Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools, the university became the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, formerly a part of the University of Pittsburgh, to form Carnegie Mellon University. With its main campus located 3 miles (5 km) from Downtown Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon has grown into an international university with over a dozen degree-granting locations in six continents, including campuses in Qatar and Silicon Valley, and more than 20 research partnerships.
The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a leading private school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the top computer science programs over the decades. U.S. News & World Report currently ranks the graduate program as tied for 1st with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and University of California, Berkeley.
Watts S. Humphrey was an American pioneer in software engineering who was called the "father of software quality."
Open-source hardware (OSH) consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered by the open-design movement. Both free and open-source software (FOSS) and open-source hardware are created by this open-source culture movement and apply a like concept to a variety of components. It is sometimes, thus, referred to as FOSH. The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily discerned so that others can make it – coupling it closely to the maker movement. Hardware design, in addition to the software that drives the hardware, are all released under free/libre terms. The original sharer gains feedback and potentially improvements on the design from the FOSH community. There is now significant evidence that such sharing can drive a high return on investment for the scientific community.
Graffiti Research Lab, founded by Evan Roth and James Powderly during their fellowships at the Eyebeam OpenLab, is an art group dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers, artists and protesters with open source technologies for urban communication. The members of the group experiment in a lab and in the field to develop and test a range of experimental technologies. They document those efforts with video documentation and DIY instructions for each project and make it available for everybody. The GRL is particularly well known for inventing LED Throwies.
Robert Alan Iannucci is a computer scientist. His areas of expertise include multiprocessing and embedded systems. He earned his PhD at MIT in 1988 with a thesis titled "A dataflow/von Neumann hybrid architecture.".
Eyebeam is a not-for-profit art and technology center in New York City, founded by John Seward Johnson III with co-founders David S. Johnson and Roderic R. Richardson.
In computing, multi-touch is technology that enables a surface to recognize the presence of more than one point of contact with the surface at the same time. The origins of multitouch began at CERN, MIT, University of Toronto, Carnegie Mellon University and Bell Labs in the 1970s. CERN started using multi-touch screens as early as 1976 for the controls of the Super Proton Synchrotron. Capacitive multi-touch displays were popularized by Apple's iPhone in 2007. Plural-point awareness may be used to implement additional functionality, such as pinch to zoom or to activate certain subroutines attached to predefined gestures.
Golan Levin is an American new media artist, composer, performer and engineer interested in developing artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression.
James Powderly is an artist, designer and engineer whose work has focused on creating tools for graffiti artists and political activists, designing robots and spatial computing platforms, and promoting open source culture.
Theo Watson is a British artist and programmer. His art work includes interactive video, large-scale public projections, computer vision projects, and interactive sound recordings which have featured in museums and galleries across the world including Museum of Modern Art, New York Hall of Science, Tate Modern amongst others. Watson is a partner at Design I/O, a Cambridge-based interactive design firm known for cutting edge, immersive installations. He is also co-founder of the programming toolkit openFrameworks, co-creator of the EyeWriter and a virtual fellow at Free Art and Technology Lab.
Cubit, often stylized CUBIT, is a computer user interface system for multi-touch devices, designed by Stefan Hechenberger and Addie Wagenknecht for Nortd Labs. It was developed to "demystify multitouch" technology by using an open-source model for software and hardware. It is a direct competitor of Microsoft Surface.
Ralph Guggenheim is an American video graphics designer and film producer. He won a Producers Guild of America Award in 1995 for his contributions to the film Toy Story.
The Free Art and Technology Lab a.k.a. F.A.T. Lab was a collective of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, and musicians, dedicated to the merging of popular culture with open source technology. F.A.T. Lab was known for producing artwork critical of traditional Intellectual Property Law in the realm of new media art and technology. F.A.T. Lab has historically created work intended for the public domain, but has also released work under various open licenses. Their commitment is to support "open values and the public domain through the use of emerging open licenses, support for open entrepreneurship and the admonishment of secrecy, copyright monopolies and patents. F.A.T. Lab's mission has been approached through various methods of placing open ideals into the mainstream popular culture, including work with the New York Times, MTV, the front page of YouTube and in the Museum of Modern Art permanent collection."
Ayah Bdeir is an entrepreneur, inventor, and interactive artist. She is the founder and CEO of littleBits.
Stefan Hechenberger is an Austrian artist and programmer. His works include interactive software, computer vision projects and open-source hardware.
Lindsay Howard is an American curator, writer, and new media scholar based in New York City whose work explores how the internet is shaping art and culture. She produced the 50th anniversary of the Experiments in Art and Technology program with Nokia Bell Labs and the New Museum. Previously, she curated the inaugural digital art auctions at Phillips in New York, which were called an “art breakthrough" in WIRED Magazine.
Deep Lab is a collective group of artists, researchers, writers, engineers, and cultural producers. These women are involved in critical assessments of contemporary digital culture and, together, work to exploit the potential for creative inquiry lying dormant in the deep web. Outside of Deep Lab, the members engage in activities that range from magazine editing, journalism, various forms of activism, and teaching. Research by the collective involves privacy, code, surveillance, art, social hacking, race, capitalism, anonymity, 21st century infrastructures, and useful skills in tangible situations and is both an independent and collaborative effort. Deep Lab draws influence from Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), Cypherpunks, Guerrilla Girls, Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T.), Chaos Computer Club, and Radical Software.
Addie Wagenknecht is an American artist and researcher living in New York City and Austria. Her work deals primarily with pop culture, feminist theory, new media and open source software and hardware. She frequently works in collectives, which have included Nortd Labs, F.A.T. lab, and Deep Lab. She has received fellowships and residencies from Eyebeam, Mozilla, and The Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.
Chris Harrison is a British-born, American computer scientist and entrepreneur, working in the fields of human-computer interaction, machine learning and sensor-driven interactive systems. He is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Future Interfaces Group within the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. He has previously conducted research at AT&T Labs, Microsoft Research, IBM Research and Disney Research. He is also the CTO and co-founder of Qeexo, a machine learning and interaction technology startup.
