People@CoC
GT HPC Researchers Make Another Strong Showing at SC11
College of Computing faculty and graduate-level students demonstrated at SC11, one of the largest industry tradeshows Georgia Tech attends, the wide range of research in big data and high performance computing taking place throughout the Institute. The Nov. 12-18 conference in Seattle was attended by some 40 College faculty and students with strong involvement in the technical program. The Graph500 announcement, in which David Bader (CSE) unveiled the ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers, was standing-room-only; the GT-hosted Intel machine, mirasol, came in at No. 19 on the list. Aparna Chandramowlishwaran’s George Michael HPC Fellow presentation engaged the audience with a high level of interaction afterwards. For a full roster of Georgia Tech participation in SC11, visit the GT@SC11 website.
Feamster, Braunstein Present at GCATT's Broadband 2020 Symposium
Nick Feamster (CS) and Mark Braunstein (IC) participated in the Georgia Centers for Advanced Telecommunications Technology's (GCATT) Broadband 2020 symposium, held Oct. 26 in the GT Global Learning Center. The event aims to take stock of progress made toward pervasive broadband connectivity and the steps we'll need to take to achieve measurable and world-leading levels of "Broadband-for-All" by the year 2020. Feamster spoke on managing broadband networks in the home, while Braunstein delivered a talk on "Health Informatics in the Cloud." A full list of speakers, along with slide decks and audio recordings of their presentations, is available on the GCATT website.
Vazirani Balances Digital Equilibrium Talks at Caltech, Wisconsin
Vijay Vazirani (CS) delivered his talk, "Extending General Equilibrium Theory to the Digital Economy: Equilibrium Pricing of Semantically Substitutable Goods," at Caltech on Nov. 15. Six days later at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he delivered a variation on the same theme in a Distinguished Lecture titled, "Can the Theory of Algorithms Ratify the 'Invisible Hand of the Market?'" The talk discussed how a new pricing model needs to be developed for digital goods. General equilibrium theory, which Vazirani called the "undisputed crown jewel of mathematical economics" over the past century, does not apply to digital goods; once produced, a digital good can be reproduced at (essentially) zero cost, thus making its supply infinite. Vazirani's talk was based on a joint paper with Kamal Jain of Microsoft Research.
Guzdial, Ericson Promote CS Education Down Under
Mark Guzdial (IC) and Barb Ericson (CoC) visited Australia in November to deliver several talks and workshops related to computing education. On Nov. 18, Guzdial delivered the keynote address, titled "Creating Computer Science for All Students," at the Eighth Melbourne Computing Education Conventicle. The next day, Ericson offered an App Inventor Workshop for high school teachers in Melbourne. On Nov. 22, both visited the University of Adelaide Festival of Learning and Teaching, where Guzdial presented an address, "Introducing Computing with Media, with a Pedagogical Side Tour," while Ericson spoke about CS outreach. Finally, on Nov. 27, the pair delivered a joint keynote presentation, "Why & How to Teach Computing to Everybody," at the Sydney Computing Education Conventicle, held at the University of Sydney. Guzdial made the most of the visit, also speaking on "Inspiring Computing Education with Media" at a University of Sydney alumni event. The pair's visit was partially sponsored by the Australian Council of Deans of ICT, Guzdial said.
Feamster Tackles Open Access, Copyright Enforcement in Talks
Nick Feamster (CS) delivered a presentation, "Open Information Access: Old Problems, Emerging Challenges," at the IEEE Computer Communications Workshop, held Oct. 10-12 in Hyannis, Mass. Feamster also participated in a panel discussion at an Oct. 12 mini-conference organized by the Information Economy Project and hosted by the George Mason University School of Law. Titled "Copyright Compromises: Creators' Rights, ISP Efficiency & Consumer Welfare," the event focused on the so-called "six strikes deal" between copyright holders and Internet service providers, brokered by the White House in July. The panel on which Feamster sat examined the issue of "How the ISPs Work, Before & After the Copyright Enforcement Deal."
IC Faculty See Their Way to 13th ICCV Conference in Barcelona
The College sent a respectable contingent to the 13th International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2011), held Nov. 6-13 in Barcelona, Spain. Irfan Essa (IC) served as an area chair, and Grant Schindler (IC) served as a reviewer. The following papers were delivered by CoC researchers:
• "Generalized Subgraph Preconditioners for Large-Scale Bundle Adjustment," by Yong-Dian Jian, Doru Balcan and Frank Dellaert
• "Gaussian Process Regression Flow for Analysis of Motion Trajectories," by Kihwan Kim, Dongryeol Lee and Irfan Essa
• "Understanding Egocentric Activities," by Alireza Fathi, Ali Farhadi and James M. Rehg
• "Large-Scale Image Annotation using Visual Synset," by David Tsai, Yushi Jing, Yi Liu, Henry Rowley, Sergey Ioffe and James M. Rehg
Finally, three IC faculty, Frank Dellaert ("Perception Challenges for Autonomous Aggressive Driving and Flying"), Jim Rehg ("Behavior Imaging and the Study of Autism ") and Aaron Bobick ("On Human Action") delivered invited talks at associated workshops.
