Eileen Kraemer attended the IEEE Workshop on Program Comprehension, and presented a paper "Issues in Visualization for the Comprehension of Parallel Programs" co-authored with her advisor, John Stasko.
Michael Cox received the best paper award for the Artificial Intelligence Symposium at the Seventh International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics and Cybernetics. The paper "Using Knowledge From Cognitive Behavior to Learn From Failure" was co-authored by Michael Freed from NASA Ames Research Center.
"The Electronic Tower of Babel," an article by graduate student Russ Clark appeared in the "Tech on Tomorrow" column in the December issue of Atlanta Computer Currents.
Georgia Tech Team #1 placed 4th in the ACM U.S. Southeastern Regional Programming Contest held at Mercer Univ. in Macon on Nov 19. Over 65 teams from universities in Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana competed. Team #1 consisted of Corey Rhoden(ug), Brian McNamara(ug), and Peter Lindstrom(g); Ben Combee(ug) was the alternate. Georgia Tech Team #2 placed 30th. Team #2 members were Jason Hong(ug), Cristian Joita(g), and Konstantin Derenshyten(ug). Kalyan Perumalla(g) was the coach for the two teams.
The 1995 World Book Annual Science Supplement contains a photograph of visiting researcher Rob Kooper riding the virtual elevator and several paragraphs about phobia research in the GVU Center.
Juan Carlos Santamaria participated at the Third Annual Cognitive Science Graduate Student conference ( GSGSC-94).
Marie Little, and Annie Anton have been asked to serve on the Inaugural Committee, which will plan and implement the ceremony and events associated with Dr. Clough's formal installation as President.
Michael Cox travelled to Paris, France in November to present a paper (Managing Learning Goals in Strategy-Selection Problems) at the Second European Workshop on Case-Based Reasoning.
Allison Elliott, a CoC Ph.D. student, is a new member of Executive Round Table (ERT). ERT has a long history of tradition that dates back to its founding in 1956. In keeping with the vision of its founders, ERT has maintained an approximate ratio of 50% students, 25% faculty, and 25% industry/professional members. Membership in ERT has long been considered one of the highest honors a Georgia Tech student can earn.
Eileen Kraemer presented a talk on "The Animation Choreographer" at George Mason University on November 11. She also attended a CRA Workshop on Academic Careers for Women on November 12.
Keith Edwards and Beth Mynatt presented a paper "Providing Access to Graphical User Interfaces - Not Graphical Screens" at the ASSETS '94 Conference (the ACM Conference on Assistive and Enabling Technologies) in Marina Del Rey. Beth also led a panel on "Interface Modeling Issues in Providing Access to GUIs for the Visually Impaired." A week later, Beth presented a paper "Designing with Auditory Icons" at the International Conference on Auditory Display, sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute.
Annie Anton was selected for membership in Omicron Delta Kappa (ODK) National Leadership Honor Society. ODK recognizes students who have attained a high standard of achievement, to bring together a group of students representative of all phases of collegiate life, and to bring together members of the student body and faculty on a basis of mutual interest and understanding.
On November 6 Beth Mynatt participated in an NSF workshop on "NII and the Disabled - Setting a Research Agenda."
Juan C. Santamaria presented a paper titled "On-line Speedup Learning and Knowledge Compilation in Continuous Task Domains" during the IV Iberoamerican Congress on Artificial Intelligence (IBERAMIA-94) that was held in Caracas, Venezuela, October 24-29. Juan co-authored the paper with Ashwin Ram, his advisor.
Beth Mynatt recently received $20,000 from the Advanced Technology Development Center as part of its Faculty Research Commercialization Program. This grant will be used to develop a near-market product from Mynatt's current research prototype, Mercator. The new system, called Sonic X, will provide access to Motif applications for blind computer users. The system will transform graphical interfaces into auditory interfaces utilizing non-speech auditory cues and synthesized speech.
