When a guidance counselor told Mariah Liggins, then a junior in high school, that she wasn’t going to get into college, she didn’t let that stop her. Now the program director of the John Lewis Student Leadership Pathways at Georgia Tech, she did her research, submitted her applications, and took 15 Greyhound bus trips to tour schools before placing seven acceptance letters — all accompanied by full-ride scholarships — on her counselor's desk.  

Aleksandra is a master’s student in Music Technology at Georgia Tech, but “student” barely scratches the surface. This summer, she’s been everywhere—physically in Massachusetts and intellectually somewhere between a Pride performance and a human-AI jam session at MIT.

“I’m always with my microphone and MIDI keyboard,” she says, like it’s just second nature. “I love singing and coming up with tunes.”

Live from MIT — It’s Human + AI Jamming
Forget dusty textbooks and silent labs—Aleksandra’s research life is about real-time musical interactions between humans and AI. As a visiting researcher at MIT this summer, she’s digging into what it looks like when musicians "jam" with intelligent systems. Think futuristic band practice, but with algorithms joining in.

“It’s giving me a lot of exposure to co-design methodologies,” she explains, “and letting me observe how musicians respond to each other—and to AI.”

It’s not just code and theory, either. The insights come alive when she brings them to the stage. This summer, Aleksandra’s band performed at The Music Porch in Reading, MA for Pride Month. Their cover of Pink Pony Club turned into a moment she won’t forget.

“It was so fun seeing people—especially teenagers—singing and dancing together,” she says. “That’s one of those moments where I just thought, yep, this is why I picked music tech.”

From Winehouse Covers to Ableton Experiments
Despite her research chops, Aleksandra hasn’t lost touch with the joy of just making music. She sings and plays keyboard in a band, covers Amy Winehouse songs, and occasionally writes music just for fun. (Her dream studio partner? You guessed it: Amy herself.)

She’s also been expanding her technical toolkit this summer, diving deeper into sound design with Ableton and Serum.

“Still learning,” she says, “but I’m using them for sound design in songs—and loving it.”

And then there are the unexpected “whoa” moments. Like when she built a vocal patch for the Pixies’ Where Is My Mind? to use live during a performance.

“It was haunting,” she says. “And it worked so well live.”

Dream Tech and Georgia Tech
Ask Aleksandra what she’d invent if she could mash up two instruments, and she already has an idea:

“Automatic vocal effects through a microphone with a built-in amplifier,” she says, laughing. “Honestly, someone probably already made this, but I want it anyway.”

That kind of thinking is exactly what her time at Georgia Tech has sparked. Before the program, she saw music mostly through the lens of conventional instruments. Now? She’s all about how software and hardware can expand what music even is.

Her Summer, in Sound
If Aleksandra’s summer had a vibe, it’d be:

• A creek bubbling in the background
• A long, ghostly reverb trail on a siren vocal
• And the ever-cozy tones of Animal Crossing

Not exactly your typical lab soundtrack—but that’s the beauty of it.

This fall, she’s heading back to Georgia Tech after a gap year at Bose, ready to jump into research on multimodal music source separation (AKA teaching machines to pick apart and understand layers in music the way humans do).

And yes, she’ll still be singing.

Hits with Aleksandra

• Current summer jams: Rosebud by Oklou & the new Lorde album
• What people don’t “get” about her work: “How music signals work on a granular level”

Aleksandra Ma doesn’t just study music tech—she lives it. Whether she’s tweaking reverb patches, performing under porch lights, or teaching AI how to groove, she’s showing what it really means to be a 21st-century musician.

CBF Isekai is sponsored by SON Technologies — short for Swagged Out Nerds — a Macon esports company focused on workforce development. SON believes the best gamers can also become promising IT professionals. 

A startup founded by two Air Force veterans, SON is already making a name for itself in the esports world and has support from Georgia Tech. It is one of the Accelerate companies in the startup portfolio of Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), one of the oldest and most successful university-affiliated incubators in the United States.

Swagged Out Start

SON founders Jason Clarke and John Robinson first met when they both worked in cybersecurity in the Air Force. As they transitioned to civilian IT careers, they realized a perhaps unlikely source sparked their IT expertise — video games. In 2019, the two partnered to create an esports competition team for veterans, but they knew the company’s mission could be bigger.

“When people think of gamers, you think of a 40-year-old person in their mom’s basement,” Clarke said. “But we wanted to change the perception. Gamers have employable skills that can be used for substantial IT work.”

For example, when a person plays a multiplayer game like Fortnite, they can assume a leadership role, delivering directives to their teams. What may look like mere play actually entails planning, organizing, and executing. Even a simple task like troubleshooting a household wi-fi network is a skill that can be expanded on with the right training.

From Player to Professional

SON wants both kid and adult gamers to know they have options. They regularly host gaming tournaments and conventions to find people who would be right for their programs and cultivate community. Through a partnership with digital education company Aperion Global Institute and cybersecurity certification organization EC-Council, Clarke and Robinson administer a high school-level curriculum highlighting the synergies between IT and gaming. 

Adults also have opportunities. Past SON tournament competitors can take an eight-week program, Sticks to Clicks, to turn their gaming skills into IT proficiency. These initiatives come at a crucial time: Between now and 2030, according to O*NET OnLine, 51,000 cybersecurity jobs in the state of Georgia are expected to be vacant. 

Game-Changing Career Paths

The programs’ benefits are already tangible. One adult participant in Sticks to Clicks had an annual income of less than $10,000 before joining the program. In the first seven weeks, he earned a certification in CompTIA Security+. In the eighth and final week, he interviewed with some of SON’s workforce partners. He was ultimately hired to install network infrastructure for $46,000 a year. 

High school students have had similar success. In the 2025-26 school year alone, 150 students went through the SON program and received stackable credentials that can prepare them for IT careers even if they don’t go to college. 

All of this momentum got ATDC’s attention, and SON Tech was accepted as a portfolio company in Fall 2024. Both Georgia AIM and the Air Force went to Macon for the 2025 Isekai convention and met potential employees firsthand. They saw that SON was just getting started.

The ATDC Connection

SON joined ATDC in 2024 under the AI and Manufacturing vertical sponsored by Georgia AIM, a statewide coalition to advance manufacturing using AI. SON is one of ATDC’s first middle Georgia companies, but the entire state will experience benefits. Through ATDC, SON can use Georgia Tech resources, meet experts in grant applications and corporate networking, and plug into the startup ecosystem in Atlanta. The three-to-five-year program helps startups scale up. 

“The truth is when you’re starting a company, the first few years are the worst of your life,” said Nwanyinma Dike, who serves as the Georgia AIM and ATDC liaison. In this role, she advises SON. “Connecting into a community of folks rooting for you, listening to you, helping you breathe through whatever challenges occur is one of the most valuable resources ATDC has to offer.”

The size of the March Isekai event was only possible thanks to ATDC’s support. They helped SON fundraise by finding the right sponsors.

“We went from starting this convention in a pizza shop to now packing an entire plaza downtown,” Clarke said. “To see the growth is amazing. We've received a lot of industry backing because of the creative ways we're helping workforce development.”

Dike wants to ensure the event wasn’t a one-off and that SON can keep up the momentum. SON is already planning an even bigger 2026 Isekai convention, with exciting new partners in the pipeline who want to share in the energy of this creative workforce development solution and movement.

SON also announced a partnership with gaming company Blaze Fire Games and the Houston County School District. The school district can access Blaze Fire Games’ Recruit, Reclaim, and Retain career pathway program, which is designed to help close the technology industry’s vast talent gap.

“The partnership is exciting because it represents more than creating and launching an esports club,” said Isiah Reese, CEO and co-founder of Blaze Fire Games. “This agreement allows our company to continue creating opportunities and develop relevant, sustainable career-readiness skills required to compete in today’s environment.”

Sherri Johnson, the CEO and principal of Houston County College and Career Academy, agrees. "The partnership is a real game-changer for our students. These unique, forward-thinking, 21st-century digital economy workforce educational courses will empower our instructors to reimagine and enhance classroom learning within our cybersecurity and gaming career pathway programs.”

SON is ready to rise to whatever industry or challenge needs their model next. What they have been able to do for the IT and cybersecurity fields could eventually be applied to the Federal Aviation Administration or even healthcare technician jobs. There’s an entirely new way to develop the tech world field, and it may not start in a classroom but with a controller.

Few animals captivate people’s imagination like sharks. From the enduring cultural legacy of Jaws, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, to the continued popularity of the Discovery Channel's Shark Week, now in its 37th year, media portrayals of the apex predator can shape public perception, illuminate their role within Earth's ecosystems, and influence conservation efforts.  

It may not be long before augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) headsets cause them to keep their phones in their pockets when they want to read The New York Times or The Washington Post.

Data visualization and AR/VR researchers at Georgia Tech are exploring how users can interact with news stories through AR/VR headsets and are determining which stories are best suited for virtual presentation.

Tao Lu, a Ph.D. student at the School of Interactive Computing, Assistant Professor Yalong Yang, and Associate Professor Alex Endert led a recent study that they say is among the first to explore user preference in virtually designed news stories.

The researchers will present a paper they authored based on the study at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems this week in Yokohama, Japan.

Digital platforms have elevated explanatory journalism, which provides greater context for a subject through data, images, and in-depth analysis. These platforms also allow stories to be more visually appealing through graphic design and animation. 

Lu said AR/VR can further elevate explanatory journalism through 3D, interactive spatial environments. He added that media organizations should think about how the stories they produce will appear in AR/VR as much as they think about how they will appear on mobile devices.

“We’re giving users another option to experience the story and for designers and developers to show their stories in another modality,” Lu said.

“A screen-based story on a smartphone is easy to use and cost-effective. However, some stories are better presented in AR/VR, which will become more popular as technology gets cheaper. AR/VR can provide 3D spatial information that would be hard to understand on a phone or desktop screen.”

Active or Passive Interactions?

Using Meta’s Oculus Quest 3, the researchers and their collaborators created four immersive virtual reality simulations from web-based news stories produced by The New York Times:

• Why opening windows was key to classroom ventilation during the Covid-19 pandemic
• The destruction of Black homes and businesses in the Tulsa Race Massacre
• How climate change could create dramatic dangers in the Atlantic Ocean
• How 9/11 changed Manhattan’s financial district

The study aimed to determine whether users prefer to be actively or passively immersed in a story, whether from a first-person or third-person point of view, or a combination of these perspectives.

“We’re in the nascent stages of storytelling in VR,” said Endert, whose research specializes in data visualization. “We lack the design knowledge of which mode of immersion we should use if we want a certain reaction from the audience. Understanding design is at the crux of our study.”

Active immersion gives the user complete control over their experience. The classroom simulation offers a first-person point of view and allows users to teleport from one point in the classroom to another. New information from the story is presented each time the user moves to a new point. 

The researchers acknowledged they could design a free-roaming simulation that allows users to walk freely within the classroom. However, they restricted that ability for this study due to safety concerns and lab space constraints. 

In the Tulsa Race Massacre simulation, which uses a passive, first-person point of view, users follow a predefined route along one of Tulsa’s main streets. Information about each building is presented at each step.

The Atlantic Ocean simulation is an active, third-person experience. The user sees a representation of Earth and can select which interaction points to explore to learn new information.

The 9/11 simulation is a passive third-person experience. Each step includes a narrative paragraph with companion visual elements, and users proceed to the next step through a navigation trigger.

Finding the Right Balance

Lu said that first-person active enhances spatial awareness, while third-person passive improves contextual understanding. Journalists and VR designers must determine which presentation is most effective case by case.

Yang said the goal should be to balance interests in making those determinations, which might require compromise. Knowing how users prefer to consume news is critical, but journalists still have an editorial responsibility to decide what the public should know and how to present information.

“You have more freedom to explore in an active experience versus a passive experience,” Yang said. “But if you give them too much freedom, they might stray from your planned narrative and miss important information you think they should know. We want to understand how we can balance both ends of this spectrum and what the right level is that we can give people in storytelling.”

The study and others indicate that users retain information better when they feel like they are part of the story. Yang said the technology to make that possible isn’t there yet, but it’s coming along as wearable VR devices become more accessible.

The debate is whether these devices will become people's preferred technology for consuming content. According to the Pew Research Center, 86% of U.S. adults say they at least sometimes get their news from a smartphone, computer, or tablet.

“I believe AR and VR will be mainstream in the future and will replace everything, but I think there’s a transition period,” Yang said. “Older devices will exist and act as support. It’s an ecosystem.”

Wang is a recipient of the 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). The award recognizes Wang for his lifelong work on democratizing human-centered AI.

“Throughout my Ph.D. and industry internships, I observed a gap in existing research: there is a strong need for practical tools for applying human-centered approaches when designing AI systems,” said Wang, now a safety researcher at OpenAI.

“My work not only helps people understand AI and guide its behavior but also provides user-friendly tools that fit into existing workflows.”

[Related: Georgia Tech College of Computing Swarms to Yokohama, Japan, for CHI 2025]

Wang’s dissertation presented techniques in visual explanation and interactive guidance to align AI models with user knowledge and values. The work culminated from years of research, fellowship support, and internships.

Wang’s most influential projects formed the core of his dissertation. These included:

• CNN Explainer: an open-source tool developed for deep-learning beginners. Since its release in July 2020, more than 436,000 global visitors have used the tool.
• DiffusionDB: a first-of-its-kind large-scale dataset that lays a foundation to help people better understand generative AI. This work could lead to new research in detecting deepfakes and designing human-AI interaction tools to help people more easily use these models.
• GAM Changer: an interface that empowers users in healthcare, finance, or other domains to edit ML models to include knowledge and values specific to their domain, which improves reliability.
• GAM Coach: an interactive ML tool that could help people who have been rejected for a loan by automatically letting an applicant know what is needed for them to receive loan approval.
• Farsight: a tool that alerts developers when they write prompts in large language models that could be harmful and misused.  

“I feel extremely honored and lucky to receive this award, and I am deeply grateful to many who have supported me along the way, including Polo, mentors, collaborators, and friends,” said Wang, who was advised by School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Professor Polo Chau.

“This recognition also inspired me to continue striving to design and develop easy-to-use tools that help everyone to easily interact with AI systems.”

Like Wang, Chau advised Georgia Tech alumnus Fred Hohman (Ph.D. CSE 2020). Hohman won the ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2022.

Chau’s group synthesizes machine learning (ML) and visualization techniques into scalable, interactive, and trustworthy tools. These tools increase understanding and interaction with large-scale data and ML models. 

Chau is the associate director of corporate relations for the Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech. Wang called the School of CSE his home unit while a student in the ML program under Chau.

Wang is one of five recipients of this year’s award to be presented at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025). The conference occurs April 25-May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. 

SIGCHI is the world’s largest association of human-computer interaction professionals and practitioners. The group sponsors or co-sponsors 26 conferences, including CHI.

Wang’s outstanding dissertation award is the latest recognition of a career decorated with achievement.

Months after graduating from Georgia Tech, Forbes named Wang to its 30 Under 30 in Science for 2025 for his dissertation. Wang was one of 15 Yellow Jackets included in nine different 30 Under 30 lists and the only Georgia Tech-affiliated individual on the 30 Under 30 in Science list.

While a Georgia Tech student, Wang earned recognition from big names in business and technology. He received the Apple Scholars in AI/ML Ph.D. Fellowship in 2023 and was in the 2022 cohort of the J.P. Morgan AI Ph.D. Fellowships Program.

Along with the CHI award, Wang’s dissertation earned him awards this year at banquets across campus. The Georgia Tech chapter of Sigma Xi presented Wang with the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award. He also received the College of Computing’s Outstanding Dissertation Award.

“Georgia Tech attracts many great minds, and I’m glad that some, like Jay, chose to join our group,” Chau said. “It has been a joy to work alongside them and witness the many wonderful things they have accomplished, and with many more to come in their careers.”

Olympians compete for national pride, glory, and, for the first time, prize money.  

Did you always want to be an entrepreneur?

I always did. I had my first company, an educational technology app, when I was 16, which ran for about two years. I ended it in my first year of college. I'm from India originally and the vision was to provide resources to the larger mass market of India for extracurricular activities. But, we realized there wasn't a business model. When we tried to make money, we started serving the rich kids. When we tried to serve the market, we didn't make money, which doesn't make investors happy, though we did end up making enough money to repay them.

That didn't stop me; it just gave me more lessons. 

What other experience in entrepreneurship have you had?

I've been involved in entrepreneurship communities at Georgia Tech forever. I was co-director of Startup Exchange, which is where I met a lot of really driven people. I got a chance to build their fellowship program and initiate their first pitch competition, which is now called Summit. I've collaborated with CREATE-X for different events, and I try to attend any event hosted by CREATE-X, Startup Exchange, or ATDC.

Why did you choose to join the spring cohort of Startup Launch this year?

CREATE-X provides everything you need, like legal support, financial support, sales support, mentors, and an introduction to VCs, which is why I decided to join the Launch program. I think all of that boosted our startup’s growth.

Why did you feel like acquisition was the way to go for your company?

I think because I always knew this wasn’t “the” thing I was going to do. This summer I'll be starting to work for Apple on their VisionPro team, and it has a direct conflict-of-interest. They wanted me to stop working on this for a while. So, I felt like this might be a good time to explore the acquisition.  We had really rich content, which had proven to work. We had curated that content after hundreds of customer interviews, and we had advisors from Nike, Disney, and Netflix. I knew that was a strong point, so that's why I knew that acquisition would be a good exit. 

What support have you had in taking the acquisition path?

Seth [Radman, who has had multiple exits himself and is a Startup Launch alumnus] has been guiding me professionally for a while. I met him at previous events through Startup Exchange, but then he recently came to a CREATE-X event. Rahul [Saxena, CREATE-X director], has also been a great support for me since day one. He was the one who suggested Startup Launch to me.

In December of last year, we started monetizing. We were testing different things. It was helpful to share the numbers and the data points with Rahul, mentors, and other people in my cohort so that I was not blindsided, and I could take actions based on the educated analysis of a database. It helped me drive down our customer acquisition cost, increase our customer lifetime value, and didn't keep me in my own bubble.

How were you okay with letting that product go?

It was a tough decision; it was my baby. I'd been working on it 10 to 15 hours a day, at least for the last few months. Rahul and Seth convinced me that if this is not the thing you want to do long-term and you know the market isn't big enough, you should move on to the next thing and put your time and energy there. 

I had to use my brain, and not my heart.

What's the biggest piece of advice that you've received as you developed your company?

Try to never lie to yourself, which is harder than it seems. I've built two companies and worked with several others, and I still lie to myself. When you love your product so much, it's very easy to lie to yourself about how there is a market for it, or people are using it. I think even in the future, I’ll probably be caught doing that, but the best way I've found to overcome that is to surround yourself with people who can tell you when you are doing it and help you see your company the way it is instead of the way you want it to be.

How has this decision affected you so far?

My lifestyle has completely changed, from looking at a dashboard every 10 to 15 minutes, seeing how the product is doing, and burning so many fires every 30 minutes, to being pretty chill. Like, what am I supposed to think about before I go to bed? What am I supposed to do now? Who are the customers I am supposed to be thinking about? It's been interesting, but I think this gives me space to now work on that next venture and have more time to think about what I want to do next.

Do you think you'll want to return to entrepreneurship in the future?

Yes, for sure. All the money I received from the acquisition will also fuel my next venture. My main goal is to grow in this industry. I'm an entrepreneur at heart, so I will be returning to the space soon or building products that people like. 

How are you celebrating this win?

I did celebrate it on our last day with Rahul, my amazing mentor, Margaret [Weniger, who founded Rising Tide], and the other cohort members. I will be celebrating it with a few of my friends because my 21st birthday is coming around, so I'll be celebrating these occasions together. 

But I don't want to take the money out from the company or for anything else, because it’s for my next venture. It shouldn't change my lifestyle at all, so I've kept all that money in a separate place.

What encouragement would you give to students interested in pursuing a startup?

Relative to other colleges, we have a cushion, a sense of security that we will get good jobs. Entrepreneurship is a riskier and more unpredictable path, which I've seen, and I'm personally experiencing right now having to choose between Big Tech versus entrepreneurship. But once you start building it and when you hear from your first customer how you affected the way they live, then there's no going back. Statistically, you'll probably fail, but you won't know until you start building; and if you do fail, it’ll teach you so many valuable lessons that are applicable in whatever career path you choose.

CREATE-X will launch its 12th cohort of Startup Launch on Aug. 29 at 5 p.m. in the Georgia Tech Exhibition Hall. Register today to secure your spot.

Interested in becoming a CREATE-X supporter? Startup Launch is made possible by contributions to Transforming Tomorrow, a $2 billion comprehensive campaign designed to secure resources that will advance the Institute and its impact, and by the continued engagement of our entrepreneurial ecosystem. Learn more about philanthropy at Georgia Tech and donate by visiting transformingtomorrow.gatech.edu.

To become a mentor in CREATE-X, visit the CREATE-X mentorship page. Any other inquiry may be sent to create-x@groups.gatech.edu. We appreciate your help and commitment to supporting our students in research and innovation.

At the core of Cowboy Carter is an exploration of genre boundaries, seamlessly blending elements of country music into Beyoncé's signature sound. From the twang of the steel guitar to the storytelling of classic country ballads, Beyoncé's foray into country-pop represents a reimagining of American musical traditions. 

“She's very much Southern in her Texas roots, and she's playing with that heritage in a way that is opening up the way in which we even think about who can do country — but also reclaiming African American culture and community's role in creating and helping country music become what it is,” Wilson says.   

The influence of Tina Turner also looms large over the Cowboy Carter landscape, underscoring the impact of the rock and roll pioneer and the ways in which she was able to push the boundaries of musical hybridity, Wilson added. Celebrated for her electrifying performances and genre-bending approach, Turner's legacy continues to inspire artists across generations. Beyoncé's incorporation of elements like powerful stage presence and innovative genre fusion reflects Turner's influence, demonstrating how her pioneering spirit resonates in contemporary music. 

Through Wilson's exploration, there emerges a deeper understanding of the layers embedded within Beyoncé's latest work. From themes of empowerment to narratives of resilience, Wilson illuminates how Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter album has resonated with audiences worldwide. 

This subgenre of horror, in which people face the wrath of nature and its emissaries, has never been more popular — driven in large measure by climate change anxiety and showcase titles such as the hit video game and HBO series The Last of Us.

For many, ecohorror offers a safe outlet for our tangled and difficult feelings about climate change. The heroine of ecohorror comic Dark Fang, for example, sets out to solve the fossil fuel problem — or at least avenge beaches blighted by an oil spill — by attacking oil company CEOs, said Brianna Anderson, a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication.

“Ecohorror is great at expressing the rage and fear that people have about environmental issues, at the inadequacy of contemporary environmental movements,” Anderson said. “In the 1980s, we thought everything would be okay if we recycled, right? But now we know that’s absurd, that it’s not even close.”

Read the full article on the Ivan Allen College website.

Hibbard studies how people talk about their identities and share them with others. Much of this comes down to storytelling, he explains. Humans love to share stories because it's how we relate to each other and find common ground. In video games, role-playing, and tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), storytelling comes to life in an interactive way that movies, TV shows, and books just don't match. 

"Games are such a huge marker of identity formation, especially for young people, because they give you the chance to pick up and play with things and try stuff out for fun," Hibbard says. "It's a lower stakes opportunity to experiment with yourself and with other people, and it's a cool way to learn about yourself."

Interest in these kinds of games has exploded since the Covid-19 pandemic, with one study reporting that online searches for D&D have increased by 85% since 2020. Beyond playing the games themselves, fans spend millions of hours a year on Twitch and YouTube watching players adventure in these fantasy worlds. Rising interest and a growing gamer base spur discussion about the importance of inclusion in such spaces, Hibbard says.

In the following Q&A, Hibbard discusses why inclusive gaming is so important and how it can help people in marginalized communities claim space in the real world.  

