The American Psychosomatic Society has selected Carnegie Mellon University’s J. David Creswell as the recipient of its 2017 Herbert Weiner Early Career Award.

Since 1991, the annual award has recognized scientists who, in the early stages of their careers, have contributed significantly to the fields of health psychology and behavioral medicine, and have shown substantial promise of continued academic accomplishments.

Creswell, associate professor of psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, focuses on how the mind and brain influence stress resilience and physical health. He does this by integrating neuroimaging, biological and behavioral methods to understand stress regulation. Among his many discoveries, Creswell was the first to determine the brain mechanisms that cause stress management strategies, such as mindfulness meditation and self-affirmation, to work.

“David is an impressive scientist, collaborator and teacher, and his work is already having an enormous impact on health psychology,” said Michael J. Tarr, head of the Department of Psychology. “We are delighted that the American Psychosomatic Society has chosen to honor David, and it will be exciting to watch his career unfold further.”

Most of Creswell’s work examines stress, coping strategies and interventions. For example, he discovered that self-affirmation promotes recovery from breast cancer, improves problem-solving under stress and reduces biological stress reactivity. Creswell’s early mindfulness meditation research demonstrated that fostering mindful awareness can reduce biological stress reactivity and can improve a broad range of stress-related health and disease outcomes.

In another line of research, Creswell uses human brain imaging to understand learning and decision-making. He found that the brain regions responsible for making decisions continue to be active even when the conscious brain is distracted with a different task. The research provides initial indications that show how the brain unconsciously processes decision information in ways that lead to improved decision-making.

Creswell’s work is on the forefront of the brand new field of health neuroscience, which he is credited for helping to establish. Bridging behavioral and health psychology with brain research, health neuroscience is the missing link between understanding how health and well-being is mediated by the brain.

“Overall, David’s work has addressed important and interesting questions, using multiple and innovative techniques,” said Sheldon Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty University Professor of Psychology at CMU and world-renowned health psychologist. “He has developed promising theoretical approaches to an area that sorely lacked theory and has been a prolific and impactful contributor. He has received substantial funding for his work in an extremely competitive funding environment.”

Creswell’s work is having an impact outside of academia as well — his research has been regularly featured in the media, including The New York Times, USA Today, The Today Show, Huffington Post and many others.

At CMU, Creswell is also a faculty member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and BrainHub. He also was the recipient of the American Psychological Association’s 2014 Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology.

Creswell will receive the Herbert Weiner Early Career Award at the organization’s next meeting, March 15 – 18, in Seville, Spain.

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Research by Jeff Galak and co-authors shows that while gift givers tend to focus on the moment of exchange when selecting a gift, the recipients are more focused on the gift's long-term utility or practical attributes.

Gift givers often make critical errors in gift selection during the holiday season, most notably putting too much emphasis on the actual moment of exchange, according to new research from Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business and Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.

The research by the Tepper School's Jeff Galak, associate professor of marketing - along with co-authors Elanor Williams of the Kelley School, and Tepper School Ph.D. student Julian Givi - shows that while gift givers tend to focus on the moment of exchange when selecting a gift, gift recipients are more focused on the gift's long-term utility or practical attributes.

"We studied many existing frameworks from research in this area, trying to find a common ground between them. What we found was that the giver wants to 'wow' the recipient and give a gift that can be enjoyed immediately, in the moment, while the recipient is more interested in a gift that provides value over time," Galak said.

"We are seeing a mismatch between the thought processes and motivations of gift givers and recipients. Put another way, there may be times when the vacuum cleaner, a gift that is unlikely to wow most recipients when they open it on Christmas day, really ought to be at the top of the shopping list as it will be well used and liked for a long time," Galak explained.

The researchers found that this differential focus on the moment of exchange and the desirability of the gift showed up in a number of different ways. For instance, some gift giving errors included:

• Giving unrequested gifts in an effort to surprise the recipient, when, in fact, they are likely hoping for a gift from a pre-constructed list or registry;
• Focusing on tangible, material gifts, which are likely to be immediately well received, when, in fact, experiential gifts, such as theater tickets or a massage, would result in more enjoyment later on; or
• Giving socially responsible gifts, such as donations to a charity in the recipient's name, which seem special at the moment of gift exchange, but provide almost no value to recipients down the road.

Raj Rajkumar has helped Carnegie Mellon become a research hub for driverless technology.

Raj Rajkumar, the George Westinghouse Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, has been named a 2016 Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

Nominated by their peers, NAI Fellows have "demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society."

NAI nominees must be named an inventor on at least one patent and be affiliated with a university, government or nonprofit research institute, or other academic entity. The NAI Fellows Program represents more than 757 inventors worldwide and nearly 26,000 patents.

Rajkumar, an internationally reputed researcher in embedded real-time systems, cyber-physical systems, operating systems and wireless sensor networks, holds three patents and founded Ottomatika, astartup that commercialized his research on intelligent software for self-driving vehicles. Ottomatika was acquired by Delphi Automotive in 2016.

A leading expert in autonomous vehicle research, Rajkumar helped Carnegie Mellon become a research hub for driverless technology. He is director of two U.S. Department of Transportation National University Transportation centers (UTC), including the recently announced Mobility21 and the Technologies for Safe and Efficient Transportation National UTC on Safety. He is co-director of the GM-CMU Connected and Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab and director of Metro21, a center related to smart cities.

Rajkumar was named a 2012 Fellow by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for "contributions to predictable real-time systems and operating systems," and was the 2009 recipient of the IEEE's Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award. In 2011, Rajkumar received the Carnegie Science Award in Information Technology, which recognizes innovation in the development and commercialization of an information technology-based solution resulting in significant business impact.

Rajkumar joins five other Carnegie Mellon faculty members who are also NAI Fellows: President Subra Suresh, Jay Whitacre, Krzysztof Matyjaszewski, José F. Moura and Raj Reddy.

Rajkumar will be formally inducted on April 6, 2017, during the NAI's Sixth Annual Conference at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

By Shilo Rea

Stephen E. Fienberg, University Professor of Statistics and Social Science at Carnegie Mellon University, died Wednesday, Dec. 14, in Pittsburgh. He was 74.

An internationally acclaimed statistician, Fienberg was best known for developing and using statistical applications to influence science and public policy in many areas, including aspects of human rights, privacy and confidentiality, forensics, survey and census taking. He was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1999 and made theoretical and methodological advances in algebraic and multivariate statistics, followed his wide-ranging curiosity into other disciplines and helped to pioneer machine learning as a field and at CMU. He shared his passion for statistics and his work with his students and junior faculty members, training and mentoring the next generation of statisticians and data scientists.

"For 36 years, Steve was one of Carnegie Mellon's most valued citizens," said Provost Farnam Jahanian. "A brilliant, nationally renowned statistician and a thought leader on data-sharing, he made a transformative impact on the fields of social and behavioral science and machine learning. As a teacher and leader, he was collaborative, thoughtful and remarkably generous — a truly rare find. Steve has left an indelible mark on the institution and on the countless students, faculty and staff who were fortunate to work alongside him."

Fienberg joined CMU's Statistics Department in 1980 and, over the years, added additional appointments in the Machine Learning Department, CyLab and Heinz College. He served as head of the Department of Statistics from 1981-1984 and was instrumental in moving it from a freestanding department into the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (now the Dietrich College) and retaining and recruiting world-class faculty. From 1987-1991, Fienberg served as dean of the college, creating the Modern Languages Department and expanding the college's overall stature and impact.

"It was an incredible fortune to know and work with Steve Fienberg. He was the consummate academic who did it all — from administrative work to teaching and advising all while working to solve many of society's grand challenges," said Richard Scheines, dean of the Dietrich College. "Steve had preternatural energy, and he made everything he took on better, including the Statistics Department, the National Academy of Sciences, the Machine Learning Department, you name it.  He was rightfully regarded by his CMU colleagues and his collaborators around the world as a world-class talent. He will be sorely missed."

Fienberg was deeply involved with NAS for more than 40 years. He served on 35 committees and panels addressing everything from bilingual education and census taking to research methodology and the accuracy of polygraph tests. For the past 12 years, he was part of the report review process, in which a team of up to 25 reviewers ensures that the results of a study are effectively and accurately communicated. Fienberg was responsible for reviewing 200 reports each year.

He also served on the Standing Committee of the American Opportunity Study, which aims to combine existing data from the U.S. census, surveys and programs like Social Security to study individuals and families over time.

"Out of all of his valuable contributions to the activities of the National Academies, Steve's most impactful contribution has been as co-chair for the past eight years of the Report Review Committee.  Steve's exceptional regard for integrity and quality has ensured that reports met the Academies' highest standards for objectivity and evidence.  As Steve recently told me, 'we've had a good run!'  His unique contributions and style will be greatly missed by all of us at the Academies," said Porter E. Coggeshall, executive director of Report Review at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

An example of Fienberg's foresight and pioneering work is the 1985 report for the National Research Council on data sharing that examined the advantages and disadvantages to opening access to research data for reanalysis. It also outlined recommendations to responsibly share data and is considered to be the seminal report on the topic.

