At the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, we are defining the new face of computing in education, research and outreach, as well as shaping computing's role in the world. Here are some stories about how we're doing it.
The College of Computing 2011 Holiday Gift Guide |
| What makes a perfect holiday gift for the technology enthusiast? Here’s our own spin on the traditional holiday gift guide, showcasing some of the College of Computing’s biggest research stories from 2011 and providing top technologists with all sorts of “gift” ideas for this holiday season! Read more... |
Undercover CEO: Jasmine Lawrence Not Your Normal Undergrad |
| Jasmine Lawrence has a secret. For two years, the rising junior from Williamstown, N.J., has been attending classes, studying for tests and engaging herself in extracurricular activities, just like any other CS major. She works in a robotics lab. She likes to sing and make stained glass in the Craft Center. Her Thread choices are Devices and Intelligence. But beneath Lawrence’s exterior of a typical undergraduate is a seasoned and successful chief executive—a woman who at 18 had already made more high-level business decisions than most people twice her age. Read more... |
Creative Inception: Daniel Hooper Makes Game Design Debut With Percepto |
| Like many instances of artistic inspiration, this one came to Daniel Hooper in a dream. “I saw this room, and it kind of flattened,” says the rising senior from Alpharetta. “You could rotate it a bunch of different ways. Then I woke up, right after the dream, and I jumped out of bed and just started sketching.” What Hooper sketched was a puzzle game in three dimensions. His initial idea was, by his own admission, “bizarre,” like something out of the movie Inception, with shifting rules of gravity and playing spaces flipping upside down. “It was just going to be really crazy,” he says. Read more... |
The People's Network: Computing Students Work for More Transparent Internet |
| Over the past 20 years, the Internet has opened up an entire universe of information and made it available to (according to recent statistics) a third of the world’s population, literally at their fingertips. Ironically, one area for which information is still hard to come by is the Internet itself—its performance as a conglomeration of digital networks, and the actors that influence that performance. College of Computing students and faculty are trying to change that. Read more... |
Quality Table Time: ShareTable Facilitates Long-Distance Communication |
| When Svetlana Yarosh came south to Georgia Tech from her hometown in Maryland, it was the first time she’d ever lived more than an hour’s drive from her little brother. She promised to keep in touch. She promised weekly phone calls, long video conversations via Skype. And she delivered on those promises, but something was missing. “With a phone call, your interaction is limited,” says Yarosh, a Ph.D. candidate in human-centered computing. “Even with Skype, after a while you’re just staring at each other.” Read more... |
Computational Nanogami: Search for RNA Structure Stretches Across Georgia Tech Disciplines |
| Back in 2009, Josh Anderson didn’t know much about biology. But he knew that a summer undergraduate research assistantship working on something called “RNA folding” had to be better than the job his mother had lined up for him. Prashant Gaurav recalls that in 2009 he was thinking about applying to graduate school in computer science—not about the base pairings of a nasty RNA virus like Hepatitis C. Yet in 2011 both Anderson and Gaurav are hard at work on problems in computational molecular biology. Read more... |
Algorithm for Success: Zvi Galil Brings the Fire to Georgia Tech |
| In the summer of 1968, Israeli television was newborn. Just two years previous, a group of 32 schools had received the first broadcast signal in the country’s history, and in May 1968 the brand-new Israeli Broadcasting Authority launched regular public transmissions. That fall, the authority wanted to introduce its audience to a new technology called “computers.” To help explain, they turned to Zvi Galil. Read more... |
Problem Solver: Edmond Chow Triangulates Solutions to Big Problems |
| For seven years (1998-2005), Edmond Chow worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing. For five years after that, he applied his skills at the D. E. Shaw Research firm. In fall 2010, Chow returned to the world of academia as an associate professor in the School of Computational Science & Engineering. Read more... |
Everyday Computing: Beth Mynatt’s Quest for Usable Ubiquity |
| In 1998, when Beth Mynatt started work as an eager assistant professor at the College of Computing, she got in trouble because she wanted to be mundane. More precisely, she wanted to study the mundane activities of life and how computing could support them. Read more... |
An Agile Architecture: Hyesoon Kim Looks to Combine CPUs & GPUs |
| Growing up in Korea, Hyesoon Kim wanted to know how things worked. "How does a valve work? How does a gear work?" she remembers asking herself. "I liked those questions a lot." Read more... |
String Music: Apostolico Uses Algorithms to Decode the Mysteries of Life |
| DNA is often called the “language of life.” As an example of a mathematical string, DNA is simply—and almost impenetrably—a massive string of four characters: A, C, G and T. Alberto Apostolico talks about DNA a lot. Read more... |
Ghost in the Machine: Charles Isbell Works for a Higher (Artificial) Intelligence |
| Charles Isbell studies artificial intelligence. His work explores the frontiers of machine learning, looking for ways to create ever-more-functional autonomous agents and plugging those agents into such applications such as interactive entertainment. To understand this work, consider the story of a charming adolescent named Cobot. Read more... |
Quantum Resistance: Chris Peikert & the Power of Lattices |
