People@CoC
Ammar Talks WAM Continuum at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute
Mostafa Ammar (CS) delivered a talk at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, on June 10 as part of its ACCESS Distinguished Lecture Series. The Royal Institute's ACCESS Centre is devoted to interdisciplinary study of networked systems, or "finding ways to facilitate communication between people, systems and machines." The talk was titled "Living in the WAM Continuum: Unified Design and Operation of Wireless and Mobile Networks," and video is available online for viewing.
CUNY Workshop Invites Peikert as a 'Face of Modern Cryptography'
Chris Peikert (CS) is an invited speaker at the upcoming "Faces of Modern Cryptography" workshop, Sept. 9 at City University of New York (CUNY). Sponsored by CUNY's Center for Algorithms and Interactive Scientific Software, this year's event focuses on two emerging areas of research: lattice-based cryptography and leakage-resilient cryptography. The one-day conference will feature five 50-minute addresses by leading international experts in those two areas.
CISTP Fellow Lukasik Publishes IEEE Paper on Arpanet Origins
Steve Lukasik, distinguished research fellow at Georgia Tech's Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy, wrote the featured cover article in the July-September IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, titled "Why the Arpanet Was Built." Lukasik served as deputy director of ARPA when Arpanet was conceived and then as director during the network's launching years. The paper is a summation of the history Lukasik relayed in a joint GTISC/CISTP lecture in 2008.
Bader a Summer Speaker In Demand on Supercomputing
David Bader (CSE) delivered several invited lectures over the summer, beginning with one on "Accelerating Real-World Applications" at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit 2011, June 14 in Bellevue, Wash. Next up was a birds-of-a-feather presentation at the 26th International Supercomputing Conference, held June 19-23 in Hamburg, Germany. At the conference, Bader co-presented the second Graph 500 Benchmark release of the world's fastest supercomputers; the Graph 500 Benchmark list is intended to complement the older Top 500 list with data-intensive applications. Finally, Bader gave a keynote talk on "Opportunities and Challenges in Massive Data-Intensive Computing,'' at the NSF Workshop on Data Intensive Computing, Graphs and Combinatorics in Bio-Informatics, Finance and National Security, held at the City University of New York on Staten Island, July 26-27. The workshop addressed current topics in data-intensive computing, such as computational-statistical, graph-theoretic and combinatoric approaches in bio-informatics, financial data analytics, linguistics and national security.
ARC Center to Host Delft Institute's Vallentin, Sept. 25-Oct. 22
The ARC Center will host Frank Vallentin, assistant professor of optimization and system theory at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, for a series of visiting lectures to be held from Sept. 25 to Oct. 22. Vallentin's specialty is developing usable techniques to solve hard combinatorial optimization problems in a continuous setting, drawing motivation from computational applications to biology and the social sciences, typically involving large amounts of data. During his visit, he will give a series of five lectures, starting with an ARC colloquium on Sept. 26 titled, "New Applications of Semidefinite Programming: Discrete Geometry and Harmonic Analysis."
