“We are pleased to offer the first truly interdisciplinary robotics Ph.D. program in the country,” said Dr. Henrik Christensen, KUKA Chair of Robotics for the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. “Exposing our students to course work from multiple disciplines early on prepares them to think about robotics from a holistic approach once they enter the workforce. True to our mission in robotics at Georgia Tech, our program will recruit and educate outstanding students who will provide leadership in a world that is increasingly dependent on technology.”

According to robotics industry associations in North America and Japan, the global robotics market is expected to significantly expand over the next five years, including gains in both the service and personal robotics fields. With a focus on personal and everyday robotics, as well as the future of automation, faculty involved with RIM@Georgia Tech developed the doctoral degree program to best enable students to understand and drive the future role of robotics in society and industry. Approximately 15 candidates per year are expected to be admitted, gradually building the program to 60 enrolled students.

“Over the next five to ten years, robotics technologies will become more integrated throughout various industries that directly impact human activity and culture, such as healthcare, food processing, logistics and others,” said Dr. Christensen. “At Georgia Tech, our doctorate students will be guided through their research by at least two faculty members from distinct participating schools, providing more insight and expertise into a specific industry sector or focus area.”

Students in the Robotics Ph.D. program must first be admitted to one of the participating academic units, subsequently designated as the student’s home unit. Students will then progress through the course requirements consisting of 36 semester hours of core research and elective courses, the passing of a comprehensive qualifying exam with written and oral components, and the successful completion, documentation and defense of a piece of original research culminating in a doctoral thesis.

Over 30 faculty members from the schools of Interactive Computing, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering are affiliated with this new Ph.D. program. Faculty involved in the development of the new doctoral program include Henrik Christensen (College of Computing), Frank Dellaert (College of Computing), Eric Johnson (School of Aerospace Engineering), Ayanna Howard (School of Electrical and Computer Engineering), Steve DeWeerth (Department of Biomedical Engineering), and Harvey Lipkin (School of Mechanical Engineering).

About the Robotics & Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech (RIM@GT)
The Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (RIM@Georgia Tech) leverages the strengths and resources of Georgia Tech in robotics education, research, and leadership by reaching across traditional boundaries to embrace a multidisciplinary approach. The College of Computing, College of Engineering and the Georgia Tech Research Institute play key, complementary roles through Tech's traditional expertise in interactive and intelligent computing, control, and mechanical engineering. Emphasizing personal and everyday robotics as well as the future of automation, faculty involved with RIM@Georgia Tech help students understand and define the future role of robotics in society. www.robotics.gatech.edu

About the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech
The College of Engineering at Georgia Tech is the largest engineering program in the U.S. and ranked 4th among the country’s best graduate programs by U.S. News and World Report. A respected leader in interdisciplinary research and education, the College of Engineering grants the highest number of engineering degrees in the nation across nine fields of study. For more information about the programs in the College of Engineering, please visit www.coe.gatech.edu.

About the College of Computing at Georgia Tech
The College of Computing at Georgia Tech is a national leader in the creation of real-world computing breakthroughs that drive social and scientific progress. With its graduate program ranked 11th 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 College of Computing at Georgia Tech, its academic divisions and research centers, please visit www.cc.gatech.edu.

Useful Links
Sting Racing – www.sting-racing.org
Robot Ethics – www.cc.gatech.edu/news/robot-ethics-proposal-funded-by-dod
Intelligent Machine Dynamics – www.imdl.gatech.edu
Institute for Personal Robots in Education – www.roboteducation.org
Human Automation Systems – humanslab.ece.gatech.edu
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Research – uav.ae.gatech.edu

For more information, contact:

Stefany Wilson

College of Computing at Georgia Tech

404.894.7253

stefany@cc.gatech.edu

www.cc.gatech.edu

More About:

• Gregory Abowd
• James Rehg
• Rosa Arriaga
• Microsoft Research's Intelligent Systems for Assisted Cognition Awards

More About:

• Anind Dey
• Microsoft Research's Intelligent Systems for Assisted Cognition Awards

"Multi-core computing has forced us to go back to the
basics," says Matthew Wolf, director of IHPCL and research faculty with
a joint appointment between the School of Computer Science and Oak
Ridge National Laboratory.  This rethinking not only applies to the
basics of computer science, like schedulers, I/O systems, and parallel
languages, but also to the way that we train students in sciences and
engineering to think about using their machines.

Karsten Schwan,
founding director of IHPCL and current director of the Center for
Experimental Research in Computer Systems, further focuses on the
innovative approach Georgia Tech has taken towards multi-core
education.  "Rather than try to fit all of the multi-core training in
one lonely course in the senior year, a team of CS and ECE faculty
within CERCS has been working hard to find ways to expose students to
multi-core repeatedly throughout the curriculum.  Resources like IHPCL
provide the vital link between the Institute's research mission and the
mission of training the next generation of computer scientists and
engineers."

The new facilities are focused at several levels,
and faculty are encouraged to inquire about availability of resources
for courses requiring parallel and/or multi-core environments, as well
as seed proposal requests for time to start undergraduate or graduate
thesis projects in the broader high performance computing context.

Read Rich DeMillo's full discussion on CAPTCHA here.

Read the ABC News item "Crafty Spam Outsmarts Gmail's Filters" here.

Two areas in which Dr. Kalai has made strong contributions are online algorithms and machine learning. In online algorithms, he has contributed a new proof of a stock market strategy called the Universal Portfolio which has led to a polytime algorithm using a biased random walk - a new tool for online algorithms. In the past few years, Adam’s work on the online decision problem has changed the course of the field. Adam discovered an algorithm for the general problem of online linear optimization where costs add up over the sequence: maintain the best solution on the past, on a randomly perturbed version of the data so far. Adam’s proof is so transparent that it has lead to many follow-up papers in a short time. In learning theory, he found a new algorithm for learning parity functions in the presence of random noise. This settles a theoretical question about the power of statistical learning and remains the best-known algorithm for this central problem in learning theory. His algorithm also has a direct application to the classic question of finding the shortest vector in a lattice.

Dr. Feamster’s research agenda is in the area of network operations. He interprets the scope of this research to encompass questions regarding network connectivity such as how to make it robust and how to incentivize it within the context of Internet economics. His research also considers network security as an operational primitive and is concerned with how network monitoring can be used to enhance security. Within these broad research areas, Nick has several important and highly creative research contributions including work on a routing configuration compiler that incorporates program analysis techniques to analyze complex router configurations in a network to predict their behavior; a technique for detecting spam through network traffic monitoring that relies on understanding the network-level behavior of spam and using that signature to detect spam as it is being carried over the network; and an architecture for network virtualization that can provide robust and flexible network connectivity, an idea first proposed by Dr. Feamster as the basis of a future Internet design.

Assistant professors Feamster and Kalai are among the 16 recipients of the award for Computer Science this year. The award carries a two-year, $50,000 grant for the faculty to spend on their respective research interests. Previous recipients of the fellowship at the College of Computing include distinguished professor Santosh Vempala, assistant professor Subhash Khot, associate professor Beth Mynatt, and associate professor Dana Randall.

About Nick Feamster:  www.cc.gatech.edu/directory/nick-feamster

About Adam Kalai:  www.cc.gatech.edu/directory/adam-kalai

About Sloan Fellowships: www.sloan.org/programs/scitech_fellowships.shtml

List of this year's awardees:  www.sloan.org/programs/fellowshiplist.shtml

Mark Riedl joined the School of
Interactive Computing as an Assistant Professor in December 2007. Prior to that,
he was a research scientist at the University of Southern California Institute
for Creative Technologies. In 2004, he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science
from North Carolina
State University
for his work in artificial intelligence techniques for generating stories with
recognizable plot structures and character fidelity.

