Those statistics have spurred three state agencies to launch a new outreach effort that utilizes a Web-based business analysis program to help them allocate state resources toward growth opportunities - and address issues that could signal future challenges. The Business InSight program - a partnership between Georgia Tech's Economic Development Institute (EDI), the Georgia Department of Technical and Adult Education (DTAE) and the Georgia Department of Industry, Trade and Tourism (GDITT) - will provide assistance to the state's manufacturers.

"Existing industries create most of the new jobs in our economy, so ensuring their success is crucial," says Glenn Cornell, GDITT commissioner. "The Business InSight partnership allows us to maximize state resources to assure that these businesses remain viable and competitive, and provide jobs for Georgians well into the future."

The partners will initiate efforts with a pilot program in the coastal region that will target approximately 20 companies to identify industry trends, needs and opportunities. Using existing offices in Brunswick and Savannah, the partners will visit with and listen to senior executives on issues related to the market, industry, workforce and product or service of the company.

"This initiative to proactively identify how best to support these vital industries is one of the most exciting projects we've been involved with," says Jackie Rohosky, DTAE's assistant commissioner for economic development programs. "I anticipate that Business InSight could become one of the key applications that help us take workforce and economic development in Georgia into the 21st century."

Though the job losses at affected facilities usually make the largest headlines, the impact on communities goes deeper. For example, in the coastal Georgia region, a typical 100-employee chemical manufacturer translates to $34.6 million in generated revenues and $6.6 million in employee compensation. In other words, the state can't afford to lose such manufacturers.

EDI Director Rick Duke stresses the need to move quickly. "As a coordinated team of state service delivery organizations, we want to approach those key companies and offer to assess where they are now and assist them with strategies and implementation that will make them as competitive as they can be," he says. "Let's not wait until it's too late."

Overall, increased earnings of the 90,000 University System graduates analyzed in the study added $1.25 billion to the state's economy during 1998 - the most recent year for which information was available. These University System graduates had widespread impact on the state, bringing at least a million dollars a year in additional economic impact to more than half of Georgia's 159 counties.

"The economic value of college graduates is so massive, so widespread and so long-lasting that we tend to take it for granted," said Bill Drummond, a professor in Georgia Tech's City and Regional Planning Program and principal investigator for the study. "It is one of the huge, but hidden, drivers of Georgia's rapid economic growth, which is the envy of most other states in the country."

The researchers studied University System students who graduated between 1993 and 1997. Commissioned by the University System's Intellectual Capital Partnership Program (ICAPP), the study relies on an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, combined with Georgia Department of Labor information.

Additional annual earning power attributed to a college degree ranged from $5,706 for graduates of a two-year college up to $19,362 for graduates of the Medical College of Georgia. Other institutions at the top of the ranking for helping graduates increase their annual earnings included the Georgia Institute of Technology ($18,621), Georgia State University ($18,513), Southern Polytechnic State University ($17,034), the State University of West Georgia ($15,860) and the University of Georgia ($14,682).

In total economic impact, Georgia State University led the state with $217.8 million in total educational value for its 11,767 graduates, who had an average wage of $42,465 in 1998. The University of Georgia's 14,383 graduates produced an educational value of $211.1 million and had an average wage of $36,018.

Georgia Tech led University System units in the average annual wages of its recent graduates -- $46,535 - though the smaller number of graduates studied (5,472) contributed a smaller total educational value: $101.9 million.

"Georgia benefits from the University System in many ways, including the production of an educated labor force, the generation of new knowledge through research, the creation and expansion of businesses, and - perhaps most important in a democracy - the development of educated and responsible citizens," Drummond said. "But this study has shown that one factor alone, the direct economic impact of University System graduates, more than justifies Georgia's investment in higher education."

University System Chancellor Thomas C. Meredith said: "As our funding partners struggle with grave budget issues, I would encourage them not to harm this generator of economic growth. Georgia so far has resisted the trend we see in many states to reduce substantially the state's investment in higher education. Our economy has benefited from that decision, and as this study has shown, those benefits will continue to increase in the decades to come."

The Georgia Tech study adapted analysis techniques used by the U.S. Census Bureau in its 2002 report, "The Big Payoff," which examined the benefits of college education on a national basis.

"Traditionally, the impact of the University System has been calculated on expenditure data," noted Jan Youtie, a researcher in Georgia Tech's Economic Development Institute (EDI) and Drummond's collaborator on the study. "But universities are not in the business of spending money. They are in the business of educating people. So the methodology we used is uniquely appropriate to measure the value of education."

"Bringing these activities together will enhance the ability of Georgia Tech and its faculty to partner with industry, move new technologies into the marketplace, form new ventures from research innovations and help advance Georgia's economy. I'm pleased to have Wayne Hodges leading this important effort," said Jean-Lou Chameau, Georgia Tech's provost.

For more than a decade, Georgia Tech has been ranked among the top five U.S. universities for the volume of industrially-sponsored research, and during 2002 the Institute's technology licensing program received a record 40 patents. Georgia Tech's technology incubator, the Advanced Technology Development Center, is considered the premier university-based program of its kind in the world. And a recent Southern Growth Policies Board study ranked Georgia Tech as the top U.S. university for supporting economic development.

To maintain that leadership, Georgia Tech must continue making improvements, noted Charles Liotta, vice-provost for research and dean of graduate studies.

"We want to define the research university of the 21st century," Liotta said. "A university today must interact with the society in which it exists to transfer research results for the betterment of society. This new structure will facilitate doing that."

The new organization will also provide new opportunities for faculty and students to work with the business community, Hodges said.

"By bringing together formerly separate units, the new organization will provide a clear pathway for faculty and students who wish to commercialize technology they have developed - while providing easy access to Georgia Tech for industrial clients and others in the business community," he explained. "There will be no divisions between the organizations involved."

For Georgia Tech researchers, the consolidation will mean a more seamless integration of the technology evaluation, patenting, marketing and licensing process, said Jilda Garton, general manager of the Georgia Tech Research Corporation (GTRC), which holds Georgia Tech's intellectual property. "Through its interaction with industry, the new organization will more effectively bring together research ideas that are developed in Georgia Tech labs and the research ideas that interest industry," she said.

The restructuring had been recommended by outside organizations, including the Washington Advisory Group, which studied Georgia Tech's commercialization activities last year. While the group praised the Institute's accomplishments, it recommended bringing units with complementary missions together to improve communication and collaboration.

Hodges, who served as associate vice-president before the restructuring, has more than 30 years of economic development experience. He was part of the team that founded the Advanced Technology Development Center -- Georgia Tech's technology incubator - and in 1993 consolidated Georgia Tech's economic development resources into the Economic Development Institute (EDI). He has also served as deputy commissioner of the Georgia Department of Industry, Trade and Tourism.

To facilitate collaboration with EDTV in evaluating and marketing technology, George Harker - who directs the Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) - will take on additional responsibilities as assistant vice-provost for technology commercialization in Hodges' organization. He will work with the staff of EDTV's VentureLab to evaluate and market technology developed in Georgia Tech's $300 million-per-year research program.

"In addition to displacement, resurgent gentrification also raises issues about changes in political power - at both the neighborhood level and throughout the city," said Larry Keating, professor of city and regional planning at Georgia Tech's College of Architecture. Keating presented a paper, "Resurgent Gentrification: Politics and Policy in Atlanta," at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting held Aug. 16-19 in Atlanta.

Keating uses the term "resurgent gentrification" to contrast current restoration with the slower-paced gentrification that occurred from 1965 to 1990. Resurgent gentrification in Atlanta has six key characteristics:

• More extensive. Compared to three or four neighborhoods that were gentrifying at any one time in the past, Keating counts eight or more Atlanta neighborhoods now in transition, including Mechanicsville, Edgewood, Summerhill, Cabbagetown, Reynoldstown, Pittsburgh and Capitol View. In addition, a greater number of housing units are affected.

• Less dependent on unique architecture. Past gentrification was largely driven by historic-preservation efforts. Today's gentrification is more about location - people want to be closer to city amenities and avoid long commutes and traffic congestion. That means proximity is influencing their real-estate purchases more than architectural style.

• Reversed racial transition. Today whites are moving into black neighborhoods whereas 20 years ago, the term "racial transition" referred to blacks moving into white neighborhoods, Keating said.

• Greater volatility. In previous decades, gentrifiers were typically middle- and upper-class whites moving into white working-class neighborhoods. With the new racial component -- whites moving into black neighborhoods -- combined with socioeconomic differences, resurgent gentrification sparks more conflict.

• State-sponsored gentrification is more prevalent -- and a greater threat to poor communities. Today public subsidies, such as federal block grants, are funding projects that often result in homes priced in the $200,000-$300,000 range rather than affordable housing. In past seven years, the Atlanta Housing Authority has taken down approximately 5,000 affordable housing units that haven't been replaced, Keating said.

• Population shifts affect racial composition of the electorate. From 1990 to 2000, the black population in the city of Atlanta dropped from 67.1 percent to 62.1 percent while the white population increased from 31 percent to 34 percent. Although small, these population changes remain significant because they cause political power to shift in some districts. Conversely, during earlier waves of gentrification, blacks were still moving into Atlanta, so gentrification had less of an effect on politics.

Three of the most serious repercussions of resurgent gentrification are: loss of affordable housing, displacement of poor residents and the destruction of indigenous sociological communities. "Although the resulting challenges of resurgent gentrification are similar to those of previous decades, what has changed is the magnitude of the problem," Keating said. "In the long run, more poor people lose."

Aquarius is a one-of-a-kind underwater ocean laboratory deployed three and half miles offshore, at a depth of 60 feet, next to spectacular coral reefs. Scientists live in Aquarius during 10-day missions using saturation diving to study and explore the coastal ocean. Aquarius is owned by NOAA and is operated by the National Undersea Research Center (NURC) at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW).

During each Aquarius mission, anyone with Internet access can watch live web cameras, read expedition journals from the scientists aboard, view project summaries and pictures, and much more at the NURC/UNCW Aquarius Web site: (www.uncw.edu/aquarius/).

Hay, who is leading this Aquarius mission, is an experimental ecologist. He uses field and laboratory experimentation to assess how consumer-prey interactions, competition and physical stresses interact to determine community structure and ecosystem function in temperate versus tropical oceans, and in marine versus freshwater systems.

In related work, the Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have also learned to use weak attractive forces between the soft spheres to produce uniform crystalline structures with particle concentrations much lower than possible with hard spheres. The developments were described September 10th at the 226th national meeting of the American Chemical Society in New York.

In April 2002, a research team led by Andrew Lyon, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, announced it had developed a family of hydrogel-based nanoparticles that could be used to create photonic crystals whose optical properties could be tuned by thermally adjusting the water content of the particles.

The soft, conformable spherical particles provided a unique system for producing self-assembled periodic structures that could be tuned to transmit specific wavelengths of light. Applications were expected in optical switching and optical limiting.

The work discussed at the ACS meeting moves the nanoparticles closer to practical application by providing a way to form complex patterns in the crystalline structures. The patterns could be useful as optical waveguides or lenses.

"This represents a fundamentally new method for patterning self-assembled photonic materials," Lyon said. "By combining a photo-patterning method with a self-assembly technique, we can rapidly make large volumes of very nice optical materials. This provides the best of both worlds - a good optical material that is easy to prepare, combined with a process that allows us to tell the material what kind of overall structure it should have."

Lyon's group creates the pattern with a frequency-doubled Nd:YAG laser whose beam applies specific amounts of heat to the poly-N-isopropylacrylamide nanoparticles, which average 224 nanometer in diameter. To produce the smallest possible features, the researchers include tiny gold nanoparticles with the hydrogels; the gold converts the laser light to heat, allowing precise thermal control.

The heat prompts phase transitions, causing the particles to shrink or swell depending on the temperature. That changes the crystalline structure.

"The gold particles allow us to use a very narrowly-focused laser beam to locally heat the material," Lyon said. "We can have a very sharp temperature gradient between the center of the laser spot and the surroundings. Everything outside of the laser spot experiences mostly ambient conditions and stays crystallized. Everything inside the laser spot goes through a melting phase. Then, the effective cooling rate is very rapid as the laser moves away, trapping the material as an optically transparent, non-diffractive glassy material."

The patterning could be used to create optical waveguides or microlenses.

"This organism might be useful for cleaning contaminated subsurface environments and restoring drinking-water reservoirs," Georgia Institute of Technology researchers report in the July 3, 2003 issue of the journal Nature.

The paper, titled "Detoxification of vinyl chloride to ethene coupled to growth of an anaerobic bacterium" is the culmination of five years of field and laboratory studies funded by the National Science Foundation and the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program.

Scientists and engineers have struggled for years with clean up of groundwater and subsurface environments contaminated decades ago by unregulated use of the common solvents tetrachloroethene (PCE) and trichloroethene (TCE). These toxic compounds are primarily used in dry cleaning operations and degreasing of metal components. Complicating the situation are natural biotic and abiotic processes that transform these solvents to intermediate substances, such as toxic dichloroethenes, and cancer-causing agents, such as vinyl chloride.

But in a step toward engineering better bioremediation strategies, Georgia Tech researchers have isolated a naturally occurring bacterium, designated Dehalococcoides strain BAV1, in a pure culture - without other microbial species present in the sample. Though some progress was made in the past decade in understanding the bacteria involved in partial degradation of PCE and TCE, this study represents a significant advance, researchers said.