Read the full article on the Ivan Allen College website.

Keung Yoon Bae, an assistant professor of Korean Studies at the School of Modern Languages, explores how the Korean esports industry is one of the first to confront the challenge of describing physical performance in a digital medium. Through industry events and promotional materials, they've developed a new visual language to describe what cannot be seen by viewers watching the gamers in competition. As the novel language and strategies spread, it also helps cement Korean esports as a pioneer in the field.

"South Korean esports media have developed visual strategies, their own specific visual language, to try and communicate on-screen abstract concepts such as the prowess of their players and the histories that they bring to the game," Bae writes in her book chapter "Visualizing the Invisible: Korean Esports and the Representation of Gameplay Skill."

For example, esports player Ryu Je-Hong streams with a camera aimed at his hand to show how sensitive his mouse is and how accurate his hand movements are. In the animated hype videos tournaments use for promotion, companies don't show players sitting in chairs at screens. Instead, they create more exciting visuals, such as the players climbing a mountain peak or standing in a room surrounded by portraits of past tournament champions.  

"Esports broadcasts and promotional media often look quite absurd or bizarre to those unfamiliar with esports, so these visual strategies give us a great point of access to understand why esports looks the way it does," Bae says. 

Her chapter counters what she says is a common misconception: that esports is not an actual sport because it doesn't involve physical skill. 

"Physical skill is core to esports, just not in the way we are used to," Bae says. "Therefore, it is also core to esports discourse, which often contends with questions about gender and biology — even if the discussions often use biology research in problematic or misguided ways," she adds.

"Visualizing the Invisible: Korean Esports and the Representation of Gameplay Skill" was published in Introducing Korean Popular Culture in 2023.

Bae's next project will take a historical approach to the field, interviewing esports professionals in Korea about how copyright law, intellectual property law, and esports ownership have changed over the past decade.

Ask any Georgia Tech student what makes up a star, and they'll likely be able to tell you that it is comprised primarily of hydrogen and helium. Michelin stars, however, are made up of top-quality ingredients, mastery of cooking techniques, consistency, and personality. Worldwide, less than 3,500 restaurants have received at least one Michelin star, and just 13 U.S. restaurants have earned a three-star rating from the Michelin Guide –– the highest possible honor. A green star is the latest addition to the guide, awarded to restaurants deemed to be leaders in sustainable gastronomy.  

"I think it fits in with Atlanta's recent globalization," Alex Oettl, a professor of strategy and innovation at the Scheller College of Business, said. "It's becoming more of an international city. We're home to numerous Fortune 500 companies, but the guide is a recognition that Atlanta is a destination for food as well. Atlanta is already a transport hub with the world's busiest airport, but if people realize the quality of the food scene here, I think it could help more people stay in Atlanta and spend a night instead of just connecting through."

While there is no guarantee that the guide inspectors will award a star to any metro Atlanta restaurant, it does stand to invite more diners to explore the diverse options around the city. The Visitor’s Bureau brought the guide to Atlanta for $1 million, which Oettl believes will prove to be a worthy investment that will keep travelers in the city.  

The guide was first published by the tire conglomerate in France in 1920 as a tool to attract motorists in search of a good meal. It has since become one of the most renowned publications in the restaurant industry, spanning 30 territories and three continents and garnering consumer trust worldwide.  

Koushyar Rajavi is an assistant professor in Scheller College whose research highlights how consumers perceive brands and how brands build trust. For the Michelin Guide, he believes it's in the formula.  

"The process is designed to ensure these inspectors are not influenced by anything other than the quality of the food or the experience they have in these restaurants. Once you have a rigorous process in which other elements and incentives are not polluting it, that leads to reliable outcomes. Over time, people see that these outcomes and these stars are reliable recommendations. That leads to a positive feedback loop for the reputation and trust that people have,” he said.  

Rajavi further explained that the brand's system helps legitimize its evaluations as opposed to Google or Yelp reviews, which can be more easily manipulated.  

"I personally don't have the palate to distinguish between 'good' and 'very good.’ When I look at consumer ratings, people sharing that they’ve had a good experience may not provide the full picture. So, for regular restaurants, I would trust others' opinions, but when it comes to the absolute best in the world, you need more than regular consumers to give that assessment," he explained. 

Because of the high-level evaluation, the guide is often criticized for limiting stars to fine-dining establishments and favoring Eurocentric cuisines. In its announcement, Atlanta was hailed by Michelin as a "culturally diverse city," a trait that Oettl hopes to see reflected in the upcoming guide.  

"One of the best parts about our dining scene is the ethnic diversity that exists. Anyone who's ever been to Buford Highway can attest to that, and I hope the Michelin Guide doesn't overlook those cuisines because I do think those are some of the biggest gems in the culinary landscape of Atlanta," he said.  

While the guide's launch signifies a step forward for the city's culinary scene, it can come with the risk of driving costs up and value down. And restaurants that do earn a Michelin star will bear the weight of elevated expectations. Rajavi warns that if they are not prepared, or fail to maintain the standard set, they risk not only losing stars but alienating their consumer base and losing their trust. 

Like actors chasing Oscars by landing the perfect role, Oettl believes that the guide's arrival could continue attracting top culinary talent to Atlanta while also providing an additional amenity for the city as it competes with growing metro areas like Nashville and Charlotte.  

"The more amenities that exist within a city, the more attractive it becomes. I think the Michelin Guide will certainly help in reducing uncertainty as to the quality of the dining scene here from an outside perspective. I think most Atlantans know that food here is quite good, but this now gives an outside validation," Oettl said.  

Michelin Guide North America has announced plans to host a ceremony launching the guide on Tuesday, Oct. 24, at Georgia State’s Rialto Center for the Arts.

Hyundai is investing $5.54 billion to develop the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, a new dedicated electric vehicle and battery plant in Bryan County, Georgia, which will create more than 8,100 direct jobs. Hyundai created a $120,000 STEM scholarship at Georgia Tech when it broke ground on the site in October 2022.

The partnership also includes field-naming recognition at Bobby Dodd Stadium, which will now be known as Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field, and sponsorship elements that feature enhancements to boost the experience on gamedays for fans in and around the home of Georgia Tech football.

“Like Georgia Tech, Hyundai is a global brand that is synonymous with quality, innovation, and a commitment to advancing technology to make a positive difference in the world. The more we have gotten to know each other, the more obvious the alignment of our values has become,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “I am grateful for the transformative investments Hyundai is making in our state, and I am proud that the Hyundai brand will feature prominently on our campus. I look forward to working with Hyundai leaders to deepen our partnership as we work to develop exceptional leaders and produce new ideas that will shape the automotive industry and advance mobility in the future.”

“Georgia Tech is known around the world for having some of the best and brightest graduates as well as a storied athletics program,” said José Muñoz, president and global COO of Hyundai Motor Company, and president and CEO of Hyundai and Genesis Motor North America. “Proximity to institutions like Georgia Tech was one of the many reasons Hyundai selected Georgia for our new EV manufacturing facility. We are thrilled to expand our relationship with Georgia Tech, which will include opportunities for student professional development and cooperative work programs in addition to athletic engagements.”

“Georgia Tech Athletics is proud to partner with Hyundai as it invests in Georgia Tech and the state of Georgia. This partnership will be truly transformative for Georgia Tech Athletics, both now and for years to come,” said J Batt, director of Athletics, Georgia Tech. “I want to express our sincere appreciation to José Muñoz and his team for their genuine interest in aligning with Georgia Tech. We are thrilled to join forces with Hyundai and look forward to a long-lasting, mutually beneficial partnership.”

The benefits of the partnership are wide-ranging and substantial for Georgia Tech and the state of Georgia. They include:

• A vital pathway for Georgia Tech to meet its stated goal of expanding its stature as a leading research entity in the electrification of the automotive industry through its world-class hydrogen research.

• An opportunity for Georgia Tech to more broadly contribute to the state of Georgia’s commitment as a hub for the production of electric vehicles.

• New revenue for Georgia Tech Athletics, which, within the ever-changing landscape of intercollegiate athletics, will be vital in providing student-athletes and teams with the resources needed to compete at the highest levels, both athletically and academically. The new revenue will also allow Georgia Tech Athletics to continue to provide Tech students, alumni, and fans with a world-class experience as supporters of the Yellow Jackets.

Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field is the oldest on-campus stadium in NCAA Division I’s Football Bowl Subdivision and one of the nation’s most unique and historic settings for college football. It opened in 1913 as Grant Field, then was renamed, in honor of legendary Georgia Tech Coach and Athletics Director Bobby Dodd, in 1988. The historic Grant Field name will continue to be memorialized with a display at the stadium.

Legends, which has managed corporate partnerships and multimedia rights for Georgia Tech Athletics since 2021, helped facilitate the athletics partnership with Hyundai.

ABOUT GEORGIA TECH ATHLETICS

With 400-plus student-athletes across 17 varsity sports, Georgia Tech competes at the highest level of intercollegiate athletics as a member of NCAA Division I and the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), while also developing young people who will change the world. Georgia Tech has long been a leader in innovation in college athletics with the NCAA CHAMPS/Life Skills Program (known as the Total Person Program at GT), commitments to athletics scholarships until student-athletes graduate, and the use of virtual reality in recruiting among the many concepts that originated on The Flats. The Yellow Jackets have won five national championships during their illustrious history (four in football – 1917, 1928, 1952, and 1990; one in women’s tennis – 2007) and appeared in two Final Fours in men’s basketball (1990 and 2004) and three College World Series in baseball (1994, 2002, and 2006). Combining world-class education with top-notch athletics, Georgia Tech has produced 90 Academic All-Americans. For more on Georgia Tech Athletics, visit ramblinwreck.com.

ABOUT HYUNDAI MOTOR COMPANY

Established in 1967, Hyundai Motor Company is present in over 200 countries with more than 120,000 employees dedicated to tackling real-world mobility challenges around the globe. Based on the brand vision ‘Progress for Humanity,’ Hyundai Motor Company is accelerating its transformation into a Smart Mobility Solution Provider. The company invests in advanced technologies such as robotics and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) to bring about revolutionary mobility solutions, while pursuing open innovation to introduce future mobility services. In pursuit of a sustainable future for the world, Hyundai will continue its efforts to introduce zero emission vehicles equipped with industry-leading hydrogen fuel cell and EV technologies.

ABOUT LEGENDS

Founded in 2008, Legends is a premium experiences company with six divisions operating worldwide — Global Planning, Global Sales, Hospitality, Global Partnerships, Global Merchandise, and Global Technology Solutions — offering clients and partners a 360-degree data-and-analytics-fueled service solution platform to elevate their brand and execute their vision. Currently, Legends works with marquee clients across business verticals including professional sports, collegiate, attractions, entertainment, conventions, and leisure. They are the industry leaders in designing, planning, and realizing exceptional experiences in sports and entertainment. For more information, visit Legends.net and follow Legends on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @TheLegendsWay.

There’s been so much media excitement over the premieres of these two movies in contrast to the opening of other highly anticipated blockbusters this summer, such as Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Spider-Man: Across the Spider Verse, or The Flash. Why?

Yaszek: Because the Atomic Bomb and the Atomic Blonde are two cultural icons central to the modern American imagination! Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project ushered in the era of truly world-changing technosciences and catapulted the U.S. into a position of global leadership. Barbie was the first mass-produced doll that invited girls to imagine adult roles for themselves outside of motherhood, emerging in tandem with the beginning of the sexual revolution, the revival of feminism, and the start of modern conversations about sex and gender. These are two the key ways we define ourselves as Americans! It doesn’t matter if you know the details of Oppenheimer’s specific role in the creation of nuclear weapons, or if you ever actually played with Barbie and her pals. Everyone knows that “Oppenheimer” is shorthand for our complex feelings about the promises and perils of modern technologies that both sustain and threaten to end civilization as we know it, and everyone knows that “Barbie” is shorthand for our complex feelings about new social and sex roles that somehow both radically depart from — and yet also still echo — more conservative ones from earlier eras.

Yoshinaga: In the financial context of the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes as well as most of those other franchise films not meeting with summer box-office expectations, I think some industry watchers are hailing Barbenheimer’s killer opening weekend as a sign of hope for the entertainment industry. Barbie has enjoyed the largest open for a female-director-led movie in history, and Oppenheimer drew a respectable box office take as well. Both Barbie and Oppenheimer, drawing strongly on the last century’s sociopolitical context, promise some intellectual engagement, some critical thinking, some historical insight of who we are as a society.

Colatrella: That audiences connect the films — one representing the story of Barbie as documenting varying and shifting views on feminism and the other documenting varying and shifting views about the atomic bomb — resonates with contemporary concerns about women’s independence and with our wartime concerns about developing and using weapons and other technologies that have unforeseen consequences. It is interesting to me that Barbie incorporates the doll’s creator as a character and that Oppenheimer acknowledges the protagonist’s technological contributions and his subsequent restraint in using what he helped create. The films present revisionist histories demonstrating the force and fluctuations of political ideologies over time.

Play Video

Why should we see Barbie?

Colatrella: It’s great to see a film that celebrates feminism as a force enhancing gender equity, personal development for women and men (Kenough!), mother-daughter bonding, and community decision-making in BarbieWorld. In developing my book Toys and Tools in Pink, I met with Lego marketing and production executive in Billund, Denmark, and was impressed with their commitment to design construction and building toys that could appeal to girls as powerfully as Barbie does. They valued that children’s toys could contribute to collaborative play.

Yoshinaga: In the growing landscape of feminist directors, writer-director Greta Gerwig has carved out an intelligent, sensitive approach to portraying women on film—from the delightfully twee Frances Ha, which she co-scripted with director (and frequent filmmaking partner) Noah Baumbach, to the critically lauded Little Women and autobiographical, regionalist Lady Bird, all of which display her signature style of gentle observational humor, gender role insight, and quiet yet powerfully accumulating ethics. By making the screen story postmodern and feminist, she’s now viewed as having successfully “cracked” Barbie, a complex and potentially sexist/problematic IP that other skilled female comedy writers, including Diablo Cody and Amy Schumer, had not been able to pitch effectively.

Yaszek: First and foremost, we should all see the Barbie movie now because it promises a bit of hope and fun in a moment when our news cycle has become an endless loop of doom and gloom clickbait headlines. Having said that, I also think we can double or even triple our pleasure by having some serious fun with the Barbie film. The history of Barbie is one of changing ideas about sex and gender. The doll debuted in 1959, just as the feminist revival was taking off and women were beginning to challenge simple gender binaries that suggested men were naturally suited to paid labor in the rough and tumble world of the public sphere while women were naturally suited to unpaid nurturing and caretaking in the home. With her many different careers and a Dream Home that originally was all dressing room and no kitchen, Barbie seemed to capture the excitement and possibility of the early Women’s Liberation Movement. In a toy market flooded with baby dolls that demanded their owners act like little mothers, Barbie offered kids whole new imaginative play possibilities and, of course, whole new ways to think about sex and gender beyond the simple, pseudo-Darwinian binaries popular for much of American history. So I think it’s no surprise that while Barbie is always popular, she’s having a real moment right now, as we once again grapple with expanding sex and gender ideals.

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Why should the Georgia Tech community, especially, see Oppenheimer?

Yaszek: I think members of the Georgia Tech community can use Oppenheimer’s life story as a kind of test case for thinking through technoscientific and ethical dilemmas they might encounter in their own lives. Oppenheimer’s role in the Manhattan Project was to supervise the translation of abstract concepts from theoretical physics into practical applications — in this case, the creation of a working nuclear bomb. Along the way, he had to negotiate some serious moral and ethical issues, including his own excitement at seeing the work progress and misgivings about what would happen if these weapons were really used. While most of our graduates are unlikely to be in that exact position, our students often do go on to work at the intersection between pure science and applied technology and as such, may well grapple with ethical questions and unseen social impacts in relation to their work. It’s always instructive to see and hear stories that engage the issues we face in our own lives; they are virtual laboratories for testing certain courses of action before we act on them in the real world. And they give us ways to keep asking and exploring important questions about the impact of our actions on the world, long after the story itself is over.

Yoshinaga: One of my colleagues who teaches at a private aeronautical university — a Florida science-and-tech school with much less race and gender diversity in its student population than Georgia Tech — taught a section of her science-fiction studies course about the Manhattan Project. And some of her young undergraduates responded by claiming that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was “fake news.” This is the kind of dangerous misinformation trend that we faculty and researchers need to address, discuss, and teach/write about. Oppenheimer’s focus on scientific ethics in the context of both U.S. and global geopolitical history does just that.

Colatrella: I want to see it to better understand the man and the historical forces contributing to and judging his work. But I’d also like to read the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin because I wonder if having more women on the Los Alamos team would have made a difference.

What’s your most lasting memory about Barbie and her friends, or about the nuclear age, of the postwar era? 

Colatrella: When I was young, I enjoyed playing with Barbies with cousins and friends; we would sew outfits for our dolls and imagine what decisions they would make about romance, education, and work. When my daughter was growing up, I bought her a Barbie Dreamhouse because I always wanted to have one, and I was reluctant to let it go until I could give it to the daughter of a Georgia Tech alumna who had been one of my students.

Yoshinaga: When I was a very young child, my parents couldn’t afford to buy me a Barbie doll, so I went without one for much of my early years. Besides, I’d always asked for mythology books! So it was my uncle who finally got me a classic Barbie, but by that time, I was in my late elementary-school era and didn’t know what to do with it. I was reading a lot of Marvel comics by then, so I would put Barbie into action-sequence fights with my little brother’s GI Joe. When it comes to the postwar era, I’m too young to remember the nuclear-attack drills and propaganda of the 1950s and ‘60s. Still, all the sci-fi dystopias I saw in the movie theaters involved a nuclear apocalypse as the start of the end of the world. So I always believed a mushroom cloud was just around the corner. There was also a sense that we were the “good” empire and the Soviets were “evil”; that we were helpless, caught between this global battle of geopolitical giants that might end up incinerating all of humanity.

Yaszek: I remember getting in a tussle with my mom over Barbie versus Stephie, the crafty country mom from the Sunshine family of dolls. My mom was a good second-wave feminist, very earnestly devoted to making sure her kids escaped the grip of the American beauty myth, and she thought Stephie, with her trim but realistic proportions and cute but modest clothes, was the role model for us girls. But all I wanted was the Barbie doll with the diamond jewelry and the pink satin jumpsuit! I felt that way in part because I was and still am a big fan of shine and sparkle, but also in part because Stephie’s clothes only seemed appropriate for one role, that of a crafty country mom, while I could imagine Barbie’s clothes taking her anywhere — from paid work as anything from a teacher to astronaut to working on her car in Barbie’s Dream Garage to dinner and dancing, depending on her hairstyle and accessories. To my mom’s credit, she did give in and get me the Barbie of my dreams. Plus, it turned out that my little sister, who was teething, loved chewing on the Sunshine family dolls, so everyone was happy in the end.

Interested in more?

Here are some suggestions for pop culture books, films, and TV series to extend your 'Barbenheimer' experience:

The atomic age and women’s roles in it:

Yaszek recommends:

• Caroline Herzenberg and Ruth Howes’s Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project
• Martha Ackman’s The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight
• The writings of postwar science fiction luminary Judith Merril. Her short story “That Only A Mother” is one of the most often-anthologized stories in science fiction history, and her novel Shadow on the Hearth was adapted for television as part of the prestigious Motorola story hour as “Atomic Attack!”

Yoshinaga recommends:

• WGN America network’s Manhattan, which focuses on the wives and families of the scientists behind the bomb

Feminism and the cultural importance of Barbie

Colatrella recommends:

• Her book, Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science, and Technology, as well as her forthcoming Feminism’s Progress: Gender Politics in British and American Literature and Television since 1830

Yoshianaga recommends:

• Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a once-banned filmed in part with Barbie dolls by Todd Haynes, a filmmaker of stylish LGBTQIA+-themed movies

Yaszek recommends:

• Breanne Fahs’ Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution to better understand the centuries long history of feminist thinking
• The National Women’s History Museum’s online exhibits on the four major waves of modern feminist activism.
• Her own The Future is Female! volumes

“When I was in elementary school and was asked, ‘What do you want to be when you're older?’ my answer was a game developer," he said.

In his final semester at Tech before graduating with a B.S. in computer science, Carr won the Best Student Game award at the Independent Game Festival (IGF) in San Francisco for his adventure game, Slider.

He began studying game development in high school, leading him to eventually enter a game jam –– a competition that tasks participants with creating a game from scratch in a short time. Though he didn't find immediate success in his first contest, Carr kept going.

The game, a PC title in which players solve puzzles and rearrange maps to help reconnect humanity, emerged from a competition in November 2021. The game received positive feedback after the jam, and while Carr felt like there was more to be done, he nearly let the project fall by the wayside.

"I remember along the way, there was a lot of doubt in me," he recalled. "I asked myself, ‘Should I carry this through all the way?’ I remember someone telling me that you have to trust yourself at the start of the vision you set out on because while you're working through it, you'll doubt yourself a lot. And, I just did that and kept working on it."

Carr looked to the Tech community for help and pitched the game to the Georgia Tech Video Game Development Club (VGDev) in January 2022. Work on the game continued over the next two semesters, and they submitted Slider to IGF, which receives over 600 entries, later that year. Carr and the team didn't expect a response, but to their surprise, in early January, they were named one of six finalists in the student category.

Over spring break, Carr and six other VGDev members went to San Francisco for the conference. Carr still didn’t believe that winning was a possibility, so when Slider was announced during the award ceremony, he was genuinely shocked. He took the stage and reflected on the hard work that went into the game's development by nearly 30 individuals over the years. 

While winning was a highlight of the trip, Carr found himself similarly enthralled with the universal language of gaming.

"One of the coolest things was seeing how much of an international community there is around game development –– there were all sorts of games from European countries, Latin America, and all over the world. Everyone is making games."

A playable demo of Slider is available on Steam, and Carr plans to leave the link active through development in the hopes of expanding the game's reach. As someone who grew up on PC gaming, he knows the platform is accessible to a vast audience. Despite the recent accolades, he explains that the game is not a finished product, but taking his own advice, he plans to trust his vision and keep working on it.

With one degree in hand, Carr is now interning with Amazon and will return to Tech in the fall to get his master's degree in computational intelligence. He plans to keep game development as a hobby for the time being but admits that he’ll never close the door on pursuing it as a career in the future.

One of the youngest players to compete on Survivor, the 21-year-old from Rome, Georgia, also stood out as one of the most prepared — ever, according to the show’s producers.

“My approach was, ‘This is a test. It’s a test in a different way, and I’m going to be as prepared as I would be for any exam or for any homework assignment,’” he said. “I asked myself, ‘What can I do? What can I prepare for? I want to be ready for everything that comes my way.’”

And he was. During this season’s casting process, Garrett took a 3D design class at Georgia Tech, and he began designing and printing puzzles from previous Survivor seasons — which paid off during several challenges. To prepare for weeks of meager food supplies and inevitable weight loss, he put on extra pounds and researched the best way to build muscle quickly.

He also read dozens of books about social relationships, how to be an effective listener, and how to determine if someone is lying. He wasn’t always able to successfully navigate the deceptions that are integral to the competition, but, he said, “It did give me foresight and confidence, and maybe I was better at this than I was expecting. I was this young kid who everyone might underestimate, and I wanted to be as prepared as I could be.”

Two Roads Converged

Garrett’s path to Survivor is inseparable from his Georgia Tech journey. His uncle and several friends had attended the Institute, it was close to home, and he knew it was a great school. “I was honored to get in, especially because the aerospace engineering program is No. 1 in the U.S. — that’s incredible for the undergraduate program.”

At the end of his first year at Tech, he was at home, watching Survivor at 2 a.m. In that moment, he decided to apply for the show. “I spent five minutes talking in the middle of my bedroom, whispering to the camera.” The next day, Garrett received word from NASA that he’d been accepted into their L’SPACE Program, a 12-week class in which students learn NASA mission procedures and protocols from industry professionals and complete team-based projects.

