Message from the Dean

Stop and listen a moment. Can you hear it? That's the buzz of activity, growth, and achievement in the halls of CCB, TSRB, and outside as the final touches are put on KACB. We are about two weeks into the new academic year and there are a lot of new faces around the college—several new hires and joint faculty appointments (welcome to the CoC, and to Atlanta), the largest freshman class ever, as well as about double the usual amount of grad students in both the Master's and Ph.D. programs. College staff have been here all summer helping prepare for what will be a year of "firsts"—the Klaus building is opening next month, the Threads program is officially in gear, we're beginning our "Defining the New Face of Computing" campaign, a new provost has been selected, I'm giving the inaugural State of the College Address next week, our new Algorithms & Randomness Think-tank is opening, we're entering the DARPA Grand Challenge...and this is all just during fall semester. As always, it's a demanding and electrifying time for the college, and the discipline of computing in general—lots of activity and room to make lasting impact in education, research, and the world. CoC is happening, and I welcome everyone, whether for the first time or coming back, to keep it happening.

Inaugural State of the College Address

Don't forget, you are invited to CoC's inaugural State of the College address by Dean Rich DeMillo on Thursday, September 7 at 11 am in the CCB Auditorium (Room 16, first floor). The talk will be webcast live from the CoC website home page, and lunch will be served afterwards in the courtyard. Please RSVP to Stefany by Monday, September 4th with a yes OR no answer.

Klaus Advanced Computing Building Grand Opening Update

"Save the dates" are in the mail and invitations are on the way, but for the latest information about all the upcoming Klaus Grand Opening events, click here.

Student News

CoC Welcomes Largest Class in College History

This year's Freshman class is swelling to over 2,900 students compared to the 2,600 total from last year. Courses like CS1315, CS1371, and CS1301 are bursting at the seams as the largest class in CoC history starts the semester.

Graduate Student Numbers Reach an All-Time High

The College of Computing usually welcomes 35 to 40 new doctoral students and 100 Master's students each year. However, this fall the College is enjoying the highest numbers ever recorded with 80 Ph.D. students and 135 MS students.

Division News

CSE Faculty Retreat Focuses on Strategic Planning

The Computational Science & Engineering (CSE) division welcomed faculty from Biology, Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering, and ISyE to focus on strategic planning. This year's faculty retreat was held on August 11 at Stone Mountain Park.

CSE to Host Strategic Planning Workshop on Computational Systems Biology

Select Georgia Tech faculty will attend a workshop at Chateau Elan this month to discuss the Institute's direction towards computational systems biology. Due to space restrictions, the workshop is by invitation only.

CSE Posters Go to "Top" Departments in The Nation

The Computational Science & Engineering (CSE) division is sending their fabulous new recruitment posters to the best math, biology, aerospace, and computer science departments in the country. As CSE continues to develop its education programs, the posters will help increase visibility and attract students within engineering and the sciences.

CSS Faculty Retreat to Calloway Gardens

The Computer Science & Systems (CSS) division is hosting its faculty retreat on September 28-29 at Calloway Gardens. Elaine Kettner, a consultant from Cambridge Concord will facilitate the strategic planning sessions for CSS.

GVU News

Thad Starner's CATS & CopyCat Featured on Maya & Miguel Website

The Center for Accessible Technology in Sign (CATS) is a joint project between CoC and the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf (AASD) dedicated to providing accessibility to learning via sign language. CopyCat is a sign language tutor designed to augment a deaf child's classroom experience by encouraging the child to sign and interact with on-screen characters in a fun and engaging way while improving his communication skills. Both projects are led by Associate Professor Thad Starner, and will be featured on the PBS and Scholastic Media website for the children's program "Maya & Miguel" during Deaf Awareness Week on September 24-30, 2006.