"Isolating this bacterium will allow us to study the organism and the dechlorination process in more detail," said lead researcher Frank Loeffler, an assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "We can get a lot more information that we can then use to engineer systems in the environment so PCE and TCE degradation would not stop at the toxic intermediate stage, but rather would continue to be dechlorinated to a non-toxic end product, such as ethene."

One site that appears likely to benefit from in-place bioremediation with this bacterium is the Bachman Road residential area contaminated with PCE by a former dry cleaning operation in Oscoda, Mich. There, researchers recently used BAV1 in a successful pilot demonstration, which they briefly reference in the Nature paper. Loeffler and his colleagues described the results of the pilot study in greater detail in a paper published in February 2003 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

At this contaminated site, PCE penetrated the water table and contaminated drinking-water wells in the area. The contaminants also migrated through the groundwater into nearby Lake Huron.

"We've opened up the potential use of microneedles for delivering a broad range of therapeutics," said Mark Prausnitz, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and principal investigator for the project. "Fabricating both hollow and solid microneedles in a variety of shapes, sizes and materials allows us to deliver large molecules with significant therapeutic interest such as insulin, proteins produced by the biotechnology industry, and nanoparticles that could encapsulate a drug or demonstrate the ability to deliver a virus for vaccinations."

Georgia Tech's development of microneedles began in the late 1990s with microfabrication of solid needles made from silicon, using microlithography and etching technologies originally developed for the microelectronics industry. The researchers produced arrays of up to 400 needles designed to punch holes in the outer layer of skin to increase its permeability to small molecules applied with patches.

That work has broadened to include both solid and hollow microneedles in a broad range of shapes with feature sizes from one to 1,000 microns. Prausnitz and his research team have fabricated microneedle arrays from metal and polymer materials that have sufficient strength to reliably penetrate the skin without breakage.

Moving beyond the original - and complex - microelectronics-based fabrication techniques, the researchers have developed multiple manufacturing processes suitable for the mass production of microneedles from inexpensive metal and polymer materials. By making molds of their silicon needles, for instance, the research team has produced arrays of identical metal or polymer microneedles using a modified form of injection molding that can readily be adapted to industrial mass production.

Molds were also made without the need for creating silicon needles to use as masters. Metal microneedles were produced through electrodeposition onto laser-drilled polymer molds, while glass microneedle masters were fabricated using conventional drawn-glass micropipette techniques.

The broad range of sizes, shapes and materials will permit production of microneedle arrays customized for the type and volume of drug to be delivered, the time period of use, and most importantly, minimizing pain.

"There are trade offs between getting needles to go into the skin easily, getting drugs to deliver easily and making needles that don't hurt," Prausnitz said. "Not every application will need a different needle, but there will probably be classes of applications that will benefit from different needle designs."

The technique was reported in the September 15 issue of the journal Environmental Science and Technology. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan and the University of Oklahoma participated in the research, which was sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Great Lakes Mid-Atlantic Center for Hazardous Substance Research.

"We're trying to make remediation of contaminated groundwater more efficient, because it is now largely driven by economics," said Kurt Pennell, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "The idea is to make this process so efficient that the cost of cleaning up a site is less expensive than traditional approaches which rely on groundwater extraction and long-term monitoring."

The technique offers a new approach to removing dense nonaqueous phase liquids (DNAPLs), including tetrachloroethane (PCE), trichloroethene (TCE) and chlorobenzene (CB). Relatively stable chemicals that don't readily degrade, their concentrations in groundwater must be kept to a few parts-per-billion (ppb) to meet environmental standards.

"A single 55-gallon drum of one of the compounds can contaminate hundreds of thousands of gallons of groundwater," Pennell noted.

Established remediation techniques (pump and treat) often rely on pumping large amounts of contaminated water out of the ground, flushing the pollutants with it. However, these techniques require large volumes of water and may need to be operated for decades. The cost of treating the contaminated water and the time required make this approach very expensive -- and serves only to contain the contaminated groundwater.

The approach developed by the Georgia Tech team could allow remediation engineers to directly address pollution mass removal, with recovery rates exceeding 90 percent.

"Our approach is to aggressively treat the source zone where the actual spill occurred and remove the compound, then separate and treat or recycle it above ground," Pennell explained. "We are trying to remove the long-term source of groundwater contamination in a manner that will produce the most results for the least cost. It's generally not economically feasible to treat an entire aquifer."

One of Georgia Tech's most active outreach groups, EDI provides technology-driven solutions to help Georgia companies become more competitive and Georgia communities address economic growth issues. Last year EDI helped some 1,300 companies around the state with strategic-management and technical assistance issues. Since 2000 EDI has provided economic development assistance in 153 of Georgia's 159 counties.

"We're the type of organization that should have constituents and customers visiting us on a regular basis, however, our former location stifled us," Duke said, referring to EDI's old offices in the O'Keefe Building on the northeast side of campus. "There, we only have a couple of visitors a day," Duke said. "But in our new space, our goal is to have 100 visitors a day - about 25,000 a year."

At Technology Square, EDI will be next to the new Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center, making it easy for out-of-town visitors to reach EDI's offices. For example, the Georgia Economic Developers Association (GEDA) will hold its monthly meeting in the hotel this October - an event attracting more than 300 economic developers from around the state.

Besides being more accessible to the community, EDI's new headquarters puts it closer to key Georgia Tech partners:

* The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), Georgia Tech's incubator for technology startups - and EDI's sister organization. In August, ATDC will move its headquarters to Centergy One, a 12-story building on Fifth Street across the street from Technology Square.

* The Global Learning Center, a new university facility devoted to corporate meetings, training programs and other forms of continuing education. EDI hosts classes on a wide variety of topics, such as lean manufacturing, environmental management and international standards. In fact, EDI conducted more programs last year than any group on campus, was second in the number of program participants and third in revenues, according to statistics from Georgia Tech's Professional Education Group.

* The Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, part of the College of Architecture's City Planning Program, will be housed with EDI at Technology Square. "The center deals with sustainable growth and smart growth, which goes hand in hand with what we do," Duke said.

Atlanta-based CardioMEMS is using microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology to create a new generation of medical devices. The company's first products will enable doctors to more easily monitor heart patients with tiny, wireless sensors inside the human body.

The sensors operate without batteries: Radio waves activate the devices, which internally measure heart and blood pressure, then transfer the information to an external receiver.

"This represents a milestone in monitoring and safety," says David Stern, CEO of CardioMEMS. "Instead of having to go to the hospital for invasive surgical tests or expensive CT scans, people can be monitored in their doctor's office - or even their own homes. This will significantly lower costs, provide more information for doctors and make life a lot easier for patients."

MEMS technology, which originated in the late '80s in the integrated-circuit industry, allows engineers to build electrical and mechanical devices at the micron scale (one millionth of a meter).

CardioMEMS co-founders Dr. Jay Yadav and Mark Allen met in 2000 when Yadav, a cardiologist and director of peripheral and carotid intervention at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, was exploring ways to use MEMS technology for healthcare innovations. Allen, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech, had already been working with MEMS to measure pressure inside turbine engines.

Allen's microsensors were designed specifically for military drone aircraft, however, he and Yadav believed that they could adapt the technology to monitor heart and blood pressure in people.

"Although the human body is nothing like a jet engine, they both create a very hostile environment for devices like ours," Stern explains. "It's difficult to gain internal access to the body, and it doesn't welcome foreign materials. Implantable devices must be both biocompatible and durable because you can't go back and make modifications or replace a battery."

In early 2001, CardioMEMS raised $2.5 million in seed capital and licensed key patents from Georgia Tech related to Allen's research. Although Allen had already worked out the engineering process, the researchers needed to develop new materials that the human body would accept and be stable enough for long-term implantation. CardioMEMS is initially developing two products with its wireless pressure-sensing technology:

* The heart sensor measures intra-cardiac pressure in patients with congestive heart failure, a condition in which the heart is not pumping properly due to clogged arteries, high blood pressure or other medical conditions.

* The AAA sensor measures blood pressure in people who have been treated for an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which is a weakening in the lower aorta that can cause it to expand and rupture.

CardioMEMS microsensors will be implanted using a minor surgical procedure. Once these sensors are in place, doctors can regularly audit their patients and collect information that can't be obtained in an isolated test, making it easier to spot trends and changes in patients' condition.

"Our sensors serve as an early-warning system," Stern says. What's more, the AAA sensor provides richer information than current tests, he adds, explaining that CT scanners only reveal the size of an abdominal aortic aneurysm - not pressure, which can be a more reliable indicator of whether a stent graft (used to treat an abdominal aortic aneurysm) is functioning properly.

Nearly 5 million people in the United States have congestive heart disease, which makes the market for the heart sensor significant. Although the market for the AAA sensor is smaller - currently about 50,000 stent-graft procedures are done each year to repair abdominal aortic aneurysms - it remains an attractive niche because CardioMEMS faces less competition.

Carnahan is an employee of the ATDC, one of the nation's oldest and most successful incubators for technology companies. As a member of ATDC's staff, he will make the resources of the nationally-recognized incubator available to help Columbus-area entrepreneurs launch and build successful technology companies.

"By leveraging the 'tried-and-true' methods of one of the nation's leading high-tech incubators - the ATDC - our chances of success have been greatly enhanced," Carnahan said. "Through the center, Columbus area start-ups will have access to the ATDC's practical business advice, credibility in the financing community and connections to the people and resources young companies need to be successful."

The Columbus initiative grew out of a partnership between the Georgia Department of Industry, Trade and Tourism (GDITT); the Greater Columbus Chamber of Commerce; Columbus State University and Georgia Tech's ATDC. It is part of the state's "Greater Georgia" initiative aimed at developing innovation centers in mid-sized cities where potential has been identified for technology development.

"Columbus already has a strong base of banking, investment, transaction processing and insurance companies that with the Army's presence, provides a foundation for the growth of technology-based companies," said Jeff Strane, director of GDITT's Office of Science & Technology. "This initiative will help develop a new part of the community's economic engine based on smaller, entrepreneurial companies."

The Columbus incubator program is the second for the Greater Georgia initiative. The first helped create a program in Savannah, also managed by ATDC. Launched a year ago, the Savannah initiative already has an innovative electronics company whose product has attracted news coverage in The New York Times.

Carnahan's initial responsibilities will be to oversee completion of the Columbus Regional Technology Center's building, which is scheduled to begin construction on the campus of Columbus State University by August 1. He will also develop a marketing plan, establish a technology association, organize an advisory board, and work with ATDC's Atlanta-based staff of "venture catalysts" on prospective companies.

The fresh-baked buns are scanned by a digital camera as they move along Flowers' production line. Items not measuring up in terms of color, shape, seed distribution, size or other criteria are identified by the computerized eye's imaging software and eventually removed automatically from the conveyor.

The system concept is under development by engineers from the Georgia Tech Research Institute's (GTRI) Food Processing Technology Division in association with researchers from Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and BakeTech, a baking equipment manufacturer in Tucker, Ga.

The project was made possible, in part, by funding from Georgia's Traditional Industries Program for Food Processing, a 10-year-old research and development program designed to improve the market competitiveness of Georgia's food processing industry -- the state's second-largest employer. The Food Processing Advisory Council (FoodPAC) oversees such state-funded research grants.

The computerized imaging system in development will automate the inspection process at Flowers. Ultimately, the new approach will save money and time by increasing yield and reducing waste, says Doug Britton, a GTRI research engineer and co-principal investigator for the project.

"It should reduce the time between noticing a problem and fixing it," Britton explains. Also, the system will automatically record data, such as product count and the number of out-of-spec buns, to generate production reports. "Flowers will have all this data immediately for doing statistical process control so they can implement changes that reduce the number of poor-quality buns," he adds. "They'll get a better handle on what they are producing."

"There is a lot of concern in the electronics industry about thermal management," said Raghav Mahalingam, a research engineer in Georgia Tech's School of Mechanical Engineering. "New processors are consuming more power, circuit densities are getting higher and there is pressure to reduce the size of devices. Unless there is a breakthrough in low-power systems, conventional fan-driven cooling will no longer be enough."

Processors, memory chips, graphics chips, batteries, radio frequency components and other devices in electronic equipment generate heat that must be dissipated to avoid damage. Traditional cooling techniques use metallic heat sinks to conduct thermal energy away from the devices, then transfer it to air being circulated by fans.

However, cooling fans have a number of limitations. For instance, much of the circulated air bypasses the heat sinks and does not mix well with the thermal boundary layer that forms on the fins. Fans placed directly over heat sinks have "dead areas" where their motor assemblies block air flow. And as designers boost air flow to increase cooling, fans use more energy, create more audible noise and take up more space.

Developed by Mahalingam and Glezer, synthetic jet ejector arrays (SynJets) are more efficient than fans, producing two to three times as much cooling with two-thirds less energy input.

Simple and with no friction parts to wear out, a synthetic jet module in principle resembles a tiny stereo speaker in which a diaphragm is mounted within a cavity that has one or more orifices. Electromagnetic or piezoelectric drivers cause the diaphragm to vibrate 100 to 200 times per second, sucking surrounding air into the cavity and then expelling it. The rapid cycling of air into and out of the module creates pulsating jets that can be directed to the precise locations where cooling is needed.