About INTETAIN
The Second International Conference on Intelligent
Technologies for Interactive Entertainment (INTETAIN-2008), held in cooperation
with ACM SIGCHI, aimed to stimulate interaction among academic researchers and
commercial developers of interactive entertainment systems. It focused on the
development of novel user-centered intelligent computational technologies and
interactive applications for entertainment, being made possible through the use
of a wide range of interactive device technologies and media delivery
infrastructures.

The book was published as part of the HCI Remixed project which aimed to produce a collection of essays in which researchers and practitioners reflect on a paper or other piece of work by someone else, that is at least 10 years old, and that has had a personal impact on their view of or approach to HCI. The book aims to reflectively and appreciatively view the past works in HCI and provide an opportunity to save worthy prior work from obscurity. It will act as a resource for newcomers to the HCI field. Editors of the book are Thomas Erickson, Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and David W. McDonald, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle.

College of Computing Associate Professor Rebecca E. Grinter's chapter titled "The Work to Make Software Work" explains the Software Engineering issues of division of code and coordination in software development. Associate Professor W. Keith Edwards' chapter "Infrastructure and its Effect on the Interface" is about connecting HCI with concepts from core computer science. His chapter is a call to arms for HCI research to be more involved in all aspects of computer science, including networking, security, and others. Faculty member Amy Bruckman has also written a chapter titled "Back to Samba School: Revisiting Seymour Paper’s Ideas on Community, Culture, Computers and Learning"

“Computation has become widely accepted as the third mode of discovery, along with theory and experimentation, in the advancement of scientific knowledge,” said Richard Fujimoto, Regents’ Professor and Chair of the Computational Science and Engineering division in the College of Computing. “Computation, through modeling, simulation, analysis and its other forms, is essential in creating new applications with great impact on the sustainable growth of cities, the design of power-efficient buildings, the creation of new biomedical devices, the eradication of life-threatening diseases and other issues of great social importance. Through the study of phenomena as large as the universe, or the engineering of systems as small as nanomaterials, breakthroughs in the CSE field will be the catalyst for future innovations that affect society and culture on a global scale.”

Georgia Tech is an established leader in the fields of engineering and sciences, and is quickly becoming recognized for defining the direction of the computing discipline. Interdisciplinary in nature, this new degree program will capitalize on the talented faculty and wealth of resources that exist in these three areas and enable students to take best advantage of the growing number of career opportunities in this field. Approximately 10 candidates per year are expected to be admitted, gradually building the program to 50 enrolled students. Georgia Tech currently has over 80 faculty actively engaged in CSE research.

The new CSE doctoral program begins with core computational science and engineering research requirements, along with dedicated components to solidify each student’s competency within a variety of computing specializations. Students must take at least four courses from the following five areas of study: numerical and scientific computing, computational science and engineering algorithms, modeling and simulation, computational data analysis and visualization, and high performance computing. As the student’s research progresses, he/she will then select a primary computational area of focus, a course of study in some application domain, as well as a qualifier examination and, finally, the completion of a dissertation.

About the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech
The College of Sciences at Georgia Tech includes seven schools: Applied Physiology, Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences,
Mathematics, Physics, and Psychology plus the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC), which works with K-12 schools
and teachers to improve Georgia science and mathematics education. For more information about the College, please visit www.cos.gatech.edu

About the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech
The College of Engineering at Georgia Tech is the largest engineering program in the U.S. and ranked 4th among the country’s best graduate programs by U.S. News and World Report. A respected leader in interdisciplinary research and education, the College of Engineering grants the highest number of engineering degrees in the nation across nine fields of study. For more information about the programs in the College of Engineering, please visit www.coe.gatech.edu.

About the College of Computing at Georgia Tech
The College of Computing at Georgia Tech is a national leader in the creation of real-world computing breakthroughs that drive social and scientific progress. With its graduate program ranked 11th 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 College of Computing at Georgia Tech, its academic divisions and research centers, please visit www.cc.gatech.edu.

Useful Links
The College of Computing at Georgia Tech Announces New Computational Science and Engineering Division
College of Computing at Georgia Tech, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and UT-Battelle Collaborate to Advance U.S. High-Performance Computing
College of Computing Designated First STI Center of Competence Focused on Cell Processor
First Book on Petascale Computing Launched at SC07

For more information, contact:

Stefany Wilson

College of Computing at Georgia Tech

404.894.7253

stefany@cc.gatech.edu

www.cc.gatech.edu

More About:

• Gregory Abowd
• CHI 2008 Awards

Judges at the annual event were: Rosa Arriaga, senior research scientist, SIC; Richard Fujimoto, chair, CSE; Hyesoon Kim, assistant professor, SCS; Spencer Rugaber, senior research scientist, SCS; Andrea Thomaz, assistant professor, SIC.

JUDGES' AWARDS

First Place ($750)

James Robinson
"MANET Routing: Using Manifolds and the WDL"
Advisor: Santosh Vempala

Second Place ($300)

Megan Elmore
"Interdomain Path Splicing with BGP"
Advisors: Nick Feamster and Santosh Vempala

Third Place ($100)

Kathryn Long
"Restructuring Knowledge Among Different Robots"
Advisors: Zsolt Kira and Ron Arkin

PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARDS

First Place

Brittany Duncan and Sweta Vajjhala
"Can a Robot Learn a Model of a Human's Actions?"
Advisors: Alan Wagner and Ron Arkin

Second Place

Andrew Bardagjy, Roman Shtylman, Stefan Posey, Jason Kulpe, and Ben Johnson
"Development of a Small Size Robocup Team"
Advisor: Chris Paredis

Third Place (tie)

Scott Gilliand
"Curveball: Using Grip and Motion to Interact with Modal UIs"
Advisor: Thad Starner

and

Christina Lacey
"Second Mind: A Wiki Environment for Authoring Virtual Characters"
Advisors: Manish Mehta and Ashwin Ram

This is the first time that the Georgia Tech team has qualified and has been ranked in the top 10 teams in the nation.

The men’s team and the women’s team both won the NCTTA Georgia Division held Nov. 4, 2007. In the second phase of the NCTTA Georgia Division held Feb. 17 the women’s team placed second, while the men took first place again -- beating every other team without dropping a single match.

The team members are:

Men’s team
Nikhil Almeida (COC), Deepak Rao (COC), Aneece Khalek (Mech), Zhengzhi Zhou (PSE)

Women’s team
Apparna Chandramowlishwar (COC), Neha Kharsikar (COC), Bravishma Narayan , OC), Ketaki Kulkarni (ISYE).

The rankings released on the web and to media today are based on a
survey of deans and department chairs at CS programs around the
country. For a complete listing of CS program rankings and extensive
specialty rankings, visit the U.S. News web site here.
All new and old rankings will be available in U.S. News’ “Best Graduate
Schools” guidebook, which will hit newsstands next week.

In addition to the Artificial Intelligence (#7) and Systems (#10)
rankings, the College’s Theory specialty held its No. 9 ranking (last
year the program leaped from 16th to 9th). There were no rankings
issued again this year for Graphics/Visualization, which received a 4th
place ranking in 1999, or in Databases, which ranked 7th in 1999.

In the past decade, the College of Computing’s overall graduate
Computer Science program has risen consistently in the U.S. News
ratings:

• 1996—18
• 1997—18
• 1999—13
• 2002—12
• 2007—11

The College’s reputation continues to grow and improve through its
outstanding research, creative approaches to educational programs,
world-class faculty, and richly diverse student body. By fostering
leadership, collaboration and innovation, the College hopes to build
its esteem and prominence across the board.

