People@CoC
Lipton Closes Out Final GT Summer Commencement
Dick Lipton (CS) delivered the main address at Georgia Tech's final summer Commencement ceremony, held Friday, Aug. 3, in Atlanta's Fox Theatre. In his address, Lipton discussed some of history's more notable predictions for the future—including many from the world of computer science, such as "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons" (Popular Mechanics, 1949) and "640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody" (Bill Gates, 1981). But Lipton left his audience with the hopeful challenge of not predicting the future, but rather inventing it. Click here for archived video of the full address.
Best Delivers Several Invited Talks During Summer 2012
Michael Best (IC) gave several talks and presentations over the summer, including::
* "ICTs for Post-Conflict Reconstruction: The Case of Liberia" at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society Forum, held in Geneva, May 14-18
* "New Media and Civic Engagement," at the New Media & Governance: Tools and Trends Conference, held in Abuja, Nigeria, May 14-15
* "A Decade of Sustainability: From India to Liberia," at ICT4D, held in Cuzco, Peru, in July
* "Technologies, Conflict, Peace and Reconciliation," at an Engineers Without Borders Workshop in Bogota, Colombia, in July
Riedl Spearheading Top U.S. Conference on Game AI
Mark Riedl (IC) is serving as general chair for the 8th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE'12), to be held Oct. 8-12 in Palo Alto, Calif. AIIDE is the premier U.S. conference on artificial intelligence for computer gaming, billing itself as "the definitive point of interaction between entertainment software developers interested in AI and academic and industrial AI researchers." Also serving on the program committee for the conference are Charles Isbell and Brian Magerko (both IC).
Riedl also delivered a lecture, "Interactive Narrative: A Novel Application of Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games," at the 26th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held July 22-26 in Toronto.
Ram Keynote Advocates 'Social Web' for Health Info
Ashwin Ram (IC) delivered the keynote address at the Fourth International Workshop on Web Intelligence & Communities, held April 16 in Lyon, France. In the talk, titled "Healthcare 2.0 - Social Networks for Health & Wellness," Ram said the Internet has surpassed physicians as the leading source of health information, advocating a "consumer-centric" approach to providing such information. Such an approach, he said, could "combine the benefits of the 'information web' (timely, relevant health information) with those of the 'social web' (human interaction, support, comfort)."
Busy (and Multilingual) Summer for Vempala
Santosh Vempala (CS) gave several talks and presentations over the summer, including:
* "The Algorithmic Frontier of Convex Geometry," at the Algorithmic Frontiers Workshop, held June 11-14 at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland.
* "On the Complexity of Integer Programming, Modeling and OPtimization: Theory and Applications," plenary talk at the Modeling & Optimization: Theory and Applications (MOPTA) 2012 conference, held July 31-Aug. 1 at Lehigh University
* "Effective Principal Component Analysis, Conf. on Similarity Search and Applications," invited keynote at the 5th International Conference on Similarity and Applications (SISAP 2012), held Aug. 9-10 in Toronto
* "High Dimensional Sampling Algorithms," mini-course taught at the 21st Machine Learning Summer School, being held Aug. 27-Sept. 7 in Kyoto, Japan.
* "Algoritmos Espectrales y sus Aplicacioness,"mini-course taught (in Spanish) at the Escuela Regional de TIC in Asuncion, Paraguay.
Mihail Gives Invited Talk at University of the Aegean
Milena Mihail (CS) gave an invited talk, "Mathematical Models for Complex Networks," at the University of the Aegean Summer School on Algorithmic Game Theory, held July 14-21 in Vathi, Greece. The summer school's goal was "to blend blue seasides, green forests, bar night lights and beautiful ideas in algorithms and game theory."
Nersessian's Science as Psychology Wins APA Book Award
Science as Psychology: Sense-Making and Identity in Science Practice, (Cambridge University Press, 2011) by Nancy Nersessian (IC) and co-authors, has been awarded the American Psychological Association's 2012 William James Book Award. Nersessian co-wrote the book with Wendy Newstetter (BME) and Lisa Osbeck and Kareen Malone at the University of West Georgia. Sponsored by Society for General Psychology Division I, the William James Book Award honors books that integrate material across psychological subfields or provide coherence to the diverse subject matter of psychology. A co-winner of the 2012 award, the book was recognized for its "scope and breadth in approach to a new conceptualization and application of general psychology."
