Carnegie Mellon

A new study by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University assessed cannabis use in the United States between 1979 and 2022, finding that a growing share of cannabis consumers report daily or near-daily use and that their numbers now exceed those of daily and near-daily alcohol drinkers. The study concludes that long-term trends in cannabis use parallel corresponding changes in policy over the same period. The study appears in Addiction.…

Tartan linebacker Kevin Cooke is a Chicago Bears fan who enjoyed watching Brian Urlacher play defense for his favorite football team, but his real hero is his older brother Sean, who also played football for CMU. “Sean was always the person I looked up to on the football field. He was a running back, but I was able to learn so much from him,” he said. Cooke, who will graduate…

A tape measure may seem an unlikely tool to identify unconscious bias within an organization, yet in the hands of biologist Nancy Hopkins, it quantified gender bias and became a powerful symbol of the fight for gender equality. At Carnegie Mellon University, during the most recent Scientists & Strategists lecture hosted by the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology(opens in new window) (CMIST) on Tuesday, April 23, guest speaker Kate…

A new study examined the drinking levels and patterns of young adults before, during and after the pandemic. The researchers found alcohol use and alcohol-related problems substantially decreased in heavy-drinking young adults during the pandemic, and these decreases were still evident as the pandemic began to wane. The results are available in the May 2 issue of the journal Nature Mental Health(opens in new window). Kasey Creswell “The pandemic gave…

Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute(opens in new window) (SEI) and OpenAI published a white paper(opens in new window) that found that large language models (LLMs) could be an asset for cybersecurity professionals, but should be evaluated using real and complex scenarios to better understand the technology’s capabilities and risks. LLMs underlie today’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, such as Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Bing AI, and ChatGPT, released in November 2022 by…

In a lawsuit, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said Amazon used a secret algorithm to determine how much to raise prices in a way competitors would follow and that brought the company $1 billion in revenue. Amazon insists the project had a benign aim and was scrapped. In this context, a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University sheds light on the effectiveness of automated pricing strategies used in e-commerce and their interactions…

“RoboAgent is a critical milestone toward general robotic agents that are efficient learners, effective in novel situations and capable of expanding their behaviors over time,” said Vikash Kumar, adjunct faculty in the School of Computer Science(opens in new window)’s Robotics Institute(opens in new window). “Current robots are highly specialized and trained for individual tasks in isolation. In contrast, we set out to create a single artificial intelligence agent capable of…

Large language models (LLMs) use deep-learning techniques to process and generate human-like text. The models train on vast amounts of data from books, articles, websites and other sources to generate responses, translate languages, summarize text, answer questions and perform a wide range of natural language processing tasks. This rapidly evolving artificial intelligence technology has led to the creation of both open- and closed-source tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google…

The COVID-19 pandemic saw a marked surge of e-commerce and online grocery delivery services that persisted past lockdown conditions. The latest work(opens in new window) by Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering researchers examined the impacts of grocery delivery on energy use, emissions and traffic congestion, and whether there might be a better way to manage and optimize deliveries. The study found that grocery delivery was less energy efficient than…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, robots helped Carnegie Mellon University students in the Computational Biology Department complete lab assignments. Joshua Kangas(opens in new window), an assistant professor in the Computational Biology Department(opens in new window) and co-director of the Master of Science in Automated Science(opens in new window) (MSAS) program, said students could log in to the Automated Science Lab(opens in new window)’s integrated robot, design experimental protocols and use cameras…