IPaT hosted its Fall Town Hall meeting last month to discuss research priorities and faculty opportunities for this academic year.

Georgia Tech Executive Vice President for Research Steve Cross welcomed faculty, staff and students to the meeting. IPaT Director Beth Mynatt then outlined upcoming Fall events including next month’s Wearable Computing Forum and IPaT’s Thursday Think Tank series.

Mynatt also discussed our overarching goals – continuing to be national and international thought leaders, internal coordination and facilitation, resource facility and management, and support of our Georgia Tech network of centers, labs, faculty initiatives, and student programs.

IPaT continues to support new research by funding seed grants for Georgia Tech faculty, which can lead to larger national research programs. Georgia Tech assistant professor Lauren Wilcox received a seed grant from IPaT and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, which turned into a 2-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Smart Health grant. And, associate professors Karen Liu and Charlie Kemp, along with professor Greg Turk received a seed grant in 2013, which led to a 4-year, $1.2 million NSF grant for “Robotic Assistance with Dressing Using Simulated Optimization” and a 2015 SIGGRAPH paper on “Animating Human Dressing”.

Mynatt talked about IPaT’s research priorities: wearable computing, civic computing and urban innovation, pediatric healthcare delivery, healthcare transformation, humanitarian systems and disaster response, and successful aging. Faculty leaders representing each research area then discussed current projects, industry partners, and upcoming events. IPaT staff also introduced themselves and talked about the services they provide to faculty, as well as top-level priorities for the academic year.

The Town Hall wrapped up with a look at two of this year’s GVU Center and IPaT engagement Grant projects. Professors Ashok Goel and Elizabeth Whitaker seek to foster internal collaboration and enhance external visibility in cognitive systems. They plan to host seminars, monthly meetings, and workshops with the goal of creating an interdisciplinary center for cognitive systems. Meanwhile, associate professor Carl DiSalvo presented his team’s research into the use of visualization techniques to explore humanities data. This team will host a two-day workshop this Spring.

IPaT will hold another Town Hall meeting in January.