GVU Students Win First Place at VAST

Graduate students Summer Adams and Kanupriya Singhal won first place at the 2006 IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Contest for their paper, "Visualizing Relationships in a Diverse Data Collection." VAST promotes the development of benchmarks for visual analytics and establishes a forum to advance evaluation methods. The VAST Conference will be held October 31- November 2 in Baltimore, Maryland. For details, click here.

RIM@GT News

2006 Robotics Lecture Series is Underway

The first Robotics & Intelligent Machine (RIM) seminar was held on August 21 with approximately 120 in attendance. Several faculty met with the speaker Shankar Sastry of UC-Berkley including Frank Dellaert, Jim Rehg, Ron Arkin, Irfan Essa, Aaron Bobick, and Dean Rich DeMillo. The complete schedule of RIM's fall seminar series is now available here.

KUKA Robotics Moves to Tech

KUKA Robotics is working to establish a presence at Georgia Tech and is scheduled to move into the Manufacturing Research Center at Georgia Tech by October 2006.

GTISC News

GTISC Industry Leader Lectures

The GTISC Industry Leaders Lecture Series is underway. Each lecture starts at 4 pm and is followed by a networking reception. For a complete line up, click here.

New Funding For GTISC

Intel is funding research in scalable hypervisors, virtual machine monitoring, and trusted distributed infrastructure. A recent gift of $80,000 will support several GTISC students working on such projects.

Symantec is providing $50,000 to support usable security research. This funding will sponsor a team in the annual "Tiger Team" competition, jointly held by GTISC and GVU.

Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Bellsouth are funding research in VoIP totaling $300,000. The two-year effort will address a variety of issues related to VoIP security.

Three GTISC proposals have been recommended for funding by NSF CyberTrust program managers totaling approximately $1,050,000.

Recent GTISC Research Publications

Understanding the Network-Level Behavior of Spammers. Anirudh Ramachandran and Nick Feamster. In Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, Pisa, Italy, September 2006.

Misleading Worm Signature Generators Using Deliberate Noise Injection. Roberto Perdisci, David Dagon, Wenke Lee, Prahlad Fogla, and Monirul Sharif. In Proc. 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, May 2006.

Polymorphic Blending Attacks. Prahlad Fogla, Monirul Sharif, Roberto Perdisci, Oleg Kolesnikov, and Wenke Lee. In Proc. 15th USENIX Security Symposium (SECURITY '06), Vancouver, B.C., Canada, August 2006.

CERCS News

CERCS Faculty Win High Performance Computing Research Awards

New awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Energy (DOE) will support CERCS researchers Karsten Schwan, Ada Gavrilovska, Greg Eisenhauer, and Matt Wolf as they explore new directions in high performance I/O for petascale systems. Collaborators at the University of New Mexico at Sandia, and at Oak Ridge National Laboratories contributed both new technologies and representative applications for this effort.

Professors Mustaque Ahamad, Wenke Lee, and Karsten Schwan recently received NSF and Intel awards to develop scalable methods for virtualizing next generation and also exploring entirely new ways of utilizing multi-core machines within enterprise systems.

IBM is funding CERCS faculty David Bader, Santosh Pande, Irfan Essa, and Karsten Schwan as they examine new directions in multi-core systems, focusing on gaming applications and on new programming and compiler methods for such heterogeneous computing platforms.

CERCS Seminars

The CERCS/Systems Seminar takes place every Wednesday at 12 pm. Contact ada@cc.gatech.edu for more information.

CERCS and GTISC are supporting a new Health Systems Seminar every Thursday at 2 pm. Contact dblough@ece.gatech.edu for more information.

Office of Diversity & Community News

CoC Creates New Student Ambassador Organization

Undergraduate and graduate (CS & CM) students are currently being solicited for interviews to create CoC's Student Ambassador Organization. These students will be the new "face" of the College at all recruitment and outreach events. After the application process, approximately 30 students will be selected for the 2006-07 academic year. For more information, contact Giselle Martin.

