Picture of the Month

Visualizing Movement

An image from Ph.D. candidate Mario Romero's paper“Viz-A-Vis:
Toward Visualizing Video through Computer Vision" (Romero, Jay Summet, John Stasko, Gregory Abowd) was chosen for the cover of the TVCG: Vis and InfoVis 2008 proceedings. The image is a visualization of human activity— specifically a two-hour dinner party at the Aware Home Research Institute—across space and time. Space is depicted as a horizontal plane and time is vertically stacked on top of the plane. The intent of the visualization is to provide an analytical tool to detect and track patterns of behavior.

Research News

Financial Dashboard August 2008

Newly Awarded Contracts

Grants/Gifts Received

People@CoC

Interim Dean Names Four New Associate Deans

Jim Foley announced the appointment of four new associate deans who will help guide the College over the next year and beyond.
• Ron Arkin, associate dean for research, will work with CoC leadership to identify research priorities and opportunities to leverage work across the College and the Institute, communicate opportunities to the faculty, review and sign off on major proposals, coordinate with appropriate offices both within and outside Georgia Tech and manage intellectual property issues for the College.
• Beki Grinter, associate dean for graduate affairs, will take a close look at MS and Ph.D. programs, be in charge of graduate-level program formation, recruitment, coordination across schools and colleges, compliance with Institute policy, and assessment. She also will create development programs for graduate students and inform them of professional and academic opportunities.
• Mary Jean Harrold, associate dean for faculty affairs, will work with professors, school chairs and deans to create a comprehensive development program for all faculty at all stages of their careers, liaise with the professional and academic organizations in the field and play a central role in RPT activities
• Charles Isbell, associate dean for undergraduate affairs since June, will manage CoC’s overall approach toward undergraduates, including course scheduling, advising and mentoring, promoting diversity and community and representing undergraduate educational efforts to external audiences.
• Beth Mynatt, associate dean for strategic planning and initiatives, will help engage the CoC community in looking forward and deciding where the College wants to be in five years and in developing strategies for getting there. She’ll also help articulate strategic goals and values.

Bader Speaks on Petascale Computing

David Bader (CSE) was an invited speaker at the 37th SPEEDUP Workshop on High-Performance Computing, held Sept. 8-9 at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Bader spoke about “Petascale Computing for Large-Scale Graph Problems and Computational Biology” to an audience of faculty and students primarily from the top Swiss research schools specializing in computation, such as ETH Zürich, University of Basel, and EPF Lausanne. The workshop focused on the data challenge of HPC.

O’Neill Awarded ARCS Foundation Scholarship

Computer science Ph.D. student Adam O'Neill, who is doing research in cryptography with adviser Alexandra Boldyreva, has been awarded the ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) Foundation Scholarship. According to the organization’s website, “The ARCS Foundation provides scholarships to academically outstanding U.S. citizens studying to complete their degrees in science, medicine and engineering, thereby contributing to the worldwide advancement of science and technology.” Recipients of the scholarship must be recommended by their departments and must maintain a grade point average of 3.5 or above.

Randall Named to National Research Council

Dana Randall has been named a “National Associate of the National Academies,” a lifetime appointment recognizing “extraordinary service” to the National Research Council of the National Academies. According to the organization’s website, “The mission of the NRC is to improve government decision making and public policy, increase public education and understanding, and promote the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in matters involving science, engineering, technology and health.”

Computing Paper Wins Award at Software Engineering Conference

A paper by Ph.D. student Raul Santelices, former visiting researcher Pavan Kumar Chittimalli, alumnus Taweesup Apiwattanapong and Professors Alessandro (Alex) Orso and Mary Jean Harrold—all of the School of Computer Science—received a “Distinguished Paper Award” at the 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2008), held in L'Aquila, Italy, Sept. 17-19. " The paper title is: “Test-suite Augmentation for Evolving Software.”

David McCoy Blogs about Technology, Life and More

CoC Advisory Board member David McCoy is now blogging on his “personal views on life, technology and process management—not necessarily in that order.” In his first few blog entries, McCoy ruminates on time travel to the future vs. the past, the nature of families, the effects of one’s world perspective on his or her approach to software engineering and the annoyance of being given senior citizen discounts prematurely.

Bruckman Gives Keynote Workshop Talk at Music Conference

Amy Bruckman gave a keynote speech at the Sept. 24 music technology workshop, which served as the introduction to the 2008 College Music Society Conference held at CoC. In her talk, titled “Social Support for Creativity and Learning Online,” Bruckman reviewed the fairly short history of peer production of content on the Internet (people performing and recording music for posting on YouTube, for example) and presented research being done in the Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) Lab that aims to help shape this phenomenon.

IC Team Has Paper at Case-Based Reasoning Conference

IC graduate students Saurav Sahay, Sundaresan Venkatasubramanian, Anushree Venkatesh, Priyanka Prabhu, alumnus Bharat Ravisekar and Ashwin Ram had a paper at ECCBR-08 (European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, held in Trier, Germany, Sept. 1-4) that was not included in last month’s issue of The Compiler. It is: “IReMedI – Intelligent Retrieval from Medical Information.”

