“The core computer science curriculum first established in the 1960’s has become too narrow in focus and too antiquated in application to satisfy the educational objectives of a technology-driven world,” says College of Computing at Georgia Tech Professor Mark Guzdial. “In anticipation of the expansive and extensive impact that technology will continue to have on our culture and society, it is imperative that educators engage a broader base of potential computer science students, particularly women and minorities, thorough more contextualized and appealing methods and practices. With this grant, the College of Computing at Georgia Tech has an exciting opportunity to integrate a new and highly-creative approach to computer science education across the learning spectrum – from kindergarten to college, and beyond.”

Potential projects funded with this grant include: partnerships with state and local youth-oriented organizations to develop engaging computer science programs to increase participation at the K-12 level; involvement of computer science college undergraduate and graduate level students as mentors; workshops for faculty at other institutions to teach vanguard educational approaches developed by College of Computing at Georgia Tech faculty; support in disseminating curriculum ideas among a developing set of users; and creating streamlined methods of communicating results to peer institutions considering curriculum changes. Work in support of these initiatives began in fall 2006 and will continue through the 2008-2009 academic year.

Guzdial based the winning proposal on his experience in helping create a Bachelor of Science in Computational Media degree program in 2003, and rebuilding the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science curriculum on the Threads platform in 2006. Developed in recognition of computing's significant and increasing impact in non-traditional subject areas, these highly-contextualized and transformational approaches have proven successful in engaging a wider spectrum of computer science students. Presently, 23 percent of Computational Media students are women, and the total number of enrolled students has increased 77 percent from 2005 to 2006.

“The computing industry can only achieve its full potential when it best resembles and reflects the users and communities whose lives we are trying to impact,” said Richard A. DeMillo, John P. Imlay, Jr. Dean of the College of Computing. “At the College of Computing we are defining the new face of computing by expanding the horizons of traditional computer science students through lifelong, relevant education focused on real-world issues. The model for broadening computing participation here in Georgia will serve as a model for our industry, and the entire United States.”

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.

Media Contacts
For the College of Computing at Georgia Tech
Stefany Wilson
v. 404.894.7253
m. 404.312.6620
stefany@cc.gatech.edu

The CCC was established by a National Science Foundation (NSF) cooperative agreement with CRA to identify major research opportunities and establish “grand challenges” for the field. The core leadership for the CCC comes from the CCC Council that Zegura is a part of, and is described as a group with the stature, diversity and longevity needed for the CCC to be effective.

"We're pleased that NSF has charged our organization with establishing the CCC," said Dan Reed, CRA Chair and director of the Renaissance Computing Institute in North Carolina. "Computing research continues to fuel the innovations that drive economic productivity. We see the CCC as a mechanism that will enable continued innovation by enhancing our community's ability to envision and pursue long-term, audacious computing research goals."

CRA recently constituted a nominating committee to generate potential appointees to the more permanent CCC Council and Chair which will replace the interim council later this year. Under a three-year, $6M agreement, the Council is responsible not for doing the visioning, but for putting processes into place that stimulate and facilitate visioning by the computing research community.

One of the first tasks of the CCC will be to assume the role of community proxy organization for the NSF's GENI Project, providing broad scientific oversight to its potential construction and operation. GENI is an experimental and collaborative facility with NSF and the research community. As an appointed member of the GENI’s Advisory Board, Ellen Zegura works toward enabling the research community to invent and demonstrate a global communications network and related services that will be qualitatively better than today's Internet.

For more information on GENI, click here.
For more info on the CCC Council, click here.

The Kaleidoscope project is developing techniques, tools, and systems to facilitate network operations---a class of tasks that includes monitoring network conditions, detecting actionable problems, and taking steps to remediate them. “We focus on two areas of network operations,” says Feamster “first, network security (specifically, unwanted traffic) and second, network monitoring, diagnosis, and troubleshooting.”  The results from this project will both streamline today's network operations tasks and provide design insights for network operations in the next-generation Internet.

The first part of the project involves performing measurements and analysis on the current Internet to better understand both the extent of network operations problems today and the degree to which cooperation between users and operators can mitigate them.  Based on these findings, Feamster’s project will propose new approaches to network operations both for the current Internet and for future networks.  This research leverages recent advances in streaming data management, machine learning, economics, and privacy and may inspire new work in these areas, as well.

NSF CAREER Awards are one of the highest honors given to young university faculty in science and engineering who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Feamster is an assistant professor within the College’s School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems, including the design, measurement, and analysis of network routing protocols, network security, anonymous communication systems, and adaptive streaming media protocols.

For more information about Nick Feamster, click here.

ATLANTA – February 16, 2007 – The College of Computing at Georgia Tech, a national leader in the creation of real-world computing breakthroughs that drive social and scientific progress, today announced that it has formed the School of Computer Science and the School of Interactive Computing under the College of Computing umbrella. This move, along with a planned future formation of the School of Computational Science and Engineering, marks the first time a college-level computing program has delineated the field into separate but related bodies of study.

“With the continued growth and expansion of the global technology sector, the term ‘computer science’ has become too narrow in scope to encompass the number of different disciplines rapidly growing out of this sector,” said Rich DeMillo, Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech. “At the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, we have identified the need to further segment the ‘computing’ field so that proper attention is given to emerging sub-disciplines such as media computation or robotics. With the creation of these new schools, we are taking the next logical step to make sure future generations of computing students are educated in the context most relevant to their interests and talents.”  

The new School of Computer Science (SCS), chaired by Dr. Ellen Zegura, will focus on the roots of the computing discipline. Students will be exposed to mathematical foundations and system building principles and practices. Research questions will address foundational issues such as algorithms and complexity, to systems issues of robustness and performance. SCS will naturally engage mathematics, electrical and computer engineering, systems engineering and management to collaborate on multidisciplinary problems.

Dr. Aaron Bobick will chair the School of Interactive Computing (SIC), focusing on computing’s interaction with users and the environment. Students learn as much about modeling people or the world as they do about computers. Research questions focus broadly on how computers impact the quality of people’s lives. SIC connects to a large range of non-computing disciplines including psychology, mechanical engineering, music, and art.

Both the School of Computer Science and School of Interactive Computing will officially begin operation immediately.

“When creating the College back in 1990, the Institute foresaw the limitations of calling it the College of Computer Science,” said Gary Schuster, Provost of the Georgia Institute of Technology. “As an educational program, the College of Computing has always been at the forefront of transformation and it’s exciting that today we are still taking the lead on defining what the field will become.”

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 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 at Georgia Tech, its academic divisions and research centers, please visit www.cc.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

Friends of the deceased, Victor Jaworski and James Gaines, along with Compton's father, Jim Compton, lead the effort to have Compton recognized with a posthumous degree.

