Alexander Memorial Coliseum at McDonald's Center
Admission is only $1.00! (FREE ADMISSION with Buzz Card).

This game will be televised on ESPN2. Show your support of Georgia Tech as the ISyE family comes together to support GT Women's Basketball.

Astronaut Mike Massimino, former ISyE faculty member, was scheduled to appear at this game as an Honorary Coach. Due to the recent tragedy of the Space Shuttle Columbia, Mike had to postpone his appearance until next season. In recognition of Mike and the entire NASA family, a moment of silence will be observed in memory of the seven STS-107 crewmembers: Mission Specialist David Brown, Commander Rick Husband, Mission Specialists Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla and Michael Anderson, Pilot William McCool and Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon.

While returning from orbit on Feb. 1, 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia and all seven STS-107 crewmembers were lost over north central Texas. Columbia was returning from a 16-day scientific research mission.

Vito is a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Tech and Sainfort is a professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

In making the announcement Giddens said "Drs. Vito and Sainfort will each be one-half time in the Dean's Office and will devote one-half time to research, teaching and other academic duties in their respective schools."

Giddens cited a need for the College of Engineering to take a more active leadership role in engineering education, faculty career development and the pursuit of interdisciplinary research.

He said he believes these appointments are the beginning of that effort.

Read the full story at the TECHNIQUE.

Ammons, an IIE member for 28 years, is recognized for her "significant and sustained technical and service contributions to the field of industrial engineering," according to IIE officials. "Dr. Ammons has achieved outstanding accomplishments in manufacturing systems research, in engineering education scholarship, in service to IIE, and in service to interdisciplinary activities as an ambassador for the industrial engineering field."

She joins several current and emeriti ISyE faculty who have been honored with IIE Fellow distinction, including:

Robert Lehrer (1963), James Apple (1968), Harold Smalley (1968), Cecil Johnson (1980), Gerald Thuesen (1987), Michael Thomas (1988), Jack Lohmann (1996), Leon McGinnis (1996), Don Ratliff (1996), John Jarvis (1997), Justin Myrick (2000), Donovan Young (2000), Jerry Banks (2002)

To learn more about the American Statistical Association, please visit their website at http://www.amstat.org.

A world-renowned statistician, Wu received the prestigious COPSS (Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies) Presidents Award in 1987. This award, commissioned by five statistical societies, is given to the best researcher under the age of 40. He is also an elected member of Academia Sinica and a Fellow of the American Society of Quality, the Institute for Mathematical Statistics, and the American Statistical Association. He has won numerous awards, including the 1990 Wilcoxin Prize for the best practical application paper in Technometrics; the Brumbaugh Award for the single most important paper to quality control among publications sponsored by the American Society for Quality Control; and the 1997 Jack Youden Prize for the best review paper in Technometrics. He was the 1998 P.C. Mahalanobis Memorial Lecturer at the Indian Statistical Institutes.

His research work is widely cited, and is listed as "ISI Highly Cited Researcher" in 2003 on www.isihighlycited.com. He is also well cited in professional journals and magazines, including a feature article about his work in Canadian Business and a special issue of Newsweek on quality. He has served as editor or associate editor for several prestigious journals, such as Annals of Statistics, Journal of American Statistical Association, Technometrics, and Statistica Sinica. Wu has published more than 100 research articles in peer review journals. He has supervised 29 Ph.D.s; 14 of these are now working in major research departments in statistics/engineering/business in the U.S. and Canada, and two are senior vice presidents at major U.S. companies. He also co-authored, with Mike Hamada, the award winning book Experiments: Planning, Analysis, and Parameter Design Optimization (Wiley, 2000).

Wu is excited about joining the ISyE faculty. "One of my lifetime goals is to develop an industrial statistics program that will become a new paradigm and role model in the engineering college," he says. "During my first visit to ISyE in February of 2002, I was immediately impressed and convinced that this would be the place for me to carry out this vision. With their resources, reputation, and innovative outlook, Georgia Tech and ISyE provide an ideal environment to develop a world-class program in engineering statistics and quality engineering."

