Put simply, where the tech world is going — self-driving cars; personal A.I. concierges; robot workers — is where Carnegie Mellon’s faculty and students have been for decades.
Frequently, campus research projects spill into the larger city, like when a professor develops a start-up company (the school encourages entrepreneurship), or the local government allows Pittsburgh to be used as a lab (a number of traffic lights in East Liberty are controlled by a Carnegie Mellon professor and his colleagues, who have developed smart signal technology).