GVU Picks Winners of 2011-12 Research & Engagement Grants
The GVU Center has announced the winners of its 2011-12 GVU Research and Engagement Grants competition. The program's objective is to support research activities involving faculty and students from the many disciplines represented in GVU, specifically supporting bold new work that, by its preliminary nature, would be difficult to fund through ordinary channels. From 17 proposals, grant recipients were chosen from Ivan Allen College, Tennenbaum Institute, College of Sciences and College of Computing. Financial support for winning proposals will be provided by both GVU and the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). This year's grant recipients are:
• Mike Best (IC) and Angela Dalle Vacche, "New Media Nollywood"
• Rahul Basole and John Stasko (IC), "Visual Analytics for Innovation Ecosystem Intelligence"
• Richard Catrambone (IC) and Mark Guzdial (IC), "Driving Advances in Computing Education Through Application of Educational Psychology Principles
• Clint Zeagler and Thad Starner (IC), "Electronic Textiles Swatch Book Workshops"
CoC Sees Solid Representation at CVPR 2011
Three College of Computing papers were presented at the 2011 IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (IEEE CVPR), the world’s leading conference on computer vision, held June 21-23 in Colorado Springs, Colo. The papers included:
• "Learning to Recognize Objects in Egocentric Activities," by Ph.D. student Alireza Fathi (CS), Xiaofeng Ren and James Rehg (IC)
• "Auto Directed Video Stabilization with Robust L1 Optimal Camera Paths,” by Ph.D. student Matthias Grundmann (CS), Vivek Kwatra, and Irfan Essa (IC)
• "Structure From Motion for Scenes With Large Duplicate Structures,” by Ph.D. student Richard Roberts, Sudipta Sinha, Richard Szeliski and Drew Steedly
GT Posts Another Strong Performance at Silver Anniversary IPDPS
Georgia Tech demonstrated its technical leadership at the 25th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), May 16-20 in Anchorage, Alaska. As the 25th year planning chair of IPDPS, David Bader (CSE) packed the program with a gala celebration, two panels on "Looking Back" and "What's Ahead?" in parallel computing, and a special, limited-edition IEEE compendium DVD with the 25 years of proceedings. Four papers from Georgia Tech were presented, including two from the College of Computing:
• "Enriching 3-D Video Games on Multicores," by Romain Cledat (CS) , Tushar Kumar (ECE), Jaswanth Sreeram (CS) and Santosh Pande (CS)
• "The Impact of Soft Resource Allocation on n-Tier Application Scalability," Qingyang Wang (CS), Simon Malkowski (CS), Deepal Jayasinghe (CS), Pengcheng Xiong (CS), Calton Pu (CS), Yasuhiko Kanemasa, Motoyuki Kawaba, and Lilian Harada
Additionally, Bader served as co-chair of the co-located 10th IEEE High Performance Computational Biology (HiCOMB) workshop. Ada Gavrilovska (CS), Hyesoon Kim (CS) and Rich Vuduc (CSE) served on the IPDPS 2010 Program Committee. Gavrilovska served on the program committee of the 1st Workshop on Communication Architecture for Scalable Systems. Karsten Schwan (CS) served on the program committee of the 7th Workshop on High-Performance, Power-Aware Computing. Jeffrey Vetter (CSE) served as the workshop co-chair of the 5th Workshop on Multithreaded Architectures and Applications (MTAAP), and Bader served on its program committee.
Finally, Ph.D. student Vipin Sachdeva (CSE) was selected to present his research, "p2MATLAB: Productive Parallel MATLAB for the Exascale," at the IPDPS Ph.D. forum.
More College papers appeared at IPDPS' co-located workshops:
• HCW: "A Waterfall Model to Achieve Energy Efficient Task Mapping for Large Scale GPU Cluster," by Zhihui Du, Wenjie Liu, Xiao Yu, David A. Bader (CSE), Chen Xu
• MTAAP: "Tracking Structure of Streaming Social Networks," David Ediger (ECE), Jason Riedy (CSE), David A. Bader (CSE), Henning Meyerhenke (CSE)
Bader is an IPDPS Steering Committee member and next year's symposium will be held May 21-25, 2012, in Shanghai, China.
Ph.D. Student Kim Takes Student Research Prize at CHI 2011
Ph.D. student Hyungsin Kim (HCC) took first prize at ACM CHI 2011 Student Research Competition, held May 7-12 in Vancouver, for her paper and poster, "Exploring Technological Opportunities for Cognitive Impairment Screening." Kim received a gold medal and was recognized at the closing session at CHI 2011, and will also receive an award plaque, $500 prize and two-year complimentary ACM membership with a subscription to ACM's Digital Library. Kim now is eligible to compete in the ACM-wide Grand Finals of Student Research Competition, where the winners of several ACM conferences compete for more prizes and recognition.