GT Hosts, Nabs Best Student Paper at Creativity & Cognition Conference
Ashok Goel (IC) served as general chair for the 8th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition, held Nov. 3-6 at Atlanta's High Museum. Joining Goel as a conference program chair was Brian Magerko (IC), who also served along with Ph.D. student Kurt Luther (IC) as a local chair. Ellen Do (IC) served as graduate student symposium chair, and Nancy Nersessian and Janet Kolodner (both IC) served on the conference advisory committee.
The College made a clean sweep of Best Paper awards in both the general and student categories. Best Paper went to Goel and coauthors Swaroop Vattam, Michael Helms and Bryan Wiltgen for "An Information-Processing Account of Creative Analogies in Biologically Inspired Design." Best Student Paper went to authors Nicholas Davis, Boyang Li, Brian O'Neill (and faculty members Mark Riedl (IC) and Michael Nitsche) for "Distributed Creative Cognition in Digital Filmmaking." Other papers presented by College authors included:
• "Kinesthetic Pathways: A Tabletop Visualization to Support Discovery in Systems Biology," by Andy Wu, Jung-Bin Yim, Eric Caspary, Ali Mazalek, Sanjay Chandrasekharan, Nancy J. Nersessian
• "Creative Gadget Design in Fictions: Generating Novel Object Types in Blended Spaces," by Boyang Li, Mark Riedl
• "A Scale Model of Mixed Reality," by Evan Barba, Blair MacIntyre
• "Computing Harmony With PerLogicArt: Perceptual Logic Inspired Collaborative Art," by Nicholas Davis, Pramod Gupta, Shruti Gupta, Ellen Do
• "Formally Modeling Pretend Object Play," by Alexander Zook, Brian Magerko, Mark Riedl
• "Finding The Odd One Out: A Fractal Analogical Approach," by Keith McGreggor, Ashok Goel, Adam Hampshire
Dovrolis on Planning Teams for WIE, CoNEXT 2011 Events in December
Constantine Dovrolis (CS) is a co-organizer of the Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE), co-hosted by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) and Georgia Tech, Dec. 1-2 in San Diego. The goal of the WIE workshop series is to bring together researchers, commercial Internet facilities and service providers, technologists, theorists, policy makers, RIR stakeholders, and pundits of Internet economics to try to frame a concrete and useful research agenda for the emerging but stunted field of Internet infrastructure economics.
Dovrolis also is serving as program committee co-chair for the ACM SIGCOMM CoNEXT 2011 conference, to be held in Tokyo, Dec 5-10. The conference is a major forum for presentations and discussions of novel networking technologies that will shape the future of Internetworking.
Stasko Heads North for Prestigious Killam Lecture on InfoViz
John Stasko (IC) gave an invited Killam Lecture, titled "Visual Analytics for Investigative Analysis and Exploration of Documents and Data", at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Nov. 14. The University's Dorothy J. Killam Memorial Lecture Series is meant to present important and topical issues with an aim to stimulate public support for research. This year's series focused on information visualization, and Stasko's lecture was preceded by an October lecture by Daniel Keim of the University of Konstanz in Germany.
Personnel Announcements
Tielei Wang has joined CoC as a Post-Doc in CS effective 11/8/11. His email address is tielei.wang@cc. Welcome Tielei!
Carlos Batist has joined CoC as a Financial Admin. III in CS effective 11/28/11. His email address is cbatist@cc, phone number is 5-6381 and is located in KACB 3415. Welcome Carlos!
Billy Lau has joined CoC as a Research Scientist I in CS effective 11/29/11. His email address is blau@cc and is located in KACB 3111. Welcome Billy!
Jeffrey Hubbs' last day at CoC was 11/15/11.
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General News
Nigeria's 'Nollywood' Film Industry Connects With Georgia Tech
The Nigerian film industry, colloquially known as "Nollywood," is the world's most prolific movie maker, producing 40 new movies a week (as much as five times more than Hollywood) and representing one of Africa's most significant and dynamic cultural exports. From Nov. 14-25, Georgia Tech hosted New Media Nollywood Week as a chance to engage with this vibrant visual medium and to help explore and invent its use of social, interactive and multimedia technologies. According to event co-host Michael Best (IC), a highlight was the Wednesday night screening of Memories of My Heart, introduced by Nigerian Consul General Geoffrey Teneilabe and capped off with a panel composed of the film's two producers, director, two main stars and the president of Nigeria's association of film producers. Another was Nazir Ahmad, the exiled Hausawa hip-hop artist, rapping his hit "This is Me" (which was banned by the Nigerian government) while the chair and executive vice chair of the Nigerian Communications Commission sat in the audience. To get a feel for how the week went, check out these New Media Nollywood photo galleries.
C4G Review Day to Highlight Latest Group of Student Projects
On Tuesday, Dec. 6, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. in the Klaus Atrium, the Computing for Good class will hold its 3rd Annual C4G Review Day, in which both current and former students display posters describing their projects and talk with visitors about the C4G work. This fall's class, taught by Jim Foley (IC), is working to provide computational solutions for such problems as international election monitoring, adolescent pregnancy, wheelchair mobility, mental health and IT education in Liberia, care for those suffering from ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), and more. To learn more, visit the C4G Class blog.
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