The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the technological godfather of things stealth, smart bullets and the Internet, is sponsoring a road race this week --- with one overriding entry requirement.
Only robots need apply.
The race, called the DARPA Grand Challenge, begins Saturday at dawn at the Slash X Ranch near Barstow, Calif. The still-secret course is guaranteed to be a grueling grind over 200 miles of blue highways, back roads, trails and open desert from Barstow to the Nevada state line.
Twenty-five robots with assorted pedigrees --- modified Humvees, souped-up sport utility vehicles, dune buggies, all-terrain vehicles, a six-wheeled military truck and a motorcycle --- will vie for a congressionally authorized prize of $1 million.
The winner also gets bragging rights to one of the most daunting challenges robots have ever faced: that distinctly human, infinitely complex activity we call driving.
With or without a winner, the Defense Department's top research agency believes the interest generated by the race will stimulate some grassroots innovations that might be useful in future military robots. Under a congressional mandate to make a third of the country's military vehicles autonomous by 2015, DARPA has already funded dozens of research projects to develop machines that can replace human soldiers.
New ideas wanted
But they're still looking for a few good machines --- and the race is intended to draw out fresh approaches to robotics from universities and entrepreneurial companies that might never think about applying for million-dollar defense contracts.
Robotic contests aren't really new. There are hundreds every year --- robo-soccer championships, robotic egg hunts, robotic firefighting competitions, cleaning robot contests, even robotic sumo matches.Robots do a lot of serious work these days, too. They assemble automobiles, solder circuit boards, sweep floors, answer telephones, and even assist doctors in surgery. At the moment, roving robots are trundling across hostile terrain 100 million miles from Earth --- revealing details of a Martian landscape that no human has ever set foot on.
So far, however, robots haven't done much driving, and for good reason: They're not very good at it.
A robotic van "drove" from Pittsburgh to San Diego in 1995, but there was a human in the driver's seat, just in case. The van-bot did fine on interstate highways, but it never mastered the exit ramps and intersections. Robotics enthusiasts counter that 43,000 traffic fatalities a year prove humans aren't great drivers, either.
But Saturday's race is a sign of the changing times. These drivers are also the driven. For 200 miles, the entrants will be guided entirely by satellite navigation systems, racing through thousands of interim waypoints --- precise points of longitude and latitude --- to the finish line.
Computers and sensors aboard the vehicles will be entirely responsible for the steering, turning, braking and accelerating as they cross the desert.
The final course --- chosen from more than 1,200 miles of possible routes --- won't be disclosed to participants until two hours before the race.
The vehicles, including the University of Alaska's Arctic Tortoise, Louisiana State University's CajunBot and Virginia Tech's club car Cliff, will have 10 hours to cover the course.
Defense officials are promising that: "The route will include surfaced and unsurfaced roads, trails, and off-road areas. Manmade and natural obstacles --- both above and below the surface of the average terrain --- are likely. Examples of obstacles include ditches, washboard, open water, rocks, underpasses, construction, power line towers, barbed wire fences and other vehicles."
Opinions among robotics experts vary about whether the race should be known as the grand challenge or the impossible dream.
"You're talking about a course over very rough roads and open desert," says Frank Dellaert, co-director of Georgia Tech's robotics lab, which is not participating in the race. "I would have trouble driving some of these roads myself. I think it's beyond the capabilities of autonomous vehicles today."
One robotics team has already reinforced those sentiments. Team Overbot, made up of former Stanford University engineering students and Silicon Valley volunteers, dropped out of the race last month, announcing that they were "not able to deliver a safe autonomous vehicle in time."
Interest running high
Mark Maimone of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will watch the competition with special interest. He's well aware of the potential pitfalls. He wrote the software now being used by NASA's Mars rovers.
"It is a huge challenge to operate the rovers on Mars, but this is a lot different," Maimone says. "It takes the Mars rovers a minute and a half to scan what's ahead and make a decision. At the speeds these vehicles will be traveling, they are going to have to do that 20 times a second.