Compton was a co-op student and attended Georgia Tech in good standing from Fall 2002 to Spring 2006.

"This country could lose its competitive edge very quickly," warns Georgia Tech President Wayne Clough. According to Clough, all schools need to customize education with programs like Threads™ to fit individual students' needs, talents and desires.

For the complete article, Atlanta Business Chronicle subscribers can click here .

For more information on the College of Computing's new curriculum, visit the Threads™ website .

This project will research the impact of 3D integration technology on conventional single-core and multi-core processors as well as emergent “many-core” processors (many 10’s or even 100’s of cores on a chip). From these studies, new architectures specifically targeting a 3D technology will be developed.

Modern microprocessor designs are severely limited by wire delays within the chip. Like walking from one end of a building to the other, sending signals across a chip requires time and energy. Beyond a certain size, architects of buildings construct additional floors which can help reduce the distances traversed by the occupants. In a similar fashion, microprocessors of the future will be composed of multiple layers of circuitry arranged in a three-dimensional stack.

This technology has the potential to significantly reduce the lengths of wires throughout the chip which can lead to an increase in performance with a simultaneous reduction in power consumption.

The development of skyscrapers required the invention of new building architectures; likewise the 3D microprocessors of tomorrow will need new computer architectures to fully exploit this new technology.

They key research challenges include answering how to best design the new architectures to extract performance and power benefits from the technology, how to cope with potential thermal problems that may arise from stacking multiple layers of highly active circuits, and how to build a compelling system using stacks of different types of devices (e.g., RF/analog, DRAM, flash, CMOS).

ARWU rankings in engineering, technology and computer science are based on academic and research performance. In all, more than 1000 institutions were ranked, the top 106 making it into the published report. Ranking indicators include alumni and  faculty winning Nobel Prizes and fields medals, highly cited researchers, articles indexed in Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI).

Two new indicators were introduced with this years broad subject ranking: the percentage of articles published in the top 20% journals of each field and engineering research expenditure.

The top ten Engineering/Technology and Computer Science programs were all in the USA:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
2. Stanford University
3. University of Illinois Urbana Champaign   
4. University of Michigan - Ann Arbor    
5. University of California - Berkeley    
6. Pennsylvania State University - University Park    
7. Georgia Institute of Technology
8. University of Texas - Austin
9. University of California - San Diego
10. Purdue University - West Lafayette

View the complete ranking online at http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ARWU-FIELD2007/ENG.htm

In the paper, the authors use a performance model to analyze the potential of simulating large-scale biological systems faster than many cluster-based supercomputing platforms.

Computer Magazine is the flagship publication if the IEEE Computer Society and has a hardcopy circulation of approximately 90,000 subscribers.

The paper is available to IEEE Digital Library Subscribers or can be purchased online: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2007.108

The 2006-2007 Undergraduate Awards

• Outstanding Freshman - Christopher Adam Sladky
• Outstanding Sophomore - Michael E. Hale
• Outstanding Junior - Megan Leigh Elmore
• Outstanding Undergraduate - David Schachter
• Outstanding Undergraduate Research - Steven Dalton
• Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Assistant - David Schachter
• Outstanding Undergraduate Research Assistant - Steven French

The Dave & Carrie Armento Scholarship - Gary Mann
Established by David D. Armento to be awarded to an African-American computer science major who is a resident of the State of Georgia.

The Bierne M. Prager Scholarship - Jason Power
Established to award an undergraduate student from Shelby County, Tennessee.

The 2006-2007 Graduate Awards

• Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant - Jessica Paradise-Elliott
• Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant - Shwetak Patel, Qi Zhao
  CS7001 Research Project Award - Hwa-You Hsu, Wanchun Li, Ogechi Nnadi, Christopher Parnin, Hina Shah, Yanbing Yu

The Donald V. Jackson Fellowship - Angela Navarro
This Fellowship supports the master’s program and is awarded to a well-rounded computer science student who best embodies values of academic excellence and leadership.

The Marshall D. Williamson Fellowship - Roozbeh Mottaghi
This Fellowship supports the master’s program and is awarded to a well-rounded student who best embodies values of academic excellence and leadership.

2005-2006 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award:

• Vivek Kwatra - (graduated Summer 2005), Example-based Rendering of Textural Phenomena, Advisors: Aaron Bobick and Irfan Essa
• Yaxin Liu - (graduated Spring 2005), Decision-Theoretic Planning Under Risk-Sensitive Planning Objectives, Advisors: Sven Koenig and Craig Tovey

Outstanding Support and Service Staff Awards

• Francine Lyken
• John David Sturgill

Institute Awards

Don Bratcher Human Relations Award - Gregory D. Abowd

10 Years of Service

• Michelle Bernard
• Amy Bruckman
• Marcus Johnson
• Thomas Pilsch
• David Smith

25 Years of Service

• Vivian Chandler
• Cathy Dunnahoo

Faculty Awards

Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award - Charles Isbell
Outstanding Senior Faculty Research Award - Eric Vigoda

The Raytheon Faculty Fellowship - Santosh Vempala
The Raytheon Faculty Fellowship is a $15,000 seed grant designed to foster and encourage collaborative activities among CoC faculty members and to further
promote a sense of community within the college. The recipient can be academic as well as research faculty members in the CoC who seek to collaborate on new
research initiatives in any area. Thanks to the ongoing support of the college by the Raytheon Company, this award is presented annually.

Outstanding Instructor - Robert Waters

William A. “Gus” Baird Faculty Teaching Award - Amy Bruckman
This award is given to a faculty member who is recognized by his or her peers for excellence in teaching. It is fitting that “Gus” – “the man who wanted nothing more than to teach” – be remembered each time this award is presented. “Gus” received his master’s degree from Georgia Tech in 1980 and was a favorite College of Computing undergraduate instructor for nearly 15 years.

The Peter A. Freeman Faculty Award - Leo Mark
The Freeman Award is presented annually to a member of the College of Computing faculty who has demonstrated the entrepreneurial spirit for which the founding Dean, Peter A. Freeman, was known.

The Dean’s Award - David Bader
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.

Lifetime Achievement Award – James D. Foley
The Lifetime Achievement Award is the most prestigious award given by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer/Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Jim Foley was one of the computer graphics pioneers who helped to establish Human Interactive Computing as a discipline.

Social Impact Award – Gregory Abowd
This award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer/Human Interaction (SIGCHI) to individuals who promote the application of humancomputer interaction research to pressing social needs. Gregory’s research explores applications of ubiquitous computing technologies, combining both human-centered and technology-driven research themes.

