Georgia Tech’s College of Computing welcomes the 2014 holiday season today with the release of its fourth annual Holiday Gift Guide, a lighthearted review of the year’s research that will make year-end “shopping” easier for the digitally minded friends and family on everyone’s gift lists.

Launched in 2011 to boisterous acclaim from the United Nations*, the Holiday Gift Guide has become a yuletide tradition around the College of Computing. During the entire year, faculty and students busily cobble together algorithms and server configurations, robotic drummers and artificial intelligence tests, just waiting for the big day when Santa (a.k.a. the College website) delivers their creations to good boys and girls all over the world (or, at least, those who visit said website).

"Once again we wish everyone season’s greetings—and hope they get a few laughs—with our Holiday Gift Guide and its tour through College of Computing research in 2014," said Dean Zvi Galil. "Even with serious computing research, it’s important to step back and have some fun. We hope you enjoy this Gift Guide as much as we enjoyed doing the work it describes.”

This year’s projects include:

ROBOT DRUMMER: A two-stick robotic drumming prosthesis with one drumstick controlled by the musician and a second one with a mind of its own. From the lab of Gil Weinberg.

HEALTH SENSOR FOR GOOGLE GLASS: An application that allows Google Glass to detect its wearer’s pulse and respiration rhythms with high accuracy in real time. From the labs of Jim Rehg and the Affective Computing Group at MIT’s Media Lab.

REMIXED BARBIE COMPUTER ENGINEER: A more, ahem, empowered imagining of the recent Barbie tale from Georgia Tech women who are engaged in the field. From the labs of Casey Fiesler and Miranda Parker.

LOVELACE 2.0: A creative alternative to the celebrated “Turing Test” to determine whether a machine or computer program exhibits human-level intelligence. From the lab of Mark Riedl.

CS 7641 MACHINE LEARNING: The best-reviewed course in Georgia Tech’s online MS in Computer Science program and an example of computer science instruction meeting tag team comedy. From the labs of Charles Isbell and Michael Littmann.

DATA SCIENCE FOR SOCIAL GOOD: A summer fellowship program in which students are matched with experienced data science mentors who work together to solve problems that directly benefit their local community. From the workshop of Ellen Zegura.

FALLING CATS: Feline inspiration for developing new methods to reduce the impact of falling robots, with potential application in such robotic jobs as search-and-rescue missions in hazardous conditions. From the labs of Karen Liu, Jun Ueda, Jeffrey T. Bingham, Jeongseok Lee, and Ravi N. Haksar.

SOCIAL MEDIA AVENGERS: Merely the world’s most esteemed assemblage of experts concerning social media, they fight for anyone who wants to understand or participate in this ever-evolving arena of computing. From the labs of Ian Bogost, Amy Bruckman, Munmun De Choudhury, Jacob Eisenstein, Casey Fiesler, and Eric Gilbert.

CAPTIONING ON GLASS: Application that uses Google Glass to provide real-time captioning on the device’s head-mounted display, like having a conversation piped right into the wearer’s eye. From the labs of Jim Foley, Qian Xie, Jay Zuerndorfer, and Thad Starner

YAHOO! SERVERS: Yahoo! Some servers! Two hundred of them! Gifted from our purple-clad friends in Silicon Valley through the company’s Y-STAR program (Yahoo Servers To Academic Researchers). From the lab of Polo Chau.

ENCORE: A piece of code designed to work behind the scenes of your website to collect baseline measurements of online censorship through visitors’ browsing history. From the labs of Nick Feamster and Sam Burnett.

HACK GT: The first Georgia Tech-sponsored hackathon and the South’s largest hackathon to date, offering about $120,000 worth of prizes. From the hard-working students of Hack GT.

Click here for the 2014 Holiday Gift Guide!

* Not actually true; we emailed the United Nations but never heard back. Also, though some of the items described in the Gift Guide are indeed available for purchase or free download, it is not intended as a practical reference for consumers.

About the Georgia Tech College of Computing

The Georgia Tech College of Computing is a national leader in the creation of real-world computing breakthroughs that drive social and scientific progress. With its graduate program ranked 10th nationally by U.S. News and World Report, the College’s unconventional approach to education is defining the new face of computing by expanding the horizons of traditional computer science students through interdisciplinary collaboration and a focus on human-centered solutions. For more information about the Georgia Tech College of Computing, its academic divisions and research centers, please visit http://www.cc.gatech