Carnegie Mellon University
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Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, founded in 1900 by the Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools.[2] The institution adopted its current name in 1967 after merging with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, a chemistry and applied-science laboratory founded in 1913 by Andrew W. Mellon and Richard B. Mellon.[19] CMU enrolls roughly 16,700 students across seven schools and colleges and operates as a single integrated university with no separate medical school, deriving much of its identity from a strong technical and design heritage.[18]
Within computer science and artificial intelligence, Carnegie Mellon occupies an unusually central historical position. The discipline of artificial intelligence took shape in the late 1950s and early 1960s in part through work conducted at CMU by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, whose Logic Theorist program (1956) is frequently cited as the first running artificial intelligence program.[9] Newell and Simon shared the 1975 ACM A.M. Turing Award, and Simon also received the 1978 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.[13] Their successors, including Raj Reddy, Tom Mitchell, and Manuela Veloso, built CMU into one of the most influential centers in the world for symbolic AI, machine learning, robotics, speech, and language technologies.[3]
The School of Computer Science (SCS), formally established in 1988, contains the world's first dedicated Machine Learning Department (founded 2006), the first university-based Robotics Institute in the United States (founded 1979), the Language Technologies Institute, and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.[3] CMU is also the host institution for the federally funded Software Engineering Institute, established by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1984.[12] The university is consistently ranked among the top three or four programs in the world for computer science alongside MIT, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley.[15]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1900 (as Carnegie Technical Schools) |
| Founder | Andrew Carnegie |
| Type | Private research university |
| Endowment | $3.2 billion (FY2024) |
| President | Farnam Jahanian (since March 2018) |
| Provost | James H. Garrett Jr. |
| Total enrollment | ~16,676 (Fall 2024) |
| Undergraduate | ~7,824 |
| Graduate | ~8,852 |
| Campus | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, urban (157 acres main campus) |
| Athletic conference | University Athletic Association (NCAA Division III) |
| Colors | Cardinal, Tartan, Steel Gray, Iron Gray |
| Mascot | Scotty the Scottish Terrier |
| Nickname | Tartans |
| Website | cmu.edu |
In 1900 Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born steel magnate whose Carnegie Steel Company had recently been folded into U.S. Steel, donated $1 million to the city of Pittsburgh for the creation of a technical school.[2] The Carnegie Technical Schools opened to students in 1905 with four divisions: the School of Science and Technology, the School of Fine and Applied Arts, the School for Apprentices and Journeymen, and the Margaret Morrison Carnegie School for Women.[1] Carnegie envisioned vocational training for the sons and daughters of Pittsburgh's working class, many of whom worked in his mills, and his motto, "My heart is in the work," remains the school's official motto.[2]
In 1912 the Carnegie Technical Schools were reorganized as the Carnegie Institute of Technology, often shortened to "Carnegie Tech," and began awarding four-year bachelor's degrees.[1] Over the next several decades the school developed strengths in fine arts, engineering, drama, and applied research, hiring noted faculty in metallurgy, chemistry, and architecture. The first graduate degrees were granted soon after, and the institution was accredited as a degree-granting university.
