PITTSBURGH — Will that hybrid vehicle pay for itself and help the environment? That depends on how and where you drive, Carnegie Mellon University researchers report.

Jeremy Michalek, a professor of mechanical engineering and engineering and public policy at CMU, and Orkun Karabasoglua, a mechanical engineering research assistant, analyzed the potential cost and greenhouse gas savings of hybrid and electric vehicles under different driving conditions.

"We found that for highway drivers, hybrid and plug-in vehicles cost more without much benefit to the environment," Michalek said. "But for drivers who experience a lot of idling and stop-and-go traffic, a hybrid could lower lifetime costs by 20 percent and cut greenhouse gas emissions in half."

The study, funded by the National Science Foundation, Ford and Toyota, appears in the journal Energy Policy as the EPA is rolling out new fuel economy labels starting with 2013 vehicles.

"The new labels are improved, but no single test can capture all kinds of driving," Michalek said. "Hybrid and plug-in vehicles will do the most good at the lowest cost if adopted by drivers who spend a lot of time in traffic. For these drivers, hybrids are a win-win, and the benefits may be much more than the labels suggest."

The U.S. government uses standard laboratory tests to measure vehicle fuel efficiency for federal fuel economy labels and standards.

"The fuel economy standards are still based on old lab tests that make vehicles appear to be more efficient than they really are," Michalek said. "This has always been an issue, but it is simplified with today's vehicle technologies. These tests may be underestimating the relative real-world benefits of hybrid and plug-in vehicles."  

Driving conditions affect not only cost and emissions, according to Michalek. "Aggressive driving can cut vehicle range by 40 percent or more. That's a notable risk for pure electric vehicles, which already have limited range and take a long time to recharge. But with hybrid electric vehicles, which run on gasoline, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that use electricity for short trips and switch to gasoline for longer trips, there's no added risk of being stranded," he said.

Michalek reports that "the bottom line is: before you buy, consider how you drive."

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PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University's Metin Sitti showcased one of his latest creations — a pill-sized capsule robot capable of performing tissue biopsies and dispensing drugs inside a human — at the 2013 World Science Festival June 10 in New York City.

"It was a wonderful opportunity to meet and chat with top-notch scientists, artists, journalists, politicians and most importantly the public at this event," said Sitti, a professor of mechanical engineering and head of CMU's NanoRobotics Lab.

The World Science Festival, sponsored by the Science Festival Foundation since 2008, is designed to help the general public better understand science and the many research implications for the future.

Sitti is working to create miniature, micron-sized medical robots that can interact inside the human body and work cooperatively with people in a variety of health care environments.

While pill-sized capsule endoscopes are increasingly used as wireless imaging devices for diagnosing disease in the human digestive tract, the technology is limited to sensing applications.

"I am working to address these limitations by designing and manufacturing new pill-sized soft capsule robots that can be controlled remotely to enable critical diagnostic and therapeutic functions for the gastrointestinal tract," said Sitti, who received a three-year $787,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health and a CMU matching grant in 2012.

Sitti also discussed what we can expect in the next decade of nanomedicine during a World Festival panel session that also included: New York Times contributor Carl Zimmer; Zahl Fayad, a radiologist from Mount Sinai School of Medicine; Peter Hoffmann, a physicist from Wayne State University; and Bjorn Torger Stokke, a biophysicist from the Norwegian Institute of Technology.

For additional information about the program, see http://worldsciencefestival.com/events/science_on_the_verge.

Pictured: One of Metin Sitti's latest creations — a pill-sized capsule robot about the size of a quarter that's capable of performing tissue biopsies and dispensing drugs inside the human body.

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Event: More than 70 Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts and Brownies from Point Breeze, Springdale, Shadyside and Castle Shannon will get hands-on experience in identifying poisonous plants, creating historic structures with Legos and a cache of other engineering projects at the third annual Scouting for Engineers program. The program, sponsored by Carnegie Mellon's Engineering College, is designed to educate scouts about engineering.

