President Subra Suresh presented his first annual update on the university yesterday to several hundred in McConomy Auditorium and to a global audience on a live webcast. He said he wants to close each academic year with a broad presentation while engaging in more of a Q&A town hall meeting in the fall.

Suresh highlighted numerous achievements he's seen during his nearly two years as president, crediting the CMU community for bringing to life the Simon and BrainHub initiatives, Presidential Fellowships and Scholarships, the ProSEED grant program and the Tepper Quad project.

He put those in a broader narrative of the university's trajectory that also included two initiatives announced through recent campus-wide emails leading up to his address: new endowed funds of $1 million each to support projects in the arts and humanities in which outside funding is scarce, and planning for new flexible space along Forbes Avenue.

The endowed funds would generate proceeds to support faculty research and creative works, and are intended to be a first step, and a challenge to continue raising money to support these faculty endeavors.

Suresh said he is optimistic about developing an innovation corridor along Forbes Avenue that would surpass any such hub between Silicon Valley and the East Coast.

The corridor would build on the university's strengths and momentum, and include several new infrastructure projects. The latest step involves seeking developers interested in partnering with the university on a major, mixed-use development located next to the museums. That facility would serve as a new gateway to the campus and could include research space, labs and studios to collaborate with external industry partners, office space, a hotel and retail space.

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Rebecca Nugent

Rebecca Nugent, Bonnie Olson, Jeanne VanBriesen and Carol Frieze will receive the university's top education awards at the Celebration of Education beginning at 4:30 p.m. today (April 23) in Rangos 1 and 2.

Nugent, an associate teaching professor of statistics, will receive the Ryan Award for Meritorious Teaching.

Bonnie Olson

Olson, academic adviser and undergraduate program coordinator in mechanical engineering, will be presented with the Academic Advising Award.

Jeanne VanBriesen

VanBriesen, the Duquesne Light Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of the Center for Water Quality in Urban Environmental Systems, will receive the Barbara Lazarus Award for mentoring graduate students and junior faculty.

Carol Frieze

Frieze, director of Women@SCS and SCS4ALL in the School of Computer Science, will be presented with the Gelfand Service Award for Educational Outreach.

Also being honored will be this year's college teaching award winners, the Wimmer Faculty Fellows and the graduate student teaching and service award winners.

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Faculty in the Mellon College of Science and Dietrich College are CMU's latest movie stars.

Michael Tarr, Nathan Urban, Timothy Verstynen and Gregg Franklin star alongside Hank Aaron, Derek Jeter and Andrew McCutcheon in "Fastball," a baseball documentary produced by CMU Trustee Thomas Tull that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this week.

The scientists talk about how a batter's brain races to process an incoming fastball nearing 100 miles per hour.

"Baseball is perhaps the ultimate test of neural abilities," said Verstynen, assistant professor of psychology and a member of CMU's BrainHub initiative. "A fastball can travel so fast that the batter's brain may not even have the time to make a decision based on what he sees."

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The Carnegie Corporation of New York has awarded CMU a two-year, $1 million grant to support its Simon Initiative, a strategic, university-wide commitment to harness learning science research and the latest in technology to improve learning outcomes for all students.

The grant will allow CMU to begin implementing recommendations from the Global Learning Council (GLC) in a white paper titled "Technology-Enhanced Learning: Best Practices and Data Sharing in Higher Education." The GLC,  a consortium of academic, industry and nonprofit leaders chaired by CMU President Subra Suresh, is part of the Simon Initiative.

The GLC recommendations are being widely circulated for discussion and feedback, with a final release planned within a year.

Marsha Lovett, Ken Koedinger, Norman Bier and David Quinn of the Simon Initiative played a critical role in developing the GLC draft white paper.

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Anthony Foxx visited the NREC yesterday.

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx spoke at the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) in Lawrenceville yesterday and saw demonstrations of emerging transportation technologies from CMU researchers.

Researchers from Technologies for Safe and Efficient Transportation, a U.S. Department of Transportation-designated National University Transportation Center, the Traffic 21 Institute and Robotics Institute demonstrated autonomous vehicles, adaptive traffic signals, smart headlights and CMU's entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge - the CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform robot (CHIMP).

Before his address, Foxx hosted a roundtable discussion with CMU students interested in pursuing careers at the intersection of technology and transportation. Heinz College student and Women in Transportation Fellow Zoe Levenson introduced Foxx to the audience, which included local elected officials, corporate partners, transportation stakeholders, CMU faculty, staff and students.

Researchers have turned a smartphone into an alarm clock with on/off and snooze buttons.

Researchers at CMU and Disney Research have developed an inexpensive toolbox of physical knobs, sliders and other mechanisms that can add functionality to any smartphone.

Drawing inspiration from wind instruments, they call these mechanisms Acoustruments. The idea is to use pluggable plastic tubes and other structures to connect the smartphone's speaker with its microphone. The device is controlled by acoustically altering sounds as they pass through the system.

Researchers have used Acoustruments to build an interactive doll, which responds when its tummy is poked; a smartphone case that can sense when it has been placed on a table or is being hand carried; and an alarm clock that provides physical on/off and snooze buttons.

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