"Steve was a clear role model for how statisticians can make a difference. He had an abiding passion for statistics and its role as a force for good in the world. He was intensely dedicated to his work and focused on doing things the right way. Steve was also incredibly invested in guiding and supporting students, from those in his freshman seminars to the doctoral students he advised. CMU Statistics would not be what it is today without him," said Christopher R. Genovese, head of the Statistics Department.

Fienberg was also an expert in forensic science and was the only statistician on the National Commission on Forensic Science, which works to strengthen and enhance the practice of forensic science by developing guidance where forensic science and the criminal justice system intersect. For NAS, Fienberg chaired the Panel on Statistical Assessments as Evidence in the Courts, whose 1989 report includes a case study assessing the quality of forensic hair identification and recommendations to improve judges', juries' and attorneys' understanding of statistical evidence, and the Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph, which found that polygraph testing was too flawed for security screening.

"Steve Fienberg's career has no analogue in my lifetime," said Robert Groves, provost of Georgetown University and former director of the U.S. Census Bureau. "He contributed to advancements in theoretical statistics while at the same time nurturing the application of statistics in fields as diverse as forensic science, cognitive psychology, and the law. He was uniquely effective in his career because he reached out to others, respected them for their expertise, and perceptively saw connections among knowledge domains when others couldn't see them. He thus contributed both to the field of statistics and to the broader human understanding of the world." 

Fienberg played a key role in making Carnegie Mellon a center for research in machine learning. Machine learning draws on both computer science and statistics to enable computer programs to identify patterns in data, learn from experience and improve their performance.

"Throughout the past 20 years, Steve has been a strong advocate for true interdisciplinary study of statistical learning," said Tom E. Mitchell, the E. Fredkin University Professor of Machine Learning and Computer Science. "The ties between the School of Computer Science and the Department of Statistics that he worked so hard to forge have provided computer scientists with more rigorous mathematical tools and statisticians with new challenges and opportunities."

Recently, Fienberg was one of 13 top scientists convened by NAS and the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands to determine how to address scientific controversies ranging from problems replicating results to researcher misconduct and sensationalism. The group, which also included CMU President Subra Suresh, identified several ways to change incentives for quality and correction.

Fienberg is also responsible for developing a new generation of thoughtful and dedicated scientists. In addition to the countless students he taught and worked with on research projects, 43 Ph.D. students wrote their dissertations under his direction.

"Steve had a gift for seeing something in people and for finding a way to offer you the right support and put you on a right path, whatever the right path meant for you," said Aleksandra Slavkovic, who received a masters in human-computer interaction (1999) and statistics (2001) and a Ph.D. in statistics (2004), all from CMU, and is a professor of statistics at Penn State University.

"You had to work hard, but he gave you freedom to find the path, to find your best, to build your confidence while being there to support you," Slavkovic said. "Understanding that there was a big shift in my academic focus and potential career when I started the graduate program in statistics, he simply said, 'there will be obstacles on the way, but we will overcome them!' I would like to stress the use of 'we' here. That's who he was, someone willing to offer endless support to his advisees no matter where they were in their career. Nowadays when I speak with my students and advisees, in moments of their doubt, I often recall that moment."

She added, "I feel extremely lucky and grateful to have had Steve as my Ph.D. adviser in statistics and as a mentor and colleague. Both he and his wife Joyce have been very dear friends."

Fienberg was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Royal Society of Canada, American Statistical Association (ASA), Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA).

With CMU's Bill Eddy, Fienberg co-founded CHANCE in 1988. The non-technical magazine is designed for anyone who has an interest in using data to advance science, education and society and is co-published quarterly by ASA and Taylor & Francis Group. Fienberg also co-founded the "Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality," was the editor-in-chief of the "Annals of Applied Statistics" and founding editor of the "Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application."

His many honors include the 1982 Committee of Presidents of Statistical Society President's Award for Outstanding Statistician Under the Age of 40; the 2002 ASA Samuel S. Wilks Award for his distinguished career in statistics; the first Statistical Society of Canada's Lise Manchester Award in 2008 to recognize excellence in state-of-the-art statistical work on problems of public interest; the 2015 National Institute of Statistical Sciences Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research; the 2015 R.A. Fisher Lecture Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies and the ISBA 2016 Zellner Medal.

Fienberg published more than 500 technical papers, brief papers, editorials and discussions.  He edited 19 books, reports and other volumes and co-authored seven books, including 1999's "Who Counts? The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America," which he called "one of his proudest achievements."

In October, the Statistics Department held a two-day event to honor Fienberg. Nearly 150 people attended a dinner, series of talks and the inaugural Fienberg lecture, given by Stephen Stigler, the Burton Distinguished Service Professor of Statistics at the University of Chicago.

Speaking at the event, Fienberg said, "The ability to take the broadest approach to what is considered to be statistics is what makes CMU's Statistics Department great, and there are very few places other than Carnegie Mellon where that could happen and thrive. It has been fantastic spending the past 36 years at CMU, working with so many terrific students, postdocs, faculty and staff."

At CMU, Fienberg co-directed the Living Analytics Research Centre, jointly with Singapore Management University, from 2011-2016. He was also a member of the Center for Human Rights Science, Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence and Quality of Life Technology Center.

He was also active in the Pittsburgh community and served in various roles for the boards of the Hillel Foundation-Jewish University Center of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh and Jewish Healthcare Foundation.

Originally from Toronto, Canada, Fienberg received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and statistics from the University of Toronto and his master's degree and doctorate in statistics from Harvard University.

Fienberg is survived by his wife, Joyce, and their two sons, Anthony and Howard, a brother, Lorne, and six grandchildren.

Services will be at 1 p.m., Friday, Dec. 16 at Tree of Life/Or L' Simcha Congregation, 5898 Wilkins Ave., Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA  15217. There will be no prior visitation. Interment at Tree of Life Memorial Park. In memoriam contributions may be made to the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, UPMC Cancer Pavillion, Suite 1B, 5150 Centre Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15232. Arrangements entrusted to Ralph Schugar Chapel, Inc.

Computer scientists and statisticians at Carnegie Mellon University are comparing artificial intelligence and the wisdom of crowds in forecasting flu activity this winter.

During the last flu season, three forecasting systems developed at CMU were more accurate than 11 competing systems used by other external groups.

“Our predictions last season proved to be reasonable, but when it comes to forecasting epidemics, whether it be for the flu or for other diseases, we’re just getting our feet wet,” said Roni Rosenfeld, professor in the Language Technologies Institute and the Machine Learning Department of the School of Computer Science.

Rosenfeld is a member of the Delphi research group, which includes faculty and students from CMU’s Machine Learning, Statistics, Computer Science and Computational Biology departments. The group is part of a research initiative with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop methods of accurately forecasting flu activity.

Last season’s predictions by the top-ranked CMU forecast system were within 25 percent of the CDC’s best estimate of flu activity just 75 percent of the time, said Ryan Tibshirani, associate professor of statistics and machine learning. The forecasts are made week by week during the flu season and the CDC updates its best estimate of flu activity throughout the flu season and for several weeks thereafter.

Making those predictions more reliable on a weekly basis would no doubt be necessary before such forecasts might be used for deciding when to launch flu information and vaccination campaigns or for making staffing and scheduling decisions within the health care industry, he added.

“We’re still trying to squeeze everything we can from these models,” Tibshirani said.

Most epidemiological forecasts are based on mechanistic models that consider how diseases spread and who is susceptible to them. But the Delphi group’s top-ranked system was a non-mechanistic model that uses a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning to make predictions based on past patterns and on input from the CDC’s domestic influenza surveillance system. The surveillance system includes reports from doctor’s offices and clinics regarding the prevalence of flu-like symptoms.

Delphi’s second-ranked system uses a different approach — using weekly predictions by humans that, together, reflect the wisdom of crowds. This human system was the top-ranked forecasting system for the 2014-15 flu season, Rosenfeld said.

Rosenfeld said that from a computer scientist’s point of view, “it’s humbling” that the human system has been neck-and-neck with the statistical, machine-learning system. “No human system did better than the statistical system, but in the aggregate, the human system did better that season.

“The human system is more robust in unusual circumstances,” Rosenfeld said, so it may do well when flu activity falls outside normal bounds. “Humans are very good at improvising when they encounter novel circumstances.”

This season’s weekly forecasts began in October and will continue through May. Forecasts are issued for flu activity nationally and for each of 10 regions within the United States. Because of lags in reporting, the actual flu activity levels will not be known until the season is over.

“Obtaining high quality data is critical for epidemiological forecasting, but it’s hard to get,” Rosenfeld said.

Flu is useful for developing forecasting systems because data is plentiful. It is notoriously “noisy” data, however, because the data usually are based on symptoms, not tests for the flu viruses themselves, he added.

The Delphi group also is developing forecasting systems for dengue fever, which sickens about 100 million people worldwide each year and kills thousands. The group plans to apply forecasting tools to other diseases and conditions, including HIV, drug resistance, Ebola, Zika and Chikungunya.

Epidemiological modeling and forecasting is a highly interdisciplinary endeavor. In addition to Rosenfeld and Tibshirani, the Delphi group that previously worked on the CDC flu challenges included David Farrow, who recently earned his Ph.D. in computational biology; Logan Brooks, a Ph.D. student in computer science; and Justin Hyun, a Ph.D. student in statistics.

