The Compiler - News for the CoC Community
 

Issue 29 | December 2008  View in a Web browser

Picture of the Month

CoC a Major Presence at SC08

CoC a Major Presence at SC'08
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

$11,638, 349

Proposed Contracts for the Month

Total

$ Amount

IC

CS

CSE

CoC RIM
13
$3,304,863 48% 31%
20%
1%
<1%

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

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

 

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:

  1. 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.
  2. TSO can allocate resources and man-power formerly used for e-mail support to other efforts in support of the Colleges overall mission.
  3. TSO estimates that the direct cost savings is in excess of $200,000. In light of recent budget cuts, this is welcome news.
  4. 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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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


Industry Outreach

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