Time: 12:30pm-1:20pm

Remote BlueJeans delivery: (recommend joining at least 5 mins early, to take care of any technical problems) https://bluejeans.com/987636040

Speaker: Aaron Lanterman

Speaker’s Title: Professor

Speaker’s Affiliation: School of ECE

Seminar Title: Turn Your Hobbies Into Your Job

Abstract of Talk: David Bowie said: “If you feel safe in the area that you are working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.” Most professors become experts in a particular research area and then propose graduate special topics classes in that area. My alternative approach is to make time to learn things that I want to learn by proposing to teach senior-level special topics classes on those things. Fortunately, my colleagues don’t ask to many questions about whether I know what I’m talking about first. This luck has led to the creation of the coolest classes on campus, “GPU Programming for Video Games,” “Analog Circuits for Music Synthesis,” and “Guitar Amplification and Effects,” as well as the coolest Vertically Integrated Project on campus, “Retrofuturistic Hardware: Music, Gaming, and Computing." We will also discuss the challenges involved in teaching and learning in the age of Covid-19; some considerations that question official policies may be voiced.

Biographical Sketch of the Speaker: Aaron Lanterman has been teaching at Georgia Tech since August 2001. As an overly ambitious undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis, he triple majored in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Music. For graduate school, he sensibly dropped down to one degree, choosing Electrical Engineering. He was received the Class of 1940 W. Howard Ector Outstanding Teacher Award in 2018, and the W. Marshall Leach Jr./.Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Senior Teacher Award in 2015 and 2020, although he is a bit unnerved about the label “senior.” He has historically worked in defense applications such as radar, infrared imaging, target tracking, and automatic target recognition, but would like to move into other areas, like quantum computing, for no other reason than quantum computers look amazing.