Corporate Scholarships

AT&T Graduate Fellowship - Lana Yarosh

Cisco Internet Generation Scholarships:

• Lawrence Jarvis
• Alex Marquez
• Cisco Leadership Award
• Courtland Goodson
• Dolapo Kukoyi
• Jennifer Whitlow

Google Anita Borg Scholarship

• Helene Brashear
• Marshini Chetty
• Andrea Grimes
  
• Julie Kientz
• Susan Wyche (Finalist)
  

IBM PhD Fellowship Award - David Hilley

PEO Fellowship - Julie Kientz

Lockheed Martin Scholarship - Jordan Garner

Rockwell Collins Scholarships:

• Denis Bueno
• Joanna Leidy

Intel Scholars:

• Matthew Benford
• Sauvik Das
• Alexander Dodson
• Catie Donnelly
• Brittany Duncan
• Meagan Elmore
• Katherine Flinn
• Matthew Fong
• Jordan Garner
• Anne Hewitt
• Lawrence Jarvis
• Terris Johnson
• Christina Lacey
• Amanda Ladd
• Vanessa Larco
• Uzoma Okafor
• Kady Rosier
• Aaron St.Clair
• Sweta Vajjhala

Intel Graduated Scholars Fall 2006

• Mina Doroudi
• Andrew Durso
• Priyanka Mahalanabis
• Logan Thomas
• Megan Thomas
• Dana Van Devender
• Jenelle Walker
• Crystal Wrenn

Intel Mentors

• Nicholas Diakopoulos
• Steven Dow
• Andrea Forte
• Manish Mehta
• Mario Romero
• Erika Shehan
• Alan Wagner
• Ping Wang
• Steve Webb
• Jose Zagal

SAIC Scholars:

• Cory Campbell
• Jill Donnelly
• Carolina Gomez
• Kathryn Long
• Candace Mitchell
• Jahmeilah Richardson
• Michael Slaughter
• Kelli Stancil
• Jennifer Stoll
• Pavani Yalla

SAIC Mentors

• Nova Ahmed
• Guofei Gu
• Zsolt Kira
• Dushmanta Mohapatra
• Bryan Payne

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

• Katie Collins
• Skji Conklin
• Catie Donnelly
• Brittany Duncan
• Megan Elmore
• Dawn Finney
• Katie Flinn
• Matthew Fong
• Jordan Garner
• Matt Goforth
• Noah Goodwin
• Michael Hale
• Blake Israel
• Nayan Jain
• Lawrence Jarvis
• Terris Johnson
• Vallerie Killian
• Vanessa Larco
• Priyanka Mahalanabis
• Micajah McGarity
• Candice Mitchell
• Charlie Morn
• Heather Phillips
• Heather Pritchard
• Peter Rosegger
• Joshua Silver
• Michael Slaughter
• Kelli Stancil
• Jeffrey Starker II
• Jennifer Whitlow
• Bennett Wilson

The paper was the ninth most downloaded paper from the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) refereed journals and conference proceedings in December, 2006, according to the March issue of Communications of the ACM.

The paper has appeared on the list of "Top 10 Downloads from ACM’s Digital Library" each month of 2007 and was reported as the 15th most downloaded paper for the year of 2006.

ACM Digital Library subscribers can download it here:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=587082

Student authors, Reynald Benoit, Travis Little and Scott Sherrill, wrote the paper for Dr. Amy Bruckman's Design of Online Communities class. Their paper uses interviews with top users of Digg.com to examine the benefits and problems associated with the online user community.

Digg.com is the 80th most popular website according to Alexa Traffic Rank.

Read the entire student publication online: http://www.scribd.com/doc/5735/Digging-for-Diggers-Analysis-of-a-Social-Media-Website

ATLANTA, March 2, 2006 – The College of Computing at Georgia Tech, a national leader in the creation of real-world computing breakthroughs that drive social and scientific progress, today hosted the New Face of Computing Symposium, signaling the debut of the College’s new educational and research focus on people-centric computing. The nation’s preeminent computing scholars, researchers and corporate leaders from organizations such as Microsoft Corporation, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Turner Broadcasting Company, Google, KUKA Robotics, IBM Internet Security Systems, Kaneva, Inc., Bryn Mawr College and others, discussed and debated topics ranging from transformative educational models for the discipline, to information technology’s unending affect on the cultural landscape, and how socially-conscious research efforts are the key to sustainable innovation in computing.

“Looking at the future of computing and its impact on global societies and cultures, the College of Computing at Georgia Tech is creating a ‘new face’ and charting a new direction for the discipline – one that is focused on affecting change for people, with technology,” said Richard A. DeMillo, John P. Imlay Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. “With the support of our colleagues throughout industry and academia, we are setting the course in people-centric computing that will drive the scientific and cultural breakthroughs of the future.”

More than 200 corporate executives, industry leaders and technologists from across the country attended the New Face of Computing Symposium. DeMillo joined featured speaker, Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft Corporation, for an onstage discussion focused on computing’s impact across industries, societies and cultures.

“We share Georgia Tech’s vision of evolving computer science in ways that will excite students today, and prepare them to tackle the challenges of tomorrow,” said Mundie. “Reinventing how computing is taught will inspire innovations across the information-technology landscape.”

Throughout the course of the day-long Symposium, industry and academic technologists participated in panel discussions to enlighten the audience on the future of computing as related to key research and educational areas. Panel topics included the following: Computing Education; Emerging Tools for Large-Scale Problem Solving; Social Computing; Robotics and Intelligent Machines; Providing Usable Security; and Next-Generation Computing. The panelists also discussed how the computing field has evolved to where it is today, identified current technological, social and culture challenges, and debated the research and educational approaches required to ensure the sustainability and growth of the discipline.

For more information about the New Face of Computing Symposium and the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, please visit the Symposium website.  To watch a pre-recorded Web cast of the event, please visit http://www.cc.gatech.edu/symposium/webcast .

The Lifetime Achievement Award is the most prestigious award given by ACM's SIGCHI, and is awarded to those who have made the greatest contributions to the study of human-computer interaction (HCI) and who have led the shaping of the field.

James D. Foley is the Stephen Fleming Chair in Telecommunications at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech and was the founding director of the Graphics, Visualization & Usability (GVU) Center within the College of Computing at Georgia Tech.

Foley was one of the computer graphics pioneers who helped to establish HCI as a discipline. He is the first author of the leading text in computer graphics, part of which deals with core technical HCI issues such as input devices, interaction techniques, and dialogue design. He has contributed over 80 publications spanning computer graphics, input devices, visualization, user interface evaluation, perceptual issues, and user interfaces.

The GVU Center has become a major center for HCI research, the training of students and future faculty, and the codification of courses and content in the field.

According to the SIGCHI 2007 Awards website, "It is difficult to think of anyone who had a larger role in the institutionalization of HCI as a discipline."

