Compiler - May 2012

The Compiler - News for the CoC Community

Issue 59 | May 2012 View in a Web browser

Picture of the Month

The Udacity of Learning

Sebastian Thrun, Stanford professor and co-founder of Udacity, visited Georgia Tech on April 18 to hold a town hall devoted to the impact of disruptive technologies on higher education. Last fall, Thrun teamed up with colleague Peter Norvig to offer an artificial intelligence class--taught on the Stanford campus to about 200 students--to some 158,000 students worldwide through the Internet. After the experience, Thrun resigned his tenured position (though he remains a Stanford research professor) to focus full-time on the startup-turned-university known as Udacity. His visit was sponsored by the Center for 21st Century Universities, and a full summary and video of Thrun's lecture are available on the C21U website.

Research News

Financial Dashboard for March 2012

FY2012 YTD New Awards

$21,874,978

Proposed Contracts for March 2012

Total	$ Amount	CS
1	$1,250,000	100%

Newly Awarded Contracts for March 2012

Sponsor	Value	PI	Co-PIs	Title
Mobile Intelligence Corp	$19,048	Jim Rehg	None	Visual Detection of Objects At a Distance

Grants/Gifts Received for March 2012

Sponsor	Value	PI	Co-PIs	Title
Verisign	$50,000	Nick Feamster	None	Early ID of Spam Campaigns With DNS Lookups
Google	$54,183	Eric Gilbert	None	Locally Grown Relationships

People@CoC

Potts Named Vice-Provost for Undergraduate Education

After 20 years of serving undergraduate students in the College, Colin Potts (IC) will continue to do so for students across Georgia Tech as the Institute’s new vice provost for undergraduate education, effective Aug. 1. In the new position, which originated out of the Office of the Provost's recent leadership reorganization, Potts will oversee the offices and programs affecting undergraduate education, including the Division of Professional Practice, Honors Program, Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, Office of Undergraduate Studies, Athletics Academic Support and the Center for Academic Success.

Christensen, GT Honored by Boeing as Supplier of the Year

Georgia Tech and Henrik Christensen (IC) recently were recognized by Boeing for outstanding performance through the company’s Supplier of the Year Awards. The Institute was one of 16 organizations to receive the award from a pool of more than 17,500 Boeing suppliers in more than 50 countries. Georgia Tech was honored in the category of Academia, which recognizes performance as a “strategic university.” As one of Boeing's eight strategic universities, Georgia Tech provides increased knowledge and understanding of fluid flow, advanced manufacturing technology, design and aircraft technology through basic and applied research. Christensen was one of five Georgia Tech professors specifically recognized by Boeing in the award.

Ph.D. Student Choudhary Earns GT TI:GER Fellowship

Ph.D. student Shauvik Roy Choudhary (CS) has been awarded a Georgia Tech TI:GER fellowship, given to five doctoral students each year to help them learn about the challenges of commercializing innovative technologies. A unique collaboration between Georgia Tech and Emory University's Law School, TI:GER is nationally recognized for its success at developing entrepreneurs. Created in 2002, it is the only program of its kind to bring together Ph.D., MBA and law students in the classroom and research lab to learn about technology commercialization. Choudhary is the only computing student selected this year for TI:GER.

Naik Nabs Software Innovation Award From Microsoft

Mayur Naik (CS) has been awarded a Microsoft Research Software Engineering Innovation Foundation (SEIF) to develop an automated test-generation methodology for mobile apps. Now in its third year, the Microsoft Research Software Engineering Innovation Foundation is a forum for collaboration among software engineers worldwide. SEIF awards provide seed funding to innovative research in software engineering, recognizing projects that aim to advance the state of the art. Naik will advance a program-analysis technique called dynamic symbolic execution while making heavy use of the Microsoft Z3 automated theorem prover.

Ram Points Out Seeds of Health Care Disruption in UC-Berkeley Talk

Ashwin Ram (IC) delivered a lecture, titled "Health : Healthcare :: Learning : Education," on April 11 at the University of California-Berkeley's iSchool. Part of Berkeley's "Thought Leaders in Data Science and Analytics" series, the talk examined how the disruptive forces—such as open courseware and social networking—that are transforming higher education are having an analogous impact on health and health care. While "health care" is driven by providers, payers, and governments, Ram explained, "health" focuses on empowering the consumer to take charge of their health and wellness.