Not long after, having also been selected for Survivor, casting began, and he was soon juggling academics and reality TV. How did he make it all work? “I think that Georgia Tech is such a challenging place — in a good way,” he said. “And I think my approach was heavily influenced by the people I was surrounded by at school. We’re all such driven people, and I’m honored to represent the school in that way. I’m very happy with my college experience and how it helped me in the game.”

Garrett even brought his own data-driven analysis to the finale, having drawn up charts ahead of time, documenting how each of the three finalists voted throughout the season and how that related to their gameplay. “It’s an important piece of the puzzle,” he said. “People were talking about how this person had better stats than that person, and I said, ‘Well, let’s talk about it’” — using actual statistics.

Though he missed out on the $1 million prize, Garrett’s hard work paid off in other ways, giving him a new sense of confidence and perspective. “I was so immensely proud of myself for pushing through and being able to see that translated in my game,” he said. “There are going to be ups and downs in life, but look at it in a positive light. I did the best I could, and I’ll take that with me wherever I go.”

Buzz, first introduced in 1980 and a fixture at campus events ever since, is among 18 finalists for the Mascot Hall of Fame’s newest class. The public voting period is open until midnight on Saturday, May 27, and you can vote once a day. The public vote will account for a portion of the final tally, with the Mascot Hall of Fame's executive committee and membership holders making up the remainder. This year’s inductees will be announced on Friday, June 23.

Buzz's competition on the ballot comes from the college and professional ranks, including a fellow Atlanta native –– Freddie Falcon. ACC foes Rameses from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Otto the Orange from Syracuse University and the Blue Devil from Duke University are also vying for a spot.

Whether Buzz is conducting the band, firing up crowds, or performing skits, the Tech mascot overwhelmingly meets the Hall of Fame's criteria of being "unique, fun, and memorable" while demonstrating a major impact on their community.

It’s already been a monumental year for the stinger-shaking mascot, who took first place at the NCA and NDA Collegiate National Cheer and Dance Championship in Daytona Beach in early April.

"Buzz has skyrocketed this year and is racking up the accolades to prove it," said Shana Spann, head cheerleading coach. "He's won Best Mascot 2022 with the CFA Peach Bowl, NCA College Nationals 2023, and is now nominated for the Mascot Hall of Fame. He has been present in the community more than ever with his fun fan interactive gameday skits. We're excited to see what he brings to the 2023-24 season and we are thankful for the Georgia Tech and Atlanta community support of our beloved mascot."

To date, 27 mascots reside in the Mascot Hall of Fame. The first class was inducted in 2005. To learn more, and to cast your daily vote for Buzz, visit mascothalloffame.com.

Attendees watched presentations and invited talks and participated in poster and demonstration sessions. It’s a typical academic conference in every way except for one significant change this year: it will take place entirely online, with social events hosted completely in virtual environments.

Blair MacIntyre, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing and IEEE VR conference co-chair, proposed transitioning to an all-virtual event to support social distancing recommendations related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We were planning on a small experiment with online attendees to investigate the use of VR to make conferences more accessible and sustainable. Suddenly we needed to ramp up to accommodate everyone across all traditional conference activities,” MacIntyre said.

The entire five-day event convened in Mozilla Hubs, an online platform for remote virtual experiences. IEEE VR marks the first time that a major academic conference of this scale will move online and depend solely on a virtual environment platform, including the social networking sessions that are an essential part of conferences.

The virtual experience merges video conferencing, video streaming, and online chat platforms with a custom version of Hubs. The platform operates in most web browsers, and conference attendees can join whether or not they have a VR device. As with an in-person conference, participants will watch and discuss talks, take part in parallel sessions, and network one-on-one while interacting through avatars.

The conference is taking place in Eastern Standard Time. While organizers acknowledge that it will be difficult for people in other time zones to attend, they say there are other benefits of a virtual conference such as better work-life balance.

“One of the hardest things for people to do in this sort of format is focus on the content,” said Kyle Johnsen, IEEE VR co-chair and associate professor of engineering in the College of Engineering, University of Georgia. “If you’re going to a virtual conference, you need to treat it like you’re at an in-person conference, at least during the business day. One of the huge advantages is that you still get to tuck your kids in at night, which is awesome, and we don’t want to lose that, but you do need to maintain the same level of time commitment. That’s the value of conferences.”

Social Change Through Technology
MacIntyre began exploring the use of Hubs in 2019 to address climate change and the carbon impact of long-haul flights to academic conferences. He points out that the carbon impact of a recent round-trip he took to a conference in Berlin, Germany, was higher than that of his own four-person household for an entire month.

He also views virtual experiences as a way of democratizing academic conferences, which are often limited to attendees from well-funded colleges, universities, and companies, while shutting out those who can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on travel or leave their jobs or families for a week or more.

“If we can take something like IEEE VR, which is normally around 1,000 people, and turn it into an event where 10,000 people can attend, we’ll have a much more diverse and inclusive event.”

Now, with recent global challenges of the coronavirus, technology is once again at the forefront of shaping our society – changes that we’re seeing, and living, in real-time. Whether it’s attending a virtual reality conference, working remotely, or taking a class online, “technology has the opportunity to help people connect,” MacIntyre said.

One recent example – the City of Atlanta has created an emergency fund to assist those impacted by COVID-19, $1 million of which will go toward purchasing technology to support the city’s telework deployment.

While our current crisis has forced an evolution in how we’re interacting through technology, he wonders about a permanent change in the future. “How many companies will shift to online? How many people will demand the opportunity? It will be interesting to see how we all feel after coming out of this forced remote experiment.” 

Any long-term technology transformation would mean an entire cultural shift, he said. “The technologies are there and can support remote work and education in different ways, but it only works if there’s a commitment.”

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Writer: Alyson Powell Key

Consumer-grade internet of things (IoT) devices aren’t exactly known for having tight security practices. To save purchasers from finding that out the hard way, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have done security assessments of representative devices, awarding scores ranging from 28 (an F) up to 100.

Their site, https://yourthings.info, shows rankings for 45 devices, though a total of 74 have been evaluated. That’s hardly a complete roundup of the tens of thousands of devices available, but the big idea behind the project is to help consumers understand important issues before connecting a new IoT helper to their home networks.

“A lot of people who purchase these devices don’t fully understand the risks associated with installing them in their homes,” said Omar Alrawi, a graduate research assistant at Georgia Tech. “We want to provide insight by providing security ratings for the devices we have tested.”

Voice-activated personal digital assistants are among the most common home IoT devices, but if not properly installed, they can provide unwanted access to the home networks to which they are connected, warned Manos Antonakakis, a cybersecurity researcher and associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“If you have an IoT app that is vulnerable, whoever has access to that app not only has access to your personal information, but could also jump into your home and eavesdrop on your conversations,” he said. “Anything that is connected in the home in proximity to the personal assistant could also interact with it. If there is vulnerable software running on the device, it could be exploited within the home network.”

One problem is that most home networks were set up for simple tasks like sharing printers, so they lack the kind of security controls found on enterprise systems at businesses, noted Chaz Lever, a research engineer in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“The home network is beginning to look a lot like enterprise networks with a range of services that have to be protected,” Lever said. “But the average consumer is not going to be equipped to do that. They don’t have an IT staff that is doing audits and securing the devices. If these devices are not secure out of the box and there aren’t easy ways to secure them, they can open the home up to a new vector of attacks.”

To give consumers helpful advice, the researchers developed a framework for analyzing the devices’ security components. In what is believed to be the first effort to objectively assess the risks of IoT equipment, they examined the devices themselves, how the devices communicate with cloud servers, the applications running on the devices, and the cloud-based endpoints.

“The more services running on the device, the higher the probability that some of them will be vulnerable to attack,” Antonakakis said. “Providing many services may be attractive from a marketing perspective, but if you have multiple services, the risk increases.”

In their study of IoT devices, the researchers found wide variations in security depending on the manufacturer. In some cases, equipment made by small and lesser-known companies performed better than devices made by larger companies.

“There are some devices that do security really well, and other manufacturers should learn from those exemplary devices,” Alrawi said. “We saw the full spectrum of good and bad, and sometimes we were surprised at the results of our evaluation.”

Because they are designed to be installed by consumers, these IoT devices must be easy to use. But ease of use can be the enemy of security. An example is a service known as UPnP, which makes devices known to the network during installation so communications can be established.

But a device announcing itself on the network can attract attackers, Lever noted. “It’s helpful for the devices to communicate what they do, but that opens up vulnerabilities. The choice of protocols affects not only the device, but also the security of the network on which it is running.”

Internet-connected light bulbs are unlikely to have a long service life, but that’s not the case with expensive appliances like internet-connected refrigerators. Antonakakis worries that these devices could become security risks without regular updates.

“Ideally, the consumer shouldn’t have to be aware that their refrigerator needs updates that have to be downloaded to the device,” he said. “We want that to happen automatically and securely. Why should anyone have to know how to patch their refrigerator?”

While the notion of hacking a slow cooker might seem amusing, the devices have heating elements that could cause a fire if a malicious actor turned up the temperature. Attacks can also affect more than a homeowner. In 2016, the Mirai botnet took advantage of unsecured internet-connected cameras — many of them baby monitors — to create a massive distributed denial of service attack that left much of the internet unavailable.

Beyond educating consumers, the researchers hope to encourage better security by device manufacturers by tracking security trends over time.

“We hope to inspire both technical and policy next steps,” said Antonakakis. “There is a need for establishing policy and standards. We want to raise the security level of all these devices. There is a lot more that could be done.”

In addition to those already mentioned, Fabrian Monrose from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was also a member of the research team.

This material is based upon work supported in part by U.S. Department of Commerce grants 2106DEK and 2106DZD, by National Science Foundation grant 2106DGX, and by Air Force Research Laboratory/Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grants 2106DTX and 2106EHP. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.

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Writer: John Toon

DoD’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) Program funds projects that bring researchers together from diverse backgrounds to work on a complex problem. Institute for Data Engineering and Science co-director, Professor Dana Randall, is project investigator and leads a team of six that includes Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics. The Formal Foundations of Algorithmic Matter and Emergent Computation team also includes chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, physics, and computational science researchers from other universities.  

The researchers are trying to predict and design emergent behavior within computation by using basic algorithms on simple machines to perform complex tasks. Emergent behavior is when a microscopic change in a parameter creates a macroscopic change to a system. This collective behavior is easy to find in nature, from a swarm of bees to a colony of ants, but also appears in other scientific disciplines. 

“A MURI lets us take a deep dive toward understanding how many computationally limited components at the micro-scale can be programmed to work collectively to produce useful behavior at the macro-scale,” said Randall, who is also the ADVANCE Professor of Computing. “Our interdisciplinary team combines expertise in many fields, mimicking the research by forming a collaboration that is also greater than the sum of its parts."

The MURI hybrid approach to algorithmic matter combines traditional logic-based programming with non-traditional computational methods, such as using physical characteristics of the interacting matter to drive a system toward collective behavior. One of the goals is to program based on this predictable emergent behavior. The approach also predicts basic properties of the collective’s emergent behavior, like whether it will behave like a gas, fluid, or solid. In this context, emergent behavior turns into emergent collective computation.

“MURI promises basic algorithms that allow very simple machines to work collectively to perform amazingly complex tasks,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) chemical engineering Professor Michael Strano said. “Our team will examine systems of autonomous cell-like particles that interact and respond to the movement of their neighbors in a programmable way. Theorists will be able to test ideas of emergent computation from these simple devices and learn how to execute tasks from the behavior of relatively simple, autonomous particles.”

Although the behavior has footing in physics, computer science, and swarm robotics, there is no underlying framework to explain why until this research. The multidisciplinary approach allows theory and experiment to continuously inform each other and determine the computational capabilities of emergent behavior. The team has an ideal range of expertise in machine learning, control theory, and non-equilibrium physics and algorithms. They are also working with experimentalists who build collective systems at granular and microscopic scales.  

“An exciting aspect of this collaboration will be our attempts to interface and integrate ideas and tools from robotics, non-equilibrium physics, control theory, and computer science to develop task-capable swarms,” Goldman said.

This MURI project will run for five years and is funded by the Army Research Office. In addition to Randall, Goldman, and Strano, the team also includes Arizona State computational science and engineering Professor Andrea Richa, MIT physics Associate Professor Jeremy England, and Northwestern mechanical engineering Professor Todd Murphey.

The overarching goal is to find how simplistic the computation can be for this complexity. This could lead to advances in engineered systems achieving specific task-oriented goals.

“The MURI promises nothing short of the transformation of robots,” Strano said, “from the large, bulky constructions that we think of today, to future clouds or swarms that enable functions that are currently impossible to realize.”

Writer: Tess Malone

Every lobby, office, and hallway in the area could someday host numerous ­internet-connected sensors, cameras, or control systems as businesses begin to roll out more and more internet of things devices and systems.

“In Tech Square alone, you could have hundreds of thousands of sensors, measuring the temperature of each room, turning on and off lights and cameras, locking and unlocking doors,” said Chang, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

During the next five years, internet of things products will grow in number to account for more than half of the world’s 27.1 billion internet-connected devices, according to a recent forecast from Cisco. In fact, at some point, it may be easier to count the objects not connected to the internet than the ones that are, said Alain Louchez, managing director of Georgia Tech’s Center for the Development and Application of Internet of Things Technologies (CDAIT).

“This is what I mean when I say that the internet of things will give rise to a pulsating world — devices all over constantly sending and receiving data,” he said.

As that internet of things wave approaches, Georgia Tech researchers are exploring the implications of a connected world — from finding ways to keep hackers at bay to developing the next-generation of wireless and cellular networks capable of supporting so many new devices.

Read the complete article in Georgia Tech's Research Horizons magazine.

Mittal, a second-year computer science major, later paired up with Joshua Wang, a third-year computer science major, and together they created an all-meme platform. The platform, Memeois, crawls the internet for memes and uses machine learning to curate a personalized feed. Think of Instagram, but for memes.

The invention is one of six competing for the InVenture Prize, Georgia Tech’s annual invention competition. The winner will be announced March 14.

“We’ve created an accessible network where people can discover and experience the magic of memes and share it with everyone,” said Mittal, who is from New Delhi, India. “There’s so much negativity in the world and we’re all under so much stress that it’s nice to give people a way to step back, relax and realize how wonderful life is. Memes help us do that.”

Wang said InVenture provides an opportunity for Memeois to attract more attention and resources.

They launched Memeois on iOS in September and it has already attracted more than 50,000 active users in 86 different countries. More than 4 million memes interactions have been conducted through the platform.

The platform is free and without advertisements. The plan is to earn money through business-to-business solutions, Mittal said, noting that memes lead to high user engagement.

Memeois uses machine learning and will recommend memes. The platform also offers share and search features, which allow for meme-filled conversations, Mittal said.

“We help people be creative and innovative with memes,” said Wang, who is from Seoul, South Korea. “I’ve always wanted to help connect people’s lives through modern technology. It’s like what we learned in our introduction to programming classes -- technologies do impact the world and computers can help connect people.” 

Math just met “warp drive” in a virtual reality headset to transport anyone who dons the visor to a reality twisted by hyperbolic geometry. The program was co-created by Sabetta Matsumoto, a physicist and applied mathematician at the Georgia Institute of Technology as a visual aid to researchers exploring geometries that deviate from the everyday norm.

Splashed in color, the virtual space’s graphics can seduce even the most math-phobic mind to roam, crawl or slither about. But mathematicians and physicists can make great use of it.

Read the story here.

The annual Georgia Tech competition brings together student innovators to foster creativity, invention and entrepreneurship.

The finale begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Ferst Center for the Arts. It will air live on GPB and can be watched online here.

Meet the finalists:

• Capable Cane is a walking cane that unfolds into a portable, full-sized comfortable seat.
• CauteryGuard is a safer electrocautery device, which is used by medical personnel to remove unwanted tissue and to stop bleeding.
• CPR+ is a CPR mask that allows an untrained bystander to perform CPR by walking the user through each step of the process.
• Gaitway are transportable, collapsible parallel bars for physical therapists to use when working with children.
• InternBlitz takes the digital college application system of the Common App and applies it to internships.
• PickAR uses augmented reality technology so warehouses can process orders more efficiently.

The winning team earns $20,000 and represents Georgia Tech in the annual ACC InVenture Prize, taking place on campus March 31.

The second-place team gets $10,000.

Both first- and second-place finishers will receive free U.S. patent filings.

A $5,000 People’s Choice Award will go to the fans’ favorite invention. Voting will be held online and by text messaging during the finale.

The open-source project demonstrated both proven and emerging technologies for interoperability and advanced functionality innovations from both the public and private sectors. The proof-of-concept delivers capabilities that VA and VHA leadership had identified as strategically important to support clinical and operational policy and program transformation plans needed to address expected changes in veteran populations, service needs and care delivery models.

For example, the demonstration included the capability to obtain patient data from disparate military and commercial electronic records systems, and accept information from a broad range of ancillary services and consumer medical devices. 

The public-private collaboration, established in partnership with the VA’s Office of Information and Technology, included the VHA, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), the Georgia Institute of Technology and private-sector companies providing services in analytics, customer relationship management, and application program interfaces. Georgia Tech served as the project’s lead architect and provided overall project management. 

“If you can liberate the data from deep inside a system and securely move it to the cloud and manage its movement through well-designed application programming interfaces (APIs), that gives you a lot of options for reorganizing work flows and processes,” said Steve Rushing, senior strategic adviser in Georgia Tech’s Health Extension Services. “We are doing for health care what has already been done for other industries that have used interoperability standards as the foundation for APIs to exchange information among different systems.”

The team – including partner organizations Salesforce (CRM), Mulesoft (API gateway), Apervita (real-time analytics) and UCB (portfolio of predictive analytics solutions for epilepsy) – conducted its first demonstration just six weeks after the contract with the VA was signed. Using Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), a standard describing health data formats and elements, and a REST API transport protocol, the team built an API gateway surrounding VistA and Georgia Tech’s testing and teaching electronic health record system, known as GTonFHIR. The project used anonymous patient data. 

The overall project created 21 system APIs, which control how specific types of data flow into and out of the DHP. This included data exchanges with the Cerner EHR (representing the Department of Defense and a community hospital), Duke University Medical Center (Epic) as an academic medical provider, DocSnap personal health record (connecting to a Navy medicine pilot project), and personal health monitoring devices via Apple Healthkit and Validic. 

Results of the proof-of-concept collaboration point to better experiences for veterans, said LaVerne Council, who was the VA’s chief information officer at the time the project was conducted. 

“The DHP leverages the power of public-private partnerships,” she said. “We brought together some of the brightest engineers and health informaticists from some of the most innovative companies and assembled them at Georgia Tech. There, over a period of eight weeks, we established an API gateway, the cornerstone of the digital health platform, consisting of 21 APIs that connected to three different EHR systems including our own, VistA, a class leading customer relationship management system, Georgia Tech’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) server, and a real time analytics system. We also developed a veteran-facing mobile app. We integrated low-cost, high-quality video communication into the fabric of the veteran experience, and we integrated internet-connected health devices that track activities and vitals including blood pressure, weight and blood glucose.”

Because the architecture is not tied to any proprietary system, the proof-of-concept accommodates future developments by connecting to and from other web services, apps, devices or electronic health systems that use the FHIR or other accepted industry open standards, Rushing said. Also, by keeping much of the original VistA system accessible via the API gateway, the strategy protects the investment in and could accelerate the deployment of the agency’s existing health information technology innovations across the VHA system during the period of full DHP component acquisition and deployment, he explained. 

“In electronic health records, like almost any other major enterprise application, about 60 percent of the code is tied to routine workflow needed on a day-to-day basis. Changing these doesn’t add strategic value because the new programming will look much like the old,” Rushing said. “The important strategic implementation is done at the edges of the system, and that’s where the VA wanted us to focus our interoperability engineering and demonstrate the power of liberating the data. By using an architecture that is API-driven, we addressed the interoperability requirement, kept what works and added new VHA-created and private industry innovations where needed.”

Among the innovations is an analytics layer. By studying the health records of service members transitioning from active duty to veteran status, the analytics layer makes recommendations about care, such as enrollment in specialized services for veterans suffering from traumatic brain injury (TBI). 

“This is basically doing the same thing – with a different intent – that happens every time you sign into Facebook or Amazon,” said Rushing. “The system learns about you from your records to help health professionals precisely meet your personal needs. Rather than wait until a veteran has a seizure because of a service-related injury, the system would use the analytics to recommend a protocol for proactively managing the problem.”

As an independent third party, Georgia Tech combined the best components from the VA/VHA and private sector companies, negotiated any differences and worked with private-sector staff in five different programming teams to meet the VA’s goals. “We just wanted the best services for veterans,” said Rushing. “That was our driving objective.”

The demonstration addressed the specific challenges of three groups of former service members: Iraq war veterans with traumatic brain injuries, women veterans who need gender-specific services not traditionally provided by the VA, and Vietnam-era veterans who are now suffering age-related illnesses such as diabetes and congestive heart failure. TBIs alone affect some 87,000 veterans.

The system was demonstrated to VA and VHA officials in September and October 2016, and the Georgia Tech team is now wrapping up the documentation for what has been done. 

“The VA is looking for a flexible, future-focused health platform and architecture focused on a services-based model,” said Jon Duke, M.D., director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Health Analytics and Informatics. “They are taking a really ambitious approach to it, and this could have a tremendous impact on care for veterans as well as on health systems more broadly.”

The project illustrates the role Georgia Tech can play because it doesn’t have a medical school or hospital and isn’t tied to any specific technology platform.

“When we are working with health systems, we’re neither a competitor nor a vendor,” Duke noted. “We approach each problem from a ‘white hat’ perspective, working to find the right data and infrastructure needed, often using open-source platforms.”

The impetus for the project was VHA strategic planning, started in the spring of 2016, on developing a successor to VistA, which has served the agency for 40 years. The strategic planning scope was expanded beyond replacement of VistA as a single EHR application system to include best practices driving enterprise information technology modernization across other industries. This included the move to a platform of interoperable cloud-based application system components. 

The envisioned architecture with its “liberated data” allows for clinical and operational functionality extensions over time by connecting a robust portfolio of interoperable web services and mobile app innovations. By building out this architecture, the project demonstrated that these services and apps could be acquired and deployed in alignment with VA and VHA technology needs for systematically transforming clinical and operations work flows. 

The proof-of-concept’s scope of work included a tactically critical goal: treating VistA as just another EHR. The intent was for DHP to not only be agnostic regarding commercial EHRs, but agnostic toward VistA as well.  This was achieved by moving VistA data and core modules to the cloud and leveraging existing successful VA initiatives to build open-source interoperable API gateway connections, such as the Enterprise Health Management Platform (eHMP). 

The independence from commercial EHRs and VistA showed that VA investments in VistA modernization and VHA investments in industry leading healthcare information technologies, such as telemedicine and home monitoring, could move forward within the DHP deployment cycle and not wait for full deployment, Rushing said. 

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Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have developed a flexible, generic data-fusion software that simplifies interacting with sensor networks. Known as FUSE, it provides a framework to standardize the diverse IoT world. Its application programming interface (API) lets users capture, store, annotate and transform any data coming from Internet-connected sources.

“The Internet of Things has always been something of a Tower of Babel, because it gathers data from everywhere – from the latest smart-building microcontrollers and driver-assist vehicles to legacy sensors installed for years,” said Heyward Adams, a GTRI research scientist who is leading the FUSE project. “Traditionally, people wanting to utilize IoT information have had to examine the attributes of each individual sensor and then write custom software on an ad-hoc basis to handle it.”

Before FUSE, Adams said, a typical IoT task could require several manual steps. For example, users would acquire data from the Internet by manually finding and setting up the proper communication protocols. Then each data value would have to be assigned to a supporting database. Finally, the user would need to process the data, via approaches such as arithmetic manipulation or statistical evaluation, before it could be fed into a decision algorithm.