| Cryptography as a human activity existed millennia before the invention of the computer. Evidence of codes and code-breaking dates back at least to the Greek classical period. Indeed, the “Caesar cipher” is named after Julius Caesar, who reportedly used it to communicate with his generals. Like all encryption methods, it involves a “problem” whose solution holds the key to the code. The harder the problem, the stronger the code. Read more... |
A More Clever Query: Hongyuan Zha Tunes Up the Search Engine |
| Every day, hundreds of millions of people around the world use Internet search engines. As they type, the vast majority of those people are blissfully unaware of the sophisticated mathematics deployed by their fingers. Hongyuan Zha, on the other hand, has spent a sizable part of his career on it. Read more... |
Painting the Data: John Stasko Brings Information to Life Through Visualization |
| Outside inquiries into his research were nothing new for John Stasko, but when he hit the pages of Fraud, his phone really started ringing. Read more... |
Active Learning: Nina Balcan Shores Up Foundations of Her Field |
| At the intellectual crossroads of machine learning, algorithmic game theory and optimization, there are signposts asking a few foundational questions: What’s the best method for gathering and using available information? How should a system adapt to change? And what’s the best way to interact with a new environment? Nina Balcan wants to provide answers to those questions. Read more... |
Closeup on Interactive Computing Research |
| Got your remote control handy? Lately the College of Computing has been burning up the hot lights of TV land. During September and October 2010, eight researchers from the School of Interactive Computing were featured on CNN. Check out our stars of the flat-screen below. Read more... |
Locked in No Longer |
| In Melody Moore Jackson’s BrainLab, there are items one doesn’t expect to find in computing research. Like a washer and dryer, and a healthy supply of towels. A three-dimensional printer. An area sectioned off with furniture as a living room, complete with couches and TV. These are the tools required to learn how to read people’s minds—literally. Read more... |
Jovial Production |
| Joy Buolamwini has accomplished quite a bit in her time. She’s lived abroad in her parents’ homeland of Ghana. She’s designed computer games. She’s built websites for African consulates. She’s pole vaulted. She’s founded multiple startup companies dedicated to gaming, mobile applications, web design or some combination of the three. She’s been named a Pepsi Scholar Athlete of the Year. She plays guitar. She writes for Newsweek. She blogs. Joy Buolamwini is 20 years old. Read more... |
Career Solution |
| Behind Dick Lipton’s ready smile, his brain is working, ever on the lookout for problems to tackle. Read more... |
Designing for Dignity |
| The design of mobile technologies often centers on consumption and the immediacy of connection: the newest device as part of a hip lifestyle connected to friends and socializing, the latest services for an on-the-move business person making decisions, or both devices and services for the busy family juggling kids and jobs and time together. Read more... |
Channeling the Flood |
| As recently as a decade ago, the challenge in data analysis was in gathering adequate amounts of data to be analyzed. Now the challenge is in making sense of the oceans of data that are being gathered. That’s where Professor Haesun Park comes in. Read more... |
Super Robot Ninja |
| When Chris Farrell travels with Kai, his more than 2-foot-tall humanoid robot, he takes it aboard planes as carry-on baggage. Passing through airport security, Chris and his companion are often singled out for further scrutiny by agents who aren’t sure what to make of 11 pounds of gleaming aluminum with a head, torso and limbs, dressed in sneakers and toddler clothes from Old Navy. Read more... |
Making it Her Own |
| Sometimes life forces you to leap without looking. Cristina Gonzalez is getting good at it. Read more... |
Algorithmic Health |
| Accoring to the World Health Organization estimates, 17 million people around the world die of cardiovascular diseases each hear. About 9 million of these are women. Everyone would like to see those numbers drop, of course. George Biros is doing something to make it happen. Read more... |
Leading the Field |
| It’s pretty tough to stand out as an undergraduate in the College of Computing. The computer science and computational media programs are full of talented, intelligent and focused young adults working hard and preparing themselves for successful careers. But Michael Slaughter stands out. Read more... |
21st Century Literacy |
| Mark Guzdial is on a mission—an audacious mission to transform computer science education at all levels, from elementary school through the undergraduate years. It’s a mission he shares with others, and they know it’s a long-term goal. But they share the belief that the success of this mission is key to the success of the information-based society we’ve built. Read more... |
Merging Humanity with Technology |
| Daniel Stensland is the son of a Georgia Tech alumnus. Of his two brothers, one is a Tech graduate, the other soon will be. All four Stensland men are Eagle Scouts. Two things were probable for Daniel, who grew up in Kennesaw, Ga.: That he would attend Georgia Tech, and that he would tackle a project befitting his Scouting achievements. Both came to pass. Read more... |
Root Problems |
| Dana Randall was always good at math. Her teachers were giving her more difficult problems than her classmates as early as the first grade. A native of New York, Randall attended Stuyvesant High School, the highly competitive New York City public high school that specializes in mathematics and science, before going on to earn a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Harvard. Read more... |
Revving Up Moore's Law |