Bader Receives Award for International Computing Collaboration
David Bader (CSE) and German professor Ulrich Rüde, Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, received an award under the Bavaria California Technology Center (BaCaTeC) program to support an international collaboration in scientific computing between the Bavarian and Georgian research groups. On June 2, Bader was welcomed by Bavarian Minister of State Emilia Müller and her delegation at a private reception hosted by the Consular General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Lutz Görgens and Ulrike Görgens. Other BaCaTeC-supported researchers from Georgia Tech invited to meet the Bavarian minister include Kurt Frankel (EAS), Uzi Landman (Physics), Mark Borodovsky (CSE) and Michael Perdue (EAS).
Ph.D. Student Yang Earns Best Student Paper Prize, Yahoo! KSC Award
Ph.D. student Shuang-Hong Yang (CSE) earned Best Student Paper honors at the 2011 ACM SIGIR (Special Interest Group Information Retrieval) conference, held July 24-28 in Beijing. Yang's paper, "Collaborative Competitive Filtering: Learning Recommender using Context of User Choice," proposes Collaborative Competitive Filtering (CCF), a framework for learning user preferences by modeling the choice process in recommender systems. Yang's coauthors include Hongyuan Zha (CSE), as well as Bo Long and Alexander Smola (Yahoo! Labs) and Zhaohui Zheng (Yahoo! Labs Beijing).
Yang also recently won a Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenge award. In addition to providing $5,000 in unrestricted research funding, the award also affords exclusive access to key Yahoo! datasets, as well as the opportunity to collaborate with Yahoo! scientists. Yang's award was in the research area of computational advertising.
Selections for 2011-12 ARC Fellowships Anything But Random
The Algorithms & Randomness Center (ARC) and ThinkTank recently announced the winners of its fellowships for the 2011-12 year. The recipients, proposed projects and mentors include:
• Prateek Bhakta (CS), "Markov Chain Convergence in Discrete and Continuous Spaces" (mentor: Dana Randall, CS)
• Daniel Dadush (ISYE), "Towards Faster Integer Programming" (Santosh Vempala, CS )
• Sara Krehbiel (ACO/CS), "Threshold Lattice Cryptography" (Chris Peikert, CS)
• Chun-Hung Liu (Math) and Peter Whalen (ACO/Math), "Tiny Robots: a Resource Allocation Problem" (Robin Thomas, Math)
• Ning Tan (ACO/Math) "Constraint Satisfaction Problems with Global Constraints" (Prasad Raghavendra, CS)
• Camilo Ortiz (ISYE), "Implementation of Fast First-Order Methods for solving Large-Scale Convex Optimization Problem" (Renato Monteiro, ISYE)
• Pushkar Tripathi (CS), "Simple Randomized Algorithms for Assignment Problems" (Vijay Vazirani, CS)
Winners were selected by a panel including Ton Dieker (chair, ISYE), Alexandra Boldyreva (CS), Santanu Dey (ISYE), Vladimir Koltchinskii (Math), Milena Mihail (CS) and Dana Randall (CS). More information is on the ARC website.
Goodman Co-Authors Article, Book Chapter on Digital Privacy Concerns
Sy Goodman (CS), along with fellow Georgia Tech professor Dan Breznitz and grad student Michael Murphree (both IntA), published an article in the June issue of IEEE Computer titled "Ubiquitous Data Collection: Rethinking Privacy Debates." The article is a discussion about the ubiquitous collection, dissemination, and processing of data, and the risks those practices involve. Goodman also published, along with Patrick Traynor (CS) and former graduate students Andrew Harris and Frank Park, a chapter titled "Emerging Privacy and Security Concerns for Digital Wallet Deployment" in the book, Privacy in America: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Scarecrow Press, 2011).
Personnel Announcements
Charles "Chip" Phillips has joined CoC as a part-time Instructor effective 5/16/11. His email address is phillips@cc. Welcome Chip!
Dave Lillethun has joined CoC as a part-time Instructor effective 5/16/11. His email address is davel@cc. Welcome Dave!
Olufisayo Omojokun has joined CoC as a Lecturer effective 5/16/11. His email address is omojokun@cc. Welcome Olufisayo!
