Business as Usual: CMU's Vice President for Research

Good afternoon, everyone. This is Audrey Russo, President and CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology Council. thrilled to be here today to have the conversation that we've been having each and every day and every day, we always have a chance to talk with some incredible people who are who are at the helm of doing amazing things across Pittsburgh. Today is no exception. In a moment, I will introduce more formally Michael McQuade. He's Vice President for Research at Carnegie Mellon University. And but before we do want to give a shout out to Huntington bank, for them being partners with us right from the onset 40 by 80. That's a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pittsburgh tech Council and that's our charitable arm where we focus on workforce development which soon to be will be an apprenticeship program, as well as helping entrepreneurs. And Jonathan Kirsten is going to talk about work scape and Knoll.

We're coming to the homestretch, Audrey. Tomorrow, we're going to be announcing the winner of the home office design make over with Nolan work scape, I think there's still a little time left to submit your home workspace one that needs a refresh, go to design at workspace inc.com upload a picture, you put a couple please as to why you need a new workspace so badly got to be in attendance tomorrow for the show, in order to win. So be here tomorrow, we're actually have someone from no on tomorrow to actually tell us more about the technology and some of the trends behind current workspaces. So it should be a lot of fun. And when everybody works, scape is fantastic at coming into your office, and helping you reconfigure your spaces, especially as we all start thinking about going back to work good stuff.

Thank you and and no one at the tech Council is allowed to be a finalist for this. Unfortunately, we could have, we could have had some really good opportunities for this. So thank you so much for for all of that. So now, I want to welcome as I mentioned before, Michael McQuaid. And really thrilled should I call you Dr. McQuade at this point?

You should call me Michael.

I should just call you, Michael. Because Yeah, first of all, thank you so much for taking the time with us. But second of all, you really do have an esteemed CMU background. And in addition to your career, and the way that I really like to start this is always like, who is Michael McQuaid, what what's been his journey? You? You You have a very interesting academic background as well as professional career. So how can you capture that for us and tell us and three, three degrees from Carnegie Mellon. That's pretty remarkable.

Well, so thank you. So first of all, so nice to see everybody and thanks for the opportunity to be here really appreciate both the chance but also what you do every day to keep the community vibrant and keep everybody connected. So so I'm a three very proud three degree physicist from CMU. My background is in long ago and far away in high energy elementary particle physics. I was in experimentalists, so I built a lot of equipment. And after graduating, I decided I really wanted to see what it was like to be a physicist in the private sector. So I went to work for three. So surprisingly, for those of you who think about three Emma's tape and post it notes, we have had a very, very successful diagnostic imaging business. So I spent first part of my career working on X ray detectors, X ray imaging systems. So there actually was some connection to my graduate work gradually ended up moving from the technical side to the general management side, there was a bunch of portfolio things that happened and I ended up at Eastman Kodak, which had sort of four times bigger of business, or in the health imaging business to Kodak for a couple of years, came back to three m ransomware medical businesses, and then made a completely sort of 90 degree shift, and went to become the chief technology officer at a large industrial company called United Technologies, which included sort of talking about sort of context switching, so half of my time was spent on aerospace and defense. So aircraft engines, helicopters, stuff to go on planes, and the other half of my time was spent on essentially built environment, energy efficiency. So we owned Kodak. Sorry, we own carrier, we owned Otis. And we owned a number of other businesses related to energy management. So So I did that for about a dozen years as the CTO, it was a phenomenal experience. So legendary engineering company that sort of did hard things that nobody else could do. And we had about 25,000 engineers in the company engineers and scientists and for about four and a half billion dollar research and development budget. I did that until late 2000s, early 2018 when I retired and I retired happily and was Happily retired and was on the board of CMU came back for a board meeting in May of that year. And for those of you who know my boss, Farnham, Gianni and the president University, let's just say I didn't walk fast enough when farnum started whispering in my ear about this wonderful opportunity. So here I am. I started in early 2019.