“FUSE lets us take a task that used to involve a week or two, and complete it in 10 or 15 minutes,” he said. “It provides a standard way of communicating in the unstandardized world of IoT.”

Adams explained that the technical challenges in creating an Internet of Things framework include not just receiving and transmitting sensor data that use different communication protocols and modalities, but also digesting and processing a variety of data encodings and formats. One particular challenge involves dealing with timing differences between incoming data sources.

To build their framework, the GTRI team developed advanced algorithms for handling the many different source types, communication modes and data types coming in over the internet. They also devised methods for managing interactions among data sources that use varying and unpredictable data rates.

The result was FUSE, with capabilities that include:

• Providing users with online forms that let them define the sources they need in the form of “domains” – abstract descriptions of how the targeted data interrelate;
• Gathering incoming raw data according to user specifications and mapping them into the specified domains. The data can then be transformed and manipulated using “tasks,” which are user-defined JavaScript functions or legacy software that run inside the FUSE service;
• Displaying the processed data to users on-screen via an interactive data visualization, exploration and analysis dashboard that supports most data types including numeric, logical, and text data. Users can also devise their own custom dashboards or other interfaces.

FUSE makes extensive use of the generic representational state transfer (REST) data capability. Referred to as RESTful, this widely used Internet standard supports the framework’s ability to receive and transmit divergent data streams.

The FUSE framework is designed to be massively distributable. Using load-balancing techniques, the service can spread IOT workloads across entire computer clusters. Moreover, FUSE can also operate on small and inexpensive microcontrollers of the type increasingly found in buildings and vehicles performing a variety of smart sensing tasks.

The development team has built a transform layer into FUSE that allows the framework to connect to legacy sensors, allowing integration of older devices that utilize diverse hardware and software designs. FUSE currently employs the open-source MongoDB program as its storage database, but GTRI researchers are developing adapters that let the service plug into common databases such as Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL.

“One of the advantages of FUSE is that it can be broken up and distributed to accommodate any sensor and server architecture,” Adams said. “So it can grow and change as a business, facility or campus changes over time.”

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Writer: Rick Robinson

But it took 120 years and a collaboration between Georgia Tech data scientists and University of Georgia historians to see what the spread of that idea had actually looked like. Starting in Chicago, site of the convention, “Cross of Gold” moved to the populous East Coast, then jumped to the West Coast before filling in the less populated areas.

“Going viral” may have taken longer in the 19th century, but the principle was much the same.

Researchers tracked Cross of Gold’s spread using U.S. News Map, a database of more than 10 million newspaper pages that is helping researchers see history with spatial information that hadn’t been available before. Using digitized newspaper articles and cutting-edge search technology, the project is helping researchers see the nation’s history in new ways.

“Every historical development has a spatial component to it, and often one that is central to explaining the ‘how’ and the ‘why,’” noted Claudio Saunt, chair of the Department of History at the University of Georgia. “With this new search engine, we now have the ability to see where newspapers were writing about a subject, and how interest in that subject changed over time. It’s a powerful tool for historians, and one that can shed new light on the past.”

A free service, the database is available at USNewsMap.com. It is based on data from approximately 10 million pages published in nearly 2,000 U.S. newspapers between 1836 and 1924. The newspapers represent what was happening in nearly 800 U.S. cities. More pages are being added all the time, though some states still have not contributed digital newspaper data and are therefore not represented on the project’s map.

To create the database behind the search engine, text from the newspaper pages was scanned by universities around the country, and each word indexed, explained Trevor Goodyear, a research scientist in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). The application uses Apache Solr database software, a document database that allowed GTRI researchers to efficiently store and index the large volumes of text and associated metadata.

The processed text exists across eight different servers, some in a data center at Georgia Tech and some in a cloud server provided by Amazon Web Services. When a user types an inquiry into the website, the servers all participate in the search together. The text database is linked to images of the newspaper pages housed at the Library of Congress, so when users find an item of interest, they can see its context on the original newspaper page.

The innovations, said Goodyear, were to show when each instance of a term appeared in the newspapers and to animate those appearances. Dots on the map show all mentions of the term in all newspapers across each U.S. city, lighter dots indicating multiple mentions. Users of the site can move a slider to see how terms pop up in different cities over time.

“We’ve placed the data onto a map of the United States that allows users to view how the term moved across the country over time,” he said. “You can navigate through time to see how each term was used in different locations. You really get a sense for how ideas went viral during that time in history.”

The Library of Congress awards grants to universities across the United States for digitizing historic newspapers. This digitization process involves applying optical character recognition (OCR) techniques to convert the printed words into computerized text. Through imperfections in the newspapers’ preservation and errors in the scanning and translation process, the results can look very different from what was originally published in the newspapers. Information lost in translation includes the distinctions between headlines, article content, author bylines, and newspaper titles. Due to these limitations, the system links users to the full newspaper page on which the search term appears instead of to individual scanned articles.

Other newspaper databases exist and the Library of Congress newspaper collection is searchable, but no other source shows the spatial component of history in this way, said Saunt, who is the Richard B. Russell Professor in American History. He expects U.S. News Map will be useful to more than historians.

“With U.S. News Map, it is easy to trace the evolution of a term – to see where it originated and how it spread – something that linguists are deeply interested in,” he said. “Historians will be able to see how news stories moved across the continent, and rose and fell over time.”

At the University of Georgia, the project began with Saunt and collaborators Stephen Mihm and Steve Berry in the institution’s eHistory.org program, which is affiliated with the Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab. “We brainstormed the idea of building a website to allow the public to visualize searches in the massive Library of Congress digital newspaper database, ‘Chronicling America,’ by showing the results on a map,” Saunt explained.

The UGA researchers contacted a colleague at Georgia Tech, where data science and data analytics are part of research in GTRI’s Innovative Computing Division. The project demonstrates how data science can extract new knowledge from massive data sets, Goodyear said.

“We had never worked with large text-based data sets like this before, and it offered an interesting challenge to conventional techniques,” he added. “We had to adjust techniques developed for short text to longer newspaper text.”

Other search examples:

• The term “miscegenation” appeared in 1864, coined during the presidential election that year. “You can type it into the search box and watch it spread across the continent like a plague,” said Saunt.
• The term “Ghost Dance,” describing the ceremonial dance that Native Americans began performing in the 1870s, appeared sporadically in western newspapers. But after the massacre at Wounded Knee, it was picked up by the press nationally, noted Saunt, who is associate director of the Institute of Native American Studies. 
• Georgia Tech appeared in newspapers in 1888 when fire destroyed the Institute’s Old Shop Building. Newspapers reported the fire and the amount of insurance coverage available, Goodyear noted. Georgia Tech began appearing regularly in newspapers once the publication of sports scores became common.
• The database covers much of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. A search turned up more than 207,000 mentions of inventor Thomas Edison, and 64,000 mentions of influential technology company General Electric.

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Writer: John Toon

Developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), Diamond Eye is a platform for one-stop data analytics. Before creating Diamond Eye, GTRI researchers had built a series of analytics tools for individual customers, such as an application-specific tool for monitoring Twitter and open source data for first responders. But because they were developed for specific applications, these tools were not designed to be used beyond the original goals and customers.

Diamond Eye takes advantage of the expertise developed for these projects. The platform enables data ingestion, processing and visualization in a single package, and is able to adapt to new data sources, new analytics, or new visualizations. Developing a flexible application program interface (API) helped make it user-friendly.

“Before Diamond Eye, it was difficult to share analytics because only the developer that had created it had the access or the know-how to use it,” said Amy Sharma, a research engineer at GTRI. “With this new framework, anyone can utilize the analytics and any developer can add new data, analytics, or visualizations.”

The system was designed to help users answer historical and real-time questions with their data. It can also provide situational and predictive results, using information about the past to help predict future conditions.

The team’s analytics work under GTRI’s Business Intelligence Strategic Initiative focuses on open data sets, such as those from social media platforms like Twitter, as well as on closed-source data provided by partners.

To learn about the key problems that businesses wanted to solve with analytics, scientists working on the project interviewed more than a dozen people in various sectors of business, with an emphasis on marketing, social media and retail organizations. An oft-cited need was for analyzing one-to-one marketing data.

For consumer brands, a traditional marketing technique involves creating a message and then broadcasting that message on TV or the Internet, hoping it resonates with a lot of potential customers. In a more modern approach, the focus is on identifying interested individuals in social media and interacting with them directly. That one-on-one marketing can either be through personalized campaigns on such platforms as Instagram and Twitter, or by identifying influential users on Twitter and interacting with them directly in the hope that they will share the message to their followers.

“One of the possible applications of our technology is to help companies better understand who is out there in social media, how you should interact with them, and how your interactions are being received,” said David Ediger, a research engineer at GTRI.

Another big question that almost every company wanted answered is how to measure marketing value on social media. The team hasn’t yet come up with a way to help companies measure this, but this solution could be in the future for Diamond Eye.

“Companies are spending very, very large budgets on marketing and they want to know if they’re getting bang for their buck on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram,” Ediger said. “We have not solved that problem, but I think we’re scratching at some possible solutions for how to measure return on investment.”

The team recently put Diamond Eye to the test by developing a social media monitoring platform for the Offshore Technology Conference, a conference that attracts more than 90,000 persons each May in Houston, Texas. In less than six weeks, GTRI researchers added the appropriate data feeds, analytics, and visualizations to provide basic Twitter statistics such as timelines, tweet frequency, follows, and platforms. They also created complicated streaming analytics to measure sentiment and most influential users, and the ability to track and sort images on Instagram and Twitter.

The team’s analytics are also useful beyond marketing. For example, Diamond Eye could also help manufacturing companies understand why equipment in one region might be breaking down more often than in other areas.

“We can marry text information from a human with numeric information from a machine and then build models about failure rates,” Sharma said. “If we notice a pattern in which machines in one region seem to be breaking more often, the company can figure out whether they might have received a bad batch of replacement parts – or whether the issue might be a bad repair person or technique.”

The research was supported by GTRI’s independent research and development program.

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Writer: Brett Israel

The issue: Hobbyists can fly drones without FAA oversight as long as the aircraft weighs 55 pounds or less, flies in unpopulated areas, and remains within line of sight of the operator. Yet flying drones for commercial purposes requires review and approval by the FAA. The only way to get a thumbs-up from the FAA is to pursue airworthiness certification (an expensive and complicated process that can take up to a year), or secure a “Section 333 exemption.”

A Section 333 exemption allows the FAA to waive the airworthiness requirement as long as the commercial UAV flights are conducted under a number of restrictions. Among these restrictions: Drone operators must notify local aviation authorities two or three days prior to flight — and operations over people or near airports are off-limits.

“Securing a 333 exemption is doable for the movie industry since obtaining aerial footage can be planned far in advance,” observed Mike Heiges, a GTRI principal research engineer who leads the CNN project. “Yet journalists can’t operate under these rules for breaking news and chaotic situations where there may be emergency responders, police helicopters, or the National Guard.”

Granted, drones aren’t needed for every news story, but they provide a unique perspective in many situations, said Greg Agvent, senior director of news operations for CNN/US.

“Being able to fly over an area after an earthquake or tornado hits would provide a deeper understanding of how widespread the devastation is,” Agvent explained and pointed to the May 12 Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia. “Part of the issue with the accident was the speed going into the curve. The ability to get footage from 200 feet in the air would have presented a better sense of the curve — context that you simply couldn’t get from the ground.”

Safety of news personnel is another benefit of drone journalism, Agvent added. “In many cases, such as a flood, safety would trump context. We could capture footage of an event without putting our people in harm’s way.”

Some of the research that comes out of the project will be helpful beyond newsgathering, observed Dave Price, a GTRI senior research technologist working on the project. “Commercial drones are of interest for crop monitoring and inspection of bridges and railroad tracks,” he explained. “Railroads and agriculture agencies will be able see the results of CNN’s camera selection and stabilization systems and take advantage of this for their own applications.”

The Right Stuff

During the past year, the researchers, including GTRI and CNN staff, have been investigating different UAVs that could carry the type of camera systems journalists need to shoot and transmit aerial footage.

That’s easier said than done. For one thing, the commercial drone industry is in its infancy. Manufacturers come and go, and there aren’t a great number with a long track record. Another challenge is finding the right equipment — airframes and payloads that match up. “It’s a trade-off,” Heiges explained. “You have to factor in size, weight, and power of what you want to put on the aircraft with what the aircraft can carry.”

Flight times for many commercial drones aren’t long enough for CNN’s purposes, nor is video quality high enough. “To install a better camera, you need a bigger vehicle for endurance,” Heiges said. “And that means stepping up to UAVs that were developed for the military, which dramatically increases price.”

GTRI has been testing drones since 2006 through the FAA’s certificate of authorization process, which enables public institutions to operate drones in national airspace for research purposes. Currently, GTRI holds 28 certificates of authorization for specific locations in five states. For the project with CNN, GTRI provides pilots to fly the drones in approved areas, plans the flight tests with CNN’s participation, collects data, and prepares reports with recommendations.

One of CNN’s takeaways from the flight tests: Drone journalism is no one-person show. “In most cases, especially for live video, you need three people,” Agvent said. This includes a pilot to guide the actions of the UAV and an operator for the camera, which is usually suspended under the drone and sits on gimbals for stabilization.

“The third person, a spotter, is particularly important in urban areas,” Agvent continued. “The spotter focuses solely on situational awareness and communicates to the pilot about people and other aircraft that may be in the area. In some cases, you could get by with a two- person team — a pilot/cameraman and a spotter — but a trio is best to ensure both high quality and safety.”

Advancing to Operational Protocols

“We’ve hit a lot of milestones in the past year,” Agvent said. “Now, we begin to work on the finer points of flight operations and coordinating with air traffic control.”

One of the FAA’s chief concerns with drones is getting the word out to manned aircraft about a UAV’s presence in the area. The current practice is to file a “notice to airmen” two or three days in advance.

A new technology known as automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) could provide a just-in-time alternative to the notice to airmen. Developed by the FAA, this technology enables aircraft to broadcast their GPS coordinates to anyone in the local air space that has ADS-B, and vice-versa, so the drone operator would be able to see other aircraft.

“It’s like having an air traffic radar map inside your cockpit,” Heiges said. “Even better, unlike conventional radar, ADS-B works all the way to the ground.” That’s important, because, in some situations, journalists may need to cooperate with police helicopters or medical aircraft flying at low altitudes to pick up patients.

Geo-fencing technologies, which prevent UAVs from entering airport and other restricted areas, could add another layer of safety, Heiges added.

Because FAA rules prohibit drones from flying over people, crowd-control issues must also be resolved. For example, are journalists responsible for blocking off the area where they wish to fly drones — or do they communicate with on-scene commanders to find out where they can operate?

Over the next few months, GTRI and CNN will meet with regional emergency responders and other stakeholders to address these questions and develop an operational framework. Then GTRI will work with law enforcement agencies to test the procedures at remote locations. “We’ll hold mock trials and simulate circumstances that would happen in a breaking news situation,” Heiges explained.

Creating appropriate regulations for various types of UAV flights is important, as the flight landscape has changed dramatically in recent years.

“When people built radio-controlled airplanes out of balsa wood, they learned the rules for flying and flew aircraft at sanctioned sites,” Heiges said. “Yet in the past few years, we now have multi-rotors and quad-rotors with automatic stabilization that don’t require the same skills. People are flying them out of the box without knowing the rules. That can be dangerous if flown beyond visual range. Any significant accident will set back the industry, punishing those who do follow the rules.”

Even small drones could cause a helicopter or aircraft to go down if it gets caught in a propeller or pulled into an engine. Indeed, drones have been in the news this past summer for interfering with firefighting efforts in California, including a San Bernadino wildfire where drones operated by curious hobbyists caused fire pilots to pull out of the fray for 30 minutes, allowing the fire to spread.

“The one thing that doesn’t get talked about enough is the differentiation between hobbyists and commercial drone users — and that most of the problems are caused by laymen,” said Agvent. “Our goal is to create a framework that allows for safe integration of commercial drones for newsgathering. It’s about having trusted vendors, trusted aircraft, and trusted procedures in place to act in a safe manner.”

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The work could help scientists better understand signaling between cells, and provide insights for designing new classes of therapeutics. For instance, the simulations showed that particles within the crowded cells tend to linger near cell walls, while confinement in the viscous liquid inside cells causes particles to move about more slowly than they would in unconfined spaces.

The research is believed to be the first to consider the effects of confinement on intracellular macromolecular dynamics. Supported by the National Science Foundation, the results are reported November 16 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Edmond Chow, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Computational Science and Engineering, and Jeffrey Skolnick, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Biology. Their goal is to develop and study models for simulating the motions of molecules inside a cell, and also to develop advanced algorithms and computational techniques for performing large-scale simulations.

“We are setting the stage for what we need to do to simulate a real cell,” said Skolnick. “We would like to put enough of a real cell together to be able to understand all of the cellular biochemical principles of life. That would allow us to ask questions that we can’t ask now.”

Earlier simulations, which produced much less fidelity, had assumed that movement within a cell was the same as movement in an unconfined space.

Skolnick compared the interior of a living cell to a large New Year’s Eve party, perhaps even in Times Square.

“It’s kind of like a crowded party that has big people and little people, snakes – DNA strands – running around, some really large molecules and some very small molecules,” he said. “It’s a very heterogeneous and dense environment with as much as 40 percent of the volume occupied.”

The simulations showed that molecules near the cell walls tend to remain there for extended periods of time, just as a newcomer might be pushed toward the walls of the New Year’s Eve party. Motions of nearby particles also tended to be correlated, and those correlations appeared linked to hydrodynamic forces.

“The lifetimes of these interactions get enhanced, and that is what’s needed there for biological interactions to occur within the cell,” said Skolnick. “This lingering near the wall could be important for understanding other interactions because if there are signaling proteins arriving from other cells, they would associate with those particles first. This could have important consequences for how signals are transduced.”

For particles in the middle of the cell, however, things are different. These molecules interact primarily with nearby molecules, but they still feel the effects of the cell wall, even if it is relatively far away.

“Things move more slowly in the middle of the cell than they would if the cell were infinitely big,” Skolnick said. “This may increase the likelihood of having metabolic fluxes because you have to bring molecules around partners. If they are moving slowly, they have more time to react because intimate interactions by accident are unavoidable.”

While the rate of activity slows quantitatively, qualitatively it is the same kind of motion.

“Slowed motion is a double-edged sword,” Skolnick explained. “If you happen to be nearby, it is likely that you are going to have interactions if you are slower. But if you are not nearby, being slower makes it difficult to be nearby, affecting potential interactions.”

The researchers also compared the activities of systems of particles with different sizes, finding that having particles of different sizes didn’t make an appreciable difference in the overall behavior of the molecules.

While the simulations didn’t include the DNA strands or metabolite particles also found in cells, they did include up to a half-million objects. Using Brownian and Stokesian physics principles, Skolnick and Chow considered what the particles would do within the confined spherical cell a few microns in diameter.

“From the results of the computer simulations, we can measure things that we think might be interesting, such as the diffusion rates near the walls and away from the walls,” said Chow. “We often don’t know what we are looking for until we find something that forces us to ask more questions and analyze more data.”

Such simulations take a lot of computational time, so the algorithms used must be efficient enough to be completed in a reasonable time. The “art” of the algorithms is trading off fidelity with processing time. Even though the simulations were very large, they managed to study the actions of the confined particles for no more than milliseconds.

“Part of the art of this is guessing what will be a reasonable approximation that will mimic the system, but not be so simple to be trivial or too complicated that you can’t take more than a few steps of the simulation,” Chow explained.

Scientists, of course, can study real cells. But the simulation offers something the real thing can’t do: The ability to turn certain forces on or off to isolate the effects of other processes. For instance, in the simulated cell Skolnick and Chow hope to build, they’ll be able to turn on and off the hydrodynamic forces, allowing them to study the importance of these forces to the functioning of real cells.

Results from the simulation can suggest hypotheses to be confirmed or rejected by experiment, which can then lead to further questions and simulations.

“This becomes a tool you can use to understand real cells,” said Chow. “It’s a virtual system, and you can play all the games you want with it.”

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant ACI-1147834. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Science Foundation.

CITATION: Edmond Chow and Jeffrey Skolnick, “Effects of confinement on models of intracellular macromolecular dynamics,” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1514757112

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These inventions are among the 20 semi-finalists competing in an annual competition to find the next generation of music instruments.

The Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, held at the Georgia Institute of Technology, seeks to find the world’s best new ideas in musical instrument design, engineering and musicianship. Entries represent a dozen countries and expand our assumed notion of what constitutes an instrument and the sounds it can produce.

“This year we have seen a tremendous variety of high-quality submissions – from beautifully designed acoustic instruments to sophisticated electronic instruments utilizing wearable, mobile and robotic technologies,” said Gil Weinberg, director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology.

The center, the School of Music, and the College of Architecture sponsor the competition. Contestants compete for $10,000 in prizes.

“In its seventh year, the competition has established itself as the place to go for those who want to get a glimpse of the future of musical performance and expression,” Weinberg said.

During this year's competition organizers will honor Richard Guthman, who recently passed away. Guthman, who graduated from Georgia Tech in 1956 with a degree in industrial engineering, founded the Margaret Guthman Keyboard Competition in 1988 as a tribute to his wife. The event evolved into the current musical instrument competition.

Judging the 20 semi-finalists are: DJ Hurricane, a producer and rapper who is best known for his work with the Beastie Boys; Graham Marsh, a Grammy award-winning producer, mixer and engineer who has worked with Ludacris, Bruno Mars and CeeLo Green; and Joe Paradiso, a physicist who designs electronic music synthesizers and directs the MIT Media Lab’s Responsive Environments Group.

And for the first time, the competition will also include a student challenge. Over 70 Georgia Tech students registered to participate in the Guthman Musical Instrument Design Challenge, sponsored by synthesizer maker Moog and the Georgia Tech Office of the Arts. Student winners will receive cash and in-kind prizes valued at more than $6,000. Participants will also get the chance to present their invention during the main Guthman Competition event.

Judges for the Student Design Challenge are: Michael Adams, CEO of Moog Music; Aaron Lanterman, a Georgia Tech professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering who specializes in digital signal processing; and Lee Lerner, a research scientist with the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

The main Guthman Competition will be held February 19 and 20 at the Klaus Advanced Computing Building on campus. The finals will be held February 20 from 7:00 – 9:00 pm on campus and are free and open to the public. The finals will also be live streamed. More information about the contest and live streaming can be found at http://guthman.gatech.edu.

Growing up in Tennessee during the 1980s, he watched the movies his family taped off television. Horror was his favorite. He was likely one of the few kindergarten students familiar with the oeuvre of Freddy Krueger and Jason from “Friday the 13^th.”

Today Browning is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Media and Communication who is an internationally recognized vampire and horror scholar. He has published nearly a dozen books and his latest, “The Vampire in Europe: A Critical Edition,” comes out this month.

This semester Browning teaches “Fashioning Monsters, Preserving Normalcy,” which examines the way we construct monsters and otherness in literature, film and society. For example, his class discussed why Leatherface from “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” became more horrifying after putting on lipstick.

“Monsters tell us a lot about society,” Browning said. “In a way, monsters are just like politicians. They show us who is powerful, who should have power and who is powerless.”

Of all the monsters out there, Dracula captured Browning’s fascination. He watched the 1979 movie starring Frank Langella over and over again. But it was the 1992 version directed by Francis Ford Coppola that made a lasting impact.

“I stopped thinking of Dracula as this fictional thing,” Browning said. “He was Vlad Dracula, a person who had a real history. The movie turned some switch on, and I really honed in on vampires and Dracula.”

He sometimes wears a replica of the silver ring Dracula wore in the movies in the 1940s. The center of the ring is a blood cornelian stone about the size of a half dollar. On top of the stone sits a crest containing a crown, a bat and the letter “D.”

The 34-year-old cuts an imposing figure at 6’4”, but his soft-spoken nature and quick smile reveal an easygoing, scholarly side. 