“This is a big deal. I could not be more proud of the effort I see
from everyone with the College of Computing,” said Dean Rich DeMillo.
“Once you reach the upper end of the rankings, it’s very difficult to
make significant jumps. That we were able to jump not one but two
spots—and into the Top 10—speaks volumes of the work we are doing and
the impact it is making, not just in higher education and computing,
but in the larger world beyond.”

For the Institute-level release regarding the rankings, click here.

The Dean’s Award

2008 Recipient
Jim Foley

The
Dean’s Award is selected by the Dean and presented to a member of the
college who has contributed significantly to the success of the college
this year.

CoC Scholarships & Fellowships

Corporate Scholarships & Fellowships

Intel Opportunity Scholars

The goal of the INTEL Opportunity Scholars Program is to support and encourage academic success, undergraduate retention and ultimate enrollment in graduate-level studies.

SAIC Scholars

The SAIC Scholars Program is a two-year program in which undergraduates are paired with graduate student research mentors that assist them with their student research project.

UROC Winners

Congratulations to the winners of the 2008 Undergraduate Research Opportunities in Computing (UROC) Research Symposium!

CC Ambassadors

CC Ambassadors exists to introduce
prospective students and parents, alumni and industry professionals to
the College of Computing community.

STARS Alliance

Ten
academic partners, including Georgia Tech, have established STARS
(Students and Technology in Academia, Research and Service), a system
of regional partnerships that seeks to increase the participation of
women, under-represented minorities, and persons with disabilities in
computing disciplines.

Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering is partnering with the School of Information Technologies at the Politecnico di Torino located in Torino, Italy. The electrical and computer engineering program requires four semesters of course work – two semesters at Georgia Tech and two at the Politecnico di Tornio. While all courses at Georgia Tech will be taught in English, lectures and laboratories at the Politecnico di Torino will be available in both English and Italian.

“Georgia Tech has long worked with key industry partners in Italy,” said Gary S. May, professor and Steve W. Chaddick School Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering. “This new affiliation will afford students the opportunity to experience competitive and complementary approaches to engineering solutions in a cross-cultural environment.”

“The dual master’s degree program brings together the resources of top-ranked research universities,” said Franceso Profumo, rector of the Politecnico di Torino. “What better way for students to prepare to make important contributions in the world marketplace than to take advantage of the stellar engineering and computing programs that both of these institutions have to offer.”

The Politecnico di Torino is in the process of developing a new industrial complex, the Cittadella Politecnica, that will eventually house research and development centers for a number of private companies such as General Motors and Microsoft. In addition, the Politecnico di Torino has partnerships with a range of internationally renowned research institutes and technology transfer centers.

One of the most prestigious institutions in Europe, the Politecnico di Torino is rated one of the top 10 European technical universities by the highly regarded Academic Ranking of World Universities, compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Institute of Higher Education. The Politecnico di Torino is a member of the Consortium Linking Universities of Science and Technology for Education and Research (CLUSTER). Georgia Tech is the only U.S. institution that is an honorary member of CLUSTER.

A dual graduate degree is also available through a partnership with Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science and the School of Informatics at the University of Trento, located in Trento, Italy. The computer science program requires the same four-semester program divided between Georgia Tech and the University of Trento, and will emphasize the development of computing and networking applications.

“The College of Computing has had an ongoing relationship with the University of Trento and the Trentino region of Italy for the last three years,” said Richard A. DeMillo, distinguished professor and John P. Imlay Jr. Dean of the College of Computing. “We are providing these students the chance to experience firsthand the new opportunities that come with globalizing education.”

The University of Trento is considered among the top universities in Italy and ranked first in many scientific areas by CENSIS, a social study and research institute. Trento is an autonomous province of Italy and invests heavily in research and education as evidenced by the Microsoft Research lab for Bio-Informatics which is partially funded by the region.

"In collaboration with our colleagues in Electrical and Computer Engineering, we have developed a significant relationship with the University of Trento and the Politecnico di Torino that we anticipate expanding to other top-rated universities in Italy including the Politecnico di Milano," said Michael McCracken, program director for the dual degrees in Computer Science and assistant dean of the College of Computing.

“Not only will students have the opportunity to complete two graduate degrees in two years, but they will also have the possibility of obtaining an internship with a multi-national firm in Italy as well as scholarship support,” said Dr. Anthony Yezzi, program director for the new dual degrees. “These programs are appealing because students can obtain two degrees in considerably less time than pursuing them individually, as well as jump start their career in the global market.”

Students must be admitted to Georgia Tech prior to enrolling in either of the dual degree programs. The deadline for fall applications is May 1, 2008. Additional information on the requirements for the dual degree programs may be found at http://www.ece.gatech.edu/academic/polito/DualProgramUSA.htm
and http://www.cc.gatech.edu/education/study-abroad/trento.

Angela Della Costanza Turner, executive advisor to Georgia Tech’s Office of International Education and president of the Italy-Atlanta Foundation, is a major proponent of the new degree programs. “We hope to encourage the Italian business communities in both Italy and the United States to sponsor scholarships,” she noted. “The program has huge potential and will help educate our next generation of computer scientists and computer engineers.”

There are a limited number of $12,000 scholarships available through the Actions for Transatlantic Links and Academic Networks for Training and Integrated Studies (ATLANTIS) program. As part of this initiative, students will spend an additional summer semester at the Technical University of Munich in Germany or can also opt to obtain their second degree from Munich and spend a summer in Italy. Both Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and School of Computer Science are participating in ATLANTIS. More information on this joint grant from the U.S. Department of Education and the European Commission can be found at http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/eu-usa/index_en.html. In the future, scholarships may also be available as a result of industry sponsorships.

#    #    #

About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's premiere research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report's top public universities, Georgia Tech’s more than 18,000 students are enrolled in its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. Tech is among the nation's top producers of women and African-American engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute. More information is available at www.gatech.edu.

About Politecnico di Torino
Located in the foothills of the Alps, the Politecnico di Torino is the oldest technical university in Italy. With 27,000 students attending programs in both English and Italian, it is considered to be one of the most prestigious institutions in Europe and is rated as one of the top 10 European technical universities by the highly regarded Academic Ranking of World Universities, compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Institute of Higher Education. More information is available at http://www.polito.it/.

About the University of Trento
The University of Trento has become one of the leading universities in Italy. With more than 15,000 students, Trento ranks first in many scientific areas and is considered a premier institution for the study of social sciences, engineering and law. The university is located in Trento, a historic city at the base of the Alps. More information is available at http://portale.unitn.it/ateneo/homepage.do?utente=Visitatore&rootchannel....

The scholarship was founded by Google in 2003 to honor the work of Dr.
Anita Borg, a computer scientist who dedicated her professional career
to increasing the participation of women and other under-represented
minorities in the field of technology.

A total of 23 Anita Borg Scholarships scholarships were awarded in the U.S. this
year, while 33 students were finalists. With six winners and four finalists, Georgia Tech had more
recipients than any other university.

The award winners are:

Jill Patrice Dimond - Ph.D., Human Centered Computing

Betsy Nora DiSalvo - Ph.D., Human Centered Computing

Erika Shehan Poole - Ph.D., Human Centered Computing

Jennifer C. Stoll - Ph.D., Human Centered Computing

Sarita Ann Yardi - Ph.D., Human Centered Computing

Svetlana Yarosh - Ph.D., Human Centered Computing

The finalists are:

Renuka Ajay Apte - M.S., Computer Science

Jessica Lee Heier - Ph.D., Industrial and Systems Engineering

Valerie Henderson Summet - Ph.D., Human Centered Computing

Kathy Tran Pham - M.S., Computer Science

Read the Google Press Release.

