For all Friends and Alumni of the
College of Computing at Georgia Tech
Jim Allchin (Ph.D., ICS '83) who currently heads a group at Microsoft that is designing and building the next generation distributed computer system, was featured in a New York Times article that was reprinted in Tech Topics. As a Ph.D. student in the early 1980's, Allchin worked on "Clouds," an advanced operating system project. Allchine and the "Clouds" project also was mentioned in the June 27 issue of Business Week.
Ron Arkin's robotics research has been featured in numerous publications: Atlanta Journal Constitution, Robotics Report, Popular Mechanics, Design News, IEEE Expert, CEO Magazine, GTRI's Research Horizons, and Georgia Tech's Alumni Magazine.
The fall issue of GTRI's Research Horizons featured research in the College of Computing. The cover article, "The Illusion of Immersion," surveyed virtual reality research at the GVU Center. Other GVU researchers profiled were Norberto Ezquerra and Rakesh Mullick for PERFEX - heart imaging research. The winter issue of Research Horizons ran a cover story on the EduTech Institute, which is directed by Professor Janet Kolodner.
Jim Foley, director of the Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center, GVU, has been appointed to the faculty committee that is helping search for Georgia Tech's next president. Jim Foley also was profiled in the Alumni Magazine last spring.
Virtual Reality ExCursions with Programs in C, a recently published book by Georgia Tech alums Christopher Watkins and Stephen Marenka, contains information on the GVU Center and the Multimedia Technology Laboratory. The book features photos of the lab and graphics research as well as descriptions of individual research projects. The authors acknowledge the contributions made by Professors Jim Foley and Larry Hodges and graduate students Tom Meyer and Jack Tumblin.
Professor Janet Kolodner has been appointed director of the EduTech Instititute, a campus-wide entity focusing on educational technology. Professor Nancy Nersessian will replace Janet Kolodner as the coordinator of the Cognitive Science group.
Professor Ellen Zegura was interviewed by a Channel 5 News reporter regarding gender issues in computing. This followed a feature story about gender issues in a recent issue of Newsweek.
For the fourth year in a row the College of Computing Supercomputing Group was asked to exhibit its research at SUPERCOMPUTING '93, a three-day high-performance computing conference that was held in Portland, Oregon, last fall.
For information on current research projects at the CoC and GVU Center, read the "Tech on Tomorrow" column appearing monthly in Atlanta Computer Currents.
This year the College of Computing created the Open Systems Laboratory to study problems in technology and systems transfer. "Standards for programming interfaces and communication have become more critical now," says Lab Director Melody Moore, "because the trend in computing environments is to migrate towards centralized mainframes to distributed client-server architectures." Studying these non- proprietary, open-systems interfaces is an important step in reducing the cost and time involved in developing software, she believes.
The mission of the lab, says Moore, "is to identify, track, and participate in the development of relevant Department of Defense and industry standards and to assess the availability and maturity of open systems software." The Open Systems Lab team also develops research prototypes to study the feasibility of transitioning to open systems.
Moore believes that open systems research is important because it is applicable to almost every area of software systems. For example, areas of current research include standardized operating systems, open systems communications and networking, user interface migration, business process reengineering, reverse engineering and tool support, and distributed databases.
The Open Systems Lab has been very successful in its first year. Lab researchers have published more than ten papers and have developed technologies in the areas of multiprotocol networks, reverse engineering, user interface migration, and business process reengineering. The staff has grown to sixteen, including eight faculty and eight graduate research assistants. The lab has received more than $500,000 in research funding and commitments for additional funding.
The open systems researchers aided by our current sponsors, the Army Research Laboratories for the TRANSOPEN project (TRANSition to OPEN Systems Environment) and the National Science Foundation for work in open systems networking, hope to one day make software as compatible and easy-to-use as the appliances in your home.
Our students are in very high demand in the workplace and are being accepted in top graduate schools. Our faculty and students carry out research that wins awards and major external funding. Our outstanding staff has a strong sense of mission and obvious devotion that consistently wins them respect and awards on campus. All of this achievement could not be attained outside a community.
