Recent updates: A journey in collaboration and innovation

Aug 7, 2026

Sponsoring high-potential research at Carnegie Mellon University, the Carnegie Bosch Postdoctoral Fellowship pairs world-class Ph.D. graduates with distinguished faculty hosts and industry mentors from Bosch to drive breakthrough technological innovations. This year’s applicants provided a strong and wide-ranging pool of candidates for the postdoctoral fellowship program. Inspired by the strength of the candidates, we were ultimately able to extend two additional fellowship offers from the original four, bringing the total to six fellows.

Among the selected topics, this year’s cohort features contact-rich robotics, semantic-aware cybersecurity, and sustainable large language models. We look forward to introducing the incoming fellows in more detail later this month.

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Learn more about and check out photos from the "Security Challenges in Physical AI” panel.

Highlights and happenings

  • Our CBI@RTC series has hosted two insightful talks this quarter featuring our postdoc Dr. Hanif Tayrani and his supervisor Jeremy Michalek, professor of mechanical engineering and engineering and public policy. Tayrani and Michalek presented their work on vehicle grid integration.
  • In partnership with the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology (CMIST), we organized an industry panel on July 22, 2026 titled "Security Challenges in Physical AI." The event was held as part of the U.S. Army War College International Fellows' visit to Carnegie Mellon University. The panel brought together 82 participants representing 78 countries, underscoring the truly global nature of the discussion. Our distinguished panelists included:
    • Andrew Moore, CEO of Lovelace AI and former Dean of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science
    • Roger Nasci, COO of local start-up Hellbender
    • Steve Wray, director of Economic Development for the City of Pittsburgh
    • Jorge Guajardo from Bosch Pittsburgh, who contributed his expertise on the topic
  • CBI supported a research project proposal to the National Science Foundation's Translation to Practice Partnerships (TTP-P) program focused on enabling intelligent agents to learn complex tasks based on real-world scenarios in manufacturing. The consortium is led by Wright State University and includes Bosch Research and LAVORO (the startup founded by Jean Oh, associate research professor in CMU’s Robotics Institute). If awarded, CBI will sponsor an external collaboration with Eric Nyberg (professor and associate director of education and curriculum in the Language Technologies Institute at the School of Computer Science), with a focus on adaptive learning through dialogue with humans.

Strategic initiatives and updates

We look forward to the second half of 2026, with several exciting initiatives on the horizon:

  • CBI-backed symposium on "Embodied Neuro-Symbolic AI for Reliable and Safe Robotics" (ReS AI) was accepted at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh (the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, one of the largest and most impactful robotics research conferences worldwide) . CBI will also present a Best Paper Award as part of the workshop. The workshop is scheduled for Sunday, September 27, 2026. Among the co-organizers are:
    • Industry mentor and area expert in robotics Jonathan Francis, lead scientist at the Bosch Research and Technology Center
    • Alessandro Oltramari, president of the Carnegie Bosch Institute