Carnegie Mellon University celebrated the official opening of its new JPMorgan Chase & Co. AI Maker Space following a robotic-assisted ribbon-cutting ceremony Wednesday at the Tepper Quad building in Oakland.
According to university officials, the new 2,000-square-foot space that is home to robots, drones, smart appliances and other advanced technologies is the first-of-its-kind on a college campus.
Intentionally placed in the building that houses the Tepper School of Business, the facility will aim to empower all students to become next-generation leaders of AI, not just those with backgrounds in computer science or engineering.
"Today, as AI advances accelerate the pace of discovery theory in all fields of inquiry and catalyze disruption in nearly every sector of our economy, from finance and health care to transportation and energy, it is vital that we keep pace as society," Farnam Jahanian, president of CMU, said. "These dramatic changes lead to celebrating a partnership that aims to do just that, and by putting critical AI tools directly into the hands of CMU students and researchers at the forefront of innovation."
Jahanian said that unlike traditional maker spaces, the new facility at CMU will go beyond hardware development as it looks to also concentrate on software research.
Students and other users of the facility will have access to several areas including a robotics playground for robotics-based experimentation as well as a kitchen-like area featuring smart dishwashers and refrigerators that could someday see further AI-based enhancements. The space also has an enclosed drone zone for testing autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles and even has room for augmented and virtual reality technologies. Additionally, there's a soundproofing area for AI-based work that relies on speech-to-text recognition.
For JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM), which made a 10-year and undisclosed monetary investment into the space, AI is becoming embedded into many different parts of the work and services the financial institution offers and the focus on human and machine interaction is only growing. By tapping into the work that will be done at the new maker space, the hope is that the company will be able to better understand how to improve AI practices it already employs across the firm, even if such data doesn't directly tie into efforts the company is undertaking directly.
The banking giant said the region could stand to benefit from the space as well.
"The business community of Pittsburgh in fact could very much also contribute problems (for research)," Manuela Veloso, head of AI research at JPMorgan and an alumna of CMU, said. "The industries in Pittsburgh could look at this space saying oh, we could make the traffic data, the bio data, the health data available for these students to eventually catch up to what our problems are."