So what do you think you? Are you originally? Where's your original home? Where were you raised?

I grew up in Penn hills.

Ah, so you are so what do you think coming back after all these years in the sense that you've had?

Yeah, so so. So the blindingly obvious, right. So from the time I started graduate, started undergraduate at CMU to when I left in the middle of my graduate career, I moved to Chicago because that's where my thesis work was done. In that whatever six or seven year period, there were, you know, close to a quarter million jobs lost in Pittsburgh, when the steel industry was collapsing in the 70s. And so obviously, it's a very different and very vibrant economy right now. So that feels both very different. And yet, at the same time, I tell people all the time, Pittsburgh is Pittsburgh is still Pittsburgh, it is still a million neighborhoods, it's filled with people who know how to laugh at each other know how to laugh at themselves. And at the end of the day, and this is, this is my fundamental statement about Carnegie Mellon, it's a university that I will argue, does the most brilliant, deep theoretical science as any place in the world. It's amazing Creative Arts place, but it's also a very, but let me use the word blue collar. And I mean, that in the most positive sense. I tell people all the time, as a vice president research that, you know, my job is to find people who want to spend money with the most fabulous faculty researchers in the world. But the most important thing you can bring to a researcher at CMU is a challenging problem, because people are really, really jazzed about seeing the result of their work, getting something done that makes a difference, makes a difference to society makes a difference to their community makes a difference to the people they serve. And that part to answer your question, after a long ramble, that part feels exactly the same as what I remember from 40 years ago.

And so but what so but what's different,

the economy is clearly different, the impact of technology both on let's say that compute artificial intelligence, robotics autonomy side, from CMU, how much of that is driving the economy? On the flip side, our colleagues at Pitt have really created an amazing economic force around bio sciences, medical, med tech healthcare, and the overlap of those two things together, bringing artificial intelligence machine learning data, understanding operations management, from CMU to classic and big healthcare problems, that's all new. So that part feels a bit different. I think it's an economy that's quite different in the sense that when I was a kid or younger, you thought about big things to drive the economy, you thought about a steel plant that had 10,000 workers in it and the decisions you made were decisions that could have impact a very large number of people at a time. It feels very different to me now in the sense that it's an economy that's made up of a million moving parts, not one big thing. There's, there's value and benefit in that in terms of resilience and robustness. There's also downside in that decisions, you have to make a lot of decisions as opposed to one or two big decisions along the way. So So that part feels different.

Right? And you know, Carnegie Mellon, most people know this. But just now that we have you here, Carnegie Mellon has been instrumental in all those pieces and parts that you just conveyed, they really have. Because of the diversity of the work that comes out of Carnegie Mellon, the amount of innovation that is spewed out of Carnegie Mellon, has, you know, in many ways put us on the map. And over the last, I would say over the last five years, we see more and more people wanting to stay in Pittsburgh, whether it's to build their business or to work with one of these pieces of our economy. Does that align with what you're saying?

That's right. I mean, I think, you know, there's lots and lots of evidence these days, you know, the folks who study how you rebuild economies, how you change economies, how you make a concert, especially when we think about the middle of the country, right, there is very clear evidence about how important a world class research university is on which to build that foundation. And I think CMU and a lot of ways is one of the primary sort of proof points of that. You know, those who've been around a long time know that it didn't just happen. I mean, CMU was a was a very highly respected University in its professional fields, but it took a very conscious effort by the leadership in the community both at CMU and Pitt. In the 1970s and early 1980s, to say we have a bigger mission, that has to be doing our part to rebuild the community, the economy and the community. And so, so I think you're right, I think I think you have a world class University, it's extremely important in being able to leverage that and and the result is, you know, all the proof points we have so so let me sort of wax eloquent for a moment, right, we made a conscious decision to put a national robotics Engineering Center into Lawrenceville. 30 years ago, it does $100 million of sponsored research a year that is vital to the global autonomy and robotics industry. What gets created there has global national and global impact is also the case that there are more than 30 companies that have been located within about two or three miles of that facility, precisely because of the technology that's come out of Iraq. And, and that's the kind of thing that you use to build an economic powerhouse.

