CMU, Yahoo Joining Together In New Partnership

PITTSBURGH (NewsRadio 1020 KDKA) - Carnegie Mellon University is about to become the testing ground for smartphone apps of the future.

Project InMind, a five-year, $10 million partnership between CMU and Yahoo, will use a "mobile toolkit" to help design the most effective use for smartphone apps.

Randal Bryant, dean of the CMU Computer Science Department, talked with Bill Rehkopf on the KDKA Afternoon News about the new partnership.

"It's more than the money, it really is a collaboration between us and Yahoo research. We are trying to see if we can make a mobile application be more tuned to a particular person who is using them, directing information that's really what they want to know about when the want to know about it," Bryant said.

How does this testing work?

Yahoo is giving CMU access to a software "toolkit," giving them access to many of the different things Yahoo has to offer, like sports, news and business.

That is where CMU's leg work comes in. They will use volunteers, university students and faculty to test out the applications. They will create a local mobile community to evaluate how they receive information and what ways would be more of a benefit to them.

Sounds pretty cool right? Curious as to how CMU was chosen? We were too, Bill asked who sought whom out for this partnership and if other places were in the running.

"We interact with many companies all around the world. I and others are visiting them, they are visiting us. We are always looking for opportunities. This particular one, it was like the stars aligned the right people got involved and the right ideas that really appealed to both us and the company," said Bryant.

You can hear more about the new partnership by listening below:

You can listen to the Afternoon News with Bill Rehkopf weekdays 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.

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