From a bike path in Montana to a backwater underneath a highway overpass in Austria, citizen scientists fanned out last June to capture high-resolution images for the first Nearby Nature GigaBlitz. Organizers are hoping for even broader participation in their efforts to document global biodiversity as they prepare for the second GigaBlitz, scheduled for the solstice week of Dec. 19-26. The GigaBlitz is organized by a trio of biologists and their partners at Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab.

For Halloween, the CORAL Lab’s CoBot2 robot donned a pumpkin costume to deliver candy bars to 300 delighted denizens of floors 6-8 of the Gates and Hillman centers, stopping at open doors and saying “Knock knock” outside closed doors.

Interbots, a Pittsburgh company that was spun off from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, took first place and won $25,000 at the first RoboBowl competition on Oct. 13. TactSense Technologies of Pittsburgh finished in second place and won $10,000. The venture competition was sponsored by the Robotics Technology Consortium, Carnegie Mellon and the Innovation Accelerator.

Tiramisu Transit, an iPhone app developed by Carnegie Mellon that uses crowdsourcing to help transit riders know when their bus will arrive, won second place in the Best New Innovative Products, Services, or Applications category of the 2011 Best of ITS Awards. The awards are sponsored by the Intelligent Transportation Society of America. They were announced at the 18th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems & Annual Meeting in Orlando, FL.

The Robotics Technology Consortium, Carnegie Mellon University and the Innovation Accelerator today announced the five teams from across the United States that are finalists in the inaugural RoboBowl venture competition. The entrepreneurial teams will compete before a blue-ribbon panel of judges at Carnegie Mellon on Oct. 13. RoboBowl Pittsburgh is the first in a series of national “next-generation robotics” venture competitions intended to find and foster startup and early-stage companies seeking to develop products and services that address unmet and underserved market needs in targeted industrial sectors.

Three commercially promising technologies being developed at the Quality of Life Technology Center will be discussed by seasoned business and investment professionals, faculty and students at the QoLT Foundry Opportunity Meeting from 11 a.m to 1 p.m. Oct. 5 in room 4405 of the Gates and Hillman centers.

The Siebel Scholars Foundation has announced that Andrew Chambers, a master’s student in the Robotics Institute, and four other Carnegie Mellon graduate students are among the 85 members of the 2012 class of Siebel Scholars. Each will receive a $35,000 award for their final year of studies.

Howie Choset, professor in the Robotics Institute, will be among four Carnegie Mellon University faculty members who will make presentations and be part of a mini-documentary being filmed at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of New Champions, Sept. 14-16 in Dalian, China. The meeting, often referred to as “Summer Davos,” brings together global business leaders and is expected to draw 1,500 participants this year.

Images of flattened buildings, muddy tent camps and desperate, homeless people have dominated the world’s view of Haiti since an earthquake shook Port-au-Prince in January 2010. But the September issue of the Robotics Institute's online GigaPan Magazine features interactive panoramas of the central Artibonite Valley, its villages and its hospital that provide an alternative view of Haitian life.

Robotics PhD student Heather Knight and her robot comedian Data were featured on the Sept. 4 edition of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN. Watch the video.