Picture of the Month

The Robot Wore Tennis Shoes

Chris Farrell, an undergraduate with the Humanoid Robotics Lab, is working with what Assistant Professor Mike Stilman calls “perhaps one of the most capable mini humanoids in the world today.”Chris designed and built this robot together with his father, Rob Farrell, at their Maine-based company, Farrell Robotics. Walking robots get better traction with rubber on their feet, Stilman says. Thus, the sneakers. The Humanoid Robotics Lab is part of RIM@GT, which recently relocated some of its offices and labs to the College of Computing Building.

Research News

Financial Dashboard for December 2008

Newly Awarded Contracts

Grants/Gifts Received

People@CoC

Christensen and RIM@GT to Present Robotics Roadmap in D.C.

Henrik Christensen and RIM@GT have been leading a national road-mapping effort for robotics in the United States. Christensen heads up the Robotics Group, a team of 15 researchers from across the county that has been conducting workshops over the past year. Sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), the Robotics Group will present its draft roadmap for the field to a panel of 10 university presidents, co-chaired by Tech’s interim President Gary Schuster, in February in Washington, D.C. As part of this ongoing project, the group provided a white paper to President Barack Obama’s transitional team. The robotics road map also will be presented to the Congressional Caucus on Robotics in March.

ARC Affiliates Deliver Five Papers at SODA

ARC members, including graduate students Sam Greenberg, Amanda Pascoe and Charlie Brubaker, post-doc fellows Navin Goyal and Luis Rademacher and Professors Dana Randall, Robin Thomas and Santosh Vempala, presented the following papers at the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), held Jan. 4-6 in New York.
• “Robust PCA and Clustering in Noisy Mixtures” by S. Charles Brubaker, ARC/Georgia Tech;
• “Sampling Biased Lattice Configurations using Exponential Metrics” by Sam Greenberg, Amanda Pascoe and Dana Randall, ARC/Georgia Tech;
• “Coloring Triangle-free Graphs on Surfaces” by Zdeněk Dvořák and Daniel Král, Czech Republic; Robin Thomas, ARC/Georgia Tech;
• “Three-coloring Triangle-free Planar Graphs in Linear Time” by Zdeněk Dvořák, Czech Republic; Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi, Japan; Robin Thomas, ARC/Georgia Tech; and
• “Expanders via Random Spanning Trees” by Navin Goyal, Luis Rademacher and Santosh Vempala, ARC/Georgia Tech.

Bader and Kang Presenting at Parallel Programming Symposium

David Bader and Ph.D student Seunghwa Kang will present their research paper, “An Efficient Transactional Memory Algorithm for Computing Minimum Spanning Forest of Sparse Graphs,” at the 14th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP) in Raleigh, N.C., Feb. 14-18. This paper presents a performance model for evaluating algorithms under transactional memory support and provides a newly designed transactional memory algorithm for computing the minimum spanning forest of sparse graphs. Kang and Bader are the first to investigate transactional memory from the algorithm designers’ perspective. A record number of submissions (109) were received for PPoPP 2009, and just 26 were selected based on novelty and technical merit.

Robotics Professors Take Part in International Forum

Henrik Christensen and Mike Stilman will participate in the Schunk International Expert Days on service robotics, a platform for international roboticists and market experts. The event will take place Feb. 18-19 in Hausen, Germany.

New Group Meets to Improve Secondary Computing Education

The Disciplinary Commons for Computing Educators (DCCE) held its first meeting Jan. 10 at Georgia Tech. Funded by a new NSF grant, the DCCE is made up of high school computer science teachers and computing faculty from the University of Georgia who are meeting monthly to share teaching practices, improve understanding of both high school and undergraduate level instruction, and develop evaluation skills. Three cohorts of teachers and faculty will participate in the three-year project.

Vazirani and Goel to Present at Algorithms Workshop

Vijay Vazirani and Ph.D. Student Gagan Goel were invited to speak at the Workshop on Approximation Algorithms and Their Limitations, to be held at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, Feb. 8-10. The workshop will focus on both the design of approximation algorithms and on hardness of approximation results. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers in the fields of approximation algorithms and complexity theory, and to present diverse angles at studying approximability.

Faculty Address CS Education at International Conference

Barb Ericson and Mark Guzdial attended the Australasian Computing Education Conference in Wellington, New Zealand, Jan. 20-23. The pair gave a two-day, pre-conference workshop on their “media computation” approach to teaching computing, and Guzdial also gave the keynote address on "Contextualized Computing Education." The Eleventh Australasian Computing Education Conference is a conference on research and innovations in computing education in its various aspects, at all levels and in all contexts.

Moore to Become Full-time Professor

Visiting Associate Professor Melody Moore has accepted an offer from Provost Gary Schuster to join the School of Interactive Computing as Associate Professor with Tenure. IC chair Aaron Bobick said, “Melody has been a key member of IC for quite a while now; we should welcome her again, this time to stay.” Moore will start in her new position officially July 1, 2009.

