Girls of Steel Meet a Real Rosie the Riveter

The Girls of Steel, the all-female robotics team sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University's Field Robotics Center, has long used World War II's iconic Rosie the Riveter as an inspiration and a team logo. On Jan. 27, the team met a real "Rosie."Julia Parsons, 96, a Carnegie Tech graduate, told the team about her exploits as a Navy codebreaker during the war and then had a look at the team's latest robot-building efforts."It was really great to be able to meet her," said Girls of Steel member Lauren Scheller-Wolf, 17, who is schooled at home. "I think everyone on the team was incredibly impressed by her and what she accomplished, and she's definitely a good role model for all of us."Parsons earned a humanities degree in 1942 and worked briefly in an Army laboratory, fixing gauges used in steel mills to produce shells and other explosive ordnance. She soon joined the Navy and, because she had studied German, was sent to Washington, D.C., to join a codebreaking team. For the remainder of the war, she helped decipher German U-boat messages sent via the infamous Enigma encryption machine. After the war, she taught English at North Allegheny High School."Her stories were incredibly inspiring, and I loved being able to talk to her about our team and what we do," said Anna Nesbitt, 14, of Winchester Thurston School. "The way that she talked about her experiences as a codebreaker gave me insight into what Girls of Steel represents, and I couldn't be happier to be a part of the team."The team of about 50 girls from Pittsburgh-area middle, high and home schools competes in the FIRST Robotics Competition. This year's competition, "FIRST Power Up" requires teams to build autonomous and teleoperated robots that will deliver "power cubes," which are used to control switches or scales to earn points."Meeting Julia Parsons was like traveling back in time," said Theresa Richards, outreach program manager for the Robotics Institute. "She is an excellent inspiring role model for the Girls of Steel, as a woman who accepted challenges and tried new things, going beyond the usual expectations of working as secretaries, nurses, costume designers and homemakers." (You can read more in a lengthier story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)

Facebook Honors Two SCS Ph.D. Students

School of Computer Science students Jessica Colnago and Xiaolong Wang are among 23 Ph.D. students named Facebook Fellows and Emerging Scholar award winners for 2018. Three additional SCS students were finalists.The Facebook Fellowship program, now in its seventh year, encourages and supports promising doctoral students engaged in innovative research across computer science and engineering that is relevant to Facebook. The Emerging Scholars program, launched last year, recognizes talented first- or second-year Ph.D. students from groups that are under-represented in the technology sector. More than 800 Ph.D. students around the world applied to the programs this year.Colnago, recognized as an Emerging Scholar, is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Institute for Software Research's Societal Computing program, and a member of both the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory and the Privacy Economics Experiments Lab. Her research includes identifying and understanding people's most salient privacy concerns and behaviors surrounding new technologies, and identifying users' preferred approach to privacy in different data-sharing contexts, such as social networking sites (SNSs) and the internet of things (IoT).

CMU WEF Contingent Boasts Strong SCS Participation

The School of Computer Science is a large component of Carnegie Mellon University's contingent this week at the World Economic Forum, held in Davos, Switzerland, through Jan. 26.This year's theme at Davos, "Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World," aims to rededicate international leaders from across industries and disciplines to developing a shared narrative that improves the world.SCS participants include Associate Professor of Machine Learning Rita Singh and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jean Yang, who will collaborate with CyLab Biometrics Center Director Marios Savvides on the IdeasLab presentation "Ultra-Biometrics and Cybersecurity With Carnegie Mellon University." Singh, Savvides and Yang will also deliver solo presentations throughout the conferenceJustine Cassell, associate dean for technology, strategy and impact in SCS, will give two solo presentations, "Governing Advanced Technologies: Machine Learning" and "Global Tech, Local Solutions: Artificial Intelligence."Finally, Randy Sargent, senior systems scientist in the Robotics Institute, will sit on several panels throughout the event, as will Robotics Professor Illah Nourbakhsh.Read more on CMU's participation in the World Economic Forum on the Carnegie Mellon News website.

Computational Method Speeds Hunt for New Antibiotics

New Algorithm Reduces Search Time From Hundreds of Years to Mere Hours

A team of American and Russian computer scientists has developed an algorithm that can rapidly search massive databases to discover novel variants of known antibiotics — a potential boon in fighting antibiotic resistance.In just a few hours, the algorithm, called VarQuest, identified 10 times more variants of peptidic natural products, or PNPs, than all previous PNP discovery efforts combined, the researchers report in the latest issue of the journal Nature Microbiology. Previously, such a search might have taken hundreds of years of computation, said Hosein Mohimani, assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Computational Biology Department."Our results show that the antibiotics produced by microbes are much more diverse than had been assumed," Mohimani said. VarQuest found more than a thousand variants of known antibiotics, he noted, providing a big picture perspective that microbiologists could not obtain while studying one antibiotic at a time.Mohimani and Pavel A. Pevzner, professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego, designed and directed the effort, which included colleagues at St. Petersburg State University in Russia.PNPs have an unparalleled track record in pharmacology. Many antimicrobial and anticancer agents are PNPs, including the so-called "antibiotics of last resort," vancomycin and daptomycin. As concerns mount regarding antibiotic drug resistance, finding more effective variants of known antibiotics is a means for preserving the clinical efficacy of antibiotic drugs in general.The search for these novel variants received a boost in recent years with the advent of high-throughput methods that enable environmental samples to be processed in batches, rather than one at a time. Researchers also recently launched the Global Natural Products Social (GNPS) molecular network, a database of mass spectra of natural products collected by researchers worldwide. Already, the GNPS based at UC San Diego contains more than a billion mass spectra.The GNPS represents a gold mine for drug discovery, Mohimani said. The VarQuest algorithm, which employs a smarter way of indexing the database to enhance searches, should help GNPS meet its promise, he added."Natural product discovery is turning into a Big Data territory, and the field has to prepare for this transformation in terms of collecting, storing and making sense of Big Data," Mohimani said. "VarQuest is the first step toward digesting the Big Data already collected by the community."In addition to Pevzner and Mohimani, the research team includes Alexey Gurevich, Alla Mikheenko, Alexander Shlemov, Anton Korobeynikov of St. Petersburg State. The U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Russian Science Foundation supported this research.

I-Corps Accepting Entrepreneur Applications

The Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship is recruiting teams for its spring 2018 National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) customer discovery training program. Teams are open to CMU faculty, staff, students and recent alumni and can be reimbursed up to $2,500 to further their business ventures. Teams also will receive access to Project Olympus programs, business mentors and guidance in writing proposals for external funding. Further details on the program and eligibility can be found on the I-Corps website.Ninety-nine teams have participated in the program since fall 2014 and have received more than $13 million in additional funding for their ideas.  The deadline for teams to apply is February 2, 2018 at http://bit.ly/2oWuR6v.