Members of the public can help the Delphi group’s efforts by joining its “wisdom of crowds” forecasting system by registering online.

The annual Student-Athlete Academic Achievement Celebration celebrates junior and senior athletes who have excelled balancing studies and sports.

Lisa Murphy, the most accomplished basketball player in Carnegie Mellon University's history with more than 1,800 career points, said she is not defined by her success on the court.

"CMU has helped me embrace everything that makes me special, and that makes me 'me,'" she said. "I'm Lisa Murphy, and I am a basketball player, I'm not Lisa Murphy, the basketball player."

Murphy was one of two student speakers at the third annual Student-Athlete Academic Achievement Celebration Dec. 14.

The event celebrates junior and senior athletes who have excelled in their field of study while balancing the challenges of being a student-athlete. This year, the 28 students who were feted had an average grade-point average (GPA) of 3.81. Of those, a dozen have GPAs of 3.9 or higher, and six of them have perfect 4.0s for their college careers.

CMU President Subra Suresh praised student-athletes for their work in the classroom.

"Let me take this opportunity to congratulate you and thank you," President Suresh said. "You not only excel in academics and athletics. You also excel in so many other dimensions, especially as future leaders. That's equally important, and it's also very much appreciated."

Murphy, who is studying psychology with a concentration in child development, said CMU has provided her with internship opportunities in Pittsburgh that have helped her decide which career paths to pursue. She also works on community services projects and has held leadership positions in honor societies and clubs.

"Overall, CMU just radiates this multidisciplinary mindset where both in and outside the classroom students want to explore and cultivate all the pieces of what makes them extraordinary," she said.

Athletic Director Josh Centor said the excellence CMU student-athletes demonstrate in the classrooms and on the playing fields deserves applause.

"Carnegie Mellon is one of the greatest universities in the world," Centor said. "Our students will be the ones who become future leaders of this country in all facets of industry — in engineering, in medicine, in teaching, in business."

Centor said CMU's intercollegiate athletics program is developing into one of the most competitive in the country. This fall, five of six teams advanced to postseason play, and four teams reached their respective NCAA championships. This year also marked the second straight year in which the football team received a bowl bid.

"Among our best students are many of our best athletes and competitors," Centor said. "Academic and athletic success is not mutually exclusive, and they prove that every day."

A member of the University Athletic Association, CMU has 18 intercollegiate teams. Like all NCAA Division III schools, athletic scholarships are prohibited, so students compete for the joy of the game. The students study in a wide variety of undergraduate programs that represent the entire university.

Tristan Lockwood, a senior in social decisions sciences and a member of the men's soccer team, shared why playing soccer had been an important part of his life for many years at the celebration.

He said student-athletes often say that sports have taught them leadership, teamwork, accountability, time management and how to handle adversity. But, he and his teammates have learned much more.

"For me there is something more important that we have all gained as athletes that has made it all worth it," he said. "And that is the idea that in order to truly better yourself — in order to truly succeed — you need to do the right thing every day."

He said through participating in athletics that concept of focusing on the right things in each aspect of life and not cutting corners can become a personality trait.

"I have heard Josh Centor say on multiple occasions, that yes, winning is important, but we will never sacrifice our values to win a game," he said. "That statement sums up the most important lesson that I believe I have learned from being a student-athlete at CMU. I hope we can all carry that forward into our everyday lives."

Carnegie Mellon University’s Dudley Reynolds will lead policymakers and industry professionals at ​a February summit in Athens, Greece, to discuss the future of teaching English to speakers of other languages.

Reynolds, a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon in Qatar and president of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) International, said the Feb. 9-10 summit, will also mark 50 years of the TESOL International Association.

“There’s no question that the number of people speaking or learning English is increasing exponentially, and that change isn’t going to stop anytime soon,” Reynolds said.

“What it means to know English — in other words, what the standards are, what the rules are, what the normal way is to say something — those rules and conventions are changing rapidly. That’s something we have to acknowledge and talk about.”

Carnegie Mellon jumpstarted its English language teaching expertise when the university opened its Qatar campus in 2004. Reynolds arrived on the scene in 2007, having been recruited by David Kaufer, then head of Carnegie Mellon’s Department of English, and Danielle Wetzel, director of the university’s first-year writing program in Pittsburgh.

“Opening the campus in Qatar forced the issue,” Kaufer said. “It was time for us to come to grips with the fact that while we have a writing program that is perhaps one of the best American writing programs in the country, we now needed to aspire to be one of the best writing programs in the world for global English.”

And that cannot be accomplished by assuming everybody is going to write and speak American English, Kaufer noted.

“More and more people every year are speaking English and making English their own,” he said. “We have to accommodate the fact that many of our students coming from other countries will never speak the exact English the inner circle speaks.”

One challenge non-native speakers face is that the English language is filled with idioms tied to American culture.

“Understanding the meaning of phrases such as ‘spill the beans’ or ‘let the cat out of the bag’ is vital background for understanding even a simple newspaper article,” Kaufer said.

Another aspect of teaching English to non-native speakers is helping international students acclimate to the American classroom.

“The American classroom is very different from many classrooms worldwide,” Wetzel explained. “In Pittsburgh we had many international students who never raised their hands in class because in classrooms from some parts of the world, there is little to no discussion. If students were to raise their hands in those classrooms, that behavior could be interpreted as an inappropriate interruption.”

Wetzel’s mother was not born in the U.S., so she has seen firsthand how language can lock or open doors for people. She has been helping to build a team and a curriculum that can address the needs of CMU’s international student population in Pittsburgh, which has nearly doubled in a decade.

She and Reynolds also are part of a Simon Initiative effort in writing and communication, co-directed by Kaufer and Richard Scheines, dean of the Dietrich College, to increase access to writing and communication-related experiences across the Carnegie Mellon system.

“We’re often talking about excellence at Carnegie Mellon, and wow, if you’re a student here who speaks multiple languages in addition to having amazing technical skills, you are going to be far ahead of students who aren’t multilingual,” Wetzel said.

“Our challenge is to get students to connect the importance of good communication skills to their future goals. Of course, this challenge is not unique to our multilingual students only,” she added.

Kaufer framed the importance of communication skills in a larger context.

“As important as the technical skills are, and they are very important, what also determines growth in a profession is one’s soft skills — one’s ability not only to speak and write and communicate visually but to work well in diverse teams and even lead them,” he said.

With respect to the design of English courses for Qatar, Reynolds said the priority is always to teach what the student needs, and that means understanding their current level of knowledge, their current competency in English, and the ways in which they need to use English.

“In a university, the kind of writing a student of business does is different from the kind of writing a computer scientist does,” he said. “One is market plans. The other is a research report. When you’ve got both students in your course, how do you give them a foundation that will start them on the road to doing well in their specific disciplines?”

As an English professor, Reynolds enjoys working closely with colleagues in computer science, business, information technology and biology.

“I’ll have a computer scientist come and say, ‘Hey, can you take a look at this writing assignment?’ or ‘I’m not sure how to evaluate my student’s writing.’ Or sometimes it’s me asking them, ‘What would be a good assignment for a class that would be interesting to a computer scientist?’” Reynolds said.

“It’s a synergy that is very exciting. The Qatar campus is a sort of laboratory for higher education and what higher education can be, and I love that about it,” he added.

Kaufer and others are building on this momentum, based on the knowledge that there is a global marketplace for people who can teach English as a second language.

Students concentrating in English as a Second Language in the Masters in Applied Second Language Acquisition program can obtain a TESOL certificate to enhance their teaching opportunities abroad. Doctoral candidates can obtain a TESOL certificate as an add-on to their degree.

Reynolds is excited about the ideas that will develop from the TESOL Summit and stressed that while someone may be a language learner, it has no relationship to their intelligence.

“They may be struggling with English but, especially if they’ve been admitted to CMU, they are an incredibly bright individual who knows a lot, who has a lot to offer the world,” he said.

“You’ve got to be careful not to let judgments about language ability cloud your judgment about them as an individual.”

Those who wish to participate in the summit and online discussions are invited to register online.

A virtual reality experience themed around racially motivated police brutality won the People’s Choice Award at the CHI PLAY conference in Austin, Texas. The interactive story, called “Injustice,” was created by a team of students in the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University.

In “Injustice,” users witness an act of racial discrimination happening in front of them and are forced to make moral and ethical decisions on the spot. The experience was created by using 10 GoPro cameras on a mannequin rig to capture every angle of the situation, giving users a completely immersive live video experience.

“The experience starts at the bus stop where the user encounters an African-American guy. He asks you if you need any help,” artist Elizabeth Won explained. “But after a while, you see this guy get in trouble with police officers right in front of you for some unknown reason. The situation escalates drastically, and you as a bystander can intervene or ignore.”

Watch the trailer.

Overall, the team sought to explore the emotional impact of virtual reality versus traditional film.

“Documentaries can be very powerful, but you can create much more empathy in a virtual reality experience than you can in any other experience. You can see what it must be like to walk in someone else’s shoes,” said Ralph Vituccio, assistant teaching professor and faculty co-leader on the project.