Personnel Announcements

Morgon Lindskog was hired permanently in Student Services effective Jan. 1. Her email address is mlindsko@cc, her phone number is 4-5207, and she is located in CCB 108 (front desk of Student Services). Congratulations Morgon!
Chad Huneycutt was promoted to Research Technologist II effective Jan. 21. His position is joint with CS (CERCS) and TSO. Congratulations Chad!
Stephanie Chaillat has joined CoC as a Research Scientist I in CSE effective Jan. 23. Her email address is schailla@cc, her phone number is 5-2024, and she is located in KACB 1333. Welcome Stephanie!
Mikisha “Mashan” Bowen’s last day at CoC was Jan. 13.
Ben Johnson’s last day at CoC was Jan. 15.

General News

Dean’s Search Committee Announced

The College of Computing has created a website dedicated to the search for its next dean. The site is intended to inform both potential candidates and the CoC community about the search process and timeline. It contains a list of the search committee members, official Institute documents related to the search (such as a position description) and other information related to the College and Georgia Tech.
In January, Provost and interim President Gary Schuster announced the 16 members of the search committee charged with recommending the next dean of the College of Computing. Gary May, professor and chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will chair the committee. The full membership includes:
• Gary May (chair), professor and chair, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Rosa Arriaga, senior research scientist, Interactive Computing
• Henrik Christensen, professor, Interactive Computing
• Nick Feamster, assistant professor, Computer Science
• Marta Garcia, associate vice president, Development
• Rebecca Grinter, associate professor, Interactive Computing
• Charles Isbell, associate dean, Undergraduate Affairs, and professor, Interactive Computing
• Wenke Lee, associate professor, Computer Science
• James McGarrah, director of Research, Georgia Tech Research Institute
• Janet Murray, professor, Literature, Communication and Culture
• Thomas Noonan, former chairman, president and CEO, IBM Internet Security Systems Inc. and chair, CoC Advisory Board
• Haesun Park, professor, Computational Science and Engineering
• Bryan Payne, graduate student, Computer Science
• Pamela Ruffin, director of Human Resources and Administration, College of Computing
• David Sherrill, professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
• Jennifer Whitlow, undergraduate student, Computational Media

May will hold town hall meetings with CoC faculty, staff and students in February and April to talk about the search and give updates on progress. The February meeting will be held Thursday, Feb. 12, from 11 a.m. to noon in Klaus 1116, and the April event will be Tuesday, April 14, also at 11 a.m. in Klaus 1116.

New Facebook page for CoC

The Office of Communications has updated the College’s presence on Facebook. Anyone with a Facebook page can join, and the goal is to get a huge and varied college community going out there so please join and pass along the invitation. Communications also is taking suggestions on what would make this group useful to you. Don’t be shy.

Follow @gtcomputing on Twitter

Do you tweet? If so, follow @gtcomputing on Twitter for a different kind of information channel. The Offiice of Communications plans to refrain from posting the same things as the website, Compiler or other channels and will do more live blogging, two-way conversation and distribution of immediately relevant information.

Women@CC and Relay For Life

Women@CC held their first meeting of the semester Jan. 12 and discussed their upcoming event, Relay For Life. The event is the American Cancer Society’s signature activity that offers anyone the opportunity to participate in the fight against cancer. This year it will be held Friday, April 10, at the CRC SAC field. Women@CC is organizing “CCB Student Organizations Relay for Life Team,” with Steph Yang as the team leader. Registration is $10, and 100 percent of the fee goes to the American Cancer Society. Women@CC will meet every Monday from 4 to 5 p.m. in the Student Organizations Room (CCB 114B).

Online Travel Approval and Reimbursement Initiative Under Way

Georgia Tech’s process for approving and reimbursing official travel will be revamped based on the recommendations of a team commissioned recently to develop a new model. Over the next few months, members of the project team will be working with department personnel across campus to test the new Web-based business process, which will provide for online submission of employee travel authorization and expense reimbursement.
The administration anticipates a transition to the new travel process early in the next fiscal year, and communications regarding project status, training and other workforce preparation efforts will be delivered throughout the project. There will also be a concerted effort to solicit feedback and input from campus users on critical issues. User input is critical to success. Please send any questions, comments or suggestions regarding this project to Travel.ask@business.gatech.edu or to Carla Bennett.

Staff performance appraisals for 2008

The classified staff performance appraisal process for the calendar year 2008 has begun. All materials pertaining to the appraisal process were emailed to supervisors Jan. 19. For those employees with a new supervisor, in most cases the new supervisor will be responsible for completing the appraisal with strong input from the previous supervisor.

Correction

The editors misidentified Andrew Orlando as Antonio Cardoza in the Photo of the Month in last month’s issue of The Compiler. Our apologies to Mr. Orlando!