The scouts will participate in a timed "Lego Battle" to see which team can build and assemble some of the world's most historic structures including: The White House; Germany's famed Brandenburg Gate; France's Villa Savoye; and New York's art deco Rockefeller Center. They also will participate in other engineering demos, from how to spell out words with magnets like a computer to learning how chemical engineers design toys, food and household products using the chemistry of big molecules.

The Allegheny County Department of Health mascot, the Brownie Burger, and CMU's Scottie Dog mascot will join the scouts to kick off the day's activities.

When: 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Monday, June 17.

Where: Tung Au Lab, Baker Hall, across from Schenley Park off Frew Street, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15213.

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PITTSBURGH — Carnegie Mellon University has been designated for the first time as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations (CAE-Cyber Ops) through 2018 by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the United States Cyber Command. The award will be presented today (June 10) in Mobile, Ala.

The honor is reserved for institutions like CMU that feature technical, interdisciplinary, higher education programs grounded in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering and extensive hands-on lab work. The NSA reviewed and approved the curriculum specifically for the Master of Science in Information Security Technology and Management (MSISTM) Program offered by the Information Networking Institute (INI).

Through the university-wide efforts of its outstanding cybersecurity education and research center, CMU was recently re-designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education and designated for the first time as a Center for Academic Excellence in Research. The NSA and the Department of Homeland Security awarded these designations through 2014.

"Through our academic and research strengths, in addition to our applied knowledge, we're educating the workforce in specialized cyber operations that are critical to the nation's security. It is an honor to attend the awards ceremony on behalf of CMU," said Dena Haritos Tsamitis, the principal investigator on CMU's CAE designations. Tsamitis is the director of the INI and director of education, training and outreach for Carnegie Mellon CyLab, one of the largest university-based cybersecurity research and education centers in the U.S.

As a result of the designations, the university and its students may be eligible for certain federal grants and programs, such as the Department of Defense's Information Assurance Scholarship Program (IASP) and the NSF-funded CyberCorps Scholarship for Services Program (SFS), which offers a full scholarship and stipend to students in information security in exchange for a commitment to work for the federal government after graduation. More than 140 students have participated in the SFS at CMU.

The INI has hosted more than a dozen scholars through the government's Information Assurance Capacity Building Program (IACBP) to enhance tomorrow's information security leaders and faculty. Since 2002, more than $1.1 million has gone to the IACBP, which is designed to guide faculty at minority-serving institutions, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic-Serving Institutions, to develop curricula with academic enrichment from the INI and Carnegie Mellon CyLab.

For additional information about CMU's latest cyber operation accolades, see http://www.nsa.gov/academia/nat_cae_cyber_ops/index.shtml.

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Event: Carnegie Mellon University's Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research (SEER) will host five top environmental journalists for its highly successful Steinbrenner Institute Environmental Media Fellowships.

The journalists include: Erika Bolstad, national environmental reporter for McClatchy News Service; Sam Evans-Brown, environmental reporter for NPR; Gary Chittim, an environmental reporter for King 5 News; Colin McDonald, an environmental reporter for the Express-News Newspaper and Kate Sheppard, an environmental reporter for Mother Jones Magazine.

"The fellowship enables leading environmental science, technology and policy journalists to broaden and deepen their knowledge of environmental issues. It also provides a unique opportunity for CMU faculty members to share their research findings with, and learn communication skills and strategies from, a group of top reporters and editors," said David A. Dzombak, the Walter J. Blenko Sr. university professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and faculty director for the Steinbrenner Institute.

The journalists meet informally with researchers in engineering, computer science, robotics, the social sciences and architecture. The fellowship is co-sponsored by the College of Engineering and the Steinbrenner Institute, which supports and enhances the environmental research and education at CMU.

In honor of the visit of the five nationally prominent environmental journalists, the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance also is sponsoring a "Pittsburgh Re-Made" river cruise to mark the 30th anniversary of Pittsburgh's great comeback from difficult economic times. The cruise, aboard a specially designed green vessel, features a narrated tour of Pittsburgh's environmental and economic comeback.