Vituccio would like to see more virtual reality projects aimed at social change, helping people better understand, for example, what it’s like to live as a Syrian refugee; or as someone of a different race or religion; or with a handicap; or to be a woman walking down the street and being harassed by males.

“Virtual reality is pretty incredible as a way of trying to bridge the communication gap between people, to make people more empathetic to others,” he said. “I think that’s really key.”

In addition to Won, the Injustice team includes Jaehee Cho, Tiffa (Xu) Cheng, Martin (Zixu) Ding, Atit Kothari and Stephanie Fawaz.

“This award showed that virtual reality can be so much more than fun games and inspire people with serious issues,” Cho said. “It motivates me to make other projects that also can have an impact on people.”

Watch the promotional video.

Brenda Harger, co-faculty lead on the project, said she is proud of the student team for not only diving into the live action interactive space, but for choosing to address a relevant issue.

“The result is a powerful validation of using virtual reality to engage at a level that can best be achieved in that medium,” Harger said.

Cho is planning to make more virtual reality experiences aimed at social issues. The Injustice team graduated this past May, so he is in the process of gathering new team members and looking for funding opportunities.

CHI PLAY is an international and interdisciplinary conference for researchers and professionals across all areas of play, games and human-computer interaction.

Chrystal Thomas, a senior majoring in biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon University’s Mellon College of Science (MCS), has been named to this year’s class of Schwarzman Scholars. The highly selective scholarship program will fully fund Thomas as she completes a master’s degree in global affairs with a concentration in public policy at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Thomas joins 129 students from 30 countries and 75 universities selected for the honor, and each scholar will pursue a master’s degree at Tsinghua University in 2017. Founded by Blackstone Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder Stephen A. Schwarzman, the program is quickly becoming the premier training ground for future leaders. Now in its second year, the scholarship program focuses on preparing exceptional students to confront future challenges and provide them with the opportunity to develop an understanding of China.

“Chrystal is one of the top students that I have known in my 38 years at Carnegie Mellon,” said Eric Grotzinger, associate dean for undergraduate affairs, emeritus, at MCS.  “She has great intellectual ability, is highly motivated, is a leader, and has a strong vision on how she will create policies and programs to benefit people around the world.  She will become a world leader in the area of public health.”

Thomas first became interested in public health and policy during a Leadership Alliance Summer Undergraduate Research Internship at the University of Pennsylvania, where she participated in a conference aimed at resolving conflicts of interest between academia and industry and discovered her passion for facilitating dialogues to create positive results. During an internship at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Disease the following summer, Thomas’s interest in the field was cemented when she attended a keynote speech on public health.

“I think there are a lot of people who want to get things done, but because they don’t effectively communicate with teammates who hold different perspectives from them, progress toward their vision gets hindered. With the Schwarzman Scholarship, I’m really hoping to work on my own communication and decision-making skills so that I can help as many people as possible,” Thomas said.

Thomas was drawn to the Schwarzman program in part by the opportunity to study abroad. The daughter of a Haitian immigrant, she is interested in barriers to health care faced by immigrant families. One-third of the immigrants moving to the United States are from China, and she hopes that she will learn more about the Chinese health care system.

Carnegie Mellon’s Fellowships and Scholarships Office (FSO) guided Thomas through the Schwartzman Scholar application and interview process.

“Authentic and inspiring, Chrystal exemplifies the leadership qualities that the Schwarzman Scholar Program seeks,” said Joanna Dickert, assistant director of Undergraduate Research and National Fellowships.  “She is deeply committed to advancing the discourse on equity and inclusion at all levels and has a track record on campus and in the community that speaks to these interests.

“Chrystal’s academic and leadership experiences at Carnegie Mellon provide an important foundation for meaningful engagement with other Schwarzman Scholars and her host community at Tsinghua University,” Dickert said. 

Thomas is an active member of the CMU community, especially in activities focused on fostering diversity at the university. She is the founder and president of Colors@CMU, a student organization that promotes open conversations on race and diversity. She was an inaugural member of the Diversity and Inclusion Roundtable, which provides counsel to Provost Farnam Jahanian and other senior leaders on diversity initiatives for the university. She is a mentor in the Coaching Minority Progress and Success in Science (COMPASS) program.

Thomas has received a number of awards and recognitions for her work in and out of the classroom. In 2013, she received a Gates Millennium Scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This fall, she was named an Andrew Carnegie Society Scholar, a distinction bestowed upon only 40 graduating seniors.

After completing her master’s degree at Tsinghua University, Thomas plans to attend medical school to pursue degres in medicine and public health.

From visits by President Barack Obama and Stephen Colbert to a record-number of first-year women in computer science and technology, Carnegie Mellon University continued to build new foundations and forge new paths with work that matters. Here is a selection of some of the top stories from the past year:

CMU's Proportion of Undergraduate Women in Computer Science and Engineering Soars Above National Averages
While national efforts to encourage women to pursue degrees in key science and technology fields have flagged, CMU reached a new high-water mark.

Legal Settlement Recognizes Groundbreaking Research, Brings University $250 Million
Carnegie Mellon reached a settlement in its 2009 patent infringement lawsuit against Marvell Technology Group Ltd. and Marvell Semiconductor, Inc.

Obama, Leading Scientists Explore Frontiers at CMU
President Obama made his fifth visit to CMU, this time for The White House Frontiers Conference, a large gathering that discussed building America's capacity in science, technology and innovation.

Colbert Drops by CMU, Offers President Obama Resume Tips
President Obama received some unsolicited career advice at CMU from Stephen Colbert, host of CBS' "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert."

Rebecca Doerge Appointed Dean of Mellon College of Science
Rebecca Doerge, the Trent and Judith Anderson Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Purdue University, was appointed dean of the Mellon College of Science.

Building Connections: Sherman and Joyce Bowie Scott Hall Opens Window to the World
Like a puzzle piece, the building and its amenities connect fields of study and expand collaboration across CMU.

World Economic Forum Features Eight CMU Faculty in Conversation With World Leaders at Davos
CMU faculty — one of the largest university delegations at the prestigious conference — met with government and business leaders from around the world to explain the latest research in fields such as big data, artificial intelligence and climate change.

President Suresh Takes Ride in Uber Driverless Car
Carnegie Mellon President Subra Suresh joined Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto for the first official ride in an Uber self-driving car. The commercial application of autonomous driving has drawn national attention, highlighting the formative role Carnegie Mellon research has played in the field.

CMU Spinoff Wins $2 Million in Cyber Attack Challenge
ForAllSecure, a Carnegie Mellon startup, won $2 million in prize money as winners of the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge, a first-of-its-kind hacking contest in which all participants were autonomous computer systems.

Carnegie Mellon Marks Launch of Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship
The university created the Swartz Center with support from a $31 million gift from James Swartz, a distinguished entrepreneur and founding partner of the global venture capital firm Accel Partners.

Carnegie Mellon Alumni Goldsberry, Odom, Jr. Win Tony Awards
Alumni Renée Elise Goldsberry and Leslie Odom, Jr. received Tony Awards for their roles in the blockbuster musical "Hamilton," bringing the number of Tonys received by Carnegie Mellon alumni to 43. CMU and the Tonys also announced that Marilyn G. McCormick, a teacher at Cass Technical High School in Detroit, won the Excellence in Theatre Education Award.

CMU, ANSYS Break Ground for New Maker Hub
CMU and ANSYS broke ground for a 30,000 square-foot facility that will become the hub of the College of Engineering's undergraduate program.

CMU Joins MasterCard Foundation To Educate Next Generation of African Tech Leaders
This new partnership at CMU's program in Kigali, Rwanda, will benefit 125 academically talented but economically disadvantaged students from Sub-Saharan Africa.

U.S. Team Wins Second Consecutive International Mathematical Olympiad
Under Coach Po-Shen Loh, associate professor in CMU's Department of Mathematical Sciences, the U.S. defeated teams from more than 100 countries in this year's competition in Hong Kong.

"Transformative" Cohon Center Addition Opens
The much-anticipated addition to the Jared L. Cohon University Center officially opened in mid-May. The new 62,000 square-foot multipurpose space will enhance campus life for students, faculty and staff.

Carnegie Mellon Receives $10 Million From K&L Gates To Study Ethical Issues Posed by Artificial Intelligence
As the ethical and policy issues surrounding artificial intelligence and other computing technologies take center stage, the global law firm made a gift to help ensure Carnegie Mellon's leadership in this emerging field.

Carnegie Mellon Featured on CBS's "60 Minutes"
"60 Minutes" correspondent Charlie Rose came to Carnegie Mellon to see the state-of-the-art work being conducted and talk with School of Computer Science Dean Andrew Moore about where AI is taking humankind.

Task Force on CMU Experience Tackles Important Campus Issues
President Suresh charged Provost Farnam Jahanian with convening an internal, campus-wide task force to closely examine the Carnegie Mellon experience and develop recommendations to enhance this community for students, faculty, staff and alumni. The Task Force is working in parallel with the President’s Advisory Board for the CMU Experience.