Wu earned his bachelor's in Mathematics from National Taiwan University and his doctorate in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley.

The report, called "Securing the Future of U.S. Air Transportation: A System in Peril," was released in September and looks at a broad range of problems in the aviation industry, from safety and security, to the capacity of the air transportation system, to consumer satisfaction.

Amy Pritchett, an associate professor who holds dual appointments in Georgia Tech's schools of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Aerospace Engineering, was a member of the report committee. The group was charged with helping to plan the nation's aviation strategy for the next 50 years.

"While the European Union, China and India all have ambitious aerospace agendas, the United States is falling behind, without a clear, long-term plan and without a broad base of basic research to support long-term innovation," Pritchett said in an interview this week. "While air transportation is a vital part of our growing economy, the capacity of our air traffic control system is reaching fundamental limits to growth. These limits can't be solved by technology alone, and there is no one 'silver bullet' solution."

Instead, Pritchett said she believes the nation needs to change the underlying operational concepts, economic structures, and role of humans and machines used in air transportation, while maintaining a safety level unique to aviation.

The report committee concluded that the government should institute a focused national leadership for aviation, guided by a strategic vision that will enable the airline industry to meet increased travel demand in the future.

"While capacity may not seem to be a pressing issue today, as recently as the summer of 2001 extremely high demand for travel caused record delays at airports and dramatically lowered customer satisfaction," said David Woods, a member of the report committee and a professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at Ohio State.

He continued: "As painful as the present economic situation is for the industry, the current travel slump provides breathing room to step back and coordinate changes across the different parts of the industry and government * before demand for air travel increases again."

The report illustrated the need for strategic coordination among the airlines, as well as all the other stakeholders in air transportation.

Such strategic coordination will require new technology * specifically, computer networks that coordinate decisions among the stakeholders. One of Pritchett and Woods' areas of expertise * how people interact with computers to make decisions in high-risk environments * will be critical in carrying out the committee's recommendations.

Pritchett said: "Making the system function as an efficient whole is a complex issue * especially when decisions will impact many different airlines and customers in ways that they may not have chosen for themselves. We cannot do this without computers * but we can't automate it completely either. Instead, we need to develop collaborative, human-interactive technologies that enable operating concepts that we haven't even conceived of yet."

Woods said computer systems will have to be designed so that airline employees can monitor what is happening in the entire United States air travel system and accurately project the consequences of certain actions.

"As daunting a task as that sounds, he said, "such a system is necessary for the airlines to make appropriate decisions that affect safety and performance." Woods offered an example. "Say weather in one area begins to delay a few flights. If I'm in charge of dispatching for an airline, I can make certain changes that will help my aircraft minimize delays and schedule disruptions. But what helps me could create bottlenecks for other aspects of the overall system."

To make good decisions, he said, dispatchers must be able to see the big picture, such as what is happening at the other airlines. The system must then be able to adapt to maintain capacity.

The National Research Council is part of the National Academies, which also comprise the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine. They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology and health policy advice under a congressional charter.

Pritchett and Woods' colleagues on the Council committee included researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Texas A&M University System, as well as members of the military and aviation industry: Durango Aerospace Inc., Lockheed Martin Air Traffic Management, Flight Safety Technologies Inc., GE Aircraft Engines, United States Air Force, Rolls Royce North America, Airports Council International-North America, The Boeing Co. Phantom Works, RJR Aviation LLC, Aviation Planning and Finance, and RAND Corp.

With nearly 25 years of experience diagnosing the factors behind human error, Woods has won awards for improving the safety of automated cockpits. He recently advised the Columbia Accident Investigation Board on its efforts to diagnose the contributors to the Shuttle disaster.

Augustine Esogbue is a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and director of the Intelligent Systems & Controls Laboratory.

The new panel — announced Tuesday in an effort to provide stronger, more focused oversight on safety assessment — is expected to play an important role in the ongoing safety assessment and review of the Space Shuttle program as it prepares to return to flight.