The Mellon Institute of Industrial Research was founded in 1913 by the Pittsburgh banking and industrial brothers Andrew W. Mellon and Richard B. Mellon in honor of their father, Thomas Mellon.[19] Originally housed within the University of Pittsburgh, the Mellon Institute was incorporated as an independent nonprofit research organization in 1927 and moved to its monumental Greek-revival building on Fifth Avenue in 1937.[19] It conducted contract research for industry on topics including frozen orange juice concentrate, air-quality monitoring, fertilizers, and plastics.[19]
In 1967, with support from Paul Mellon and the Mellons' philanthropic foundations, the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute merged to form Carnegie Mellon University.[2] The combined institution preserved the Carnegie Tech engineering and design tradition while gaining the Mellon Institute's industrial research capacity and its iconic building, which today houses the Mellon College of Science and the Department of Chemistry.[18]
Carnegie Mellon began computing research in the late 1950s when Newell and Simon brought their Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver work from RAND Corporation to the institute, and a Computer Science Department was eventually established within the Mellon College of Science.[9] Significant later milestones included:
In 2018 the Board of Trustees appointed Farnam Jahanian as the university's tenth president, after he had served as interim president, provost, and vice president for research.[5] Jahanian was reappointed in 2023 to a second five-year term.[5] Under his administration the university has expanded its work in artificial intelligence policy, autonomous systems, and quantum information science, and the endowment has grown to roughly $3.2 billion as of fiscal year 2024.[4]
Carnegie Mellon is organized into seven schools and colleges that together cover engineering, sciences, computer science, the humanities, fine arts, business, and public policy.[18]
| School or college | Notes |
|---|---|
| College of Engineering (CIT) | Direct descendant of the original Carnegie Tech engineering schools; includes Biomedical, Chemical, Civil and Environmental, Electrical and Computer, Engineering and Public Policy, Materials Science, and Mechanical Engineering. |
| School of Computer Science (SCS) | Established as a school in 1988; one of the earliest college-level CS schools in the world. |
| Mellon College of Science (MCS) | Includes Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Mathematical Sciences, and Physics. |
| Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy | Founded 1968 as the School of Urban and Public Affairs; renamed for the Heinz family. Houses the Block Center for Technology and Society. |
| Tepper School of Business | Renamed in 2004 after a $55 million gift from David Tepper; pioneered the use of mathematical models in management education. |
| College of Fine Arts (CFA) | Includes the Schools of Architecture, Art, Design, Drama, and Music. |
| Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences | Includes English, History, Philosophy, Modern Languages, Social and Decision Sciences, and Statistics and Data Science. |
CMU also operates campuses in Doha, Qatar, and Mountain View, California (Silicon Valley), as well as smaller program sites in Adelaide, Kigali, and Lisbon.[18]
The School of Computer Science is the focal point of CMU's identity as an artificial-intelligence research university. It is consistently ranked first or near-first globally for computer science by U.S. News and CSRankings, and No. 1 by U.S. News in undergraduate AI, cybersecurity, software engineering, management information systems, and mobile/web applications.[15]
The School of Computer Science is composed of seven peer-level departments and institutes, an unusual structure that gives major research areas direct representation at the college level rather than burying them inside a single computer-science department.[3]
| Unit | Founded | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Computer Science Department (CSD) | 1965 (department), 1988 (within SCS) | Algorithms, programming languages, systems, theory, and a large fraction of CMU AI faculty. |
| Robotics Institute (RI) | 1979 | Mobile robots, manipulation, computer vision, autonomous vehicles, field robotics. |
| Software Engineering Institute (SEI, FFRDC) | 1984 | Federally funded R&D in software assurance, cybersecurity, and AI engineering for the DoD. |
| Language Technologies Institute (LTI) | 1996 (from 1986 CMT) | Natural language processing, speech, machine translation, and information retrieval. |
| Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) | 1993 | Interaction design, learning sciences, intelligent tutoring, accessibility. |
| Machine Learning Department (MLD) | 2006 | First dedicated ML department in the world; statistical learning, deep learning, theory. |
| Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D, formerly ISR) | renamed 2022 | Software engineering, privacy and security, and the social context of computing. |
| Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department | 2009 | Joint with the University of Pittsburgh; computational genomics and systems biology. |
Artificial intelligence as a research field was shaped at CMU through the long collaboration of Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon. In 1955 and 1956, working with the RAND programmer Cliff Shaw, they wrote the Logic Theorist, a program that proved 38 of the first 52 theorems of Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica.[9] They presented it at the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, the meeting now widely identified as the founding event of the field.[9] Their later projects at CMU, including the General Problem Solver and Soar, established the symbolic, search-based tradition of AI and the cognitive-modeling approach known as unified theories of cognition. Both Newell and Simon won the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 1975 for their contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition; Simon additionally received the 1978 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on bounded rationality.[13]
The second great wave of AI at CMU centered on speech recognition, robotics, and machine translation. Raj Reddy, who joined the faculty in 1969, led some of the first continuous-speech recognition systems (Hearsay, Harpy, Sphinx) and shared the 1994 Turing Award with Edward Feigenbaum (himself a CMU PhD) for pioneering large-scale artificial intelligence systems.[7] The third wave, from the late 1990s onward, brought the formalization of machine learning as a discipline through Tom Mitchell, Andrew W. Moore, and Sebastian Thrun, and modern deep-learning research through faculty such as Russ Salakhutdinov, Eric Xing, Zico Kolter, Ruslan Nikolaev, and Graham Neubig.[8]
The table below lists current and historically significant AI faculty at CMU. Inclusion focuses on individuals with verifiable long-term CMU appointments.
