Last Wednesday afternoon, the Intel Open House showcased its facility and current projects in development.

Intel Research Pittsburgh is located on the fourth floor of Carnegie Mellon University's new Collaborative Innovation Center (CIC) building on Forbes Avenue. Intel Research Pittsburgh opened its doors in 2002. Its research is funded by DARPA, the National Science Foundation, Intel, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Why would Intel want to begin a partnership with Carnegie Mellon? Todd Mowry, director of the Intel Research Pittsburgh lab, explained the appeal the University held for the company.

"So many exciting ideas are being generated at Carnegie Mellon, and the students and faculty are top notch," said Mowry. "Having the ability to work with them is a real benefit to Intel."

Some of these ideas were on display at the Open House. Rooms filled with display screens and posters informed visitors about just what Intel Research is researching in the CIC. After being greeted, name-tagged, and presented with a blue Pentium man at the door, guests were invited into the two front rooms of the Intel facility to speak to researchers about their contributions and interactions at Intel Research.

Many of Intel Research's initial projects are past the research stage and are now being deployed and implemented in the real world. With so many new projects underway, Intel researchers thought it was a good time to show off what's in the works. The newest projects concentrate on dynamic physical rendering, anti-spam, and log-based architectures.

The research in the first display room focused on storage and storage devices in projects such as "Relative Fitness Models for Storage" and  "Multipmaps Preserving Disk Locality for Multidimensional Datasets." Jiri Schindler (EMC Corporation), Steve Schlosser (Intel Research Pittsburgh), and five researchers from Carnegie Mellon seek to create access to disks in adjacent paths through projects like these.

The second room used for display was set up as a demo room. Here guests learned about projects like the "Shared Caching," which seeks to answer the question, "What if software could morph in real time?" The project seeks to create reconfigurable antennas and to develop new ways to do medical visualization.

Carnegie Mellon's Brian Kirby is working on a project entitled "Macroscale Electromagnetic Catom Prototypes." Catoms are in fact 'claytronic atoms,' a form of 'programmable matter.' Kirby is working on having the cylindrical catoms demonstrate several of the principles behind claytronics. The catoms are capable of relative locomotion, power transfer, wireless communications, and modular expansion.

The e-mail-related projects included an anti-spam project called "Reliable Email via Social Networks." The goal of this project is to make e-mail as reliable as it was before spam through system "filtering" of social networks and "white listing." Using social networks to white list e-mails works better than white listing alone.

Carnegie Mellon's Yan Ke and Derek Hoiem are working with Intel's Rahul Sukthanker and Padmanaban Pillai on a music-related project. The "Music Identification over the Phone" project seeks to identify 10 seconds of music with a cell phone at a club or other comparatively noisy place. This purpose of this project is to apply the techniques from computer vision with that of machine-learning in a practical application of the two technologies.

The CIC was built with the intention that leading corporations would collaborate with university researchers to create dramatic breakthroughs in science, engineering, and technology. With its four stories of sustainable-designed workspace, it is a comfortable and ideal place to work. The Open House showed that Intel Research Pittsburgh is putting this facility to good use and greatly contributing to the success of the University's plans for productive collaborations.

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