Picture of the Month

Georgia Tech's New President

Dr. G.P. “Bud” Peterson, shown here with his wife, Val, will officially become Georgia Tech's 11th president on April 1. Peterson was confirmed by the Board of Regents on Tuesday, Feb. 24, and introduced to the Georgia Tech community at a reception the following afternoon in the Student Center. Peterson comes to Atlanta from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he has served as chancellor since 2006.

Research News

Financial Dashboard for January 2009

Newly Awarded Contracts

Grants/Gifts Received

People@CoC

Grinter Named Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs

Beki Grinter (IC) has agreed to serve as Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs. Grinter has previously served as coordinator of the Human-Centered Computing Ph.D. Program and director of Graduate Studies for the School of Interactive Computing. Blair MacIntyre will succeed Grinter as HCC coordinator.

Faculty Promotions and Tenure Awards

Congratulations to the following eight faculty members who have been promoted and/or awarded tenure:
Beki Grinter - Awarded tenure
Wenke Lee - Promoted to Professor
Ling Liu - Promoted to Professor
Beth Mynatt - Promoted to Professor
Milos Prvulovic - Awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor
Dana Randall - Promoted to Professor
Greg Turk - Promoted to Professor
Eric Vigoda - Promoted to Professor

LeDantec Wins Microsoft Research Fellowship

Christopher Le Dantec, a doctoral student in human-centered computing (HCC), has been selected as one of 15 Microsoft Research and Live Labs Ph.D. Fellows for 2009. The Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship Program recognizes and supports exceptional doctoral students in computing and those working at the intersection of computing and the sciences. This year, top schools around the world submitted nominations for 173 applicants. LeDantec received his award at a ceremony at Microsoft Research in Seattle on Feb. 23. Another HCC student, Andrea Grimes, won the fellowship last year.

Professor and Students Present at Humanitarian Logistics Conference

Santosh Vempala (CS) gave an invited talk at the 2009 Humanitarian Logistics Conference, held at Georgia Tech, Feb. 19-20. Vempala gave his talk, “Computing for Global Health,” as part of a panel titled “Long-term Development and Humanitarian Aid.” The following CoC students presented posters at the same conference:
• Ashwin Paranjpe (M.S. in InfoSec), “Reliable and Low-cost Mobile Ad Hoc Wireless Networks”
• Stephen Thomas (Ph.D. in CS), “Monitoring Blood Supply Safety in Developing Regions”
• Adebola Osuntogun (Ph.D. in CS), “V2V: Design of A Blood Flow System”
• Abisheak Iyer (M.S. in CS), “A Web-Based System for Homeless Shelters”

AAAI 2009 Spring Symposia

Two IC grad students, David Roberts and Manish Mehta, are organizing the AAAI 2009 Spring Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II to be held March 23-25 at Stanford University. Mark Riedl (IC) and Brian Magerko (LCC) are senior advisers to the organizing committee. The symposium is a follow-up to the AAAI 2007 Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies created by Riedl and Magerko. Riedl also has two papers at the symposium, the second co-authored by IC student Scott Appling:

Andrea Thomaz (IC) is organizing the AAAI 2009 Spring Symposium on Agents that Learn from Human Teachers, also being held March 23-25 at Stanford. Appling and Ellen Do (IC) have co-authored a paper titled “CLARIFY: Human-Powered Training of SMT Models” for that symposium.

Goel, Ram and Riedl Present at DARPA Workshop

Ashok Goel, Ashwin Ram and Mark Riedl, all of Interactive Computing, presented at the DARPA IPTO Workshop on Experience-based Narrative Memory (EN-Mem), Feb. 23-24 in Washington, D.C. Their presentation titled, “Experience-based Narrative Memory for Interactive Stories and Intelligence Analysis,” included a talk by Goel about a white paper he co-authored with Riedl, “Multistrategy Story Construction in Investigative and Intelligence Analysis.” Ram also spoke about his white paper, “Authoring Characters for Interactive Stories.”

Bader Presents Research on New Multicore Code

David Bader (CSE) and Amrita Mathuriya, a graduate student in CS, will present a paper titled “GTfold: A Scalable Multicore Code for RNA Secondary Structure Prediction” at the 24th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, March 8-12 in Honolulu. Co-authors on the paper include Assistant Professor Christine E. Heitsch (Math) and Professor Stephen C. Harvey (Biology). GTfold is a new multicore code the four co-authors designed to understand how RNA folds into secondary structures. Their target is to learn how to fold long RNA virus sequences, such as HIV.

Two Computing Students Make Finals of InVenture Prize

Two of the eight finalists selected in the Jan. 28 preliminary round of the InVenture Prize@GT are computing undergraduates. Junior Roger Pincombe and freshman Joy Buolamwini will advance to the final round on March 30 to compete for cash prizes ($5,000 individual and $10,000 team), free patent filings by the Georgia Tech Office of Technology Licensing (valued at $20,000 each) and a paid summer internship to work on their inventions.

