Compiler - May 2008
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Issue 23 | May 2008 View in a Web browser
Picture of the Month
CERCS
Alumni Day
The Center for Experimental Research
in Computer Systems (CERCS) held a
special Alumni Day April 4. Several
CERCS alumni attended to talk about
their technical work and interests and
share their experiences with each
other and with our current students.
Pictured, left to right: Beth Plale (now
associate professor and associate
dean for research in Engineering at
Indiana University), Arnab Paul (now
with Intel), Robin Kravets (now
associate professor in computer
science at the University of Illinois)
and Kipp Jones (now with Skyhook
Wireless).
May 2
Finals Week Ends
vcal ical
May 3
Spring Commencement
KACB 1116
vcal ical
May 10
Computing Alumni
Organization’s 2nd
Annual Spring Social
Home of Dan and Ellen
Zegura
vcal ical
May 16
CoC Advisory Board
Meeting
KACB 1116
vcal ical
Research News
YTD New Awards
Proposed Contracts for March 2008
$9,656,813
Total $ Amount IC
(48% decrease from
last year)
24
9,768,583
CS
CSE
GVU GTISC
.5% 95% 4.5% 0%
0%
May 16
Seminar Luncheon with
Richard Murray of Cal
Tech
RIM
Newly Awarded Contracts for March 2008
Sponsor
Value
Air Force
PI
Co-PIs
$1,050,730 Wenke Lee
Title
Jonathon Countering Botnets: AnomalyGiffin;
Based Detection, Comprehensive
Nick
Analysis and Efficient Mitigation
Feamster
NSF
$20,000
Mark Guzdial
None
Providing Access to the 4th ACM
International Computing
Education Research Workshop
2008
NSF
$20,000
Irfan Essa
None
Symposium of Computation and
Journalism
Lincoln
Laboratory/MIT
$50,000
David Bader
None
High Performance Computing for
Massive Graph Analysis
Closed Contracts for March 2008
Sponsor
SciberQuest
Value
PI
$168,661 Richard Fujimoto
Co-PIs
Title
None
SBIR: Computing Infrastructure and
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47
Number of CoC
students graduating
this month with
honors, high honors or
highest honors
$5,000
Prize awarded to
ElectriSense co-founder
Shwetak Patel (Ph.D.
CS) and his two
teammates for taking
third place at the
University of Oregon’s
New Venture
Championship
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Compiler - May 2008
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Inc.
Remote, Parallel Data Mining Engine
Grants/Gifts Received for March 2008
Donor
Amount
Hewlett
Packard
$35,000
Silicon
Valley
Community
PI
Co-PIs
Description of Gift/Donation
Karsten Schwan
None
CERCS - Manageability - Schwan
$99,911
Jun Xu
None
Cisco Univ. Grant# 20048117
Microsoft
$15,000
Frank Dellaert
None
IC - Gen Research - Dellaert
Microsoft
$15,000
James Rehg
None
IC - Gen Research - Rehg
People@CoC
Six HCC Students Receive Google 2008 Anita Borg Scholarship
Sarita Yardi, Lana Yarosh, Jill Diamond, Betsy DiSalvo, Erika Shehan and Jennifer
Stoll—all HCC Ph.D. students from CoC—were awarded 2008 Anita Borg Scholarships, each
receiving $10,000 for the 2008-09 academic year. Valerie Henderson-Summet (Ph.D. CS),
Kathy Pham (MS CS) and Renuka Apte (MS CS) were among the finalists and received
$1,000 each. All scholarship recipients and finalists were invited to visit Google headquarters in
Mountain View, Calif., on April 3-5 for a networking retreat that included workshops with a
series of speakers, panelists, breakout sessions and social activities.
+400,000
Number of computers
worldwide said to be
infected by Kraken, a
new botnet, according
to research by Internet
security company
Damballa
This month, various
groups at CoC are
pursuing partnerships
whith the following
companies:
Cellnet
CDC
Humana
Motorola
Nikon
nVidia
QualComm
Steelecase
Texas Instruments
Turner
Pediatric Heart Surgeon Uses Software at MAGIC Lab
Dr. Kirk Kanter of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Emory University School of
Medicine came to Jarek Rossignac's MAGIC Lab on April 16 to use Georgia Tech's Surgem
software to prepare for his next Fontan heart surgery. The software allows a surgeon to grab,
pull and twist a 3D model (created with MRI or CT scans) of the actual patient's heart and
explore several surgical options before the operation. Rossignac and his students, especially
Ph.D. student Brian Whited, developed the Surgem software.
