Picture of the Month

CERCS Alumni Day

The Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS) held a special Alumni Day April 4. Several CERCS alumni attended to talk about their technical work and interests and share their experiences with each other and with our current students. Pictured, left to right: Beth Plale (now associate professor and associate dean for research in Engineering at Indiana University), Arnab Paul (now with Intel), Robin Kravets (now associate professor in computer science at the University of Illinois) and Kipp Jones (now with Skyhook Wireless).

Research News

Newly Awarded Contracts for March 2008

Closed Contracts for March 2008

Grants/Gifts Received for March 2008

People@CoC

Six HCC Students Receive Google 2008 Anita Borg Scholarship

Sarita Yardi, Lana Yarosh, Jill Diamond, Betsy DiSalvo, Erika Shehan and Jennifer Stoll—all HCC Ph.D. students from CoC—were awarded 2008 Anita Borg Scholarships, each receiving $10,000 for the 2008-09 academic year. Valerie Henderson-Summet (Ph.D. CS), Kathy Pham (MS CS) and Renuka Apte (MS CS) were among the finalists and received $1,000 each. All scholarship recipients and finalists were invited to visit Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., on April 3-5 for a networking retreat that included workshops with a series of speakers, panelists, breakout sessions and social activities.

Pediatric Heart Surgeon Uses Software at MAGIC Lab

Dr. Kirk Kanter of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Emory University School of Medicine came to Jarek Rossignac's MAGIC Lab on April 16 to use Georgia Tech's Surgem software to prepare for his next Fontan heart surgery. The software allows a surgeon to grab, pull and twist a 3D model (created with MRI or CT scans) of the actual patient's heart and explore several surgical options before the operation. Rossignac and his students, especially Ph.D. student Brian Whited, developed the Surgem software.

GVU Students Win Design Competition

Susan Wyche (Ph.D. HCC), Kelly Caine (Ph.D. Engineering Psychology), Ben Davison (Ph.D. HCC) and Michael Arteaga (M.S. HCI) won the Georgia Product Development Management Association's (GPDMA) Student Design Competition for “Sun Dial,” a mobile phone application that uses a graphic representation of the sun moving through the sky to remind Muslims of their five daily prayer times. The team received a $1,000 prize and presented their project at GPDMA's quarterly meeting at the Georgia Tech College of Management on April 17.

‘Magic Kingdom’ Studios Donates Equipment to MAGIC Lab

Walt Disney Animation Studios has given some new equipment to MAGIC Lab to support research on Feature Animation Production Automation. Jarek Rossignac characterized the new equipment—a top-of-the-line digital drawing tablet and an HP workstation used by the artists at Disney—as “really cool.”

Grad Student Susan Wyche Presents at IxDA Conference and CHI08

HCC graduate student Susan Wyche (advisor: Beki Grinter) was invited to speak at the first annual conference of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), held Feb. 8-10 in Savannah. Wyche’s talk was titled “Fieldwork and Sketching: Translating Research Themes into Conceptual Designs.” Watch the talk on video. Wyche also presented a paper at CHI08, which took place May 5-10 in Florence, Italy. The paper, “Re-Placing Faith: Reconsidering the Secular-Religious Use Divide in the United States and Kenya,” by Wyche, S.P., Aoki, P.M., and Grinter, R.E., will appear in the Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Grad Student Andrea Grimes Wins Microsoft Awards

Andrea Grimes, another of Grinter’s graduate students in HCC, was named a 2008 Microsoft Research Fellow and given a Social Impact Award by the research organization. See all the 2008 fellows and learn more about Microsoft Research. Grimes also co-authored two papers that were presented at CHI08. “Celebratory Technology: New Directions for Food Research in HCI,” by Grimes and Richard Harper, was nominated for best paper. That paper, along with “Life Scheduling to Support Multiple Social Roles,” by Grimes and A.J. Brush, will appear in the Proceedings of CHI 2008.

New Editorial Board at CACM Includes Three CoC Faculty

Dean Emeritus Peter Freeman, Seymour (Sy) Goodman and Mark Guzdial have been named to the editorial board of Communications of the ACM, the flagship journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. The three will serve on the Viewpoints board, one of six subcommittees of the CACM editorial board.

Ashwin Ram Gives TechTalk at Google

Ashwin Ram of SIC gave an invited talk titled “Case-Based Reasoning for Game AI” on April 3 as part of the Google TechTalks series at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Game Artificial Intelligence is an effort to take computer games beyond scripted interactions, however complex, into the arena of truly interactive systems that are responsive, adaptive and intelligent. Watch the talk on video.

Personnel Announcements

Peter Wan has returned to CoC as a Research Technologist II in TSO effective April 14. His email address is peter@cc, his phone number is 5-7401 and he is located in CCB 247C. Welcome back, Peter!
Monica Ross has joined CoC as a Tech Temp in IC effective April 7. Her email address is mross@cc, her phone number is 5-7349 and she is located in TSRB 355X. Welcome, Monica!
Sharon Williams' last day at CoC was April 18. Best wishes, Sharon!
LaCole McCain's last day at CoC was April 25. Best wishes, LaCole!
Rashmi Patel's last day at CoC was April 30. Best wishes, Rashmi!

General News

CoC Helps Fund Expansion of RSI Lending Library

With the help of SCS Chair Ellen Zegura, the RSI Lending Library secured $1,000 in funding from TSO to help upgrade some of the library’s equipment. The RSI Lending Library, an initiative of the CoC Graduate Student Council, is a resource for College of Computing faculty, students and staff who are concerned about Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI). Anyone at the College can go to the library to learn how to prevent RSI or to mitigate its symptoms. The library provides a variety of ergonomic keyboards, pointing devices and other equipment that people can borrow for a month to try out before buying. The new funding will allow the library to get extra pieces of popular equipment and several new types of equipment, such as laptop stands, keyboard trays, keyboards and mice. Get more information about the library.

Papers for SIGGRAPH 2008 Selected at SIC

The School of Interactive Computing hosted the Papers Committee meeting for SIGGRAPH 2008, the premier conference in computer graphics. The meeting, held March 8-10, brought together 62 top researchers in graphics to decide on papers for this year’s conference. Georgia Tech faculty member Greg Turk led the meeting in his role as SIGGRAPH 2008 Technical Papers Chair, and CoC faculty Karen Liu and Irfan Essa served as committee members.