A film theory course during his junior year at Florida State University showed he could have an academic career because of his love of Dracula.

For part of his doctoral dissertation, Browning conducted ethnographic studies of people who identify themselves as real-life vampires. For his book Dracula in Visual Media, Browning documented more than 700 Dracula films, television programs, documentaries, animations and video games.

Next semester he’ll teach “Vampires and Zombies across History and Culture.”

“I was always someone who liked to ask questions and notice changes,” he said. “You can see culture evolve by looking at Dracula.”

When society goes through economic crises movie studios turn to horror, especially vampires, so villains can get their comeuppance.

“What’s strange now is that we want our vampires to live,” he said. “We’re rooting for the monsters, while it’s normalcy or the people who created the monsters who are being killed off.“ 

In its new location in the Centergy building on the edge of the Georgia Tech campus, the AT&T Foundry connects to the Institute’s students, research program – and dozens of early-stage technology companies being incubated through Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center, VentureLab and Flashpoint initiatives. Georgia Tech's incubation/acceleration services are rated among the top such efforts worldwide by observers such as Forbes Magazine and Stockholm-based UBI Index.

Moreover, AT&T's new location places it close to Georgia Tech's many faculty-student research teams, as well as a variety of business and startup-support groups located in midtown Atlanta. And the Foundry is just a few floors away from other major multinational companies – its Centergy building neighbors include the Panasonic Innovation Center and the ThyssenKrupp (TK) Elevator Americas innovation facility, while NCR Corp.'s Hosted Solutions Group is headquartered a block away at the Biltmore on West Peachtree Street.

"When we locate a Foundry facility, our number one criterion is to be part of an ecosystem that fosters innovation – which usually occurs at the intersection of premier education, high technology and an entrepreneurial mindset – and those are all things that we found at Technology Square," said Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO, AT&T Mobility. "When I saw the startup company incubators there, and the entrepreneurs and the high-quality technical people from Georgia Tech who are driving them, I knew this is where we needed to be. In fact, we're already talking with a startup whose technology could significantly benefit our product offerings."

Collaborative Environments

In addition to Georgia Tech, the Foundry is collaborating extensively with networking leader Cisco Systems Inc., which employs nearly 2,000 people in the metro area.  Working with Cisco, AT&T will concentrate on developing products for Digital Life, AT&T’s home security and automation service.

The team will also create new applications and services related to such focus areas as the connected car, mobility, emerging devices, and AT&T U-verse. Cisco will collaborate with AT&T on projects, and will also help identify key third-party developers, startups, investors, inventors and other entrepreneurs to bring into the facility.  

The $3 million total Foundry investment stems from the joint efforts of AT&T, Cisco and Georgia Tech, along with state and local involvement. The Foundry in Atlanta is only the fourth such venture for AT&T – the company has similar centers in Palo Alto, Calif.; Plano, Texas, and Tel Aviv, Israel.

The many startups found on Technology Square are largely a result of the ATDC startup accelerator, which provides coaching, connections and even office space to many young Georgia companies. ATDC's work is aided by Flashpoint, which helps early-stage startups minimize risk and accelerate growth, and by VentureLab, which focuses on turning discoveries by Georgia Tech faculty, research staff and students into new companies.

The collaborative environment of Tech Square extends to many Georgia Tech faculty-student research teams, which cooperate on hundreds of research projects with companies on campus and around the globe. These research teams often collaborate among themselves as well, reflecting Georgia Tech's strong emphasis on interdisciplinary cooperation among colleges, schools, departments and research institutes throughout campus.

"I think it's widely recognized that the Technology Square innovation zone offers one of the world's top business-support infrastructures," said Stephen Fleming, vice president and executive director of Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, which oversees ATDC and VentureLab. "A critical mass has been forming around Georgia Tech based on a multi-faceted innovation environment, and companies come here because they're attracted by that range of capabilities, not just by a single center or research team or partner."

Increasing Accessibility

AT&T's interest in coming to Technology Square was supported by Georgia Tech outreach efforts aimed at helping potential partners with insight and ease of access to the innovations, new technologies and startup ventures developed and supported by Georgia Tech. Greg King of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Partners office worked with AT&T as it examined the Georgia Tech and Atlanta environment. 

"When you look at everything we're doing in the intersection of people and technology, the startup community, and the exciting faculty and student innovation – a Technology Square location was a great choice for AT&T, as it has been for other corporate partners like NCR, Panasonic and ThyssenKrupp," King said. "The Institute for People and Technology, the Georgia Tech Research Institute and ATDC’s Industry Connect program that helps larger companies connect with relevant startup companies – all played a part in the selection of this area for AT&T’s Foundry.”

Making Georgia Tech accessible to potential industry partners is a top priority, said Stephen E. Cross, executive vice president for research. The institute's expanded outreach toward industry – which organizes more than 200 research centers and laboratories into about a dozen core research areas – helps make Georgia Tech more accessible and understandable.

”Georgia Tech was founded with a mandate to foster economic development and to conduct research with relevance," said Cross. "Our innovation ecosystem helps give Georgia businesses – and multinational partners such as AT&T and others – straightforward access to our world-class basic and applied research capabilities and our 'One Georgia Tech' collaborative environment."

Panasonic Innovation Center at Centergy

Panasonic Automotive Systems Company of America opened an innovation center in the Centergy Building in November 2012. Initially Panasonic opened the facility to gain access to Georgia Tech students and to north Atlanta residents for its Peachtree City, Ga.-based headquarters, said John Avery, group manager for the Panasonic Innovation Center.

But once the new innovation location was up and running, he said, it became clear that the Georgia Tech and Technology Square environment could directly benefit product development at the Automotive Systems division, which focuses on infotainment systems, sensors, switches, power systems and other products for vehicles.

"We're increasing our innovation focus, connecting with the startup community in midtown and participating in all the good things that are going on there – ATDC and Flashpoint and the Midtown Alliance and the Hypepotamus startup support group," he said. "There's a lot of great things happening at once, which are making midtown into a really significant location."

Panasonic's Centergy offices currently have space for about 40, Avery said. The center employs a number of Panasonic staffers, along with Georgia Tech students in intern and co-op roles.

Panasonic recently sponsored the Convergence Innovation Competition (CIC) for students, and plans to sponsor other student efforts such as senior capstone projects. In addition, Avery said, innovation center executives plan to approach companies incubated at Georgia Tech and in the metro area about potential business opportunities with Automotive and other Panasonic divisions.

NCR Expands in Midtown

NCR opened an R&D center in the Centergy Building nearly three years ago to hire Georgia Tech students and work on mobile applications and cloud computing technologies. That effort was successful – so much so that the center soon moved to a larger space in the nearby Biltmore, which became home to the NCR Hosted Solutions Group.

"That first little office in Centergy really exceeded our expectations – we soon had formed a phenomenal team made up mostly of new Georgia Tech grads and interns," said Mike Finley, chief technology officer for NCR’s Hosted Solutions Group. "It hit us right away what a focused and clever group of people we had. They were very entrepreneurial and very engaged – not only in the technology, but also in the kind of business that was being built."

Today, the Hosted Solutions Group's R&D center has more than 50 employees – mostly full-time – at its Biltmore location, and expects to add up to 15 new people each year, he said.

Currently, NCR is collaborating with a Georgia Tech faculty-student research team on a project involving the unstructured analysis of "big data," massive information sets that require special computation tools. In addition, the group is engaged with several small Georgia companies through the Flashpoint accelerator, and expects to be involved in Capstone Design courses in which Georgia Tech students develop real-world prototypes.

"We're working on a whole array of products – cloud and mobile applications, social applications and both consumer and business applications – and access to the skilled and highly motivated people we encounter at Georgia Tech is a vital part of our development strategy," Finley said.

ThyssenKrupp Elevator Selects Georgia Tech

ThyssenKrupp Elevator Americas is heavily invested in the U.S., with a manufacturing plant and research center in Tennessee. The company conducted a lengthy assessment of U.S. engineering colleges before deciding to site its innovation facility at Georgia Tech, said Thomas Felis, vice president for innovation management. 

"We evaluated the scores of major U.S. engineering programs on a national basis, and considered what you might call the personality of each university," he said. "Georgia Tech was a more hands-on school than MIT and certain others – which is what we were looking for. And when we also considered the infrastructure, the lab space available, and the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, we decided to come here."

Felis said that the ThyssenKrupp Elevator Innovation Center, which opened in January 2013, is already working with two Georgia Tech startup companies. The aim of the collaborations is to develop human interface improvements that could enhance elevator technology. 

"We also think a lot about lightweight material, vibration and noise cancellation, and about technologies like additive manufacturing and 3-D printing – and Georgia Tech is very strong in these areas," he said. "We have several research projects lined up with Tech, and we expect to start work on them very soon."

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“It gives me a sense of freedom that I can actually leave town and know that I can have medical information related to my cancer with me,” she said. “I’m excited to be part of creating something that other people across the country might use.”

Providing easy access to medical histories and treatment records is just one aspect of MyJourney Compass, a pilot project designed to help patients navigate the complex cancer treatment process and become more involved their health care decisions. Operated through the Georgia Department of Community Health, the project resulted from collaboration that includes two hospitals, a doctor’s group and cancer support organizations in Rome. The overall project, funded by the federal Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), is managed by health information specialists at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“This really has the potential for making people’s lives better through education and knowledge, which empowers people,” said Phil Lamson, a health care consultant with Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute. “Using MyJourney Compass, patients can have more direct communication with their providers on the common symptoms that often accompany this disease.”

MyJourney Compass represents the merger of coordinated community cancer care with technology. Rome already had a coordinated, integrated and centralized cancer care system that helps patients navigate the often confusing network of doctors and treatment options. The program’s hardware technology – inexpensive Nexus 7 tablet computers connected to a secure network – helps patients communicate with health care providers, access their health information and obtain credible information on the Internet.

A symptom tracker application developed at Georgia Tech and loaded on each tablet allows patients to provide frequent feedback to health care providers when necessary. For a patient prescribed a new pain medication, for example, the app may ask for updates several times a day to help the doctor judge whether the drug is doing what’s needed.

“Doctors know what they need to track, and when the patients report in periodically, there can be an intervention early if there is some deviation from what’s expected,” Lamson explained. “If more frequent communication between scheduled appointments prevents a trip to the emergency room or admission to the hospital, that’s a big benefit for everybody.”   

The project is funded by a federal challenge grant designed to encourage new health information technology applications. The pilot project launched officially on August 12.

“The project is funded by a $1.7 million grant from ONC through the Department of Community Health (DCH),” noted Kelly Gonzalez, health information technology coordinator for DCH. “It is one of ten challenge grants awarded by ONC to projects across the country, and is one of only two focusing on health care consumers.”

Rome was chosen for the national pilot project because the community had already come together to fight cancer. Collaboration among the community’s health care providers made it easier to launch the study.

“Everyone is amazed at the level of cooperation in our community,” said Gena Agnew, president of the Northwest Georgia Regional Cancer Coalition (NWGRCC). “Here we have a private physician’s clinic with a standalone cancer center, a private and public hospital, a group of patient navigators and the NWGRCC. The cooperation is so well known that we were the first community considered for participation in this.”

Collaborators in Rome include Floyd Medical Center, the Redmond Regional Medical Center, the Harbin Clinic, Cancer Navigators and the NWGRCC. At the state level, the project involves the Georgia Department of Community Health and Georgia Tech. Within Georgia Tech, the project includes specialists from the Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Tech Research Institute, College of Computing, and Institute for People and Technology.

MyJourney Compass uses established technology to provide electronic access to patient records, which are housed in Microsoft’s secure online HealthVault service. Secure email is provided through GeorgiaDirect, a service provided as part of the Georgia Health Information Network operated by DCH. The symptom tracker app was developed by Georgia Tech’s Interoperability and Integration Innovation Lab (I3L).

So far, 25 patients have signed up to use the system, and Lamson hopes as many as 100 breast cancer patients will be using the information exchange once the program is in full operation. Georgia Tech will be evaluating the patient outcomes and studying patient satisfaction.

Sinnock is already pleased with the 12-ounce tablet computer, which replaces a pile of printed materials she was given along with her diagnosis. “They handed me stacks of papers, handouts and books,” she confessed. “I just stuck it all in the closet and didn’t even look at it because that giant pile of information was just too overwhelming.”

The team implementing MyJourney Compass expects that the pilot project will demonstrate new ways of leveraging technology in health care and be applicable to treatment of other types of disease, including chronic health problems, hypertension and diabetes.

“The MyJourney Compass project is empowering patients to become actively engaged in their care, an important requirement of our consumer-focused State HIE Challenge Grants,” said Kory Mertz, challenge grant program manager at ONC in Washington, D.C. “The work in Rome will serve as a model to other patients, providers and communities across the country on leveraging health information technology to engage patients in their care.”

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Digital gaming has surged in recent years and is being adopted almost as fast as the mobile devices that are enabling its growth. The Georgia Tech researchers developed a simple turn-based game, then used participant scores to apply algorithms that predict how others with similar skill sets would perform and adjust the difficulty accordingly.

“People come in playing video games with different skills, abilities, interests and even desires, which is very contrary to the way video games are built now with a ‘one size fits many approach,’” said Mark Riedl, co-creator of the model and assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing.

The researchers used a method called collaborative filtering, a popular technique employed by Netflix and Amazon in product ratings and recommendations. While Netflix recommends movies, the gaming model recommends the next challenge for players, adjusting game difficulty by computationally forecasting in-game performance. Riedl said the approach can scale to tens of thousands of users.

The data-driven gaming model outperforms other current techniques specifically because it models player improvement over time, said Riedl. It uses an off-the-shelf algorithm, called tensor factorization, for the first time in gaming research to tailor challenges to individual players.

The gaming model also includes a performance arc with which an algorithm selects in-game events for gamers that brings the predicted player performance in line with the developer’s specifications for target performance (i.e., completing the game). Current games use player progress to make small adjustments to what’s going on in the game, sometimes called “rubberbanding.” The classic example: fall behind in a racing game and the other cars slow down; blow away the field with a large lead and the cars speed up.

“This is very reactionary,” said Riedl, who directs the Georgia Tech Entertainment Intelligence Lab. “You have to wait for things to fall apart, and then the game tries to correct it in this ad-hoc way.”

Riedl said that the new gaming model, which grows alongside the learner, has significant potential for educational and training applications as well. Students struggling with math concepts, for example, could use the model to master arithmetic and mitigate the chances of falling behind in a course, said Riedl.

“We’ve also done some work with the U.S. Army,” he said, “to generate virtual missions where we choose and tailor the types of things that have to happen in the mission so that we don’t overwhelm the novices or that we can really challenge the experts.”

“Our approach could allow novices to progress slowly and prevent them from abandoning a challenge right away,” said Riedl. “For those good at certain skills, the game can be tuned to their particular talents to provide the right challenge at the right time.”

Alex Zook, a Ph.D. candidate in human-centered computing, said that they were able to predict, with up to 93 percent accuracy, how players would perform in-game by modeling the changes in a player’s skills and applying the recommendation algorithm.

Zook was primary author on the paper he and Riedl presented on their findings at the 8th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment in Palo Alto, Calif. The paper is available at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/pubs/aiide12.pdf.

Known as Providing Real Opportunities for Income through Technology (PROFITT), the program is being evaluated at a maximum-security correctional facility in Texas. Once completed and approved, the PROFITT curriculum will be made available to other correctional facilities interested in starting or enhancing Braille training programs.  The project was funded by the Second Chance Act, administered by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance.

An expansion of earlier Braille training programs, PROFITT has been developed through a partnership of the National Braille Press, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the Alternative Media Access Center (AMAC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Beyond Braille skills, PROFITT teaches broader professional skills, including computer operation and computer graphics, small business management and “soft skills” designed to help ex-offenders work as independent consultants.

“PROFITT provides a blueprint for use by any correctional facility interested in implementing a comprehensive, competency-based Braille training program geared toward preparing offenders for long-term sustainable income upon release,” said Patrick Fraser, the program’s coordinator. “The goal is not only to reduce the rate of recidivism, but also to help meet the need for Braille materials.”

The PROFITT pilot program at the Mountain View Braille Facility in Gatesville, Tex., will conclude in mid-July. Input from the pilot will be incorporated into the curriculum, which must still be approved by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Braille is a good topic for prison training programs because it requires extensive instruction and practice, noted Tamara Rorie, a technology licensing associate at AMAC. The PROFITT program includes 750 hours of hands-on classroom training over a period of about 30 weeks.

“It’s a matter of not only learning the material, but also gaining experience,” she said. “It takes about a year for people to become certified in literary Braille, which is the base level. Once they get that, they can continue working on advanced certifications.”

Because the code is difficult to learn, there is an unmet need for people trained to produce Braille materials.

“There are still not enough Braille transcribers to provide the materials that students need, especially textbooks,” Rorie said. “For every hundred books that are published, only one is converted to Braille.”

The Braille code uses a system of raised dots to represent characters, words and portions of words that can be read by blind and visually impaired persons. Braille has been compared to stenographer’s shorthand, and includes several levels of higher certification for mathematics, tactile graphics, textbook formatting and even music.

“Braille is literacy for people who are visually impaired,” said Fraser. “People can listen to a book through a recording or screen reader, but they are not really grasping the full notions of spelling and grammar that are the basis for language and communication. Tactile graphics produced in Braille allow a fuller understanding of the material, and this is especially important to students.”

Braille transcription is often done by independent contractors who receive and deliver their work via the Internet. That freedom is helpful to ex-offenders, whose employment opportunities may otherwise be limited by their criminal records.

“A lot of people in the prison Braille programs have never worked a real job,” said Rorie. “Those who would like to become independent contractors must understand the kind of discipline required to work by themselves.”

There are about three dozen prison Braille training programs operating in the United States. In addition to preparing offenders for an occupation upon release, the programs provide Braille textbooks and other materials mandated by federal law for K-12 schools and other organizations. The services also can provide trainees a sense of purpose.

“The Braille program has given them a reason for being, and it gives them a reason to get up every morning because they love doing what they are doing and they love seeing the finished product,” said Delores Billman, industry supervisor at the Mountain View Prison. “They certainly like to know that someone is using what they have done to better themselves.”

PROFITT’s pilot program at the Mountain View facility is teaching about 15 women who had no previous experience with Braille. But the five-track curriculum is designed so that people with Braille skills can separately use the computer and graphics training, as well as the small business and “soft skills” portions. At Mountain View, another 23 women are studying these components in preparation for release.

Sabrina Hodges, a Braille transcriber at the Mountain View prison, sees the program as key to her future.

“I know that I am going to get something out of this, not just for parole, but when I go home,” she said. “I have made a lot of promises to my family and to myself when I got here, and this program has helped me make that happen.”

To be eligible for PROFITT, offenders must be free of behavioral infractions for a year, have a good command of the English language and be at least six months away from release. While the Mountain View facility is a women’s prison, Braille training programs operate at both men’s prisons and juvenile facilities, Rorie noted.

PROFITT provides a win-win for both offenders and the larger society, Fraser said.

“Braille is not inexpensive to produce, and programs like this can help provide textbook materials to meet the needs of blind and visually impaired students,” he explained.  “In addition to meeting the demand for these materials, these programs are providing ex-offenders with skills that will allow them to be tax-paying citizens when they get out.”

This project was supported by Grant No. 2010-RV-BX-0005 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the SMART Office, and the Office for Victims of Crime. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not represent the official position or policies of the United States Department of Justice.

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The event — whichcalls itself “a celebration of all things DIY” — will feature the skills and creationsof a variety of makers from the region, including blacksmithing, kineticsculptures, robots and 3D printers. About 50 makers will be in attendance withtheir wares, including many from the Tech community. This smaller version oflarger Maker Faires that have been held in Detroit, New York and California givesthe event its “mini” moniker.

“I thought Atlanta would be a great place for a Mini MakerFaire because there haven’t really been any in the South before, and I know theSouth is filled with just as many makers and crafters as the rest of thecountry,” said Eric Weinhoffer, the ME student organizing the event. “GeorgiaTech is an extremely good location to host an event like this, thanks to thetechnological advancements that come out of the Institute every year. Theschool itself is an inspiration to makers.”

The event is free to attend and will welcome students,faculty, staff and guests in the Manufacturing Related Disciplines Complex (MRDC)parking lot, Saturday, Sept. 10, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Most makers will beexhibiting their work, but some will have creations for sale as well. To learnmore about the makers who will be in attendance, visit the Atlanta Mini MakerFaire website.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed software that facilitates an innovative approach to active reading. Taking advantage of touch-screen tablet computers, the LiquidText software enables active readers to interact with documents using finger motions. LiquidText can significantly enhance the experiences of active readers, a group that includes students, lawyers, managers, corporate strategists and researchers.

"Most computer-based active reading software seeks to replicate the experience of paper, but paper has limitations, being in many ways inflexible," said Georgia Tech graduate student Craig Tashman. "LiquidText offers readers a fluid-like representation of text so that users can restructure, revisualize and rearrange content to suit their needs."

LiquidText was developed by Tashman and Keith Edwards, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing. The software can run on any Windows 7 touchscreen computer.

Details on LiquidText were presented in May 2011 at the Association for Computing Machinery's annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Vancouver, Canada. Development of LiquidText was supported by the National Science Foundation, Steelcase, Samsung and Dell.

Active reading demands more of the reading medium than simply advancing pages, Edwards noted. Active readers may need to create and find a variety of highlights and comments, and move rapidly among multiple sections of a document.

"With paper, it can be difficult to view disconnected parts of a document in parallel, annotation can be constraining, and its linear nature gives readers little flexibility for creating their own navigational structures," said Edwards.

• Watch videos describing how LiquidText works.

LiquidText provides flexible control of the visual arrangement of content, including both original text and annotations. To do this, the software uses a number of common fingertip gestures on the touchscreen and introduces several novel gestures. For example, to view two areas of a document at once, the user can pinch an area of text and collapse it.

Active reading involves annotation, content extraction and fast, fluid navigation among multiple portions of a document. To accomplish these tasks, LiquidText integrates a traditional document reading space with a dedicated workspace area where the user can organize excerpts and annotations of a text -- without losing the links back to their sources. In these spaces, the user can perform many actions, including:

• Highlight text
• Comment about text
• Extract text
• Collapse text
• Bookmark text
• Magnify text

For commenting, LiquidText breaks away from the traditional one-to-one mapping between content and comments. Comment objects can refer to any number of pieces of content across a document, or even multiple documents. Comments can be pulled off, rearranged and grouped with other items while maintaining a persistent link back to the content they refer to. To add a comment, users simply select the desired text and begin typing.

Content can also be copied and extracted using LiquidText. Once a section of text has been selected, the user creates an excerpt simply by dragging the selection into the workspace until it "snaps off" of the document. The original content remains in the document, although it is tinted slightly to indicate that an excerpt has been made from it. Excerpts can be freely laid out in the workspace area or be attached to one another or to documents to form groups, while each excerpt can also be traced back to its source.

"The problem with paper and some software programs is that the comments must generally fit in the space of a small margin and can only be linked to a single page of text at a time," said Tashman. "LiquidText's more flexible notion of comments and large workspace area provide space for organizing and manipulating any comments or document excerpts the user may have created."

In addition to traditional zooming and panning, the user can create a magnifying glass in the workspace by tapping with three fingers. The magnifying glass zooms in on select areas while allowing the user to maintain an awareness of the workspace as a whole. Users can manipulate the magnifying glass with simple multi-touch gestures, such as pinching or stretching to resize the lens, or rotating to change the zoom level -- like the zoom lens of a camera. Users can position, resize and control the zoom level of the magnifying glasses in a continuous motion by movements of the hand alone.

The ability to move within a document, search for text, turn a page, or flip between locations to compare parts of a text is also important for active reading. To complete these actions, LiquidText allows users to collapse text, dog-ear text and create magnified views of text.