When: 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., June 9-11.

Where: Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, Pa. 15213.

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PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University researchers are working to make cities and businesses more intelligent.

As new co-directors of the Pennsylvania Smarter Infrastructure Incubator (PSII), an interdisciplinary research lab at CMU, Burcu Akinci and Bruno Sinopoli are fostering the creation of technologies to help cities, government and industries worldwide develop smarter infrastructures.

"I am very pleased that professors Akinci and Sinopoli have agreed to co-lead the PSII. They are well known and highly regarded for their respective research activity related to smarter infrastructure. Together, they will bring exciting new ideas and research programs to the PSII. They will also continue the excellent PSII tradition of cooperation among the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES) and many other departments in the College of Engineering and other colleges," said James H. Garrett, Jr., dean of CMU's College of Engineering and the Thomas Lord Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

"We plan to explore joint research in a variety of critical technology areas to enable more efficiently and effectively managed and sustainable civil infrastructure," said Akinci, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at CMU whose work focuses on leveraging information models and a variety of sensors to streamline construction and facility/infrastructure-management practices.

Sinopoli, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at CMU, develops tools for securing and controlling cyber-physical systems.

"We want to improve the robustness and security of critical infrastructures. But to do this, we also need to improve the reliability, efficiency and integration of information and communication technologies so critical to developing performance indices," Sinopoli said.

The PSII, located within CMU's top-ranked College of Engineering, is a Commonwealth of Pennsylvania-supported economic development initiative developed to advance infrastructure technology in partnership with industry and the state. Both IBM and Bombardier were founding partners in 2010.

Akinci and Sinopoli report that government agencies at the municipal, city, state and federal level along with businesses from diverse industry sectors will be invited to partner with the PSII.

"Our goal is to develop interdisciplinary research to help better manage critical infrastructures such as buildings, power, water, gas, transportation systems and other physical structures," Sinopoli said.

The world's trillion-dollar network of rails, roads, bridges, buildings, water distribution systems and power networks have varying amounts of automated management and monitoring, but the CMU research collaboration is designed to improve these critical emerging technologies and train a new generation of employees who have the multidisciplinary perspective and skillsets to design and operate them.

As new co-directors of the Pennsylvania Smarter Infrastructure Incubator (PSII), an interdisciplinary research lab at CMU, Burcu Akinci (pictured top) and Bruno Sinopoli (pictured bottom) are fostering the creation of technologies to help cities, government and industries worldwide develop smarter infrastructures.

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PITTSBURGH—Daniel P. Siewiorek has been named director of the Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Center, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center. Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh are partners in the center, which focuses on creation of intelligent systems that improve the quality of life for everyone while enabling older adults and people with disabilities.

Siewiorek, a longtime CMU faculty member who had been acting director since the fall of 2011, was selected for the position following a nine-month national search process. He succeeds Takeo Kanade, director emeritus and professor of computer science and robotics.

"I am honored to take up leadership of the Quality of Life Technology Center as I have long been enthusiastic about the personal opportunities QoLT provides to help our older adults retain their dignity and independence," said Siewiorek, who is the Buhl University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science.

"The challenges of aging and disability are inspiring a whole cadre of interdisciplinary—minded researchers—engineers, scientists and clinicians—who are highly collaborative, well-integrated, and driven to produce QoLTs—an exciting new field of intelligent systems that will ultimately enable better quality of life for all," he added.

Siewiorek formerly served as co-founder and associate director for the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems. He also was director of the School of Computer Science's Human-Computer Interaction Institute and is founding chairman of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems. Siewiorek has led interdisciplinary teams that designed and constructed more than 20 generations of mobile computing systems. His achievements span four decades of experience in parallel processing, computer architecture, reliable computing, design automation and more.

Siewiorek will continue to oversee the QoLT Center's Virtual Coach (VC) Testbed Systems, a new generation of attentive, personalized systems that provide cognitive assistance based on an awareness of a user's activities, contexts and abilities. These include systems that help in the rehabilitation of stroke patients, prompt memory recall for people with dementia and guide people in physical exercise.