Seniors Will Design CoC's Student Recruitment & Retention Database

The design process has begun on the College's student recruitment & retention database. This tool will ideally allow appropriate administrative staff to pull much needed "on demand" data about both prospective and current CoC students. CS4911 senior design students (William Lee, Joves Luo, Dan Engel, and Mark DeJesus) are collaborating on this project with Giselle Martin, Maureen Biggers, and CoC's new web developer Bryan Jordin. A rough launch in scheduled for December.

Calling All Prospective Students

All faculty and staff who are currently speaking to, or intending to speak to, student prospects should send their contact information to Giselle Martin to ensure that each student is tracked through the recruitment cycle, and therefore receives all appropriate recruitment material from the College.

Office of Communications News

Business Week Reporter to Join Freshman LEAP Class

Dean Foust, Business Week reporter, will join Charles Isbell's September 21st Freshman LEAP class to round out his Innovations story highlighting the CoC, and also to understand exactly how we are introducing new undergraduates to the concept of the globally competitive marketplace and preparing them for it from the moment they arrive at Tech.

CoC The World

The International programs campaign encouraging undergraduates and graduate students to participate in a study abroad program offered by the CoC (or Tech) kicks off September 11th.

CCB Promotional Campaign Space

Most of you have noticed the new take on the CCB lobby and student commons hallway space that Communications has started. We will be using the lobby, stairwell boxes and the hallway hangers for various program promotions during 6-8 week intervals throughout the year and plan to approach various faculty or groups to discuss using it in the coming weeks. Thanks to Jack Ramsey for finding and installing the new hanging system for us! It's nice not to trip over easels anymore.