Karen Harwell, of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), said selection for this award was based on Rutter’s long-term, high-quality research work and for recognition of his work outside Georgia Tech.

Rosa Arriaga, Senior Research Scientist at the School of Interactive Computing, has been supervising Rutter on an ongoing research project titled Mathematical Models for Categorization and nominated him for this award.

“He embodies all of the intellectual curiosity and acumen that we value in an undergraduate researcher,” Arriaga wrote in her nomination letter.

In his work on the project, Arriaga said, Rutter designed software to conduct experimental studies, had many creative ideas in the design of the stimuli used in the experiments, and came up with his own qualitative analysis of the human data collected.

“I have had the privilege to work with undergraduates from top institutions (such as Berkeley, MIT and Harvard) in similar circumstances,” she said, “and can say that (Rutter) is the most creative and industrious undergraduate I have come across.”

UROP will host a reception and ceremony April 3 to honor all winners of the 2008 Undergraduate Research Award.

Read More About:

The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program

Daniel Miller, Computational Media
The Online Community Grid
Faculty mentor: David Bader, of Computational Science and Engineering

Moon Logan, Computer Science
Interactive Visualization of I/O System for Supercomputing Applications
Faculty mentor: Ada Gavrilovska, of Computing Science and Systems

Corbin Pon, Computer Science
The Level of Mobile Telephony in the Population of Migrant Workers in Shanghai, China
Faculty mentor: Michael Best, of International Affairs

Jared Caldwell, Computational Media
Real Time Virtual Cinema Camera
Faculty mentor: Michael Nitsche, of Literature, Communication and Culture

Krzysztof Jurgowski, Computer Science
My Paris Year, the Second Life Manifestations: Creating “Spaces” for the Georgia Tech Digital Poetry Initiative
Faculty mentor: Karen J. Head, of Literature, Communication and Culture

Martin Rojas, Computational Media
Machinima: A Procedural and Multi-Input Approach to Emergent Game Play
Faculty mentor: Michael Nitsche, of Literature, Communication and Culture

• Gregory Abowd, distinguished professor with the School of Interactive Computing, received the award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor, which includes a $5,000 prize.
• James Foley, professor and Stephen Fleming Chair in Telecommunications with the School of Interactive Computing, received the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award, which includes a $20,000 prize. Winners of this prize, which is the highest honor Georgia Tech bestows on faculty members, are selected for their outstanding commitment to teaching, research and service.
• W. Michael McCracken, assistant dean and principal research scientist with the School of Computer Science, was honored for 25 years of service to Georgia Tech.
• Alexine Bennett, an accountant with the School of Computer Science, was honored for 10 years of service to Georgia Tech.
• Mary Alice Blane, senior director of development with the College of Computing, was honored for 10 years of service to Georgia Tech.
• Elizabeth Mynatt, associate professor with the School of Interactive Computing and director of the GVU Center, was honored for 10 years of service to Georgia Tech.

The main track of IPDPS is highly competitive and contains peer-reviewed papers submitted from researchers worldwide. Only 105 of the submitted 410 papers were accepted for presentation. As a testament to Georgia Tech’s strength in parallel and multicore computing, four papers from Computational Science and Engineering division were presented as regular papers:

SNAP, Small-world Network Analysis and Partitioning: An Open-Source Parallel Graph Framework for the Exploration of Large-Scale Networks
David Bader (CSE); Kamesh Madduri (CSE)

High Performance MPEG-2 Software Decoder on the Cell Broadband Engine
David Bader (CSE); Sulabh Patel (Electronic Arts, USA)

Financial Modeling on the Cell Broadband Engine
Virat Agarwal (CSE); Lurng-Kuo Liu (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA); David Bader (CSE)

Performance Characterizations and Optimization of Parallel I/O on the Cray XT
Weikun Yu (ORNL), Jeffrey Vetter (ORNL & CSE) and Sarp Oral (ORNL)

IPDPS attracts over 600 of the top scientific researchers in the field for a week packed with technical talks and demonstrations.  In 2009, the meeting will be held in Rome, Italy, and in 2010, David Bader (CSE) will serve as the General Chair when the symposium comes to Atlanta.

College of Computing undergraduates Roger Pincombe and Juan Villa came up with DialPrice, a price-checking service that makes it possible to comparison shop without leaving the aisle. All you need is a telephone, and not even a fancy one.

“It’s a tool that you can use with any phone from anywhere,” said Pincombe, a sophomore in Computer Science. “Say you are at BestBuy, and there’s a camera for $150. You dial a regular phone number and then enter the 12-digit UPC code on the box. DialPrice will tell you the average price, the price range and what other stores or online retailers are selling it for.”

On most cell phone plans, the call -- and therefore the service -- is free. For the cost of a text message, DialPrice also can send the information in text.

For their efforts, Pincombe and Villa each won a Wii, the satisfaction of seeing their hack debut as a Yahoo! Mobile Widget, and the chance to compete with first-place winners from other participating universities at the National University Hackdown on Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale campus.

In Pincombe’s case, it also earned him an internship. In talks with Yahoo! over the last few weeks, the internet company offered Pincombe a summer gig on the Connected Life Mobile Development Team.

Professor Jim Foley of the School of Interactive Computing, one of the judges at the HackFest on March 7, said he knew the idea had commercial potential when he heard it.

”It’s great if you are at a store looking at an expensive item, like a camera or TV,” Foley said.

Georgia Tech enjoyed the biggest University Hack Day ever with more than 50 students and 21 hacks submitted, according to Jamie Lockwood of Yahoo!

Nick Padgett won second place and a video camera with Skedu, a mashup of school locator maps. Christopher Sladky, Eric Goodwin, Patrick Eisenmann and Katie Collins created Trip Hacks, a geo-location hack that won third place and won its developers some Yahoo! promotional materials.

Related information:

21 Submitted Hacks

DialPrice as a Yahoo! Mobile Widget

Stunteback and Patel travelled to Portland to presented their business idea, a solution to indoor real-time asset tracking. The team said their solution leads to lower cost of ownership for such a tracking system, because it uses existing power lines within the building infrastructure, the venture keeps hardware costs low.

ElectriSense will initially focus on the healthcare industry but expects to expand eventually into other markets and even internationally. By 2011, the team said, the company will be operating profitably.

Twenty graduate teams from universities around the world, including Hong Kong and Australia, competed in the New Venture Championship. Teams presented their business plans to panels of judges in the Aequitas Capital Management Semifinal round. The top five teams moved on to the Intel Capital Final round, where they presented and answered challenging questions from the judges.

The University of Oregon’s TakeShape and Brigham Young University’s Klymit™ tied for first place and were named co-champions. Each won $30,000 each to invest in their businesses.

To see a press release about the event, click here.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a field of computer research that deals
with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data. At
present, most AR research is concerned with the use of live video
imagery that is digitally processed and "augmented" by the addition of
computer-generated graphics.

“Augmented Reality is one of the
most exciting technologies available today. Thus far, it has only
existed in the research lab. It is our intention to commercialize the
technology and make it available to the public at large. Augmented
Reality offers us the opportunity to create an entirely new advertising
paradigm,” said Carl Freer, Co-Founder and Visionary.

“We
partnered with Georgia Tech because of their reputation for excellence
in this area. The work they have done thus far is very exciting and
their open stance with commercial entities such as Magitech provides
for a great opportunity,” said Rich Jenkins, CEO Media Power. “We are
very excited about the work we will do together.”

