Campus News in Brief
Students display technology
Two Carnegie Mellon students will take part in the U.S. finals of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup from April 20 to 22 in Los Angeles, Calif.
Over 16,000 U.S. college students registered for the competition, and Carnegie Mellon students are two of only 41 to make it to the round.
The cup is an international student technology competition in which students address a global issue. There are three categories to address each area of technology: software design, game development, and photography. For the sixth annual competition, participants designed their own software programs, video games, and digital photo essays to fit this year’s theme of the promotion of environmental sustainability.
The Carnegie Mellon participants, were part of the research group “Iced Tea Lemon,” along with two other students from the College of William and Mary and the University of California, Los Angeles. The students collaborated on a project called Lemon Sketch, a venture in electrical and computer engineering and computer science.
Lemon Sketch facilitates the use of art in software development through a combination of features that ultimately allow it to become more user-friendly, and thus more easily promote causes such as sustainability.
The winners from the U.S. finals will compete in the worldwide finals July 3–8 in Paris.
Gore to give keynote speech
Al Gore, former U.S. vice president and 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner, will be the keynote speaker at Commencement 2008.
Gore has been in the media spotlight lately due to his commitment to the environment.
Gore is the author of The New York Times bestsellers Earth in the Balance (2000) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary that examines the disastrous effects associated with global warming.
His Nobel Prize work was similarly focused, examining the consequences of climate change, which encompasses factors beyond global warming. The research for the project was done by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of researchers including Carnegie Mellon engineering and public policy professor Ed Rubin, who shared the prize.
Gore has a long history in U.S. politics. Gore served as both congressman and senator for his home state of Tennessee, before running for the Democratic ticket in the 1988 elections. Gore lost the nomination to Michael Dukakis.
After serving as vice president under Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001, Gore was the Democratic presidential nominee in the 2000 election.
He remains an important part of the political world, opening the Democratic National Convention in 2008.