/

The only interesting thing to know would be "is this site using the same certificate as the last time I connected to it". And the shitty browsers don't tell you that.

Perspectives does that, and then some.

Furthermore, what the hell do you do with a dead cat?

Cure warts with them, of course!

It is already amazing what can be done with an optical camera.

However using depth images Andrew Johnson did some impressive work on recognising objects in 3D depth maps. And Dan Munoz recently worked on applying this kind of algorithms to Willowgarage's PR2 robot. With your Kinect driver, depth sensors are getting within reach of hobby developers.

Use Perspectives.

I realize you're joking, but:

Eliza in Emacs Lisp: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/classics/eliza/emacs/0.html

To run Tetris in Emacs, use M-x tetris . (That is Emacs notation for alt-x, then type 'tetris', then enter.)

http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/kbbrowser/anonymous

# competeswith

        * scientology
                    o CPL @23 (50.0%) on 19-jan-2010 [ 'arg2 tried to sue arg1' ]

"microsoft is a company that produces macos" Iteration: 155 Date: 29-sep-2010 Confidence: 93.8 Macos

Oh dear. The good news is that at this rate it probably won't have sufficient knowledge to develop a plan to destroy the human race when it stumbles on youtube comments.

Interestingly it has found out about Jesus Christ and has concluded he is a member of the Godhead, and will return in glory. Unfortunately it thinks "Godhead" is his band, and "Glory" is his next film! I think they have some disambiguation problems.

Arnold Schwarzenegger gets the honor of being the top male that's categorized a female with 100% confidence, followed by Colin Firth http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/kbbrowser/pred:female

All of Andrej Bauer's SOMADS had achieved sentience and distinct personality profiles 10 years before this at the SAME UNIVERSITY. They were fed a steady diet of Usenet and Objectivist and Existential philosophy, and as such were able to interact not only with humans, but each other, leading to some elucidating exchanges that could not help but further the art and science of artificial intelligence design.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/andrej/www/quadratic.html

http://randomfoo.net/junk/200402/xalton.forum2000.org/matrix/forum_hof_questions.html