"The real challenge is to pull all of the sensing and control systems together and make them respond quickly," he says. "Robots don't do well with changing situations. The real world is very confusing to them."
A more confident Chuck Thorpe, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, says, "It's all going to depend on the course. Cliffs and ravines aren't the problem, but if there are nasty, tricky obstacles like water-filled holes you can't see the bottom of, or fence poles hidden behind a yucca plant, it may be no one will make it."
If any entrant does, Thorpe and other experts agree that it will very likely be Team Red, headed by his CMU colleague William "Red" Whittaker, who heads the school's field robotics laboratory and has 30 years of experience designing robotic vehicles.
Whittaker and more than 50 students have spent the last year building and testing Sandstorm, a 1986 Humvee that --- with $3.5 million in refinements --- reportedly does a pretty good job of driving itself.
Unlike other teams, Whittaker's has spent months building detailed maps of the possible race routes across the Mojave Desert. No matter how well a robot drives, it won't get where it's going if it doesn't know where it is --- just like a human driver.
The "computer farm" that serves as Sandstorm's road map holds 16 terabytes of data, enough to fill 100 hard drives on a desktop computer.
Another team, the Palos Verdes Road Warriors, may not bring as much robotic experience to the competition, but its members make up for it with youthful optimism.
The 40 gifted high school students, who each get five hours of research credit, are modifying a 2003 Acura SUV to enable it to drive itself, something many of them are still too young to do.
Under the tutelage of science teacher Graham Robertson, the Palos Verdes students have received donations of a new Acura SUV --- renamed Doom Buggy --- and $40,000 worth of electronic gear. From time to time, they also get a little friendly advice from engineers at nearby institutions like Cal Tech, the University of South California, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Even DARPA has doubts about whether driverless vehicles will be able to conquer the California outback. If no one wins, the race will be run again next year. And the year after that.
"It's hard to say who came up with the precise idea for this Grand Challenge," recalls DARPA Director Anthony Tether. "We were having a bull session. In the military that's a bunch of generals sitting around a table.
"We were all thinking about, God, you know, these unmanned vehicles really are the way to go. But how are we going to energize people, how are we going to get people out of the garages?"
Racers, venue changed
Once the race was announced, energizing people was definitely not a problem: More than 100 robotics teams applied. Realizing that 100 robots racing across Southern California might be hard to manage, the agency cut the field to 25.
Also changed was the venue, originally billed from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The idea of a pack of driverless vehicles roaring down Los Angeles freeways was deemed too ambitious for the current state of robotics technology.
Even with the empty quarter of the Mojave Desert between Barstow and the current finish line at Primm, Nev., DARPA is being careful. Judges will shadow each robot to make sure they don't run amok, or try to run each other off the road. Race rules require the robots to give the right-of-way to other vehicles.
Accidents, of course, are not always avoidable.
"They have insurance, just in case," says race spokesman Don Shipley, "They have taken out a lot of insurance."
And some fear that, at speeds that might reach 50 mph, the robots also pose a threat to the desert tortoise --- a federally threatened species and the official state reptile of California. Sluggish after a winter of hibernation, the tortoises usually emerge from their burrows this time of year.
Under orders from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, teams of biologists will sweep the race corridor before the competition, moving any tortoises out of harm's way and fencing their burrows until the robots pass.
The tortoises, which have resided in the Mojave for 60 million years and, as individuals, often live to be 100, probably won't pay much mind.
Off-roading is common in this part of the desert. And from inside a tortoise shell at ground level, it's pretty hard to tell whether someone's behind the wheel or not.
HOW THEY NAVIGATE
Each vehicle travels the course through a series of waypoints. Each waypoint has a different circumference in which vehicles must enter before advancing to the next waypoint. If a vehicle goes outside the boundaries, DARPA can remotely shut off the vehicle.
Map shows course from START: Barstow to FINISH: Primm, Nev.
Shading indicates land elevations from sea level and below to 12,000+ ft.