The jet cooling modules take up less space in cramped equipment housings, and can be flexibly conformed to components that need cooling - even mounted directly within the cooling fins of heat sinks. Arrays of jets would provide cooling matched to component needs, and the devices could even be switched on and off to meet changing thermal demands. Though the jets move 70 percent less air than fans of comparable size, the air flow they produce contains tiny vortices which make the flow turbulent, encouraging efficient mixing with ambient air and breaking up thermal boundary layers.

"You get a much higher heat transfer coefficient with synthetic jets, so you do away with the major cooling bottleneck seen in conventional systems," Mahalingam said.

The ability to scale the jet modules to suit specific applications and to integrate them into electronic equipment could provide cooling solutions over a broad range of electronic hardware ranging from desktop computers to personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones and other portable devices that are now too small or have too little power for active cooling.

The synthetic jets could be used by themselves, to supplement fans or even in conjunction with cooling liquid atomization. "We will fit in where there currently is no solution, or improve on an existing solution," said Jonathan Goldman, a commercialization catalyst with Georgia Tech's VentureLab, a program that helps faculty member commercialize the technology they develop.

Researchers want to mimic this process to improve DNA delivery for gene therapy and DNA-based vaccines, but they face many challenges in the laboratory where DNA in solution typically exists in an extended, rather than condensed state. Scientists have been able to cause DNA to condense into toroids by adding positively charged molecules to samples, but they have had difficulty finding the right molecules to achieve consistent, optimal toroid sizes of less than 50 nanometers.

However, scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology have made a significant advance in controlling the size of DNA toroids. In the July 18, 2003 online issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they report that reducing salt concentrations below normal laboratory solution levels shrinks both the diameter and thickness of DNA toroids. This finding resulted from a combined investigation of how static DNA loops and solution conditions might be used to control toroid dimensions.

"But even without static loops present, DNA produces smaller toroids if you reduce the salt concentration," said Nicholas Hud, an associate professor of biochemistry who is leading the study funded by the National Institutes of Health. "We found a systematic relationship between reducing salt and reducing toroid size. It is surprising that such a study was not previously done because salt concentration is such a fundamental parameter in studying molecules in solution, particularly such highly charged molecules as DNA."

Protocols for preparing DNA for delivery to cells often call for salt conditions that differ from those DNA encounters when injected into body tissues, Hud noted. "If you change the salt conditions during DNA delivery, it will change particle size and have a dramatic effect on the efficiency of gene delivery," he added. "This could explain why some researchers aren't getting as good a rate of transfection (the incorporation of DNA into a cell) as they should."

In the study reported in PNAS, Hud and his Ph.D. students Christine Conwell and Igor Vilfan also describe using the positively charged, inorganic molecule hexammine cobalt (III) to condense a DNA molecule containing a specially designed sequence. The synthetic sequence causes a region of the DNA molecule to bend into two loops of 25 nanometers each in diameter. In other words, these nanoscale loops were "programmed" into the DNA sequence.

The CMM rating puts the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) ELSYS laboratory among the top 20 percent of software development organizations in the world, said Jean Swank, Quality Assurance and Process Manager in ELSYS. Received June 25, the rating resulted from intensive efforts to document processes, develop standards and meet requirements in the CMM.

Developed and administered by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, the Software CMM has become the de facto standard for assessing and improving software processes.

The CMM process includes five increasingly more difficult levels, starting with Level One for organizations that have no defined software processes in place. Level Two processes include requirements and configuration management; project planning, tracking and oversight; software quality assurance and software subcontract management. Level Three focuses on training, organizational process definition and focus, inter-group coordination, integrated software management, peer review and software product engineering.

Though customer requirements led ELSYS to seek the rating, its process improvements have brought additional benefits to the lab, Swank said.

"The CMM helps us be more responsive to our customers, giving them more insight into what we are proposing to do and how we are proposing to do it," she explained. "It makes us more aware of risk reduction, and allows our managers to better understand the status of projects and what the real costs will be."

For instance, the requirement for peer review of a proposed software process during the planning stages helps reduce risks by identifying errors early. The focus on project management provides early warning of unexpected delays, allowing timely modification of a project's scope or schedule, Swank said.

ELSYS began working toward the Level 3 CMM compliance seven years ago. A relatively small organization compared to defense contractors such as Boeing or Lockheed Martin, the lab had to adapt processes to fit its unique needs. For instance, many projects involve just two or three people, imposing management and coordination issues that differ from projects involving dozens of people from different organizations.

"It has taken a lot of dedicated people and a lot of work, but it has been worth it for ELSYS," Swank said. "Our customers expected us to have this rating, and it will help us be more competitive in winning new contracts.

Receipt of the rating does not end the CMM process. ELSYS must now continue institutionalization of the processes and procedures developed during the past seven years and continue improvement efforts to address refinements for current processes and additions as appropriate. The lab has reviewed requirements and has had individuals trained in the requirements for both the SEI Capability Maturity Modeling Integration (CMMI) and the ISO 9001:2000 standard. These models will be evaluated for applicability to the organization.

"We want to be a 'best-in-class' organization," Swank said. "We want to have processes and procedures in which people find value and that can be made part of the lab's corporate culture."

Bill Rogers, director of ELSYS, praised the lab's CMM team and its researchers for their hard work in obtaining the prestigious rating.

"Receipt of this rating is truly a milestone that will help our lab reach its potential as developer of electronic systems for both military and civilian uses," he said. "This could only have been done through the hard work and commitment of the entire laboratory workforce and the long term support of GTRI management. We're very proud of this rating and our customers are already benefiting from the improved management processes it represents."

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The reconnaissance round is the idea of Charles M. Stancil, a senior research engineer at GTRI's Aerospace, Transportation and Advanced Systems Laboratory.

"The typical situation an infantry unit will encounter is a small number of hostile forces, and the unit does not know exactly where the enemy is," Stancil said. "Soldiers will be able to fire the recon round and have photos relayed to them right over the battlefield so they can see from a vertical perspective how the enemy is positioned."

Currently, a ground unit requiring aerial information has to go up the chain of command to request satellite images or aerial photos from an uninhabited aerial vehicle such as Global Hawk. The process is time-consuming, and equipment use is expensive, Stancil says. By contrast, the recon round promises to be quick, convenient and relatively inexpensive at $1,200 per device.

The 2-pound, 6-inch-long reconnaissance device, made from off-the-shelf parts such as digital camera components, would be used in weapons like mortars that launch shells high in the air. Far above the battlefield, a separation charge opens a parachute, and the surveillance device floats down, transmitting digital images as it descends.

"It can detect a human being from 1,800 feet in the air," Stancil said.

Typically deployed at a height of about 1,800 to 2,000 feet, the reconnaissance round has a field of view of 600 feet by 400 feet and can view terrain as far away 3.1 miles (5,000 meters). The device sends back four to five digital photos before it hits the ground, after which it self-destructs to prevent use by an enemy.

Currently, no such shell-based reconnaissance devices exist in the military arsenal, Stancil adds.

The reconnaissance round is mechanically analogous to an illumination round, which is typically fired from a mortar and uses a flare suspended from a parachute to light up the area below. Although the recon round has good low-light performance, it could be used in conjunction with an illumination round in extreme low-light situations.

Researchers are now testing and validating the recon round, now entering its second year of development for the Office of Naval Research (ONR). A working prototype has been successfully test-fired from an 81-millimeter mortar at a military range.

Just 10 to 60 nanometers wide and 5-20 nanometers thick - but up to several millimeters long - the new structures are similar to but smaller than the "nanobelts" first reported by Georgia Tech scientists two years ago in the journal Science. The new helical structures and their potential applications were described in the journal Nano Letters. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

"These structures are very different from our original nanobelts and are a major step toward a new system of nanostructures," said Zhong L. Wang, director of Georgia Tech's Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and a professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. "Piezoelectric and polar-surface dominated smart materials based on zinc oxide are important because they could be the transducers and actuators for future generations of nanoscale devices."

The piezoelectric properties of the new structures could make them useful in detecting and measuring very small fluid flows, tiny strain/stress forces, high-frequency acoustical waves and even air flows that would otherwise be imperceptible. When deflected by the flow of air or fluids, the nanosprings would produce small but measurable electrical voltages.

"They could be used to measure pressure in a bio-fluid or in other biomedical sensing applications," said Wang. "You could use them to measure nano- or pico-newton forces."

The piezoelectric properties could also make the structures useful as actuators in micro-systems and nanosystems, where applying voltage would induce strains. "In micromechanical systems, these structures could provide the coupling between an electrical signal and a mechanical motion," Wang noted.

Semiconductor-based nanostructures that rely on electrostatic forces have gained widespread research interest, but Wang said development of nanomaterials for piezoelectric actuators have lagged. The new nanosprings could therefore give designers of future nanoscale systems more options.

Beyond their piezoelectric properties, the new structures also display unusual electrostatic polarization, with positively and negatively charged surfaces across the thickness of the nanoribbon. This electrical charge could be used to attract specific molecules, potentially allowing the nanosprings to be used as biosensors to detect single molecules or cells.

Existing microfluidic devices, also known as "labs-on-a-chip," use tiny channels or pipes etched into silicon or other substrate material to manipulate very small volumes of fluid. Such "micropipe" devices are just beginning to appear on the market.

The Georgia Tech innovation could allow production of a new type of microfluidic device without etching channels. Instead, lasers or optical systems similar to those used in LCD projectors would produce complex patterns of varying-intensity light on a flat substrate material. Absorption of the light would produce differential heating on the substrate, creating a pattern of thermal gradients. Surface tension, a relatively strong force at micron size scales, would then cause nanoliter volumes of fluid to flow from the cooler areas to warmer areas through thermocapillary action.

"We envision that this could move multiple droplets or packets of fluid simultaneously, allowing arrays of drops to be moving at the same time at multiple locations," said Michael Schatz, a Georgia Tech associate professor of physics. "We could avoid putting detailed architectures onto the substrate. Instead, we would take advantage of advances in the miniaturization of optoelectronics to pattern the substrate with surface tension forces."

Because the temperature gradients would be formed by computer-controlled light patterns, pathways for the droplets could be quickly changed, allowing a reconfiguration not possible with existing microfluidic devices. And because the surface tension effects are strong at the micron scale, they could produce flow rates higher than channel-based microarrays, which must overcome large frictional forces. Finally, the substrate could be easily cleaned between uses, avoiding contamination.

"We believe the language of behavior is common between robots and animals," Balch said. "That means, potentially, that we could videotape ants for a long period of time, learn their 'program' and run it on a robot."

Social insects, such as ants and bees, represent the existence of successful large-scale, robust behavior forged from the interaction of many, simple individuals, Balch explained. Such behavior can offer ideas on how to organize a cooperating colony of robots capable of complex operations.

To expedite the understanding of such behavior, Balch's team developed a computer vision system that automates analysis of animal movement - once an arduous and time-consuming task. Researchers are using the system to analyze data on the sequential movements that encode information - for example in bees, the location of distant food sources, Balch said. He will present the research at the Second International Workshop on the Mathematics and Algorithms of Social Insects on Dec. 16-17 at Georgia Tech.

With an 81.5 percent accuracy rate, the system can automatically analyze bee movements and label them based on examples provided by human experts. This level of labeling accuracy is high enough to allow researchers to build a subsequent system to accurately determine the behavior of a bee from its sequence of motions, Balch explained.

For example, one sequence of motions bees commonly perform are waggle dances consisting of arcing to the right, waggling (walking in a generally straight line while oscillating left and right), arcing to the left, waggling and so on. These motions encode the locations of distant food sources, according to Cornell University Professor of Biology Thomas Seeley, who has collaborated with Balch on this project. Balch is also working with Professor Deborah Gordon of Stanford University on related work with ants.

Balch's animal movement analysis system has several components. First, researchers shoot 15 minutes of videotape of bees - some of which are marked with a bright-colored paint and returned to an observation hive. Then computer vision-based tracking software converts the video of the marked bees into x- and y-coordinate location information for each animal in each frame of the footage. Some segments of this data are hand labeled by a researcher and then used as motion examples for the automated analysis system.

In future work, Balch and his colleagues will build a system that can learn executable models of these behaviors and then run the models in simulation. These simulations, Balch explained, would reveal the accuracy of the models. Researchers don't yet know if these models will yield better computer programming algorithms, though they are hopeful based on what previous research has revealed.

In fact, 41 percent of Georgia's construction-related deaths in 2001 occurred among Hispanic workers. The numbers were even more dramatic in Atlanta, where 61 percent of construction fatalities in 2001 claimed the lives of Hispanic workers.

Statistics show that safety training can prevent such tragedies, so researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have created materials to make federally mandated training more effective for Hispanic construction workers.

"In the construction industry, education really is a matter of life and death," said Daniel Ortiz, associate director of the GTRI Safety, Health and Environmental Technology Division. "Employees need to be able to recognize hazardous conditions and point them out to supervisors."

But the majority of existing Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards and programs are written and delivered in English, which creates a problem for Hispanic workers who read or speak little English, said project director Art Wickman, head of the Health Sciences Branch in GTRI's Safety, Health and Environmental Technology Division. Even when materials are available in Spanish, there is typically so much technical jargon that the content is difficult to grasp.