| Name | Affiliation at CMU | Area |
|---|---|---|
| Allen Newell (1927-1992) | Faculty 1961-1992; PhD 1957 | Foundational AI, cognitive architecture, Soar |
| Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001) | Faculty 1949-2001 | AI, cognitive science, decision making |
| Raj Reddy | Faculty 1969-present | Speech recognition, robotics, founding director RI |
| Edmund M. Clarke (1945-2020) | Faculty 1982-2020 | Model checking, formal verification |
| Manuel Blum | Faculty 1999-present | Computational complexity, cryptography |
| Takeo Kanade | Faculty 1980-present | Computer vision, robotics |
| Tom Mitchell | Faculty 1986-present; founded MLD | Machine learning, NELL, neuroscience of language |
| Manuela Veloso | Faculty 1992-2018, now University Professor Emeritus | Multi-agent systems, robot soccer; head of AI research at JPMorgan |
| Andrew W. Moore | Faculty 1993-2006, 2014-2018 (dean SCS) | Statistical machine learning, large data |
| Jaime Carbonell (1953-2020) | Faculty 1979-2020; founding director LTI | Machine translation, NLP |
| Russ Salakhutdinov | Faculty 2016-present | Deep learning, multimodal models |
| Eric Xing | Faculty 2004-present | Probabilistic graphical models, distributed ML; founder of Petuum and president of MBZUAI |
| Zico Kolter | Faculty 2012-present; head of MLD | Robust ML, AI safety; member of OpenAI safety and security committee |
| Graham Neubig | Faculty 2017-present | Natural language processing, code generation |
| Geoffrey Hinton | Faculty 1982-1987 (later Toronto) | Backpropagation, Boltzmann machines |
| Sebastian Thrun | Faculty 1995-2003 (later Stanford and Google X) | Probabilistic robotics, autonomous vehicles |
| Yiming Yang | Faculty 1996-present | Information retrieval, text mining |
| Howie Choset | Faculty 1996-present | Snake robots, surgical robotics |
| Maxine Eskenazi | Faculty 1991-present | Spoken dialogue systems, language education |
CMU graduates have founded or led major AI labs in industry and academia. The list below includes only individuals whose CMU degree is verifiable.