The Social Impact Award is given to individuals who promote the application of human-computer interaction research to pressing social needs.

Gregory Abowd is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing and GVU Center at Georgia Tech, and co-Director of the Aware Home Research Initiative. His research explores applications of ubiquitous computing technologies, combining both human-centered and technology-driven research themes.

Since 1995, Abowd has lead the development and evaluation of several influential ubiquitous computing projects: Cyberguide; eClass (nee Classroom 2000); the Aware Home; and most recently a suite of tools to support caregivers for children with autism and other developmental disabilities.

Abowd is the co-author of a major textbook on Human-Computer Interaction and has published over 150 peer-reviewed scientific articles in the areas of Ubiquitous Computing, HCI and Software Engineering. He is a 1986 graduate of the University of Notre Dame, where he studied Mathematics and Physics. He has a M.Sc. (1987) and D.Phil. (1991) in Computation from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1994, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of York in the U.K. and at Carnegie Mellon University.

One of 12 children growing up in suburban Detroit, Abowd himself is the father of three children, two of whom have diagnoses on the autism spectrum.

Abowd serves on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Cure Autism Now Foundation (now part of the Autism Speaks Foundation) and is also a member of the Board of Directors for the Autism Society of America Greater Georgia Chapter and serves as the chair for adult services. He also also serves as moderator for the Emory Autism Center's Dad's support group.

In these roles, Abowd has been a strong advocate to encourage Computer Scientists to explore the applications of their work towards problems of relevance for the developmental disabilities community. He has also been an advocate to other researchers in the area of autism to consider the use of technology to improve their own work.

With seed funding from CAN and SBIR funding from NICHD, he has started a company, Caring Technologies, to provide video recording services for schools and families wishing to communicate behavioral evidence to behavioral and medical professionals.

“For their exceptional contributions, Richard and Nancy are both deserving of this prestigious Georgia Tech honor. That we are congratulating two of our faculty in one year is testament to a growing body of dedicated world leaders in research and education here at the College of Computing,” said Richard DeMillo, John P. Imlay Jr. Dean of Computing.

Georgia Tech awards the Regents' appointment to only two individuals per year. A committee made up of Regents' Professors and other chaired professors representing the six Georgia Tech colleges considers the nominations and makes a recommendation to the Provost based on excellence in research and teaching and contributions to their profession and to Georgia Tech. Any full professor can be nominated.

Dr. Richard Fujimoto is a Professor and Chair of the Computational Science and Engineering Division of the College of Computing. He received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1980 and 1983 (Computer Science and Electrical Engineering) and B.S. degrees from the University of Illinois (Urbana) in 1977 and 1978 (Computer Science and Computer Engineering).

Fujimoto's research is concerned with the execution of discrete-event simulation programs on parallel and distributed computing platforms. This research has included work on platforms ranging from mobile distributed computing systems to cluster computers to supercomputers. This work has included several application areas including transportation systems, telecommunication networks, multiprocessor systems, and defense systems. He lead the working group that was responsible for defining the time management services for the Department of Defense High Level Architecture (HLA) effort.

Dr. Nancy Nersessian is Professor of Cognitive Science appointed jointly in the College of Computing and the School of Public Policy. Nancy is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has an A.B. in Physics and Philosophy from Boston University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Case Western Reserve University in Philosophy. Her research focuses on human creativity in science. A major theme of this research is conceptual innovation and change in physics and in physics education, specifically the role of analogical and visual modeling and thought experimenting (simulative modeling).

Nersessian's research includes investigating reasoning and representational procedures in interdisciplinary research laboratories. This research examines the nature and role of physical and computational models researchers construct to simulate biological phenomena in problem solving and in learning.

Regents’ Professorships at Georgia Tech are granted for an initial period of three years, with the option to renew for a second three-year period, based upon recommendations. Awardees receive a $10,000 permanent increase in salary, in addition to the merit raise in the year of initial appointment. They also receive a yearly fund of $5,000 in support of their scholarship.

(April, 2007) - Richard Fujimoto, Director of the Computational Science and Engineering Division of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, recently delivered a keynote talk at a joint session of the ACM/SCS SpringSim 2007 conference and the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) Simulation Interoperability Workshop (SIW) titled "Modeling, Simulation and Parallel Computation: The Future is Now"

"The computing industry has reached an inflection point," said Fujimoto in his abstract, "Exponential clock speed improvements that have driven computer system performance advances over the last several decades have reached a plateau ... successful exploitation of parallel processing will be critical to achieve sustained growth in computation power in the years ahead."

According to Fujimoto, these advances will be necessary to keep pace with the demand for modelling systems of continually increasing complexity and scale. Among the major hurdles remaining before parallel execution can become widely exploited, Fujimoto identified the need for scalable parallel simulation software, easy to use synchronization techniques, effective load balancing and resource allocation approaches, automated fault tolerance, and time shared use of computing platforms.

SpringSim 2007 and the SCS/SISO Joint Plenary Keynote were held at the San Diego Marriott Mission Valley on March 26, 2007.

A candlelight ceremony was held in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building on April 17, 2007. Family, friends and faculty guests attended the ceremony and a reception which followed. Each member was presented with a pin and a gold braid for graduating seniors signifies UPE membership.

The mission of UPE is to recognize academic excellence at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the Computing and Information Disciplines. UPE is a member of the Association of College Honor Societies (ACHS) and has received endorsements from the two largest computer organizations in the world, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS). UPE is also a charter member of The International Federation of Engineering Education Societies (IFEES). UPE members enjoy membership in both the national and GT student chapter of ACM.

Congratulations to the following people: Summer Adams, Nova Ahmed, Martin Ahrens, Roland Alberciak, Jay Anderson, Ji Bae, Troy Brant ,Celeste Buckhalter, Benjamin Chambers, Nigel Chan, Mark Dejesus, Jared Eisner, Megan Elmore, Dawn Finney, Katherine Flinn, Jordan Garner, Carolina Gomez, April Headen, Stephen Hilber, David Hilley, Blake Israel, Kipp Jones, John Kelly, James King, Gaurishankar Krishnan, Matt Kurjanowicz, Vanessa Larco, Dongryeol Lee, Ming Li, John Meyer, Michael Orr , Chris Parnin, Bryan Payne, Kathy Pham, Michael Pieper, Andrew Roberts, David Schachter, John Schuler, Daniel Shaw, Jonathon Skypek, Aaron St. Clair, Theodoros Stotis, Kevin Tan, Garret Thompson, Alan Wagner, Elspeth Watson, John White, Frank Bennett Wilson, Elizabeth York, Samuel Young, Jose Zagal , Maureen Biggers, and Jim Foley.

The competition guidelines required student filmmakers to answer the question, "what does 'The New Face of Computing' mean to you?"