And people and people are staying. So the more that you do that, the more the more people can see the contagion. So talk about talk a little bit about the tech transfer office, and what differentiates the way that you approach the commercialization of a lot of this research.

So it's a couple of things so. So tech transfer run by Bob Aldrich, who many of you know, and I know, at least I don't know, Bob's on but only some of the pumps team are on here. tech transfer has a couple of different jobs, its primary responsibility is to work with faculty and researchers to determine what is the best way to meet the goals of that faculty or staff researcher to do something with the technology they've developed. And so let's be really clear at a place like CMU, the first decision rests with the inventor, inventor can say, I don't care if you see him, you think that piece of technology is worth $5 billion, I want to give it away. So that's a starting point that our inventors control their technology. But let's assume that they have some monetary intention in mind. So C Tech's job is to work with them to find out what's the best thing to do is it to protect the technology so that it can be licensed to a player already in the field? Is it to create a company which will then be the way that technology goes to market is it to create a company with the explicit belief that at the end of the day, the best thing to do is that company gets acquired by somebody else. So so that's c Tech's primary role is to be the sort of expert go between between what the market is what the market needs, and the inventors at CMU to be able to parlay that, that amazing technology into economic and societal value, we look at the value. So economics is easy to count, you count royalties, and you count equity and you can't license. But But we look at the value to the community, what what is it in the community, meaning Pittsburgh and the community being Pennsylvania and the nation and the world. And so, when we think about So, again, I'll use a favorite example. We think about companies like Duolingo, and what the impact of Duolingo is on everybody around the world. We think about companies that have come out of our autonomous driving capabilities. So while you won't generally go around Pittsburgh and find massive plans, building autonomous cars, everywhere that autonomous cars are being built, there is legacy technology that's come out of CMU. So that's the kind of impact that we look at. And that's the primary role for C tech. So really brilliant people, they know, IP protection, they know negotiating, they know how to do startups, and they know the community, and they know the who's in this community, and then also who's in communities outside of Pittsburgh that are that are valuable resources for what happens here.

So So most of us know what, you know, some of the core competencies have been coming out of Carnegie Mellon, because, you know, when you talk about artificial intelligence, autonomy that's been you know, going on for, you know, 35 years success story, right? The origins of that, you know, natural language processing, etc. Computational Biology, what what are you? What are you bullish on in terms of what what's going on right now that many of us might not be aware of.

So so in the, in the be aware of everything, simply I would simply reiterate all the things you've said because they are extremely important. There's a whole series of things I would sort of put on the table, which are applications of many of those kind of things. And so, applications of AI machine learning, autonomous decision making and operations management to healthcare, applications of those things to smart Cities and the way cities provide services. So there's, there's a whole series of those healthcare. City management, traffic management, supply chain management. So there's a whole series of those. I'm actually quite bullish on the application of many of those technologies to let me say entertainment writ large. So entertainment both as the personal experience, right, you have a world class Performing Arts College combined with new ways of providing entertainment value to people. So we went from a, from a world where we all got in the car and went somewhere and had a wonderful experience together listening to a play a concert, a musical performance of an opera, whatever. COVID notwithstanding, we spent a lot of time sitting next to each other on the couch, looking at two different screens, having a wonderful personal experience. The real opportunity now is how do we have a joint experience when we might not all be in the same place? And there's a lot of technology that's involved. And there's a lot of performance, and there's a lot of understanding how to motivate people. So that's another big area. The other one I would say is, and it's sort of the tie that binds a lot of things at CMU is the combination of neuroscience and learning science. So for for those who've been around for a long time, you know, that, that as powerful as CMU is in artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence grew in a very strange way at CMU. five decades ago, artificial intelligence was an outgrowth, not of pure math or pure computer science. It was that combined with the science of how people think and learn the house, the science of how brains work, the social science of how people interact. And so what's come out of that is this very powerful capability and understanding of how people learn the science of learning. And we parlay that into value in why you wouldn't necessarily go to CMU for the course content for an online course, much of what CMU has brought is how to optimize that content, to make sure people get the best learning experience, how to turn a learning experience into a customized fed back optimized learning experience. Combine that now with all of the work that we're doing on neuroscience, how brains work, how we image brains, how we can impact them, from a sensors point of view from, from a manipulation point of view, there's a very, very big, deep research thrust that goes on in that area.

