Listen now | The centerpiece of today’s post is an extensive interview with Chuck Thorpe. Thorpe, now President of Clarkson University, spent over two decades at Carnegie Mellon University. These years were largely spent as a student, project manager, and PI working on Carnegie Mellon’s autonomous vehicle vision research. The primary goal of the interview was to better understand how he and others managed systems contracts at CMU — CMU had a strong comparative advantage in this style of work while Thorpe was there. Throughout the interview, he goes on to paint a broader picture of how the CMU computer science department functioned differently than others at the time.