- Creating a Climate/Culture and Community
- Enabling Talent and Ideas to Grow in the Region
Project Olympus is a new initiative designed to create and sustain Next Generation Computing innovation for Western Pennsylvania. It aims to build an infrastructure and foster a climate that will enable talent to take root and flourish in the region-and bring to fruition projects and ideas born here.
Click here to see the KDKA-TV interview
Olympus' goals include:
- establishing a magnet to attract a new wave of technology company labs,
- stimulating a burst of new business creation opportunities in the region, and
- increasing career opportunities for the many technology workers graduating from the local universities.
Project Olympus is an ambitious endeavor. At the core is a prestigious and highly visible Research, Education and Development Innovation Lab designed to attract and train a pool of young researchers/entrepreneurs and create products and services leading to new business development and job opportunities. Operating in an interactive, interdisciplinary, and open collaborative mode, the "incubator" interfaces between the academic and the technology business sectors and builds on, and enhances, the expertise and resources available from these arenas.
Teams of Olympus Scholars (post-bachelors, post-masters and post-doctorals) work together with faculty, current students and industrial researchers on focused PROBEs (PROBlem-oriented Explorations) tackling challenges arising from Next Generation Computing such as: Web Search and Super Intelligent Computing, High-Performance Computing, and High-Assurance Software.
Guidance from business leaders, on transforming research results into products and services, and new enterprises, work to foster and sustain the initiative for the long term. Indeed, PROBE teams meet regularly with members of the Olympus Executive Board and Advisory Cabinet and its network of partners to assess progress and to develop appropriate business plans. These meetings serve also to provide high-tech entrepreneurial training for all PROBE team members including the Olympus Scholars.
Olympus emanates from, and is supported by, the Carnegie Mellon “can-do” culture that promotes collaborative interdisciplinary research and builds upon the considerable experience and success of the School of Computer Science’s ALADDIN Center for ALgorithm ADaptation, Dissemination and INtegration that promotes synergy between theory and practice.
Launched with an initial grant from The Heinz Endowments, Olympus' goals coincide with those of The Heinz Endowments' Innovation Economy program:
"to support the growth of a vibrant, sustainable regional economy that is anchored in southwestern Pennsylvania's innovation assets, with an emphasis placed on strengthening opportunities for the region's citizens to prepare themselves to take on the new challenges that this innovation-driven economy will present for its workforce over time."
Additional funds for Olympus comes from:
- The
Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance (PITA), administered
by the
Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES).
- The MSR-CMU Center for Computational
Thinking
- Intel ® Higher Education Program