'Serendipity' Earns Best Paper Award at MOBIHOC 2012
A team from the College and School of ECE took Best Paper honors at the 2012 ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MOBIHOC 2012), held June 11-14 in Hilton Head, S.C. The paper, titled "Serendipity: Enabling Remote Computing Among Intermittently Connected Mobile Devices," was written by Mostafa Ammar and Ellen Zegura (both CS), along with Ph.D. students Cong Shi (CS) and Vasileios Lakafosis (ECE). In the paper, the authors describe a system, called "Serendipity," that "enables a mobile computation initiator to use remote computational resources available in other mobile systems in its environment to speedup computing and conserve energy."
CPL Lab Boasts Huge Presence at CVPR 2012
The School of Interactive Computing's Computational Perception Lab took this year's IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2012) by storm, with some seven papers in the main conference program and workshops, a demo presentation, seven more invited talks in the main conference and workshops, and eight faculty and students attending. The seven papers included:
* "Detecting Regions of Interest in Dynamic Scenes with Camera Motions," by Kihwan Kim, Dongreyol Lee and Irfan Essa (CVPR main program)
* "Social Interactions: A First-Person Perspective," by Alireza Fathi, Jessica Hodgins and Jim Rehg (CVPR)
* "Learning Sparse Covariance Patterns for Natural Scenes," by Liwei Wang, Yin Li, Jiaya Jia, Jian Sun, David Wipf and Jim Rehg (CVPR)
* "Power Mean SVM for Large Scale Visual Classification," by Jianxin Wu (CVPR)
* "Learning to Recognize Daily Activities Using Attention," by Alireza Fathi and Jim Rehg (Workshop on Egocentric (First Person) Vision)
* "Gaze Guided Object Segmentation in Egocentric Video," by Yin Li, Alireza Fathi and Jim Rehg (Workshop on Egocentric (First-Person) Vision)
* "Mutual Gaze Detection in Egocentric Video," by Zhefan Ye, Yin Li, Alireza Fathi and Jim Rehg (Workshop on Egocentric (First Person) Vision)
For a full rundown of CPL participation in CVPR 2012, check out this Google Doc.
Vazirani Tours Old World for Summer Lectures
Vijay Vazirani (CS) gave several talks and presentations over the summer, including:
* Opening lecture of the 7th International Computer Science Symposium in Russia, held in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, July 3-7
* "The 'Invisible Hand of the Market': Algorithmic Ratification and the Digital Economy," at the Laboratory of Algorithms and Technologies for Networks Analysis, July 2 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
* "Dispelling an Old Myth About an Ancient Algorithm," at theKolmogorov Seminar on Computational Complexity and Descriptive Complexity, held in Moscow, July 9
* "Dispelling an Old Myth About an Ancient Algorithm," at China Theory Week, held in Aarhus, Denmark, Aug. 13-17
* "Market Equilibria, PPAD and Complementary Pivot Algorithms," at the University of the Aegean Summer School on Algorithmic Game Theory, held in Vathi, Greece, July 14-21
Vazirani also spent time while on his recent sabbatical as a Distinguished Visitor at Caltech's Social and Information Sciences Laboratory (SISL). SISL studies how markets and other social systems aggregate large amounts of information that is widely distributed. While in residence, Vazirani coauthored a proposal that was funded by NSF ("Markets, Algorithms, Applications and the Digital Economy") and coauthored a paper with SISL professor Leonard Schulman titled "Allocation of Divisible Goods Under Lexicographic Preferences."
No Forgetting Parnin & Rugaber Best Paper Award at ICPC 2012
Ph.D. student Chris Parnin and Spencer Rugaber (both CS) were awarded Best Paper at the 2012 International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), held June 11-13 in Passau, Germany. Proceeding from the premise that interruptions pose a significant obstacle to brain function during intellectually intensive tasks like programming, the paper, "Programmer Information Needs After Memory Failure," presents "a conceptual framework for understanding human memory organization and its strengths and weaknesses, particularly with respect to dealing with work interruptions." The goal is to suggest and design development tools that can compensate for human memory limitations.
