PITTSBURGH—In 2015 Monocle magazine, a favorite read of the global hipsterati, published an enthusiastic report on Lawrenceville, the former blue-collar neighborhood here filled with cafés, hyped restaurants and brick-row houses being renovated by flippers. Last year in a much-publicized development, Uber began testing self-driving cars on the streets, putting this city at the forefront of the autonomous-vehicle revolution.
Also last year in a less publicized development, Jean Yang, 30, returned to this city after more than a decade of living in Boston, finding a Pittsburgh she hardly recognized from her 1990s childhood.
And four months ago, Caesar Wirth, a 28-year-old software engineer, moved from Tokyo to work for a local tech start-up, Duolingo.
Underlying driver
THESE seemingly unrelated events have one thing in common: Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science.
Much has been made of the “food boom” in Pittsburgh, and the city has long had a thriving arts scene. But, perhaps, the secret, underlying driver for both the economy and the cool factor—the reason Pittsburgh now gets mentioned alongside Brooklyn and Portland, Oregon, as an urban hot spot for millennials—isn’t chefs or artists, but geeks.
In a 2014 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mayor Bill Peduto compared Carnegie Mellon, along with the University of Pittsburgh, to the iron-ore factories that made this city an industrial power in the 19th century. The schools are the local resource “churning out that talent” from which the city is fueled.
Because of the top students and research professors at Carnegie Mellon, tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Uber have opened offices here.
The big tech firms, along with their highly skilled, highly paid workers, have made Pittsburgh younger and more international and helped to transform once-derelict neighborhoods, like Lawrenceville and East Liberty.
Tech hub
INDEED, East Liberty has become something of a tech hub, said Luis von Ahn, cofounder and chief executive of Duolingo, a language-learning company with its headquarters in that neighborhood. Google Pittsburgh, with its more than 500 employees, also has some of its offices in East Liberty, as does AlphaLab, a start-up accelerator.
Within easy walking distance from them is the Ace, a branch of the hip hotel chain that opened in 2015 in a former YMCA building. The hotel’s in-house Whitfield restaurant and lobby bar have become hangouts for local techies and out-of-towners alike.
With so many of his 90 employees residing in Walnut on Highland, one of the newer housing and retail complexes in East Liberty, von Ahn joked, “We call them the Duolingo dorms.”
Von Ahn, 38, is a superstar in the tech world. He has sold two companies to Google, received a MacArthur grant and helped develop the type-the-squiggly-word thing we use online to prove we’re not bots (it’s called reCaptcha). He earned a PhD from Carnegie Mellon Universityin (CMU) 2005 and could have made a beeline for New York, Boston or Silicon Valley, but he decided to stay.
“I loved CMU, and that’s the main reason I stayed,” said von Ahn, who, in addition to his role at Duolingo, is a consulting professor in the School of Computer Science.
A grind
THERE were also business advantages to remaining: Duolingo is close to the engineering talent (“CMU is pumping out some of the best, at a rate of about 500 a year,” von Ahn said), and for millennial job-seekers, Pittsburgh’s quality-of-life-metric is looking better these days than ever-costlier, ever-more-crowded New York or San Francisco.
For Wirth, the software engineer who started at Duolingo in February, Silicon Valley is a fun place to visit, but living and working in the Bay Area would be a grind.
“I was just there last week for a conference,” Wirth said. “I was talking to someone who told me, ‘My commute is two hours on the bus.’ I just can’t do that.”
Kamal Nigam, a CMU graduate who is the head of Google Pittsburgh, said that a decade ago, workers hired by the company had family or personal connections to the city. That is no longer the case. “We’re getting people who are moving to Pittsburgh for the very first time, from all over the country and the world,” Nigam said.
He added, “With the growing number of start-ups and the big companies in the area, people realize they can have not just one job at a good tech company, but a tech career here.”
Long history
WHILE young, cool Pittsburgh may be a recent development, the research at Carnegie Mellon in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has a long history. The university was the first in the world to establish a machine-learning department, and its Robotics Institute, a division of the School of Computer Science, tested an autonomous vehicle, the Terregator, back in 1984.
It’s no surprise that Uber came to Pittsburgh to research self-driving cars (and poached 40 Robotics Institute employees). Or that Amazon recently joined them here, opening an office whose engineer-heavy work force will focus on perfecting Alexa, the company’s intelligent personal assistant that aims to turn us all into the Joaquin Phoenix character from “Her”.
Put simply, where the tech world is going—self-driving cars; personal AI concierges; robot workers—is where Carnegie Mellon’s faculty and students have been for decades.
In some ways, the School of Computer Science feels like any college campus environment, with its hodgepodge of new and classical architecture and hushed study zones. But there is also a “Roboceptionist” named Tank LeFleur. And all sorts of research projects are going on that might change the world in 10 years, or just delight someone’s colleagues.
“It’s like being in Hogwarts,” said Andrew W. Moore, dean of the School of Computer Science. “It’s really cool and exciting to have these glimpses of the future, and to see all these people running around and having these crazy ideas.”
Image credits: Kristian Thacker /The New York Times