Carnegie Mellon - Olympus - Carnegie Mellon University

PROBEs (PRoblem-Oriented Business Explorations)
At the core of Olympus’ efforts are the creation and nurturing of PROBEs
that are formed by both faculty and students.
Faculty PROBEs originate from years of deep, cutting-edge research in diverse fields such as
computer science, information systems, and engineering, often in collaboration with worldrenowned
companies such as Intel and IBM. Below are some examples of our faculty PROBEs.
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to
digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. A
CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a
human or a computer. You've probably seen them — colorful images with
distorted text at the bottom of web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by
many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually
written to generate spam.
BeaconSys leverages off-the-shelf smartphone and global positioning
systems to provide support for a rich set of location aware, and context
aware mobile applications, including first-responder support, building
navigation, retail shopping, smart transportation and more.
SpiralGen’s software teaches computers to write fast libraries. The goal is to
push the limits of automation in software and hardware development and
optimization for digital signal processing algorithms and other numerical
kernels beyond what is possible with current tools. Spiral addresses one of
the current key problems in numerical software and hardware development:
achieving close to optimal performance with reasonable coding effort.
Safaba Translation Solutions provides automated solutions for language
service providers (LSPs). Commercial demand for high-quality translation
services has increased dramatically over the past decade and has spurred the
rapid growth of the LSP business sector to an estimated $26 billion in 2009.
This expansion is driven by companies doing business multi-nationally that
require professional-quality translations of an increasing volume of
documents and web pages to support their business operations.
Pow! develops optimal power and workload allocation policies to gain more
performance from the available power by merging advanced queuing,
optimization, and stochastic process theories to produce new, nonconventional
analytical models that improve response time ranging from 2 to
5 times over current methods.
Graphics Parallelism in the Cloud is poised to play a foundational role in nextgeneration
gaming technologies. By exploiting cloud computing, this PROBE
enables revolutionary speedups in graphics computation to create a new
generation of games, advancing a $57B industry which is doubling every 5
years.
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