Issue 29 | December 2008 View in a Web browser
Picture of the Month
CoC a Major Presence at SC08 |
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CoC
Dean Jim Foley (left) talks with visitors to the Georgia Tech booth at Supercomputing 2008, held Nov. 15-21 in Austin, Texas. The booth featured videotaped interviews with computing faculty active in high-performance computing, including Haesun Park of CSE (shown on screen). |
Research News
Financial Dashboard for October 2008
2009 YTD New Awards
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Proposed
Contracts for the Month
Total |
$ Amount |
IC |
CS |
CSE |
CoC |
RIM |
13 |
$3,304,863 |
48% |
31% |
20% |
1% |
<1% |
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Newly Awarded Contracts
Sponsor |
Value |
PI |
Co-PIs |
Title |
University of Pennsylvania |
$156,250 |
Ron Arkin |
none |
HUNT: Heterogeneous Unmanned Networked Teams |
NSF |
$350,000 |
Sasha Boldyreva |
none |
CT-ISG: New Secutrity Properties for Hash and Trapdoor Functions |
NSF |
$758,297 |
Wenke Lee |
Nick Feamster, Mustaque Ahamad, Jon Giffin |
CT-L: CLEANSE Cross-Layer Large-Scale Efficient Analysis of Network ... |
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone |
$80,000 |
Mustaque Ahamad |
none |
Collaborative Research: NTT “IMS and User-Generated Content Sharing” |
Intercontinental Exchange |
$40,503 |
Mustaque Ahamad |
none |
Collaborative Research:Use of Real-Time Context to Monitor and Detect ... |
Oak Ridge National Lab |
$39,590 |
Matthew Wolf |
none |
Adios Adaptive I/O Monitoring and Reconfiguration |
Department of Homeland Security |
$400,000 |
Jim Foley |
none |
Career Development Grant--Advanced Data Analysis and Visualization |
BBN System and Technologies |
$100,000 |
Nick Feamster |
none |
Bringing Experimenters and External Connectivity to Geni |
NSF |
$439,827 |
Mark Guzdial |
none |
CPATH CB:Improving Computing Education by Developing Regional Communities |
HP Labs |
$75,000 |
Tom Conte |
Sudhakar Yalamanchili |
COTSON: An Infrastructure for System-Level Simulation |
Grants/Gifts
Received
Donor |
Amount |
PI |
Co-PIs |
Description of Gift/Donation |
Intel |
$45,000 |
Hyunsoon Kim |
none |
CS-Intel-Thread Fairness |
GTF |
$40,000 |
Mary Jean Harrold |
none |
PD-CoC FY09 Advance Prof |
Motorola |
$300,000 |
Beth Mynatt |
none |
GVU End-to-End User Experience |
GTF |
$1,500 |
none |
none |
MSN-CS FY09 CS Grad Tea |
Disney |
$30,000 |
Brian Whited |
none |
IC-General Research |
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People@CoC
Grad Students Develop New Blood Supply Monitoring System
Graduate students Adebola Osuntogun (CS) and Stephen Thomas
(IC) were invited to the annual conference of the American Association
of Blood Banks last month in New Orleans to present their work (with
their adviser, Professor Santosh Vempala of CS) on
the design and deployment of a computer tool to monitor blood safety.
The tool, which was deployed recently in 14 countries served by the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's PEPFAR (President's
Emergency Program for Aids Relief), allows public health organizations
to monitor blood supply and safety in their own and neighboring
countries. After the students' presentation, the World Health
Organization has invited them to present their system in Geneva,
Switzerland, for possible worldwide deployment.
Faculty Present at Geometry and Algorithms Workshop
ARC
members gave three invited presentations at the Princeton workshop on
Geometry and Algorithms, held at Princeton, Oct. 29-31. Navin Goyal, a post-doc in CS, spoke on why “Learning Convex Bodies is Hard;” Luis Rademacher, a post-doc fellow in CS, spoke on “Expanders via Random Spanning Trees;” and computer science Professor Santosh Vempala spoke on “Isotropic Principal Components.”
Goodman Published in NATO Book on Cyber Terrorism
Seymour E. Goodman,
a joint professor in the School of Computer Science and the Sam Nunn
School of International Affairs, contributed an invited chapter to a
NATO book that appeared in October. “Critical Information
Infrastructure Protection” was included in Responses to Cyber
Terrorism, part of the NATO Science for Peace and Security Series E:
Human and Societal Dynamics, vol. 34. The book was published by IOS
Press in Amsterdam.