"In contrast to traditional document viewing software, in which users must create separate panes and scroll them individually, LiquidText's functionality lets a user view two or more document areas with just one action, parallelizing an otherwise serial task," explained Edwards.

Since developing their initial prototype, the researchers have refined the software based on feedback from designers and human factors professionals, and active readers that included managers, lawyers, students and strategists.

Tashman is currently working with Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute to form a startup company to commercialize the technology. The $15,000 Georgia Tech Edison Prize he won, along with $43,000 in grants from the Georgia Research Alliance, will help launch the new company that plans to introduce LiquidText to the public later this year.

The Georgia Tech Edison Prize was established to encourage formation of startup companies based on technology developed at Georgia Tech, and was made possible by a multi-year grant from the Charles A. Edison Fund, named for the inventor's son. Presentation of the prize, the second to be awarded from the Fund, was part of the Georgia Tech Graduate Research and Innovation Conference held Feb. 8, 2011.

This project is supported in part by the National Science Foundation (Award No. IIS-0705569). The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF.

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The researchers believe the application could replace subjective tests now used to assess the severity of tremors, while potentially allowing more frequent patient monitoring without costly visits to medical facilities.

The program -- known as iTrem -- could be offered later this year by the App Store, an Apple Inc. website that sells iPhone applications. But iTrem will first undergo a clinical study at Emory University and must receive any required approvals from the Food and Drug Administration.

"We expect iTrem to be a very useful tool for patients and their caregivers," said Brian Parise, a research scientist who is principal investigator for the project along with Robert Delano, another GTRI research scientist. "And as a downloadable application, it also promises to be convenient and cost-effective."

iTrem utilizes the iPhone's built-in accelerometer to collect data on a patient in his or her home or office. The application directly tracks tremor information currently, and in the future will use simple puzzle games to record tremor data, which will then be processed and transmitted.

The researchers expect the clinical trial to show that data gathered by the program would allow physicians to remotely monitor the degree of disability, progression and medication response among patients with tremor-related conditions. In addition, iTrem offers a social component that allows people to share stories, pictures and data.

iTrem's developers are working with the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) to form a startup company based on iTrem and future applications that might take advantage of iPhone capabilities. ATDC is a startup accelerator based at Georgia Tech that helps Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build successful technology companies.

The GTRI team plans ongoing development of iTrem's interface, based on responses from doctors and patients. They're also investigating other consumer technologies with diagnostic potential, including the tiny gyroscopes now available in some cellular phones.

Future developments will include the addition of several other Parkinson's related tests and investigation of gait analysis in a joint effort with the University of South Florida and the James A. Haley Veterans' Hospital in Tampa, Fla. Additional developments may utilize the phone for detecting and analyzing dyskinesia, a movement disorder.

More than 10 million people in the U.S. have tremor-related disease, including Parkinson's, essential tremor and multiple sclerosis, Delano said. Data collected by iTrem could enhance research on tremor disorders, in addition to supporting treatment for current patients, he added.

Most current measurement techniques used by doctors are subjective and are performed infrequently, Delano said. Complex diagnostic procedures such as electroencephalography and electromyography are objective and thorough, but are rarely performed because they're lengthy, expensive and require a clinical setting. The result is that little data about tremor has been available to track the effectiveness of medication and therapy over time.

By contrast, he said, the ease of gathering tremor data with iTrem could help lead to a significant expansion of research in this area, as a wealth of objective data is collected and analyzed.

"Even factoring in the cost of an iPhone, using iTrem is likely to be more convenient and less expensive for patients than office visits, and the data are accurate and abundant," Delano said.

A clinical study involving iTrem use is expected to start soon at Emory University's Movement Disorder Clinic. The study will be led by Dr. Stewart Factor, a researcher in the field of Parkinson's disease at the Emory School of Medicine.

The GTRI development team presented a paper on iTrem in January at the 2011 International Conference on Health Informatics.

Delano explained that the development of iTrem was linked to his own diagnosis with Parkinson's disease several years ago. He eventually became frustrated with the subjective approaches commonplace in the characterizing of patient tremor symptoms.

"Currently, doctors observe tremor during office visits and rate it on a subjective scale of zero to four. That approach seemed outdated to me, considering all the technology now available," Delano said. "My wife Heather, who's an engineer, remarked that maybe that we could try putting some accelerometers on my arm. That made me think of the accelerometer in the iPhone -- and here we are."

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Improving archivists' ability to categorize and access hundreds of different computer file formats is critical in the digital age. Increasingly, archives receive large quantities of government and other records in a wide variety of digital formats.

"The ultimate problem we're addressing here is technical obsolescence," said William Underwood, a principal research scientist leading the file-recognition effort for GTRI. "As software programs have been superseded over the years, it’s become critical to automate the enormous task of categorizing, verifying and viewing hundreds of past and present file formats."

One major facilitator of that task is the PRONOM service, developed by The National Archives of the U.K. This file-format registry, which can be utilized online by archivists and others worldwide, employs a database containing details of more than 750 different digital file formats. Those formats, in turn, are accessed by a file-format identification tool called DROID.

Underwood explained that archivists face the task of distinguishing among data files in hundreds of different formats. At the most basic level, categorizing these data formats requires software tools that examine file extensions, which are the identifying characters such as "doc" or "pdf" found at the end of filenames.

Yet a file extension -- an external identifier that is easily modified or deleted -- can be inaccurate. More critical is the capability to identify correctly the distinctive internal signature that characterizes a file's format.

GTRI, in cooperation with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), is helping the United Kingdom expand the roster of internal signatures in the PRONOM database. GTRI has added more than 50 such signatures to PRONOM in the past months, increasing the number of signatures in the database by almost a quarter, with more additions expected next year. This work is being performed at the request of the National Archives Center for Advanced Systems and Technologies (NCAST), a NARA unit.

Currently, about a third of PRONOM's 750 file formats have internal signatures. Increasing the number of internal signatures is important, Underwood said, because it helps the DROID tool identify files more accurately. In turn, increased accuracy enables digital archivists to better identify older, obsolete file formats and develop appropriate migration strategies and preservation tools.

"We are grateful to NARA and the Georgia Tech Research Institute for the work they have recently undertaken on file-format research," said David Thomas, director of technology at The National Archives of the UK. "The decision to share their work...has significantly improved the PRONOM database and will be of enormous benefit to the wider digital preservation community."

The technology contributed to The National Archives of the UK is derived from GTRI's research into Advanced Language Processing Technology Applied to Digital Records, a project sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and by NCAST. This work applies computational linguistics technology to summarizing, accessing, reviewing and preserving electronic records of the Department of Defense, federal agencies and presidential administrations.

"In PRONOM/DROID, The National Archives of the U.K. has responded to an essential need for preserving and providing sustained access to valuable digital information," said Kenneth Thibodeau, director of NCAST. "We are happy to be able to contribute to enhancing a tool that we use in NARA's Electronic Records Archives system. This helps us and also benefits anyone who needs to preserve digital assets."

The first version of PRONOM was developed by The National Archives' Digital Preservation Department for internal use in March 2002 and was launched as a free online service to the public in February 2004. In 2007 The National Archives won the Digital Preservation Award for its development of the PRONOM and DROID tools.

In 2011, PRONOM data will be released in a linked, open format. This move will make it easier for others to reuse the data, and will provide a means to extend and develop the dataset. More information is available at http://labs.nationalarchives.gov.uk/wordpress/.

"The GTRI computational-linguistics team will certainly continue to contribute to PRONOM," Underwood said. "We're eager to use our experience in language-processing technology to support the evolution of this internationally important file format database."

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The work is part of a $19.5 million federally-funded project -- headed by the Morehouse School of Medicine’s National Center for Primary Care (NCPC) -- to help primary-care providers in smaller practices adopt comprehensive electronic health record (EHR) systems. The project is being coordinated by the Georgia Health Information Technology Regional Extension Center (GA-HITREC).

Georgia Tech is also helping establish a group purchasing program that health care providers can use to more simply and easily obtain their EHR software.

"The ultimate goal is higher quality, more cost-effective health care for Georgia," said Stephen Fleming, a Georgia Tech vice president and executive director of its Enterprise Innovation Institute, which will provide the services. "This will not only benefit individual citizens of the state directly, but will also make Georgia more attractive to companies of all sizes because health care costs are often the second-largest expense, after payroll, for business and industry across the board."

The Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2) will receive approximately $2.8 million for its contributions to the project.

The GA-HITREC project will help as many as 5,200 primary-care providers in smaller practices select electronic health record systems, properly install the software and implement new workflow processes that achieve meaningful use of the technology. Using its existing statewide network of regional technical assistance offices, Georgia Tech will be among several organizations providing direct support to providers as they adopt the technology.

"The effort will include an assessment tool to help determine what each provider practice needs to do to achieve meaningful use as defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This would include education and training, changes in clinical and administrative processes, addressing computer hardware and facility issues, and providing connectivity to emerging health information exchanges," explained Steve Rushing, director of Georgia Tech’s health@ei2 program. "Staff from the Enterprise Innovation Institute will conduct one-on-one and group presentations to explain electronic health records, assist in selecting EHR products and conduct follow-up to ensure that new systems are meeting the mandated criteria."

Some $20 billion in funding through the "Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act" (HITECH) will support similar programs nationwide to encourage the deployment of interconnected electronic health records. Funding for the program is from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009.

"The widespread adoption and meaningful use of EHRs can significantly impact the gaps in disparities among our nation’s communities," said Dr. Dominic Mack, director of GA-HITREC and deputy director of the National Center for Primary Care. "A major goal of the federal initiatives is to put underserved communities on an equal playing field when it comes to health information technology (HIT). I think with valuable partners such as Georgia Tech, we are on the right path."

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) was established by executive order in 2004 with the goal of laying the policy and standards groundwork for such a nationwide health records system. The objectives are to cut $10 billion per year from the government’s health care costs, and to generate additional savings through improvements in quality of care and care coordination, and through reductions in medical errors and duplicative care.

Across the United States and in Georgia, use of comprehensive electronic health records systems is currently limited, with less than 10 percent of hospitals and doctors using networked systems able to provide meaningful support for higher quality care. Over the coming decade, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget expects that initiatives such as the Morehouse program will boost usage of the systems to 90 percent for doctors and 70 percent for hospitals.

"A comprehensive electronic health records system is important for the long-term management of chronic health problems such as diabetes and heart disease," said Mark Braunstein, assistant director of the Health Systems Institute, a program operated jointly by Georgia Tech and Emory University. "As much as 75 percent of U.S. health care dollars now pay for this type of care, and without adoption of technology for more coordination of care, that cost will continue to grow as the population ages."

Care for chronic diseases takes place over years, is often provided by many different sources and -- ultimately -- the outcome depends heavily on patient behavior.

"We need health information infrastructure that will allow every doctor to know what other providers are doing to efficiently and effectively care for a patient with chronic disease," Braunstein explained. "If most physicians are still using paper records, this will be virtually impossible."

By adopting electronic records capable of so-called "meaningful use," the initiative will also help doctors stay current with new information on the best and most cost-effective methods.

"With the rapid advances in medical knowledge, it is very difficult for physicians -- particularly rural primary-care physicians who must treat virtually all medical problems in their communities -- to keep up," Braunstein noted. "Helping every physician successfully adopt technology that can help them stay current is a top priority."

In a study released earlier this year, EI2 also documented that the state's health information technology industry includes more than 100 companies and employs approximately 10,000 people. Investments in electronic health record systems will therefore have an additional economic development benefit beyond helping control health care costs.

"Georgia businesses stand to benefit substantially from this national investment in health information infrastructure," Fleming noted.

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Sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DARPA Network Challenge attracted hundreds of teams to tackle the problem of how to locate the balloons, which were positioned Dec. 5 at locations ranging from San Francisco and Portland to Memphis and Miami.

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won the $40,000 prize for correctly locating all 10 balloons. A team led by researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) found nine of the 10 balloons during the nine-hour competition.

DARPA's interest in the competition was in assessing how social networks could be used to address massive information-gathering tasks. In addition to its research component, the challenge also marked the 40th anniversary of the ARPANET, the forerunner of today's Internet.

GTRI researchers Erica Briscoe and Ethan Trewhitt began discussing the challenge in early November, and quickly organized a core team of seven co-workers. They established a Web site and began using Facebook and word-of-mouth communications to build a network that eventually included more than a thousand people pledged to help.

One of their initial decisions was that if they should win, the prize would be donated to the American Red Cross -- rather than being split among the team members and balloon spotters. Team members believe that was important to attracting altruistic volunteers.

“One thing that surprised us was that many balloon reporters specifically chose our team because we had decided to donate the winnings,” said Betty Whitaker, a GTRI principal research scientist who helped coordinate the team. “We pledged any winnings to charity to encourage recruitment and avoid complicated issues with money after the contest.”

Another key was establishing the Web site “I Spy A Red Balloon,” which built a high ranking on Google thanks to references on established Web sites. That allowed the team to attract people who may have seen a red balloon on Dec. 5 and wondered what was going on.

“Though we focused on getting the word out to the public prior to launch day, our strong presence on that day made it possible for people who were unaware of the competition to find our team after running across a balloon,” explained Trewhitt, a GTRI research engineer.

The team also connected established networks and used the news media to get information out to potential balloon-spotters. Beyond those who pledged to help, thousands more people knew about the effort and would have made contact had they seen a balloon.

But as with popular social networking services, not everybody could be trusted.

“Because teams were commonly infiltrated by members of competing teams, one of the toughest parts of this competition was not being able to trust any particular members of the group,” Trewhitt added. “This led us to realize that trust in large groups is a tricky issue -- and a topic for future research.”

On competition day, which began at 10 a.m. with balloons being raised in the 10 previously-undisclosed locations, team members searched Twitter and Facebook for news of balloon sightings. They called friends, family and local businesses to validate alleged sightings, and analyzed incoming photographs to spot fakes and confirm the location of authentic red balloons.

They also used a variety of tools, some of which they built, to help track sightings. Their Web site, for instance, used Google Maps to summarize reports.

Though the GTRI team didn't win the top prize, its leaders believe the effort established credibility and planted seeds for future research projects.

“We would like to study issues of trust in large social networks, as well as how to extract and validate useful and correct information from un-moderated online media such as Twitter,” said Erica Briscoe, a GTRI research scientist. “Twitter is often the fastest medium for notification of real-time events because it is unfiltered and raw. It would be useful to research methods for determining the accuracy and authenticity of rumors in this type of environment.”

The competition also showed how much could be done on a budget of just $200, which was what the “I Spy A Red Balloon” team spent in total.

For its part, the agency also seemed pleased with what the teams had done.

“[The DARPA Network] Challenge explores basic research issues such as mobilization, collaboration and trust in diverse social networking constructs, and could serve to fuel innovation across a wide spectrum of applications,” the agency said in a news release. “DARPA plans to meet with teams to review the approaches and strategies used to build networks, collect information and participate in the Challenge.”

Beyond those already mentioned, the team also included Stephen Cuzzort, Jessica Pater, Rick Presley and Miles Thompson, all from the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

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Scientists at the Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC) at Georgia Tech are investigating the use of extremely high radio frequencies (RF) to achieve broad bandwidth and high data transmission rates over short distances.

Within three years, this 'multi-gigabit wireless' approach could result in a bevy of personal area network (PAN) applications, including next generation home multimedia and wireless data connections able to transfer an entire DVD in seconds.

The research focuses on RF frequencies around 60 gigahertz (GHz), which are currently unlicensed -- free for anyone to use -- in the United States. GEDC researchers have already achieved wireless data-transfer rates of 15 gigabits per second (Gbps) at a distance of 1 meter, 10 Gbps at 2 meters and 5 Gbps at 5 meters.

"The goal here is to maximize data throughput to make possible a host of new wireless applications for home and office connectivity," said Prof. Joy Laskar, GEDC director and lead researcher on the project along with Stephane Pinel.

GEDC's multi-gigabit wireless research is expected to lend itself to two major types of applications, data and video, said Pinel, a GEDC research scientist.

Very high speed, peer-to-peer data connections could be just around the corner, he believes - available potentially in less than two years.

Devices such as external hard drives, laptop computers, MP-3 players, cell phones, commercial kiosks and others could transfer huge amounts of data in seconds. And data centers could install racks of servers without the customary jumble of wires.

"Our work represents a huge leap in available throughput," Pinel said. "At 10 Gbps, you could download a DVD from a kiosk to your cell phone in five seconds, or you could quickly synchronize two laptops or two iPods."

The input-output (I/O) system of current devices cannot approach such speeds.

Moreover, Pinel said, users of multi-gigabit technology could wirelessly connect to any device that currently uses Firewire or USB.

Wireless high-definition video could also be a major application of this technology. Users could keep a DVD player by their side while transmitting wirelessly to a screen 5 or 10 meters away.

Currently, Pinel said, the biggest challenge is to further increase data rates and decrease the already-low power consumption, with a goal to double current transmission rates by next year. The Georgia Tech team is seeking to preserve backward compatibility with the WiFi standard used in most wireless LANs today.

GEDC researchers are pursuing this goal by modifying the system architecture to increase intelligence and effectiveness in the CMOS RF integrated circuits that transmit the data. The researchers are using advanced computer-aided design tools and testbed equipment to recalibrate system models and achieve the desired improvements in speed and functionality.

Investigators are placing special emphasis on implementing an RF concept called single-input-single-output (SISO) / multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO), which enables ultra-high data throughput. At the same time, they seek to preserve backward compatibility with WLAN 802.11, the WiFi standard used in most wireless LANs today.

"We are pursuing a combination of system design and circuit design, employing both analog and digital techniques," Pinel said. "It's definitely a very exciting mixed-signal problem that you have to solve."

Even when sitting on a user's desk, Pinel stresses, a multi-gigabit wireless system would present no health concerns. For one thing, the transmitted power is extremely low, in the vicinity of 10 milliwatts or less. For another, the 60 GHz frequency is stopped by human skin and cannot penetrate the body.

The fact that multi-gigabit transmission is easily stopped enhances its practicality in an office or apartment setting, he adds. The signals will be blocked by any wall, preventing interference with neighbors' wireless networks.

Currently there are no world standards in this bandwidth, explains GEDC Director Laskar. To address the situation, representatives of the ECMA International computer-standards organization met at GEDC in February to discuss a new international 60 GHz standard. The three-day gathering included representatives from the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute of Korea, GEDC, Intel Corp., IBM Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (Panasonic), Newlans, Philips Semiconductors, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd and Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co. Ltd. The ECMA International organization will meet again at GEDC in October to finalize the technical decisions.

The IEEE, the top international association of electrical engineers, is also weighing a 60 GHz standard, to be called 802.15.3C.

Laskar believes that additional applications will emerge as multi-gigabit technology becomes standardized and gains maturity.

"The promise of multi-gigabit wireless is tremendous," he said. "The combination of short-range functionality and enormous bandwidth makes possible a whole range of consumer and business applications that promise great utility."

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Media Relations Contacts: Rick Robinson (404-694-2284); E-mail: (rick.robinson@innovate.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail: (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: Rick Robinson

Fast-forward to today: Video gaming has become one of the fastest-growing forms of entertainment. According to a recent study sponsored by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA):

- Sales of video-game software in the United States totaled $8.2 billion in 2004 - not far behind the music industry, which generated $11.4 billion the same year.

- By 2010, U.S. sales of video games are expected to grow to $15 billion.

- Video gaming is expected to generate more than 250,000 jobs by 2009, a 75 percent increase over the industry's 144,000 full-time positions in 2004.

The New Golf

What's caused video games to evolve from a boutique market to a bona fide industry? Experts point to a myriad of reasons, including more powerful central processing units (CPUs) and advanced technology for sound, video, 3-D art and motion in game play.

"Digital media lets you describe the world in ways that older media couldn't," observes Janet Murray, a professor and director of graduate studies at Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Communication and Culture (LCC). "Technology allows us to create imaginary worlds that people can act in. We can set up games that are more challenging and have more variety because they are procedurally created by making up rules in the computer. In contrast to a traditional board game, like Monopoly, which can only do one thing, the computer is tireless."

Michael Nitsche, an assistant professor at LCC, points out that Hollywood films and related video games are often released at the same time. "This blurring of boundaries between media is putting video games more into the limelight," says Nitsche. "Plus, we have a longer history of video gaming now, which means a bigger, older and sometimes more mature fan base."

Stereotypes suggest that video gaming is primarily for adolescents, but ESA statistics show the market is much broader. According to the organization, 69 percent of American heads of household played video games in 2005. The average age of gamers was 33 years, and 25 percent of players were older than 50.

Celia Pearce, an LCC assistant professor who heads up the Experimental Game Lab, studies both female and older players. "There's a popular misconception that older gamers, especially women, are only playing casual games," she says. "It turns out that Baby Boomer gamers are hard core players, though they have very different practices and preferences than the groups for which the industry typically develops and markets games. Plus, they are spending a lot more money."

Pearce sees a demographic shift as gamers get older, and older people get into gaming. The Nintendo Wii machine is leading this shift with aggressive marketing to Baby Boomers and women. "They even had a booth at the American Association for Retired Persons (AARP) National Event and Expo, which is an all-time first for a game company," Pearce notes.

Video games, it seems, have gone beyond mainstream and captured audiences early developers never imagined.

"In many ways, video gaming is becoming the new golf," says Christopher Klaus, founder and CEO of Kaneva, an Atlanta startup focused on building a 3-D virtual entertainment world. (Klaus also founded Internet Security Systems, which IBM purchased recently for $1.3 billion.)

"While players are on a game quest, they're also building friendships and bonds with other people - similar to golf," explains Klaus. In addition to developing an innovative virtual entertainment world, Kaneva also plans to let subscribers use its platform to engineer their own virtual world or video games.

The term 'video games' comes with a lot of baggage, Klaus continues: "Most people think video games are just for kids. Yet this technology is becoming part of our social fabric and culture. It goes beyond being just a game; it becomes part of your identity."

Beyond Entertainment

What's more, gaming technology has transferred to other industries, ranging from health care to defense, where it is used for educational and training simulations.

Take Persuasive Games, an Atlanta startup launched by Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech's LCC. Among its products, Persuasive Games has developed a game for Cold Stone Creamery that teaches employees about portion sizes and how they affect profitability.

Another game helps grade-school students learn about the science behind telecommunications technologies.

Bogost, who is interested in how games can argue position and attempt to convince people of a particular belief, has also created a number of public-policy games, such as 'Take Back Illinois.' Sponsored by the Illinois Republican Party, this game challenges players to explore four issues tied to the 2004 state elections.

Sparking innovation in hardware, SimCraft - a member company of Georgia Tech's Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) - is introducing a low-cost, military-grade, full-motion simulator that provides a simulated G-force for SimRacing and FlightSim at home.

SimCraft's system features a patent-pending chassis that rotates around three degrees of freedom. At its most advanced setup, the system allows the cockpit's occupant to yaw up to 50 degrees to the left and right, pitch up to 30 degrees fore and aft, and roll up to 50 degrees port and starboard.

"Some experts believe that the physical, tactile element is the most significant factor affecting the realism of any vehicle simulation, " says Sean MacDonald, SimCraft's CEO. "A sense of realism is particularly important if you're using a simulator for training, because it makes learning more intuitive and fun - and consequently more efficient."

Initially, the company is focusing on simulations for amateur race car drivers and general aviation pilots because they receive dual benefits in both training and entertainment at home.

"Since racing and flying are so expensive, a simulator allows enthusiasts in these hobbies to subsidize actual racing or fl ying with realistic simulation," says MacDonald. "It is a safe, convenient and cost-eff ective way for them to enjoy their hobby and get better at it in the comfort of their home."

SimCraft's technology also has broad applications that include more generalized video gaming entertainment and military defense training.

On the Upswing

Georgia's video-gaming industry is relatively small but poised for growth, say observers.

