Biography.
Narasimhan was born in India and completed her high school in Zambia, in Africa. [5] She attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and was awarded the 2000 Lancaster Best Doctoral Dissertation Award [5] for her research in the area of developing mechanisms to provide fault-tolerance transparently (i.e., with no code modifications) to existing distributed applications.
In 2001, she moved to Pittsburgh to join Carnegie Mellon University as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where her academic interests have included dependable distributed systems, fault-tolerance, embedded systems, mobile systems and sports technology. [5] She became an avid fan of the Pittsburgh Penguins upon moving to Pittsburgh in 2001, and her experience at a Penguins' hockey game was the inspiration for YinzCam. [4] She is also a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers. [1] She founded YinzCam as a Carnegie Mellon spin-off in 2009, after working on research to provide in-venue, multi-angle, real-time streaming to fans within the Pittsburgh Penguins' arena. She also served as the Director of Intel Labs Pittsburgh, the head of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Embedded Computing at Carnegie Mellon.
Research, Entrepreneurship, and Impact.
Academic research. She has been a faculty member in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University since 2001. She has served as co-director of the CyLab Mobility Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University [5] and headed the Intel Science and Technology Centre in Embedded Computing at Carnegie Mellon University. She has written and published more than 150 research papers on distributed systems and fault tolerance, research that led to the development of a fault-tolerance industrial standard. With her Ph.D. students at Carnegie Mellon, she has worked on research in the areas of failure diagnosis, mobile edge computing, adaptive fault-tolerance, live software upgrades, static analysis, and machine-learning to solve systems problems. [1]
Social research and impact. During the major snowstorm of 2010, Narasimhan and her students worked with the Pittsburgh City Council to launch a website, How's My Street, [6] to allow Pittsburgh residents to know which streets were freshly plowed and, therefore, passable for driving. Through the Trinetra [7] project, she developed mobile technologies to provide increased independence to blind people in their daily activities such as shopping, taking public transportation. She and her students collaborated with the Pittsburgh City Council to develop and launch iBurgh, a groundbreaking mobile app to allow citizens to report complaints to the city's IT departments via smartphones. [5] [8] With her Ph.D. students, she has worked on using edge-device Wi-Fi data to diagnose real-time problems in high-density Wi-Fi networks. Her research group has also worked on technologies for mobile edge computing, as well as problem diagnosis in large-scale production distributed systems. She had also developed AndyVision, a robotics project under the Intel Science and Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, to build an indoor robot that is capable of quickly inventorying merchandise and detecting out-of-stock conditions in retail environments. [9]
Serial entrepreneurship. She helped to start Eternal Systems, Inc., a California-based company where she served as Chief Technology Officer and the Vice-President of Engineering to transition her Ph.D. research into products for commercial use. [1] Her research led to the development of 24x7 highly available platforms and solutions for data centers, large online systems and deeply embedded systems. [1] She co-authored a commercial fault-tolerance standard, the Fault-Tolerant CORBA standard, based on her Ph.D. research. Her interest in technology led her to start a Pittsburgh-based company, YinzCam, [10] [11] focused on designing and building mobile apps bringing real-time statistics, multimedia, streaming radio, social media, and live video feeds [12] to teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, NWSL, EPL, F1, and other sports leagues, tournaments, stadiums, and teams around the world. [13] YinzCam has 120MM+ installs of its mobile apps world-wide. She has also developed data-warehouse platforms to help sports teams understand their business operations and to improve the fan experience. [14] She has developed new augmented-reality experiences for sports teams, along with bridging digital and physical technologies through collaborations with industry partners such as Avery Dennison. [15]
Sports technology and impact. She brings the lessons from her industry experience with YinzCam into her graduate-level Sports Technology course in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as to motivate Ph.D. research in the field of mobile edge-computing and using edge clouds to improve the user experience in high-density environments such as stadiums. [16] She has also worked to incorporate embedded systems into sports through her Football Engineering project that aimed to track the real-time trajectory of footballs, players and other equipment on the field at game-time. [17] Her teaching involves sports entrepreneurship, and she works with students on their startup ideas, particularly to brings sports-related innovations to life in the market. She writes a weekly newsletter offering her perspectives on taking products to market.
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, it became Carnegie Mellon University through its merger with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, founded in 1913 by Andrew Mellon and Richard B. Mellon and formerly a part of the University of Pittsburgh.
The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the best computer science programs over the decades. As of 2024 U.S. News & World Report ranks the graduate program as tied for No. 1 with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley.
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Manuela Maria Veloso is the Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research & Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Head of the Machine Learning Department. She served as president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.
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YinzCam is an American software company that builds mobile applications, IPTV platforms and augmented-reality experiences. It specializes in creating applications for professional sports organizations. As of 2018, YinzCam's software had been downloaded over 55 million times and used by 170+ sports properties, including NFL clubs, NBA/WNBA teams, AFL clubs (Australia), La Liga clubs (Spain), as well as in the La Liga official league app and the NBA's G League app and the NBA2k app. The applications generally offer real-time statistics, multimedia, streaming radio, social media. The live video technology offering instant replay, including NFL RedZone, is offered within NFL stadiums.
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