Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing

 

Hey, it’s February! I am happy to report that our ongoing efforts to test, mask, and socially distance continue to pay off. There was a brief spike in positive tests after the students returned to campus at the beginning of the semester, but the rate of positives is currently well below 1 percent. Oh, and the campus testing team has just passed a milestone: they have now administered 200,000 Covid tests. We are living in interesting times, but at least folks are working to make it better. 

We’ve had some good news closer to home as well. Two of our doctoral students have won Google-CMD-IT Dissertation Fellowships: Alexander Moreno and Amber Solomon. The fellowship is a joint venture between Google and the FLIP program created here at GT and run by the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT, and is aimed at increasing the diversity of Ph.D. graduates. Congratulations, Alexander and Amber, and thank you for representing the College of Computing so ably.

We have good faculty news as well. Rich DeMillo and Dick Lipton are being recognized as people who fundamentally shaped the field of computer science. Their 1979 paper, Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs, written with Alan Perlis, has been included in a new anthology, Ideas that Created the Future. The anthology covers papers from the very distant past of Aristotle through the merely distant past (like, say, 1979), up to the present, documenting the discoveries that have shaped our world. Please join me in congratulating Rich and Dick, and in thanking them for their intellectual leadership.

And that’s some of what’s going on. Have a good week, everyone. Stay safe and stay strong. Better days are coming... and when they do, we’ll be proud to look back at how we’ve taken care of each other during the crisis.