This page provides a starting point for exploring AI research at CMU, including example research areas, seminars and reading groups, and links to departments and institutes across the university. The list is not exhaustive and evolves over time. Please feel free to email us at cmu-ai-mentoring-questions@lists.andrew.cmu.edu if you have suggestions for resources to add.
Here are some descriptions of the areas listed on our 1:1 signup form to get an idea of what research areas exist.
Creating supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms that learn from data
Deep learning and neural networks
Reinforcement learning
Representation learning
Robustness and generalization
Efficient and scalable machine learning
Robot learning through interaction with people, objects, and environments
Autonomous driving and mobile robotics
Robot perception, including vision for robots
Legged locomotion, manipulation, and control
Human-robot interaction and assistive robotics
Planning and decision-making for robots
Natural language processing (NLP)
Culturally-aware language technologies
Machine translation and multilingual NLP
Multimodal understanding (e.g., combining text, video, or other modalities to make inferences)
Language technologies for embodied AI and robots
Speech signal processing
Image and video understanding
Object and person detection
Tracking objects and people across videos
Fundamental research in visual perception
Efficient algorithms for real-time perception
Large language models (LLMs)
Text, image, and video generation
Code generation
Theoretical foundations of generative models
Fairness and bias in AI systems
Explainable and interpretable AI
Safety, reliability, and responsible AI development
Understanding societal impacts of AI systems
Applications of AI to healthcare, education, accessibility, and other societal challenges
Designing AI systems that better serve stakeholder needs and minimize risks
AI for medicine and healthcare (e.g., disease detection)
Computational biology
AI-assisted drug discovery and research
Understanding how people interact with AI systems
Designing userful and usable AI-powered interfaces
Human-AI collaboration and decision-making
Social and conversational agents
Designing and evaluating interactive AI systems
AI algorithms and complexity
Game theory
Decision-making under uncertainty
Machine learning theory
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
Robotics Institute Calendar - includes Robotics, Visual and Autonomous Systems, Graphics Colloquium
Language Technologies Institute calendar includes LTI Colloquium
Reading groups
These tend to be smaller, focused groups where people present or discuss research. Here are links to sign up to some.
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