Carnegie Mellon University

What it is

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Its roots go back to Andrew Carnegie, who founded the Carnegie Technical Schools in 1900. They were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912, and in 1967 the institute merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to form Carnegie Mellon.^[1]

Origins

The university's computer science work started with a department that was one of the first of its kind in the United States. The Computer Science Department was created in July 1965 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, Alan J. Perlis and others. The School of Computer Science followed in 1988.^[2]

Its early AI roots include a program called the Logic Theorist. Newell, Shaw and Simon's symbolic reasoning program was discussed at the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, which Simon and Newell attended.^[7] Symbolic AI of this kind works by manipulating explicit symbols according to rules, and the school carried that tradition forward into the decades that followed.

Known for

CMU's work spans several areas. Raj Reddy was the founding director of the Robotics Institute and dean of the School of Computer Science. He received the ACM Turing Award in 1994.^[2]

Speech recognition is another. Kai-Fu Lee earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon in 1988 under Raj Reddy, with Sphinx, a large-vocabulary, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system.^[6] Because Sphinx is speaker-independent, it was built for speech from many people rather than one voice.

Neural networks are a third. Alexander Waibel's Time Delay Neural Network, developed at CMU, is described as the first convolutional neural network trained by gradient descent with backpropagation.^[2] Geoffrey Hinton was an assistant and then associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon from 1982 to 1987.^[3] The 1986 Nature paper on backpropagation lists Hinton at Carnegie-Mellon's Department of Computer Science, with David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams of UC San Diego.^[4]

Game-playing and chess are a fourth. Deep Blue's lineage began at CMU. Graduate student Feng-hsiung Hsu helped develop ChipTest in 1985 and, with Murray Campbell and others, Deep Thought, before joining IBM Research in 1989.^[5]

Autonomous driving is a fifth. Tartan Racing, led by Red Whittaker with General Motors, won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge with the autonomous vehicle Boss.^[2] Finally, thirteen School of Computer Science faculty and alumni have won the ACM Turing Award, including former faculty member Geoffrey Hinton.^[2]

Place in AI history

CMU's history covers much of what AI has tried. Its early programs reasoned with symbols. Its speech systems and its neural network work moved the field toward learning from data. Its chess lineage led to Deep Blue, and its vehicle team showed autonomous driving in a competitive urban setting.

Hinton's time at Carnegie Mellon connects CMU to the later deep learning story. The 1986 backpropagation paper, written with colleagues at two universities, is one of the foundations of that story. For a reader, CMU is a useful case study: a single university that contributed to symbolic reasoning, speech, neural networks, robotics and games, and whose former faculty and alumni appear across the history of computing.