Living Game Worlds IV—Interplay: Multiplayer Games & Virtual Worlds
The Living Game Worlds IV
Symposium, the fourth in a series of annual events that explore
emerging questions in design and theory in the production and critique
of video games, will take place Dec. 1-2 at TSRB. This year the
symposium will focus on networked play and foster dialogue on the
rapidly growing domain of multiplayer games and virtual worlds,
including online networked entertainment as well as pervasive, mobile
and tangible gaming. It will explore various aspects of networked play
from a historical, cultural, technological and design perspective and
look at current and future trends such as user-created content and the
rising use of virtual worlds in the workplace. Living Game Worlds is
presented by the GVU Center and the Graduate Program in Digital Media
in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture.
Grad Students Present Papers at Theory Conference
CS graduate students Charlie Brubaker and Gagan Goel
(both studying theory and affiliated with ARC) presented research
papers at the IEEE Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science
(FOCS), one of the two premier annual theory conferences, held in
Philadelphia, Oct. 26-28. Brubaker's paper (with Santosh Vempala) was titled, “Isotropic PCA and Affine-invariant Clustering”; Goel's (with recent CS Ph.D. Deeparnab Chakrabarty)
was titled “On the Approximability of Budgeted Allocations and Improved
Lower Bounds for Submodular Welfare Maximization and GAP.”
Yusuf Wins Google Scholarship
Computer science grad student Lateef Yusuf
has won a scholarship from Google's 2008 Scholarship Programs. Yusuf
will receive a $10,000 academic scholarship and an invitation to attend
the all-expenses-paid Annual Google Scholars' Retreat, held each spring
at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. Seronda Nash, an undergrad
in Electrical Engineering, also won a scholarship. As part of Google’s
efforts to increase diversity in the technology and computing industry,
the company partners with the United Negro College Fund, the Hispanic
College Fund and the American Indian Science & Engineering Society.
According to the Google website, the company awarded scholarships to 42
U.S. students “who have been recognized for their outstanding academic
and leadership accomplishments in the computer science field.”
CS Undergrads Compete in Regional Programming Competition
The
Georgia Tech ACM Programming Team attended the Southeastern Regional
Programming Competition in Savannah on Oct. 25. Sixteen CS
undergraduate students, led by coach Topraj Gurung, a
Ph.D. candidate, assembled five teams to compete in the regional
competition. Of those five, “Team Buzz” made the biggest impact,
placing 16th out of 73 teams.
Lebanon Co-Chairing Machine Learning Workshop and Symposium
CSE Professor Guy Lebanon is co-chairing a workshop and a symposium at AML08:
Algebraic Methods in Machine Learning. The conference will be held Dec.
11-12 in Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia, in conjunction with
the 2008 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, a major
conference in the field.
Personnel Announcements
Jessica Brock has joined CoC as a Tech Temp in Community effective Oct. 28. Her email address is jbrock8@cc Welcome Jessica!
Elijah Cameron has joined CoC as Director of Assessment and Evaluation in Community effective Nov. 10. His email address is ecameron@cc, and he is located in CCB 111. Welcome Elijah!
Cedric Stallworth has been promoted to Assistant Dean of Community effective Nov. 1. Congratulations Cedric!
Congratulations to the following staff members who have completed an
Office of Organizational Development certificate program:
Cynthia Bryant – Office Professional Certificate
Dani Denton – Emergency Preparedness Program
Pamela Gordon – Departmental Financial Management Certificate
Susie McClain – Supervisory Development Certificate
Preethi Reddy-Veluri – Supervisory Development Certificate
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Administrative News
New GT Policies to Save Money and Combat Abuse
Steven G. Swant,
executive vice president for administration and finance at Georgia
Tech, sent out an e-mail to all faculty and staff on campus regarding
recent abuses of Institute policies and new methods to make sure these
abuses are stopped. Swant outlined five areas at greatest risk for
abuse: P-cards, check requests, travel, vacation and sick leave
reporting and information security. Any incidents, especially
high-profile incidents, of fraud in these areas will cause the public,
the government and all those who give Tech sponsored research funds to
lose their trust in the Institute, Swant wrote. Further information can
be found at the Office of Internal Auditing, the Office of Organizational Development, the “How to Do GT Business the Right Way” website and the Coc Finance Office.
