With the top names in tech in town—-Seagate, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Intel—and the top talent in students and researchers, the potential for collaboration is limitless. And it could benefit all involved, including Pittsburgh.
“We produce the best and most sought after high tech products and resources on the planet ---namely our students,” says Lenore Blum, Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. “Then we export them everywhere but here.” That could soon change with her creation of Project Olympus, a high-tech incubator lab interfacing between the university and the region that was recently awarded $400,000 from the Heinz Endowments.
“We expect to not only produce new science and technologies but to also move those discoveries into local companies or new spin-offs for commercial development,” says Blum. “We¹re convinced that the ideas hatched here can also be brought to fruition here, so the talented students who graduate from our universities can pursue careers in our region.”
Teams of Olympus Scholars—the goal is a total of 50—will work with faculty, industrial researchers and business leaders on the “Next Generation Computing”. The Heinz grant will help launch the first of many “probes”-- to develop Games with a Purpose, Internet games that harness brain power using a technique called human computation, pioneered by CMU professor Louis von Ahn, a 2006 MacArthur Foundation genius grant winner. The goal is to solve intractable—up until now--problems such as enabling sight-impaired individuals to "see" the images on the Internet.
Writer: TC
Source: Lenore Blum, CMU