The winning video, entitled "Scripted," features a chase sequence, a rap about recursion, and a profile of the director, who is a computer science major, a student assistant and a varsity crew member with a self-proclaimed passion for film.

"It's thrilling to see such a variety of takes on 'The New Face of Computing,'" said College of Computing Director of Diversity and Community Giselle Martin, who sat on a panel of judges comprised of Georgia Tech faculty, administration and media representatives.

"This showcase of creative talent proves that ideas about computing are really changing. It's a discipline that is both coming of age and expanding in more directions than we can list. Today, computing students come from virtually every interest area." Martin said.

Second place winners Joshua Cuneo, Achille Brighton, Shawn Wick, Thao Nguyen and Jeremy Duvall took home Apple iPods for their film showcasing a broad selection of new computing research.

The third place film, a comedy depicting the foiled recruiting efforts of a fictional computing company (Orange, Inc.), got laughs before iPod Shuffles were awarded to the team members, Eric Bolten, Christopher Henderson, Brett Jones, Adeeb Zaer and Anne Schneider..

Teams were given one week from February 13-19 to shoot and edit their films using digital cameras, laptop computers and editing software provided by Apple, Inc. and Campus MovieFest. Prizes were donated by Apple, Inc.

The iMovie Competition Red Carpet Premiere and Awards Ceremony was held in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building on the Georgia Tech campus immediately following the New Face of Computing Symposium. The event was hosted by David Roemer, co-founder and CEO of Ideas United, the company that organizes the international student film competition Campus MovieFest.

Watch all iMovie Competition entries online.

(April, 2007) – David A. Bader, Executive Director of High-Performance Computing, and Associate Professor in the Computational Science and Engineering Division of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, recently delivered a keynote talk on “Petascale Computing for Large-Scale Graph Problems“ at the 8th IEEE International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Scientific and Engineering Computing (PDSEC), on March 30 in Long Beach, CA, held in conjunction with the 21st IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS).

“Graph theoretic problems are representative of fundamental kernels in traditional and emerging computational sciences such as chemistry, biology, and medicine, as well as applications in national security,” said Bader, “Yet they pose serious challenges for parallel machines due to non-contiguous, concurrent accesses to global data structures with low degrees of locality. We consider several graph theoretic kernels for connectivity and centrality and discuss how the features of petascale architectures will affect algorithm development, ease of programming, performance, and scalability.”

IPDPS is considered the premier academic conference in the areas of parallel and distributed computing.  This year's symposium held from March 26-30 in Long Beach, CA, was met with record attendance with over 650 attendees and included 109 peer-reviewed papers in its highly-competitive main track, four keynote talks and over 20 workshops. Being highly regarded by the professional community as the annual meeting for top research results in the field, IPDPS had strong international participation with approximately equal attendance from the U.S., Europe and Asia.

The College of Computing had strong participation at the symposium, with 20 activities related to the College:

TECHNICAL PAPERS

International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) 2007:

• Spam-Resilient Web Rankings via Influence Throttling
  James Caverlee, Steve Webb and Ling Liu
• RF2ID: A Reliable Middleware Framework for RFID Deployment
  Nova Ahmed, Rajnish Kumar, Robert Steven French and Umakishore Ramachandran
• On the Design and Analysis of Irregular Algorithms on the Cell Processor: A Case Study of List Ranking
  David A. Bader, Virat Agarwal and Kamesh Madduri
• Optimizing Multiple Distributed Stream Queries Using Hierarchical Network Partitions
  Sangeetha Seshadri, Vibhore Kumar, Brian F. Cooper and Ling Liu

 The 6th High-Performance Computational Biology (HiCOMB) Workshop:

• A Graph-Theoretic Analysis of the Human Protein-Interaction Network Using Multicore Parallel Algorithms
  David A. Bader and Kamesh Madduri

The NSF Next Generation Software Workshop:

• DOSA: Design Optimizer for Scientific Applications
  David A. Bader and Viktor K. Prasanna

Security in Systems and Networks (SSN) Workshop:

• Improving Secure Communication Policy Agreements by Building Coalitions
  Srilaxmi Malladi, Sushil K. Prasad and Shamkant B. Navathe

Performance Optimization for High-Level Languages and Libraries (POHLL) Workshop

• Model-Guided Empirical Optimization for Multimedia Extension Architectures: A Case Study
  Chun Chen, Jaewook Shin, Shiva Kintali, Jacqueline Chame and Mary Hall

Multi-Threaded Architectures and Applications (MTAAP) Workshop:

• SWARM: A Parallel Programming Framework for Multicore Processors
  David A. Bader, Varun Kanade and Kamesh Madduri Advanced Shortest Paths Algorithms on a Massively-Multithreaded Architecture
  Joseph R. Crobak, Jonathan W. Berry, Kamesh Madduri and David A. Bader

KEYNOTE TALK

Parallel and Distributed Scientific and Engineering Computing (PDSEC) Workshop:

• Petascale Computing for Large-Scale Graph Problems
  David A. Bader

CO-CHAIR

• David A. Bader, The 6th High-Performance Computational Biology (HiCOMB) Workshop

PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBERSHIPS

• David A. Bader, IPDPS 2007
• Sudhakar Yalamanchili, IPDPS 2007
• David A. Bader, The 16th Heterogeneity in Computing Workshop (HCW)
• Alberto Apostolico, The 6th High-Performance Computational Biology (HiCOMB) Workshop
• David A. Bader, Multi-Threaded Architectures and Applications (MTAAP) Workshop
• Jeff Vetter, Multi-Threaded Architectures and Applications (MTAAP) Workshop

David A. Bader, a faculty member in the Computational Science and Engineering Division, and Executive Director of High-Performance Computing at Georgia Tech, chairs the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP), which sponsors IPDPS.  Bader will also host the Monday evening general membership reception on behalf of TCPP.

For more information about IPDPS 2007, visit www.ipdps.org .

The two-day workshop is sponsored by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI), Toshiba and IBM and will be held at the Klaus Advanced Computing Building on Georgia Tech’s campus. Keynote speakers at the event include Bijan Davari, IBM Fellow and Vice President, Next Generation Computing Systems and Technology; Dominic Mallinson, Vice President, US Research and Development, SCEI and Yoshio Masubuchi, General Manager, Broadband System LSI Development Center, Toshiba’s semiconductor company. More information on the workshop may be found at http://sti.cc.gatech.edu/. 

“We are very excited to be able to support the growth of this breakthrough technology by bringing some of the top minds in the industry together at Georgia Tech to stimulate discussion about the future of Cell/B.E. technology,” said David A. Bader, Associate Professor and Executive Director of High-Performance Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. “The Cell/B.E. processor represents the future of computing using heterogeneous multi-core processors, and we are proud to help drive the continued advancement of computationally-intensive applications that will directly impact the global growth of our industry and evolution of our society.”