Eisenstein Wins Google Research Award in Natural Language Processing
Jacob Eisenstein (IC) received a Google Research Award over the summer for his project, "Latent Discourse Trees." Awarded in the category of "natural language processing," the research project's goal is to use machine learning to find high-level structure in language. For example, a possible application is to identify the main sentiment of a movie review (thumbs up or thumbs down, and why), or to summarize the main points of a long email thread. The award carries a $50,000 gift.
Naik Wins SEIF Award at MSR Summit
Mayur Naik (CS) was awarded a SEIF (Software Engineering Innovation Foundation) 2012 Award at this summer's Microsoft Faculty Research Summit for his project, "Automated Scalable Testing of Mobile Apps Using Z3." SEIF Awards support academic research in software engineering technologies, tools, practices and teaching methods. Projects can be related to any of the core areas of interest in software engineering research and education. The award carries an unrestricted gift of $25,000.
Liu Chairs VLDB 2012, Appointed Editor of IEEE Journal
Ling Liu (CS) served as general program chair for the 38th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2012), held Aug. 27-31 in Istanbul. VLDB is a premier annual international forum for data management and database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers and users. Liu also has been appointed editor of the IEEE Transactions on Service Computing (TSC), effective Jan. 1, 2013. TSC focuses on the algorithmic, mathematical, statistical and computational methods that are central in services computing and on the emerging fields of service-oriented architecture, Web services, business process integration, solution performance management, and services operations and management.
Ammar Spends Early Summer With Planète Group
Mostafa Ammar (CS) spent three weeks (May 28-June 15) visiting the Planète Group at INRIA (Inventeurs du Monde Numèrique) in Sophia-Antipolis, France. Planète is a multi-center collaborative research group dedicated to examine computer networking "with an emphasis on designing, implementing, and evaluating Internet protocols and applications." The group's goal is to propose new architectures, services and protocols to enable efficient and secure communications through the Internet.
Liu, Turk Earn Awards at SIGGRAPH 2012
Karen Liu and Greg Turk (both IC) carried home individual awards from the 39th ACM Annual Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH 2012), held Aug. 5-9 in Los Angeles. Liu received the Significant New Researcher Award "in recognition of her pioneering contributions in the field of computer animation, particularly her work in optimization and control of human motion. Liu's seminal contributions lie in physics-based animation, character animation, and computational biomechanics." Turk was awarded the Computer Graphics Achievement Award "for his contributions to physically-inspired mathematical application in graphics, particularly his work on texture synthesis, geometric modeling, and physical simulation involving thin structures."
Pater, Baker Receive Excellence in Research Award
Jessica Pater and Paul Baker of the Center for 21st Century Universities were part of a team that won the Excellence in Research Award from the InfoSci-Journals group. This award recognized the best articles from the IGI Global's journal collection for the 2011 volume year. Published in the International Journal of E-Politics (IJEP), the pair's article was titled "Beautiful to Me: Identity, Disability, and Gender in Virtual Environments" and was co-written with Abbe Forman of Temple University and Kel Smith of Anikto LLC.
GT Software Engineers Represent at ISSTA 2012
The School of Computer Science's software engineering group fielded a strong presence at the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2012), held July 15-20 in Minneapolis. ISSTA is the premier conference in software testing and program analysis (see http://crisys.cs.umn.edu/issta2012/ for details). The College's showing included:
* Four papers, including two from Mary Jean Harrold's group and three from Alex Orso's group (one paper was joint between them).
