Two graduate students in the Robotics Institute – Sanjiban Choudhury and Ruta Desai – are among five Carnegie Mellon University graduate students named 2013 Seibel Scholars by the Seibel Scholars Foundation.

On a recent, hot Friday afternoon members of the Platypus team were gathered around a pond in Schenley Park below the Carnegie Mellon University testing their technology.

Hear Me, a youth project based in the Robotics Institute’s CREATE Lab, will provide personal stories of bullying for a community forum on bullying organized by WYEP and WESA. More information on the free event at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 14 in Point Park University’s George Rowland White Theater is available online.

For the first time members of the general public will help select four robots for induction into the Robot Hall of Fame® from a slate of a dozen nominees. The new robots will be inducted in a ceremony Oct. 23, when they will take their place alongside such notables as NASA’s Mars Sojourner, Honda’s ASIMO and Star Wars’ R2-D2 and C-3PO.

Now that NASA has successfully landed its Curiosity rover on Mars, a version of Carnegie Mellon University navigation software will help guide the robot during its mission to determine if Mars ever could have supported life. The software is a version of Field D*, which was first developed at the Robotics Institute in 2000 by Tony Stentz, now director of the National Robotics Engineering Center. Stentz will discuss CMU's contributions to the mission on KDKA-TV's "Sunday Business Page" at 6:30 a.m. Aug. 12.

Paris is one of those cities that has a look all its own, something that goes beyond landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and INRIA/Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris have developed visual data mining software that can automatically detect these sometimes subtle features, such as street signs, streetlamps and balcony railings, that give Paris and other cities a distinctive look.

Computer graphic artists who produce computer-animated movies and games spend much time creating subtle movements such as expressions on faces, gesticulations on bodies and the draping of clothes. A new way of modeling these dynamic objects, developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Disney Research, Pittsburgh, and the LUMS School of Science and Engineering in Pakistan, could greatly simplify this editing process.

Simon Engler has spent this summer at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute working on robotic technology that might search for life on Mars. And next year, he’ll be working on food preparation skills that may one day support life – human life – on that planet. Engler, a Robotics Institute Summer Scholar (RISS), is one of six people selected from more than 700 applicants to participate early next year in a NASA-sponsored experiment called Hi-SEAS, or the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. They will be testing new forms of food and food preparation strategies designed for sustaining astronauts on Mars and other deep-space missions.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, working with colleagues at Google and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), have adapted their technology for interactively exploring time-lapse imagery to create a tool that enables anyone to easily access 13 years of NASA Landsat images of the Earth’s surface.

M. Bernardine Dias, associate research professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute and the founder and director of the TechBridgeWorld program, will receive the 2012 Borg Early Career Award from the Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W).