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon Awarded Coveted NEH Grant
The interactive online tool allows anyone to trace the personal relationships among figures like Bacon, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton and many others.

Martin Gaynor Elected to National Academy of Medicine
Gaynor, the E.J. Barone Professor of Economics and Public Policy and former director of the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission, is renowned for his research on competition, antitrust policy and health care markets.

International Team of Scientists Led by Carnegie Mellon Chemistry Professor Verifies the Discovery of Four New Elements
The seventh row of the periodic table is finally set.

Posner Family Gives $5 Million to CMU for Presidential Scholarships
The gift will create a minimum of five undergraduate scholarships each year.

Patrick Wilson Returns To Make Directing Debut
The Broadway, television and movie star returned to his alma mater to make his directorial debut with "The Full Monty."

The J. Erik Jonsson University Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research, emeritus, was the 2016 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division of Developmental/Life-Course Criminology (DLC) of the American Society of Criminology.

Social Historian Sways Smithsonian Dance Performance
Nico Slate never imagined his historical research would inspire dance.

CMU's Heinz College Named Top Analytics Program
Whether it's better understanding consumer behavior, improving health care for veterans or finding ways to save taxpayer money, operations research and analytics play a critical role.

Great-granddaughter Follows Path of CMU's First Ph.D. Graduate
In 1919, Mao Yisheng was the recipient of the first Ph.D. ever given by the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now known as Carnegie Mellon. In 2016, his great-granddaughter Patricia Xu graduated with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering.

Website Gets a New Look
Some of the most popular pages on www.cmu.edu have a new look and new content. The new pages are responsive, and the updates are part of an ongoing cmu.edu web redesign project that includes an overhaul of the site architecture.

June Beighley, right, is a 1991 graduate of CMU’s Mellon College of Science, and co-teaches AP computer science at Pittsburgh's Creative and Performing Arts High School. Photo by Brian Cohen.

Carnegie Mellon University has teamed up with Microsoft to enlarge Pittsburgh's pipeline for computer scientists.

The Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS) program in the Pittsburgh Public Schools pairs computer science professionals with educators to teach computer science to high school students.

"We recognized that the earlier you can expose people to the discipline, the more likely they are to have an interest," said Mark Stehlik, assistant dean for outreach in CMU's School of Computer Science.

The program also benefits high school teachers and computer science professionals. Teachers learn the fundamentals of computer science and computer scientists learn classroom management.

Microsoft launched TEALS in the Pacific Northwest before expanding across the U.S. Approached about establishing a program in Pittsburgh, Stehlik reached out to CMU alumni, including Spencer Whitman, who jumped at the chance to volunteer.

Whitman, who earned his bachelor's degree in computer science in 2007 and his master's degree in electrical and computer engineering in 2012, founded the Pittsburgh startup App Certain before moving on to Google and Rent Jungle, a website that consolidates U.S. rental listings.

"I became very passionate about seeing Pittsburgh grow its technical capability and watching the number of startups grow and flourish," Whitman said. "I have a chip on my shoulder that Pittsburgh should be more of a tech community than it is today, and a big part of that is starting computer science education earlier.

"When the TEALS opportunity came along, it totally aligned with my feelings," he said.

Five public Pittsburgh high schools — Allderdice, Brashear, Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA), Carrick, and the Science and Technology Academy — now offer one of three classes: introduction to computer science, computer science principles or AP computer science.

Whitman co-teaches AP computer science at CAPA with University of Pittsburgh alumna Jessica Nebgen and math teacher June Beighley, a 1991 graduate of CMU's Mellon College of Science.

"I haven't taught computer science for a long time, maybe 12 years. I wanted to teach the course, and while I thought I would be able to figure out the programming, I was really nervous about the computer science principles," Beighley said. "It's wonderful to have the support in the classroom."

By introducing students to computer science professionals — people who program, build robots and design apps — TEALS helps students gain a true understanding of what it takes to build technology.

"We are a bridge between industry and education," said Nathaniel Granor, lead program manager of the TEALS East region, who, along with Pittsburgh TEALS manager Courtney Hodge, worked with CMU and the Pittsburgh Public Schools to launch the program. "The need here is really great. Tech companies are eager to fund pipeline initiatives and are looking for ways to grow more talent.

"We also believe that computer science is a foundational skill set, just like reading, and for the 21st century for whatever industry or role you are in, there is potential for you to use computer science and critical thinking," Granor said.

That philosophy reflects President Obama's Computer Science for All initiative, which aims to empower all American students to learn computer science and have the computational thinking skills they need to be creators in the digital economy, and to be active citizens in a technology-driven world.

Stehlik hopes TEALS will bring that kind of computational thinking to groups that remain underrepresented in computer science. Improving access to computer science at the high school level helps schools like CMU and its peers recruit more diverse students, which remains essential for the future of the industry.

"The more our workforce mirrors the customer base, the more successful the products are," Stehlik said. "We get better results with more viewpoints at the table."

PwC US and Carnegie Mellon University announced today the establishment of the new Risk and Regulatory Services Innovation Center, which will advance how businesses use technology to solve organization-wide issues and address compliance requirements.

Leveraging PwC’s client engagement experience with CMU’s world-class research, faculty and students, the center will support and perform education and non-federal research in risk and compliance-related issues across sectors, specifically audit innovation, data analytics, information privacy and security. CMU faculty, staff and students will work closely with PwC resources to develop and test next-generation solutions for these sectors.

PwC is initially investing $11 million into the new center, including a faculty chair and fellowships, with potential funding of $31 million over five years. PwC and CMU also are developing executive training courses for chief risk officers and chief privacy officers.

“Leveraging our client leadership with Carnegie Mellon’s research leadership is a sure-fire proposition,” said Dean Simone, U.S. Risk Assurance Leader. “We’re investing in a future where our clients in both non- and regulated industries and public safety can maximize technology to solve their biggest challenges. This relationship aligns to our purpose statement: building trust in society and solve complex business problems.”

“We are excited at this opportunity to work with a global leader like PwC to solve real-world business problems,” said CMU President Subra Suresh. “Our thought and research leadership in technology with PwC’s strategic and real-world expertise will make a difference around the world and bring valuable experience and resources to our faculty and students.”

CMU’s internationally renowned strengths, ranging from artificial intelligence, robotics and cybersecurity to the performing arts and technology-enhanced learning, allow for a multidisciplinary approach to meet society’s challenges. CMU’s technology expertise continues to receive significant attention from industry, which has led to agreements with more than 350 U.S. companies.

Related Story
Acquisti Named Director of New PwC-CMU Innovation Center

Alessandro Acquisti has been named the inaugural director of the Risk and Regulatory Services Innovation Center, which was established by PwC and Carnegie Mellon University.

Alessandro Acquisti

The center will work to advance the ways organizations use technology and analytics to solve issues of public safety and information security. The center resides in Carnegie Mellon’s H. John Heinz III College, a combination ideally suited to address these challenges.

“I’m pleased to take up this important research and education role,” said Acquisti, professor of information technology and public policy at CMU’s Heinz College and the director of the Peex (Privacy Economics Experiments) lab at CMU. “The proliferation of data over the last decade has created various challenges for consumers as well as organizations, and especially organizations that face compliance hurdles. This represents an exciting opportunity for our faculty and students to work with PwC to develop and test real-world solutions.”

“Professor Acquisti is the world’s leading scholar in the economics of privacy,” said Ramayya Krishnan, dean of Heinz College. “I am thrilled that he will bring his considerable talents to the Innovation Center and that PwC and their customers will benefit from his expertise.”

Acquisti’s studies have been published in leading journals across diverse disciplines, including economics, information systems, psychology, computer science and marketing. His 2009 study on the predictability of social security numbers received international media attention. Two years after the study, the Social Security Administration changed the assignment scheme of Social Security numbers.

Alka Patel

His research investigates the economics and behavioral economics of privacy, including privacy in online social networks. Acquisti has been the recipient of the PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, the IBM Best Academic Privacy Faculty Award, the Heinz College School of Information Teaching Excellence Award, and numerous Best Paper awards. In 2015, he was named to the inaugural class of the Andrew Carnegie Fellows by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Alka Patel, a registered patent attorney who has worked with startups, universities and Fortune 500 clients on technology and intellectual property matters, has been appointed deputy director of the center. Her specialties include privacy, data security, patents and strategic analysis of intellectual property. Prior to joining CMU, Patel was managing director and senior counsel at BNY Mellon.

By Byron Spice

Poker Pro Dong Kim shown here in the first Brains vs. AI contest in 2015.

Four of the world’s best professional poker players will compete against artificial intelligence developed by Carnegie Mellon University in an epic rematch to determine whether a computer can beat humans playing one of the world’s toughest poker games.

In “Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante,” beginning Jan. 11 at Rivers Casino, poker pros will play a collective 120,000 hands of Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold’em over 20 days against a CMU computer program called Libratus.

The pros — Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou — are vying for shares of a $200,000 prize purse. The ultimate goal for CMU computer scientists, as it was in the first Brains Vs. AI contest at Rivers Casino in 2015, is to set a new benchmark for artificial intelligence.