"My wife and I watched our own parents age in assisted living and nursing homes," Siewiorek said. "We saw their health and capabilities decline firsthand. We witnessed their efforts to help each other compensate for individual shortcomings and we observed directly the enormous toll that is often placed on caregivers. Their enduring, human spirit is what originally motivated me to focus my research on creating a new breed of assistive technologies."

The Quality of Life Technology Center was founded in 2006 to explore the development of intelligent systems that augment body and mind functions, maintain health and well-being, prevent or slow decline, compensate for diminished human capabilities and enhance intact ones. In contrast to other smart devices, QoLT's are uniquely marked by emphasis on human-system symbiosis—an emerging approach to universal design that seeks to assure human and engineered components are mutually dependent and working together collaboratively towards task completion. QoLT leverages state-of-the-art expertise in computation, sensing, robotics, machine learning, communication, social sciences, design and more to enable its disruptive paradigm.

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Event: Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering will host seven top journalists June 2-4 at the seventh annual Information Technology Media Fellowship.

The journalists include: Francie Diep, a reporter with Popular Science Magazine; Seth Fletcher, a reporter with Scientific American; Cathie Gandel, a reporter with U.S. News & World Report; Bill Jackson, a reporter with Government Computer News; Sara Reardon, a reporter with New Scientist; James Sawyer, a senior editor of Manufacturing Engineering Media; and Teake Zuidema, a tech reporter and contributor to the European version of Scientific American.

The fellowship enables leading technology and science reporters to deepen their understanding of emerging technologies. It is also designed to help Carnegie Mellon faculty better understand how to share important research and other tech breakthroughs with news reporters, editors and producers. Participants meet informally with researchers in the labs and in the field. Their visit spans topics ranging from micro-sensors and critical infrastructure to novel nanorobotics, biometrics and leading-edge data storage research.

The Infotech Media Fellowship also is supported by the Department of Media Relations and the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance, which has arranged for the fellows to have a networking dinner with several new high-tech companies and an overview of "Creating Breakthrough Products" by author and CMU Mechanical Engineering Professor Jonathan Cagan.

When: 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., June 2-4.

Where: Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, Pa. 15213.

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PITTSBURGH – Carnegie Mellon University's Gabriela Hug will receive the Outstanding Young Engineer Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) Power and Energy Society (PES) July 23 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

"I'm extremely honored to receive this award as this is a great recognition for my involvement in IEEE and the energy research that I and my students are doing," said Hug, an assistant professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) at CMU. Hug has been working on various topics in the field of optimization and control in electric power systems with the overall goal to provide the computational methods required for the integration of large-scale renewable generation.

The award is presented annually at the IEEE PES annual meeting. Recipients receive a plaque, up to $1,000 for travel to attend the meeting, and have the privilege of designating a college or university to receive a $2,000 scholarship for an electrical engineering undergraduate.

"We are pleased and proud of Professor Hug's accomplishments. From my first encounter with her, I was sure she would be an outstanding engineer because she is intelligent, analytical, hardworking and innovative," said Goran Andersson, a professor at the Eidgenossiche Technische Hochschule Zurich (ETH), Hug's Ph.D. adviser and the award nominator. "The award is a corroboration of my thoughts for the past decade, and I'm convinced that we've just seen the beginning of a very successful career."

A research pioneer, Hug recently received the National Science Foundation's Early Career Development Award, its most prestigious award for junior faculty.

Hug reports that she is developing tools to enable a self-managing grid by the means of ubiquitous power flow control. "The main goal is to make the power grid more flexible so that it can adjust to the increasingly varying flows caused by variable renewable generation," she said.

"This is a wonderful honor for a talented and innovative engineer who is working on systems to improve our nation's critical infrastructures," said M. Granger Morgan, the Thomas Lord University Professor of Engineering, EPP head and director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation.