"Hispanic construction workers may receive safety papers, but often have no idea what they're signing," said Juan Rodriguez, an Archer Western Contractors safety specialist who collaborated with GTRI on the project. Workers who need jobs often won't admit they don't understand the content of safety materials. He added, "They're going to nod their heads and say, 'Sure.' "

That means that protective equipment and procedures can be futile if workers don't understand how to use them. For example, 10 workers might try to use a fall-protection cable that can only support two workers.

The new GTRI safety curriculum focuses on five areas where the greatest number of injuries and deaths occur among construction workers: fall protection, scaffolding, trenching and excavation, electrical hazard and material handling. To accommodate workers with varying degrees of education and language skills, GTRI created a wide range of materials:

• Computer presentations for formal job orientations.
• Detailed presentations geared to supervisors and trainers who already possess a certain degree of safety expertise.
• Workplace posters and hazard bulletins that use colloquial Spanish and convey safety messages graphically for workers with poor reading skills.
• Pamphlets for foremen and supervisors to use during "toolbox" meetings (informal safety meetings).

Jeffrey M. Gerth, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), has been working with DEK, an international machine manufacturer headquartered in Weymouth, England. Gerth's mission: to improve the user interface on screen printers that DEK produces for the circuit-board and electronics-assembly industries worldwide.

User interfaces - the commands or menus that allow people to communicate with a computer or electronic device - are critical to nimble manufacturing. "The job of operators is to monitor machines so they're in constant operation," says Gerth, who specializes in human factors at GTRI's Electronic Systems Laboratory. "If production stops or isn't going as fast as intended, then a manufacturer is losing money."

DEK approached Gerth in 2001 after seeing a project from Georgia Tech's Manufacturing Research Center demonstrated at a trade show. The project included an Internet portal and user interface that Gerth had designed for surface-mount technology (SMT) manufacturing - one of DEK's domains.

Now in its final stages, Gerth's redesigned interface saves time and streamlines production. Some of its advantages include:

• Easier to use. Whereas DEK's former interface was text-based, the new interface uses graphics to reduce dependency on language, which is important for an international player like DEK. What's more, the new interface accommodates a number of functional adjustments made to screen printers over the years - customer requests that didn't take machine operators into account until now.

• Decreases training time. Training materials are embedded in the interface, saving operators from having to reach for a manual whenever they have a question.

• Reduces errors. The new interface is geared to support best practices and circumvent problems. For example, a new alert system tells operators when replenishments, such as cleaning solvents, are dropping too low. The interface not only reports errors, but also provides troubleshooting tips to help operators take appropriate action instead of calling on a process engineer.

In fact, the new interface is so user friendly, DEK has dubbed it the "Instinctiv™." A beta version of Instinctiv debuted this spring at the APEX manufacturing show in Anaheim, Calif., and is now being tested in two of DEK's critical markets.

"The project has been a great success," says Dick Johnson, DEK's software manager. "DEK Instinctiv is a new and easier way of interacting with DEK printers. It's an interface designed for machine operators -- not just engineers."

Led by Cornell University, the NNIN will enable students and researchers from any school in the United States - as well as scientists from U.S. corporate and government laboratories - to have open access to resources they need for studying molecular and higher length-scale materials and processes, and for applying them in a variety of structures, devices and systems.

The $70 million network is expected to begin operation in January 2004 for a five-year period.

Georgia Tech will share its nanotechnology fabrication resources - including a new system capable of creating nanometer-scale features - and lead the network's education and outreach efforts, said James Meindl, director of Georgia Tech's Microelectronics Research Center.

"Georgia Tech is installing a $4 million electron-beam nanolithography system that will allow etching of patterns at the nano-scale," he said. "This critical tool, funded by the Georgia Research Alliance, will facilitate advances in bio-electronics, nanotechnology and advanced microelectronics. The system, one of only a few such university-based instruments in the nation, will be available to NNIN partner institutions along with skilled personnel to operate it."

The NNIN's outreach and education effort will focus on K-12, undergraduate and professional education, Meindl noted. "Georgia Tech brings to the network strengths in engineering education and outreach, and we anticipate close collaboration with our sister sites on such key issues as diversity and minority education," he said.

The new network was approved by the National Science Board, the 24-member policy advisory body of the National Science Foundation.

"The network will be an investment of at least $70 million under NSF's nanoscale science and engineering priority area," said Lawrence Goldberg, NSF senior engineering advisor. "NNIN expands significantly beyond the current capabilities of the five university National Nanofabrication Users Network (NNUN) that is concluding its ten-year life span this year."

In addition to Cornell and Georgia Tech, the network will include Harvard University, Howard University, North Carolina State University, Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, the University of New Mexico, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Washington.

"By assembling and offering to share our specialized resources with any and all qualified users, we have created the world's largest, most comprehensive and accessible nanotechnology laboratory," said Sandip Tiwari, the Cornell electrical engineering professor who will serve as director of the NNIN.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia Southern University and Armstrong Atlantic State University will work directly with the Ports Authority to develop innovative new technologies for the efficient, secure movement of freight.

"This is the first relationship of its kind in the country," said Doug Marchand, Georgia Ports Authority executive director. "Ultimately, this Center will provide global thought leadership on maritime logistics and security and provide a forum for the demonstration of best practices for both industries."

All the technologies developed in SMLIC, both hardware and software, will be evaluated and potentially implemented by the Georgia Ports Authority. Research will focus on increasing security and productivity at the nation's ports and all points of entry.

"Long-term, the work of this Center will have broad and long-lasting impact not only for the nation, but for the world," said Chip White, SMLIC executive director. "This marks a new chapter in Georgia's leadership in transportation and logistics."

The SMLIC will offer logistics and security companies the opportunity to take advantage of the intellectual capital being developed there by becoming members of the center. Wayne Hodges, director of Georgia Tech's Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), said he also expects the Center's commercialization efforts to result in the creation of new companies based on the research done at the Center.

"The commercialization of this research will create the newest and best ways to move freight around the world," said Hodges. "By creating this strong foundation, new companies will be established, new jobs created and our state will become a world leader."

"Year to year fluctuations in these rankings sell magazines, but it's the consistency of performance over the years that measures academic quality," said President Wayne Clough. "I'm pleased to see that with increasing enrollments and decreasing budgets we continue to be ranked among the elite in American higher education. It's a credit to our students, our faculty, our staff, our alumni and friends."

Georgia Tech's peer assessment, the school's perceived quality among other universities, was high enough to be ranked among the top 20 of all universities in the nation. However numerical scores in faculty resources, percentage of classes under 20, and graduation rates, pulled Tech down. Among the top 50 universities in the nation, Tech ranked 65th in faculty resources, and 69th in retention and graduation rates. Further, Tech had fewer than half the number of classes with fewer than 20 students.

"While we can't place too much emphasis on these data, some patterns are readily discernible. Class size, faculty resources, and undergraduate support are clear areas of emphasis. Unfortunately, our current budget situation, combined with increasing demand for a Georgia Tech education, will make it difficult to make notable progress in those areas. One counter to that problem, however, is the generosity of our alumni," said Clough. Our alumni giving rate is first among all public universities and 18th overall. That is a very strong endorsement by our alumni as to the value of their education. We sincerely appreciate that investment from them."

Georgia Tech's nationally prominent College of Engineering moved into the top five nationally (Tech's graduate engineering program is also ranked fifth) as did three programs within the College. Most prominent among those programs was the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, again ranked number one; Aerospace again ranked number two, and Civil Engineering moved down one to fourth. The DuPree College of Management ranked 36th in the competitive business school rankings. U.S. News also sited Tech's Co-Op Program, the largest volunteer co-op program in the country, as a "Program to look for".

"It is another very solid showing," said Tech President Wayne Clough, "You shouldn't place too much emphasis on these or any other rankings. But I'm pleased by our national reputation and the consistency of our performance over the last five years. We're consistently ranked among the nation's elite public universities and our College of Engineering and its programs continue their national prominence. For our School of Industrial and Systems Engineering to rank number one in the entire nation year, after year, after year, is truly impressive. I also think that we're taking all of the right steps to allow our College of Management to flourish," said Clough, "not the least of which is their move into the impressive Technology Square complex. That move will not only improve their ability to deliver high quality academic content, but it will dramatically improve their ability to partner with other universities and the private sector to the benefit of our students. It's also very satisfying to see our Co-Op Program continue to receive national recognition. It is a program," said Clough, "that really benefits our students and their careers and this type of recognition can only help."

Georgia Tech scored particularly well in the areas of academic reputation (tied with Emory and Vanderbilt) SAT scores of incoming students (2nd among public universities), percentage of full-time faculty on staff (99%), and alumni giving rate (1st among public universities). Areas of improvement include faculty resources (65th) graduation and retention rate (69%), and class sizes.

"We've shown dramatic improvement in our faculty resources, thanks to an impressive research program that has allowed us to re-invest in the Institute. But we still have to make a concerted effort to improve our retention and graduation rates, always a challenge at a technological research university. But we've accomplished a great deal on resources that pale in comparison to many of our peers. That's a credit to our faculty, staff, and students."

This year's U.S. News undergraduate rankings included:
--Best National Universities
--Best Engineering & Business Schools
--Schools with a Specialty
--Campus Diversity/International Students
--Programs to look for

"I fell in love with math at a very early age," said Dowling. "Initially my only goal was to make a contribution to theoretical mathematics - a beautiful result on a pedestal. Over the last four years, my goal has expanded to include the innovation of new applications of mathematics to societal problems - such as the HIV project I'm working on now. I'm looking forward to learning the foundations of mathematics at Princeton, and hope to be able to then teach them to the next generation."

Dowling feels this fellowship will give her the freedom to concentrate on her studies. In April when she received an e-mail from one of her math professors suggesting she apply for the fellowship, she had already been offered a teaching fellowship at Princeton, which covered all expenses for four years. Dowling felt the Homeland Security Fellowship provided more flexibility. As part of the fellowship, Dowling will be required to complete an internship with DHS the summer after her first year.

Dowling, an outstanding student who graduated from Tech with a perfect 4.0 GPA, has received many honors. She was a finalist for the highly prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, which included an intensive application and interview process that she found very thought provoking. She also received the Phi Kappa Phi Scholarship Cup, awarded each year to the graduating senior with the most outstanding scholastic record in the class.

As an undergraduate, she pursued several research projects. She worked on a joint Georgia Tech - Emory University research project with Dr. Dana Randall, associate professor in the College of Computing and adjunct in the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech and Dr. Guido Silvestri, assistant professor of medicine at the Emory Vaccine Research Center & Yerkes National Primate Research Center. The project's goal is to develop a mathematical model of HIV infection in vivo, along with computer software allowing biologists, to visualize the progression of the disease. For this project, she won first place in the annual UROC (Undergraduate Research Opportunities in Computing) competition. Dowling is involved in ongoing research with the project, and anticipates publication of their work sometime in the next year. Another project was a National Science Foundation-sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates focusing on elliptic curves and quadratic residue tournaments.

"Blair completely embodies the type of student that made me want to become an academic," said Randall. "She demonstrated such extreme professionalism and scientific integrity in our HIV modeling research project that it is hard to believe that she was still an undergraduate. For the project, Blair had to comprehend the immunological dynamics involved in HIV infection at the level of a graduate student in biology, she had to understand partial differential equations used in mathematical modeling and reinterpret them as stochastic equations, and she had to demonstrate proficiency in programming methodologies. Her enthusiasm and dedication elevated this joint Georgia Tech-Emory project to a level far beyond our original expectations, and we were incredibly fortunate to have her work with us."

Dowling, from Savannah, Ga., enjoys teaching. At Georgia Tech she worked as a teaching assistant for Calculus II courses. One summer, she served as head counselor for a math camp for high school students at Boston University called PROMYS - the Program in Mathematics for Young Scientists.

Despite her heavy academic load, Dowling found time for extracurricular activities as well. She played on the Georgia Tech Women's Ultimate Frisbee team and additionally served as captain of an intramural ultimate team all four years. Dowling served as president of the Georgia Tech chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon, the National Math Honor Society, and faculty credit her with reviving this organization and transforming it into a vibrant group that promotes excellence in mathematics and interactions among department faculty and students. Also, Dowling was an active member of Westminster Christian Fellowship and helped organize and raise funds for the renovation of their on-campus building in the spring of 2003.

Through this education program, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security supports the growth and mentoring of the next generation of scientists as they study ways to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, reduce America's vulnerability to terrorism, and minimize the damage and recovery efforts from attacks that occur. More than 100 experts from a variety of fields reviewed the applications. About one-third of the awards were given to students from engineering disciplines, followed by computer science and math, psychology and social sciences.

Critics charge that Bayh-Dole restricts future research on a technology, is unnecessary, and motivates researchers to pursue profitable areas of research, rather than "pure" basic research.

Georgia Tech professor Marie Thursby, the Hal and John Smith Chair in Entrepreneurship in the DuPree College of Management, and Jerry Thursby, Department Chair and Professor of Economics at Emory University, examine the evidence and address these issues in their recently published paper in the August 22, 2003 edition of the highly prestigious journal, "Science."