“Since the earliest days of AI research, beating top human players has been a powerful measure of progress in the field,” said Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science. “That was achieved with chess in 1997, with Jeopardy! in 2009 and with the board game Go just last year. Poker poses a far more difficult challenge than these games, as it requires a machine to make extremely complicated decisions based on incomplete information while contending with bluffs, slow play and other ploys.”

A previous CMU computer program, called Claudico, collected fewer chips than three of the four pros who competed in the 2015 contest. The 80,000 hands played then proved to be too few to establish the superiority of human or computer with statistical significance, leading Sandholm and the pros to increase the number of hands by 50 percent for the rematch.

“I’m very excited to see what this latest AI is like,” said Les, a pro based in Costa Mesa, Calif. “I thought Claudico was tough to play; knowing the resources and the ideas that Dr. Sandholm and his team have had available in the 20 months since the first contest, I assume this AI will be even more challenging.”

Brains Vs. AI is sponsored by GreatPoint Ventures, Avenue4Analytics, TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, the journal Artificial Intelligence, Intel and Optimized Markets, Inc. Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science has partnered with Rivers Casino, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) through a peer-reviewed XSEDE allocation, and Sandholm’s Electronic Marketplaces Laboratory for this event.

“We were thrilled to host the first Brains Vs. AI competition with Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science at Rivers Casino, and we are looking forward to the rematch,” said Craig Clark, general manager of Rivers Casino. “The humans were the victors last time, but with a new AI from the No. 1 graduate school for computer science, the odds may favor the computer. It will be very interesting to watch and see if man or machine develops an early advantage.”

Les said it’s hard to predict the outcome. Not only is the AI presumably better, but the pros themselves are playing better.

“From the human side, poker has gotten much tougher in the last 20 months,” Les said. That’s because pros generally have embraced publicly available game theory tools that have elevated game play, he explained.

“Since the earliest days of AI research, beating top human players has been a powerful measure of progress in the field,” said CMU Computer Science Professor Tuomas Sandholm.

“Though some casual poker fans may not know all of them, Les, Kim, McAulay and Chou are among the very best Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold’em players in the world,” said Phil Galfond, a pro whose total live tournament winnings exceed $2.3 million and who owns the poker training site Runitonce.com.

Unlike the multi-player poker tournaments popular on television, professional one-on-one No-Limit Texas Hold’em is often played online.

“Your favorite poker player almost surely wouldn't agree to play any of these guys for high stakes, and would lose a lot of money if they did,” Galfond added. “Each of the four would beat me decisively.”

The Libratus AI encompasses new ideas and is being built with far more computation than any previous pokerbot, Sandholm said. To create it, he and his Ph.D. student Noam Brown started from scratch.

“We don’t write the strategy,” Sandholm said. “We write the algorithm that computes the strategy.”

He and Brown have developed a new algorithm for computing strong strategies for imperfect-information games and are now using the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Bridges supercomputer to calculate what they hope will be the winning strategy.

“We’re pushing on the supercomputer like crazy,” Sandholm said, noting they have used around 15 million core hours of computation to build Libratus, compared with the 2-3 million core hours used for Claudico. That computing process will continue up to and during the contest.

Claudico’s favored strategy was limping, a poker term for getting into a hand by calling, rather than raising or folding. Sandholm said that Libratus also will limp sometimes.

“It will make many types of weird moves — we know that already,” he added.

Libratus is a Latin word, meaning balanced and powerful. It was chosen because the program’s algorithm incorporates new technology for attaining what game theorists call a Nash equilibrium. Named for the late Carnegie Mellon alumnus and Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash Jr., a Nash equilibrium is a pair of strategies (one per player) where neither player can benefit from changing strategy as long as the other player’s strategy remains the same.

One of Libratus’ new technologies is a faster equilibrium-finding method. It identifies some paths for playing a hand as not promising. Over time, the algorithm starts to ignore those bad paths.

“We don’t write the strategy. We write the algorithm that computes the strategy.” — Tuomas Sandholm

“We found that this is not just faster, but that the answer is better,” Sandholm said.

Another change has to do with endgame strategies. During last year’s contest, the pros noticed Claudico was making some all-too-obvious bluffs that they were able to exploit. Rather than rely on abstractions for endgame play as Claudico did, Libratus will use the Bridges computer to do live computations with a new endgame-solving approach and algorithm.

Head’s Up (two-player) No-Limit Hold’em is an exceedingly complex game, with 10160 (the number 1 followed by 160 zeroes) information sets — each set being characterized by the path of play in the hand as perceived by the player whose turn it is. That’s vastly more information sets than the number of atoms in the universe.

The AI must make decisions without knowing all of the cards in play, while trying to sniff out bluffing by its opponent. As “no-limit” suggests, players may bet or raise any amount up to all of their chips.

Solving such a game has many real-world applications in areas also characterized by incomplete and misleading information, such as business, military, cybersecurity and medicine, Sandholm said. The algorithms are not poker specific but rather apply to a myriad of decision-making situations of incomplete information.

“Extending AI to real-world decision-making, where details are unknown and adversaries are actively revising their strategies, is fundamentally harder than games with perfect information or question-answering systems,” said Nick Nystrom, senior director of research at PSC. “This is where it really gets interesting.”

In February 2016, an earlier AI developed by Sandholm and Brown won both categories of Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold’em in the Annual Computer Poker Competition, announced at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference in Phoenix.

The easier game of Head’s Up Limit Hold’em, which has 1013 information sets, has been near-optimally solved by a computer poker group at the University of Alberta, headed by CMU alumnus Michael Bowling.

To ensure that the outcome of the competition is not due to luck, the four pros will be paired to play duplicate matches — Player A in each pair will receive the same cards as the computer receives against Player B, and vice versa. One of the players in each of these pairs will play on the floor of the casino, while his counterpart will be isolated in a separate room.

For this second installment of Brains Vs. AI, the pros have agreed to increase the number of hands to improve the chance of reaching statistical significance, that is,ruling out with high confidence the possibility that either the humans or the computer win by just getting lucky. To do so, the pros will play more days and will “two-table,” playing two hands simultaneously.

Play will begin at 11 a.m. each day at Rivers Casino and end around 7 p.m. The public is welcome to observe game play, which will be in Rivers’ Poker Room.

The site of the competition, Pittsburgh’s Rivers Casino, opened in 2009 and has been named “Best Overall Gaming Resort” in Pennsylvania by Casino Player Magazine for seven years straight. No one under age 21 is permitted on casino property.

Winners of Carnegie Mellon University’s 2017 Martin Luther King, Jr. Writing Awards tackled topics from self-identity and racism to terrorism and the U.S. presidential election. The awards program — established in 1999 to give high school and college students a safe, creative space to explore racial and cultural differences — received a record-breaking 220 entries from 16 high schools and five colleges.

The student winners will read their poems and essays at an awards ceremony at 4:30 p.m., Monday, Jan. 16, in CMU’s Rangos Ballroom in the Cohon University Center. The winners will receive cash prizes and their pieces will be published in a booklet distributed at the ceremony. Local music groups will perform, and the family-friendly event is free and open to the public.

“I was particularly excited to have a number of new schools participate this year. The more schools that submit work, the more representative of the community the awards become,” said Jim Daniels, the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English who founded and directs the awards program.

Zainab Adisa, 17 and a student at Pittsburgh’s Creative and Performing Arts School (CAPA), won first place in high school poetry for “We Are Americans.” In it Adisa struggles with a Brazilian friend who tells her she is not an American.

No, I am not American, he’s right.
My blood lines the heritage of Nigerian
village kin whose accents flow in a wind
I have yet to tame and words
I’ve yet to claim.
But when he says,
“You are not American”
I know he knows nothing about my heritage.
Without knowing, he is referring to citizens
of the United States of America.
to the blondes
with blue eyes
and peckish habits,
to the brunettes
with long legs
and apparent attitudes,
to the pale skinned
with their perfect
verb conjugations,
to the “blacks”
with kinky curls
and grease slathered fingers
and lastly, the mulatto hued
with a sense of limbo
hiding between their words.

Daniels, an award-winning poet, was impressed with Adisa’s ability to shape her poem, relying on original language and imagery to convey the complexity of her subject.

CMU senior Melanie Diaz won first place in the college prose category for “Being Mexican-American Post-Election.” Diaz, an English and global studies major, takes readers through the three days following the 2016 election. She reflected on what her grandmother would have thought of Trump, how her mother will cope and what the future holds for her 15-year-old sister. And she wrote about her tears and reactions from a professor.

I look at my little sister’s picture, and it’s one of the ones with her smiling. It’s a photo of the day she and my mom dropped me off at college. She had her short hair then from donating the rest of it to cancer patients, but her smile is still exactly the same. During the election, she said she was ready to go to Canada. What was I suppose to tell her? What was I going to tell a little girl who’s been trying to escape the limitation of her brown skin all her life?

“Every year the submissions bring surprises, but the range and quality of stories this year was particularly impressive. While the recent election showed up in a number of pieces, it was more of a catalyst for students to tell their individual stories than to go off on a political rant. The maturity of these young people in discussing sensitive topics is truly inspiring,” Daniels said.