Pincombe’s DialPrice is a price-checking service that makes it possible to comparison shop without leaving the store aisle. “You dial a regular phone number and then enter the 12-digit UPC code on the box,” he said. “DialPrice will tell you the average price, the price range and what other stores or online retailers are selling it for.”

Buolamwini describes her invention, Admissions Conquered, as “a web-based platform for students or parents looking for help with all aspects of the admissions process and for those wanting to share their knowledge and experiences.”

The following Computing students were among the more than 100 competitors.

CM majors: Bryan Berry, Hal Helms, Nick Cory Johnson, Holden Link, Danny Miller, Amir Sattari

CS majors: Taggart Bowen-Gaddy, Joy Buolamwini, Robert Bush, Joshua Casaceli, Andrew Cray, William Cray, Patrick Crenshaw, Krishnakant Ram Desai, Chris Farrell, Travis Gockel, Ian Robert Guthridge, Ajai Karthikeyan, Aurel Lazar, Robert Loftin, Timothy Reeves Martin, Jr., Miles Kendrick McCrocklin, Roger Pincombe, Andrew Rosen, Abhishek Shroff, Joshua Slaughter, Jin Yao

Bader Serves as Distinguished Panelist at HPC Meeting

David Bader (CSE) served on the HPCA/PPoPP 2009 Panel on Opportunities Beyond Single-Core Microprocessors, chaired by Mark Hill (Wisconsin). In addition to Bader, panelists at the Feb. 16 event included Sarita V. Adve (Illinois), Bill Dally (Stanford), Bill Harrod (DARPA) and Vivek Sarkar (Rice). Both the HPCA 2009 (15th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture) and PPoPP 2009 (14th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming) took place Feb. 14-18 in Raleigh, N.C.

Vazirani and Goel Invited to Workshop in Algorithmic Game Theory

Vijay Vazirani (CS) and grad student Gagan Goel (CS) will participate in a workshop on algorithmic game theory to be held March 22-29 at the Bellairs Research Institute in Barbados. The workshop will address new issues arising from the open, distributed nature of the Internet—the quintessential computing platform today, Vazirani said—by applying principles from game theory and algorithm design.

Second Edition of “Computing for Engineers” Text Published

David Smith, a CoC lecturer since 1997, has just published the second edition of the book he wrote while teaching CS 1371, “Computing for Engineers.” The text is designed for engineering students with little or no previous computing experience. Smith, himself an engineer, uses MATLAB to illustrate computing fundamentals in the book and offers hands-on exercises using engineering industry examples.

CS Professor and Student to present at ASPLOS

Nate Clark and graduate student Farhana Aleen will be at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) in Washington, D.C., March 9-11 to present their paper, “Commutativity Analysis for Software Parallelization: Letting Program Transformations See the Big Picture.” Clark said he and Aleen developed a fundamentally new compiler technique for software parallelization that allows internal computation to be incorrect as long as the outputs still match. Only 29 papers were accepted from among 113 submitted.

Alumna to Give Keynote Address at Summit

Three-time alumna of the CoC, Annie Anton (BS 1990, MS '92, PhD '97), is one of the keynote speakers at the Summit on the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges. Anton is professor of computer science and director of The Privacy Place at North Carolina State University Department of Computer Science in Raleigh.

Personnel Announcements

Steven Akins has joined CoC as a Tech Temp in TSO effective Jan. 29. His email address is birdman@cc, his phone number is 5-2680, and he is located in CCB 234. Welcome Steven!
Tina Moseley’s last day at CoC was Feb. 17.
Matthew Mullins’ last day at CoC was Feb. 15.
Olufisayo Omojokun’s last day at CoC was Feb. 6.

General News

2009 Undergraduate Research Symposium

The deadline for submissions to the 2009 Undergraduate Research Symposium is Wednesday, April 1, at 5 p.m. Winners will be chosen by a panel of faculty judges. The first prize winner will get $750, the second prize winner will get $300 and the third prize winner will get $100. In addition to the judges’ awards, $50 People's Choice Awards also will be given out based on a popular vote. Additional prizes will be awarded to all entrants. The UROC Symposium, which is supported by a gift from Yahoo!, will be held Wednesday, April 15, from 3 to 6 p.m. Amy Bruckman (IC), Alex Orso (CS) and Richard Fujimoto (CSE) are UROC coordinators.

2009 CoC/ECE Career Fair Has Record Attendance

The first joint career fair of the College of Computing and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, held Feb. 3-5 in the Student Ballroom, drew more than 1,700 students, a record for the event. Organizers attributed the strong attendance to the fact that, for the first time, undergraduates and graduate students in computer science, computational media, computer engineering and electrical engineering were invited to attend. Despite fears that the economy might keep companies away from the fair, 35 companies on average were represented each day of the three-day event. Plans for a larger event next year are already under way.

Correction

In the Grants/Gifts Received section of the February issue of The Compiler, a $60,000 grant from Intel was mistakenly attributed to Karen Liu. The principal investigator for that grant is Ling Liu.