Well, that's exciting. Yeah, and that's not and that's not surprising. So COVID, let's just let's just sort of make you know, parlay into COVID it's, in fact of universities really hard, early on, really hard, scrambling, working. We, you know, we see, we saw that from every university here, you know, no less Carnegie Mellon, how did the the pandemic actually affect the university? And particularly, in terms of r&d? And, and what have you been doing? Because I know that you've gotten some recognition for the work that you've done in terms of COVID testing, and actually the lab and that was, you know, you were at the helm of that. So can you? Can you talk about that? What are you researching? What are you doing anything that you can share?

Yeah, so maybe three things. So let me put on the side for everybody. We have since March of last year, we have been running a hybrid education model. So almost all classes are available, either remote or in person. The density on campus is quite low, but we have probably somewhere like between eight and 10,000 students in the Pittsburgh area. Sometimes I think that many students came to Pittsburgh just to get out of mom and dad's basement. They still take all of their classes from their apartment. But most of our classes are being done both ways. And, and sort of density on campus increasing in March on 24 hours notice we moved all research off of campus. And it was a really, really spectacular sort of exercise by all of the faculty where we basically shut down everything except if you had to be on campus because there was life involved, whether it was an animal or biological sample of some kind, or there were some very specific things. We also led people on campus to do COVID related research. So people that were doing vaccine delivery systems, people doing sensing systems, etc. Starting in May, we began to sort of titrate people back and we essentially have on campus Now, everybody whose research requires them to be on campus and it's been done in a very, very structured fashion. Everybody's lab has a plan, how they manage density, how they manage, who's there that we can track in case we have to do contact tracing, etc. So if you look at our research spend and our research, sponsorship acquisition, so sort of getting new research, we haven't missed a beat, everybody's continued to do that along the way. And most important, I used to say zero, I probably need to say, one. Since May, we've only had I think one case, where there's been a COVID transmission that's been associated with people not being as disciplined as they need to be in a laboratory. So spectacular accomplishment. You mentioned, we made the decision in August, we were using are using had been using commercial testing, we tested everybody coming back to campus in August, September timeframe. We have commercial solutions for symptomatic people, if you have COVID symptoms, you come to university health services, and you get a test if you're a student. But we made the decision in the August September timeframe that we wanted to implement high volume asymptomatic testing on campus. And I have the honor of leading that team. So this is not, you know, I should not be the one who gets the credit here. There's probably 100 different people that have been involved in this including some amazing faculty on campus, we went from nothing to a saliva based PCR test. We have a CLIA approved laboratory on campus, we have set an expectation that all students, faculty and staff who are on campus should be tested once a week. We did 5000 tests last week, we'll do roughly the same number this week. And I would say two things. One, the whole process has worked brilliantly well. And our asymptomatic prevalence numbers are quite low. So we're sort of two for two and the overall goals of the project.

Is there any research that it's tied to that simultaneously? Are you doing any, any other sponsored research in light of that?

So we have lots of COVID research going on on campus? The precise answer to your question about the test laboratory is no, because we wanted to draw a very clear legal boundary between a diagnostic medical test and an IRB driven test along the way, so we haven't crossed that boundary. So we're doing these tests. It's a, it's a mirrored off of an EPA approved test, but it's in what's called an LD t a lab developed test. So it's not a test that we can use externally or anything like that. And we're just being very careful not to cross the boundary of using it for research purposes right now.