Randall Keeps Active Talk Schedule During MSRI Residency

Dana Randall (CS) delivered an invited plenary talk, "Sampling, Random Structures and Phase Transitions," at the Latin American Theoretical Informatics Symposium (LATIN 2012), held April 15-20 in Arequipa, Peru. Randall also has been delivering several West Coast lectures while in residence this semester at UC-Berkeley's Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI). In February she spoke on "Colloids, Lattice Gasses, and other Models with Hard Constraints" at a MSRI Workshop on Percolation and Interacting Systems. In April she spoke as part of the MSRI-Evans Lecture Series (a joint colloquium between MSRI and Berkeley's math department) on "Sampling Paths, Permutations and Lattice Structures." Finally, on May 14, Randall will deliver a Stanford Probability Seminar on "Biased Paths and Permutations."

Turing Fellowship Means Sumner Internship for CS Undergrad

Undergraduate CS major Bethany Sumner has been racking up the hardware this semester, including being named a Turing Fellow through a program created by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The NYC Turing Fellows Program matches top computer science and engineering students with outstanding summer internships at leading New York startups, and Sumner will spend this summer interning with Kickstarter. Sumner's Turing Fellowship comes on the heels of earning an Outstanding Oral Presentation Award at Georgia Tech's Spring 2012 UROP Symposium. Her presentation was titled "Helping Households Control and Manage their Home Network" and was based on Sumner's involvement in the Kermit and uCap projects out of the School of Interactive Computing's Pixi (Keith Edwards) and Work2Play (Beki Grinter) labs. Both are prototypes of household broadband management applications to be tested in households in order to learn more about what types of tools are helpful to the average home Internet user. Finally, Sumner also took a first-place award at the College's own Spring UROC Symposium (see story below), also for the same projects.

Kolodner Speaks at Brookings Institution Panel

Janet Kolodner (IC) participated in an April 24 panel discussion sponsored by the Brookings Institution's Center for Technology Innovation. Titled "Collaboration Between Social Networking and Education," the event addressed challenges of using new technology and the policies behind integrating technology into the American education system. Both video and audio-only of the event are available here.

Two Invited Talks on the Schedule for Bader in May

David Bader (CSE) will deliver a pair of talks this month. First, at "From Data to Knowledge: Machine-Learning with Real-time and Streaming Applications," a May 7-11 conference sponsored by UC-Berkeley's Center for Time-Domain Informatics, Bader will speak during the "Streaming Networks & Streaming Algorithms" session. Then, on May 21 in Shanghai, China, Bader will deliver the keynote, "Analyzing Massive Data using Heterogeneous Computing," at the 21st International Heterogeneity in Computing Workshop. The event is co-located with the 26th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), to be held in Shanghai May 21-25.

Vazirani Logs Frequent Flier Miles in April for Invited Talks

Five invited talks kept Vijay Vazirani (CS) busy in April, beginning with an April 5 address at Stanford titled "Dispelling an Old Myth About an Ancient Algorithm." He delivered the same address on April 9 at UC-Berkeley. Next was an April 12 lecture at Stanford's Graduate School of Business as part of the school's Economics Brown Bag Series. Vazirani traveled cross-country for his April 17 talk at MIT on "Market Equilibria, PPAD, and Complementary Pivot Algorithms," then back to the West Coast to again deliver the "Old Myth/Ancient Algorithm" address," April 25 at Caltech.

Personnel Announcements

Brian Boddy has been promoted to a Financial Administrator III in CoC's Financial Services department, effective 4/2/12. Congratulations Brian!
Darryl McCune has joined CoC as a Tech Temp in Community effective 4/17/12. His email address is dmccune@cc. Welcome Darryl!
Spencer Rugaber's 's last day at CoC was 4/20/12. Best wishes to Spencer!

General News

RIM Holds Open House for National Robotics Week

The RIM Center opened its doors to more than 400 middle school and high school students on April 11 for the third annual Robotics Open House. Robotics M.S. and Ph.D. students demonstrated more than 20 projects around campus, marking the Institute’s participation in National Robotics Week. Students saw a variety of projects, including an autonomous race car, robotic submarines and Andrea Thomaz’ (IC) robot Simon (click here for a video of the day’s events). “You can see the students’ eyes light up when they’re watching our demos. They get really excited because they often have little knowledge that such projects exist, and they are in many cases not aware of the potential impact of new technology,” said RIM Director Henrik Christensen (IC). National Robotics Week was established by Congress in 2010. This year, there were 150 affiliated events across all 50 states, the highest participation to date.

ARC to Hold Phase Transition Workshop, June 4-7

From June 4-7, the Algorithms & Randomness Center will hold a Workshop on Computation and Phase Transitions that will bring together researchers from statistical physics, probability, discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science. The convergence of ideas from these fields has led to breakthroughs in the understanding of the limits of computation for approximate counting and random sampling problems. For more information, contact Dani Denton.