According to Marie Thursby, "The issues we examine in this paper are of great importance not only to universities and research institutions but also to the public at large. Huge sums of federal dollars go toward research. Licensing provides incentives for businesses to use the resulting discoveries, but it is important that these incentives not destroy the fundamental research mission of universities."

According to Jerry Thursby, "The critical nature of universities in the U.S. innovation system is well known. What is less well known, and hence our interest as economists, is how technology transfer is affected by economic incentives."

The Thursbys examine four primary questions based on their own survey data as well as data from the Association of University Technology Managers' 1991 and 2000 surveys and other studies. Full details of these conclusions are in the paper entitled "University Licensing and the Bayh-Dole Act, " in the August 22 issue of the journal.

1. Would technologies be transferred out of the lab without the Bayh-Dole Act?Yes, they would, but Bayh-Dole provides another channel beyond the traditional publications, meetings and consulting.

2. Are technology transfer offices at universities profit centers?
Profits are not the sole goal of licensing, and the average income per active license is $66,465, but only 43 percent of licenses earned royalties.

3. Does licensing technologies to outside firms restrict the spread of the academic research?
Research that is company sponsored, rather than federally funded, is usually not shared as readily.

4. Have financial incentives from licensing technology diverted faculty away from "pure" basic research to more lucrative research areas?
Based on the limited evidence available, the answer is no.

NOTE: To obtain a copy of the article, please contact Elizabeth Campell at Georgia Tech's Communications and Public Affairs office at 404-894-4233 or elizabeth.campell@icpa.gatech.edu. Reporters may also request a copy of the paper from the AAAS Office of Public Programs at 202-326-6440 or scipak@aaas.org.

"We aren't guessing at what the results from these standards will be," said Robert Hemenway, chairman of the NCAA Division I Board of Directors and vice chancellor of the University of Kansas, when the reform proposal was announced this past year.

"If you continue to meet the academic profile in your first, second, third, fourth and fifth year, you will be on track to graduate," Hemenway said. "If you don't meet the academic profile, you won't be participating in college sports."

The new academic reforms include, among other things, provisions that require incoming freshmen student-athletes to earn six hours of academic credit each semester for a total of at least 18 semester hours each academic year.

Earning those course hours comes in addition to a freshman football player's schedule, for example, which on a typical Wednesday includes a mandatory, 30-minute study-hall session beginning at 7:15 a.m.; a team meeting for an hour and 45 minutes in the afternoon; football practice for two hours and 15 minutes; and another mandatory study hall session at 7:45 p.m. -- for as long as needed -- through 10 p.m.

Jim Stevens -- director of academic services for the Georgia Tech Athletic Association -- and his staff of seven advisers have been charged with the task of implementing the new academic reforms this fall.

"It's a fact that our student-athletes have a lot on their plates. They're going to have stresses put on them," Stevens said. "[The academic reforms] require us to be more precise in the course options we line up for the student-athletes, and they've all got to work at it.

"But I don't want any of our student-athletes treated differently than any other student at Georgia Tech," he said. "My expectations are high for them. I expect them to be at class and to be prepared for that class. They should, in fact, be able to contribute to the class."

Stevens said the new NCAA academic requirements will be rigorous for Georgia Tech's student-athletes, but he has full confidence that they will rise to the challenge. The new "40-60-80 rule," in particular, will be tough on Tech's freshmen athletes, he said.

This reform states that, in order to compete, student-athletes must earn 40 percent of their degree requirements by the beginning of their third year of enrollment; 60 percent by the beginning of their fourth year; and 80 percent by the beginning of their fifth year. The new 40-60-80 split applies to incoming freshman athletes for 2003; current sophomore athletes and above may still compete under the previous 25-50-70 percentage split.

"It will be tough, because there's a relatively small number of majors for students to pursue at Georgia Tech compared to other Atlantic Coast Conference schools, and all the majors here are demanding," Stevens said. "In a sense, [the new reforms] will be tougher on our student-athletes. We have great courses that are truly demanding, and our student-athletes don't have a large number of free electives to choose for their course loads."

But, the 40-60-80 rule also makes academic advising more straight-forward and somewhat easier in terms of tracking student-athlete progress toward their degree. That's because every course student-athletes take must be applicable to their degree, Stevens said.

Georgia Tech President Wayne Clough, a member of the NCAA Division I Board of Directors, has put his full support behind the new academic reforms.

"I have always expected, and will continue to expect, that our coaches will work with Jim Stevens and our academic support personnel in a coordinated fashion to ensure that student-athletes have the opportunity to meet the challenges of a Tech education and make steady progress toward graduation," Clough said.

"I also expect our student-athletes to achieve at an academic level comparable to that of the average of the student body, including remaining on track for graduation," he said. "That is why our academic support services are so important. They are important to the performance of our athletes and they are important for the ultimate mission of the Institute.

"Credible and competent academic support enhances the experience of our student athletes and upholds the rigorous academic excellence of Georgia Tech," Clough said.

NCAA President Myles Brand, another supporter of the reforms, said the best way to protect and enhance the values of college sports is to ensure the academic success of all student-athletes. The current academic reform movement under way in NCAA Division I, he said, is key in that regard.

"The new initial-eligibility and progress-toward-degree standards are going to yield results," he said. "Graduation rates are going to rise. The increase to 16 core courses will produce better-prepared freshmen. And the requirements for enrolled student-athletes will result in genuine progress toward a specific degree and not just the false success of merely sustaining eligibility."

At Tech, Stevens has implemented several new checks-and-balances in the academic advising process, and he also plans to implement several new forms of documentation to track the process, he said.

Academic advisers will continue to make sure the courses student-athletes choose are applicable to their degree, and athletes will be encouraged to take courses in their proper sequence as much as possible, Stevens said. Advisers also will perform checks to make certain student-athletes attend classes, and reports will be provided to coaches.

In addition, athletes will continue to attend study hall sessions as required by the guidelines Stevens has established with Tech coaches. But a new system is in place to ensure that student-athletes meet their objectives for each session.

"What I'm interested in is that they come into study hall with a goal that they want to accomplish by the end of their session," Stevens said. "They have a sign-in sheet, and they must fill out that objective when they come in for their study session. Their work is checked when they're done, and they are quizzed to see that they've met that goal."

"I'm excited about the fall," he said. "The Georgia Tech Athletic Association has some great people working with the student-athletes. This is an exciting job, because we can really have an impact in a kid's life."

The GIFT program is administered by Georgia Tech's Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing, a unit within the College of Sciences. Its new board members include representatives from the business community, government and academic institutions.

Among the new advisory board members are Roger Wartell, chair of Georgia Tech's School of Biology; Ralph Cordell, acting director of Science Education at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Lewis Massey, president and CEO of SciTrek; Stephen Dolinger, president of Georgia Partnerships for Excellence in Education; and Marcia White, executive director of Atlanta Partners for Education for the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.

Also serving on the board are influential members from metro Atlanta school systems' curriculum committees, who can help teachers bring their experiences into the classroom. They include Judy H. Dennison, director of science for the Fulton County School System; Wanda Gilliard, director of mathematics for the DeKalb County School System; George Stickel, high-school science supervisor for Cobb County Schools; Adrian Epps, director of the Atlanta Systemic Initiative for Atlanta Public Schools; and Dana McGraw, director of continuous improvement for Gwinnett County Schools.

"We are excited to be able to add such a diverse group of stakeholders to the GIFT Advisory Board," said Mike Robertson, chair of the board and director of Human Resources for EMS Technologies. "The expertise that these new members bring will make GIFT an even more exciting opportunity to share business experiences with teachers and better prepare our students for tomorrow's workforce."

About the Georgia Industrial Fellowships for Teachers Program

The GIFT Program is a collaborative effort designed to enhance mathematics and science experiences among Georgia teachers and their students. It offers teachers throughout Georgia summer fellowships in business, industry, public-science institutes and research venues.

Since 1991, officials with GIFT have placed more than 700 middle- and high-school teachers in four- to eight-week summer fellowships at sponsored companies and organizations. There they gain first-hand skills and knowledge necessary for the preparation of Georgia's future work force - its students. The teachers then develop classroom curriculums based on their summer experiences.

About 30 teams from around the world will compete July 13 - 23 to see who has the fastest car in the American Solar Challenge, a 2,300-mile race between Chicago and the Los Angeles area. The winner will be the car with the best cumulative time. The race is sponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE) and its National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

With students behind the wheels, the high-tech, high-efficiency solar cars will cross the Great Plains, climb the Rocky Mountains, dart over the great American desert, and dash across the finish line in Southern California. A dozen students make up the Georgia Tech team, called the Solar Jackets. After months of designing and building their car, the team is ready to see how their car will perform on the road.

"This is our first time building a solar-powered car," said Team Leader Nathan Melanson, a senior computer science major. "We're looking forward to seeing how it does."

The car - almost 20 feet long and seven-feet-wide - holds a driver and one passenger. The team members will rotate those responsibilities. Dozens of solar panels cover the car's body and act as the charger for the car's 144-volt battery pack. Students on the team represent a number of schools at Georgia Tech, including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, aerospace engineering and physics. In addition, a graduate student studying photovoltaic (solar) cell manufacturing was an integral part of the team.

Weather and energy management play an important role in the race; the sunnier the day, the faster and farther the cars can run. Bright days also allow the cars to "fill up" their batteries for cloudy or rainy days.
The cars generally travel at highways speeds and are required to obey local speed limits.

The event begins at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry on Sunday, July 13 and is expected to wrap up 10 days later in Claremont, Calif. It will follow Route 66 at much as possible, with checkpoints in Springfield, Ill.; Rolla, Mo.; Joplin, Mo.; Edmond, Okla.; Sayre, Okla.; Amarillo, Texas; Tucamcari, N.M.; Albuquerque, N.M.; Gallup, N.M.; Flagstaff, Ariz.; Kingman, Ariz.; and Barstow, Calif. before reaching the finish in Claremont.

This is the second American Solar Challenge. In the 2001 race, the University of Michigan's "M-Pulse" crossed the finish line first, completing the trip in 56 hours, 10 minutes and 46 seconds, for an average speed of 40 mph. According to the DOE, improvements in solar cells and batteries could mean an even faster race this year.

For news and reports from the road, including daily standings and photos, visit the American Solar Challenge Web site at www.americansolarchallenge.org.

Ivan Allen Jr. was a legendary Atlanta figure-a former mayor who personified the city's emerging identity as a progressive and energetic capital of the South. Allen was a respected businessman and a loyal alumnus of Georgia Tech whose support of the Institute has been undaunted over the years.

"Georgia Tech has always been incredibly important to my father and to our family," said his son, Inman Allen. "Both as an alumnus and as mayor, my father recognized Tech's importance in his own life and in the life of Atlanta. He realized early on that Georgia Tech could play a significant role in the city's success and reach the highest levels of excellence as a university. Time has proven him right."

" Georgia Tech was honored to have had a graduate of such courage, generosity, compassion and humanity," said Ivan Allen College Dean Sue Rosser. "We are indeed blessed."
In 1966, the New York Times Magazine captured Allen's energy in this excerpt from an article about him: "Ivan Allen is very much like Atlanta, a comparison he would like. He is successful, optimistic, young in spirit, and disdainful of anything that stands still. He is the perfect personification of that great American phenomenon, the civic shaker and business mover."
Perhaps more to the point, on March 2, 1971, New York City's former mayor John V. Lindsay described Allen's impact on history. "Mayor Allen no longer sits in Atlanta's City Hall. But few Atlantans will forget what he did while he was there," said Lindsay. "When the urban history of America in our time is written, Ivan Allen Jr. will be singled out for the kind of praise few mayors have earned. Of him, it will be accurately said that he made a very real difference."
The Ivan Allen College was founded in 1990 to add a strong liberal arts dimension to the Georgia Tech education and to offer focused majors in humanities and social sciences, with an international, technological and professional emphasis. The liberal arts complement science and technology as part of the intellectual core needed to understand the human implications of knowledge.
During its tenth anniversary celebration, the College decided to honor Allen on his 90th birthday by establishing an annual Founder's Day event on his date of birth, March 15. It also instituted the Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Progress and Service, which has since been given each year to an individual with Georgia connections who, like Allen, personifies the ideals of the College. To date, the recipients have been former Governor and now U.S. Senator Zell Miller, former Governor and President Jimmy Carter, and award-winning columnist Molly Ivins.

Ivan Allen Jr.
A Biographical Sketch
Born: March 15, 1911, Atlanta, Georgia
Parents: Ivan Allen Sr. and Irene Beaumont Allen
Spouse: Married Louise Richardson Inman, 1936
Children: Ivan III (deceased), Inman, and Beaumont

B.S. (Commerce), Georgia Tech, 1933
Student Body President, 1932-33
Omicron Delta Kappa
Dean's List Business

Joined the Ivan Allen Company (office products) in 1933
President, 1946-70
Chairman, 1970-95
Chairman Emeritus, 1995-present
Civic leadership

Atlanta Community Chest and United Way (president)
Atlanta Chamber of Commerce (president)
Atlanta Arts Alliance (chair and member,
Board of Trustees)
Spellman College (member, Board of Trustees)
Georgia Tech (member, National Advisory Board)
Georgia State Chamber of Commerce (president)
FDR Memorial Commission (member,
Board of Trustees)
Government

Mayor, City of Atlanta, 1962-70
Major achievements

Development of Atlanta/Fulton County Stadium
Development of Atlanta Civic Center
Creation of Metro Area Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA)
Development of the Model Cities Program
Development of Atlanta Arts Alliance Complex
Ivan Allen College of Georgia Tech named in his honor, 1990

The ASEE reports bachelor's degrees awarded in 2001-2002 increased 3.4 percent to 67,301, marking the third year of growth nationally at the undergraduate level. Overall, bachelor's degrees increased by 7.9 percent since the 1998-1999 academic year.