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" compute-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 of IBM, Sony Corporation, SCEI and Toshiba Corporation (Toshiba).

The College of Computing also announced today that it is one of the first universities to deploy the IBM BladeCenter® QS20 Server for production use. The QS20 uses the same ground-breaking Cell/B.E. processor appearing in products such as Sony Computer Entertainment’s PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system, and Toshiba’s Cell Reference Set, a development tool for Cell/B.E. applications. The Georgia Tech installation includes a cluster of 28 Cell/B.E. processors (14 blades) and supports the operation of Cell-optimized multi-core applications in areas such as digital content creation, gaming and entertainment, security, scientific and technical computing, biomedicine, and finance. Georgia Tech will grant users access on the cluster to test drive the Cell/B.E. processor and support independent software vendors (ISVs) that develop products and tools for the Cell/B.E. processor. The Georgia Tech Cell/B.E. processor installation will use Altair Engineering’s PBS Professional job scheduling software that increases the utilization of the IBM Blade Center® QS20.

Directed by Bader, the STI Cell Center of Competence at Georgia Tech has a mission to grow the community of Cell/B.E. processor users and developers by performing research and service in support of the Cell/B.E. processor, and further enable students at the College to grow their skills and experience around Cell/B.E. technology to apply in future career opportunities. The Center will sponsor discussion forums and workshops, provide remote access to Cell/B.E processor based blade hardware installed at Georgia Tech, create and disseminate software optimized for Cell/B.E. processor based systems, and perform research on the design of Cell/B.E. processor based systems, algorithms, and applications. A collaboration with SCEI, Toshiba and IBM supports the Center’s activities and research efforts in support of broadening the Cell/B.E. processor’s impact into multiple sectors and industries, including scientific computing, digital content creation, bioinformatics, finance, gaming and entertainment.


About the College of Computing at Georgia Tech
The College of Computing at Georgia Tech 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 11th 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 at Georgia Tech, its academic divisions and research centers, please visit www.cc.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

(May 31, 2007) - The College of Computing at Georgia Tech has been ranked 4th in the Nation for graduate programs in an article published in the June 2007 issue of Communications of the ACM. The article by Jie Ren and Richard N. Taylor, "Automatic and  Versatile Publications Ranking for Research Institutions and Scholars," also ranks Georgia Tech 3rd in the nation for software  engineering and lists NSF ADVANCE Professor of Computing Mary Jean Harrold as the number one software engineering scholar in the world.

The rankings framework employed by the authors uses publications data from 1995 to 2003 to rank computing graduate programs  automatically and objectively. One of the most well-known rankings, the U.S. News and World Report rankinging icludes both  objective indicators and subjective polls, and currently ranks the College of Computing graduate programs 11th in the nation.

Software engineering institutions and scholars were ranked based on data from 2000 to 2004 from journals and conferences that are  considered to be the most prestigious in the field: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, IEEE Transactions on  Software Engineering, the International Conference on Software Engineering, and the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the  Foundations of Software Engineering.

The top 5 ranked computing graduate programs are:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. University of Maryland, College Park
3. Carnegie Mellon University
4. Georgia Institute of Technology
5. Stanford University

The top 5 ranked software engineering institutions are:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. Carnegie Mellon University
3. Georgia Institute of Technology
4. University of Maryland, College Park
5. Oregon State University

ACM subscribers can find the complete article here.

College of Computing Students Christian Menkens, Dannon Teremiah Baker, David McCann, John Etherton, Vinesh "Vinny" Ramachandran, Gaurishankar "Shanks" Krishnan, Shivam Goyal, Devin Hunt, Robert Watts, Andrew Trusty and Priyanka Mahalanabis were among the winners.

The College of Computing currently offers a unique sequence covering mobile device application programming.

"We are working with the sponsors to make this competition a multi-year endeavor that brings mobile device application programming deep into the undergraduate curriculum," said College of Computing Research Scientist Russell Clark, who supervised the Georgia Tech side of the competition along with Matt Sanders, a Research Scientist in the Office of Information Technology at Georgia Tech.

The competition, which began last October, awarded prizes to the six student teams that created the most innovative mobile communications applications for use by families, campus communities, young adults/teens, or business users. To develop these applications, students utilized the 3G/IMS laboratory at The Georgia Institute of Technology, a $5 million state-of-the-art communications lab that opened last October through a co-sponsorship by Nokia Siemens Networks and AT&T. The lab serves students and researchers as a test bed for the creation of third generation IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) convergence applications and services that bring together audio, video and data over a variety of networks.

“Nokia Siemens Networks, AT&T and The Georgia Institute of Technology have created a unique learning experience and an innovative approach to technology education,” said Ron Hutchins, associate vice provost for research and technology and chief technology officer at Georgia Tech. “By giving our students a hands-on opportunity to develop, experience and operate new technologies and applications and see them at work, the IMS Research Competition and the 3G/IMS lab play an important role in helping develop future innovators in the field of mobile communications.”

The competitors covered a diverse range of wireless technologies and use cases to achieve commercial appeal for various demographic groups. Award winners included:

Grand Prize and Campus Community Category Winner: Christian Menkens from St. Wolfgang, Austria; Matthew Rhodes from Angleton, Texas; Anders Davoust from, Vaxjo, Sweden and Nikls Kjellin from Enkoping, Sweden will be awarded $35,000 to split and each will be offered internships by Nokia Siemens Networks on work that will leverage their project experience, for their creation of SoCoNet, a social campus community network that gives students access to lecture materials, campus events and location-based social networking.

Four teams were named first prize winners in the remaining categories, and each will be awarded $15,000 to split among team members:

Business User Category Winner: Dannon Teremiah Baker from Augusta, Georgia; David McCann from Lawrenceville, Georgia and John Etherton from Jacksonville, Fla. were awarded for their creation of Distributed Asset Tracking, an inventory and asset management application that enables camera-phones to scan barcodes and track inventory, without the need for separate RFID or scanning devices.

IMS Enabling Category Winner: Vinesh “Vinny” Ramachandran from Dalton, Georgia was awarded for his creation of Extensible Triggering Services, an application that allows a network to make changes to a particular phone’s settings, based on the user’s presence and preferences.

Young Adults/Teens Category Winner: Gaurishankar “Shanks” Krishnan from Bangalore, India and Shivam Goyal from Bhopal, India were awarded for their creation of mobMedia, a location-based media sharing and social networking application.

Family Category Winner: Devin Hunt from Atlanta and David Jimison from Washington, D.C. were awarded for their creation of Kinship, a distributed live video sharing application that instantly uploads video to a server and also provides video sharing, location-based video collaboration and chat features.