Anthony McCoy is now the Facilities Manager II for the College of Computing Bldg. (CCB). Congratulations Anthony!
Joshua Jones has joined CoC as a Temporary Research Scientist I in IC effective 5/24/11. His email address is joshua.jones@cc. Welcome Joshua!
Anthony Lockett has joined CoC as an Administrative Professional III in IC/GVU effective 6/2/11. His email address is alockett@cc, phone number is 4-0075 and is located in TSRB 214A. Welcome Anthony!
Julie Reynolds has joined CoC as a Tech Temp in CS effective 6/7/11. Her email address is jreynold@cc and is located in KACB 3415. Welcome Julie!
Jeffrey Hubbs has joined CoC as an IT Support Professional Sr. in TSO effective 6/9/11. His email address is jhubbs@cc, phone number is 5-3188 and is located in CCB 234. Welcome Jeff!
Adam Allred was promoted to Research Technologist I effective 6/1/11. His position is joint with GTISC & TSO. Congratulations Adam!
Alexander Hood has been hired permanently as an Administrative Professional I in CoC's Office of Outreach Enrollment and Community and CoC's Institute for Computing Education effective 6/20/11. His email address is ahood@cc, phone number is 4-6858 and is located in CCB 305/349. Congratulations Al!
Gregory Anderson has been hired permanently as a Building Coordinator I in CoC's Facilities department effective 6/20/11. His email address is ganderso@cc, phone number is 5-2298 and is located in KACB 1219. Congratulations Greg!
Chris Grayson has joined CoC as a Research Scientist I in CS effective 6/30/11. His email address is cgrayson3@gatech.edu and is located in KACB 3201. Welcome Chris!
Troy Peace has joined CoC as an Academic Program Coordinator I in Community effective 7/6/11. His email address is tpeace@cc, phone number is 5-2378 and is located in CCB 350. Welcome Troy!
Stephen Williams has joined CoC as a Temporary Research Scientist I in IC effective 7/8/11. His email address is swilliam@cc and is located in the RIM Center of the 2nd floor of CCB. Welcome Stephen!
Justin Law has joined CoC as a Graphic Designer in Communications effective 7/13/11. His email address is jlaw@cc, phone number is 5-2317 and is located in CCB 142. Welcome Justin!
Nina White has joined CoC as an Administrative Professional Sr. in IC/RIM effective 7/18/11. Her email address is nwhite@cc, phone number is 5-3300 and is located in CCB 217. Welcome Nina!
Mayur Naik has joined CoC as an Assistant Professor in CS effective 7/18/11. His email address is mayur.naik@cc.gatech.edu, phone number is 5-4746 and is located in KACB 2320. Welcome Mayur!
Stephanie Tofighi has joined CoC as an Administrative Professional III in IC effective 7/26/11. Her email address is stephanie.tofighi@cc. Welcome Stephanie!
Pak Ho "Simon" Chung has joined CoC as a Post-Doc in CS effective 8/2/11. His email address is pchung@cc and is located in KACB 3119. Welcome Simon!
Marshini Chetty has joined CoC as a Post-Doc in IC effective 8/4/11. Her email address is marshini@cc and is located in TSRB. Welcome Marshini!
James Suh has joined CoC as an Application Developer I in CS effective 8/15/11. His email address is jsuh@cc and is located in KACB 3201. Welcome James!
Margaret "Meg" Poitevint has joined CoC as a Development Associate in Development effective 8/22/11. Her email address is mpoitevi@cc, phone number is 5-7210 and is located in CCB 162. Welcome Meg!
Alex Snoeren has joined CoC as a Visiting Associate Professor in CS effective 8/22/11. His email address is alex.snoeren@cc and is located in KACB 3222. Welcome Alex!
Gabriel Loh's last day at CoC was 5/15/11.
Renata LeDantec's last day at CoC was 5/20/11.
Don Schoner's last day at CoC was 5/20/11.
Bobby Strickland's last day at CoC was 5/20/11.
Kathy Cheek's last day at CoC was 5/31/11.
