What is everyone looking at? It’s a common question in social settings because the answer identifies something of interest, or helps delineate social groupings. Those insights someday will be essential for robots designed to interact with humans, so researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute have developed a method for detecting where people’s gazes intersect. The researchers tested the method using groups of people with head-mounted video cameras. By noting where their gazes converged in three-dimensional space, the researchers could determine if they were listening to a single speaker, interacting as a group, or even following the bouncing ball in a ping-pong game.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Raj Reddy, the Mozah Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics and the founding director of the Robotics Institute, among its latest class of ACM Fellows.

The Carnegie Mellon research team that created Tiramisu, a smartphone app that enables transit riders to create realtime information about bus schedules and seating, has won this year’s Federal Communications Commission Chairman’s Award for Advancement in Accessibility in the Geo-Location Services category.

Car and Driver magazine named Srinivasa Narasimhan's smart headlight system as one of the ten most promising technologies for 2013. The system can improve visibility in rain and snowstorms by constantly redirecting light to shine between particles of precipitation.

RobotRadar.org, a web site co-founded by Illah Nourbakhsh, professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, will share the insights of leading thinkers and experts in robotics regarding the popular news media’s coverage of robotics.

Daniel Wilson, the author of the best-selling "Robopocalypse" and a Ph.D. alumnus of the Robotics Institute, is among the 25 most powerful authors in Hollywood, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) and Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC) of Johnstown, Pa., are working with the Air Force Research Laboratory and Ogden Air Logistics Center 309 AMXG to develop and demonstrate a robotic system that uses high-powered lasers to remove coatings from fighter and cargo aircraft.

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The BBC recently reported on the science of geckos and the secret behind their uncanny climbing ability. Metin Sitti, professor of robotics and mechanical engineering, said creating synthetic materials that provide the same sort of adhesion as a gecko's footpad could lead to new kinds of closure technologies.

The Nov. 14 episode of NOVA ScienceNOW, “What Will the Future Look Like?” featured a profile of Adrien Treuille, assistant professor of computer science and robotics, and EteRNA, his unique research project that taps online game play to explore RNA design.