Honorable mention was awarded to the team of Robert Watts from Dunwoody, Georgia; Andrew Trusty from Atlanta and Priyanka Mahalanabis from Decatur, Georgia for their creation of Family Game Suite, a network gaming server application that allows a family to play games against each other and simultaneously chat on their mobile devices. This team will be awarded $5,000 to split among team members.

“We congratulate all of the students who competed in this contest for their achievements and innovations in mobile communications,” said Mark Louison, North America Region Head, Nokia Siemens Networks. “By 2015, we estimate 5 billion people worldwide will enjoy the benefits of being connected all the time, and mobile applications are key to this notion. The students who participated in this competition have a great opportunity to be among the future innovators who bring a unique set of products and solutions to people around the world.”

”This program is a win for all involved. Through this competition, we support individual Georgia Tech students, Georgia Tech as a whole, and promote IMS technology, which will allow the industry to deliver fixed mobile convergence to its customers and usher in a new era in multimedia capabilities between mobile devices and traditional computers and televisions,” said Jim Ryan, vice president of consumer data products, AT&T's wireless unit.

For more information on the IMS Research Competition and a copy of the Official Rules, visit the competition website.

College of Computing Advisory Board Member Christopher Klaus is Kaneva's founder and Chief Executive Officer. Kaneva
is the first virtual entertainment world that unifies the 2D web with a
3D experience, integrating social networking, shared media, and
collaborative online communities into a modern-day, immersive 3D
Virtual World.

Visit the competition website for more information about the contest, or to submit and view entries.

69 CM students surveyed ranked the program's advising with an average score of 3.86 out of 4. David White, jointly appointed with the College of Computing and the School of Literature, Communication and Culture and Academic Advisor Margaret Cutler of the College of Computing work together to advise all CM students.

Students who had visited an advisor at least once this year were asked whether they would recommend their advisors to other students and to rate their overall level of satisfaction with academic advising in their major for the current year. The CM degree had a 38.5% response rate with most respondents rating CM advising "excellent" or "good."

The complete report can be downloaded here .

Fujimoto wrote the paper with School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Assistant Professor Michael Hunter and students Jason Sirichoke, Mahesh Palekar, Hoe Kim, and Wonho Suh.

PADS is the oldest conference in the parallel and distributed simulation field. For more information on the PADS conference, visit the conference website.

Subscribers can download the full paper at the ACM Digital Library.

ATLANTA, June 25, 2007 — College of Computing Associate Professor David A. Bader is one of eighty-three of the nation's brightest young engineers who have been selected to take part in the National Academy of Engineering's (NAE) 13th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium. The two and a half-day event will bring together engineers ages 30 to 45 who are performing exceptional engineering research and technical work in a variety of disciplines. The participants — from industry, academia, and government — were nominated by fellow engineers or organizations. Participants were chosen from more than 260 nominations.

Bader is a pioneer in the use of high-performance computing for problems in bioinformatics and computational genomics. "High-performance computing is essential for solving 21st century problems such as the design of safe water technologies, developing sustainable biofuels, and engineering proteins, which will be key themes at this symposium,”  he said.

The symposium will be held September 24-26 at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., and will examine trustworthy computer systems, safe water technologies, modeling and simulating human behavior, biotechnology for fuels and chemicals, and the control of protein conformations. Dr. Henrique Malvar, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and managing director, Microsoft Research, will be a featured speaker. His research at Microsoft has focused on audio and video signal enhancement and compression, multirate signal processing, and signal decompositions. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, Malvar headed research and advanced technology at PictureTel and the Digital Signal Processing Research Group at Universidade de Brasília.

"It is exciting to witness the energy when outstanding engineers from many different fields come together in this unique venue," said NAE President William A. Wulf. "Frontiers of Engineering is a proven mechanism for traversing engineering disciplines. By exposing bright young minds to developments in areas other than their own — and giving them lots of time to interact — Frontiers enables advances in approaches and thinking that would not have occurred otherwise."

Sponsors for the 2007 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering are the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. Department of Defense (DDR&E-Research), DARPA, the National Science Foundation, Microsoft Corp., Cummins Inc., and numerous individual donors.

The National Academy of Engineering is an independent, nonprofit institution that serves as an adviser to government and the public on issues in engineering and technology. Its members consist of the nation's premier engineers, who are elected by their peers for their distinguished achievements. Established in 1964, NAE operates under the congressional charter granted to the National Academy of Sciences in 1863.

A meeting program and more information about Frontiers of Engineering is available at the symposium website.

About the College of Computing at Georgia Tech

The College of Computing at Georgia Tech 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 11th 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 at Georgia Tech, its academic divisions and research centers, please visit www.cc.gatech.edu

Media Contact
For College of Computing at Georgia Tech
Stefany Wilson
404-894-7253

The paper presents research that shows the use of Web lectures enhanced the classroom learning  experience in an introductory human-computer interaction course. A quasi-experiment was conducted over  a 15-week semester with 46 students in two sections of the same course-one section using Web lectures  and one using traditional lectures.

The award will be presented at the 2007 IEEE Education Society awards on Friday evening, October 12,  as part of the Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

IEEE Subscribers can download the full text of the paper on the IEEE Explore Website.

College of Computing Associate Professor David A. Bader was selected as the first academic member of the IBM Technical Leadership Forum and attended the forum’s recent meeting held at the IBM Executive Briefing Center in Mainz, Germany, on May 3-4, 2007. The meeting included about 32 members of the forum as well as a dozen IBM VP’s, CTO’s, and Distinguished Engineers.

David A. Bader is an associate professor in the Computational Science and Engineering division of the College of Computing and is executive director of high-performance computing.

The IBM System Storage Executive Briefing Center specializes in storage and systems research and development.

The Best Freshman Professor Award is given every year by FAB. The 30 freshman members of FAB come up with a pool of nominations from across campus and the nominees are then featured on the FAB website where all freshman are asked to vote for the winner. The nominees are professors who primarily teach freshman level courses (ones that are typically composed of all mainly freshman and that are typically taken during the first year at Tech) and who the FAB members feel do an  excellent job of teaching and engaging the students in the college  classroom. After the voting is completed, the winner is selected based  on the most votes and is presented with the award the Georgia Tech awards ceremony at the end of the spring semester.

An FRP is a grant given by the Georgia Tech Provost's Office designed to provide start-up support for research programs that could not be carried out through individual effort or within the resources of a single unit. Normally, an FRP involves a group of faculty members from more than one unit and is intended to provide start-up support for coordinated research projects that have the potential to develop into research centers within one to two years.