GVU Students Win Design Competition
Susan Wyche (Ph.D. HCC), Kelly Caine (Ph.D. Engineering Psychology), Ben Davison
(Ph.D. HCC) and Michael Arteaga (M.S. HCI) won the Georgia Product Development
Management Association's (GPDMA) Student Design Competition for “Sun Dial,” a mobile
phone application that uses a graphic representation of the sun moving through the sky to
remind Muslims of their five daily prayer times. The team received a $1,000 prize and
presented their project at GPDMA's quarterly meeting at the Georgia Tech College of
Management on April 17.
‘Magic Kingdom’ Studios Donates Equipment to MAGIC Lab
Walt Disney Animation Studios has given some new equipment to MAGIC Lab to support
research on Feature Animation Production Automation. Jarek Rossignac characterized the
new equipment—a top-of-the-line digital drawing tablet and an HP workstation used by the
artists at Disney—as “really cool.”
Grad Student Susan Wyche Presents at IxDA Conference and CHI08
HCC graduate student Susan Wyche (advisor: Beki Grinter) was invited to speak at the first
annual conference of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), held Feb. 8-10 in Savannah.
Wyche’s talk was titled “Fieldwork and Sketching: Translating Research Themes into
Conceptual Designs.” Watch the talk on video. Wyche also presented a paper at CHI08, which
took place May 5-10 in Florence, Italy. The paper, “Re-Placing Faith: Reconsidering the
Secular-Religious Use Divide in the United States and Kenya,” by Wyche, S.P., Aoki, P.M., and
Grinter, R.E., will appear in the Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems.
Grad Student Andre Grimes Wins Microsoft Awards
Andrea Grimes, another of Grinter’s graduate students in HCC, was named a 2008 Microsoft
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Research Fellow and given a Social Impact Award by the research organization. See all the
2008 fellows and learn more about Microsoft Research. Grimes also co-authored two papers
that were presented at CHI08. “Celebratory Technology: New Directions for Food Research in
HCI,” by Grimes and Richard Harper, was nominated for best paper. That paper, along with
“Life Scheduling to Support Multiple Social Roles,” by Grimes and A.J. Brush, will appear in the
Proceedings of CHI 2008.
New Editorial Board at CACM Includes Three CoC Faculty
Dean Emeritus Peter Freeman, Seymour (Sy) Goodman and Mark Guzdial have been
named to the editorial board of Communications of the ACM, the flagship journal of the
Association for Computing Machinery. The three will serve on the Viewpoints board, one of six
subcommittees of the CACM editorial board.
Ashwin Ram Gives TechTalk at Google
Ashwin Ram of SIC gave an invited talk titled “Case-Based Reasoning for Game AI” on April
3 as part of the Google TechTalks series at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Game Artificial Intelligence is an effort to take computer games beyond scripted interactions,
however complex, into the arena of truly interactive systems that are responsive, adaptive and
intelligent. Watch the talk on video.
Personnel Announcements
Peter Wan has returned to CoC as a Research Technologist II in TSO effective April 14. His
email address is peter@cc, his phone number is 5-7401 and he is located in CCB 247C.
Welcome back, Peter!
Monica Ross has joined CoC as a Tech Temp in IC effective April 7. Her email address is
mross@cc, her phone number is 5-7349 and she is located in TSRB 355X. Welcome, Monica!
Sharon Williams' last day at CoC was April 18. Best wishes, Sharon!
LaCole McCain's last day at CoC was April 25. Best wishes, LaCole!
Rashmi Patel's last day at CoC was April 30. Best wishes, Rashmi!
General News
CoC Helps Fund Expansion of RSI Lending Library
With the help of SCS Chair Ellen Zegura, the RSI Lending Library secured $1,000 in funding
from TSO to help upgrade some of the library’s equipment. The RSI Lending Library, an
initiative of the CoC Graduate Student Council, is a resource for College of Computing faculty,
students and staff who are concerned about Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI). Anyone at the
College can go to the library to learn how to prevent RSI or to mitigate its symptoms. The
library provides a variety of ergonomic keyboards, pointing devices and other equipment that
people can borrow for a month to try out before buying. The new funding will allow the library
to get extra pieces of popular equipment and several new types of equipment, such as laptop
stands, keyboard trays, keyboards and mice. Get more information about the library.
Papers for SIGGRAPH 2008 Selected at SIC
The School of Interactive Computing hosted the Papers Committee meeting for SIGGRAPH
2008, the premier conference in computer graphics. The meeting, held March 8-10, brought
together 62 top researchers in graphics to decide on papers for this year’s conference. Georgia
Tech faculty member Greg Turk led the meeting in his role as SIGGRAPH 2008 Technical
Papers Chair, and CoC faculty Karen Liu and Irfan Essa served as committee members.
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