| Tom Conte likes cars. He gets paid to talk about computers. Problem is, people tend to be more mystified by computers than by cars. So Conte puts the two together and uses cars (and things related to them) to explain computers. He does this a lot. Read more... |
Spotlight on Alumni |
| For more than 40 years, Georgia Tech has produced computing graduates who went on to define the new face of the field. Since 1990, these graduates have been called proud alumni of the College of Computing. In this section we share with you the stories of those graduates—often in their very own words. Read more... |
Bringing Society to Cyberspace |
| Amy Bruckman is an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing. Which makes perfect sense since she was admitted to graduate school in art history. Which also made sense since she majored in physics as an undergrad. All of which, of course, prepared her for a job as a technical writer for a medical publishing company in Massachusetts. Read more... |
An Internet for Everyone |
 | Helping kids get the most out of the Internet, particularly while researching for school assignments, is one goal of a project conducted by the College of Computing's Guy Lebanon. Read more... |
Understanding Genomic Evolution with Petascale Computing |
 | Technological advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing have opened up the possibility of determining how living things are related by analyzing the ways in which their genes have been rearranged on chromosomes. However, inferring such evolutionary relationships from rearrangement events is computationally intensive on even the most advanced computing systems available today. Read more... |
Finding a Quasar in a Haystack |
| The datasets Alex Gray works with are truly astronomical—in every sense of the word. Analogous to Moore's Law, which holds that computer speeds double every 18 months, is the even faster growth of the sizes of data collections in all fields—from document collections and business-transaction databases, to data collected by unprecedented international science instruments—many of which are in the realm of terabytes and petabytes. Read more... |
Georgia Tech Women in Computing |
 | The College of Computing at Georgia Tech is defining the new face of computing, which literally means "a new face." The computing discipline cannot be fully successful without more women. As evidenced by more than 30 female faculty, researchers and instructors, a graduate computer science program that is 20 percent women and 13 Anita Borg scholarship winners, we have an overwhelmingly successful support organization and network that's helped make us a top destination for the field's most promising students and world-class faculty. Read more... |
Instant Upgrade – Autotuning Software for the Parallel World |
 | Rich Vuduc uses a familiar routine to introduce his students to the concept of parallel programming. On the first day of class, the assistant professor hands a pile of papers to a student. That student takes one and passes the bundle to the next person, and so on. The stack moves along until everyone in the room has a paper. Read more... |
Like Reality, but Better |
| Blair MacIntyre conducts pioneering research in the field of augmented reality (AR), a new medium that combines aspects of the physical and virtual worlds. An oft-cited but primitive example of AR is the first-down line superimposed on the playing field during televised football games. Read more... |
Lifesaving Heart Surgery |
| Professor Jarek Rossignac and his graduate students in the School of Interactive Computing have developed software that allows pediatric cardiac surgeons to manipulate a digital 3D model of the patient’s actual heart and explore surgical options before they ever set foot in an operating room. Read more... |
Avatars with Swagger |
| One day, the avatars now inhabiting the virtual worlds of interactive computer games will look as old-fashioned as the herky-jerky rhythm of a Charlie Chaplin film. In fact, that day is fast approaching—thanks to research under way in Karen Liu's lab at the College of Computing. Read more... |
Randomness Hits Big with NSF Grant |
| Four College of Computing professors (and a fifth outside Georgia Tech) will share a $1.08 million grant from the National Science Foundation with the goal of discovering how randomized algorithms can yield solutions to some of the most vexing problems in science and engineering. Read more... |
Maintaining Transparency for the Internet |
| M-Lab Tracks Metrics for 'Net Neutrality: Keeping the Internet robust, innovative and democratic are the goals behind the Internet Measurement Lab (M-Lab), a project founded and supported by Google, the PlanetLab Consortium and the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute. Read more... |
Lock Up That Phone |
| Cell phones and other mobile devices are becoming more powerful, more functional and more indispensable in many people's lives. But these same qualities also make them tempting targets for criminal hackers—and at the moment, there's little to stop the damage they could do. Read more... |
MedVault: Improving Healthcare Through Data Efficiency, Security |
| Converting medical records to an electronic format would allow seamless information sharing among health care providers and give patients control over their medical records. Moreover, such records could produce significant cost-saving efficiencies while improving the quality of health care. Read more... |
Go Go Social Robot |
| The possibilities for social robots -- defined as robots that interact with people -- are enormous. They could serve as helpmates and companions for elderly or disabled people, or work behind store counters. "[These are] environments that people are changing all the time," says Andrea Thomaz, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing. "People create a lot of dynamics that are impossible to anticipate and program into a robot." Read more... |