--"Efficient Regression Testing of Ontology-Driven Systems"; GT co-authors inlude Mijung Kim, Jake Cobb, Harrold, Sham Navathe (CS), Orso and Joel Saltz (CSE)
--"Isolating Failure Causes through Test Case Generation"; GT co-authors include Orso
--"Testing Concurrent Programs to Achieve High Synchronization Coverage"; GT co-authors include Sang Min Park and Harrold
--"ViewPoints: Differential String Analysis for Discovering Client and Server-Side Input Validation Inconsistencies"; GT co-coauthors include Mattia Fazzini, Shauvik Roy Choudhary and Orso
* 13 percent of the overall program consisted of Georgia Tech papers
* Orso delivered the keynote address at the ISSTA Workshop on Dynamic Analysis
* Five GT students in attendance--Choudhary, Cobb, Fazzini, Kim and Park--all co-authors (and some presenters) of accepted papers
Dovrolis, Fujimoto Organizing DOE Workshop on Internet Modeling
Constantine Dovrolis (CS) is organizing a Department of Energy-funded workshop, "Computational Modeling of Large-Scale Networks," to be held Sept. 11-12 in Washington. "If we were to look at the Internet in the same way that a biologist looks at a living organism or a geophysicist looks at the climate system, what would be the Internet research agenda?" Dovrolis has explained. "How would we try to understand, monitor and control the Internet, considering the full extent of its complexity?" This is an exploratory workshop that Dovrolis said may lead to the establishment of a new funded research program at DOE. Richard Fujimoto (CSE) also is serving on the organizing committee.
Personnel Announcements
Russ Clark has been promoted to a Sr. Research Scientist. Congratulations Russ!
Barb Ericson has been promoted to a Sr. Research Scientist. Congratulations Barb!
Ada Gavrilovska has been promoted to a Sr. Research Scientist. Congratulations Ada!
Paul Royal has been promoted to a Research Scientist II. Congratulations Paul!
Matt Wolf has been promoted to a Sr. Research Scientist. Congratulations Matt!
Marcus Johnson has been promoted to Faculty Administration Manager effective 7/1/12. Congratulations Marcus!
Julie D'huyvetter has been promoted to Academic Program Manager II effective 7/23/12. Congratulations Julie!
Benjamin "Ben" Powellhas joined CoC as a Financial Manager II in CS effective 5/2/12. His email address is bpowell@cc, phone number is 5-4490 and is located in KACB 3414. Welcome Ben!
Derek Moon has joined CoC as a Web Developer in Communications effective 5/15/12. His email address is dmoon@cc, phone number is 4-9646 and is located in CCB 138. Welcome Derek!
David "Andrew" Leonard has re-joined CoC as an IT Support Professional II in TSO effective 6/4/12. His email address is aleonard@cc, phone number is 4-7065 and is located in CCB 148. Welcome back Andrew!
Chanteal Edwards has joined CoC as a Tech Temp in Community effective 6/5/12. Her email address is cedwards@cc. Welcome Chanteal!
Phillip Hutto has joined CoC as a Research Scientist II in CS effective 6/8/12. His email address is phutto@cc. Welcome Phil!
Josie Giles has joined CoC as a Communications Officer I in Communications effective 6/18/12. Her email address is jgiles@cc, phone number is 5-8547 and is located in CCB 218. Welcome Josie!
Nazanin Magharei has joined CoC as a Research Scientist II in CS effective 5/15/12. Her email address is nmagharei3@mail.gatech.edu. Welcome Nazanin!
Marielle Thomas has joined CoC as an Admin. Professional II in Community effective 6/25/12. Her email address is mcthomas@cc, phone number is 4-0531 and is located in CCB 355. Welcome Marielle!
Welcome to Annie Anton, Chair of the School of Interactive Computing. Her email
address is aianton@cc, phone number is 4-8591 and is located in TSRB 211B.
Welcome to Lance Fortnow, Chair of the School of Computer Science. His email
address is fortnow@cc, phone number is 4-8100 and is located in KACB 3406.
James Suh's last day at CoC was 4/30/12.
Jinwoo Shin's last day at CoC is 6/25/12. Best wishes Jinwoo!
Anthony Lockett's last day at CoC was 7/6/12. Best wishes to Anthony!
Nikea Davis' last day at CoC was 7/13/12. Best wishes to Nikea!
Elena Grigorescu's last day at CoC is 7/31/12. Best wishes to Elena!
Lev Reyzin's last day at CoC is 8/3/12. Best wishes to Lev!
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