Okay, thank you. So let's, let's talk a little bit about sponsored research. Okay, because that's also a hat that we spoke about at the onset of me bringing you out here. So, you know, you oversee sponsored research, and that, you know, that has done a tremendous amount for putting Pittsburgh on the map. You know, we we benefit from that, right, either accidentally or intentionally or, you know, whatever you can you talk about the type of assets. Can you talk about that businesses can leveraged through this.

So let me let me set scale, we do roughly half a billion dollars of sponsored research at CMU. One of the huge benefits we have is that we can do three different kinds of research we can do, the bulk of our research is fundamental open basic science research done on campus, sponsored 75% by the federal government, 25%, by foundations, private companies, etc. The primary objective of that kind of research is to create new knowledge and to publish it out for the world. And we can work programs with companies as to the sort of IP rights that happened downstream and all of those sorts of things. We also have the capability to do research that has certain restrictions on it in off campus locations, like Enric restrictions around proprietary nature of that research restrictions around datasets that are not to be disclosed to the public as part of a publication. And then I think as many of you know, we also have the Software Engineering Institute, which is which is almost a third of our research spend. That's a federally funded research and development center. It's come up on almost 40 years old now. It exists to provide expertise in cybersecurity, software engineering, and AI engineering, to the national security establishment. So, as I tell people all the time, MCI was founded in the 80s when every software program in the Department of Defense was screwed up, and the Department of Defense realized it needed a place to go from expertise. So you don't go to sci fi, to have somebody write code for your system, whether that's a battlefield system or whether that's a backroom human resource systems, you go to sci fi to learn how you should do that stuff, how you should evaluate people that are doing that for you, and what methods you should be using along the way. So an SI can do a full range of work, it can do basic research, it can do applied research, it can do classified research, it doesn't do much classified research, but it can. And so we run the whole spectrum. As I said, what has grown dramatically over the last five or six years, is the growth in private sector sponsored research. It's about twice as much as it was five years ago. And it's 20% of our portfolio right now. So big companies, small companies, companies who benefit from both the research and ultimately, I mean, when I was at UTC, we spent money at CMU, because they could do things that I needed to be done. And maybe I could get my grubby hands on some of these brilliant people that were graduating would come work for me when it was also it's certainly

been a path to put Pittsburgh on the map as well, we benefit from it tremendously. And the partnerships that we have with Carnegie Mellon, and bringing those people here, even virtually is amazing. So we appreciate that actually, we count on that. That's that's part of the secret sauce of what you call Pittsburgh is the same in terms of these 90 plus little neighborhoods. It's also, you know, the secret sauce in terms of Pittsburgh and economic development. So you do have a hand in that you do in your role. Okay.

We don't have a vet, we don't have.

Can you take the last question here? I have someone at the bar

salutely. Absolutely. So great to have you here. I want to know, what is the annual CMU industry sponsored research amount?

Yeah, it's a little bit less than 20% of our sir roughly half a billion dollars. That has two components to it, right. One is direct spend from private companies. And the other is where it's government money that goes to the company, and we become a secondary, secondary research. And it all feels the same for us because it is all coming from the companies who spend on us, roughly, and

what are piton Carnegie Mellon offices doing together to bring more industry sponsored research. I think it's great when you guys work together, it's just become so cool.

