Raise your hand if - at home, work or school - you typically find yourself in a room with a window and the lights on.

Since most artificial lights are designed to light a room completely on their own, it's not exactly energy efficient at the times when natural light is available.

To solve this problem - and save energy and money - four Information Systems students developed GreenLight. GreenLight is a wireless, green energy lighting system that is unlike any commercial product available.

Read more. 

Six undergraduates interested in international and public policy have arrived in Washington, D.C., to begin study in CMU's revamped Washington Semester Program (WSP).

The effort leverages the strength of faculty networks and their policy expertise in the nation's capital.

Under the new format, CMU solely operates all aspects of the program, from academics and internships to events and housing.

In 1999, English Professor Jim Daniels had an idea to help Pittsburgh-area students better understand Martin Luther King, Jr.'s lasting legacy of combating racial inequality: he founded the university's Martin Luther King Jr. Day Writing Awards to encourage high school and college students to reflect on their personal experiences with race and discrimination.

Now celebrating its 15th anniversary, the program's mission - to think about King and race in the context of their everyday lives - continues to resonate with adolescents and young adults.

A record 228 entries were received this year from public and private high schools, colleges and universities throughout the region.

Read more, including the list of winners and their entries.

View photos from the Writing Awards ceremony and School of Drama Choir performance.

Watch a video of four Writing Award winners and Daniels on Pittsburgh Today Live. 

Roberta Klatzky will receive the Charles J. Queenan Professorship of Psychology in recognition of her outstanding contributions in human perception and cognition research.

Klatzky, who joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1993, investigates perception, spatial thinking and action from the perspective of multiple modalities, sensory and symbolic, in real and virtual environments. Her research has been instrumental to the development of telemanipulation, image-guided surgery, navigation aids for the blind and neural rehabilitation.

"Carnegie Mellon has been a leader in the cognitive sciences for nearly 65 years, and Roberta Klatzky is one of the reasons we continue to be at the forefront," said John Lehoczky, dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Read more.