Diagram of waypoints shows course line and areas where teams must enter.
Each waypoint determines vehicle speed. If a vehicle travels faster than the recommended speed, it will be disqualified.
The Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship is an extraordinarily competitive award, involving nominations for most of the very best scientists from around the country. Sloan Research Fellows, once chosen, are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of the most compelling interest to them. The Fellowship carries with it a grant of $40,000, to be used over a two-year period in support of research.
Samrat (Bobby) Bhattacharjee received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech in 1999. His thesis was part of the CANES active networking project. At Tech, he also worked on the GT-ITM and SOREN projects. Bhattacharjee is also an assistant professor in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and an affiliate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland. He is a NSF CAREER Award recipient. His research interests include wide-area networking, network protocol design, operating systems and distributed systems and algorithms. His research group has designed a set of protocols and mechanisms that address different aspects of implementing cooperative applications. The focus is on incentive-based cooperation policies, on mechanisms to scalably check and enforce partnerships and on protocols to ensure privacy and integrity.
James O'Brien earned his doctorate in Computer Science from the Georgia Tech’s College of Computing in August of 2000 before going to UC Berkeley. His interests are in most areas of Computer Graphics and Animation, but his research focuses primarily on the physically based simulation of complex deformable and fluid systems. The methods developed by his research group can be used for generating special effects in movies, realistic environment in video games and for training simulations. In addition to serving on the committees for other conference and journals, O'Brien has twice served on the ACM SIGGRAPH Papers Committee. He has published seven journal papers and twenty conference papers, including ten in the ACM SIGGRAPH conference. “I think one of the reasons I've been successful is that I had the opportunity to work closely with outstanding faculty at Georgia Tech, and learn from each one of them," says O'Brien. "The real secret to success is to be excited about your work and enjoy it. Other things like integrity and self-honesty are important too."
The Sloan Research Fellowships were established in 1955 to provide support and recognition to young scientists. Twenty-six Sloan Fellows have won Nobel Prizes later in their careers, and hundreds have received other honors. Currently a total of 116 fellowships are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics. Since the beginning of the program, the Foundation has spent nearly $99 million for support of over 3,800 young researchers.
]]>Reflecting the scope and extent of the computing field, the 2003 ACM Fellows were cited for contributions to everything from wireless telecommunications to network services, bioinformatics, Internet architecture, secure database management, and artificial intelligence, among others.
“This year’s ACM Fellows join the ranks of outstanding ACM members who have contributed to the computing community through distinguished service and significant achievements in information technology,” said John White, CEO of ACM. “By their contributions, they have advanced the computing discipline and its increasingly critical role in society in countless ways."
It is quite impressive and possibly an unprecedented honor to have four of the 30 ACM Fellows from one institution, so Congratulations to CoC Faculty, and specifically to:
Mostafa Ammar - For contributions to the design of systems and protocols for scalable network services.
Richard DeMillo - For contributions to the engineering of reliable and secure software.
Mary Jean Harrold - For contributions in software engineering.
Ramesh Jain - For contributions to computer vision and multimedia information systems.
ACM will formally recognize the new Fellows at its annual Awards Banquet in the spring of 2004. Additional information about the ACM 2003 Fellows, the awards event, as well as previous ACM Fellows and award winners is available at www.acm.org/awards.
Initiated in 1993, the Fellows program celebrates the exceptional contributions of the leading members in the computing field. These individuals have helped to enlighten researchers, developers, practitioners and end-users of information technology throughout the world. They reflect the makeup of ACM’s diverse membership roster, with representation from men and women, from universities and corporations, from North America and abroad.
2003 ACM FELLOWS
Rakesh Agrawal - IBM Almaden Research Center
Mostafa Ammar - Georgia Institute of Technology
Victor Bahl - Microsoft Research
Bonnie Berger – Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Elisa Bertino - University of Milano
John Carroll – Pennsylvania State University
Richard DeMillo - Georgia Institute of Technology
Barbara J. Grosz - Harvard University
Brent Hailpern – IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Jiawei Han - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Mary Jean Harrold - Georgia Institute of Technology
Peter E. Hart - Ricoh Innovations, Inc.