In addition to conducting award-winning research at CMU, Hug is co-director of the Electric Energy Systems Group, the leader of the thrust area on Transmission and Distribution Management in the Smart Grid Research Center and a member of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center.

She obtained her master's degree in 2004 and Ph.D. in 2008 in Electrical and Computer Engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and she also received a diploma in higher education teaching from the same institution in 2007.

For additional information about Hug's latest award, visit http://www.ieee-pes.org/outstanding-young-engineer-award.

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PITTSBURGH - Carnegie Mellon University has named Lorenz (Larry) T. Biegler, a University Professor and the Bayer Professor of Chemical Engineering, as the new head of its Chemical Engineering Department, effective Nov. 1. He succeeds Andrew J. Gellman, who has been department head since 2003.

"This is a wonderful honor for me and I pledge to work diligently with all my esteemed colleagues to continue the leading edge research so endemic to our outstanding Chemical Engineering Department," Biegler said. "CMU is a unique place where we continue to solve some of the world's most pressing challenges, including the ongoing debate about energy independence for the U.S."

A member of the College of Engineering faculty since 1981, Biegler is internationally renowned for his research in computer-aided process engineering and his projects in design research and systems analysis. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He also served as director of CMU's Center for Advanced Process Decision-Making from 1999-2005.

"I am very pleased that Larry Biegler will join the college leadership team as the new head of the Chemical Engineering Department," said James H. Garrett Jr., dean of the College of Engineering and the Thomas Lord Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at CMU. "His phenomenal scholarly reputation, demonstrated commitment to professional service, passionate interest in making the Chemical Engineering Department the best it can be, and collegial nature make him an excellent choice for this position."

In addition to research and teaching at CMU, Biegler has been a visiting scholar at Northwestern University, a scientist-in-residence at Argonne National Lab, a distinguished faculty visitor at the University of Alberta, a Gambrinus Fellow at the University of Dormund, a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Heidelberg, a Cheungkong Visiting Professor at Zhejiang University and a Distinguished Jubilee Lecturer at ITT Bombay. He has taught courses on dynamic optimization in Argentina, China, Finland, Colombia, Germany and Mexico, and started new research activities with colleagues in all of these countries.

Among his many awards for outstanding achievements, Biegler is a recipient of the Warren K. Lewis Award for Chemical Engineering Education and the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Biegler also serves as an associate editor for the SIAM Journal of Optimization and Industrial and Engineering Chemistry and was the meeting program chair for the 2012 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AICHE) Conference in Pittsburgh.

He received his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1977 from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and his master's degree (1979) and Ph.D. (1981) in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin.

He is married to Lynne Webber and they have one son, Matthew, who recently graduated from CMU.

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PITTSBURGH — Two Carnegie Mellon University alumni are giving smartphone users a reality check with a new book that identifies and explains the cyberthreats posed by snooping hackers and other malware communication challenges.

Anmol Misra and Abhishek Dubey, who earned master's degrees at CMU's Information Networking Institute (INI), have written a comprehensive book about security challenges facing Android, one of the leading platforms for smartphones and tablet use. In their book, "Android Security: Attacks and Defenses," the authors explain how attackers can get control of your smartphone.

"This book is a wonderful example of how our graduates apply the knowledge and experience gained from their work in our interdisciplinary master's programs," said Dena Haritos Tsamitis, director of CMU's Information Networking Institute (INI) and director of education, training and outreach for Carnegie Mellon CyLab, one of the largest university-based cybersecurity research and education centers in the U.S.

Tsamitis, who wrote the book's foreword, points out that "anyone with an interest in mobile security will be able to get up to speed on the Android platform, and will gain a strategic perspective on how to protect personal and enterprise customers from the growing threats to mobile devices."

Both Misra and Dubey report that ever since Android has emerged as a leading platform for mobile devices, it has increasingly become the target for malicious attackers as vast amounts of personal data are stored in emails, texts and other applications, and personal information is increasingly easy to find on social networks. And the trend is going to continue with the rise in popularity of Android-based devices.