Esogbue, who also serves at the director of the Intelligent Systems & Controls Laboratory at Georgia Tech, is one of only two members selected to the panel who hold academic appointments. The rest were selected from the military and private industry. The panel was chartered by Congress in 1967, after the tragic fire aboard Apollo 1, to act as an independent body advising NASA on the safety of operations, facilities, and personnel.

"The Columbia Accident Investigation Board report clearly indicated we need to get back to basics with our safety assessment," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said in a written statement. "By recommitting ourselves to the original concept for the ASAP, we believe a stronger, more focused advisory panel will benefit the entire agency well beyond our Return to Flight efforts."

In naming the members, NASA also announced the new panel will begin with a new charter — the original charter from 1967, signed by then-NASA Administrator James E. Webb. According to NASA, the new provisions help assure an independent, long-term oversight of the agency's safety policies and programs. Some of the revisions include:

— The new ASAP will report quarterly instead of annually;
— The term for new members is two years, extendable to a maximum of six years in order to stagger terms of service and ensure a fresh perspective at regular intervals;
— The new ASAP focuses on NASA's safety and quality systems. ASAP will focus on industrial and systems safety, risk management, trend analysis and the management of these activities.

The new panel will have the opportunity to develop its agenda in concert with the oversight findings of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, according to NASA.

"By drawing on and asking the technical support of the NASA Engineering and Safety Center, the panel will have a deep capacity to conduct comprehensive, independent, external oversight of our safety systems, operations and culture," O'Keefe said. "We welcome the members' active participation in our efforts to emerge from the Columbia tragedy a smarter, stronger and safer agency dedicated to exploration."

Esogbue has been a professor at Georgia Tech since 1972. In 1976, he founded Georgia Tech's chapter of NSBE - the National Society of Black Engineers and currently serves as the chapter's faculty advisor. His research interests include dynamic programming, fuzzy sets, decision making and control in a fuzzy environment, and operations research with applications to socio-technical systems such as health care, water resource management and disaster control planning.

As director of the Intelligent Systems and Controls Laboratory, he is currently investigating a hybrid approach to intelligent control via fuzzy sets, neural networks, and reinforcement learning theories, as well as its application to various large-scale, nonlinear and uncertain dynamical systems.

Here is a list of the new panel members:

Rear Admiral Walt Cantrell, USN (Ret)
Former Commander, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command
Member, NASA Stafford-Covey Return to Flight Task Group
Former NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel member

Vice Admiral Joe Dyer, USN (Ret)
Former Commander, Naval Air Systems Command
General Manager, Military Systems Division, iRobot Corporation

Augustine Esogbue, Ph.D.
Professor and Director, Intelligent Systems & Controls Laboratory,
School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Tech
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science

Major General Rusty Gideon, USAF (Ret)
Former Commander, U.S. Air Force Safety Center, and USAF Chief of
Safety
Former Director of Operations, Headquarters Air Force Materiel Command
Former Commander, Foreign Aerospace Science and Technology Center

Deborah Grubbe
DuPont Corporate Director &#8212 Safety and Health
Member, National Academy of Sciences
Former consultant, Columbia Accident Investigation Board

Rosemary O'Leary, J.D., Ph.D.
Professor of Public Administration and Political Science, Maxwell School
of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, New York
Member, NASA Stafford-Covey Return to Flight Task Group

John Marshall
Delta Airlines, Vice President Corporate Safety and Compliance, Atlanta
Co-chair, Commercial Aviation Safety Team
Board member, National Defense Transportation Association

Steve Wallace
Director, Office of Accident Investigation, Federal Aviation Administration
FAA representative to National Transportation Safety Board
Former Columbia Accident Investigation Board member

Rick Williams
Corporate Safety Director, Alcoa, New York
Former Director, Human Resources, Alcoa Primary Metals, Knoxville,
Tenn.

Brigadier General Joseph Smith, USA — Ex-Officio Member
Director, U.S. Army Safety Center, Fort Rucker, Ala.

Redistributed from Georgia Tech's Institute Communications and Public Affairs.