Under the
guidance of Georgia Tech professor Blair MacIntyre, GVU's faculty and
students with expertise in computer science, human-centered computing,
digital media and game design will partner with Magitech to explore new
mobile AR application concepts. The gift from Media Power also enables
research in new kinds of design and authoring tools for handheld AR
systems, including systems empowering end-users to create AR games
themselves. The partnership will create opportunities for GVU
researchers to evaluate commercial-grade AR applications in realistic
settings.

“Augmented Reality is one of the most significant
emerging industries in the world right now,” said Rich DeMillo, Dean of
the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. "Its influence will be felt
from entertainment to education to health care. Georgia Tech’s
leadership in AR research and Media Power’s strength in
commercialization make this an ideal partnership to achieve our mutual
goal of creating breakthrough technologies that achieve sustained real
world impact.”

“GVU has a long track record in Augmented
Reality and mobile computing," said Elizabeth Mynatt, Director of the
GVU Center. "This partnership with Media Power strengthens our ability
to look at the entire ecosystem of mobile computing from human
experience to technology, design strategies to business opportunities."

Magitech also announced today the opening of its Atlanta
offices, located at 817 West Peachtree Street in the Biltmore Hotel
building, a location providing easy access to Georgia Tech. Magitech
has already hired a sizable compliment of designers, 3D modelers, AR
programmers, researchers and content developers, consisting of over 15
Georgia Tech and Savannah College of Art and Design-Atlanta graduates.

Magitech is Media Power’s Atlanta-based augmented reality
division. Its world class research partners include the Georgia
Institute of Technology in Atlanta, the Graz University of Technology
in Austria and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Magitech’s
goal is to develop commercial grade Augmented Reality products and
networks.

About Media Power

Media Power is a unique
tech company that develops consumer and business products based on
Augmented Reality technology (AR) and other advanced systems. Media
Power has four divisions offering a range of hi-tech goods and
marketing services: Magitech; GetFugu.com; Gizmondo; and Chinetic. For
more information visit the company's <p><br /><b>About GVU</b></p>
<p>The
GVU Center at Georgia Tech is an interdisciplinary research center
encompassing a number of individual colleges at Georgia Tech as well as
external collaborators. GVU focuses on unlocking and amplifying human
potential through technical innovation in computing technologies. The
faculty and students associated with GVU bring expertise ranging from
science and engineering to the humanities and design. It is through
deep collaboration between these diverse domains that enables the GVU
Center to engage in research that would otherwise be difficult to
tackle in traditional academic and industrial settings.</p>
<p>After
more than a decade and half of practicing interdisciplinary research,
GVU has gained an international recognition in 3D Compression,
Animation, Augmented Reality, Collaborative Work, Educational
Technologies, Gaming, Graphics, Human-Computer Interaction, Information
Visualization, New Media, Online Communities, Perception, Robotics,
Ubiquitous Computing, Virtual Reality and Wearable Computing. For more
information visit the center's <a href=">website.

About GVU
The GVU Center at Georgia Tech is an
interdisciplinary research center encompassing a number of individual
colleges at Georgia Tech as well as external collaborators. GVU focuses
on unlocking and amplifying human potential through technical
innovation in computing technologies. The faculty and students
associated with GVU bring expertise ranging from science and
engineering to the humanities and design. It is through deep
collaboration between these diverse domains that enables the GVU Center
to engage in research that would otherwise be difficult to tackle in
traditional academic and industrial settings.

After more than a
decade and half of practicing interdisciplinary research, GVU has
gained an international recognition in 3D Compression, Animation,
Augmented Reality, Collaborative Work, Educational Technologies,
Gaming, Graphics, Human-Computer Interaction, Information
Visualization, New Media, Online Communities, Perception, Robotics,
Ubiquitous Computing, Virtual Reality and Wearable Computing. For more
information visit the center's website.

For more information, contact:
Becky Biggs
GCI Group
rbiggs@gcigroup.com
(404) 260-3510

The five-year, $500,000 grant will support Dey’s work on making intelligent, interactive systems easier for people to understand and control. These systems are expected to proliferate in the coming years, gathering information about people’s circumstances, environment and preferences. Such systems could help with tasks such as planning routes for car travel, making travel reservations and managing family schedules. But they also have the potential to be intrusive and to make annoying mistakes that could lead people to reject them.

“These systems will have to explain themselves or people will abandon them,” said Dey, now an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “If people understand how the system works, I believe they will be more willing to accept them.”

Microsoft, for instance, eventually eliminated Clippy, the paperclip-like character that was supposed to help people use Microsoft Office 97 features but proved puzzling and annoying. Amazon.com, on the other hand, solved problems with its system for recommending books based on previous purchases by allowing customers to note recommendations that were unwanted.

With the NSF’s support, Dey’s research team is creating a tool for developing these intelligent systems to include features that explain to users why they do certain things and give users control over the system and any personal information it gathers.

HSI is a joint research effort that includes Tech, Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. According to the Institute’s website, HSI brings together the expertise of many disciplines at Georgia Tech and Emory to foster the development and implementation of new interdisciplinary and collaborative research, education, and outreach programs. The Institute’s goal is to transform healthcare delivery systems and lead the nation away from a system that is ineffective, reactive and focused on disease and toward one that is more cost-effective, pro-active and focused on health- and wellness.

Georgia Tech also announced today that it will host the Second Annual Cell/B.E. Processor Workshop from July 10-11, 2008, focusing on software, tools and applications for the Cell/B.E. processor, including high performance computing applications and programmability tools. The two-day workshop is sponsored by Sony Group, Toshiba and IBM and will be held at the Klaus Advanced Computing Building on Georgia Tech’s campus. More information on the workshop may be found at http://sti.cc.gatech.edu/.

The STI Center of Competence was created at Georgia Tech to test the boundaries and demonstrate the extreme performance of the Cell/B.E. architecture. “Today, we are carrying out the vision we always intended - to generate breakthrough innovations using Cell/B.E. technologies working hand-in-hand with researchers at Sony Group, Toshiba and IBM,” said David A. Bader, professor and executive director of High-Performance Computing in the Georgia Tech College of Computing. “We are very encouraged that our initial research results are showing the multi-faceted applicability of this technology.”

One of the key research challenges that the collaborators will address through continued applied research is the use of Cell/B.E. technology to better monitor an aircraft’s structural safety in commercial and military airplanes. Researchers will develop Cell/B.E. based data-processing software that will expeditiously and accurately monitor structural components in flight by measuring and recording an aircraft’s vibrations through a distributed network of sensors. Although a commercial signal processing application for airplanes is a long term plan, researchers are working to develop a solid software foundation in the labs.

“IBM has invested in a strategy that applies the use of technology to solve grand challenges with our trusted university partners,” said Jai Menon, IBM Fellow, vice president, Technical Strategy and University Relations. “In our collaboration with Georgia Tech, we are working together to better predict airline mechanical failures to make flying in airlines safer for passengers like you and me.”

The other joint research projects in productivity enhancements include:
•    A useful signal processing kernel needed for oil and gas exploration and seismic monitoring;
•    Data compression, used for file compression or reducing the size of messages sent between computers required in multiple industries;
•    Financial services applications for consolidated debt optimization, as well as European and American options pricing;
•    Encryption libraries for securing communications for privacy;
•    High-speed multimedia codecs, such as MPEG2 and JPEG2000 encoders and decoders;
•    Bioinformatics, such as DNA sequence alignment and comparison;
•    Software productivity enhancement tools that involve a cross-platform profiler, performance estimation and tuning system with IDE type features;
•    Single-source automatic translator for generating PPU and SPU codes from a monolithic C/C++ application.