Mark Horowitz - Stanford University
Paul Hudak - Yale University
H.V. Jagadish - University of Michigan
Anil Jain - Michigan State University
Ramesh Jain - Georgia Institute of Technology
Niraj Jha - Princeton University
Dexter Kozen - Cornell University
Yi-Bing Lin - National Chiao Tung University
Kathleen McKeown - Columbia University
Thomas P. Moran - IBM Almaden Research Center
Eugene W. Myers - University of California-Berkeley
Craig Partridge - BBN Technologies
Daniel Reed – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Stuart J. Russell - University of California, Berkeley
William H. Sanders - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Scott Shenker - University of California, Berkeley/International Computer Science Institute
Gurindar Sohi - University of Wisconsin
Cornelis J. van Rijsbergen - University of Glasgow
]]>White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John H. Marburger, III, presented CRA-W Co-Chair Dr. Mary Jean Harrold (Georgia Tech, College of Computing) and CRA-W representative Dr. Jan Cuny (University of Oregon, Computer Science Department) with the citation at a noon ceremony in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. CRA-W was one of just eight institutional winners of the annual award, given to those organizations identified as "exemplars" and leaders in the national effort to more fully develop the Nation's human resources in science, mathematics and engineering.
The award cites CRA-W's work providing "hands-on research experiences, mentoring, role models and information exchange to women pursuing careers in [the] field." CRA-W programs seek to increase the number of women involved in computer science and engineering, increase the degree of success they experience, and provide a forum for addressing problems that often fall disproportionately within women's domain.
In a message from the President read by Marburger at the ceremony, Bush noted that new technology was redefining the American workplace and that, "in order to stay on the leading edge we must insure the participation of people from diverse backgrounds and experiences."
"The programs recognized today will serve as role models [in that process]," the President's message said. "I'm incredibly pleased that the long-term work of CRA-W has received this recognition," Harrold said. "CRA-W's success is owed to a long progression of women in computing who gave – and give – of their time and effort to share their knowledge and experiences with the next generation. As the President noted, the country will be well-served by continuing to increase the participation of underrepresented groups."
"The problem is particularly acute in computing," Cuny said. "Five of the 10 fastest growing occupations in the next decade will be computer related, but women make up less than a third of the IT workforce and an even smaller percentage of the academic pipeline. This underrepresentation represents a loss of talent and creativity that we will need shaping the future role of technology in society."
In addition to the Presidential Citation, the award also includes $10,000 to be used by CRA-W to further its efforts. In addition to the eight institutional awards, the President also named nine individual awards for 2004.
The Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) is an action oriented organization dedicated to increasing the number of women participating in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) research and education at all levels. The current CRA-W co-chairs are Mary Jean Harrold (Georgia Tech) and Carla Ellis (Duke University).
More Information:
CRA Website
PAESMEM program
Ten additional university centers, including Kennesaw State University’s Center for Information Security Education and Awareness, were added to the fraternity, bringing the total number of such centers to 59 in 27 states.
]]>WWW 2004 is a highly competitive conference with over 1,000 attendees. The paper was selected from an initial list of 506 submissions for the Refereed Research Papers Track, and the “Best Paper Award” was presented at the closing ceremony on Friday of May 21. For more information, visit http://www.www2004.org/awards.htm
]]>For their senior-level computer design course, computer science majors at Georgia Tech are required to complete a significant team project. The project’s teams usually consist of four students who spend between 750 – 1,000 hours working on the project over the 15-week semester. Students have a choice of either a project of personal interest or one for an off-campus client. Many students include this capstone project in their portfolio and seek challenging projects. “The most appealing aspect of this project was the fact it's for a good cause—feeding the hungry,” says Zipperer, recent computer science graduate from the Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. “To me, it was a lot more motivating to know the system I was designing might help put food on some family's table than to be writing a new system for an insurance firm would have been.”
