Trips and stumbles too often lead to falls for amputees using leg prosthetics, but a robotic leg prosthesis being developed at Carnegie Mellon University promises to help users recover their balance by using techniques based on the way human legs are controlled.

Can children learn to read, write and do basic arithmetic without a teacher or classroom, relying only on tablet computers, each other and some intelligent software? A team of educational researchers from Carnegie Mellon University aims to find out in the $15 million Global Learning XPRIZE competition.

Citizens and government officials are using a new online resource, the Shenango Channel, that uses Carnegie Mellon University computer technology to share, compile and analyze images and air quality data related to a coke plant on Allegheny County’s Neville Island.

Datasets for everything from gene expression to employment demographics are growing so large and complex that automated methods sometimes seem the only way to glean knowledge from them. But a new web-based tool being developed at Carnegie Mellon University provides the option to keep human judgment and intuition in the analytic loop.

Even a novice can design and build a customized walking robot using a 3-D printer and off-the-shelf servo motors with the help of a new design tool developed by Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University.

The 5th annual Robot Film Festival, after two years each in New York and San Francisco, is coming to Pittsburgh and the Row House Cinema in Lawrenceville on Saturday. The festival was founded by Heather Knight, a Ph.D. student in robotics, and Robotics Institute alumnus Marek Michalowski to celebrate robots, both on the screen and in performance.