“We anticipate a paradigm shift in computing and our collaboration with the Georgia Tech College of Computing will create innovative applications for Cell/B.E. processors," said Yasu Yokote, general manager, CELL Application Development Center, Sony Corporation. "For a year STI Center created at Georgia Tech, they created software productivity enhancement tools, which are valuable for moving legacy code bases to CELL/B.E. and will generate tremendous value to all Cell-based products."

"Within a year of the opening of the Center of Competence at Georgia Tech, researchers are already generating outstanding results on Cell/B.E.,” said Mitsuo Saito, Chief Fellow, Toshiba Corporation Semiconductor Company. "The future will see growing demand for multi-core processor applications, and we are delighted that the Center is playing a key role in anticipating and responding to such demand."

About the Georgia Tech College of Computing
The Georgia Tech College of Computing is a national leader in the research and creation of real-world computing breakthroughs that drive social and scientific progress. With its graduate program ranked 9th nationally by U.S. News and World Report, the College’s unconventional approach to education is pioneering the new era 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 College of Computing, its academic divisions and research centers, please visit http://www.cc.gatech.edu.

About the Cell Broadband Engine

The revolutionary Cell/B.E. processor is a breakthrough design featuring a central processing core, based on IBM's industry leading Power Architecture™ technology, and eight synergistic processors.  Cell/B.E. "supercharges" computation-intensive applications, offering fast performance for computer entertainment and handhelds, virtual-reality, wireless downloads, real-time video chat, interactive TV shows and other "image-hungry" computing environments. The processor was created through a collaboration between Sony Group, Toshiba Corporation (Toshiba) and IBM.

All company/product names and service marks may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.  Cell Broadband Engine is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

For more information, contact:
Stefany Wilson
Georgia Tech College of Computing
404.312.6620
stefany@cc.gatech.edu

Sony Group, Toshiba and IBM Renew Cell Broadband Engine™ Center of Competence with Georgia Tech

ATLANTA, GEORGIA - JULY 9, 2008 – The Georgia Tech College of Computing
today announced the renewal of the Sony Corporation/Sony Computer
Entertainment Inc. (Sony Group)-Toshiba-IBM Center of Competence (STI
Center), based on Georgia Tech’s exceptional work in multiple areas of
research and evangelism for the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.)
technology. Through Georgia Tech’s efforts, the STI Center has been
responsible for creating and disseminating software optimized for
Cell/B.E. systems, and for performing research on the design of
Cell/B.E. systems, algorithms and applications. In conjunction with
this renewal of the STI Center, Georgia Tech is announcing a series of
new research projects that are being undertaken at the center to
develop applications and productivity tools based on the Cell/B.E.
microprocessor.

Georgia Tech also announced today that it will host the Second Annual
Cell/B.E. Processor Workshop from July 10-11, 2008, focusing on
software, tools and applications for the Cell/B.E. processor, including
high performance computing applications and programmability tools. The
two-day workshop is sponsored by Sony Group, Toshiba and IBM and will
be held at the Klaus Advanced Computing Building on Georgia Tech’s
campus. More information on the workshop may be found at
http://sti.cc.gatech.edu/.

The STI Center of Competence was created at Georgia Tech to test the
boundaries and demonstrate the extreme performance of the Cell/B.E.
architecture. “Today, we are carrying out the vision we always intended
- to generate breakthrough innovations using Cell/B.E. technologies
working hand-in-hand with researchers at Sony Group, Toshiba and IBM,”
said David A. Bader, professor and executive director of
High-Performance Computing in the Georgia Tech College of Computing.
“We are very encouraged that our initial research results are showing
the multi-faceted applicability of this technology.”

One of the key research challenges that the collaborators will address
through continued applied research is the use of Cell/B.E. technology
to better monitor an aircraft’s structural safety in commercial and
military airplanes. Researchers will develop Cell/B.E. based
data-processing software that will expeditiously and accurately monitor
structural components in flight by measuring and recording an
aircraft’s vibrations through a distributed network of sensors.
Although a commercial signal processing application for airplanes is a
long term plan, researchers are working to develop a solid software
foundation in the labs.

“IBM has invested in a strategy that applies the use of technology to
solve grand challenges with our trusted university partners,” said Jai
Menon, IBM Fellow, vice president, Technical Strategy and University
Relations. “In our collaboration with Georgia Tech, we are working
together to better predict airline mechanical failures to make flying
in airlines safer for passengers like you and me.”

The other joint research projects in productivity enhancements include:

•    A useful signal processing kernel needed for oil and gas exploration and seismic monitoring;

•    Data compression, used for file compression or reducing the size
of messages sent between computers required in multiple industries;

•    Financial services applications for consolidated debt optimization, as well as European and American options pricing;

•    Encryption libraries for securing communications for privacy;

•    High-speed multimedia codecs, such as MPEG2 and JPEG2000 encoders and decoders;

•    Bioinformatics, such as DNA sequence alignment and comparison;

•    Software productivity enhancement tools that involve a
cross-platform profiler, performance estimation and tuning system with
IDE type features;

•    Single-source automatic translator for generating PPU and SPU codes from a monolithic C/C++ application.

“We anticipate a paradigm shift in computing and our collaboration with
the Georgia Tech College of Computing will create innovative
applications for Cell/B.E. processors," said Yasu Yokote, general
manager, CELL Application Development Center, Sony Corporation. "For a
year STI Center created at Georgia Tech, they created software
productivity enhancement tools, which are valuable for moving legacy
code bases to CELL/B.E. and will generate tremendous value to all
Cell-based products."

"Within a year of the opening of the Center of Competence at Georgia
Tech, researchers are already generating outstanding results on
Cell/B.E.,” said Mitsuo Saito, Chief Fellow, Toshiba Corporation
Semiconductor Company. "The future will see growing demand for
multi-core processor applications, and we are delighted that the Center
is playing a key role in anticipating and responding to such demand."

About the Georgia Tech College of Computing

The Georgia Tech College of Computing is a national leader in the
research and creation of real-world computing breakthroughs that drive
social and scientific progress. With its graduate program ranked 9th
nationally by U.S. News and World Report, the College’s unconventional
approach to education is pioneering the new era 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 College of Computing, its
academic divisions and research centers, please visit
http://www.cc.gatech.edu.

About the Cell Broadband Engine

The revolutionary Cell/B.E. processor is a breakthrough design
featuring a central processing core, based on IBM's industry leading
Power Architecture™ technology, and eight synergistic processors. 
Cell/B.E. "supercharges" computation-intensive applications, offering
fast performance for computer entertainment and handhelds,
virtual-reality, wireless downloads, real-time video chat, interactive
TV shows and other "image-hungry" computing environments. The processor
was created through a collaboration between Sony Group, Toshiba
Corporation (Toshiba) and IBM,

All company/product names and service marks may be trademarks or
registered trademarks of their respective companies.  Cell Broadband
Engine is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

For more information, contact:

Stefany Wilson

Georgia Tech College of Computing

404.312.6620

stefany@cc.gatech.edu

“More and more graduate school applicants are coming to us with conference papers and research internships already on their resumes,” CoC Dean Richard DeMillo said at a welcome luncheon. “Building up your research portfolio here this summer will be a great springboard for you in graduate school or in your career, whichever way you go.”

