Carnegie Mellon in Qatar opened in 2004 with 41 students and two academic programs. On Tuesday, March 18, 400 students in five academic programs, and nearly 200 faculty and staff will celebrate the campus' 10-year anniversary with an hourlong celebration highlighting campus achievements, and including live music, videos and speeches by President Subra Suresh, a student and an alumna.

The celebration will be webcast live beginning at noon (EDT).

Gloria Khoury, assistant dean for Student Affairs at CMU-Q, is one of several faculty and staff who were there at the very beginning and who are still at the campus today.

The first faculty and staff had to "jump in with both feet and get to work," Khoury recalled. "We always call the first class the pioneers, but I think we felt like we were pioneers, too.

"I remember standing nervously at the Ritz Carlton with the dean, and then the students started to arrive one-by-one with their families. We said the first 'hellos' and gave the first handshakes, and that to me was the moment when it all became real," Khoury said.

Read more about the CMU-Q pioneers.
View the CMU-Q timeline.
Watch the 10-year celebration webcast.

Carnegie Mellon has been selected as one of the locations for a motion picture being filmed in Pittsburgh in March and April.

Scenes for the movie will be filmed inside and outside of the College of Fine Arts building on Friday, March 14.  Locations include the Great Hall, Kresge Theater and the north stairway, and outside on the CFA lawn. There will be intermittent restricted access to these locations during filming. 

The Alumni Concert Hall and some classroom and studio spaces also will be used for catering and holding areas for extras. Prep work for the filming will take place on March 13, and some tear down work will occur March 15.

Frew Street will be closed to traffic and parking on Friday, March 14.

Learn more.

Ben Wizner, lawyer for Edward Snowden, will be among panelists on March 24, when Carnegie Mellon's College of Engineering hosts two panel discussions on "The Future of Cybersecurity and Global Journalism," sponsored by the Overseas Press Club of America. Wizner will appear live via Skype.

The discussions will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. in the first-floor DEC Room of the Robert Mehrabian Collaborative Innovation Center. The discussions are free and open to the public.

Jim Cuddy Jr., managing editor of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, will moderate the first panel, titled "Hackers Everywhere - Is the Internet Really Our Friend?" The panel will include FBI Special Agent J. Keith Mularski, Nicholas Christin, an expert on information systems security at Carnegie Mellon CyLab, and Pittsburgh Tribune Review investigative reporter Andrew Conte.

The second panel, titled "The Big Picture: The National Security Agency After Snowden," will be moderated by David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. That panel will include Wizner, via Skype, Carnegie Mellon CyLab Director Virgil Gligor, University of Pittsburgh law professor David A. Harris, and Mark Rochester, deputy managing editor of the Post-Gazette.

Learn more about the panels.

Innovation and entrepreneurship took center stage at the 2014 McGinnis Venture Competition, a cross-campus challenge in which students compete for $60,000 in investments for their startup companies. Five winners were announced March 6.

Two MBA students in the Tepper School Class of 2014, Jason Cahill and Neel Kishan, claimed the top prize of $25,000 in the graduate student division. Their startup company, Impaqd, has created a real-time, GPS-enabled app that connects shipping customers directly to freight carriers, allowing them to identify and fill empty cargo space.

The $4,000 first prize among undergraduates was secured by an interdisciplinary team representing three CMU schools. Their startup, Tailored Fit, is an online shopping service that learns an individual's preferences over time and makes personalized shopping suggestions, providing products and services from multiple retailers on one website. Sharing the prize are Kate Vogt (CS'14),  Nathaniel Eliason (DC'15), Heidi Yang (TPR'14), Zach Bush (TPR'16) and Matt Baker, Soloman Benjamin, Zach Piekut and Leanna Verderese.

Learn more about the competition.

Carnegie Mellon's 2014 International Film Festival brings 12 award-winning independent films with ties to 20 countries to various locations throughout Pittsburgh, March 20 -  April 5. This year's theme, "Faces of Work," reflects the late CMU professor and filmmaker Paul Goodman's focus on the challenges and achievements of diverse groups of workers worldwide.

The festival opens at 7:15 p.m., Thursday, March 20, at the Regent Square Theater with the 2013 Polish film "Walesa: Man of Hope." The film follows the life of Lech Walesa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning former leader of Poland who was instrumental in the collapse of communism. Walesa's wife and former first lady of Poland, Danuta Walesa, will attend the screening and answer questions afterward.

Other festival highlights include the U.S. premiere of Goodman's final film, "Shipbreakers," at 7:15 p.m., Friday, March 21 in McConomy Auditorium. "Shipbreakers" tells the story of 40,000 migrant workers in Alang, India, who make $1-$2 per day scrapping huge ocean vessels that are no longer seaworthy. They work in extremely dangerous conditions without any safety or labor regulations.

Learn more about the film festival.
See the film schedule.
Read more about "Shipbreakers."