Centers, initiatives, and institutes

The Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation is a campus-wide institute that spans all energy-related research and education across the Carnegie Mellon campus. The institute is focused on addressing several complex challenges, including:

• How to use the energy we already have far more efficiently
• How to expand the mix of energy sources in a way that is clean, reliable, affordable, and sustainable
• How to create innovations in energy technologies, regulations, and policies

Decisions in climate and energy involve multiple factors that differ across the variety of decision-makers, time horizons, and uncertainties that are involved. They range from choosing among the multitude of strategies available to reduce carbon dioxide emissions over the next fifty years to how to decide which marine ecosystems to protect from an increase in the oceans’ pH levels. The Center for Climate and Energy Decision-Making and its graduates will develop and promulgate new and innovative, behaviorally and technically informed insights involving the intersection points between climate and energy. It will also generate methods to frame, analyze, and assist key stakeholders in addressing important decisions regarding climate change and the necessary transformation of the world’s energy system.

Core funding for the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center comes from the Electric Power Research Institute, NSF, and the Department of Energy, with additional funding from CEIC’s corporate members. CEIC's primary mission is to work with industry, government, and other stakeholders to address the strategic problems of the electricity industry. In the process of doing so, CEIC is producing a cadre of well-trained researchers, most of whom continue to address the industry’s problems during their subsequent professional careers. Research areas include markets and investment, distributed energy resources, advanced generation, transmission and environmental issues, reliability and security, and demand response.

Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Executive Education in Technology Policy (CEE-TP) provides courses that inform government officials and current and future leaders worldwide about technology-related public policy issues. We serve leaders from many countries, with an initial focus on the policy issues of information and communications technology (ICT) through our ICT in Developing Countries program.

CEE-TP provides a broad and multifaceted curriculum that is highly interdisciplinary, mixing technology, policy, economics, and business issues. Our courses, delivered by world-class instructors with extensive experience in academia, government, and industry, help governments and private sector actors in these countries make informed decisions so they can establish policies and regulations that foster accessible and secure infrastructure, encourage investment and innovation, and generally meet the needs of their citizens.

The Vehicle Electrification Group at Carnegie Mellon University was founded by Professor Jeremy Michalek and Professor Jay Whitacre in 2009 to study electrified vehicles, including hybrid electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and battery electric vehicles. The group studies various aspects of electric vehicles, including:

• Technology: Vehicle, battery, and electric power systems, design, control and optimization
• Life-cycle: economic, environmental, and energy security implications
• Consumer behavior: technology adoption and driver behavior
• Public policy: policy-relevant technical findings and policy analysis

The Center for Atmospheric Particle Studies (CAPS) strives to be a world leader in science, engineering, and policy, covering the full role of fine particulate matter in the atmosphere. The goal of the center’s research is to substantially advance the state of knowledge across this spectrum, and to provide both policy-relevant research and to participate directly and actively in the evolution of environmental policy related to particulate matter.

The CyLab Security and Privacy Institute’s research strategy is holistic. Seven areas of research and development have been designated, spanning a wide range of technologies, systems, and users. Each project meets the criteria of one or more research areas, aiming towards building cross-functional and multi-disciplinary solutions and leveraging cross-cutting skills from faculty across the university, such as policy development, risk management, or modeling. The objective is to build a new generation of technologies that will lead to measurable, available, secure, trustworthy, and sustainable computing and communications systems, as well as associated management and policy tools that enable the successful exploitation of the new technologies.

Carnegie Mellon scholars have developed a rich portfolio of research to provide a sound intellectual foundation for the study of technological change. Their investigations explore such topics as the origin and performance of new entrepreneurial ventures and the impetus for spin-off firms within industries. Such research also draws attention to the motives for the formation of firms, the migration of skills from one firm to another, and the role of spin-offs in the regional agglomeration of industries such as automobiles and semiconductors. Carnegie Mellon University researchers engaged in this program also study the characteristics of university entrepreneurs, the impact of entrepreneurship on technical research, and the role of incentives in academic careers as spurs for commercial technology.

The CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) brings together researchers working on a diverse set of projects related to understanding and improving the usability of privacy and security software and systems. Our research employs a combination of three high-level strategies to make secure systems more usable: building systems that “just work” without involving humans in security-critical functions, making secure systems intuitive and easy to use, and teaching humans how to perform security-critical tasks.