"The overall gaming industry is experiencing tremendous growth and we believe that Georgia has the ingredients to be a hub of activity," says Tony Antoniades, general manager of the ATDC. "From the design industry in Savannah to the computing and visualization expertise in Atlanta, we expect to see more great gaming technologies over the next few years."

Kaneva's Klaus is also upbeat. "If there's one industry that Atlanta could jump into, it's video games. We can leverage the high-tech foundation that already exists here," he says, noting that ISS alone employs some 300 engineers in the metro area. "If you look at where entertainment is going, it's all about high tech. Today, entertainment is being driven by how good the technology is."

For the Atlanta region, video gaming is a comeback story of sorts. For in the early 1990s, there were a number of game studios here, including divisions at IBM and Turner Broadcasting. "But then the market shifted from PCs to console gaming, and both IBM and Turner shut down their gaming groups," says Marcus Matthews, CEO and co-founder of Blue Heat Games, an up-and- coming developer of wireless video games.

Matthews, a graduate of Georgia Tech's Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, was working for Turner at the time of the downturn. He relocated to San Francisco where he joined Sega of America and eventually ran its sports group, which generated about $100 million in revenue.

Yet Matthews had an entrepreneurial itch that led him back to Georgia to launch Blue Heat in 2001. "I felt there was a lot of untapped talent in Atlanta - plus the cost of living was lower here," he explains. Blue Heat, which counts 16 employees, has shipped more than 30 mobile games during the past four years including one on Jimmy Neutron, a movie and TV character that Nickelodeon is distributing.

Blue Heat is one of some 60 companies working in Georgia's video-game arena, says Clinton Lowe, founder of the Georgia Game Developers Association, Inc. (www.ggda.org), a nonprofi t trade organization focused on growing the state's gaming industry.

"I see video games as a new market for Georgia - one that, if we make some fundamental investments, will explode," says Lowe. Among positive signs, the Georgia General Assembly recently passed tax credits aimed at game developers and film companies that base production activities, such as editing, animation and coding, in the state.

Why care about video gaming? For one thing, the industry provides high-paying jobs that could help ease the economic sting of Georgia's eroding manufacturing base. According to ESA statistics, entry-level game developers earn $67,000 per year.

Video-game development is high science, providing white-collar, intellectual jobs, Lowe notes. Today's game development teams must have expertise in a wide range of skill sets, including 3-D graphics, architectural engineering, artificial intelligence, computer networking, databases, mathematics, physics, digital sound and more.

Educating the Next Generation

Education is one advantage that the state already has in its favor, for Georgia Tech is a magnet school for video gaming.

"When game companies hire employees, Georgia Tech is one of three schools that they turn to," says LCC's Murray, noting the other two schools are Carnegie Mellon and the University of Southern California. "We're supplying the next generation of game designers and we're training them in a way that employers can't get elsewhere."

Georgia Tech has offered a master's degree in digital media since 1993. In 2004, the school expanded its offerings by launching both a Ph.D. program in digital media and an undergraduate degree in computational media, the latter being a joint program between the College of Computing and LCC. Currently there are about 40 graduate students and 200 undergraduate students in the three degree programs.

"More than half of the undergraduate students in computational media are interested in the video-game industry, which is difficult to get into," says Blair MacIntyre, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing, which is part of the College of Computing.

"Our program sets students apart from other people," he adds. "The degree puts them in a position to bridge the gap between art and technology and get them into production management as opposed to being down in the trenches."

Strengthening Georgia's video-gaming industry would not only improve the state's economy, but also prevent brain drain. "If graduates are getting into video games, they're more than likely relocating to the West Coast," says GGDA's Lowe. "That's a tremendous loss of human capital for the state of Georgia. We're spending tax dollars to educate students and then letting them go."

To bolster gaming, Lowe would like to see more venture capital flowing toward video-game startups. That's because the average cost of developing a video game today has soared from about $40,000 to $10 million during the last decade. "One of the things GGDA is doing is to help companies learn to speak the language of capital sources and learn how to approach venture capitalists," says Lowe.

Attracting a major video publishing company would also be a plus, Lowe adds. Publishers have muscle in managing intellectual property - an area where small design studios typically are weak.

On Matthews' wish list: recruiting more senior-level talent to Georgia. "We have a good pipeline school, but we also need seasoned people who can avoid making mistakes - and that's something that only comes from years of experience in an industry,- he explains.

Still, Matthews remains optimistic. "We're starting to get a nucleus of companies and talent that are doing things," he says. "Georgia has the right pieces in place - state incentives, business and technical talent, the right cost structure - it's just a matter of time."

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Research Horizons Magazine.

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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail: (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: T.J. Becker

"Georgia Tech Savannah students go through the same degree program as the Atlanta students, but they get a little something extra," says Frost, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, director of Georgia Tech Savannah and a Georgia Tech vice provost. "With the distributed environment utilized for part of their academic engineering program, students are not bound by classroom walls or campus fences, but are very comfortable using technology to connect and interact. A large number of employers have commented that they like this in our graduates."

Beyond their teaching responsibilities, each of Georgia Tech Savannah's 25 faculty members is conducting several research projects, ranging from hurricanes, tsunamis and beach erosion to development of technologies and logistics for port operations and distance learning. Frost notes that a growing number of research projects are being facilitated by Savannah-based industries such as Gulfstream and JCB, another benefit of being a coastal Georgia campus.

"We have ties back to the main campus in Atlanta and are able to easily access resources, but our geographic location is a unique asset that allows our students and faculty to complement the programs and activities in Atlanta," he says. "By working together, we can move the Institute forward and make a greater impact in this state and beyond."

What follows is a small sampling of the research being conducted at Georgia Tech Savannah.

Developing Educational Technologies that Enhance Student Experiences

Monson Hayes, professor and associate chair for electrical and computer engineering programs at Georgia Tech Savannah, says it was the inherent challenges of the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program that led him and his colleagues to explore how to enhance students' distance learning classroom experiences.

"Oftentimes, faculty here will be teaching students that are distributed on other campuses. Delivering audio and video of lectures over the Internet can sometimes lead to lower quality, and traditional distance learning students can feel a bit detached," he notes. "That's what we want to change at Georgia Tech Savannah."

When Hewlett-Packard (HP) issued a call for proposals to explore how tablet PCs might be used in the classroom, Hayes and Elliot Moore, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, proposed using the PCs to get high-quality video of distance learning lectures to the students. They were awarded funding to jump-start their research project and HP also donated 22 tablet PCs. Due to the success of the program and the novelty of their idea, Microsoft provided additional funding the following year.

Tablet PCs allow users to incorporate aspects of pen and paper into computing via a stylus pen or wireless keyboard. Information such as handwritten class notes or annotated electronic documents can be stored digitally and accessed wirelessly. The portability of the tablet PCs also allows professors to lead classroom discussions even if they are away from campus.

Hayes and Moore began using software called DyKnow, which uses intuitive tools to enhance teaching strategies and engage students. The software allows instructors to turn over control of the classroom to any student, broadcasting material from the students' tablet PC to everyone else. Students can be engaged - from a distance - to solve problems, take quizzes and answer questions or polls.

"Tablet PCs could probably be used in just about any STEM discipline - science, technology, engineering, mathematics," Hayes says. "They definitely involve a different teaching style and philosophy."

Ghassan AlRegib, an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, is also researching educational technologies that project distant classrooms into a 'cyber classroom' that is accessible by instructors and students. Examining multimedia and immersive communications, he is collaborating with colleagues at several institutes and corporations to develop networking and streaming algorithms for sending multimedia objects over the Internet, in particular video and 3-D environments that require large bandwidth.

"I come from a multimedia processing and communications background, and there's something called immersive communication where you can immerse people - students, teachers, business people, CEOs - in this virtual world," AlRegib says. "I want to know how we can use multi-camera arrays to capture the real environment."

The multi-camera array, provided by HP, consists of 24 small cameras aimed at a wall that is 32 feet long and eight feet high. The software developed by HP stitches all of the images together, allowing for high resolution in real time. For example, students in a remote classroom are able to zoom in and out to focus on writing on a whiteboard, and professors can see the facial expressions of students, making the experience as close to the traditional classroom as possible. The camera is currently operational in an experimental classroom at Georgia Tech Savannah where AlRegib's research group is conducting research and developing educational tools that utilize the camera.

"The high resolution of the camera and the scenes being stitched together at the pixel level in real time are unique to this camera and make it cutting edge," AlRegib notes. "My prediction is that this will be the future of imaging in educational environments."

AlRegib is also conducting research in collaborative virtual environments, a technology he and his colleagues developed for use in science teaching and 3-D manuals, among others. The transmission algorithms - which allow for a networking of multiple virtual environments - dictate when and in what state information is to be transmitted across the network. When multiple virtual environments are networked, users have the opportunity to cooperate or compete with other users. Interacting with humans more realistically models the actual world on which the virtual environment is based.

"All of this fits into communication - the camera captures the visual and the collaborative system captures the motion," he says. "Both capture the real environment and map it into a virtual environment so people can meet, interact and work together in a natural way. The applications are really endless."

Applying Sensing Technologies to Real-World Problems

James Tsai, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech Savannah, probably knows more about Georgia's 18,000 miles of highways than just about anybody else. For more than 10 years, he has been working with the Georgia Department of Transportation (DOT) to implement a pavement preservation and management system - Georgia Pavement Management System - based on information technology and geographic information systems (GIS).

"The focus of my research is pavement distress, preservation and management," he says. "Departments of transportation typically spend more than half of their total annual budgets on infrastructure, especially pavements. Applying the right pavement treatment method in the right location at the right time means saving money, so the economic impact of my research is potentially large."

Tsai works with a 10-member, multi-disciplinary Georgia Tech research team on pavement condition assessment, pavement rehabilitation technology, deterioration and forecasting models, long-term system performance simulation, and resource optimization. For local transportation agencies, Tsai and his team have developed and implemented an integrated asset-management system that uses global positioning system technology. They are extending their research to manage other assets, including traffic signs, bridges and railroads.

Some of Tsai's research, sponsored by the Innovation Deserving Exploratory Analysis Program of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, has involved the development of an intelligent sensing system and vehicle to automatically collect roadway asset and pavement distress information. Tsai and his team developed innovative image-processing technology using cameras and lasers to measure pavement quality, roadway signs, number of lanes, pavement width and shoulder width.

"By using sensing technologies, including lasers and cameras mounted on a van, we can take photographs every 20 feet and obtain laser data to automatically collect information on signs and pavement distress," Tsai says. "We have developed algorithms to analyze pavement distress and to build a forecasting and optimization model. This sensing technology provides us the most comprehensive and accurate information."

This year will mark the tenth anniversary of the implementation of Tsai's Computerized Pavement Condition Evaluation System (COPACES), a program used by Georgia DOT to evaluate its highway system.

Whereas Tsai is using sensing technologies to examine surfaces, David Frost, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of Georgia Tech's Savannah campus, is using them to go below the surface. He has improved traditional penetrometers - instrumented cylindrical devices made of hardened steel - used to record friction resistance and pore pressure in soils. They are also used to evaluate soil types and predict where soil will liquefy, to determine how foundations of buildings will behave and to study the characteristics of natural and man-made geo-materials under earthquake and other dynamic loading conditions.

"When we first began this research in 1996, we were studying how to quantify the roughness or smoothness of these man-made materials ' called geo-membranes ' that are often used in landfill liner systems," he recalls. "This earlier research sparked an idea to build something that would allow us to produce a number that quantitatively relates the device texture to soil behavior. Through the insight we've gained, we can now tell you how much texture and what type of texture will work best for a particular application."

The original cone penetrometer - considered the standard for more than 50 years by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) - was designed to have a smooth surface. Frost and his colleagues modified the device to include multiple sleeves of different roughness that would yield different measurements. The National Science Foundation funded work on the multi-friction penetrometer, and ASTM recognized Frost and his student with its 2003 International Hogentogler Award, an annual award given to the authors of a paper of outstanding merit on soil and rock for engineering purposes.

"This new device gave us the potential to measure multiple values of force with a single device in a single sounding," says Frost.

Frost has since developed a multi-piezo friction penetrometer, which is able to measure not only force, but also water pressure. Each textured sleeve is associated with a piezo sensor so friction force and water pressure can be measured independently. The device is especially useful when studying earthquakes.

Frost, who most recently traveled to China as part of a U.S. delegation to meet with Chinese government officials and study the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province, is currently exploring how to miniaturize the technology for investigating the characteristics of soil on the moon.

"Because of plans to perhaps build permanent bases on the moon and on Mars, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has begun investigating soil," he says. "Our devices, which have been patented by Georgia Tech, represent a dramatically different approach to what technology was available and used when previous lunar explorations occurred in the late '60s and early '70s."
Imagining Georgia Tech's Coastal Future

Frost is passionate about moving the Savannah campus forward by leveraging local assets and opportunities as part of a network of campuses and programs that educates the leaders of a technology-driven world. According to Frost, this will be achieved in part by continuing to develop educational programs, conducting basic and applied interdisciplinary research, stimulating regional economic development, developing an interdisciplinary academic environment, expanding access to an engineering-centered education, and growing a modern campus.

Planning metrics call for 500 students to be enrolled at the Savannah campus by 2012, with more than half participating in an out-of-classroom experience like the cooperative education program or an international program. In the same time, faculty research expenditures will increase, a graduate-student-to-faculty ratio of four to one will be achieved, and at least two dual degree programs with partner institutions will be offered.

"This all comes back to technology," Frost says. "Technology is the enabler that allows us to achieve our vision. Innovative education has no boundaries."

Georgia Tech Savannah in a Snapshot

Approximately 160 students are enrolled at Georgia Tech Savannah - 132 undergraduates and 32 master's and doctoral students. Degrees are available in civil, computer, electrical, environmental and mechanical engineering. The first undergraduate degrees were awarded in fall 2001, and since then, nearly 275 students have graduated from the Savannah campus.

There is also a strong transfer program as part of the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program (GTREP), a formal academic collaboration between Georgia Tech and three partner institutions: Armstrong Atlantic State University and Savannah State University in Savannah, and Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Ga. Students are taught by Savannah-based faculty complemented by distance instruction from other Georgia Tech campuses.

In addition, students have access to world-renowned researchers in a wide variety of disciplines and expertise. There are 16 instructional labs in areas such as automation and robotics, digital education, electronic circuits and instrumentation, hydromechanics and systems and controls, and 18 research centers and laboratories.

Academics are not the only focus of Georgia Tech Savannah; outreach is also an integral part of the campus. The Savannah office of the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) - Georgia Tech's nationally recognized science and technology incubator - assists new ventures arising from Savannah's diverse technology community that includes educational institutions such as the Savannah College of Art and Design, established companies and a growing community of startups. Currently, there are six ATDC member companies in Savannah.

The Savannah campus is also home to a regional office of Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute, an organization that helps companies, entrepreneurs, economic developers and communities improve their competitiveness through the application of science, technology and innovation. It is one of the most comprehensive university-based programs of business and industry assistance, technology commercialization and economic development in the nation.

This article was originally published in the Summer 2008 issue of Research Horizons, Georgia Tech's research magazine.

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Writer: Nancy Fullbright

What do these trends suggest for the future of media companies around the world?

Renu Kulkarni doesn't know for sure, but she wants to "start the conversation" about the question -- and the role that Georgia will play in shaping the future of digital, social and multimedia. As head of the new FutureMedia Initiative at the Georgia Institute of Technology, she believes the Peach State is uniquely positioned to be both a global pioneer and innovator in helping define the future of media.

"With world-class university research, proven engineering and commercialization expertise, a successful community of entrepreneurs -- and leading digital media, communications and entertainment industries -- Georgia really does have what it will take to help chart the future of media," said Kulkarni, who joined Georgia Tech after a 20-year career in the high-tech industry, most recently serving as vice president for technology partnerships at communications giant Motorola.

The FutureMedia Initiative will kick off October 15 with a day-long conference aimed at encouraging dialogue about what Georgia needs to do to create an open innovation ecosystem for developing media of the future.

To be held at the Palomar Hotel adjacent to the Georgia Tech campus, the FutureMedia Conference (www.futuremediaga.com) will feature media visionaries, thought leaders from Georgia universities and industry -- and demonstrations of technologies already in the innovation pipeline from the startup and university research communities.

Among the speakers will be Chris Klaus, founder and CEO of Kaneva; Krishna Bharat, creator of Google News, and Ron Clark, founder of The Ron Clark Academy. The event will also include speakers from the University of Georgia's New Media Institute, the Savannah College of Art and Design, Emory University's Goizueta Business School, Georgia Tech's GVU Center and its School of Literature, Communication and Culture. Industry represented will include Cisco, Motorola, Turner Broadcasting, Music Intelligence Solutions, Noro-Moseley Partners and Chrysalis Ventures.

An afternoon session will provide demonstrations of university research, including innovative music technology, gesture navigation, augmented reality -- and advanced high-speed network and mobile technologies. As many as 60 startup companies are expected to demonstrate their new products and services.

Hosted by Georgia Tech, the event is sponsored by Turner Broadcasting. Partners include the Creative Coast Alliance, Georgia Department of Economic Development, Georgia Research Alliance, the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce, Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, the MIT Enterprise Forum of Atlanta, the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia, the Savannah College of Art and Design, the Technology Association of Georgia, the Technology Executives Roundtable and Venture Atlanta 09.

Georgia has created an integrated innovation pipeline for developing new commercially-important technologies and moving them into the marketplace, noted Susan Shows, senior vice president at the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA). The GRA's VentureLab program has already spun off dozens of startups based on university research.

"Investments in Georgia's research universities are paying off in the formation of new companies that are creating the industries and jobs of the future," Shows said. "By bringing university-industry resources together, FutureMedia will accelerate our success in the media industries that will be important 5, 10 or 20 years from now."

Georgia Tech intends to play a strong role in expanding Georgia's media industry and startup infrastructure, said Georgia Tech Vice President Stephen Cross, who also serves as director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) -- where the FutureMedia Initiative is headquartered.

"What's unique about Georgia Tech is that we already have a number of fabulous thought leaders, researchers and scientists, companies and startups," he said. "Many of the pieces of the story are already well known, but we haven't integrated them yet into a common and mutually supportive story line. The plot is evolving quickly, but the ending is not yet clear. We intend to be the authors of a great ending and FutureMedia will help us do that."

More than a dozen Georgia Tech units are already developing digital media. The goal of FutureMedia, said Kulkarni, will be to expand the Institute's overall role.

"We want to make the pie larger for all without getting in the way of what is already going on," she explained. "The conference is meant to bring the community together to begin a dialogue. FutureMedia is something that has lots of opportunities for all of us if we work together."

What's the ultimate goal of FutureMedia?

"We envision physical and virtual places where all are invited to experiment, discover, create, commercialize and shape the future of media," Kulkarni explained. "We want to create a rich, open innovation ecosystem that will make Georgia a global pioneer in this field and provide a model not only for what we do in enabling the future, but also in how we do it."

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Writer: John Toon

As head of Georgia Tech's FutureMedia Initiative, Renu Kulkarni's charter is to help bring all these elements together in an open-innovation environment that will make the state of Georgia both a leader in developing new media and a model for how to bring new ideas to market.

"Mine is a collaborative role, one that will help all the players span the innovation cycle from research to discovery to creation, commercialization and scale-up," she said. "My job will be to connect universities, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and industry to create a rich and robust open innovation ecosystem that builds on and leverages our world-class resources."

Most recently vice president for technology partnerships at communications giant Motorola, Kulkarni has more than 20 years of experience in turning research and development into new products, building strategic alliances for industry, and developing new business.

Before becoming vice president, she also directed Motorola's research and development portfolio, managing a $150 million-per-year fund, a technology and market trend analysis program, and research and development partnerships with customers. She also served as Motorola's senior director for corporate strategy and held a variety of business consulting, marketing and technical management positions for companies including Deloitte Consulting, BellSouth International, Sprint and GTE Corp.

Kulkarni holds an M.B.A. from Emory University's Goizueta Business School and a B.S. degree from Georgia Tech's Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. She is also a graduate of the Stuyvesant High School, the famed mathematics and science magnet school in New York City.

At Georgia Tech, she reports to the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), Georgia Tech's applied research organization, and to the Enterprise Innovation Institute, which helps enterprises of all kinds become more competitive through the application of science, technology and innovation. Together, the two institutions span the innovation cycle from research and discovery to commercialization and scale-up.

"With its more than seven decades of experience in integrating research results to solve real-world problems, the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) can play a key role in bringing resources together to ensure that Georgia takes advantage of the opportunities in future media," said Stephen E. Cross, GTRI's director and a Georgia Tech vice president. "With her background in technology collaborations, Renu Kulkarni is the ideal person to lead this initiative."

One of Kulkarni's first assignments has been to lead development of the FutureMedia conference (www.futuremediaga.org) to be held on October 15, an event she expects will "start the conversation" about what Georgia needs to do to capitalize on its strengths.

The broad-based event features Chris Klaus, founder and CEO of Kaneva, Krishna Bharat, creator of Google News and Ron Clark, founder of The Ron Clark Academy. It will also include speakers from the University of Georgia, the Savannah College of Art and Design, Emory University and Georgia Tech -- and demonstrations from more than 60 startup companies and dozens of university researchers.

Speakers from Georgia Tech will include G.P. "Bud" Peterson, Georgia Tech's president; Elizabeth Mynatt, director of the GVU Center, and Janet Murray, Dean's Recognition Professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture (LCC) and director of LCC's Graduate Program in Digital Media. Stephen Fleming, vice provost of Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute, will moderate a panel discussion on the state of digital media.

Hosted by Georgia Tech, the event is sponsored by Turner Broadcasting. Partners include the Creative Coast Alliance, Georgia Department of Economic Development, Georgia Research Alliance, the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce, Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, the MIT Enterprise Forum of Atlanta, the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia, the Savannah College of Art and Design, the Technology Association of Georgia, the Technology Executives Roundtable, and Venture Atlanta 09.

Beyond the event, Kulkarni has been meeting with more than a dozen campus leaders in digital media and with business organizations across the state that have a strategic interest in future media.

What's the ultimate goal of FutureMedia?

"We envision a physical and virtual place where all are invited to experiment, discover, create, commercialize and shape the future of digital media," Kulkarni said. "We want to create an open innovation ecosystem that will make Georgia a global pioneer in this field and provide a model not only for what we do in future digital media, but also in how we do it."

Research News & Publications Office
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Media Relations Assistance: Kirk Englehardt (404-407-7280); E-mail: (kirk.englehardt@gtri.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail: (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

Awarded a $9 million contract through the 2008 KORUS Tech Program, an initiative of the Korean Industrial Technology Foundation, Georgia Tech was chosen out of 109 universities to lead the development and design of the next generation of digital convergence devices that will let users establish and participate in digitally connected communities. This award marks the first time that the Korean government has chosen a U.S. university to lead one of its research and development programs.

Project investigators will develop immersive technologies on a hybrid graphics processing unit (GPU) - central processing unit (CPU) platform, which will be created at the newly established KORUS Research Center for Informersive Systems (CIS). The center will be headed by Jongman Kim, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the lead investigator for this project and consortium.

An enabling technology for personalized, interactive media convergence, the platform will consist of a custom-designed massively parallel architecture with a hybrid GPU accelerated many-core and heterogeneous multicore fusion system for new machine learning and multimedia algorithms and techniques. To balance resources and computationally demanding applications for high performance, Kim and his team are developing new mechanisms -- dynamically decomposed computing and hardware-based load balancing techniques. He will introduce a new holistic design analysis model -- the Performance, Energy, and Fault-Tolerance Metric.

"The interdependence among speed/throughput, energy, and fault-tolerance shows the importance of having this new metric that can identify the best tradeoffs among these three competing traits and desired design goals," said Kim, who leads the computer architecture part of this project.