"Thirty-two applications available through the official Google market (Google Play) were recently infected with BadNews malware," said Misra, who earned his master's degree in information networking in 2005 and is now a member of Cisco's Information Security team. "People need to be able to trust the source of their applications, application behavior and they need assurance that data on their mobile devices is safe. Employees are increasingly bringing their personal devices to work — in many cases Android phones and tablets. This can result in significant exposure for enterprise security," Misra added.

Dubey, who earned his master's degree in information security and technology management in 2006 and is now a member of Cisco's Security Services and Cloud Operations team, said one of the big problems is that consumers are running old software programs on their smartphones and tablets. "This makes Android appear to be a mobile malware," Dubey said.

Misra and Dubey said the other challenge with mobile devices is that more personal data is now stored on these ubiquitous devices. "People need to upgrade frequently, develop backup systems for storage of personal material and ask for help before hackers completely overwhelm systems," the authors said.

"These mobile systems are pioneering and revolutionizing the way we work, play and live, but more attention must be spent on developing novel defenses to keep data safe, secure and reliable," Misra said.

Industry leaders agree.

"Dubey and Misra have filled a critical gap in software security literature by providing a unique and holistic approach to addressing this critical and often misunderstood topic. Android has become a key platform for mobility over the last few years and this book is a valuable resource for securing the same," said James Ransome, senior director of product security at McAfee.

For additional book information, see http://www.androidinsecurity.com or subscribe to the book's Twitter feed @droidinsecurity.

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PITTSBURGH — Carnegie Mellon University's M. Granger Morgan will moderate a distinguished panel of experts on the critical infrastructure in the United States from 7 to 8 p.m., Thursday, May 30, at the sixth installment of the CMU College of Engineering's Washington Speaker Series at the Cosmos Club at 2121 Massachusetts Ave. in Washington, D.C.

The panel discussion, titled "Natural Disasters & Terrorism: Strategies for Protecting Critical Services and Infrastructure," will feature:

• Jacobo Bielak, professor of civil and environmental engineering at CMU;
• Caitlin Durkovich, assistant secretary for Infrastructure Protection at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security;
• Tim Manning, deputy administrator for Protection and National Preparedness at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA);
• David K. Owens, executive vice president of Business Operations at Edison Electric Institute; and
• Bruno Sinopoli, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at CMU.

The panelists will discuss how modern technologies could limit the risk of power outages from natural disasters and terrorism.

"The U.S. power grid is vulnerable. Continued growth of demand, new regulations created in the 1990s to promote industry competition, and more use of highly variable sources of power such as wind have produced an increasingly fragile network," said Morgan, the Thomas Lord University Professor of Engineering, head of CMU's Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) and director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation.

"While we need to make the system more robust, there is no way to make the power system perfectly secure against large natural disasters or terrorist attacks. For that reason, we also need to be taking steps to be able to speed up the restoration of the system after an outage, and to sustain critical social services when the bulk power system is down," Morgan said.

Morgan points out that CMU's Scott Institute has just released a new policymaker guide that provides recommendations on how to safely and reliably incorporate more variable energy resources — such as the wind — into the U.S. energy grid. CMU researchers also are involved with the Pennsylvania Smarter Infrastructure Incubator (PSII), a research center aimed at creating, applying and evaluating applications of sensing, data analytics and intelligent decision support for improving the construction, management and operation of critical infrastructure systems.

Carnegie Mellon's Washington Speaker Series is a nonpartisan forum designed to enhance meaningful exchange among business, government and research leaders through an exploration of issues at the intersection of policy, technology and innovation. The series is sponsored by the university's College of Engineering, which is recognized as a top 10 engineering school by U.S. News & World Report. For more information, see http://www.cit.cmu.edu/wss.

