Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover
Can we use this to judge gymnastics competitions?’ Then you say, ‘Wait, couldn’t we use this in securing Penn Station in New York?’”
Frequently, campus research projects spill into the larger city, like when a professor develops a start-up company (the school encourages entrepreneurship), or the local government allows Pittsburgh to be used as a lab (a number of traffic lights in East Liberty are controlled by a Carnegie Mellon professor
and his colleagues, who have developed smart signal technology).
“It’s uplifting to see.”
Speaking of Red Whittaker, the professor who led Carnegie Mellon in winning the $2 million Darpa Urban Challenge self-driving car competition in 2007, Mr. Gutkind said, “Red was into self-driving vehicles before anyone,” using Carnegie Mellon’s resources
and reaching out to local investors for money and technical support.
M.U., and that’s the main reason why I stayed,” said Mr. von Ahn, who, in addition to
his role at Duolingo, is a consulting professor in the School of Computer Science.
With so many of his 90 employees residing in Walnut on Highland, one of the newer housing
and retail complexes in East Liberty, Mr. von Ahn joked, “We call them the Duolingo dorms.”
Mr. von Ahn, 38, is a superstar in the tech world.
“It’s really cool and exciting to have these glimpses of the future, and to see all these people running around and having these crazy ideas.”
Mr. Moore was the founding director of Google’s Pittsburgh office before returning three years
ago to the college, where he was previously a professor of computer science and robotics.