Cut Out Hunger is a volunteer effort that provides a website listing the best deals at specific grocery stores in 10 markets including Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, Utah, and Long Island, New York, matching sales with grocery coupons available in the Sunday newspaper to maximize savings. The free site's objective is to help people save money and increase food donations to local hunger organizations. Stephanie Nelson, the founder and driving force behind Cut Out Hunger, approached Georgia Tech because she knew her Cut Out Hunger website’s old technology was inefficient. Nelson founded Cut Out Hunger several years ago when she realized there are thousands of store and manufacturer coupons that never get used and these unused coupons and in-store specials could be used to fill community food banks and soup kitchens. Her idea was simple - since in-store specials make some products practically free, buy it even if it’s not your product of choice and donate it to a food bank.
“We push our students to find a project that's interesting technically but also has real world impact,” says Dr. John Stasko, associate professor in the College of Computing and faculty adviser for the team. Stasko says the team concentrated on the architecture and database access for the Cut Out Hunger website, which greatly reduced the amount of administrative and upkeep time Nelson had to spend each week entering the week's coupons and in-store specials. The re-design greatly reduced the labor-intensive process of entering long UPC codes into a spreadsheet. In addition, Stasko says the team did a good job working with the client to understand her needs and design a solution for her. Nelson, an admitted technology novice, was unaware of the possibilities of automating and simplifying her weekly website updates.
Nelson says the new website and database system designed and built by the students have reduced her data-entry time each week from 15 hours per week for just the Atlanta market to 5 hours per week for 10 markets. The estimated savings for those using the Cut Out Hunger site is $200 a month per family (10,000 current users) for a total $24 million each year, according to Nelson. “I am deeply grateful to Georgia Tech and these students for their creativity, their many hours of work, and their determination to improve the functionality of this website. Their contribution is worth thousands of dollars, and it will help retain more long-term web site users. As a result, more people will save money and donate food to feed the hungry,” says Nelson.
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's premiere research universities. Ranked among U.S. News & World Report 's top 10 public universities, Georgia Tech educates nearly 17,000 students every year through its Colleges of Engineering, Management, Computing, Sciences, Architecture and Liberal Arts. Tech maintains a diverse campus and is the nation's top producer of women and African-American engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 80 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute. During the 2002-2003 academic year, Tech totaled more than $660 million in research awards and expenditures.
More information about Cut Out Hunger is online at www.cutouthunger.org.
]]>The paper was selected from an initial list of 265 submissions. Sigmetrics - Performance presents papers on the development and application of state of the art, broadly applicable analytic, simulation, and measurement-based performance evaluation techniques. For more information, visit http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sigm2004.
]]>NGA Chairman Governor Kempthorne is launching an initiative on long-term care and healthy aging to NGA Chairman Governor Kempthorne is launching an initiative on long-term care and healthy aging to help confront existing and future healthcare challenges in America . Georgia Tech's Vice Provost for Research Charles Liotta and the College of Computing's Imlay Dean of Computing Richard DeMillo, joined researchers of the Aware Home Research Initiative, led by members of the GVU Center, to emphasize Georgia Tech's dedication to developing new technologies to promote independent and healthy aging within the home environment. As the first wave of baby boomers will reach the retirement age within the next seven years, putting an unprecedented level of stress on the U.S. healthcare structure, it is becoming essential to develop awareness technologies that can provide assistance to the aging population, thereby enabling senior adults to stay in their own homes longer, as opposed to moving to an assisted living facility.
