Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover<br />Can we use this to judge gymnastics competitions?’ Then you say, ‘Wait, couldn’t we use this in securing Penn Station in New York?’”<br />Frequently, campus research projects spill into the larger city, like when a professor develops a start-up company (the school encourages entrepreneurship), or the local government allows Pittsburgh to be used as a lab (a number of traffic lights in East Liberty are controlled by a Carnegie Mellon professor<br />and his colleagues, who have developed smart signal technology).<br />“It’s uplifting to see.”<br />Speaking of Red Whittaker, the professor who led Carnegie Mellon in winning the $2 million Darpa Urban Challenge self-driving car competition in 2007, Mr. Gutkind said, “Red was into self-driving vehicles before anyone,” using Carnegie Mellon’s resources<br />and reaching out to local investors for money and technical support.<br />M.U., and that’s the main reason why I stayed,” said Mr. von Ahn, who, in addition to<br />his role at Duolingo, is a consulting professor in the School of Computer Science.<br />With so many of his 90 employees residing in Walnut on Highland, one of the newer housing<br />and retail complexes in East Liberty, Mr. von Ahn joked, “We call them the Duolingo dorms.”<br />Mr. von Ahn, 38, is a superstar in the tech world.<br />“It’s really cool and exciting to have these glimpses of the future, and to see all these people running around and having these crazy ideas.”<br />Mr. Moore was the founding director of Google’s Pittsburgh office before returning three years<br />ago to the college, where he was previously a professor of computer science and robotics.
