And yet the exuberance and creativity you see and can feel in the city is real—a kind of nerdy chic that partakes of the old Pittsburgh (the unpretentiousness and unsentimental practicality) and mixes it with a new digital globalism in high tech and the arts. I wouldn't go so far as to declare that Pittsburgh is hip (and how in heck would I know, anyway?), but, with CMU and Pitt and a dozen other institutions, it is a college town.

There is only one other American city with two world-level research universities immediately next door to each other: Cambridge, Mass.

In fact, it was competition with Cambridge and Boston that led Professor Narasimhan to her greatest triumph of technological hustle so far: the "Yinzcam." (For those uninitiated in Pittsburgh dialect, "yinz" is the local equivalent of the Southern "y'all." As in: "I seen yinz gwon dahntahn for the Stillerz victory prayd!")

Using the built-in GPS capability of iPhones (and soon, BlackBerrys and other devices) and Google Maps, Narasimhan wrote a program that automatically collects and pinpoints citizen complaints and reports about potholes in streets and graffiti on public structures, and spits out reports—updated constantly—for local officials. In a city knitted together by hundreds of bridges and crisscrossed by streets famously Swiss-cheesed by potholes, the program was an instant success. "As soon as five complaints are collected about a pothole, the location instantly shows up on the city repair map," Narasimhan proudly explained. The system spits out a route map showing repair crews where to go, and what path to follow that uses the least amount of fuel. "Now dozens of cities want to use this technology. And we beat Boston!"

A native of Madras in India, Narasimhan was educated there and in Zambia before getting her Ph.D. at UC Santa Barbara. She came to CMU in 2001 to join its world-class computer-engineering faculty. In what can best be described as a spiritual conversion, she saw her first Steelers football game. "I used to think: football, violence, ugh! Now I love it." At CMU, she wears a Steelers sweatshirt, but she's a Penguins hockey fan as well. And now she is combining sports and engineering.

There is the chip-in-the-football program, well underway, as well as another one to put a microtransmitter into receiver's gloves. "That way," she said, "there will never be any doubt whether a catch is really a catch." She has developed a program to take raw footage of hockey games from arena cameras, and turn it into a "three-dimensional depiction of the game."

The Walt Disney Co. recently announced a relationship with CMU, which also happens to have one of the nation's best theater programs, and computer animation is a popular study topic there.

Hollywood on the Monongahela? It sounds preposterous, I know. Mickey Mouse. We'll take it.

© 2009