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PITTSBURGH — Making bits and bytes smaller creates more heat. So, manufacturers continue to seek ways of tracking heat transfer in products as diverse as a computer's silicon chips to light-emitting diodes or solar cells.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers Jonathan A. Malen, Alan J.H. McGaughey, Keith Regner and Zonghui Su have developed a new tool called broadband frequency domain thermal reflectance to measure the thermal and vibrational properties of solids. In a recent paper published in Nature Communications, the CMU team collaborated with Christina Amon and Daniel Sellan from the University of Toronto to study materials in which heat is transferred by atomic vibrations in packets called phonons.

"In an analogy to light, phonons come in a spectrum of colors, and we have developed a new tool to measure how different color phonons contribute to the thermal conductivity of solids," said Malen, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. "Our study provides the first experimental resolution to how individual phonons impact thermal conductivity."

According to the CMU researchers, the new tool will give both industry and academia a clearer picture of how an electronic device's dissipative ability shrinks with its size, and how materials can be structured at the nanoscale to change their thermal conductivity.

For example, in the initial demonstration, the CMU team showed that as silicon microprocessors continue to shrink according to Moore's Law, their operating temperatures will be further challenged by reduced thermal conductivity. But knowledge of the individual phonon contributions also will allow researchers to better design nanostructured thermoelectric materials with an increased efficiency of converting waste heat to electrical energy.

Earlier this year, Malen and McGaughey used nanocrystal arrays to explore heat flow in hybrid organic-inorganic materials. Such materials are touted as a cost-and-resource-effective alternative to conventional semiconductors in energy production.

Funding for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

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Event: Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering will host a panel discussion about career opportunities in the energy industry.

"More than ever, energy jobs are evolving to meet the sector's new demands, and we are training the next generation of leaders to fill those jobs," said M. Granger Morgan, the Lord University Professor in Engineering, director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, and head of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at CMU.

A key mission of the Scott Institute, established last fall, is to take a systems approach to energy issues — collecting information and research results throughout CMU — to provide an up-to-date understanding of energy issues facing today's policymakers.

Morgan will discuss energy innovation at CMU prior to kicking off a panel session about energy jobs. The panelists are: Joshua Bordin, a process safety engineer at Siemens Gas and Oil Division; Gabriella Gonzalez, a social scientist at the Rand Corp.; Amul D. Tevar, a fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy; Dave Vaglia, a principal engineer at Westinghouse Electric (Nuclear); and Jay Whitacre, CTO of Aquion Energy Inc. and a professor of materials science and engineering and engineering and public policy at CMU.

The event is hosted by the College of Engineering's Energy, Science, Technology and Policy (ESTP) Master's Degree Program.

When: Noon to 3 p.m., Tuesday, May 14.

Where: 125 Scaife Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, off Frew Street, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15213.

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PITTSBURGH — Carnegie Mellon University's Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation released a new policymaker guide that provides recommendations for incorporating more variable energy resources — like wind — into the U.S. energy grid. The guide was released today at a Capitol Hill policy briefing.

"Today, variable energy resources produce only about 3 percent of U.S. electricity; however, CMU researchers have found that renewable energy's contribution to the grid could be 20 percent to 30 percent. As summarized in the Scott Institute guide, most of the proposed actions would not require new government subsidies, but instead call for refocusing of existing subsidies along with management, technical and operational changes," said Deborah Stine, associate director for policy outreach at CMU's Scott Institute.

Most states have a renewable portfolio standard — a policy designed to require or encourage electricity producers within a given jurisdiction to supply a certain minimum share (typically 15 to 30 percent of their electricity from designated renewable sources).

If policymakers, grid operators and independent system/regional transmission operators take actions, such as providing incentives to locate renewable facilities in the mid-Atlantic they will reduce the most pollution, establish appropriate decommissioning standards for wind power facilities as well as oil and gas wells, and encourage regulators and insurers to provide incentives to develop offshore wind facilities.

A key mission of the Scott Institute, established last fall, is to take a systems approach to energy issues – collecting information and research results throughout CMU – to provide an up-to-date understanding of energy issues facing today’s policymakers.

For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/energy/public-policy/renewable-energy-guide.pdf.

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