This summer a GaTech team competed in the AAAI Mobile Robot Competition. The team won an event with a reactive, multiagent, cooperating team of robots. Tucker Balch was the leader and built most of the hardware. Juan Carlos Santamaria wrote the high-level, reactive control system. Tom Collins wrote most of the vision code. Gary Boone wrote the low-level control system, which handled sensor and actuator control. Many others helped, too. More information.
Beth Mynatt published in the current SIGCHI bulletin. She and Barry Arons led a workshop at the annual CHI conference on the Future of Speech and Audio in Human-Computer Interfaces. The article contains a summary of the 1 1/2 day workshop.
Keith Edwards presented a paper, "Session Management for Collaborative Applications," at the CSCW'94 Conference (ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) in Chapel Hill, NC, at the end of October. At that same conference, Keith also participated in a "Workshop on Distributed Systems, Multimedia, and Infrastructure in CSCW." His position paper is entitled "Infrastructure for the Sharing of Coordination Information in CSCW Systems."
Beth Mynatt presented a paper coauthored with Keith Edwards and Kathryn Stockton at the upcoming ASSETS'94 Conference in LA. ASSETS is the ACM Conference on Assistive and Enabling Technology. Her paper is titled "Providing Access to Graphical Interfaces - Not Graphical Screens."
Juan Carlos Santamaria was awarded with the GTE fellowship. He also published and presented one paper at the AAAI-94 Workshop on Case-Based Reasoning in Seattle, Washington. He was part of the robotic team that participated during the Third AAAI Robotic Competition in Seattle, Washington. The team took first place during the trials and during the final competition in the event: "Clean Up the Office".
Keith Edwards participated in a panel discussion at UnixExpo in New York City on October 6. The panel is titled, "Persons with Disabilities: An Untapped Multimedia Resource." Keith discussed the Multimedia Computing Group's research on the Mercator project, a nonvisual interface to X Windows.
Mostafa Ammar and Ph.D. student Kevin Almeroth attended the 3rd International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks in San Francisco, September 12-14. The following papers were presented: Kevin Almeroth and Mostafa Ammar, "Providing a Scalable and Interactive Video-on-Demand Service Using Multicast Communication." George Rouskas and Mostafa Ammar, "Dynamic Reconfiguration in Multihop WDM Networks."
Ron Arkin and Juan Carlos Santamaria were in Munich, Germany, September 11-17 to present a paper they co-authored at IROS-94.
Q. Alex Zhao went to Silicon Graphics Computer Systems, Mountain View, California. With the CASEvision/WorkShop(TM) group, he worked on a memory allocation corruption detection library, did some performance analysis on various IRIX desktop tools, participated in a performance experiment for dynamically shared objects, and proposed possibilities for future development.
Kaushik Ghosh spent the summer at Sun, working on their new distributed OS called Spring.
Kiran Panesar interned at SAIC in Arlington VA. He developed fast parallel simulators that will be used for battle field simulations.
Samir Das graduated this summer and is now an assistant professor of computer science in The University of Texas at San Antonio. His new email is samir@ringer.cs.utsa.edu.
Dean Ptaszynski is currently working on Electronic Commerce and Electronic Data Interchange within the Army and also an Information Warfare Project. He can be contacted at daniel.d.ptaszynski@pentagon-1dms2.army.mil or 703-913-5468.
Byron F. Warner is now with Oracle's Distribution Applications Divison as an Applications Engineer. He can be contacted at:
Address: 500 Oracle Parkway Box 659305 Redwood Shores California 94065 Phone: 415.506.8770
Jeff Steinberg MS '93 was promoted to Senior Software Engineer last month. He works in a new division of Motorola Paging concentrating on software related to personal communications systems (the merging of computers, paging, and wireless technologies). Jeff and his wife Lisa are currently building a house in Boca Raton, Florida. Anyone wishing to contact Jeff can send him email at jsteinbe@pts.mot.com
James Pitkow College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology grad-news@cc.gatech.edu