The 16 high schools with student submissions were Allderdice, Brashear, CAPA, Carrick, Fox Chapel, the Kiski School, Lincoln Park Performing Arts, Oakland Catholic, Obama Academy, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, Penn Hills, Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy, Shadyside Academy, Westinghouse, Winchester Thurston and Woodland Hills.

Students from Carlow University, Carnegie Mellon (including the Silicon Valley campus), Chatham University, Duquesne University and the University of Pittsburgh entered the contest.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Writing Awards are sponsored by CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of English, Office of Student Affairs and Office of the President.

The 2017 Martin Luther King, Jr. Writing Award Winners

High School Prose
First Place: Being a Minority in a School of the White and Privileged
Djibril Branche, 16
Shady Side Academy

Second Place: Gate No. 1
Zihao Kong, 17
Winchester Thurston

Third Place: Sono Con Voi?
Adero Kauffmann-Okoko, 17
Winchester Thurston

Third Place: The “S” Word
Kristen Deasy, 17
Oakland Catholic High School

Honorable Mention:
Katherine Davenport, 17
Shady Side Academy

Honorable Mention: Eskimo Box Days
Cherisse Tompkins, 17
Winchester Thurston

Honorable Mention: Just Because
Emma Steckline, 14
CAPA

High School Poetry
First Place: We Are Americans
Zainab Adisa, 17
CAPA

Second Place: I Am Not Wrong: Wrong is Not My Name
Elsa Eckenrode, 18
CAPA

Third Place: Wide Tooth Comb
Ciara Sing, 16
CAPA

Honorable Mention: Compliment
Ruthanne Pilarski, 16
CAPA

Honorable Mention: Route 28
Becca Stanton, 17
CAPA

Honorable Mention: Black Lives with Corrupted Minds
Katerria Weldon, 17
Taylor Allderdice High School

College Prose
First Place: Being Mexican-American Post-Election
Melanie Diaz, 21
Carnegie Mellon

Second Place: Dear Sir
Christian Manaog, 19
Carnegie Mellon

Third Place: Am I a Terrorist?
Shamanta Mostofa, 21
University of Pittsburgh

Honorable Mention: The Truth from my Chair
Uduak Obong-Eren
Carnegie Mellon- Silicon Valley

Honorable Mention: Mixed Girl Problems
Julianne Mercer, 18
University of Pittsburgh

College Poetry
First Place: Microdermabrasion
Katherine Huang, 21
Carnegie Mellon

Second Place: Whitewash
Indigo Baloch, 22
Chatham University

Third Place: some assembly required
Javier Spivey
Carnegie Mellon

Honorable Mention: The “Dirty” Mirror
Kyle A. Burnett, 22
University of Pittsburgh

Honorable Mention: Birthright
Theresa Abalos, 18
Carnegie Mellon

Honorable Mention: Engineering 101
Pragna Mannam, 20
Carnegie Mellon

Read all of the award-winning entries.

Carnegie Mellon University has created the first and only undergraduate major in behavioral economics to meet the rising demand for trained professionals in the field from the government, nonprofit and industry sectors. The Bachelor of Arts degree in behavioral economics, policy and organizations (BEPO) begins this semester and will train students to apply psychological insights to human behavior to explain and predict economic decision-making.

Governments seek to use behavioral economics to inform public policy and improve their effectiveness. In industry, it is used to position brands, inform product design, adjust hiring and performance evaluations, motivate employees and improve the quality of employee’s decisions regarding their benefits plans.

At Carnegie Mellon, BEPO students will learn about behavioral economics at the institution responsible for pioneering the field. The late CMU Professor Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize and Turing Award winner, coined the phrase “bounded rationality” to describe a more descriptive conception of the limits of human problem-solving ability. CMU Professor George Loewenstein co-founded behavioral economics and is a renowned expert in a wide range of subjects, including decision-making over time, bargaining and negotiations, psychology and health, law and economics, the psychology of adaptation, the role of emotion in decision-making, the psychology of curiosity, conflict of interest and "out of control" behaviors such as impulsive violent crime and drug addiction.

The BEPO major is offered through the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Department of Social and Decision Sciences (SDS). It complements SDS’ highly sought after Ph.D. program in behavioral decision research, which has alumni working at Facebook, Google, Fidelity Investments, Mckinsey & Company, the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a number of nonprofits, startups and consulting firms.

“We have a large group of top-notch faculty in behavioral economics, and I am delighted that they will channel this expertise into this exciting, forward-looking program,” said Richard Scheines, dean of the Dietrich College. “Along with excellent undergraduate programs in economics and joint majors in economics-statistics and in economics-math, this interdisciplinary major in behavioral economics gives Carnegie Mellon a very broad and deep set of undergraduate degrees in economics.”

In addition to Loewenstein, students in the BEPO major will have the opportunity to learn from world-class behavioral economists, including Linda Babcock, a prominent expert in gender discrimination in the workplace who also focuses on behavioral labor and economics and negotiation; John Miller, whose research interests include bidding behaviors in auction markets and the dynamics of political platforms in spatial elections and of price formation in simple markets; Saurabh Bhargava, who examines barriers to enrolling in social service programs, the social and economics factors that affect happiness, factors that influence job searches and wage expectations of the unemployed; and Alex Imas, a rising star in behavioral economics who studies risk taking in financial markets, how social concerns and emotions influence decision-making and preferences and self-imposed mental accounts and risk attitudes.

“Carnegie Mellon has one of the best groups of behavioral economists in the world. We are excited to introduce this new major and involve undergraduates in our groundbreaking research,” said Babcock, head of the Social and Decision Sciences Department and the James M. Walton Professor of Economics. “Our faculty are actively partnering with numerous governments and companies to bring behavioral economics insights into these organizations, and undergraduates will participate with faculty on these applied projects.”

The BEPO curriculum is interdisciplinary and will give students a firm foundation in economics and psychology as well as how to integrate the two perspectives. Students will take calculus and have a solid grounding in quantitative methods and experimental design, both in the laboratory and field.

To celebrate the new BEPO major, the Social and Decision Sciences Department will host an afternoon program featuring behavioral economics work by CMU faculty, alumni and students and their research partners at various industry and government organizations. The event, which will be held from noon - 5 p.m., Feb. 3, in Hamburg Hall 1214, is free and open to any interested student or member of the Pittsburgh or CMU community.  

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are getting closer to understanding how your brain perceives faces and recognizes old friends you haven't seen in years. 

In a study published in the Dec. 26, 2016, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists used highly sophisticated brain imaging tools and computational methods to measure the real-time brain processes that convert the appearance of a face into the recognition of an individual. The research team is hopeful the findings might be used in the near future to locate the exact point at which the visual perception system breaks down in different disorders and injuries, ranging from developmental dyslexia to prosopagnosia, or face blindness.

"Our results provide a step toward understanding the stages of information processing that begin when an image of a face first enters a person's eye and unfolds over the next few hundred milliseconds, until the person is able to recognize the identity of the face," said Mark D. Vida, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences' Department of Psychology and Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC).

To determine how the brain rapidly distinguishes faces, the researchers scanned the brains of four people using magnetoencephalography (MEG). MEG allowed them to measure ongoing brain activity each millisecond while participants viewed images of 91 different individuals each having two facial expressions: happy and neutral. The participants indicated when they recognized that the same individual's face was repeated, regardless of expression.

The MEG scans allowed the researchers to map out, for each of many points in time, which parts of the brain encode appearance-based information and which encode identity-based information. The team also compared the neural data to behavioral judgments of the face images from humans, whose judgments were based mainly on identity-based information. Then, they validated the results by comparing the neural data to the information present in different parts of a computational simulation of an artificial neural network that was trained to recognize individuals from the same face images.

"Combining the detailed timing information from MEG imaging with computational models of how the visual system works has the potential to provide insight into the real-time brain processes underlying many other abilities beyond face recognition," said David C. Plaut, professor of psychology and a member of the CNBC.

In addition to Vida and Plaut, CMU's Marlene Behrmann and University of Toronto Scarborough's Adrian Nestor participated in the study.

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Pennsylvania Department of Health's Commonwealth Universal Research Enhancement Program and the National Science Foundation funded the research.

Using MEG and computational tools to map how the brain processes faces from sight to recognition is one example of Carnegie Mellon's strengths in combining cutting-edge cognitive neuroscience with big data and analytics. The university's BrainHub initiative, which is designed to leverage these strengths, focuses on how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors.

By Michael Cunningham
   
Ramayya Krishnan, dean of Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz III College, shared his expertise on smart cities and mobility as a guest panelist at the Consumer Technology Association's 2017 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
 
As a member of the "Smart Cities, Smart States, Smart Mobility" panel, Krishnan spoke about the intersection of smart transportation technology, policy and effective business models that form the foundation for solutions to mobility problems that cities and communities face.

"Pittsburgh has had the visionary leaders in both the public sector and the philanthropic community who understand this three-pronged strategic approach, which has enabled the community to test and ultimately utilize many smart city applications," Krishnan said.
 
Krishnan cited CMU's partnership with the City of Pittsburgh and the support of the Hillman Foundation, the Heinz Endowments and the Richard King Mellon Foundation in developing and implementing smart traffic signals to shorten travel times and reduce harmful vehicle emissions as an example of technology and policy working together to create a tangible smart city solution.
 
