A look at 2026 so far: Fostering innovation and building new partnerships

The first quarter of 2026 has been a period of significant growth and exciting new developments at the Carnegie Bosch Institute. We've seen our core programs flourish and have forged new partnerships that push the boundaries of research and innovation.

Here’s a look at what we’ve been up to.

Growing our community: Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

We are thrilled to report a surge of interest in our postdoctoral fellowship program, with applications increasing by over 40% from last year. After a competitive review process, we have extended offers to four exceptional candidates who will drive research in our key areas of AI, cybersecurity and privacy, robotics, and sustainability. We look forward to sharing more about their forward-looking projects after the hiring process is finalized.

Seeding groundbreaking research

Interdisciplinary collaboration is at the heart of innovation. This quarter, we were proud to partner with two of Carnegie Mellon's leading research institutes on their seed funding initiatives.

With CyLab, we are supporting two critical cybersecurity projects:

• "Adaptive LLM Routing for Security Incident Detection, Triage, and Annotation" (Osman Yagan)
• "Building Resilient Organizations with Educational Cybersecurity Games" (Jessica Hammer, Rotem Guttman)

In partnership with the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, we are co-funding "Leveraging Robotics and Advanced Sensing Technologies to Create Pathways for Smart Homes," a project that promises to reshape our understanding of smart home technology and its impact on grid stability.

Highlights and happenings

CBI@RTC talks: Our research and technology series featured insightful presentations on novel robotics technology for real-world translation from our own postdoc Kyin Chin and her faculty host Carmel Majidi.

We also launched our new website design: We are excited to unveil our newly restyled CBI website!

Looking ahead: Strategic initiatives on the horizon

The rest of the year (and beyond!) is already shaping up to be just as dynamic, with several major initiatives underway:

• Security for physical AI: In partnership with the Block Center for Technology and Society, we are organizing an industry panel on "Security Challenges in Physical AI" (July 23). This event will be part of the U.S. Army War College International Fellows' visit to CMU, continuing a tradition of discussing the world's most pressing security challenges.
• ReS AI symposium proposal: Building on the success of our inaugural event in 2025, we have submitted a proposal to host the next ReS AI Symposium in conjunction with IROS 2026, one of the world's premier robotics conferences, which will also be held in Pittsburgh.
• Neuro-Symbolic AI conference in Pittsburgh: We are excited to announce that we will be bringing the prestigious Neuro-Symbolic AI conference to Pittsburgh in September 2027! CBI President Alessandro Oltramari will serve as general chair, with a local committee featuring prominent CMU experts like Machine Learning Department’s Pradeep Ravikumar.

We are proud of the progress made this quarter and look forward to sharing more updates on our journey of innovation and collaboration.