| Person | CMU degree | Subsequent role |
|---|---|---|
| Allen Newell | PhD 1957 | Co-founded AI research at CMU; 1975 Turing Award |
| Edward Feigenbaum | BS 1956, PhD 1960 | "Father of expert systems"; Stanford professor; 1994 Turing Award |
| Andrew Moore | PhD (postdoc and faculty) | Former dean SCS; head of Google Cloud AI 2018-2022 |
| Red Whittaker | MS 1975, PhD 1979 | Founder of CMU field robotics; led Tartan Racing |
| Chris Urmson | PhD 2005 | Co-founder and CEO of Aurora Innovation; led Google self-driving car project |
| Bryan Salesky | BS 2002 | Co-founder and CEO of Argo AI |
| Drew Bagnell | PhD 2004; faculty | Co-founder and chief scientist of Aurora Innovation |
| Sebastian Thrun | Faculty (1995-2003); not alumnus | Founder of Google X self-driving program; Udacity |
| Sandra Carberry, Justine Cassell, Carolyn Rose | PhD/Faculty | NLP and human-computer dialogue |
| Salesh Kumar / John Langford | PhD 2002 | Microsoft Research, Vowpal Wabbit |
| Vinod Khosla | MS 1978 (biomedical engineering) | Co-founder of Sun Microsystems; founder of Khosla Ventures |
| James Gosling | PhD 1983 | Creator of the Java programming language |
| Shafi Goldwasser | BS 1979 | MIT/Berkeley professor; 2012 Turing Award |
CMU's AI alumni have populated the senior research staff of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Google Brain, Meta AI, Microsoft Research, and Apple machine intelligence groups, as well as starting numerous independent labs and companies.[14]
Carnegie Mellon counts more than two dozen recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award (the so-called "Nobel Prize of computing") among its faculty and alumni.[13] The university maintains an official list of more than twenty Turing Award winners, including:[13]
| Year | Recipient | Connection |
|---|---|---|
| 1966 | Alan J. Perlis | BS Carnegie Tech 1942; faculty 1956-1971; first Turing Award |
| 1971 | John McCarthy | Postdoc and visiting positions; primary career at Stanford |
| 1975 | Allen Newell | PhD 1957; faculty 1961-1992 |
| 1975 | Herbert A. Simon | Faculty 1949-2001 |
| 1976 | Dana S. Scott | Faculty 1981-2003 |
| 1986 | Robert Tarjan | Faculty 1972-1973 |
| 1986 | John Hopcroft | Faculty 1964-1967 |
| 1994 | Edward Feigenbaum | BS 1956, PhD 1960 |
| 1994 | Raj Reddy | Faculty 1969-present |
| 1995 | Manuel Blum | Faculty 1999-present |
| 2007 | Edmund M. Clarke | Faculty 1982-2020 |
| 2008 | Barbara Liskov | Honorary; not CMU faculty (MIT) |
| 2010 | Leslie Valiant | Faculty 1973-1974 |
| 2012 | Shafi Goldwasser | BS 1979 |
| 2014 | Michael Stonebraker | Faculty (early career, 1971-1972) |
| 2018 | Geoffrey Hinton | Faculty 1982-1987 |
| 2024 | Andrew Barto | (Not CMU; listed for context, primary affiliation UMass) |
In addition to Turing Awards, CMU faculty and alumni have received numerous other major prizes, including the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (Newell, Simon, Reddy, Mitchell, Veloso), the AAAI Allen Newell Award, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (Simon, 1978; Lars Peter Hansen, MS 1974, 2013; Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott, faculty, 2004; Oliver Williamson, faculty 1965-1983, 2009), and many MacArthur Fellowships.[14]
The Robotics Institute (RI), founded in 1979, was the first robotics department at any U.S. university and remains one of the largest in the world by faculty count and research expenditure.[7] Its founding director Raj Reddy served from 1979 to 1991.[7] The headquarters building, Newell-Simon Hall, is located on the main campus, and the institute also operates the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) in Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville neighborhood, which conducts applied robotics work for industrial and government sponsors.
Major research programs and historical milestones include:
RI faculty include Takeo Kanade, Howie Choset, Kris Kitani, Deva Ramanan, David Held, Sebastian Scherer, Aaron Steinfeld, Matt Mason, Martial Hebert (former director and dean of SCS), Christopher Atkeson, and many others.
The Language Technologies Institute evolved from the Center for Machine Translation, which Jaime Carbonell founded in 1986.[3] LTI faculty have contributed core methods in statistical machine translation, neural machine translation, speech synthesis (Festival), spoken-dialogue systems (Olympus, Communicator), question answering, and information retrieval. Recent and current faculty include Graham Neubig, Yiming Yang, Maxine Eskenazi, Yulia Tsvetkov (formerly), Mona Diab, Daniel Fried, and Robert Frederking.
