MFI mentioned in the media

2021

August

The Dean’s Office’s Sandra DeVincent Wolf has been selected to serve on the National Academies Committee on Convergent Manufacturing. The committee will put together a publicly-accessible workshop, titled “Convergent Manufacturing Platform - A Future of Additive, Subtractive, and Transformative Manufacturing: A Workshop.” It will look into issues associated with research and development leading to convergent manufacturing capability here in the United States.

June

Carnegie Mellon University was featured in The Wall Street Journal after being awarded a $150 million grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. Half of the funding with be used in building the Robotics Innovation Center, with construction expected to be complete by the 2025-2026 school year, as well as making the current Manufacturing Futures Initiative a permanent institute at the university. The other half will be dedicated toward constructing a new science building, located on the Oakland campus. This story was also featured in: Forbes, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, WESA, NEXT Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Business Times, Trib Live, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

April

MechE’s Ding Zhao was quoted in WIRED about using simulations for industrial applications. There’s growing interest in using AI to control robots and other industrial machines. This often uses an AI approach called reinforcement learning, which involves an algorithm experimenting and learning, from positive feedback, how to achieve a specific goal. “This is definitely the way to go,” says Zhao. He says simulations are crucial to using AI for industrial applications. “Machine learning is data-hungry, and collecting it in the real world is expensive and risky,” he says.

2020

December

The public monitor for Hazelwood Green’s Mill 19, home to CMU’s Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing and Manufacturing Futures Initiative, went live last week, reports Next Pittsburgh. One can, at any given time, see how much energy the country’s largest single-sloped solar array produces via an online solar monitor showing real-time output.