Elizabeth Collums' last day at CoC is 6/29/11.
Louise Russo's last day at CoC was 7/8/11.
Alexine Bennett's last day at CoC was 8/8/11.
Logan Moon's last day at CoC was 8/19/11.
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General News
C21U to Formally Launch with Sept. 27 Event, Panel Discussion
The Center for 21st Century Universities, led by former College of Computing Dean Rich DeMillo (CS), will formally launch its activities with a Sept. 27 event featuring keynote speaker Jonathan Cole (former Columbia University provost and author of The Great American University) and a panel of educational innovators. The event is a chance for faculty, students, staff and anyone with an interest in higher education to hear a cast of leaders from industry and academia share their ideas about the future of higher education and the disruptions in store for American universities. Chronicle of Higher Education editor Jeffrey Selingo will moderate the panel, which includes Stephen Cross, GT executive vice president for research; Devin Fidler, research manager for technology horizons at the Institute for the Future; Alan Kay, president of the Viewpoints Research Institute; Roger Shank, executive director and founder of Engines for Education and chairman and CEI of Socratic Arts; and Lynne Weisenbach, vice chancellor for educator preparation at the University System of Georgia.
CoC to Host Nobel Laureate Aaron Ciechanover on Oct. 4
Nobel Prize-winning biologist Aaron Ciechanover will visit Georgia Tech for a lecture, “Drug Development in the 21st Century: Are We Going to Cure all Diseases?,” to be held Oct. 4 at 6:30 p.m. in the College of Management auditorium. Ciechanover is Distinguished Research Professor in the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. In 2004, he shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with professors Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation, a mechanism by which the cells of most living organisms cull unwanted proteins. Ciechanover also shared the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, the second-most prestigious prize in life sciences and medicine, and the Israel Prize, the highest recognition bestowed by the State of Israel. He is a member of the Israeli National Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Vatican and the American Philosophical Society.
C21U Offers GT’s First Massive Open Online Course
This fall the Center for 21st Century Universities is offering Georgia Tech’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), open to anyone in the world and available for credit to Georgia Tech students. Centered on the subject of instructional technology, the MOOC is a form of computer-mediated learning, with each week’s lecturer providing course materials and discussion topics on that week’s theme. Learners contribute to the class by building on the topics discussed, researching the topics further, then creating their own relevant content in the form of blog posts, video responses and discussions—which other students then comment on, critique, connect and share, creating create a community of content shared by all. For more information, visit the C21U website or the MOOC’s website.
GVU Welcome Back and Ice Cream Social
On Thursday, Aug. 25, GVU hosted its traditional Ice Cream Social to welcome back students and faculty after the summer and kick off the GVU Brown Bag series. GVU Acting Director Keith Edwards (IC) used the event to give new students a short overview of GVU's activities, call for applications for the Foley Scholars Fellowships and provide more information on the GVU Research and Engagement Grants. For more information, visit http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/lectures.
Summer Upgrades for CCB Data Center, LAWN Network
Over the summer, the CCB 247 Data Center room received a major upgrade by having its power capacity increased by a factor of six, allowing TSO to accommodate the College's increase in research and instructional server computing. TSO extends its thanks to GTISC for its financial contribution in this project.
In May and July, OIT upgraded wireless network access points in CoC buildings (TSRB, KACB and CCB) to provide better range and higher throughput. TSRB was in the most need, so all access points were upgraded, while in KACB only the classroom wing access points were upgraded. In CCB, most but not all areas were upgraded.
Grad Orientation Primer Available
In August at the CoC graduate student orientation, TSO presented information from the "Fall 2011 CoC Graduate Orientation Primer," which details information and resources that incoming graduate students will find useful as they become familiar with the computing environment at Georgia Tech. The PDF version is available on the TSO website.
TSO Warns Students, Employees to Always Ignore Phishing Emails
Please be on the lookout for and delete email messages that request your username, password or other sensitive information including credit card numbers. These types of email messages are known as "phishing" attempts. Neither OIT nor TSO will ever ask for your password or credit card information in an email.
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