While communities have physical infrastructure (in our case, computers and networks, office space, and labs) that is essential, it is the people and the work they do that form the core of a community. This highlights the second factor that has been so important to us - balanced quality.
In everything we do in the College, we strive to do it with the highest possible quality consistent with our objectives of always having a community in which people want to learn, research, and work - hence, my use of the word "balanced." This can be clearly seen in our recruiting of new faculty. Several times faculty candidates with strong intellectual credentials have been taken off our list of candidates after it became clear that community-building was not a high priority with them.
Supportive communities and high-quality people and programs mean little, though, if unfocused and irrelevant. We have chosen productive strategic directions and, increasingly, have focused our efforts in order to gain maximum benefits from our resources. We continue to emphasize the interaction of computer science and other disciplines while pushing our core discipline forward. We are constantly evaluating and modifying our strategic directions to remain at the forefront of education and research in computing. We are constantly evaluating and modifying our strategic directions to remain at the forefront of education and research in computing.
Another essential ingredient in our success has been flexibility . This ability of almost all our faculty members to face new conditions and respond well to them will be very important in the coming months. As you know, a new president will be named shortly. There is strong consenus on campus and among all the important outside constituencies that Georgia Tech and the College are headed in the right direction; the prevailing spirit is to find ways in which to head in this direction with even more vigor and success. Our flexibility and openness to change will serve us well during the transition between administrations.
We have many plans for the future and many goals yet to achieve. I firmly believe that we have the right fundamentals and that we will continue to prosper.
I invite you to visit us soon and frequently, and to become an active member of this exciting community! An open house is held once a month at the College's Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center from 1:30 until 5:00 p.m. Open houses are also scheduled for August 25, September 22, and October 20.
On Friday, November 18, we will be combining these two events in order to make them even more valuable to our attendees. Sponsored by the members of the College's Industrial Partners Association (IPA) and the Dean's Circle, the "Future of Computing" forum will give our attendees an opportunity to interact and brainstorm with each other and with our faculty in a non-competitive setting; meet our students; and see our research and educational efforts in action, through demonstrations and poster sessions.
The cost of the day-long event will be $25, which will cover the cost of meals. (The fee is waived for current sponsors.) The tentative program is as follows:
Contact Anne Bourne (404/894-9679 or anne@cc.gatech.edu) to register. We hope to see you on November 18!
Enroll in the Continuing Education networking certificate program and find out what's going on with OSI, TCP/IP and the Information Superhighway. The program consists of a series of short comprehensive courses on open systems and networking. Participants may also elect to take individual courses. Upcoming courses include:
This year's College of Computing Awards Ceremony, sponsored by E-Systems, included a moving tribute to William A. "gus" Baird (ICS '80), who died last summer. The faculty teaching award, which recognizes a faculty member with outstanding teaching skills, was renamed the William A."gus" Baird Faculty Teaching Award.
Graduate student Annie Anton dedicated the award and remembered gus as a man who could teach programming to an inanimate object. gus was a professor in the College of Computing and the School of Information and Computer Science for fifteen years.
gus' mother, daughters, and other family members attended the awards ceremony, where Professor Janet Kolodner presented the award to Ashok Goel, an assistant professor in the College with research and teaching interests in the area of cognitive science.
Upon gus' death, an undergraduate scholarship fund was established in his memory. The College actively seeks to endow this scholarship at the level of $15,000, so that the fund will last in perpetuity. If you would like to make a tax-deductible gift to the gus Baird Scholarship, please mail your check to Molly Croft at the College of Computing, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280. Make it payable to the Georgia Tech Foundation and note that it is for the gus Baird Scholarship.
The names of all contributors will be listed in the next issue of the newsletter. The individuals who have donated to the scholarship as of Friday, July 1 are listed in the insert of this issue.
The scholarship award winner will be named at each year's awards ceremony. We hope that all of the donors to the gus Baird Scholarship will be able to join us next year for this special occasion.