Organized by the Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Division of CoC, the Computing Research Undergraduate Intern Summer Experience (CRUISE) partners each student with a faculty member and a graduate student in the CSE Division, the School of Computer Science or the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Throughout the 10-week program, participants conduct research guided by their mentors and attend workshops and weekly seminars on high-performance computing, programming, compilers and processors. Several students will participate in interdisciplinary research in distributed computing, simulation and intelligent transportation systems. Others will be working on optimizing algorithms on the IBM Cell/B.E. processor for real-world problems in computational biology and national security. The program aims to help the students pursue advanced degrees or a career in computing.

Program organizers say CRUISE also helps Georgia Tech identify some bright prospects for graduate study here, especially among underrepresented groups in science and engineering. CRUISE focuses on racial minorities and women and tries to attract at least a few international students each session.

This year, eight students were sponsored through an NSF-funded alliance created by CoC between historically black universities and research universities. Another six come through a Department of Defense program called Joint Educational Opportunities for Minorities, while three students from Indian Institutes of Technology are funded by CSE researchers.

Several faculty members are acting as mentors, including CSE Chair Richard Fujimoto, and CSE Professors David Bader and Rich Vuduc; SCS Professors Hyesoon Kim and Nate Clark; and Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Michael Hunter.

“We want the students to have a good experience with research,” Fujimoto said. “At the same time, we introduce them to Georgia Tech and maybe feed the pipeline of talented students who might be candidates for our graduate programs.”

Shwetak Patel, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of
Interactive Computing (SIC) took home the Best Paper Award from the Pervasive
Computing 2008 conference, which was held May 19-22 in Sydney, Australia.
Professor Gregory Abowd, Patel’s faculty adviser, and Matt Reynolds,
former Senior Research Scientist in SIC and now assistant professor at Duke
University, contributed to the winning paper titled “Detecting Human
Movement by Differential Air Pressure Sensing in HVAC System Ductwork: An
Exploration in Infrastructure Mediated Sensing.”
Patel also won the Best Paper and Best Presentation awards
at Ubicomp 2007 and was nominated for best paper at the Pervasive Computing
conference in 2006. In his five years as a graduate student at the College of
Computing, Patel has published nine full papers at these two top forums for
research in ubiquitous computing.

RICHLAND, Wash. (July 14, 2008) -- The newest breed of supercomputers have hardware set up not just for speed, but also to better tackle large networks of seemingly random data. And now, a multi-institutional group of researchers has been awarded $4.0 million to develop software for these supercomputers. Applications include anywhere complex webs of information can be found: from internet security and power grid stability to complex biological networks.

The difference between the new breed and traditional supercomputers is how they access data, a difference that significantly increases computing power. But old software won't run on the new hardware any more than a PC program will run on a Mac. So, the Department of Defense provided the funding this month to seed the Center for Adaptive Supercomputing Software, a joint project between the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Cray, Inc, in Seattle.

"The system will allow much faster analysis of complex problems, like understanding and predicting how the power grid behaves -- one of the most complex engineering systems ever built," said Moe Khaleel, director of Computational Sciences and Mathematics at PNNL, which is leading the project.

Other researchers in the software collaboration hail from Sandia National Laboratories, Georgia Institute of Technology, Washington State University and the University of Delaware.

These new machines are built with so-called "multithreaded processors" that enable multiple, simultaneous processing compared with the linear and slower approach of conventional systems. The Center will focus on applications for the multithreaded Cray XMT, one of which Cray delivered to PNNL in September 2007 (http://www.pnl.gov/news/release.asp?id=271).

"Traditional supercomputers are not well suited for certain kinds of data analysis, so we want to explore this advanced architecture," said PNNL computational scientist Daniel Chavarría.

In previously published work, PNNL computational scientist Jarek Nieplocha used a predecessor of the Cray XMT to run typical software programs that help operators keep the power grid running smoothly. Adapted to the advanced hardware, these programs ran 10 times faster on the multithreaded machine. "That was the best speed ever reported. We're getting closer to being able to track the grid in real time," said Nieplocha.

In biology, another complex web is woven by genes (or their protein products) working together inside people's cells. “We have discovered genes implicated in breast cancer using a massively multithreaded algorithm on the Cray XMT,” said Georgia Tech computational scientist and engineer David A. Bader. “It’s like finding a needle in a haystack. The algorithm searches for genes whose removal quickly causes networks and pathways in the cell to breakdown."

The processors and computer memory in the advanced computers interact in a novel way. In traditional supercomputers, each processing chip gets an dollop of memory to use for its computations. To perform a calculation, the chip dips into the memory, does its work, then accesses the memory again for its next calculation, like an elephant dipping its trunk into a bag of peanuts and eating them one at a time. Each processor-memory unit is linked together over a network, and performance improvements come with more and faster processors and sleek network connections.

The Cray XMT multithreaded system lumps all the memory together, and the processors freely access the much larger memory pool. But like an elephant with many trunks, each processor has multiple threads: it dips into memory with one thread, and while that thread is performing the calculation at hand, another thread goes into the memory, and another.

By the time all the threads have dipped, the original thread has finished its calculation and is ready for another trip to the memory bank. A many-trunked elephant would have a distinct speed advantage plowing through a bag of peanuts over its hungrier zoo-mate, just as a multithreaded system does.

"The processors are doing useful work all the time, so the computer can be faster," said Chavarría. Each Cray XMT processor has 128 hardware threads with which to access the shared memory.

Conceptually, this advantage translates into the machines being able to handle complex, random networks of data. Mainstream machines split up the data, assigning parcels of data to individual processing units. For example, a supercomputer trying to model how a community of microbes behaves would subdivide the community spatially.

The computer would then analyze what goes on within each subdivision, but it couldn't reach across other subdivisions to find out what happened to the microbe that wandered off to the other side of its habitat. Multithreaded machines, however, can examine the whole space at once, essentially assigning each thread to a microbe.

"If all of your microbes move to the other side of the territory, it doesn't matter, because the threads still have access," said Chavarría.

Another advantage multithreaded machines have over mainsteam computers is in power consumption. Although the Cray has not yet been tested, other multithreaded machines have shown reduced energy usage compared to traditional architectures.

The Computational Science & Engineering division at the Georgia Institute of Technology (CSE) was established in 2005 to strengthen and better reflect the critical role that computation plays in the science and engineering disciplines. CSE supports interdisciplinary research and education in computer science and applied mathematics. The Georgia Tech CSE program is designed to innovate and create new expertise, technologies, and practitioners in areas including high performance and grid computing, modeling and simulation, and data analysis and mining. http://www.cse.cc.gatech.edu

Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is a Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory where interdisciplinary teams advance science and technology and deliver solutions to America's most intractable problems in energy, national security and the environment. PNNL employs 4,000 staff, has a $855 million annual budget, and has been managed by Ohio-based Battelle since the lab's inception in 1965. http://www.pnl.gov/news

Media Contacts:

Mary Beckman, for PNL
marybeckman@pnl.gov
(509) 375-3688

Stefany Wilson, for Georgia Tech
stefany@cc.gatech.edu
404-312-6620

Christopher Miller, for Sandia
cmiller@sandia.gov

According to organizers, the goal of this by-invitation-only workshop
is to help women in the field expand their networks of colleagues,
increase their collective impact on industry and academia, explore and
evolve their personal vision and leadership style, and create an
environment where innovation and risk-taking are safe.

Confirmed speakers at the event, which is being hosted by the School of
Computer Science, are: Dr. Leah Jamieson, John A. Edwardson Dean of
Engineering and Ransburg Distinguished Professor of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, Purdue University; and Duy-Loan T. Le, Senior
Fellow, Texas Instruments. For more information, please visit the Anita
Borg Institute website.

