Issue 8 | December 2006

Division Chair Advisory Committee Results

After a recent vote, the CoC Division Chair Advisory Committee will include: Karsten Schwan (At Large), Mary Jean Harrold (Full Professor), Eric Vigoda (Associate Professor) and Milos Prvulovic (Assistant Professor).

Ashwin Ram Receives Adjunct Appointment At Emory

Associate Professor Ashwin Ram was recently appointed adjunct professor at Emory University within the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (MathCS). Ashwin has had ongoing collaborations with MathCS as well as Emory Medical School in the areas of bioinformatics and medical decision support.

Inspiring Women In Computing

HCI Master's student Sarah Williams was among more than 1,300 people who attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in San Diego, CA from Oct. 4-7. Sarah was interviewed by the San Diego Business Journal saying "It's great to hear from persons who I want to be like; these role models who have gone down the road and done all these things have jumped over all these hurdles that I think are so monumental...I thought that was really inspiring." Full article.

Craig Tovey's Ph.D. Student Gets "Shortlisted"

Sunil Nakrani, one of Professor Craig Tovey's doctoral students from Oxford recently had his dissertation nominated for the "2006 Distinguished Dissertation Award," an honor given by the British Computer Society (BCS) which is the UK equivalent of ACM here in the U.S. The Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC), in conjunction with the British Computer Society (BCS), annually selects for publication the best British Ph.D. dissertations in computer science. Sunil's work titled "Biomimetic and Autonomic Server Ensemble Orchestration" addresses the problem of webhosting which had an estimated annual revenue of $30 billion in 2005. Full article.

Seven IIC Papers Accepted At IJCAI

The Interactive & Intelligent Computing division will have seven papers at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) held next month in Hyderabad. IJCAI is the premier Artificial Intelligence (AI) conference and one of the most difficult to get into. Congratulations to IIC faculty and graduate students regarding the following papers:

• "Fast Incremental Square Root Information Smoothing" by Michael Kaess, Ananth Ranganathan and Frank Dellaert.
• "Improving Activity Discovery with Automatic Neighborhood Estimation" by David Minnen, Thad Starner, Irfan Essa and Charles Isbell.
• "Loopy SAM" by Ananth Ranganathan, Michael Kaess and Frank Dellaert.
• "Transfer Learning in Real-Time Strategy Games Using Hybrid CBR/RL" by Manu Sharma, Michael Holmes, Juan Carlos Santamaria, Arya Irani, Charle Isbell and Ashwin Ram.
• "Interpretation of Design Drawings by Analogy" by Patrick Yaner and Ashok Goel.
• "Managing Domain Knowledge & Multiple Models with Boosting" by P. Zeng and Charles Isbell.
• "Towards Runtime Behavior Adaptation for Embodied Characters" by P. Zang, Manish Mehta, Michael Mateas and Ashwin Ram.

Amy Bruckman Keynotes for Veterinary Parasitology Educators

Amy Bruckman will give a keynote address titled "Educational Technology: The Hype and the Reality" at the annual meeting of veterinary parasitology educators in Atlanta on Saturday, December 12.

IIC Welcomes Margaret Clayton

Margaret recently joined the Interactive & Intelligent Computing (IIC) division as an Academic Advisor I working with the Computational Media Program. Margaret comes to Georgia Tech from East Carolina University where she worked as an Academic Advisor for three years after earning both her undergraduate and graduate degrees.

CoC Personnel Announcements For November 2006:

• Tyshawn Dunbar has joined CoC as a Tech Temp in TSO effective 11/2/06. His email address is tdunbar@cc.
• Lamar Gardere has joined CoC as a Tech Temp in IIC working with Gregory Abowd effective 11/1/06.
• Kent Lyons is now a Research Scientist II in IIC working with Thad Starner effective 11/1/06.
• Brian Cooper's last day at CoC was 11/1/06.

Matt Wolf to Serve as Co-Chair of NCA '07

Matt Wolf, co-director of the Interactive High Performance Computing Laboratory in CERCS, will serve as program committee co-chair for the 6th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA '07).