Liu Papers Accepted for Publication and Conference
A paper by computing Ling Liu and alumnus Mudhakar Srivatsa (who joined IBM last summer), titled “Mitigating Application-Level Denial of Service Attacks on Web Servers: A Client-Transparent Approach,” appeared in the July 2008 issue of ACM Transactions on the Web and is featured by MIT Technology Review and accessible online. Another paper by Liu and her student Anand Murugappan, titled “An Energy Efficient Approach to Processing Spatial Alarms on Mobile Clients,” won the best paper award in the 17th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering (SEDE-2008), held June 30 to July 2 in Los Angeles.

New Visiting Professors in Computer Science

• Assistant Professor Yun Li from Shanghai JiaoTong University is visiting for one year funded by her university and the Chinese Education Ministry. She is working on security problems in pervasive computing systems. Li, who arrived in mid August, is working in KACB 3403.
• Associate Professor Xiaofeng Rong from Xi’An Tech University is visiting for one year, also funded by his university and the Chinese Education Ministry. He is working on wireless network and location security. Rong, who arrived in September, can be found in KACB 3201.
• Professor Eladio Martin, assistant professor at Universitas Miguel Hernandez in Spain, is funded under the Fulbright Program and the Spanish government. He is working on mobile and wireless location management. Martin arrived recently and officially begins his visit on Oct. 1. His office is in KACB 3403.

Vazirani Gives Talk at Google

Vijay Vazirani gave a talk at Google on Sept. 12 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. A video of the lecture can be viewed on YouTube.

CoC Students Attend Women in Computing Conference

The CoC Office of Outreach, Enrollment and Community sponsored 20 students to attend the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference on Sept. 30. The conference focuses on research, career interests and the role of women in technology fields. Program Coordinator Beth Collums and Instructor Kristin Marsicano accompanied the graduate and undergraduate students to the conference in Keystone, Colo.

Record Number of Papers by Feamster at SIGCOMM ‘08

Nick Feamster had an unprecedented three papers at this year’s ACM SIGCOMM conference, held in Seattle, Aug. 17-22. The papers were:
• “Path Splicing,” by Murtaza Motiwala, Megan Elmore, Nick Feamster, Santosh Vempala
• “Answering What-If Deployment and Configuration Questions with WISE,” by Mukarram bin Tariq, Amgad Zeitoun, Vytautas Valancius, Nick Feamster, Mostafa Ammar
• “Accountable Internet Protocol (AIP),” by David Andersen, Hari Balakrishnan, Nick Feamster, Teemu Koponen, D. Moon, Scott Shenker

This is the first year any single CoC faculty member has had three papers at SIGCOMM, the premier networking conference that draws about 600 attendees from academia, research and industry. The paper on path splicing was completed in collaboration with ARC and in particular with Santosh Vempala. Feamster’s group also had two papers at the online social networking workshop at SIGCOMM and a poster in the poster session.

Stasko To Be Most Published Author at InfoVis—Three Papers This Year

John Stasko has three papers coming up at the IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis) Conference in Columbus, Ohio, Oct. 19-21. Stasko’s three papers make him not only the first to have three papers in one year but also the most published author since the conference began in 1995.
• “Distributed Cognition as a Theoretical Framework for Information Visualization,” by Zhicheng Liu, Nancy Nersessian, John Stasko
• “Viz-A-Vis: Toward Visualizing Video through Computer Vision,” by Mario Romero, Jay Summet, John Stasko, Gregory Abowd
• “Effectiveness of Animation in Trend Visualization,” by George Robertson, Roland Fernandez, Danyel Fisher, Bongshin Lee, John Stasko

Lebanon Has Paper at Upcoming InfoVis Conference

Guy Lebanon has a paper in the IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis) Conference in Columbus, Ohio, Oct. 19-21.“Visualizing Incomplete and Partially Ranked Data,” by Paul Kidwell, Guy Lebanon, William S. Cleveland.

Personnel Announcements

Pamela Gordon has joined CoC as an Accountant III in Computer Science effective Sept. 9. Her email address is pgordon@cc, her phone number is 5-7716, and she is located in KACB 3415. Welcome Pamela!
Christopher Rouland has joined CoC as an adjunct lecturer in GTISC effective Aug. 28. His email address is crouland3@cc. Welcome Christopher!
Ilya Lashuk has joined CoC as a post-doc in CSE working with George Biros effective Aug. 20. His email address is ilashuk3@cc, and he is located in KACB 1343. Welcome Ilya!
James Niehaus has joined CoC as a Tech Temp in IC working with Mark Riedl effective Sept. 2. Welcome James!

General News

Interim Dean Outlines Goals and Strategies at Town Hall Meeting

Jim Foley reassured faculty and staff at a town hall meeting Sept. 23 that the College will weather the current budget crunch and emphasized the need to keep moving forward and upward, lest the program lose ground against its competitors. Foley discussed his four priorities, which are: improving the Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure (RPT) process; focusing on both internal and external communications; improving and in some cases outsourcing services provided by TSO; and creating a work climate in which people are both professional and respectful of others. The slide show that accompanied Foley’s remarks is available on the CoC intranet.