Picture of the Month

Honoring Those With Honors

Research News

Financial Dashboard for November 2008

Newly Awarded Contracts

Grants/Gifts Received

People@CoC

Tetali to Be Journal’s Editor-in-Chief

Prasad Tetali, who holds a joint appointment with the School of Computer Science and the School of Mathematics, has been appointed editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. Tetali will assume his new role Jan. 20.

New Mentoring Program for Computing Undergrads

The Office of Outreach, Enrollment and Community is inviting current computing students to apply to be mentors in a new program aimed at supporting incoming freshmen. It’s designed to increase retention, build leadership skills and provide social support and academic assistance. As mentors, students will have the opportunity to:
• develop relationships with fellow CS/CM majors;
• build and help develop the College of Computing community;
• meet and network with GT alumni and College of Computing staff and faculty; and
• take part in program events (basketball games, leadership workshops, etc.) and in academic assistance programs.
The outreach office hopes to hire 25 or more mentors for the 2009-10 academic year, and each mentor will be assigned about 10 freshman protégés. Any student who entered Georgia Tech in fall 2008 or before may apply for the job. Applications are due by Jan. 23. Email Elizabeth Collums with “mentor application” in the subject line or pick up an application in CCB 135.

Vazirani Presents at Theory Workshop in India

Vijay Vazirani (CS) presented his research at Microsoft Research (MSR) India Theory Day 2008, an annual one-day workshop on theoretical computer science. The workshop, held Dec. 17 at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, was jointly organized by MSR India and the host institution. Vazirani gave a talk titled, “Nash Bargaining via Flexible Budget Markets,” which looks at bargaining through the combined lens of algorithms, game theory and economics. In his talk, Vazirani takes the bargaining problem as defined by John Nash in his seminal 1950 paper and transfers it to a market in the traditional sense of mathematical economics. He then solves the problem—that is, he finds stable prices for goods in the market—using methods developed in the field of algorithms over the last seven years. This solution, in turn, yields the solution to the Nash bargaining problem.

RIM Launches Phase I of Move to CCB

The Robotics and Intelligent Machines Center began its move Dec. 18 from its current space in TSRB to newly renovated offices and labs on the second floor of the College of Computing Building. Director Henrik Christensen (IC) and five RIM faculty, along with their students and research labs, will now be located in CCB. This is the first phase in a master plan to bring all RIM faculty together in one place.

GVU Affiliate Publishes Book in Game Studies

Michael Nitsche, assistant professor at the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture and faculty member at GVU, has a new book coming out with MIT Press. Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds examines the shift to 3D graphics in video games—a dramatic artistic and technical development in the history of video games that suggests an overall transformation of games as media. Nitsche looks at how the move to 3D makes the players’ experience of space a key element of understanding and playing the game, and at what this shift means for video game design and analysis. Video Game Spaces provides a range of necessary arguments and tools for media scholars, designers and game researchers with an interest in 3D game worlds and the new challenges they pose. The book and more information about it can be found on the MIT Press website.

CSE Enters the Spotlight at SC08 Conference

Several faculty and graduate students in the Computational Science and Engineering Division participated in SC08, an annual international conference on high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. This year the conference was held Nov. 15-21 in Austin, Texas. These were the CoC participants:
David Bader
• co-chaired a workshop on “Supercomputing, Multicore Architectures and Biomedical Informatic”;
• spoke at a workshop on “Bridging Multicore's Programmability Gap”;
• spoke on a panel on “Can Developing Applications for Massively Parallel Systems with Heterogeneous Processors Be Made Easy(er)?”;
• participated in two Birds of a Feather discussions—“Exascale Software Challenges” and “Unleashing the Power of the Cell BE for HPC Applications”; and
• made a presentation at the GT booth on the Sony-Toshiba-IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Broadband Engine Processor
Aparna Chandramowlishwaran (grad student)
• gave two presentations at the Georgia Tech booth: “Concurrent Collections: A Model for Parallel Programming” and “On the Design of Fast Pseudo-Random Number Generators for the Cell Broadband Engine and an Application to Risk Analysis.”
David Ediger (grad student)
• gave a presentation at the Georgia Tech booth: “Large-Scale Graph Problems on the Cray XMT.”

Ilya Lashuk (post-doc fellow)
• gave a presentation at the Georgia Tech booth: “Kernel-Independent Fast Multipole Method with Scalable Octree Construction.”
Rahul Sampath (grad student)
• presented a technical paper with co-author George Biros , titled “Dendro: Parallel Algorithms for Multigrid and AMR Methods on a 2:1 Balanced Octrees.”
Jeffrey Vetter
• co-authored two technical papers and a poster at the conference: “Wide-Area Performance Profiling of 10GigE and Infiniband Technologies”; “Early Evaluation of BlueGene/P”; and “Modeling Assertions for Petascale Applications and Systems.”

Computing Alumni Organization Seeks to Build Alumni Community

Graduation doesn’t have to mean goodbye. The Computing Alumni Organization (COA) is here to benefit all current and former students of the College of Computing and alumni of its predecessor, the School of Information and Computer Science. The organization is guided by the 11-member CoC Alumni Council and is supported by both the College of Computing’s Office of Development and the Georgia Tech Alumni Association. The COA strives to:
• foster life-long participation with the College of Computing and Georgia Tech;
• assist CoC and Georgia Tech to enhance alumni involvement in both volunteerism and philanthropic support;
• plan and implement CoC’s alumni events and activities;
• provide networking opportunities for CoC alumni and students; and
• support the continued excellence of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech.
For more information or to join the Computing Alumni Organization, please visit the council website or the CAO wiki, or email council chair Bobby Krupczak (M.S. and Ph.D. in CS, 1993 and 1997).

Personnel Announcements

Sheila Williams has joined CoC as an Academic Advisor I in CSE effective Dec. 16. Her email address is sheilaw@cc, her phone number is 5-8529 and she is located in KACB 1321. Welcome Sheila!
Michelle Bernard’s last day at CoC was Dec. 3.