SCS faculty members, students and alumni will predominate among the speakers at the inaugural Launch|CMU, a new semiannual event of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) that will showcase the university's technology, cutting-edge research and some of its most promising startup companies.

The invitation-only event will be May 21 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., and will focus on "big data and machine learning." Subsequent programs are planned to alternate between Silicon Valley and Pittsburgh each spring and fall, with the next scheduled for Oct. 31 in Pittsburgh.

The SCS faculty presenters include:

• J. Zico Kolter, assistant professor of computer science and software research, who will talk about computational methods for sustainable energy;
• oah Smith, associate professor of language technologies and machine learning, who will explore the relationship between text and social context; and
• Adrien Treuille, assistant professor of computer science and robotics, who will present his experiences creating large-scale crowdsourcing projects and discuss the impact and challenges of crowdsourcing on the future of labor.

Also presenting will be Ian Lane, research assistant professor at the CMU Silicon Valley campus, who will talk about machine learning approaches for accelerating speech analytics."The faculty, students and their research at Carnegie Mellon are ideally suited for addressing extremely complex and emerging issues like big data and machine learning," said Lenore Blum, professor of computer science, who co-directs the CIE with Dave Mawhinney of the Tepper School of Business.

"We see Launch|CMU as a vehicle that reaches out to the greater entrepreneurial community and brings together academic experts, researchers, community development officials, startup entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists to share the latest information in innovation and technology," she added.

The event will include breakout sessions with the founders of five big data and machine learning startup companies including: Prashant Reddy, a Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning Department, of Lumator; computer science alumni Rob Wang (CS'04) and Christopher Twigg, Ph.D. (CS'08) of 3 Gear Systems; Henry Hongwen Kang, who recently received his Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute, of Peekabuy, Inc.; Justin Betteridge, a Ph.D. student in the Language Technologies Institute and Mehdi Samade, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science, of Solvvy, formerly known as AhaaMap; and Doug Camplejohn, an electrical engineering and MBA alumnus, of Fliptop.