While the number of undergraduate degrees conferred at Georgia Tech's College of Engineering saw a slight increase during 2001-2002 - up 4.3 percent to 1,231 from the previous year - Tech awarded the nation's second-highest number of bachelor's degrees in engineering, according to the ASEE report. Pennsylvania State University was first, awarding 14 more degrees with 1,245.

Last year also marked the first time in the past three years that Tech saw an increase in the number of bachelor degree awards since 1999. That year Tech awarded 1,293 bachelor degrees. In 2000, the number dropped to 1,243 and, in 2001, to 1,180.

The latest enrollment figures show the upward trend continues at Tech. In the 2003 fiscal year, 1,286 bachelor degrees were awarded in engineering. Tech's strengths in its undergraduate recruitment program have led to the Institute's status of being the largest producer of engineers in the country. In turn, that's helped the College of Engineering maintain its focus on quality and diversity, rather than quantity, said Narl Davidson, associate dean of engineering.

"Our undergraduate enrollments have grown in the past two years due to the success of the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program at the GT-Savannah campus and due to the recruiting efforts of the Women-in-Engineering program here in Atlanta," Davidson said.

The ASEE study found that growth in undergraduate degrees is not consistent across the disciplines. For example, in the past three years, biomedical degrees nationally jumped 49 percent at the bachelor's level, while chemical engineering degrees decreased by 11 percent. Electrical and computing engineering bachelor's degrees rose 18 percent.

Nationally, electrical and computer engineering remains the most popular engineering discipline at the undergraduate level (114,456 enrolled). It also awarded the most undergraduate degrees (21,812). Figures at Georgia Tech mirror that trend. Electrical and computer engineering at Tech had the highest undergraduate enrollment of all engineering disciplines (1,826) and awarded the most degrees (333).

Graduate Engineering

The numbers tell a slightly different story at the graduate level. While enrollment for master's and doctoral programs both jumped by over 14 percent from last year, the number of master's degrees awarded increased by only 1.4 percent. Doctoral degrees awarded decreased by 4. 7 percent.

"The weak labor market might be causing more Ph.D. candidates to postpone gradation in favor of staying in their funded positions," said Michael T. Gibbons, a project manager for surveys and statistics at ASEE. "This trend in matriculation comes as a relief to many universities in need of increased teaching support but unable to hire faculty because of hiring freezes."

Georgia Tech was first in the nation for the number of graduate students enrolled in 2001-2002, with 3,165 students. Tech ranked fourth in the number of master's degrees awarded (708) and No. 5 in the number of doctoral degrees awarded.

At the master's and doctoral levels, electrical and computer engineering graduated the most students (10,127 and 1,658 respectively).

Other data for the 2001-2002 academic year show that:

--Georgia Tech is the top producer of women engineering graduates at the bachelor level. Tech awarded 350 bachelor degrees in engineering to women.

--Georgia Tech awarded the most bachelor degrees in chemical engineering than any other school in the nation (133).

--Georgia Tech leads the nation in the number of women engineering faculty who are tenured or tenure-track (44). Rounding out the top five are: MIT (40); Pennsylvania State University (39); Ohio State University (31): and Purdue University (30).

--Georgia Tech awarded the second-largest number of bachelor degrees in mechanical engineering (250). Kettering University awarded the most (252).

--Georgia Tech awarded the second largest number of bachelor's degrees in engineering to African-Americans (123). North Carolina A&T State University awarded the most (222).

--Tech ranked No. 7 in civil engineering degrees (137) and No. 8 in electrical and computer engineering (333).

Alexander Memorial Coliseum is located on 10th Street off the I-75/85 Connector in downtown Atlanta. Participants are asked to enter the Coliseum parking lot via Fowler Street and 8th Street. The general public is encouraged to bring any brand of old computer-related equipment-computers, computer monitors, keyboards, mice, printers or other peripherals to the site for collection and recycling by Dell. There will be no charge for the drop-off of these items on this day only.

Due to the success of an initial five-city tour earlier this year, Dell extended the tour to ten additional U.S. cities, including Atlanta. The events are in support of the U.S. Envrionmental Protection Agency's "Plug-In to eCycling" campaign. While computers are safe to use, they do contain some environmentally sensitive materials. These materials can be safely removed or recycled, but only if we all work to keep them out of our landfills.

Other partner/sponsors for the Atlanta event include the City of Atlanta, Pollution Prevention Assistance Division (P2AD) of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Georgia Recycling Coalition, Emory University Recycling, EPA Region IV and the Georgia Soft Drink Association. Anyone unable to make it to the event that day may check the following website to locate vendors for recycling these materials throughout the year: www.p2ad.org.

If you would like to volunteer the day of the event as a greeter, with unloading computers, or directing traffic, please contact the Georgia Recycling Coalition at garecycles@mindspring.com.

For additional information, contact:
Rick Jennings
323.761.7475
rjennings@gci.group.com

The program, "Strengthening Student Outcomes in Mathematics," will enhance the teaching and learning of math through tutorial and mentoring programs. It also will help teachers develop real-world activities for classroom implementation.

At the core of the program is a unique approach that brings together Atlanta Public Schools teachers with a BellSouth employee, who will serve both as a mentor and partner to the teachers participating in the program. Together they will analyze data and test results to focus in on the areas of need in the school system's mathematics instruction plan and process.

As a part of the plan, the BellSouth partner will develop and implement a lesson plan that relates the concepts being taught to a real-life or business situation.

"We are very excited to be involved with the Atlanta Public School system and Georgia Tech in helping to give both teachers and students in our community the skills they need to improve math proficiency," said Duane Ackerman, chairman and chief executive officer of BellSouth. "Studies continue to show that students who master critical math skills are better prepared as they enter high school and college and we think that our program will assist in doing just that."

Georgia Tech will provide training to the BellSouth volunteers, ensuring that they understand the environment and culture of the classroom and that they have realistic expectations of what they may achieve as part of the program. The Institute's participation will be managed by its Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC).

"This is a great partnership and we at Georgia Tech are pleased to be able to participate," said Georgia Tech President Wayne Clough. "The Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing has established a national reputation for strengthening student understanding and application of mathematics, and we believe our involvement will result in positive benefits for Atlanta Public Schools students."

Strengthening the math skills of teachers and students can only bring more success to the state, said CEISMC Director Paul Ohme.

"Georgia Tech is pleased to bring its knowledge of mathematics, students and the business community to this project," Ohme said. "We are excited to be part of a community team that seeks to provide students with one of the key ingredients to a successful economic life -- mathematics."

Participation in the program will be offered to almost 80 Atlanta Public School system teachers currently enrolled in the Middle Grades Mathematics Endorsement Program. BellSouth volunteers will include more than 40 full-time employees whose efforts will be supported by involvement of the BellSouth Volunteers office.

"We appreciate the support of both BellSouth and Georgia Tech in helping to address an area that is critical to the success of students in Atlanta," said Beverly Hall, superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools. "Our math-related scores on statewide tests continue to improve, and we believe this effort will contribute to that improvement. This program also is a great example of how business and educational institutions can work together to provide a payoff for all involved."

Gripping three colored markers positioned above a white canvas, the robotic drawing arm operates based on the neural activity of a few thousand rat neurons placed in a special petri dish that keeps the cells alive. The dish, a Multi-Electrode Array (MEA), is instrumented with 60 two-way electrodes for communication between the neurons and external electronics. The neural signals are recorded and sent to a computer that translates neural activity into robotic movement.

The network of brain cells, located in Professor Steve Potter's lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and the mechanical arm, located in the lab of Guy Ben-Ary at the University of Western Australia in Perth, interact in real-time through a data exchange system via an Internet connection between the robot and the brain cells.

And while the robot's drawings won't put any artists out of business (picture the imaginative scribbling of a three-year-old), the semi-living artist's work has a deeper significance. The team hopes to bridge the gap between biological and artificial systems to produce a machine capable of matching the intelligence of even the simplest organism.

"We're attempting to create an entity that over time will evolve, learn, and express itself through art," said Potter, a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

Potter and his team in the Laboratory for Neuroengineering at Georgia Tech began collaborating with Ben-Ary's team at Western Australia in 2002. They call the robot "MEART," which stands for multi-electrode array art. The project combines the technology of multi-electrode arrays at Potter's lab with the robotic and artistic ingenuity of the team at Western Australia, called the "SymbioticA Research Group."

At the time, Ben-Ary and his group were conducting research into meshing biological technology and artistry in a project called "Fish & Chips." In that project, the team used music to stimulate electrical activity from a few fish neurons cultured on silicon chips, which in turn controlled a robotic arm.

"The goals are both to learn more about how brains work and to apply what is learned to designing fundamentally different types of artificial computing systems," said Ben-Ary, who directs the Image Acquisition and Analysis Facility in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at Western Australia.

Meanwhile, Potter's group was already connecting cultures containing living neurons to computers using multi-electrode arrays that stimulate and record mammalian neurons. Most notably, the group developed the first robotic device whose movements are controlled by a cultured neural network capable of adaptive behavior and learning. They call the hybrid robot a "Hybrot."

The neural activity recorded by the electrodes is transmitted over a two-way communication system and processed both in Atlanta and Perth to control the robotic drawing arm. Depending on how the neuro-electrical activity fires, the robotic arm will draw on a portion of the canvas or choose how many colored markers to use at one time and which colors it will use.

Central to the experiments is Potter's belief that over time the teams will be able to establish a cultured in vitro network system that learns like the living brains in people and animals do. To achieve that, the information from the robot's sensors is sent back through the system to the cultured network of cells in the form of electrical stimuli. By closing the loop, the group hopes the robot will learn something about itself and its environment.

"I hope that this merging of art and science will get the artists thinking about our science, and the scientists thinking about what is art and what is the minimum needed to make a creative entity," Potter said. "On the science side, I hope that we can look at the drawings it makes and see some evidence of learning. Then we can scrutinize the cultured network under the microscope to help understand the learning process at the cellular level."

At the University of Western Australia, the SymbioticA Research Group is managed by Oron Catts and directed by Professors Miranda Grounds and Stuart Bunt in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology. Phil Gamblen developed the robotic arm.

Note: The semi-living artist will be on display at "ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show" (http://artbots.org) in New York City July 12 and 13 at the Eyebeam Gallery.

Approved by the University System of Georgia's Board of Regents this summer, the four-year Joint Degree Program in Law and City and Regional Planning from Georgia State University's College of Law and Georgia Tech's College of Architecture began accepting students this fall. Graduate students who successfully complete the program will earn a juris doctor degree from GSU's College of Law and a master's degree in City and Regional Planning from Georgia Tech's College of Architecture.

"This isn't the creation of a new program or degree, but it does allow our students who wish to earn a J.D. degree and their master's degree to pursue both at the same time and during a shortened period," said Cheryl Contant, director of Georgia Tech's City and Regional Planning Program. "We're able to do this by allowing certain courses in GSU's J.D. program and in our master's program to count toward both degrees."

"Students at both schools will benefit from taking classes with each other, because they will gain a greater understanding of both professions," said Julian Juergensmeyer, the GSU law professor who spearhead development of the program along with Contant and Georgia Tech planning professor Chris Nelson. "The students will learn how to work together."

Contant said the concurrent degree option is one of about 20 such programs offered in the United States, and it will allow Georgia Tech and GSU to produce "a new breed of planning lawyers or attorney-planners" for the region.

"These are going to be folks who will understand the limitations city and regional planners face based on legal requirements, but they'll also understand how to change the law to achieve their planning objectives," she said. "These folks are likely to become important players in state agencies, law firms and other official capacities.

"Having been a faculty member in a program with a similar joint law degree, what I've noticed is students who would apply for jobs just having earned a J.D. and a planning degree, well, it was always so curious to employers that it made the student's resume rise to the top immediately," Contant said. "It also works out that many attorneys often want someone on their staff who has a good understanding of land-use planning."

Joe Cooley, one of the first students to enroll in the concurrent program, said that planning and law have become so interrelated that anyone practicing either profession needs to have a good understanding of the other.

"Both planners and attorneys will make better and more defensible decisions through the study of both fields," Cooley said. "I believe having both degrees as well as my previous experience consulting and in the public sector will give me a leg-up in the job market. More importantly, I believe it will allow me to be a better practitioner."

Shannon Sams, another student in the program, said it offers him a chance to become acquainted with urban and rural growth problems in more detail and with greater sophistication than either degree can offer on its own.

"I hope to develop a city planner's perspective on how to best accommodate growth and use my legal degree to form workable solutions," Sams said. "At the very least I will learn innovative land-use techniques, what factors should be taken into account before making a land-use decision, and be exposed to planners who will be making decisions or working for those who will make decisions concerning growth in the Atlanta area."