Former Director of the Aware Home Research Initiative and College of Computing (CoC) Associate Professor, Gregory Abowd, recently testified before both the U.S. Senate's Committee on Aging and the National Governor's Association chiefs of staff and health policy advisors, increasing state and federal level awareness of the interdisciplinary research endeavors within the Aware Home Research Initiative and encouraging the gubernatorial visit to the Aware Home. Elizabeth Mynatt, CoC associate professor and new director of the Aware Home Research Initiative as of January 1, led the Governors' visit with an overview of the AHRI, and then guided the distinguished visitors as they participated in three project demonstrations. The first demonstration, called "What was I Cooking?" illustrated Ph.D. student Quan Tran's research of memory aid technologies. Next, Psychology Professor Dan Fisk and Ph.D. students Anne McLaughlin and Yan Huang featured their work with the "Blood Glucose Monitor" project, demonstrating how technology can assist with the accuracy of self administered tests and activities. Associate Professor Irfan Essa, who is also working on the Blood Glucose Monitor project, was instrumental in addressing questions from the governors. Finally, Ph.D. student Jim Rowan provided the guests with a demonstration of the "Digital Family Portrait" project, which provides a visual display for an adult child to monitor the day-to-day activity levels of their elderly parent, who is living in a different location.
]]>TIDSE 2004 brought together researchers, developers and practitioners working in the areas of art and design, human sciences, computer sciences and related areas. The conference covered a wide range of story and entertainment related invetigations including authoring, user interfaces, games, dramaturgy and applications. Conference participators got a deep insight into innovative technologies of TIDSE, relevant for commerce and industry. It was a platform for communication and exchange of new ideas to improve game industries, interactive entertainment, information management, web technologies, education and training, infotainment, movie industry and industry with world wide dependences. The conference featured several informal get-together possibilities to give room for talks and contacts. For more information, visit http://www.zgdv.de/TIDSE04.
]]>The first two undergraduate students graduating with a B.S. in Computer Science with an Information Assurance certificate are James P. (Jim) Gruen and Stephen C. (Craig) Wampler. The recently approved Information Assurance certificate is a joint program between the College of Computing and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
After graduation, Gruen and Wampler both plan to work for the National Security Agency (NSA). They both participated in Cyber Corps, a scholarship opportunity for students in either the Department of Defense Information Assurance Scholarship Program or the NSF Scholarship for Service Program, designed to increase and strengthen the cadre of federal information assurance professionals who protect the government’s critical information infrastructure.
Another Cyber Corps participant, Sheree N. Elliott, graduated with a Master of Science in Information Security. Two years ago, Elliot was the first Georgia Tech student selected for the Department of Defense Information Assurance Scholarship Program. Elliot interned with NSA last summer and plans to work for the agency after graduation. She received her undergraduate degree in computer science from Clark Atlanta University, a historically black college and university (HBCU) partner with GTISC.
As a designated National Security Agency Center of Academic Excellence in Information Security Assurance Education, GTISC has a unique information security education and scholarship partnership with three HBCUs in Atlanta-Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College and Spelman College.
]]>The team will face a series of six to eight complex, real-world programming challenges, to be completed in less than five hours. These grueling problems are designed to test not only programming skills, but also creativity and teamwork. Huddled around a single computer, competitors will race against the clock in a battle of logic, strategy and mental endurance. Teammates will collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds and build software systems that solve the problems under the intense scrutiny of expert judges. Linux1 and Eclipse2 provide the backbone for the contest-programming environment under an open source paradigm at this year’s ACM-ICPC.
If the “Yellow Jackets” solve the most problems correctly in the least amount of time, they will be international collegiate programming champions and bring the championship back to the U.S. for the first time since 1997. Stay tuned for World Finals results or get the latest updates from http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/.
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1 Drawing on resources from across IBM and key IBM Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of e-business. For more information about IBM and Linux, visit www.ibm.com/linux. *Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.
2 Eclipse is an open platform for tool integration built by an open community of tool providers. Operating under an open source paradigm, with a common public license that provides royalty free source code and world wide redistribution rights, the eclipse platform provides tool developers with ultimate flexibility and control over their software technology. Visit www.eclipse.org<http://www.eclipse.org> to discover more!