	Issue 5 \| September 2006 Message from the Dean Stop and listen a moment. Can you hear it? That's the buzz of activity, growth, and achievement in the halls of CCB, TSRB, and outside as the final touches are put on KACB. We are about two weeks into the new academic year and there are a lot of new faces around the college—several new hires and joint faculty appointments (welcome to the CoC, and to Atlanta), the largest freshman class ever, as well as about double the usual amount of grad students in both the Master's and Ph.D. programs. College staff have been here all summer helping prepare for what will be a year of "firsts"—the Klaus building is opening next month, the Threads program is officially in gear, we're beginning our "Defining the New Face of Computing" campaign, a new provost has been selected, I'm giving the inaugural State of the College Address next week, our new Algorithms & Randomness Think-tank is opening, we're entering the DARPA Grand Challenge...and this is all just during fall semester. As always, it's a demanding and electrifying time for the college, and the discipline of computing in general—lots of activity and room to make lasting impact in education, research, and the world. CoC is happening, and I welcome everyone, whether for the first time or coming back, to keep it happening. Inaugural State of the College Address Don't forget, you are invited to CoC's inaugural State of the College address by Dean Rich DeMillo on Thursday, September 7 at 11 am in the CCB Auditorium (Room 16, first floor). The talk will be webcast live from the CoC website home page, and lunch will be served afterwards in the courtyard. Please RSVP to Stefany by Monday, September 4th with a yes OR no answer. Klaus Advanced Computing Building Grand Opening Update "Save the dates" are in the mail and invitations are on the way, but for the latest information about all the upcoming Klaus Grand Opening events, click here. Student News CoC Welcomes Largest Class in College History This year's Freshman class is swelling to over 2,900 students compared to the 2,600 total from last year. Courses like CS1315, CS1371, and CS1301 are bursting at the seams as the largest class in CoC history starts the semester. Graduate Student Numbers Reach an All-Time High The College of Computing usually welcomes 35 to 40 new doctoral students and 100 Master's students each year. However, this fall the College is enjoying the highest numbers ever recorded with 80 Ph.D. students and 135 MS students. Division News CSE Faculty Retreat Focuses on Strategic Planning The Computational Science & Engineering (CSE) division welcomed faculty from Biology, Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering, and ISyE to focus on strategic planning. This year's faculty retreat was held on August 11 at Stone Mountain Park. CSE to Host Strategic Planning Workshop on Computational Systems Biology Select Georgia Tech faculty will attend a workshop at Chateau Elan this month to discuss the Institute's direction towards computational systems biology. Due to space restrictions, the workshop is by invitation only. CSE Posters Go to "Top" Departments in The Nation The Computational Science & Engineering (CSE) division is sending their fabulous new recruitment posters to the best math, biology, aerospace, and computer science departments in the country. As CSE continues to develop its education programs, the posters will help increase visibility and attract students within engineering and the sciences. CSS Faculty Retreat to Calloway Gardens The Computer Science & Systems (CSS) division is hosting its faculty retreat on September 28-29 at Calloway Gardens. Elaine Kettner, a consultant from Cambridge Concord will facilitate the strategic planning sessions for CSS. GVU News Thad Starner's CATS & CopyCat Featured on Maya & Miguel Website The Center for Accessible Technology in Sign (CATS) is a joint project between CoC and the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf (AASD) dedicated to providing accessibility to learning via sign language. CopyCat is a sign language tutor designed to augment a deaf child's classroom experience by encouraging the child to sign and interact with on-screen characters in a fun and engaging way while improving his communication skills. Both projects are led by Associate Professor Thad Starner, and will be featured on the PBS and Scholastic Media website for the children's program "Maya & Miguel" during Deaf Awareness Week on September 24-30, 2006. GVU Students Win First Place at VAST Graduate students Summer Adams and Kanupriya Singhal won first place at the 2006 IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Contest for their paper, "Visualizing Relationships in a Diverse Data Collection." VAST promotes the development of benchmarks for visual analytics and establishes a forum to advance evaluation methods. The VAST Conference will be held October 31- November 2 in Baltimore, Maryland. For details, click here. RIM@GT News 2006 Robotics Lecture Series is Underway The first Robotics & Intelligent Machine (RIM) seminar was held on August 21 with approximately 120 in attendance. Several faculty met with the speaker Shankar Sastry of UC-Berkley including Frank Dellaert, Jim Rehg, Ron Arkin, Irfan Essa, Aaron Bobick, and Dean Rich DeMillo. The complete schedule of RIM's fall seminar series is now available here. KUKA Robotics Moves to Tech KUKA Robotics is working to establish a presence at Georgia Tech and is scheduled to move into the Manufacturing Research Center at Georgia Tech by October 2006. GTISC News GTISC Industry Leader Lectures The GTISC Industry Leaders Lecture Series is underway. Each lecture starts at 4 pm and is followed by a networking reception. For a complete line up, click here. New Funding For GTISC Intel is funding research in scalable hypervisors, virtual machine monitoring, and trusted distributed infrastructure. A recent gift of $80,000 will support several GTISC students working on such projects. Symantec is providing $50,000 to support usable security research. This funding will sponsor a team in the annual "Tiger Team" competition, jointly held by GTISC and GVU. Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Bellsouth are funding research in VoIP totaling $300,000. The two-year effort will address a variety of issues related to VoIP security. Three GTISC proposals have been recommended for funding by NSF CyberTrust program managers totaling approximately $1,050,000. Recent GTISC Research Publications Understanding the Network-Level Behavior of Spammers. Anirudh Ramachandran and Nick Feamster. In Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, Pisa, Italy, September 2006. Misleading Worm Signature Generators Using Deliberate Noise Injection. Roberto Perdisci, David Dagon, Wenke Lee, Prahlad Fogla, and Monirul Sharif. In Proc. 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, May 2006. Polymorphic Blending Attacks. Prahlad Fogla, Monirul Sharif, Roberto Perdisci, Oleg Kolesnikov, and Wenke Lee. In Proc. 15th USENIX Security Symposium (SECURITY '06), Vancouver, B.C., Canada, August 2006. CERCS News CERCS Faculty Win High Performance Computing Research Awards New awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Energy (DOE) will support CERCS researchers Karsten Schwan, Ada Gavrilovska, Greg Eisenhauer, and Matt Wolf as they explore new directions in high performance I/O for petascale systems. Collaborators at the University of New Mexico at Sandia, and at Oak Ridge National Laboratories contributed both new technologies and representative applications for this effort. Professors Mustaque Ahamad, Wenke Lee, and Karsten Schwan recently received NSF and Intel awards to develop scalable methods for virtualizing next generation and also exploring entirely new ways of utilizing multi-core machines within enterprise systems. IBM is funding CERCS faculty David Bader, Santosh Pande, Irfan Essa, and Karsten Schwan as they examine new directions in multi-core systems, focusing on gaming applications and on new programming and compiler methods for such heterogeneous computing platforms. CERCS Seminars The CERCS/Systems Seminar takes place every Wednesday at 12 pm. Contact ada@cc.gatech.edu for more information. CERCS and GTISC are supporting a new Health Systems Seminar every Thursday at 2 pm. Contact dblough@ece.gatech.edu for more information. Office of Diversity & Community News CoC Creates New Student Ambassador Organization Undergraduate and graduate (CS & CM) students are currently being solicited for interviews to create CoC's Student Ambassador Organization. These students will be the new "face" of the College at all recruitment and outreach events. After the application process, approximately 30 students will be selected for the 2006-07 academic year. For more information, contact Giselle Martin. Seniors Will Design CoC's Student Recruitment & Retention Database The design process has begun on the College's student recruitment & retention database. This tool will ideally allow appropriate administrative staff to pull much needed "on demand" data about both prospective and current CoC students. CS4911 senior design students (William Lee, Joves Luo, Dan Engel, and Mark DeJesus) are collaborating on this project with Giselle Martin, Maureen Biggers, and CoC's new web developer Bryan Jordin. A rough launch in scheduled for December. Calling All Prospective Students All faculty and staff who are currently speaking to, or intending to speak to, student prospects should send their contact information to Giselle Martin to ensure that each student is tracked through the recruitment cycle, and therefore receives all appropriate recruitment material from the College. Office of Communications News Business Week Reporter to Join Freshman LEAP Class Dean Foust, Business Week reporter, will join Charles Isbell's September 21st Freshman LEAP class to round out his Innovations story highlighting the CoC, and also to understand exactly how we are introducing new undergraduates to the concept of the globally competitive marketplace and preparing them for it from the moment they arrive at Tech. CoC The World The International programs campaign encouraging undergraduates and graduate students to participate in a study abroad program offered by the CoC (or Tech) kicks off September 11th. CCB Promotional Campaign Space Most of you have noticed the new take on the CCB lobby and student commons hallway space that Communications has started. We will be using the lobby, stairwell boxes and the hallway hangers for various program promotions during 6-8 week intervals throughout the year and plan to approach various faculty or groups to discuss using it in the coming weeks. Thanks to Jack Ramsey for finding and installing the new hanging system for us! It's nice not to trip over easels anymore.	Sept. 6 RIM Lecture (Steven M. LaValle, UIUC ) Sept. 7 Inaugural State of the College Address (Rich DeMillo, CCB Auditorium) 11 am - Lunch to follow in the courtyard Sept. 19 GTISC Lecture (Phyllis Schneck, CipherTrust) Sept. 20 RIM Lecture (John Leonard, MIT) Sept. 26 GTISC Lecture (David Rowan, SunTrust) 2,900 The largest Freshman Class in GT history 44 Total number of new GTA's for Fall 59% Percentage of CoC's newest international student community members who just arrived in the U.S. This month various groups at CoC are pursuing partnerships with the following companies: · Dell · Google · Toyota · Microsoft · The Weather Channel Interactive (TWCi)
The Compiler is a publication of the Office of Communications; content is determined by the staff Communications Council, under the editorial direction of Joy Weaks. All content ©2006 The College of Computing at Georgia Tech Contact Communications View The Compiler Online View Past Issues