The Human-Computer Interaction Institute was founded in 1993 and offered one of the first PhD programs in HCI in the world.[3] HCII research spans intelligent tutoring systems (Cognitive Tutor and the Open Learning Initiative), social and accessible computing, design research, and the integration of machine learning into interactive systems. The institute houses the Cognitive Tutor research program that became Carnegie Learning, one of the earliest large-scale educational AI deployments.
The Machine Learning Department was established in 2006 inside SCS, growing out of the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery that Tom Mitchell co-founded in 1997.[8] It was the world's first department dedicated to machine learning and offered the first PhD program in the discipline.[8] Mitchell served as founding chair, succeeded by Roni Rosenfeld, Geoff Gordon, Manuela Veloso, and the current chair Zico Kolter. Notable departmental research programs have included Mitchell's Never-Ending Language Learner (NELL), Eric Xing's Petuum platform for distributed machine learning, deep generative models from Salakhutdinov and his students, and Kolter's work on adversarial robustness and AI safety.
MLD has offered a master's degree in machine learning since 2007 and an undergraduate concentration since 2010. In 2018 SCS launched a Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence, the first standalone undergraduate AI degree at any U.S. research university.[3]
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and operated by Carnegie Mellon under contract.[12] The DoD selected CMU as the host site on November 14, 1984, and the institute began full operations in early 1985.[12] The SEI is best known for the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and its successor CMMI, the CERT Coordination Center for cybersecurity incident response and vulnerability disclosure, and a portfolio of work on software architecture, AI engineering, and software supply-chain security.[12] The SEI's contract with the DoD was renewed in 2025 for a further period.[12]
Carnegie Mellon's research has seeded a dense network of AI and robotics companies in Pittsburgh.[18] The National Robotics Engineering Center alone has incubated or spun out dozens of ventures.
| Company | Founders or CMU connection | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Argo AI | Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander (former CMU/NREC and Google) | Founded 2016; backed by Ford and Volkswagen; wound down October 2022 |
| Aurora Innovation | Chris Urmson, Drew Bagnell, Sterling Anderson | Public 2021; large-scale autonomous-truck operations launched 2024 |
| Astrobotic Technology | Red Whittaker (CMU faculty) | Built Peregrine and Griffin lunar landers; first U.S. commercial lunar lander attempt January 2024 |
| RE2 Robotics | Jorgen Pedersen and CMU NREC alumni | Mobile-manipulation; acquired by Sarcos in 2022 |
| Petuum | Eric Xing | Distributed ML platform; healthcare AI |
| Carnegie Learning | Spinoff of HCII Cognitive Tutor | Adaptive math instruction software |
| Marble Robot, Bossa Nova, Caterpillar autonomy, ANYbotics partnerships | Various NREC alumni | Logistics, retail, mining robotics |
| Duolingo | Luis von Ahn (CMU faculty) and Severin Hacker (CMU PhD) | Founded 2011 in Pittsburgh; public 2021 |
| reCAPTCHA | Luis von Ahn | Acquired by Google 2009 |
The Pittsburgh region has explicitly positioned itself as a global hub for autonomous systems and robotics, with CMU as the anchor institution. Major firms including Uber Advanced Technologies Group (formed in 2015 after the high-profile recruitment of dozens of CMU NREC staff), Nvidia, Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft operate research offices in Pittsburgh that work directly with CMU faculty and graduates.
Carnegie Mellon's endowment stood at $3.2 billion as of June 30, 2024, having returned 6.6% net of fees over fiscal year 2024.[4] Including CMU's share of the Dietrich Foundation, the combined investment pool totaled approximately $4.0 billion.[4] Distributions from the endowment in fiscal 2024 were nearly $150 million, equivalent to about 9.4% of annual operating expenditures, and the university's net assets reached $5.9 billion at year end.[17]
Research expenditures at CMU exceed $400 million per year. In fiscal 2021 the university reported $402 million in research spending, of which the School of Computer Science accounted for $100.3 million, the Software Engineering Institute for $71.7 million, the College of Engineering for $48.5 million, and the Mellon College of Science for $47.7 million.[17] Federal sources, principally the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, provided the majority of research funding.
