The Weekly Beat

May 7th - May 13th, 2023

Hello and welcome to the second issue of The Weekly Beat from Pittsburgh Tech Beat! This week’s post is one day late given that this past weekend was my wife and my first wedding anniversary. We spent it in the Finger Lakes region of NY and returned with way too many bottles of wine. Thanks for your patience!

On normal weekends, these posts will go out on Sunday mornings with a summary of what went down in the Pittsburgh tech scene in the past week for you to read with your morning coffee. All companies mentioned are local to Pittsburgh unless otherwise noted. To listen to this summary, rather than read it, click play on the voiceover above. Here’s the latest:

• Near Earth Autonomy Inc., an autonomous flight systems startup headquartered in Southside, has been selected by a division of the US Air Force to help develop a reliability standard for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

• The Advanced Robotics Manufacturing Institute announced it will be funding four “makerspaces” in Southwestern, PA at Community College of Allegheny County, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Penn State New Kensington, and Westmoreland County Community College respectively. Makerspaces are a shared resource for regional manufacturers and entrepreneurs, providing access to equipment, knowledge, and other stuff to build robots.

• Ford’s new Latitude AI unit, which has risen from the ashes of Argo AI, just started a hiring push.

• The City of Pittsburgh’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure hosted an Emerging Technology Roundtable on May 10th at Hazelwood Green to talk about the history and future of Autonomous Vehicles. They were supposed to publish a video of this event, but they haven’t yet. I’ll be watching for it. :)

• Carnegie Mellon University got $20mil from the US government towards creating an AI Institute for Societal Decision Making (AI-SDM). The goal is to be able to use AI for things like disaster management and public health. Seems spooky, but hopefully helpful? Let me know your take in the comments.

• Lastly, Duolingo reopened their taqueria with a much bigger space and an expanded menu. I never checked out the original one, so I’ll be trying to hit this up this week to report back on whether or not it’s good. I’ve been to literally every other taco place in Pittsburgh at this point (except maybe Smok?) so I’ll hopefully have some good comparisons!

You may have noticed a new format this week, where I highlight the company instead of the date of the news. Let me know which format you’ve enjoyed the most in the comments.

Much love, and have a great week!

—Austin