Dr. Bader coordinated the proposal entitled "Focused Research Program in High-Performance Computing" on behalf of researchers in the College of Computing, the College of Engineering and the College of Sciences. Drs. Bruckman and Mihail's proposal, entitled "Focused Research Program in Web Science," is a collaboration among researchers in 11 units: Interactive Computing; Computer Science;  International Affairs; Architecture; Public Policy; Literature, Communications and Culture; Electrical and Chemical Engineering; Industrial and Systems Engineering; Management; and Mathematics.

In all, fifteen proposals across campus for FRPs were submitted, five of which were approved.

The election for Advisory Council members closed on June 28, with 57% of eligible member institutions from industry and research casting ballots. Bader, who was nominated by members of the Governance and Nominations Committee, will sit on the Research Advisory Council (RAC) of Internet2 along with two other researchers from MIT and Carnegie Mellon.

The RAC is responsible for advising the Internet2 Board (consisting primarily of university presidents and CIOs, as well as leaders from industry and research) on matters relating to Internet2's support for research, both network-focused research and disciplinary research that makes use of the network as a tool. The RAC provides a forum for strategic questions about how best to support the development of resources for scientific, humanities, clinical, computational, and other research communities domestically and internationally. The RAC will also provide advice on the nature and extent of research undertaken by Internet2 staff.

Internet2 is a not-for-profit advanced networking consortium comprising more than 200 U.S. universities in cooperation with 70 leading corporations, 45 government agencies, laboratories and other institutions of higher learning as well as over 50 international partner organizations. Beyond just providing network capacity, Internet2 and its members actively engage in the development of important new technology including middleware, security, network research and performance measurement capabilities which are critical to the progress of the Internet.

For more information and the complete announcement, visit the Internet2 website.

Bader focused on graph theoretic kernels for connectivity and centrality to impact applications like biomedical research and national security.

“Our free lunch is over – we can no longer ride the rapid advance of microprocessor technology to achieve the high-performance necessary for future advancements,” said Bader, “We must innovate and design new manycore algorithms and techniques that can take advantage of chips with potentially hundreds of cores."

The PPAM 2007 conference was held in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)  and attended by over 230 researchers. The focus this year was on grid computing and large-scale applications, as well as software tools which facilitate efficient and convenient utilization of modern computing architectures. The biennial conference was first held in 1994.

Spam is becoming increasingly virulent as it makes use of images and
PDFs to evade content-based filters.  To make matters worse, spammers
are sending spam from "fresh" machines every day, which makes it
difficult to maintain static blacklists of known bad senders. 

To get a step ahead, the researchers have taken a different approach:

rather than filtering spam based on content or an ephemeral identity of
the sender (e.g., an IP address), the researchers have invented a new
technique called "behavioral blacklisting".  Behavioral blacklisting
aims to learn and "fingerprint" spammers' sending patterns---for
example, the set of recipients a particular sender is targeting---and
blacklist senders based on their sending behavior, rather than a fixed
identity.

The researchers developed their first behavioral blacklisting technique
by applying Professor Vempala's novel spectral clustering algorithms,
which have also successfully been applied to other areas (e.g., Web
search).

You can read the paper here.

"By creating this new development post, Georgia Tech has recognized
the potential for further growth in Computing," said Rich DeMillo, John
P. Imlay, Jr. Dean  of Computing. "We feel quite fortunate that Juan
will bring his experience in working at the College level to building
lasting relationships between the School of  Computer Science and its
alumni and industrial partners."

Dr. McGruder will report to Ellen Zegura, Chair of the School of
Computer Science, and Mary Alice Isele, Director of Development for the
College of Computing.

As the chief development officer for the School of Computer Science,
Dr. McGruder's primary responsibility will include the design and
implementation of a comprehensive program for private sector fund
raising, and development and implementation of the School’s fund
raising plan during a major capital campaign.

About Dr. Juan A. McGruder

Before joining the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, Dr.
McGruder was Director of Development and Assistant Professor of
Education at Clark Atlanta University (CAU). Previously, Dr. McGruder
served as Assistant Director of the Consortium for the Advancement of
Private Higher Education (CAPHE). Earlier, in his career he held
positions in student affairs at Radcliffe College, Simmons College,
Western Kentucky University, the University of Louisville, Clark
Atlanta University, and Morehouse College. Dr. McGruder received a
Ph.D. in education and human development (higher education) at
Vanderbilt University in 1999 and holds various other degrees from
Harvard University, Clark Atlanta, Western Kentucky University, and
University of Cambridge, England.

The book's description (from Cambria Press):

Primary and secondary school students, college students, and corporate employees are all engaging more and more in some form of online or blended online/face-to-face education. Given the large number of pedagogical and design choices that we must make, however, where do we begin when designing new environments? This book argues that it is important for us to consider how technological design choices interact with pedagogical choices and cognitive states to affect learning behaviors.

Specifically, this book focuses on synchronous, text-based chat and asks two questions: first, since research has often reported that chat environments promote conversational equity, which features of this technology seem to help create conversational equity; and second, how this change impacts the content of small group discussions. Using ethnographic-style observations and quasi-experimental studies, this book shows how changing conversational media influences (or does not) the resulting discussion among students. Based on these findings, Chatting to Learn examines the broader implications for the design of conversational environments, whether for educational or business use.

"Chatting to Learn: The Changing Psychology and Evolving Pedagogy of Online Learning," is available from Cambria Press, Amazon.com and wherever books are sold.

The paper presents a theoretical framework, which offers a
principled, general approach for studying interactive robotics problems.

IEEE RO-MAN07 was sponsored by IEEE Industrial Electronics society
(IES), IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (SMC), IEEE Robotics
and Automation Society (RAS), Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ), and
Korea Robotics Society (KRS).

The paper can be downloaded for a fee at the IEEE Xplore website.

Shwetak N. Patel also received the Best Presentation Award at Ubicomp 2007 for his presentation of the paper.

"In the last 10 years, there has been a growing community of
researchers who try to detect activities based on simpler sensing
[methods] than a camera. The problem with most of these approaches is
that you have to attach sensors to lots of people, places and things,"
said Adowd. Such a problem is solved by a solution presented in the
paper.

The approach developed by the group uses a single plug-in sensor to
detect events such as turning on or off a particular light switch, a
television set, or an electric stove. According to the paper's
abstract, activity-sensing in the home has applications for research in
areas including healthcare, entertainment, home automation, and home
energy monitoring.

According to the Ubicomp 2007 website, the conference series
"provides the premier forum in which to present research results in all
areas relating to the design, implementation, application and
evaluation of ubiquitous computing technologies, bringing together
leading researchers from a variety of disciplines and geographical
areas who are exploring the frontiers of computing as it moves beyond
the desktop and becomes increasingly interwoven into the fabrics of our
lives."