The Race is On! Nearly 30 teams are trying to put a lander on the moon and win Google's Lunar X Prize. Here's why a CMU spinoff has the clear lead.

Headed by William “Red” Whittaker, CMU’s Fredkin Professor of Robotics, Astrobotic is one of 29 teams competing for the Google Lunar X Prize—an award of up to $25 million for the first privately funded team to land on the moon and travel 500 meters, sending data and video to Earth. The rover is built. By the time you read this story, the lander will be ready, too.

When Ziv Bar-Joseph talks about his research, he’s precise, but rapid-fire. It’s as if language can’t keep up with him; as if the ideas have to come out more quickly than verbal communication can allow.

Alexei (Alyosha) Efros is an associate professor of robotics and computer science at CMU and last year received a Finmeccanica Career Development Chair.

CMU leads a multi-university effort to develop translation programs for less-common languages

A student-run chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery is getting noticed both on- and off-campus

The predecessors of today’s Unisys Corp. pioneered some of the most amazing technological breakthroughs of the 20th century—the airplane auto-pilot, radar and microwave communications, and the first American-made commercially available computer, UNIVAC.

Can robots tell jokes? If they want to be accepted by humans, they can—and should, says grad student Heather Knight

A new measurement standard for supercomputers owes a debt to the work of CMU’s Christos Faloutsos

Obama visits NREC to launch a major initiative designed to boost high-tech manufacturing in the United States

As the board nears its 10th anniversary, I’d like to share just a few thoughts about what this dedicated alumni group has meant to me.

Congratulations to Ram Raghunathan (CS’11), winner of the ninth-annual SCS Alumni Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Computer Science.

No matter how they became connected to SCS or where their career paths have taken them, all of the members of the SCS Alumni Advisory Board share a passion for the School of Computer Science.

B.S., computer science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2001

M.H.C.I., human-computer interaction, Carnegie Mellon University, 1996; M.A., instructional science, CMU, 2000; Ph.D., human-computer interaction, CMU, 2004

No other prize in the long history of technology prizes (see cover story, “Astrobotic’s Race to the Moon”) has as many connections into Carnegie Mellon University as the Fredkin Prize.