President Obama Announces an Initiative in Technology

President Barack Obama visited a university research center in Pittsburgh on June 24 to announce a new partnership between the government, industries and leading universities to speed the movement of technological advances to commercial users.

The trip was the latest of his increasingly frequent travels to battleground states to showcase Administration efforts to create manufacturing jobs. After touring the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University, a high-technology facility adjacent to a rusted factory symbolic of the area’s industrial past, President Obama said federal agencies would invest more than $500 million to seed the initiative. Of that, $70 million is to go to robotics projects like one he viewed at the center: a boom-box-size robot that inspects sewer pipelines, made by a company started by a Carnegie Mellon professor.