Carnegie Mellon is consistently ranked among the leading universities in the world for technical and design fields. In 2024-2025 it placed:
The School of Drama, the School of Design, the School of Architecture, and the School of Music in the College of Fine Arts are also among the most selective and highly regarded programs in their disciplines.
While this article focuses on AI, CMU's broader alumni and faculty rolls are extensive.
| Name | Field | CMU connection |
|---|---|---|
| Andy Warhol (1928-1987) | Visual art (Pop Art) | BFA in pictorial design 1949 (Carnegie Tech) |
| Philip L. Glass | Music | Faculty (early career) |
| Holly Hunter | Acting | BFA Drama 1980 |
| Ted Danson | Acting | BFA Drama 1972 |
| Zachary Quinto | Acting | BFA Drama 1999 |
| Steven Bochco | Television writing | BFA Drama 1966 |
| Frank Gehry | Architecture | Honorary degree; affiliated work |
| Eugene Cernan (1934-2017) | Astronaut, Apollo 17 | BS Electrical Engineering 1956 |
| Judith Resnik (1949-1986) | Astronaut, Challenger | BS Electrical Engineering 1970 |
| James E. Murdoch | Media executive | Attended Harvard, but joined CMU board; NOT a degree holder |
| Charles "Pete" Conrad (1930-1999) | Apollo 12 commander | Naval Academy and Princeton; honorary CMU connection only |
| Lars Peter Hansen | Economics, 2013 Nobel Prize | MS Economics 1974 |
| Finn Kydland | Economics, 2004 Nobel Prize | Faculty 1973-2004 |
| Edward C. Prescott (1940-2022) | Economics, 2004 Nobel Prize | Faculty 1971-1980; PhD 1967 |
| Oliver Williamson (1932-2020) | Economics, 2009 Nobel Prize | Faculty 1965-1983 |
| Charles Geschke (1939-2021) | Co-founder Adobe Systems | PhD Computer Science 1973 |
| Vinod Khosla | Sun Microsystems, Khosla Ventures | MS Biomedical Engineering 1978 |
| Stephen Bourne | Bourne shell author | Visiting scholar |
Carnegie Mellon's drama, music, design, and architecture programs continue to send graduates into Broadway, Hollywood, and the major design studios at a rate disproportionate to the school's size, and the Mellon College of Science has produced a steady stream of Nobel laureates in economics through close affiliation with the Tepper School and Dietrich College.
The main Pittsburgh campus occupies 157 acres in the Oakland and Squirrel Hill neighborhoods, adjacent to Schenley Park, the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History, and the University of Pittsburgh.[16] Notable buildings include Hamerschlag Hall (housing electrical and computer engineering and topped by an iconic bell tower), the Mellon Institute building (a Greek-revival temple with a 1937 lobby), Hunt Library, the Gates and Hillman Centers (the home of SCS, donated by Bill and Melinda Gates and Henry Hillman in 2009), Newell-Simon Hall (Robotics Institute), and the Tepper Quadrangle (opened 2018).
Student traditions include the annual Spring Carnival and Buggy races, the Fence (a wooden fence repainted nightly by student groups), Mobot races at Spring Carnival, and the school's pipe band, which performs in tartan kilts. The official mascot, Scotty the Scottish Terrier, was inspired by Andrew Carnegie's pet Scotties and was formally adopted as the live university mascot in 2007.[16] Athletic teams are known as the Tartans and compete in NCAA Division III as a founding member of the University Athletic Association.[16]
CMU is known for a culture that encourages cross-disciplinary work, captured in the long-running phrase "my heart is in the work," Andrew Carnegie's motto, and the more informal "interdisciplinary by default" identity that derives from having design, fine arts, computer science, engineering, and business on the same compact campus.