{"70277":{"#nid":"70277","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Two Georgia Tech Faculty Honored by the White House","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EKim Cobb, assistant professor in Georgia Tech\u0027s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the College of Sciences, and Nick Feamster, assistant professor in the School of Computer Science and the Georgia Tech Information Security Center in the College of Computing, have been recognized as two of the nation\u0027s top young scientists with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The ceremony was held today at the White House.\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EThe PECASE program recognizes outstanding scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of knowledge. This Presidential Award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers beginning their careers. \n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022I\u0027m delighted that the achievements and extraordinary potential of these two exceptional faculty members are being recognized by the National Science Foundation and by the President of the United States,\u0022 said Gary Schuster, interim president of the Georgia Tech. \u0022This is outstanding news for them - a PECASE award and the accompanying support can have a lasting positive effect on a research career. And this is yet another indicator that Georgia Tech\u0027s reputation is strong as a leading research institution. I am proud to serve at a university that has such dedicated and committed faculty members.\u0022\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EKim Cobb\u003C\/strong\u003E\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003ECobb\u0027s research focuses on understanding climate change using geological archives such as corals and cave stalagmites. By reconstructing the climate from the past few decades to the last several millennia, Cobb aims to inform current climate models that help predict how changes might occur in the future.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022I\u0027m happy that my climate change research seems to be a focus on the national stage,\u0022 said Cobb. \u0022I hope that it serves to emphasize the importance of paleo-climate research in this field.\u0022\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EShe joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2004 after earning her Ph.D. in oceanography in 2002 from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and spending two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022Models can only take you so far in seeing how the climate may change over the next few decades,\u0022 said Cobb. \u0022In many cases, the data is too short, so the paleo-climate data is added to make a more complete record, so we can see how temperature and precipitation patterns respond to climate forcing.\u0022\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003ECobb has spent time in the caves of Borneo, analyzing stalagmites in search of clues about the climate of the earth\u0027s past. This month, she\u0027s traveling to the Bahamas to take high-definition footage of coral reefs so they can be rendered in a 3D virtual environment.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EThe multidisciplinary research team, which also includes Frank Dellaert from Tech\u0027s College of Computing and Brian Magerko from Tech\u0027s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, will also be using the hi-def images they take of the reef to create a virtual ecosystem that scientists can use to collaborate and share data. \n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022This current research has educational uses for schools and museums, but we can also use the technology to capture large tracts of the reef in detail so other scientists can see species diversity and coral health without having to spend the money to go there,\u0022 she said.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ENick Feamster\u003C\/strong\u003E\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EFeamster received his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 2005, and his bachelor\u0027s and master\u0027s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively. He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in January 2006.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EHe is developing techniques, tools and systems to make it easier to manage and protect network operations. Networks, particularly communications networks, have become larger, more complex and virtually ubiquitous. This makes them more valuable to users, but also more vulnerable to problems and attacks.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022A lot of people have figured out that you can make a quick buck with spam or phishing attacks, and securing networks has become a really big problem,\u0022 Feamster said. \u0022You have people out there who are not just trying to do damage or inflict harm to the network, but to make money.\u0022\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EMuch of Feamster\u0027s current research focuses on making it easier for network operators and managers to do their jobs well. Network operators have to make the network highly available and secure at the same time, and that means monitoring network conditions, detecting problems that can be fixed and quickly taking steps to fix them. But when networks go down or suffer outside attacks, he says, operators often don\u0027t have a complete picture of what happened and have to rely on anecdotal data gathered from individual users who have called a help line or reported a problem.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022If we could automate some of that and gather data from the edge of the network where the individual machines and users are and somehow push that information back into the network, it would help network operators figure out the problem and fix it faster,\u0022 he said.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003EFeamster also is working on solutions to unwanted network traffic\/spam and phishing attacks. He says current fixes, such as applying spam filters based on words in an e-mail or the IP address of the sender\u0027s computer, are too specific, and spammers have quickly figured out how to get around them. In his research, Feamster focuses on identifying some key and unchanging characteristics of spam so computer scientists can develop broader protections against it.\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003E\u0022The number of recipients is a good example,\u0022 he said. \u0022If an e-mail has hundreds of recipients, there\u0027s a good chance it\u0027s spam. Also legitimate users of e-mail send messages that vary greatly in length, from one-liners to maybe several pages. The length of spam is almost always within a certain, limited range.\u0022\n\u003C\/p\u003E\n\u003Cp\u003ECobb and Feamster were nominated for the PECASE by the National Science Foundation. Eight federal departments and agencies annually nominate scientists and engineers at the start of their careers whose work shows exceptional promise for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge during the twenty-first century. Participating agencies award recipients up to five years of funding to further their research in support of critical government missions.\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"Kim Cobb, assistant professor in Georgia Tech\u0027s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the College of Sciences, and Nick Feamster, assistant professor in the School of Computer Science and the Georgia Tech Information Security Center in the College of Computing, have been recognized as two of the nation\u0027s top young scientists with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Kim Cobb and Nick Feamster receive PECASE awards"}],"uid":"27310","created_gmt":"2008-12-18 01:00:00","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:01:20","author":"David Terraso","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2008-12-19T00:00:00-05:00","iso_date":"2008-12-19T00:00:00-05:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"70279":{"id":"70279","type":"image","title":"Nick Feamster","body":null,"created":"1449177304","gmt_created":"2015-12-03 21:15:04","changed":"1475894616","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:43:36"}},"media_ids":["70279"],"related_links":[{"url":"http:\/\/www.cc.gatech.edu\/~feamster\/","title":"Nick Feamster"},{"url":"http:\/\/shadow.eas.gatech.edu\/~kcobb\/","title":"Kim Cobb"}],"groups":[{"id":"1214","name":"News Room"}],"categories":[{"id":"153","name":"Computer Science\/Information Technology and Security"},{"id":"154","name":"Environment"},{"id":"135","name":"Research"}],"keywords":[{"id":"1329","name":"cobb"},{"id":"1634","name":"Feamster"},{"id":"1633","name":"PECASE"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EGeorgia Tech Media Relations\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ELaura Diamond\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:laura.diamond@comm.gatech.edu\u0022\u003Elaura.diamond@comm.gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E404-894-6016\u003Cbr \/\u003EJason Maderer\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:maderer@gatech.edu\u0022\u003Emaderer@gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E404-660-2926\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["david.terraso@comm.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}