Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
SCS News [More]
Android App Lets Visually Impaired in India Listen to Texts in Native Languages
Byron Spice Thursday August 04, 2016
Millions of visually impaired people in India may benefit from free, open-source software for Android devices that converts electronic text written in Indian languages into messages they can hear.The text-to-speech (TTS) software, developed by Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with the Hear2Read project, can now be downloaded free of charge from Google Play. Tamil is the first language offered, with subsequent releases of seven major languages — Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Punjabi and Telugu — expected over the remainder of the year.Four out of five people in India... Embracing the Free Market for Brilliant People
Andrew Moore Wednesday August 03, 2016
The following article, penned by School of Computer Science Dean Andrew Moore, originally appeared in The Conversation on Tuesday, Aug. 2.When Uber decided to develop its own self-driving car, it went big. The company came to Carnegie Mellon University, the epicenter for autonomous driving research for three decades, and hired away four professors and 36 technical staff members.A lot of news reports described that as "poaching." I call it embracing the free market for brilliant people.As dean of CMU's School of Computer Science, I don't take lightly the loss of 40 valued employees. We in... Carnegie Mellon's CREATE Lab Expands Education Network Nationally
Byron Spice Tuesday August 02, 2016
A program to empower students with technology by leveraging Carnegie Mellon University's robotics and computer science talent with education expertise at partner universities is expanding beyond the Western Pennsylvania/West Virginia region to include satellite labs in Atlanta and Salt Lake City.With support from a $250,000 grant from the Infosys Foundation USA, CMU's Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab will work with partners in both cities to provide educators with tools and training to help their students learn about technology and adapt it to their... Adding Up How the Brain Does Math
Shilo Rea Thursday July 21, 2016
A new Carnegie Mellon University neuroimaging study reveals the mental stages people go through as they solve challenging math problems.In the study, which was published in Psychological Science, researchers combined two analytical strategies to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify patterns of brain activity that aligned with four distinct stages of problem-solving: encoding, planning, solving and responding."How students were solving these kinds of problems was a total mystery to us until we applied these techniques," said John Anderson, the R.K. Mellon University Professor... Carnegie Mellon Algorithm Characterizes How Cancer Genomes Get Scrambled
Byron Spice Thursday July 21, 2016
A new method for analyzing the scrambled genomes of cancer cells allows researchers, for the first time, to simultaneously identify two different types of genetic changes associated with cancers and to identify connections between the two.Jian Ma, associate professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Computational Biology Department, said his new algorithm, called Weaver, could become an important tool for identifying interactions of the alterations within a cancerous cell's DNA that drive the disease."This work uses a rigorous and elegant approach to give a better picture of the genome changes... Computational Design Tool Transforms Flat Materials Into 3-D Shapes
Byron Spice Monday July 18, 2016
A new computational design tool can turn a flat sheet of plastic or metal into a complex 3-D shape, such as a mask, sculpture or even a lady's high-heel shoe.Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, say the tool enables designers to fully and creatively exploit an unusual quality of certain materials — the ability to expand uniformly in two dimensions. A rubber band, by contrast, contracts in one dimension while being stretched in another."We're taking a flat piece of material and giving it the tendency, or even... Holladay, Kumar Named Stehlik Scholarship Recipients
Susie Cribbs Tuesday July 12, 2016
The School of Computer Science has named rising seniors Rachel Holladay and Ananya Kumar the recipients of this year's Mark Stehlik SCS Alumni Undergraduate Impact Scholarship.Now in its second year, the Stehlik Scholarship recognizes undergraduate students near the end of their Carnegie Mellon careers whose reach for excellence extends beyond the classroom. Awardees are working to make a difference in SCS, the field of computer science and the world around them.Holladay, a native of Slidell, La., is an active undergraduate researcher and has done exciting gesture research in the Robotics... Robot and Mathematical Models Suggest How Animals Moved 360 Million Years Ago
Byron Spice Thursday July 07, 2016
Could a tail have allowed ancient vertebrates to make the transition from water to land?Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Clemson University, and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis report in the journal Science this week on the results of a groundbreaking study to answer this question using amphibious fish, robots and mathematical models of movement.The study tested the hypothesis that coordinated tail movement played an important role in the evolution of terrestrial vertebrates. The researchers found that, for the...