]]>Each year the president recognizes the people and institutions that have provided broad opportunities for participation by women, minorities and people with disabilities in science, mathematics and engineering in elementary, secondary, undergraduate and graduate education. Each award includes a $10,000 grant for continued mentoring work.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education programs across all fields of science and engineering, administers the awards on behalf of the White House. In the eight years the awards have been made, 78 individuals and 62 institutions have been recognized. The program allows for an annual maximum of 10 awards each for individuals and institutions.
Recipients of this year's individual awards include a range of professionals from chemical engineering and computer science to biology and medicine. Their innovative approaches include comprehensive programs and enrichment activities for K-12 students to initiatives aimed at reaching a continuum of students from early childhood through undergraduates, using such community resources as schools and churches.
Christine Grant, currently at North Carolina State University, is one of only six tenured African-American women faculty members in chemical engineering nationwide. Her outreach activities serve students from K-12 through graduate education. She includes students in her research agenda, and she gives additional attention to mentoring junior faculty. She has built an array of activities that seek to stop leaks in the academic pipeline for women and students from traditionally under-represented groups and teaches students how to work within the system.
Calvin Mackie, currently at Tulane University, is a tenured associate professor of mechanical engineering. His mentoring and outreach activities extend to pre-college, undergraduate, and graduate populations. Active in the community, speaking to large audiences and to schools, Mackie is authentic, humorous and has a high-energy, charismatic style in communicating science. He also develops video and other visual materials. His skill in using a unique cultural framework in his mentoring has effectively motivated students from diverse backgrounds to succeed.
Also recognized during the noon ceremony at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building were: Chellu S. Chetty, professor of biology, Savannah State University; Denice D. Denton, dean of engineering, University of Washington; Linda Bailey Hayden, professor of computer science, Elizabeth City State University; Rudolf E. Henning, professor of electrical engineering, University of South Florida; Ellis Ingram, University of Missouri-Columbia; Lisa Pruitt, professor of biomedical engineering, University of California-Berkeley, and; Margaret Werner-Washburne, professor of biology, University of New Mexico.
The institutional awards recognize organizations that have developed mentoring approaches that encourage improved achievement, keeping young students in the "pipeline" of science, engineering and mathematics education, and creating peer mentoring programs.
The institutional honors went to: American Physiological Society; Center for the Advancement of Hispanics in Science & Engineering Education; Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research, Computing Research Association (CRA-W); CONNECT, University of California at Riverside; Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's "Increasing Ph.D.s for Underrepresented Minorities;" National Society of Black Engineers; Science and Technology Programs, New York State Department of Education, and; Women in Engineering Program (WEP), Pennsylvania State University.
Collectively, the 2003 awards recognize exemplary mentoring programs nationwide, from New York to Florida, and westward from Pennsylvania to California. Four of the eight institutional awards were to organizations in or around Washington, D.C.
For more information on the presidential mentoring awards program, see: http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/HRD/paesmem.asp
]]>The author of over 100 articles and books, DeMillo's research has spanned several fundamental areas of computer science and includes innovation in computer security, software engineering and mathematics. His present research interests focus on information security and nanotechnology, and he is active in many aspects of the IT industry. DeMillo serves on several technology company advisory boards and panels, and he also serves on the board of directors for RSA Security.
"This is a well deserved recognition,” says Dr. Alan Leshner, Chief Executive Officer of AAAS and Executive Publisher of the journal Science. The rank of fellow is the highest awarded by the AAAS, bestowed upon a small fraction of members by their peers, because of their efforts to advance science or foster applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874. DeMillo will be presented with an official certificate and a gold and blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin on Saturday, February 19 at the 2005 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
The Georgia Tech College of Computing houses one of the largest computer science programs in the country and provides high quality instruction that integrates computing knowledge into other academic disciplines, as well as aspects of daily life. The College of Computing is ranked 9th overall at the doctoral level, and houses several interdisciplinary research centers including the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC), the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center (GVU), Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS), and the Modeling & Simulation Research and Education Center (MSREC).
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was founded in 1848, and serves some 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. As publisher of the journal, Science (www.sciencemag.org), AAAS has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of one million. The non-profit AAAS (www.aaas.org) is open to all and fulfills its mission to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy; international programs; science education; and more. For the latest research news, log onto www.eurekalert.org, the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS.