Yeah, so. So in terms of what we're doing to bring more people here, I think it's, I think it's the cooperation that gets embodied in the research projects, we do so. And that's in areas where we overlap. In particular, we overlap two things, right? The the AI, machine learning computer science tech, with the biology of Pitt, it's also places where we are doing biological research, and it becomes a clinical test clinical help site for us. I did a look, a couple of months ago, if you look at the places we parked in this, like all global universities, all of our research programs generally have lots of partners associated with them. If you just count those partnerships, Pitt is the number one partner that we have, in terms of the number of things we do. And then somebody Dave Moses, who's on here made a comment. There's the Pittsburgh supercomputing Center, which is a resource, not just for the researchers at Pitt and CMU. But for the national community. There are some very customized machines, there are particular machines related to some specific things around genetics and biomarkers and bio systems. But it also has access through its consortium to large scale, high performance computing that's available in the community.

And if we have time for one more question, what is your take on the Pittsburgh health data Alliance?

I think the Pittsburgh health data Alliance is extremely important. And I'll just sort of repeat what I said before this, this ability to to marry, what health care is both at the personal and the public health level. And what we learn from analyzing that and turning that into solutions that better individual care. So so that combination of expertise, you know, go back to where I was at the very, very beginning, that combination of expertise is what Pittsburgh is all about. It's how you bring disparate disparate technology bases to deliver solutions to the community.

So there's like a lot of really interesting noise happening on the show right now. And Michael, I just want to tell you that that's probably the first time my dogs actually really acted out in over 200 shows. So take that as a compliment. The we're coming to the end, but I think there's one piece here, the relationship with the Army's AI Task Force. Can you talk about that? A great relationship Have them thanks to him.

I will. And a big shout out to Mike Turner who's on here so, so three years ago, when the army stood up army futures command, which is the place that is responsible for the evolution and of the technology that the army will use to deliver its mission in the future, the first sub command they set up for the first focus was how to bring AI to the army, they immediately made the decision that they should do that in Pittsburgh. So the army AI Task Force located in Pittsburgh for those who had experience with the Department of Defense, that decision was made in October. And by January, there were 15 people billeted here from the army that that never happens. That's like lightspeed warp 10 for the way the Department of Defense work, that's now grown to close to 30 people plus another 25 students that are in master's programs at CMU, it is all about doing applied directed research research, to deliver on the Army's most important missions around situational awareness around disaster recovery around battlefield management, all of those sorts of things. And so it's a combination of CMU researchers with specific people from the army and the army missions. And then this wrapper around the whole thing of we came to Pittsburgh, because CMU is there and we came to Pittsburgh because of the ecosystem that's in Pittsburgh, to ultimately take those technologies to commercial success.

Well, Michael, we are wrapping up our time with you. But that doesn't mean that you're going to be a stranger to us. So appreciate your leadership, appreciate you coming out of retirement. It doesn't sound like you're having one restful moment. But it sounds like you're almost everything pretty amazing. And we we value. And you know, actually, we require the leadership that comes out of Carnegie Mellon for the entire ecosystem here. And so my hat's off to you.

Well, thanks for the chance to talk. I really enjoyed it.

Yeah, I really thank you. And I know you're working with a lot of incredible people. So thanks for thanks for coming home and being a true real, real boomerang. And for the time, and if people want to know more, Michael, about your, your piece of the organization, is there someplace that you can point them to? And we can put that out in our chat or share it?

Yeah. Do you want to post something in the chat as to where people should should contact? Yeah. Or we'll get it. We'll get it to you, Adrienne. You can get it out to people when we're Yeah,

we'll keep we'll definitely do that. So thank you so much, Michael, for taking the time. Stay safe. Thanks for your leadership. Jonathan. Tomorrow. What do we have going on tomorrow?

Big Day, we're announcing the winner of the home office makeover. And we have Kimberly Barbary Smith from no stopping by, to give us the latest and greatest is what's happening around how you can improve your workspace, whether it's at home, or of course at the office, and so much fun working with escaping all to make this happen. Number wordscapes. can hook you up with some sweet office space. That's for sure.

That's great. All right. Thank you again, Michael. Thanks.

Can I just do a big shout out to all my CMU colleagues that are on thanks for all the work you do both on your day job and for supporting the community here. So thank you.

Thank you. Hi.

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