MacIntyre Shows Off Argon at USA Science & Engineering Festival

Georgia Tech fielded a strong presence at the 2nd Annual USA Science & Engineering Festival, held April 28-29 in Washington, D.C., and on hand to represent the College were students and researchers from Blair MacIntyre's (IC) Augmented Environments Lab, who showed off the augmented reality web browser, Argon. Aimed at the nation’s K-12 students, the event is intended to “to re-invigorate the interest of our nation’s youth in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) by producing and presenting the most compelling, exciting, educational and entertaining science festival in the United States.” The festival featured some 3,000 fun, interactive exhibits, more than 100 stage shows and 33 author presentations. On hand for Georgia Tech were Iulian Radu, Keith Bujak and Maribeth Gandy from the Augmented Environments Lab, as well as Jennifer Whitlow from the Office of Outreach, Enrollment and Community. In addition to Argon, the Georgia Tech booth also featured exhibits on nanotechnology and lasers.

College Faculty, Staff to Pick Up GT Institute Awards, April 12

Nine faculty and seven staff members walked away from Georgia Tech’s 2012 Faculty & Staff Honors Luncheon, held April 12 in the Student Center Ballroom. Following is the list of winners:
• Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award: Richard Lipton (CS) ($20,000 prize)
• Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activities Award: Santosh Vempala (CS) ($7,500 prize)
• Faculty Outstanding Service Award: Tucker Balch ((IC) $5,000 prize)
• Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award: Ling Liu (CS)
• Outstanding Faculty Leadership for the Development of GRAs: Wenke Lee (CS)
• CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence: Christopher Peikert (CS) and Michael Stilman (IC)
• Eichholz Faculty Teaching Award: Colin Potts (IC) ($5,000 prize)
• Outstanding Professional Education Award: Mustaque Ahamad (CS) ($2,500 prize)
• Outstanding Staff Performance Award: the entire Office of Outreach, Enrollment and Community, including Cedric Stallworth, Barbara Ericson, Troy Peace, Jennifer Whitlow, Al Hood, Stephanie Echols, Christina Gardner and Daryl McCune (all CoC)
Also, the following faculty & staff were recognized for reach 10 and 25 years of service with Georgia Tech:
• 25 years of service: Ron Arkin (IC)
• 10 years of service: Daron Foreman (CoC), Charles Isbell (IC), Daniel Walker (IC), Rich DeMillo (CS), Constantine Dovrolis (CS), Susie McClain (CS), Deborah Mitchell (CS)

UROC 2012 Recognizes Another Group of Undergrad Researchers

Several talented undergraduate researchers walked away winners from the 2012 Undergraduate Research Opportunities in Computing (UROC) Research Symposium, held April 16 in the CCB Commons. Below is the list of winners and their projects:
Judges' Awards
• First Place ($500): (tie) David Esposito, "Improved RNA Secondary Structure Prediction Using Stochastic Context Free Grammars s" (advisors: Christine Heitsch, Shel Swenson, Svetlana Poznanovik); and Bethany Sumner, ""Helping Households Understand and Control Their Home Network" (advisors: Marshini Chetty, Keith Edwards)
• Second Place ($250): Farzon Lofti & Baris Arin, "Efficient Molecular Dynamics: Profiling and Optimizing LAMMPS Particle Simulations Using GPGPU" (advisors: Hyesoon Kim, Seung Soon Jang)
• Third Place ($100): Christopher Russell, "Occluded Motion Capture of Human Tongues" (advisor: Karen Liu)
People's Choice Awards ($50 each)
• First Place: Donovan Hatch, Jinhyun Kim & Yoomi Pyo, "WalkSafe: A Transient Social Networking Application for Campus Safety" (advisor: Kishore Ramachandran)
• Second Place (tie): Daniel Castro, "Calibration Free Rolling Shutter Removal" (advisor: Irfan Essa); and Daniel Doozan, "Web Users Beware: Online Personalization Can Be Manipulated" (advisors: Nick Feamster, Wenke Lee)
• Third Place: Farzon Lofti & Baris Arin, "Efficient Molecular Dynamics: Profiling and Optimizing LAMMPS Particle Simulations Using GPGPU" (advisors: Hyesoon Kim, Seung Soon Jang)
Judges for this year's symposium were Chaitrali Amrutkar, Shauvik Roy Choudhary, Frank Dellaert, Hyesoon Kim, Jake Cobb, Catherine Grevet, Sudarsun Kannan, Nagesh Lakshminarayana, Mayur Naik and Karthik Raveendran. The UROC Symposium is supported by a generous gift from Yahoo!.

Compiler Goes on Summer Break

This edition of Compiler will be the last until Sept. 1. All newsbytes and suggestions should be mailed to the Office of Communications or to Mike Terrazas.

CoC In the News

To help Compiler readers stay informed of the latest College of Computing media coverage, we share the month's headlines from the CoC website. Below are links to all headlines from April 2012 (most recent headlines at the top).

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