]]>Khot earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2003 under his advisor Professor Sanjeev Arora. He stayed at Princeton for another year as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study before joining the Theory Group at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing.
FOCS is a premier theory conference, and is considered one of the most important venues for presenting new results in theoretical computer sciences. The annual FOCS conference is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and is organized by what is now called the IEEE Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (TC-MFCS). FOCS began in 1960 as a "Symposium on Switching Circuit Theory and Logic Design" (SCT&LD), changed its name in 1966 to the "Symposium on Switching and Automata Theory" (SWAT), and assumed its current name in 1975.
The FOCS program committee may choose up to three papers as Best Papers each year. The main criterion for giving the award is: introduction of a strong new technique, solution of a long-standing open problem, introduction and solution of an interesting and important new problem. The program committee must also have substantial confidence in the accuracy of the paper. Each author on each of the selected Best Papers receives a certificate or plaque with the name of the award, the name of the paper, and the names of the authors of the paper. The other Best Paper Award at FOCS 2004 was “Cryptography in NC^0” by authors Benny Applebaum, Yuval Ishai, and Eyal Kushilevitz.
The Georgia Tech College of Computing houses one of the largest computer science programs in the country and provides high quality instruction that integrates computing knowledge into other academic disciplines, as well as aspects of daily life. The College of Computing is ranked 9th overall at the doctoral level, and houses several interdisciplinary research centers including the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC), the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center (GVU), Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS), and the Modeling & Simulation Research and Education Center (MSREC).
]]>Over the next three months, regional competitions across the globe are expected to draw more than 3,000 teams from over 70 countries on 6 continents. Of these, 75 teams will compete at the World Finals, April 3-7, 2005, in Shanghai, China, hosted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The ACM-ICPC aims to develop the next generation of information technology talent, and to ensure that the computer sciences education pipeline remains full.
Georgia Tech sent three, three-man teams to the South Eastern Regionals, and placed 1st, 9th, and 21st out of 64 teams. The top Georgia Tech team included Charlie Reiss, Topraj Gurung, and Chris Sidi. The other six students representing Tech were: Justin Altman, Garry Boyer, James Robinson, Nick Clift, Will Rorabaugh, and Nirmal Thakker. Two months prior to the competition, Georgia Tech students dedicated their Sundays to seven-hour practices with volunteer coach David Van Brackle.
“This is the world's premier university competition in the computing sciences and engineering,” said Dr. Bill Poucher, ICPC Executive Director.” The world’s universities have partnered with IBM and ACM to offer the best and brightest students the opportunity to challenge themselves to achieve far beyond classroom expectations so that they can build the cutting edge technology of tomorrow.” The contest challenges students, working in three-person teams, to rely on their programming skills and creativity during a five-hour battle of logic, strategy, and mental endurance. Students solve complex problems using both traditional and new software development tools.
The Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets are grateful for the support of their corporate sponsors: Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HP), IBM, King Industrial Realty, ISX, and Vocalocity, as well as their ACM sponsors: Andrew Harp, Dan Colestock, and Harrison Caudill.
Founded in 1947, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) promotes and increases knowledge of science, design, development, construction, languages and applications of modern computing. The ACM is the society for computing professionals. The Georgia Tech Student Chapter (GTACM) is the primary student organization for computer science majors. Activities include organized corporate and faculty presentations and other events, which benefit both undergraduate and graduate students. GTACM also provides an avenue for students to develop corporate leadership skills.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a major force in advancing the skills of information technology professionals and students. ACM serves its global membership of 75,000 by delivering cutting edge technical information and transferring ideas from theory to practice. ACM hosts the computing industry's leading Portal to Computing Literature. With its journals and magazines, special interest groups, conferences, workshops, electronic forums and Career Resource Centre, ACM is a primary resource to the information technology field. For more information, see <a xhref="http://www.acm.org">www.acm.org</a>.
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