Thomas Galloway, dean of Georgia Tech's College of Architecture, said the new concurrent degree program is an exciting collaborative effort for Tech and GSU.

"This takes the best parts of two excellent programs and produces a new kind of graduate, one who will be well prepared to work throughout this region and, indeed, throughout the nation," Galloway said. "Many communities in this country -- and especially Atlanta -- need professionals with a foot in both planning and law to address critical questions revolving around land use, redevelopment, historic preservation and many other sensitive issues."

The greater understanding gained by lawyers and planners of their respective fields will help them be more creative in finding solutions to the development issues facing communities, GSU College of Law Dean Janice C. Griffith said.

"In the past, city planners have often felt stymied by their lack of understanding of what would result if they made certain planning decisions," she said. "A better knowledge of the law will improve their decision-making process. Likewise, a greater understanding of planning will help lawyers do a better job shaping the law to improve the physical environment."

Georgia Tech awarded more bachelor's and master's degrees to African-American engineering students during the 2001-2002 academic year than any other university or college in the country, according to the report. Georgia Tech ranked #4 (tied with Pennsylvania State University) for the number of African-American engineers who received a doctorate that year.

The Black Issues rankings, considered by Georgia Tech to be an important tool to measure the success of campus diversity endeavors, underscore Tech's efforts to create a diverse campus through strong recruitment and retention practices, rather than relying on affirmative action quotas.

"Georgia Tech is proud of its long-standing success with our minority recruitment efforts, but more importantly, we are proud of the successes of our minority graduates," said Provost Jean Lou Chameau.

Georgia Tech awarded 125 bachelor's degrees in engineering to African-American students for the 2001-2002 academic year, which accounted for 10 percent of the total number of undergraduate engineering degrees awarded at Tech that year. Among the top five universities to rank in this category, Tech is the only institution that does not have a predominantly black student population. Rounding out the top five are: North Carolina A&T State University with 124; Florida A&M University with 76; Morgan State University with 72; and Tuskegee University with 70.

Georgia Tech awarded 37 master's degrees in engineering to African-Americans, which accounted for six percent of the total number of master's degrees in engineering awarded at Tech during the 2001-2002 academic year. The Institute also awarded African-American students with four doctoral degrees in engineering, which accounted for two percent.

This year's Black Issues report saw Georgia Tech regain its spot as the leading producer of African-American engineers at the bachelor's level after slipping from that spot to #2 in the 2000-2001 academic year, behind North Carolina A&T State University. During that academic year, North Carolina A&T awarded 120 bachelor's degrees in engineering to African Americans, compared to Georgia Tech's 107.

Tech maintained its top ranking in the master's degree level this year, but slipped from #1 to #4 in the doctorate category. During the 2000-2001 academic year, Tech awarded 10 doctorates to African-American engineers, compared to four during the 2001-2002 academic year.

Black Issues, a publication that covers minorities in American higher education, used statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Education to compile the rankings edition. The special report identifies the top 100 minority degree producers among institutions of higher education and is the only national report of U.S. colleges and universities awarding degrees to African-American, Latino, Asian American and Native American students.

The report was released as a two-part series spotlighting undergraduate and graduate statistics. Graduate and professional degree statistics appear in the July 3 edition of Black Issues. Undergraduate statistics were released in the magazine's June 5 edition.

"Georgia Tech has approached minority recruitment on a number of fronts from elementary to graduate school," said Robert Haley, director of special projects in the College of Engineering. Haley is creator and coordinator of FOCUS, an annual event at Tech designed to attract the country's finest minority undergraduates to its graduate programs.

Each year, approximately 300 African-American students from more than 80 colleges and universities across the nation attend the three-day series of lectures, tours, panel discussions and social events. The program, which is held annually during the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, is now in its twelfth year.

"Through FOCUS and other programs, we are working to create a campus environment of inclusion, respect, and community, where diversity is viewed as a valuable asset in every aspect of campus life," Haley said. "The leadership at Georgia Tech has made a strong commitment toward encouraging and achieving diversity in the academic setting."

In addition, Georgia Tech enjoys a good relationship with the historically-black institutions in the Atlanta area that make up the Atlanta University Center - Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morris Brown College, Spelman College, Morehouse School of Medicine, and the Interdenominational Theological Center.

More than 100 African-American students are currently enrolled in a joint-degree program in which students obtain an undergraduate degree in liberal arts from the Atlanta University Center then move on to obtain an undergraduate degree in engineering from Georgia Tech.

Other programs at Georgia Tech that have been successful at attracting and supporting African-American students are:

SURE (The Summer Undergraduate Research in Engineering/Science Program) - a 10-week summer research program designed to attract qualified minority students into graduate school in the fields of engineering and science. Approximately 30 students of at least junior-level undergraduate standing are recruited on a nationwide basis and paired with a faculty member and a graduate student mentor to undertake research projects in the College of Engineering, College of Sciences and the Packaging Research Center.

FACES (Facilitating Academic Careers in Engineering and Sciences) - a collaborative effort of Tech's Colleges of Engineering and Sciences and Morehouse College to increase the number of African-Americans receiving doctoral degrees and encourage them to become faculty members.

The Georgia Tech Chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers - an organization that seeks to increase the number of culturally responsible black engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally and positively impact the community. It hosts activities including academic retreats, study sessions, dinners for future business owners and an annual career fair.

1.It's a good time to borrow
Beginning July 1, federal student loan interest rates will drop to 2.82 percent for students in school or in the grace period and 3.42 percent for students in repayment. Rates for PLUS loans (federally guaranteed loans for parents) will drop to 4.22 percent. In most cases, taking out a student loan is a better investment than having a parent pull money out of an IRA or home equity.

2.Take more hours
At some schools, including Tech, students pay per credit hour up to 12 hours. So, if you can take 15 hours, you will only have to pay for 12. Over the course of several semesters, the savings add up.

3.Think about cooperative education programs, internships, work-study or part-time work
Co-op programs, in which students alternate between semesters of work and school, and internships can be great ways to earn extra money and gain experience that will help you land that first job. Work-study can also boost your income, but those positions are limited, so act quickly if you want to get one.

4.Avoid scholarship scams
Information on scholarships is freely available. You should never, ever pay anyone money for information that is free. Some will ask you for a credit card number or a bank account number so they can "deposit the money in your account," when they're really trying to set up a withdrawal. Despite their claims, there's not as much scholarship money out there as you might think. Non-university-funded scholarships account for less than 1 percent of the money available for students.

The Seven Deadly Sins People Commit When Trying to Get Financial Aid

Skip the application
It's like the lotto. You can't win if you don't play.

Apply late
Deadlines are important, and most people applying for aid meet them. So don't expect much sympathy if you're late.

Apply incompletely
The applications are important, so fill in every line. This is not the SAT, where you're supposed to leave a question blank if you don't know the answer. If you don't know the answer, find out, or call the financial aid office for help.

Don't accept the offer
If you don't respond to the offer for aid, the financial aid office assumes you don't want the money.

Refuse to provide a social security number or provide an incorrect number
This is government money. They already know your social security number. So while it's not a good idea to give your social security number to telemarketers or the guy on the corner selling hot dogs, giving it to the financial aid office is essential if you want the money.

Neglect to report changes in financial circumstances
If your financial resources suddenly bottom out, let the financial aid office know. Many awards are based on financial need, so if you have that need, make it known.

Let your grades slip
Some financial aid awards, such as the HOPE scholarship, are contingent upon students keeping their grades up. So don't throw good money away by getting bad grades.

"A Silver level rating certification is a significant achievement for a building project. The added significance of Georgia Tech's Management Building is the opportunity for the education facility to serve as a practical application of the benefits of high-performance green building to the future business leaders that will pass through this facility," said Christine Ervin, president & CEO of the U.S. Green Building Council.

Georgia Tech has a strong tradition in environmental and sustainability education and research, and now the campus boasts one of the first LEED certified buildings.

"Georgia Tech is proud to receive LEED Silver certification for the business school building in Technology Square, as well as to have included many of the LEED requirements in all the buildings that were recently constructed there," said Bob Thompson, senior vice president for administration and finance at Georgia Tech. "Sustainability and environmental consciousness are major elements in Georgia Tech's education and research programs, and this project is an example of our efforts to 'walk the talk' in all our Georgia Tech building projects."

Located in the heart of Midtown Atlanta at the corner of West Peachtree Street and Fifth Street, the four-story LEED certified building serves as the new home for the DuPree College of Management and also houses the Institute for Sustainable Technology and Development, the Environmentally Conscious Design & Manufacturing Program, and the Barnes & Nobles @ Georgia Tech bookstore. The project incorporates many environmentally friendly features such as energy-efficient heating and cooling system and water-saving fixtures that serve as a model for future sustainable construction on the Georgia Tech campus.

For Georgia Tech's business school the real news is not about bricks and mortar; it's about heart and soul.

"The new building is our laboratory for preparing business leaders for changing technological environments," says Terry Blum, dean of the DuPree College of Management. "As the business school at Georgia Tech, we are proud that our new home uses the latest environmental technologies to provide a safe and environmentally responsible environment for our students - the future leaders of business. It also fits with our plans to create a business of sustainability niche in our curriculum and in our collaboration and research with our colleagues in the Institute for Sustainable Technology and Development."

In order to achieve a LEED certification, a building must fulfill several requirements for sustainable design, construction, and operation. Beyond that, the project must meet several point-earning credits selected from six categories -- sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, and innovation and design process.

Environmental features range from the high tech to the mainstream. A computerized Energy Management and Control System continuously monitors energy use in both mechanical and electrical systems.

"The indoor air quality of the Management building will have long lasting benefits to the people that occupy the building," said Bill Miller, project manager of Technology Square. "We used low-emitting interior paints, sealants and adhesives in the construction process, green-label carpeting, and non-urea/formaldehyde materials in the wood furniture and doors. Special high filtration systems were installed in the air supply, and copier rooms are separately vented to remove fumes. Also, carbon dioxide monitors alert the mechanical systems to supply more outside air as needed."

Most of the indoor air quality and energy efficiency features used in the LEED certified Management building were also incorporated into the other three buildings and parking deck at Technology Square, according to Miller.

The project uses the latest in water conservation and energy efficiency as well. The use of a water efficient drip irrigation system and drought resistant native plants reduces watering requirements by 50 percent. Bathroom fixtures use only 25 to 50 percent of the water consumed by typical bathroom fixtures.

The building sports a high-performance building envelope and other features such as the highly reflective white roof, efficient heating and cooling systems, and energy saving light fixtures make the building 16.5 percent more energy efficient than the national ASHRAE standard. In addition the cooling systems use no ozone-depleting refrigerants.

LEED certification also addresses issues related to recycling construction materials, using recycled materials, and alternative transportation options. Pedestrians Educating Drivers on Safety (PEDS) recently recognized Technology Square as the most pedestrian-friendly new development in metro Atlanta.

"Pursuing LEED certification definitely added extra costs to the project, but we felt the additional investment of time and money was well worth it to gain better buildings for everyone," says Miller.

The Epsten Group, an Atlanta-based architectural firm with more than a dozen years experience as high-performance building consultants, guided Georgia Tech and the project team through the complex and detailed LEED certification process.

Merkle will be joining the College of Computing faculty as Professor of Computing and director of GTISC, reporting to the Office of the Provost, effective September 8. Merkle fills the position currently held on an interim basis by Richard A. DeMillo, the Imlay Dean of the nationally ranked College of Computing.

"Ralph brings his undisputable expertise and worldwide name recognition in the field of information security, an important area of focus for Georgia Tech," said Jean-Lou Chameau, provost and vice-president for academic affairs. "His extensive research experience, credibility, and leadership will enhance GTISC's successes."

Merkle is widely recognized for his award-winning work in the field of cryptography as one of the co-founders of public-key cryptography. The New York Times said, "Dr. Ralph C. Merkle is celebrated as an inventor of the encryption technology that allows secure transactions over the Internet." More recently, he has focused in the emerging area of nanotechnology, also called molecular manufacturing, gaining a reputation for achievement in that field as well.

"Ralph Merkle, together with Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie, invented modern cryptography," said DeMillo. "Today there are millions of ordinary people -- internet users, cell phone subscribers, bank customers, soldiers in the battlefield -- who depend on Ralph's inventions for security and trust in cyberspace. He really provided the key insight that led to the explosion of security innovation that we see today. We are, needless to say, very excited that Ralph will be joining our community and leading information security research here at Georgia Tech."

"Ralph's selection is great news," said Christopher W. Klaus, founder and chief technology officer of Internet Security Systems. "It'll be a good time for him to bring leadership to GTISC and be a part of the next big security wave. I look forward to working with him."

"Computers have exploded into every facet of our lives as never before. They shape what we know, what we can do, and what is done to us - and yet we cannot and do not trust them. That must change, and the time for that change has now come," said Merkle. "It is both an honor and a pleasure for me to return to my first loves of computer security and cryptography to help Georgia Tech play a pivotal role in this coming transformation."

About Merkle
Merkle comes to Georgia Tech from Zyvex LLC, a nanotechnology start-up company headquartered near Dallas, where as principal fellow he led the company's nanotechnology research efforts since 1999. During this time he kept up his interests in security by consulting with, among others, Xerox PARC, Securify, and various confidential clients.