Ericson and the other seven members of the AP Computer Science Development Committee will help establish a set of skills and knowledge that successful test-takers should be able to demonstrate and will help determine the test content based on data including feedback from a national curriculum survey of teaching faculty.

“Barbara has been a long time supporter of the AP Computer Science program, and we are pleased to welcome her to the Development Committee,” said Lien Diaz, associate director of math curriculum for the College Board’s Advanced Placement Program. “We will rely on her experience at Georgia Tech to ensure content alignment and proper exam question rigor to the typical curriculum of college entry Computer Science 1 and 2 courses.”

Members of the committee, a mix of high school and college faculty involved with teaching relevant college undergraduate courses, may serve up to four years.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a field of computer research that deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data. At present, most AR research is concerned with the use of live video imagery that is digitally processed and "augmented" by the addition of computer-generated graphics.

“Augmented Reality is one of the most exciting technologies available today. Thus far, it has only existed in the research lab. It is our intention to commercialize the technology and make it available to the public at large. Augmented Reality offers us the opportunity to create an entirely new advertising paradigm,” said Carl Freer, Co-Founder and Visionary.

“We partnered with Georgia Tech because of their reputation for excellence in this area. The work they have done thus far is very exciting and their open stance with commercial entities such as Magitech provides for a great opportunity,” said Rich Jenkins, CEO Media Power. “We are very excited about the work we will do together.”

Under the guidance of Georgia Tech professor Blair MacIntyre, GVU's faculty and students with expertise in computer science, human-centered computing, digital media and game design will partner with Magitech to explore new mobile AR application concepts. The gift from Media Power also enables research in new kinds of design and authoring tools for handheld AR systems, including systems empowering end-users to create AR games themselves. The partnership will create opportunities for GVU researchers to evaluate commercial-grade AR applications in realistic settings.

“Augmented Reality is one of the most significant emerging industries in the world right now,” said Rich DeMillo, Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. "Its influence will be felt from entertainment to education to health care. Georgia Tech’s leadership in AR research and Media Power’s strength in commercialization make this an ideal partnership to achieve our mutual goal of creating breakthrough technologies that achieve sustained real world impact.”

“GVU has a long track record in Augmented Reality and mobile computing," said Elizabeth Mynatt, Director of the GVU Center. "This partnership with Media Power strengthens our ability to look at the entire ecosystem of mobile computing from human experience to technology, design strategies to business opportunities."

Magitech also announced today the opening of its Atlanta offices, located at 817 West Peachtree Street in the Biltmore Hotel building, a location providing easy access to Georgia Tech. Magitech has already hired a sizable compliment of designers, 3D modelers, AR programmers, researchers and content developers, consisting of over 15 Georgia Tech and Savannah College of Art and Design-Atlanta graduates.

Magitech is Media Power’s Atlanta-based augmented reality division. Its world class research partners include the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, the Graz University of Technology in Austria and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Magitech’s goal is to develop commercial grade Augmented Reality products and networks.

About Media Power

Media Power is a unique tech company that develops consumer and business products based on Augmented Reality technology (AR) and other advanced systems. Media Power has four divisions offering a range of hi-tech goods and marketing services: Magitech; GetFugu.com; Gizmondo; and Chinetic. For more information visit the company's website.

About GVU
The GVU Center at Georgia Tech is an interdisciplinary research center encompassing a number of individual colleges at Georgia Tech as well as external collaborators. GVU focuses on unlocking and amplifying human potential through technical innovation in computing technologies. The faculty and students associated with GVU bring expertise ranging from science and engineering to the humanities and design. It is through deep collaboration between these diverse domains that enables the GVU Center to engage in research that would otherwise be difficult to tackle in traditional academic and industrial settings.

After more than a decade and half of practicing interdisciplinary research, GVU has gained an international recognition in 3D Compression, Animation, Augmented Reality, Collaborative Work, Educational Technologies, Gaming, Graphics, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualization, New Media, Online Communities, Perception, Robotics, Ubiquitous Computing, Virtual Reality and Wearable Computing. For more information visit the center's website.

For more information, contact:
Becky Biggs
GCI Group
rbiggs@gcigroup.com
(404) 260-3510

ATLANTA, GA. (September 17, 2008) - While most personal computers today can process a few hundred thousand calculations per second, computer scientists are laying the groundwork for exascale machines that will process more than a million trillion – or 10¹⁸ – calculations per second. Just a few months ago, scientists reached the long-sought-after high-performance computing milestone of one petaflop by processing more than a thousand trillion – or 10¹⁵ – calculations per second.

"The need for exascale-sized machines is well-established," said Karsten Schwan, a professor in the School of Computer Science in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "With exascale machines, weather simulations will be able to operate at finer resolution, biologists will be able to model more complex systems, and businesses will be able to run and manage many applications at the same time on a single large machine."

Schwan recently received a 2008 HP Labs Innovation Research Award to work with HP Labs, HP’s central research arm, to help solve some of the key problems in developing exascale machines. The high-impact research award, one of only two granted for exascale research and 41 granted overall to professors around the world, encourages open collaboration with HP Labs. The award amount is renewable for a total of three years based on research progress and HP business requirements.

With the petaflop barrier broken, researchers like Schwan are focusing on the next goal – improving that processing power a thousandfold to reach the exascale. Schwan’s expertise in high performance and enterprise computing will help him solve some of the challenges surrounding exascale systems.

"We believe that machines will reach exascale size only by combining common chips – such as quad core processors – with special purpose chips – such as graphics accelerators," said Schwan, who is also director of the Georgia Tech Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS).

A challenge that arises from this scenario is how to efficiently run programs on these heterogeneous many-core chips. To investigate possible methods for doing this, Schwan will team with Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Sudhakar Yalamanchili, an expert in heterogeneous many-core platforms.

Exascale machines must also be able to run multiple systems and applications on a single platform at the same time, while guaranteeing that they will not interfere with each other. An approach called virtualization may help solve this challenge by hiding some of the underlying computer architecture issues from applications.

"With virtualization, decisions have to be made about where, when and for how long certain programs should run, but there are many ways of determining what might be appropriate because there might be multiple goals," explained Schwan. "For instance, one might want to minimize the exascale machine’s power consumption while at the same time meet some performance goal for the application. In other words, virtualized systems must be actively ‘managed’ to attain end user, institutional or corporate goals."

Ada Gavrilovska, a specialist in virtualization and multi-core operation and research scientist in the School of Computer Science in the College of Computing, will collaborate with Schwan to determine how to manage multiple programs on exascale machines that consist of hundreds of thousands of processors.

Though exascale machines are high-performance computing systems, the vision for these future systems goes beyond the typical vision painted for high performance computing. Instead of scaling a single program to run on hundreds of thousands of cores, exascale systems will also be used to run multiple programs on a single large machine.

"This future virtualized and managed exascale system will guarantee some level of service even when parts of the machine get too loaded or too hot or fail, since applications can be moved while they are running," said Schwan.

Though it will be several years before exascale systems are developed, scientists at Georgia Tech will use the HP Labs Innovation Research Award to lay the foundation for solving emerging science and engineering challenges in national defense, energy assurance, advanced materials and climate.

"Around the world, HP partners with the best and the brightest in industry and academia to drive open innovation and set the agenda for breakthrough technologies that are designed to change the world," said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs. "HP Labs’ selection of Karsten Schwan for a 2008 Innovation Award demonstrates outstanding achievement and will help accelerate HP Labs’ global research agenda in pursuit of scientific breakthroughs."

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Technical Contact: Karsten Schwan (404-894-2589); E-mail: (schwan@cc.gatech.edu)