AI at CMU

On this page, we compile information about AI at CMU to help you get involved. It's an ever-evolving list, so please email us at cmu-ai-mentoring-questions@lists.andrew.cmu.edu if have suggestions. 

AI topic descriptions

Here are some descriptions of the areas listed on our 1:1 signup form to get an idea of what research areas are out there.

Collaboratively maintained by our mentors

Robotics

• Robots learning how to act from interacting with objects

• Autonomous driving

• Robot perception (e.g., computer vision for robots)

• Legged locomotion and control

• Human-robot interaction 

AI and text

• Natural language processing

• Culturally-aware language technologies

• Machine translation 

• Language understanding (from text, speech, videos, robots, etc) 

• Multimodal communication modeling 

• Speech signal processing 

• Code generation

Computer vision

• Making decisions based on images

• Tracking objects in videos

• Passenger detection

• Fundamental research in visual perception 

• 3D Reconstruction and Mapping

• Providing Localization and Spatial Awareness for Robotics 

• Designing efficient algorithms for Real-time

Generative AI

• Image generation

• Text generation

• Speech and audio generation

• Large Language Models

• Code Generation and LLM Agents

AI for social good

• Fairness in AI systems

• Explainable AI (algorithms that can explain their decisions)

• Applications of AI for healthcare, education, sustainability challenges in society 

AI and biology

• AI for medicine (e.g., disease detection, preventative diagnosis) 

• Computational biology (e.g., genomic data analysis)

Algorithms and theory

• Game theory

• Planning 

• Decision-Making

• Theory

  • Understanding fundamental ideas in machine learning theory (mathematics of machine learning)

  • Proving properties of learning algorithms

  • Designing efficient learning algorithms

AI Research events

These are a list of calendars with many AI research talks. Look for words such as "seminar" or "colloquium" to find talks aimed at general technical audiences. Some departments have public thesis proposals and defenses as well, which are given by individual students at CMU. Many include youtube videos of past events so you can get an idea of what previous talks are like. 

Seminar series calendars

• CMU Artificial Intelligence Seminar Series 

• Robotics Institute Calendar - includes Robotics, Visual and Autonomous Systems, Graphics Colloquium 

• Language Technology Institute calendar includes AI in Actions, LTI Colloquium 

• AI Institute for Societal Decision Making seminar

Reading groups

These tend to be smaller, focused groups where people present or discuss research. Here are links to sign up to some. 

• Classic AI papers reading group

• Computer vision reading group

• Manipulation discussion group (robotics)

• Learning and control mailing list
  
  

Official AI at CMU department pages

• AI @ CMU About page including how AI fits into schools across the entire university

• Department websites for some departments at CMU do a significant amount of AI research. This list is not exhaustive

  • Machine Learning Department

  • Language Technologies Institute

  • Robotics Institute

  • Software Systems and Society

  • Computational Biology Department

  • Computer Science Department

  • Human-Computer Interaction Institute

  • AI Engineering in the college of engineering

  • Mellon College of Science