"That was a big win for both the city and the university," Krishnan said.
 
William Eggers, executive director of the Center for Government Insights at Deloitte, LLP, moderated the panel discussion, which also included Vinn White, Acting Assistant Secretary for Transportation, John Skowron, global consulting public sector leader at Deloitte, and Anand Shah, vice president of the Albright Stonebridge Group's India and South Asia practice.
 
Under Krishnan's leadership, the Heinz College, in partnership with the College of Engineering, has co-led the Metro 21 initiative, which focuses on 21st-century solutions to the challenges facing metro areas. Since its launch in 2014, CMU's Metro21 initiative has funded more than 30 research projects aimed at improving the quality of life for citizens of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County.

In September 2015, Metro21 and the City of Pittsburgh were founding members of the MetroLab Network, a group of more than 35 city-university partnerships in the U.S. focused on bringing data, analytics and innovation to city government through the development of smart city applications.

Related:

• Traffic21

By Byron Spice

Play began Jan. 11 for "Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante," a competition at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh that pits a Carnegie Mellon University artificial intelligence called Libratus against four of the world's best professional poker players.

During the 20-day event, Libratus and the pros - Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou - will play a total of 120,000 hands of Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em. The pros will split a prize purse of $200,000, while the AI and its creators - Professor Tuomas Sandholm and Ph.D. student Noam Brown - look to prove that AI can best the top high-stake players of the game.

"A lot of people throughout the AI community are watching this event carefully," said Andrew Moore, dean of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. He said beating some of the top players in the game would be a significant achievement for AI and will only be possible if Libratus can successfully bluff and otherwise mislead its human opponents.

Moore noted that the ability to outperform the best human players at an imperfect information game such as poker could lead to a host of new applications for AI. For example, he said negotiating the best price for a new car might someday be a task that people can assign to their smartphone.

But the game they are playing in Brains Vs. AI is two-player Texas Hold'em with no restrictions on bet size, an incredibly complex game that has proven elusive to solution by AI, said Sandholm, a professor of computer science. A previous CMU AI, called Claudico, was out-pointed in the first Brains Vs. AI competition in 2015. He noted that international betting sites consider Libratus a definite underdog in this contest, with odds varying between 4-to-1 and 5-to-1 against the AI.

"I'm really delighted that we got four of the top Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em specialists in the world here today," Sandholm said, making the event the ultimate test of the AI.

AIs developed by Sandholm and Brown have won the last two Annual Computer Poker Competitions, in which pokerbots play each other. Libratus represents a two-generation leap ahead from Claudico, the AI that competed in the 2015 Brains Vs. AI.

"I don't know what to expect," said Les, one of the poker pros and a veteran of the 2015 contest, comparing the new Libratus to a player who has been practicing the game in Antarctica for years and is only now beginning to play others. He said he and his fellow players consider Brains Vs. AI to be part of an important research effort.

"If we're going to test this system, we really want to push it to the absolute limit," Les said.

Sandholm noted that the Libratus AI is not specifically a poker program. Its algorithm could be applied to any number of situations that involve incomplete and misleading information, such as business negotiations, military strategy, cybersecurity and even medical treatment design.

Libratus developed its knowledge of the game and its strategy by analyzing the rules of the game, not by trying to copy the play of humans. The AI calculated its poker strategy using about 15 million core hours of computation on the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Bridges computer. Ralph Roskies, scientific director of the PSC, said this use of Bridges already has generated 2 1/2 petabytes of data.

To ensure  the outcome of the competition is not due to luck, the four pros will be paired to play duplicate matches - Player A in each pair will receive the same cards as the computer receives against Player B, and vice versa. One of the players in each of these pairs will play on the floor of the casino, while his counterpart will be isolated in a separate room.

For this second installment of Brains Vs. AI, the pros have agreed to increase the number of hands to improve the chance of reaching statistical significance, that is, ruling out with high confidence the possibility that either the humans or the computer win by just getting lucky. To do so, the pros will play more days and will "two-table," playing two hands simultaneously.

Play will begin at 11 a.m. each day at Rivers Casino and end around 7 p.m. The public is welcome to observe game play, which will be in Rivers' Poker Room. Libratus' games also will be streamed via Twitch. Aggregate scores will be posted each evening on the competition website.

Brains Vs. AI is sponsored by GreatPoint Ventures, Avenue4Analytics, TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, the journal Artificial Intelligence, Intel and Optimized Markets, Inc. Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science has partnered with Rivers Casino, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) through a peer-reviewed XSEDE allocation, and Sandholm's Electronic Marketplaces Laboratory for this event.

CMU Provost Farnam Jahanian

Carnegie Mellon University Provost Farnam Jahanian called for continuing investments in cybersecurity to meet the evolving challenges in securing cyberspace. He delivered his remarks during a keynote speech at the National Science Foundation's Secure and Trustworthy CyberSpace (SaTC) Principal Investigators' Meeting.

The biennial forum of the SaTC research community, held Jan. 9-11 in Arlington, Va., included top experts in academia, government and industry.

Prior to coming to CMU, Jahanian led the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, which hosted the event.

Jahanian's keynote described the co-evolution of attacks and defenses in cybersecurity. A system that was secure in the past might not be in the future and as upgrades occur, new systems introduce new vulnerabilities. As automation pervades new platforms, Jahanian cautioned that vulnerabilities will continue to threaten critical infrastructure, automotive systems, smart grids, medical devices and transportation systems.

"Cybersecurity is a multi-dimensional problem," Jahanian said. "It requires expertise from various disciplines, not just computer scientists and mathematicians, but from economists, social scientists, behavioral scientists and policymakers."

Following this holistic approach, Carnegie Mellon's CyLab brings together experts from across the entire university, spanning the fields of engineering, computer science, public policy, business and others.

Jahanian said some of the simplest security measures are not necessarily being used. A recent Duo Security Trusted Access Report estimated that 71 percent of Android mobile devices and 50 percent of iOS devices are out of date.

Future cybersecurity challenges will continue to follow internet adoption patterns and rapidly emerging technology trends.

According to Jahanian, those emerging trends include smart systems and the melding of the cyber and physical world; the explosion of data and analytics; and advances in automation and robotics.

According to research by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) cited by Jahanian, more than 40 percent of all security issues fixed by Google in the Android platform in 2016 came from externally developed software. Thus, systems are rarely written from scratch anymore and are instead built by integrating previously developed components, often from outside organizations. While accelerating the time to market, the process also introduces security issues.

While big data has transformative implications for commerce and the economy and is increasingly critical to accelerating the pace of discovery and innovation, it also has created major security targets that motivate sophisticated hackers, including those who gained access to millions of credit and debit card accounts from Target and Home Depot.

Jahanian's address emphasized the importance of cybersecurity and data privacy as national priorities that demand sustained investment.

"Future cybersecurity challenges threaten the tightly integrated economic, political and social fabric of society," Jahanian said. "There is a need for large-scale integration, experimentation and evaluation, and continued growth in R&D investments for cybersecurity and privacy at the federal level."

Academic institutions like CMU can help to bridge the gap between research, innovation and practice.

"Institutional and academic leadership need to support faculty and researchers serving in federal agencies," Jahanian said. "This is truly a call to service for the community."

Jahanian was one of several CMU representatives who spoke during the three-day meeting.

Alessandro Acquisti, professor of information technology and public policy at CMU's H. Heinz III College and Cylab, and director of the Privacy Economics Experiments (Peex) lab, gave the meeting's final keynote address Jan. 11.

Alessandro Acquisti

Acquisti's talk focused on the relationships between privacy, economics, and behavioral economics in a time when people disclose so much of their personal lives and data over the internet. Much of the talk revolved around two questions: Do people care about privacy, and should they?

The degree to which people care about privacy ends up depending on the context of the situation, Acquisti said. He added that both the sharing and the protection of personal data can benefit some while having a negative impact for others — a more nuanced approach than the argument that sharing data is an unalloyed economic win-win.

For instance, Acquisti said the success of platforms like Facebook makes it possible for employers to find job candidates' publicly shared personal information, such as religious affiliations or sexual preferences, which legally shouldn't be used in the hiring process. In an experiment that included four male candidates, including one whose Facebook profile represented him as Muslim and one whose Facebook profile represented him as Christian, Acquisti and his co-author (CMU's Christina Fong), found the Christian candidate to have about a 17 percent probability of being called back for an interview, whereas the Muslim candidate's probability was about 2 percent, in more conservative states in the U.S.

The appearance of having more control over their data also can lead to people having less privacy, Acquisti said. The study's findings suggested that, when users had more control over the publication of their private information, their privacy concerns decreased while their likelihood of publishing sensitive information increased.

Other CMU faculty participants were: Norman Sadeh, a professor in the School of Computer Science (SCS); Lorrie Cranor, professor in SCS and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) who is serving as chief technologist at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission; Greg Shannon, chief scientist for the CERT Division at CMU’s Software Engineering Institute and the assistant director for cybersecurity strategy at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy; Cleotilde Gonzalez, a research professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences; and Nicolas Christin, an associate research professor in SCS and EPP.