Update on College of Computing Main Web Site
TSO
moved the main College of Computing web site to new, more advanced
hardware infrastructure at the beginning of October. TSO also upgraded
certain versions of software to address security vulnerability in older
versions. Since that time, TSO has seen a dramatic increase in
performance from the web site and no complaints with regard to dropped
connections and slow performance.
Computer Lab Authentication and Authorization
TSO
has been working closely with OIT to use centralized Georgia Tech
credentials via the Georgia Tech Enterprise Directory and Georgia Tech
Active Directory to authorize students to access resources in the CoC
computer labs. TSO has been piloting this effort the entire fall
semester and has seen great success. TSO has been testing two solutions
since August of this year: an “out of the box” solution from Quest
called “Vintella” that lets Linux and UNIX (e.g., IBM's AIX, HP-UX, Sun
Microsystems' Solaris) clients authenticate against a Windows AD server
while providing single sign-on (SSO) functionality; and a CoC/OIT
developed “LDAP Solution” that allows Windows and Unix/Linux-based
machines to authenticate to Windows Active Directory directly. TSO has
been able to make both solutions work and is close to choosing one of
the solutions for continued production services.
The benefits of this effort will result in users having the ability to use their GT
credentials to access CoC resources. Users will not have to remember
two separate user names and passwords nor will TSO have to maintain
multiple databases. This is in line with TSO’s overall strategic plan
of utilizing Institute resources where possible and focusing CoC and
TSO resources on those activities that are unique to the College.
Zimbra E-Mail Migration
One
year ago, TSO began an effort to outsource all e-mail services and
re-purpose resources used in the ongoing support of e-mail to other
efforts. This included the reduction of the number of mail servers from
more than 50 to only two; the outsourcing of Exchange e-mail services
to GTRI; and ultimately, the outsourcing of non-Exchange mail services
to OIT. In December 2007, when the effort began, OIT was not yet
prepared to assume the management of CoC e-mail with their new and
upcoming Zimbra mail service. Understanding that CoC would eventually
migrate to OIT’s Zimbra infrastructure, TSO consolidated all mail
servers to two CoC Zimbra servers running IMAP, POP and Webmail. Since
migration between Zimbra services does not support the export of
calendaring data, TSO did not provide calendaring via Zimbra.
Beginning Nov. 7, TSO has been migrating users from the College of
Computing Zimbra instance to OIT’s production Zimbra service. The
migration for faculty was scheduled for completion by the end of
November and for CoC students by the end of December. This will
conclude TSO’s efforts to outsource e-mail as all e-mail will now be
hosted by either GTRI or OIT.
The benefits of this effort include:
- Faculty using OIT’s Zimbra offering can now share calendaring with
other faculty and students around the campus that are also on the OIT
Zimbra instance.
- TSO can allocate resources and man-power formerly used for e-mail
support to other efforts in support of the Colleges overall mission.
- TSO estimates that the direct cost savings is in excess of $200,000.
In light of recent budget cuts, this is welcome news.
- Hardware previously used for e-mail services will immediately be
provisioned to replace very old infrastructure currently supporting
student-home directories throughout the College
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All content © 2008 The College of Computing at Georgia Tech
Contact Communications View The Compiler Online View Past Issues
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December 4
Entertainment Software Producers: Game Showcase
vcal ical
December 5
Last Day of Classes
Georgia Tech
vcal ical
December 8
Final Exams
Georgia Tech
vcal ical
December 13
CoC Undergraduate Commencement Ceremony
Coliseum
vcal ical
December 14
All Grades Due
Georgia Tech
vcal ical
December 15
CoC Holiday Luncheon
KACB 1116E & W
vcal ical
December 16
Grades Available to Students
Georgia Tech
vcal ical
December 18
Degree Candidate Issues/Clearance Deadline
College of Computing
vcal ical
December 30
Open Registration for Spring 2009
College of Computing
vcal ical
8th
Georgia Tech's ranking among Engineering and IT programs worldwide
80
Number of Georgia Tech faculty working in high-performance computing
$415
Amount of money raised by Minorities@CC through its Gobble for Good event; proceeds go to Families First of Atlanta
This month various groups at CoC are pursuing partnerships with the following companies:
Aflac, Inc.
Cepstral, LLC
Disney Worldwide Services
Eastman Kodak Company
Intel
LogicBlox
Microsoft
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