Plans call for the system to be a smart, updated engine that understands user behavior; it will feature a tailored software interface that is based on intelligence and immersion with advanced three-dimensional graphics support. Ghassan AlRegib, a Georgia Tech ECE associate professor and editor-in-chief of the ICST Journal on Immersive Telecommunications, leads the multimedia processing and immersive communications portion of project, where data about home environments, modes of entertainment, and viewing and listening preferences are captured, processed, and interpreted by using motion, temperature, and light sensors; microphones; and multiple cameras that are placed in a user's home.

"Our challenge is to intelligently process this data and digitally understand the user," said AlRegib, who serves as area editor for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. "We are trying to create smart agents within media centers that understand users and adapt media accordingly."

As the hub for home-networked entertainment, this platform will have wireless connectivity to other devices and will be operated with hand gestures, body movements, and facial expressions. AlRegib also noted that the platform would further advance the use of social networks by the broadcast industry to broaden its viewer base.

"This system will allow users to have a personalized media experience; content providers and Internet-based or TV broadcasters will be able to adjust their delivered media according to individuals' needs and interests rather than regional needs," AlRegib said. "We have witnessed the impact of social networking media on our daily lives, so merging them with TV seems to be a natural next step toward complete digital convergence."

Helping Kim and AlRegib -- both faculty members at the Georgia Tech Savannah campus -- tackle these technical challenges are ECE faculty members specializing in digital signal processing, telecommunications, computer architecture, and human-computer interaction: Monson H. Hayes, III, professor and associate director at Georgia Tech Savannah; Biing-Hwang "Fred" Juang, Motorola Foundation Chair Professor and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar; and Associate Professor Sung Kyu Lim. Kim and AlRegib will create undergraduate and graduate courses related to this project, while students at the Atlanta and Savannah campuses will assist with developing technologies and testing prototypes.

Four Korea-based partners will work with Georgia Tech to make this platform into a reality. Celrun, an Internet protocol television company, will handle graphic engine, media processing, and display layout issues. C&S Microwave, a wireless communications company, has conducted a feasibility study on Femtocell (a small cellular base station for residential or small business environments) and mobility between handheld devices and the proposed system. Sungkyunkwan University will work on embedded software, semiconductor technology, operating system, virtual ware, migration, and load balancing. The Korean Electronics Technology Institute will focus on personalized service solutions for various multimedia, data fusion, and digital communities, especially in social network modeling.

Kim said that interested parties from Georgia Tech and other organizations are welcome to join CIS in creating technologies for this platform. The center will also continue working with Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute, which has provided crucial marketing research and commercialization plan assistance. "Growth in this area and industry interest is only expected to increase," said Kim, who has held R&D positions at both LG Electronics and Neopoint. "We believe that digital convergence will happen and that our work will be pivotal in its realization."

Institute officials enthusiastically support this new international partnership. "Georgia Tech and ECE have long been world leaders in digital media and its supporting technologies," said Gary S. May, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair for ECE. "The Korean government's decision to ask Georgia Tech to lead this effort further solidifies our international reputation in this arena."

The establishment of CIS and its future success could also lead to collaborations in areas like the automotive industry, according to Georgia Tech Vice Provost for International Initiatives Steven W. McLaughlin. "Georgia Tech has many longstanding collaborations in Korea and a very healthy representation here in Atlanta. The KORUS Tech program is emblematic of the partnerships we have, the kind of impact we continue to develop in the region, and the benefits those relationships have in Georgia," McLaughlin said. "Korea is a gateway to Asia for Georgia Tech, and we expect to have increasing interactions with Korean companies, institutes, universities, and ministries in the coming years."

According to the Georgia Tech study conducted for this project, Korea ranks among the world's top seven countries with the most households subscribing to broadband and is projected to move into the top five in the near future. Per capita, Korea ranks among the top four broadband subscribers, according to a June 2007 study conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and had more total subscribers than the other top eight countries combined. The United States ranked 15th per capita, but had the largest number of total subscribers.

Korean officials cited Georgia Tech's stellar reputation in research, education, and translation of technology into useful products and successful companies as the primary reasons for choosing the institute for this project. "The Georgia Tech team's innovative ideas were backed by technological rigor and complemented by detailed analysis of state-of-the-art technologies and competing initiatives," said Sungjin (Bryan) Baik, senior researcher and project manager of the KORUS Tech Program from the Korea Institute of Advancement of Technology. "Atlanta's stature in the telecommunications and information media industries was also key in deciding that Georgia Tech was the proper home for this center." The majority of CIS operations will be based at the Atlanta campus of Georgia Tech and will receive additional support from facilities and personnel at Georgia Tech Savannah.

Research News & Publications Office
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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986); Email: (jtoon@gatech.edu); Jackie Nemeth (404-894-2906); E-mail: (jackie.nemeth@ece.gatech.edu) or Abby Vogel (404-385-3364); E-mail: (avogel@gatech.edu).

Technical Contacts: Jongman Kim (912-965-2385); E-mail: (jkim@ece.gatech.edu); Ghassan AlRegib (912-966-7937); E-mail: (gregib@ece.gatech.edu); Biing Hwang (Fred) Juang (404-894-6618); E-mail: (juang@ece.gatech.edu).

Writer: Jackie Nemeth

Researchers in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering are developing programming tools to enable engineers in the defense industry to utilize the processing power of GPUs without having to learn the complicated programming language required to use them directly.

"As radar systems and other sensor systems get more complicated, the computational requirements are becoming a bottleneck," said GTRI senior research engineer Daniel Campbell. "We are capitalizing on the ability of GPUs to process radar, infrared sensor and video data faster than a typical computer and at a much lower cost and power than a computing cluster."

Mark Richards, a principal research engineer and adjunct professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is collaborating with Campbell and graduate student Andrew Kerr to rewrite common signal processing commands to run on a GPU. This work is supported by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.

The researchers are writing functions defined in the Vector, Signal and Image Processing Library (VSIPL) to run on GPUs. VSIPL is an open standard developed by embedded signal and image processing hardware and software vendors, academia, application developers and government labs. GPU VSIPL is available for download at (http://gpu-vsipl.gtri.gatech.edu/).

The researchers are currently writing the functions in Nvidia's CUDA^TM language, but the underlying principles can be applied to GPUs developed by other companies, according to Campbell. With GPU VSIPL, engineers can use high-level functions in their C programs to perform linear algebra and signal processing operations, and recompile with GPU VSIPL to take advantage of the speed of the GPU. Studies have shown that VSIPL functions operate between 20 and 350 times faster on a GPU than a central processing unit, depending on the function and size of the data set.

"The results are not surprising because GPUs excel at performing repetitive arithmetic tasks like those in VSIPL, such as signal processing functions like Fourier transforms, spectral analysis, image formation and noise filtering," noted Richards. "We've just alleviated the need for engineers to understand the entire GPU architecture by simply providing them with a library of routines that they frequently use."

The research team is also assessing the advantages of GPUs by running a library of benchmarks for quantitatively comparing high-performance, embedded computing systems. The benchmarks address important operations across a broad range of U.S. Department of Defense signal and image processing applications.

Preliminary studies have shown several of the benchmarks have straightforward parallelization schemes that result in faster operation without requiring significant optimization. For other benchmarks, additional research needs to be conducted into optimizing the use of multiple GPUs.

For the future, the researchers plan to continue expanding the GPU VSIPL, develop additional defense-related GPU function libraries and design programming tools to utilize other efficient processors, such as the cell broadband engine processor at the heart of the PlayStation 3 video game console.

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Media Relations Contacts: Abby Vogel (404-385-3364); E-mail: (avogel@gatech.edu) or Kirk Englehardt (404-407-7280); E-mail: (kirk.englehardt@gtri.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail: (jtoon@gatech.edu)

Writer: Abby Vogel

"Traditional cell phones have been ignored by attackers because they were specialty devices, but the new phones available today are handheld computers that are able to send and receive e-mail, surf the Internet, store documents and remotely access data -- all actions that make them vulnerable to a wide range of attacks," said Patrick Traynor, assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Traynor and Jonathon Giffin, also an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science, recently received a three-year $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop tools that improve the security of mobile devices and the telecommunications networks on which they operate. These Georgia Tech faculty, together with a team of graduate students, are developing methods of identifying and remotely repairing mobile devices that may be infected with viruses or other malware.

Malware can potentially eavesdrop on user input or otherwise steal sensitive information, destroy stored information, or disable a device. Attackers may snoop on passwords for online accounts, electronic documents, e-mails that discuss sensitive topics, calendar and phonebook entries, and audio and video media.

"Since mobile phones typically lack security features found on desktop computers, such as antivirus software, we need to accept that the mobile devices will ultimately be successfully attacked. Therefore our research focus is to develop effective attack recovery strategies," explained Giffin.

The researchers plan to investigate whether cellular service providers -- such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless -- are capable of detecting infected devices on their respective networks. Since infected devices often begin to over-utilize the network by sending a high volume of traffic to a known malicious Internet server or by suddenly generating a high volume of text messages, monitoring traffic patterns on the network should allow these infected phones to be located, according to the researchers.

"While a single user might realize that a phone is behaving differently, that person probably won't know why. But a cell phone provider may see a thousand devices behaving in the same way and have the ability to do something about it," said Traynor.

Once infected devices are located, those phones will need to be cleared of the malicious code. To accomplish this, the researchers are developing remote repair methods, which will allow service providers to assist in the cleaning of infected devices without requiring that the phones be brought to a service center. The methods will also have to work without much effort on the part of the customer.

This repair may require disabling some functionality on the phone, such as the ability to use downloaded programs, until the malicious program is located and removed. While the repair is underway, phone calling and text messaging functionality would continue to operate.

"Using this remote repair strategy, the service provider no longer has to completely disable a phone. Instead they just put the device into a safe, but reduced, mode until the malware can be removed," said Giffin.

To assess their proposed methods of finding and repairing infected mobile devices, the researchers plan to build a cellular network test bed at Georgia Tech that will simulate how cellular devices communicate over a network.

"We hope that developing these attack recovery strategies will let potential mobile phone and network attackers know that these response mechanisms are in place, ultimately making their attacks far less widespread or successful," said Traynor.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award No. CNS-0916047. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the researchers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

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Writer: Abby Vogel

"Basically, what people are doing is choosing their own adventure; they are finding their own path through this piece of music," said Freeman. "There are a lot of different fragments of music and different ways you can connect them together. I composed the piece intuitively. I decided what all the fragments were going to be and all the different ways they could connect together."

The online user is then able to choose among two or three options in between each fragment of music. Their choice directly impacts the direction of the composition. At the end of each night, the software produces a new version of the musical score that reflects the audience's choices made online.

Freeman says the solo violin piece will then be played in live concerts to give the audiences a more interactive experience.

"The Graph Theory Project forces the audience to make choices and engage in the process of making music," said Freeman. "Some of the greatest musical experiences that I've had were creating music, not just listening to it. I can't write a piece that expresses that joy unless it shares it."

Freeman says that he was inspired to create a piece that would allow people to engage in music even if they didn't have a traditional music background.

"It is hard for people to talk about music in abstract terms using layman's language," Freeman said. "I had an idea of a virtual composer residency. Instead of sitting everyone down in a room and saying that I want a piece that is loud, fast, slow, soft. There is a visual interface on the Web that structures people's input. It gives them choices that are defined. They are not defined in language, they are defined through things they can click on and move around."

Freeman suggests that technology and a good graphic design make this a successful project.

"Technology is an interface through which we can connect people," said Freeman. "It allows people to be musically creative without needing to know how to play a traditional instrument."

The Graph Theory Project, which was commissioned by the Turbulence Internet art group and supported with a grant from the Greenwall Foundation, is available via the Web at http://turbulence.org/Works/graphtheory/ . Freeman is already planning several concert performances, including two in Atlanta this winter. For an updated list of concerts, please visit www.jasonfreeman.net

"For this third year of the Living Game Worlds symposium, we decided to focus the discussion on a specific aspect of gaming - games that tackle real-world themes and topics," says Celia Pearce, assistant professor of digital media, Georgia Tech School of Literature, Communication and Culture and lead organizer of Living Game Worlds III. "There's a growing understanding that games can be about more than 'just entertainment,' but like film documentaries, can open people's eyes to serious issues ranging from social, political, health and education."

"Georgia Tech is a leader in multimedia, gaming and interactive technologies," says Elizabeth Mynatt, director of the GVU Center at Georgia Tech and associate professor in the Georgia Tech College of Computing. "Through the annual Living Game Worlds symposium, we offer a multidisciplinary look at these converging technologies and how they impact and represent the real world."

"Living Game Worlds exemplifies the Digital Media program's commitment to expanding the expressive power of the computer, and to exploring ways in which new genres of expression can advance knowledge and human community," says Janet Murray, professor and director of the Digital Media Graduate Program in Tech's School of Literature, Communication and Culture.

Georgia Tech's Digital Media Graduate Program in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture and the GVU Center at Georgia Tech present Living Game Worlds III in the third year of this successful symposium exploring digital media, gaming and interactive technologies.

Living Game Worlds III also includes keynote addresses by Katie Salen, executive director, Gamelab Institute of Play and associate professor in Design and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design (New York) and Tracy Fullerton, co-director, Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab and assistant professor, Interactive Media Division, University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Panel discussions will feature experts from industry, non-profits and academia discussing issues in digital media including design process, interactive design, games, and games addressing political, social, health and environmental issues. The day closes with demos and exhibits. The live webcast and detailed agenda are available at http://gameworlds.gatech.edu/.

About the Digital Media Graduate Program
The Georgia Tech Digital Media Graduate Program provides both the theoretical and the practical foundation for careers as digital media researchers and designers in academia and industry. The advent of a new medium of human communication and representation is a significant event in human social and cultural history, and introduces the possibility of new genres of artistic expression as well as new forms of information and knowledge transmission. The study of these new forms - from the point of view of the creators and the analysts - is an emerging field, one that requires a convergence of the methodologies of several traditional disciplines, and one that is also defining its own methodologies of research and practice. The Graduate Program in Digital Media is in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture (LCC) in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech.
http://www.dm.gatech.edu

About the GVU Center
The GVU Center is a university-wide, interdisciplinary research center that spans the Georgia Tech campus and includes many outside collaborators. Its faculty and students are drawn from disciplines in science, engineering, the humanities and design. The Center enables collaborative research that is often difficult to achieve in traditional academic and industrial settings. The unique combinations of research interests and expertise are the catalyst for significant insights into the rapidly evolving landscape of people and computation. The GVU Center conducts research in crucial areas of human experiences with computing including health care, education, work and home life, and entertainment. The Center consistently leads the forefront of research in fields such as human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, mixed and augmented reality, animation and graphics, wearable computing, information visualization, educational technologies, new media and communications, intelligent systems and robotics.
http://www.gvu.gatech.edu

Stamatiou created Skribit (rhymes with ribbet) out of necessity to help him as he worked on his own blog, www.PaulStamatiou.com. He had been running his blog since 2005, but was having a bit of trouble coming up with the next thing to write. So he pitched the idea at Startup Weekend Atlanta, a conference that brings together entrepreneurs, computer programmers and marketing types to create companies and products -they built it that weekend.

"After three days, people start to ask, 'why haven't you blogged in a while?'," said Stamatiou. "With Skribit, readers can vote on topics and post ideas on what to write about and the widget will sort them out by how hot they are. If you suggest something, you will get notified when they use your suggestion."

Skribit's user base is vast, according to Stamatiou. Everyone from English-speaking bloggers to Japanese, Spanish and Korean bloggers are using it. He even has a police department in Maryland using it to get feedback from the community.

What makes Skribit successful, said Stamatiou, is that it provides a place for bloggers to get new ideas, rather than simply write about what everyone else is already talking about.

"Someone might use Skribit if they want their site to be up-to-date, but don't want to go to the echo chamber to mimic everyone else," said Stamatiou.

Skribit works in two ways. Users can post suggestions on topics to write about on the site either anonymously or with a user account. Bloggers can either read the site or post a widget on their blog. The benefit, said Stamatiou, of having the widget is that readers can post their suggestions directly to the blog they read. Readers can vote on their favorite topics, and the blog displays the suggestions based on factors such as how many votes they've received and how recently they were suggested.

Stamatiou created the site while he was a Computational Media student in both the College of Computing and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech. And although it came out of his initial idea, Stamatiou continues to develop the site with co-founder Calvin Yu. When he graduates later this month, he plans to work full time on making Skribit profitable with help from the Georgia Tech Edison Fund.

The Georgia Tech Edison Fund helps provide initial funding for early-stage technology companies that have a close association with Georgia Tech. Chief Commercialization Officer Stephen Fleming said that keeping young talent from having to look outside of Atlanta for initial funding is one of his most important missions.

"At one time, I know that Paul was looking to move out to California to try to get funding for Skribit," said Fleming. "I'm glad that we were able to provide him with the initial funding to keep young talent like him here in Atlanta."

So, does Stamatiou ever use Skribit to help out when he gets blogger's block? Of course he does.

"For me it is a backup plan when I really can't think of something to write. If I notice something that has received a lot of votes in a very short amount of time, I'll take that as a note that my readers really want to read about it and I'll change my plans and blog about it," he said. "Then there are the times that, for a few weeks, I won't have any clue about what to write, so I'll just rely on it."

This year, the conference will focus on 'Interplay,' networked online play as well as multiplayer games and virtual worlds. Panelists include: Richard Bartle, writer of the first multi-user domain; online game developer Brian Green; Chip Morningstar, chief technology officer for WeMade Entertainment USA and platform developer for Yahoo!; Randy Farmer, online gaming innovator and author; and Pavel Curtis, creator of LambdaMoo.

The symposium, which will be accessible via Second Life stream, will explore various aspects of networked play from an historical, cultural, technological and design perspective, as well as looking at current and future trends such as user-created content and use of virtual worlds in the workplace.

Themes to be explored include: historical and international perspectives, productive play (including use of games in the workplace), learning communities
infrastructures, architectures and experience, augmented and alternative reality games, new directions and game creation environments.

Living Game Worlds is an annual symposium presented by Georgia Tech's Experimental Game Lab (EGL) in the Digital Media Program of the School of Literature, Communication and Culture and the GVU Center. Each year, Living Game Worlds brings together experts from academia, industry and the arts to explore topics related to research, design and cultural practices of digital games.

For more information and to register for the conference, visit http://gameworlds.gatech.edu/

During the recent holiday season, consumers spent millions of dollars on videogames. While their commercial success is unquestionable, it's amazing to think that videogames have become so successful while almost willfully excluding a sizable chunk of the population - women.

Videogame developers could take some tips from Parker Brothers 100 years ago. Parker Brothers understood the most successful board games would bring the whole family together to play: male and female, parents, children and grandparents. This belief impacted how they developed and marketed their games. Recent research I conducted with the women's game collective Ludica revealed some interesting nuances: board game covers featured intergenerational groups playing together; girls and women were as actively involved as males. Also, designers like George Parker often employed women to manufacture their products; as a result, they were often recruited to playtest his new games. This approach led to games that young and old, male and female could enjoy playing together, as well as tremendous success for Parker Brothers.

In contrast, much of the videogame industry stubbornly insists on targeting its products to the narrow audience of 'hardcore gamers' comprised of predominantly high school and college-aged males. The games are largely designed by and for men. A recent study revealed that 88.5 percent of game developers are male, tested by young men and marketed to young men. And they continue to do this in the face of overwhelming evidence that shows they are missing out on a huge opportunity to move from developing niche products to developing true blockbusters.

First of all, look at the numbers: Women make up 52 percent of the U.S. population, but only 38 percent of the videogame players. Recent studies that include web-based and downloadable games have found that women over 40 spend more time on average playing games than any other group. Despite this large and interested market, female gamers are often maligned as players of exclusively casual games (short-term play, downloadable games, such as Diner Dash), a claim that is wholly unsubstantiated by any empirical research. The mainstream game industry often marginalizes these games in favor of the 40-hour or more playtime, marquee, adrenaline-infused games like Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto produced for consoles. Imagine the opportunity if companies actually marketed to instead of against the female gamer!

Second, time and time again, titles with a strong female appeal - Pac-Man and Myst, among others - have proven to be among the most commercially successful games. Pac-Man was secretly designed as a game that would appeal to women, a fact its creator, Toru Iwatani, hid from his employers. The enduring success of Pac-Man over the past 20+ years indicates that the designer was on to something. Some recent offerings, such as Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero and the recently released Rock Band, follow up on this more inclusive tradition.

Third, we need look no further than the tremendous success of Nintendo's Wii gaming console and its handheld DS. When they started developing their next generation gaming systems, Sony and Microsoft placed their bets on higher-end graphics, pushing umpteen million polygons per second, while managing not to push the boundaries of game design all that much. Nintendo decided it didn't stand a chance in this race and its best bet was to play another game entirely.

With both the Wii and DS (as their 'GameBoy' was conspicuously renamed), Nintendo has boldly gone where no game company dared to go: to new audiences. Nintendo has unabashedly made known its strategy: its competitors can have the 'hardcore gamers,' they'll take everyone else (along with some hardcore gamers too)! They are the first game company in history to have a booth at the AARP annual convention. (Baby Boomers, anyone?)

With the fastest selling handheld ever in the DS and the Wii console outselling the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 combined, Nintendo's bet has paid off. Despite its lower price point, the Wii is also more profitable per unit than either of its competitors. The gaming industry has taken notice. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are now distributing downloadable games, popular with female gamers. Recently, Microsoft announced a new marketing and advertising campaign designed to reach casual gamers, predominantly women.

But will marketing a product designed by and for young men to a broader audience help compete for this new market into which Nintendo has tapped? Time will tell, but in the meantime, Nintendo could well position itself as the Parker Brothers of the 21st Century, finding its way into the hearts and homes of 'well' everyone.

Using play as an engine for social change, ActionQuest: ATL is believed to be the first "Big Game" with activist aims and the first "Big Game" ever held in Atlanta. Hosted in conjunction with U.S. Social Forum (www.ussf2007.org), the game
engages players in a series of cooperative quests that involve taking real-world social action in specific locations, such as identifying shelter needs for the homeless or beautifying neighborhoods by planting wildflowers on vacant lots, to name just two. After completing a "quest action," players e-mail or text message photographic evidence of its completion to an online action map that is created from the collective evidence that all the players have turned in. The more quest actions, the more complete the map becomes.

"Every day, millions of people log onto online games and spend hours working collaboratively on very difficult problems in imaginary worlds," said Pearce, director of Georgia Tech's Emergent Game Group and the Experimental Game Laboratory. "We wanted to see if we could harness that same energy and apply it to real-world problems."

She and her collaborators at DS4SI also saw the opportunity to connect Atlantans with the 10,000 social activist attendees of the U.S. Social Forum. By spreading activist activities all over the city, game organizers hope to not only raise awareness of the conference, but also give locals a fun way to engage with social justice issues in Atlanta. The game also gives attendees of the conference an alternate way to tour the city.

"We are partnering with activist organizations like the Mad Housers and Citizens for Progressive Transit to develop a wide range of challenge levels for players, from throwing seeds in empty lots to trying to navigate Atlanta in a wheelchair," said Peace. "We also think this will be a great weekend outing for families who can have fun together while learning about social justice issues."
Unlike a standard video or board game that's typically played indoors by one or a few people at a time, "Big Games" involve hundreds of people and are played outdoors over a large geographical area. Perhaps the best known of these was PacManhattan, produced by students at New York University, who dressed up in costume and played the basic rules of the video game classic Pac-Man in the streets of New York. ActionQuest:ATL channels the excitement and enthusiasm of this concept, bringing a new dimension of fun to social activism.

"Whether or not ActionQuest: ATL can actually change the world remains to be seen," said Pearce. "But at the very least, we hope it changes the way people see the world. Hopefully they'll see that collectively, they have the power to change it."

ActionQuest: ATL runs daily from noon to 8 p.m., June 28-July 1, 2007. Players can register online at http://www.actionquest.us or in-person at one of two base camps at the Little Five Points Community Center (1083 Austin Ave. N.E. 30307) or Renaissance Park (Piedmont & Pine). For information send e-mail to info@actionquest.us .