Numerous Equipment Awards From Intel

CoC researchers submitted and won seven equipment grant proposals in less than two months from Intel's Higher Education Program. Congratulations to the following:

• "Multi-Core Virtualization Laboratory" by Karsten Schwan (CERCS) and Mustaque Ahamad (GTISC) received $52,397 worth of equipment.
• "Interactive High Performance Computing and Computational Science Venues Laboratory" and "Accelerated Education in Multi-core based Environments" by Matthew Wolf and Karsten Schwan (CERCS) received approximately $470,000 worth of equipment and software.
• "Pervasive Healthcare" by Gregory Abowd (Aware Home Research Initiative) received $21,444.00 worth of equipment.
• "Distributed Network Monitoring and Troubleshooting" by Nick Feamster (Networking) received $30,444.95 worth of equipment.
• "Mobility Lab" by Ellen Zegura (Networking) and Mostafa Ammar (Security) received $32,630.00 worth of equipment.
• ""Multi-core Platform Environment for Threads&trade Education and Research" by Karsten Schwan (CERCS), Santosh Pande (CSS), Ellen Zegura (CSS), Matthew Wolf (CERCS) received $183,897 worth of equipment.

GTISC Hosts African Delegations

GTISC is currently working on a project to help build national information security capabilities in the developing countries of Africa. Two delegations from Rwanda and Tunisia recently visited Atlanta during their three-week tour of the U.S. The delegations collaborated with CoC faculty member Sy Goodman and included Internet Security Systems, Inc.

Graduation: New Fall Semester Ceremony Details

Please note that there are three different graduation ceremonies this term, but no ticket is required for any of the events. For specifics, visit the website.

Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) Workshop Series

From "Funding Your Research with the President's Undergraduate Research Award (PURA)" to "Writing Research Abstracts," "Research Ethics" and "Eye-Catching Research Posters," don't forget to mark your calendar for Spring 2007. For questions or if you want to register: Email urop@gatech.edu.

Recent Gifts to the College

The CoC Development Office recently received gifts from Aflac, Goldman Sacs, Intel, Kilpatrick Stockton and Worldspan.

December Industry Meetings

In December Development will host meetings with Earthlink, Google, Home Depot, Motorola, SAIC, Vanguard and Vodafone.

GRA/GTA Hiring Requests

In keeping with campus policy, faculty must submit requests to hire GRA/GTA no later than January 2, 2007 for Spring 2007. Waiver driven appointments will not be approved or applied after the close of registration for Spring (Friday, Jan. 12) or any other subsequent enrollment terms. The Graduate Programs Office is also in the process of creating an assistantship offer letter that will include the hiring professor, amount, term, percent time and enrollment requirements. If you would like additional information to be included, your suggestions are welcome. Contact Suzzette Willingham at suzzette@cc.gatech.edu

Annual Food Drive Still Underway

The Institute Partnerships Department's annual food drive is going strong and will continue until December 15. All faculty, staff and students are encouraged to consider donating any leftover canned goods or other nonperishables from your holiday dinners to the food drive. In an effort to keep local community residents warm this winter, clothing items especially blankets, coats, sweaters and men's clothing are also being accepted. Please donate your items in the bins located in Wardlaw, GA Tech Hotel, CRC, IC, Baker Building, CEISMC, Centennial Place Apartments, Library and D.M. Smith.

Faculty Internal Communications Survey Results Are In

Thank you to those who have participated in the Communication Office's online survey thus far. If you have not submitted a survey yet, please take 10 minutes to do so by clicking here. Results to date are available here.

Undergraduates Speak Up About Email Spam

This fall's Undergraduate Town Hall was sparsely attended but very vocal. Hot topics included Threads, Klaus, lab space, and communications. Undergraduates strongly feel they receive far too much non-essential email at the undergraduates@cc email list and would like to explore opt-in list ideas. Communications and TSO plan to address the issue next semester.

2050

The year by which The RoboCup Federation aims to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots to beat the human World Cup champions

$791K

CoC equipment awarded over the past two months by the Intel® Higher Education Program

34

Total number of CoC faculty who participated thus far in the internal communications survey

This month various groups at CoC are pursuing partnerships with the following companies:
· AT&T
· Apple
· Cisco Systems
· Dell
· Delta Airlines
· IBM
· Infosys
· Intel
· Kuka Robotics
· LogiBlox
· Nokia
· SPI Dynamics
· Tata
· Techrizon
· The Weather Channel
· Worldspan