GSC Meeting Friday 22 September 2006


  1. Report from faculty meeting reps – Steven Dow of IIC and Daron Vroon of CSS, email report from Kamesh Madduri of CSE

    1. IIC, CSS becoming schools and CSE will remain a division for now

    2. CSS will be the school of Computer Science and CSE will remain the Computational Science and Engineering division. IIC is still deciding on a name, School of Interactive Computing has been proposed.

    3. Regardless of the new divisions, the College of Computing owns the CS PhD degree and so you can be in any school or division of the college and still get a CS PhD. IIC will grant the HCC PhD degree and eventually the Robotics PhD degree when it is in place. There has been talk of a CSE PhD but it is uncertain who this will be administered by.

    4. CSE wants to possibly be an interdisciplinary school between Engineering and College of Computing but is still working this out

    5. CSS: The college will be offering a Masters of Computer Science at a Korean university. This will be run similar to GT Lorraine with students and faculty going there to teach. Most of the enrolled students will be people who are already working in Korea so this will not mean we will lose our Korean students who come to Tech. 30 people are going to be enrolled to start.

    6. IIC: there was some debate about faculty contributing to the new exchange system being purchased by TSO and complaints about the faculty having to pay more and having to let students give up time to be lab managers

    7. Email report from Kamesh:

There has been no discussion on the division-school issue in the last two CSE faculty meetings. My advisor mentioned this interdisciplinary school/center idea and the CSE PhD program, but they are both in the pre-proposal stage. (http://swiki.cc.gatech.edu/CSE.) Also, CSE is yet to be added to the existing list of 12 tracks. The faculty is hoping it gets approved this semester.

ii) Faculty decided to unsubscribe Kamesh from CSE fac mailing list as there are sensitive future discussion topics (such as qualifier committees and questions) that students shouldn't be involved in. Lometa sends me email reminders about CSE meetings now.

iii) One entire CSE meeting was dedicated to the Klaus move with Thom McLean giving an overview to the faculty. The initial plan was for CSE to move in before the official Klaus opening, around October 15th. But as of last week, the move has been put off until a week after the opening, as things still aren't in place. In any case, CSE will be one of the first divisions to move into Klaus and faculty offices and lab spaces have been assigned.





  1. Discussion about TSO and lab managers (with input from Chad Honeycutt)

    1. Complaints about lab managers – takes up time, students may not be skilled to be lab managers

    2. Perhaps we need to have another meeting with lab managers to figure out the roles of TSO vs lab managers as well as the power granted to lab managers + what TSO expects of lab managers and vice versa

    3. Proposal to assess how much work it turns out to be and then complain if you are already a lab manager and it detracts from your research

    4. Proposal for Randy to have guaranteed office hours so that lab managers can get keys, software etc when they need it from him

    5. Complaints that video conferencing facility in GVU Centre with TSO helpdesk doesn’t always help since the helpdesk is often not manned

    6. Chad talked about 2 servers TSO-research is setting up, one is a wiki server. Both will be supported by TSO-research and the research community. Brian Jordin will also be setting up a separate set of resources for college web services.

    7. Action: Ask Dave Roberts to email Randy and Thom about next lab managers meeting and let them know about proposals



  1. Discussion about Conference funding

    1. Tracy and Marshini explain the policy

    2. Proposal to have a lottery based on the day you submitted as opposed to first come first serve since time based sorting might be unreliable

    3. Explained that new policy will be advertised soon and that Jay Summet will be building the web form (thanks Jay!) and that new policy goes into effect Spring 2007

    4. For Fall, a capped pool of money will be dished out first come first serve

    5. Explained that funding is available once per calendar year and depends on budget allocated for year

    6. Action: advertise travel funding policy asap


  1. Grad student services

    1. People still experiencing difficulties with grad student services,

    2. Action: Each individual complaint should be forwarded to Leo by person affected and at end of each semester, we will only formally complain as GSC if services do not improve. Potentially send out official email to alert everyone of new procedure.


  1. Faculty Review

    1. Proposal to have it before students have to register for Spring so that they have time to think about the inputs from faculty review before they make their decisions

    2. Action: GJ is organizing this event.


  1. Grad Teas

    1. Women@cc (Julie Kientz) is organizing the first grad tea – Halloween and pumpkin carving (yay!)

    2. Sandeep might want to hold one after that in November

    3. Proposal to have a smaller weekly or fortnightly event where cookies and tea are offered – or possibly just chocolates, ice-cream etc from the Lexington chocolates – problems, cant always have it in TSRB

    4. Action: Jayoung will find out about budget for the weekly grad teas and possibly see if others are willing to help organize this

    5. Proposal for using some grad tea money for water coolers since faculty currently use foundation funds for water coolers

    6. Action: Zach will find out about this


  1. Klaus Building move

    1. From Daron, CSS faculty meeting rep: Ellen Zegura is willing to chat to GSC about the Klaus building move, layout etc and potentially organize student walkthroughs of the building

    2. Action: Daron has volunteered to find out about student walkthroughs


  1. Other

    1. Announcement about Intel scholars program

    2. Announcement about RSI equipment available from Jay


  1. End of Meeting



Next meeting will be held on Nov 3 2006.