As far as I can tell, the actual paper that this story is about is http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~guestrin/Publications/JMLR08SensorPla... - it was published months ago, and was actually submitted in 2006, meaning they probably thought of this and did the research 2-3 years ago. Given that, it's almost hard to call this 'news', although it is interesting.
Came out today, so today would be a good day for a local paper to report it. The Post-Gazette can't vet the importance of individual CMU research projects, but they trust PopSci to.