From 1988 - 1999, Merkle pursued research in both computer security and computational nanotechnology as a research scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). From 1980 - 1988, he was manager of compiler development at Elxsi Corporation, a Silicon Valley start-up company.

Merkle has published and spoken extensively and holds 11 patents. He holds the fundamental patents on many of the major technologies in cryptography and cryptographic protocols. Notable are his patents with Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie on public key distribution and public key cryptosystems.

Merkle has published extensively in such leading journals as IEEE Spectrum, MIT Technology Review, Nanotechnology, Journal of Cryptology, and Crypto. His influential books include "Secrecy, Authentication, and Public Key Systems," UMI Research Press (1982).

He was co-recipient of the 1998 Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology for Theory. For his security work he received the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Kanellakis Award for Theory and Practice, the 2000 RSA Award in Mathematics and the Kobayashi Award of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

He served for many years as the executive editor of the journal Nanotechnology. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, and the IEEE. He sits on the Board of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation and serves as vice president for technology assessment at the Foresight Institute, a Palo Alto based non-profit focused on nanotechnology.

Dr. Merkle received his B.A. and M.S. degrees in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

About GTISC
The Georgia Tech Information Security Center, a National Security Agency (NSA) Center of Excellence in Information Assurance Education, conducts interdisciplinary research and development on all aspects of information security, including systems-vulnerability assessment, theory development, and public and organizational security policies. GTISC's three-pronged mission includes: conducting research that will lay the foundations for a discipline of information security and that contributes to the development and testing of systems, devices, strategies, policies, practical concepts, and techniques; educating and training information security professionals through degree and continuing-education programs, and to insure that information security awareness is instilled in all Georgia Tech students; and assisting industry, non-profit organizations, government, and individuals to solve information security problems through outreach programs and support of groups devoted to information security.

The interdisciplinary center is housed in the College of Computing and involves faculty from Computing, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, and the School of Public Policy.

With the June national unemployment rate at its highest in nine years (6.4 percent), many students are worried that a college degree may not be enough to help them land that first job quickly.

"Nowadays my friends can't get jobs. Companies want you to have experience, but I don't know how you get experience without getting a job," said Michael Sugar, a biomedical and mechanical engineering junior at Tech. His co-op job developing and testing artificial cartilage at Salumedica in Atlanta allows him to get that elusive experience before he graduates in 2006.

Like their academic cousin, the internship, co-op programs give students a chance to gain professional experience while they're enrolled in college. But while internships are often part-time, unpaid or last only for a semester or two, students in co-opassignments work full-time, for pay, alternating semesters of work and school. This extended employment with one company gives students the chance to increase their level of responsibilities over time and use their education on the job.

Once they graduate, students who have co-op experience tend to get their first job out of college faster and at a higher starting salary than recent graduates who haven't co-oped, according to a study by Georgia Tech's Office of Assessment. The survey, conducted between December 2001 and May 2003, contains responses from more than 3,000 recent Georgia Tech graduates. It found that 45 percent of co-op students had found jobs by graduation compared with 37.9 percent of students who had no co-op experience. In addition, the average starting salary for co-op students who had job offers by graduation was $48,555 compared with $45,326.

Another study conducted by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University also found that students who co-op receive higher starting salaries than their non-co-op peers. On top of that, it suggested that once they are on the job, co-op students receive better performance reviews, faster promotions and better pay increases than co-workers without co-op experience. The study looked at 11,000 employees, most of them hired between 1995 and 2000, at four multinational corporations. The average starting salary for employees with co-op experience was $39,700 compared to $37,600 for other employees hired straight out of college. The gap widens over time, with co-op hires in the study making a current average of $46,300 compared to $42, 400 for the non co-ops.

Co-op hires were twice as likely to receive better performance reviews and receive the highest performance rating than non co-op hires. Two-thirds of the co-op hires received at least one promotion during their tenure compared to one-third of their non-co-op peers. And 14 percent of the co-op hires were promoted to managerial positions while only 7 percent of the non co-op hires made it to those ranks.

"It's a symbiotic relationship," said Tom Akins, executive director of Georgia Tech's Division of Professional Practice. "That's one of the major reasons it works so well. Students get real-world experience, companies get employees with the latest knowledge and faculty get students who can give input from the corporate world."

Co-op programs have been around for nearly a century. The University of Cincinnati started the first co-op program in 1906. Georgia Tech began its program just six years later. Today, Tech's is the largest totally optional co-op program in the country, with more than 3,500 students enrolled.

Timothy Langlais, a chemical engineering major at Tech, said the prospect of future employment and a salary is great, but so is the money he earns at his co-op job at Michelin. "I'm enjoying the money. I'm the oldest of three kids and the first to go to college. For me, being self-sufficient is definitely a strong point of the program," he said. For some students, the extra money can mean the difference between graduating with student loans and being debt free.

"Classwork is a different kind of learning. If you just take classes, you're only getting half the story. The degree builds you up, but co-op gives you a head start," said Dean. And in this tough economy, he said, he'll take all the help he can get.

Dr. Frederick begins Sept. 1. In addition to his duties at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology at Georgia Tech (IPST), Frederick also will maintain a faculty appointment in Georgia Tech's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

"Jim Frederick brings superb strategic and leadership qualities to this position, not to mention a strong, global perspective on issues and concerns facing the pulp and paper industry," Georgia Tech Provost Jean-Lou Chameau said.

"The coming weeks and months represent an important period in IPST's history," Dr. Chameau said. "Jim will be key in defining the technical direction of IPST and maximizing its strong ties to the forest products industry. His background and experience will help make IPST an internationally recognized research center in the field of paper science."

Frederick said the forest products industry stands at a "crossroads of redefinition," and that IPST at Georgia Tech can help during this transition period.

"The industry has begun to recognize itself as a producer and processor of biomass, as a manufacturer of diverse and environmentally sustainable products from renewable resources, and as a major provider of green energy," Frederick said.

"The direction of change is toward more profitable, differentiated products for consumers at all levels, rather than production of commodities," he said. "The changes in focus are accompanied by a need for new technology plus a need for scientists, engineers, and business people with the vision to achieve the change.

"The newly integrated IPST at Georgia Tech has the potential to be a world leader in research and education as this scenario of change unfolds," Frederick said. "My vision is that IPST will become an organization that connects industry and government with the larger Georgia Tech faculty and research base."

Among Frederick's areas of expertise is the field of green chemistry, especially as it relates to sustainable development. In 1987, the United Nation's Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

"With green chemistry and chemical engineering, we work toward sustainable development by inventing, designing, and implementing chemical products and processes that consume only renewable raw materials and energy," Frederick said.

Researchers in this field also hope to make highly efficient use of raw materials and energy; reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances; and reduce or eliminate the release of substances that might be harmful to humans or the environment.

Frederick's expertise in green chemistry -- plus his background in industry, government and academia -- should prove beneficial in his new endeavor at Georgia Tech.

Between 1972 and 1974, Frederick was a research engineer for General Motors Research. He then conducted research for Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis., between 1974 and 1976.

From 1976 to 1980 Frederick was an associate professor at the Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wis., and then he became the group leader for Recovery Technology Applications at the Weyerhaeuser Co. in Tacoma, Wash., between 1980 and 1983.

Frederick maintained faculty positions at Oregon State University from 1983 until 1996, and between 1988 and 1991 he was a visiting professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Finland's Abo Akademi University. He returned to Atlanta and IPST in 1997 and then was named CEI Professor of Green Chemistry at Chalmers University in August 2001.

"I'm delighted with Jim's appointment and return to IPST," said Ron Rousseau, the Cecil J. "Pete" Silas Chair at Georgia Tech and chair of the Institute's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

"He brings an impressive set of credentials to the job of director. He's been a leading researcher and administrator, and he has strong ties to the Institute," Dr. Rousseau said. "Also important is that he is well-connected to the pulp and paper industry. He knows the strengths of IPST and he knows the opportunities for strengthening the delivery of research output to member companies."

Frederick was born in Bangor, Maine, in 1945. He graduated from the University of Maine in 1967 with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. He then earned his master's degree and doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Maine in 1969 and 1973, respectively.

About IPST at Georgia Tech

The Institute of Paper Science and Technology integrated its operations with the Georgia Institute of Technology on July 1, 2003. Prior to this summer, IPST was an independent graduate school and research center supported by the paper industry for almost 75 years. Its graduates have a long history of industry leadership and can be found in countries throughout the world.

The school, founded in 1929 and previously named the Institute of Paper Chemistry, moved to the Georgia Tech campus from Appleton, Wis., in 1989. It has about 70 master's degree and doctoral students and conducts about $10 million in research annually. In 1998, IPST was recognized nationally as the fifth most innovative school in the nation in terms of patents per faculty member.

After receiving a green light from the Board of Regents, the School of Chemical Engineering is now the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE), and the School of Textile and Fiber Engineering is now the School of Polymer, Textile and Fiber Engineering (PTFE).

"Our new name, the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, more accurately reflects the school's current activities in important growth areas in the discipline of chemical engineering," said Professor and School Chair Ronald Rousseau. "Over time, and with increasing speed, the discipline has evolved so that biological sciences and chemistry now fill the position once uniquely held by chemistry."

Anselm Griffin, professor and chair of the newly-named School of Polymer, Textile and Fiber Engineering, said the name reflects the increased focus on polymers within the school. He also expects that new faculty appointments within the school will be in the polymer area.

"Our faculty view the addition of 'Polymer' to the school name as simply the next logical step into the future and in the unit's evolution after 106 years of existence in the College of Engineering," Griffin said. "We intend to maintain our traditional textile and fiber interests while becoming more deeply involved with engineered polymers."

School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE)
The renaming marks the first name change since the School of Chemical Engineering was established in 1901. Rousseau and Georgia Tech alumnus Robert Armstrong (ChE 1970), who now heads MIT's Chemical Engineering Department, received a grant from the National Science Foundation in 2002 to study how university chemical engineering programs should modernize their curricula, especially with respect to the increasing biological applications of their discipline. Rousseau said that the conclusions from their work, which was undertaken in conjunction with academics from all over the United States, , were among the key factors that prompted him to request the name change.

"Even though chemical engineering has always been about manipulating molecules, chemical engineers now work with biological mechanisms in addition to strictly chemical mechanisms," Rousseau said. "For example, biological catalysts are used in the creation of new chemicals for medicinal drugs."

He said, in recent years, the scientific concerns with the molecular transformation of matter have evolved to include strong participation from biological and life sciences. Students in the school will now complete a course of study in biology in addition to the already rigorous requirements of the chemical engineering curriculum.

School of Polymer, Textile and Fiber Engineering (PTFE)
The renaming marks the second change since the original School of Textile Engineering was established at Georgia Tech in the fall of 1897 - the third academic unit established at Tech. It kept that name for almost a century, until it became the School of Textile and Fiber Engineering in 1989, a move to more accurately describe the research and educational activities in the school.

Today the polymer, textile and fiber engineering program at Georgia Tech is one of only two such programs accredited by ABET in the United States. After a recent assessment and restructuring of its undergraduate programs, the school now offers a bachelor's degree in Polymer and Fiber Engineering with a polymer track and a fiber track. The school also offers masters and doctoral degrees.

"With the new name, the school will be more accurately described and better positioned to take advantage of the extraordinary technological and entrepreneurial opportunities in the polymer field," Griffin said.

Gaudry and two other Georgia Tech graduate students - Cindy Perreira and Russell Marzette - built an 18-inch tall robotic hand that could eventually sign the 26 letters of the English alphabet.

"We wanted to develop an interactive and fun device to teach children sign language, whether they are hearing impaired or not," Gaudry said. "We thought it would help them to visually see the signs rather than having to look at them in books."

The students worked on the project for two months this year as their final project in a graduate-level introductory course on "mechatronics" - an emerging technique in engineering that deals with the study of integration of familiar mechanical systems and components with new electronic components and intelligence-based software.

Students enrolled in the course, offered in Georgia Tech's School of Mechanical Engineering, must design, build and present a mechatronic innovation that fuses mechanics, electronics and information technology. In the class, students are taught to engineer for complete "smart product" development for the market.

Although the robotic hand project has a long way to go to market, the students have accomplished much so far. During their project presentation to the class in April, the students explained they were able to program the hand to make nine different symbols: the letters "A" to "D," and numbers one to five.

That's no small feat, considering the engineering involved in building a giant hand that signs.

"I think the most difficult part was integrating electrical components and computer-based systems into one mechanical system," said Marzette, one of the three members on the team.

"Getting the electronics to work together properly was a challenge," said Gaudry, who hopes the team can find time to take the project further. "Fifteen stepper motors are built in to control the hand and each motor has its own circuitry."

With fingers made from soldered brass tubing and rods, and strung together by cables connected to a series of small motors, the robotic hand is surprisingly agile. It takes about five seconds to sign a letter.

The hand rests on a microprocessor unit that controls the motion and all the circuitry to power the motors. The unit includes an LCD panel and a series of switches that allows the user to enter the letter or number they would like the hand to display.

Gaudry scrolls through the letters and numbers and selects the letter "C." Once selected, the motors begin to wind up the cables in the fingers, bending the joints until the hand produces the symbol, similar to the way a mechanical puppet might be manipulated. After the letter is signed, rubber bands connected to the back of each finger return the hand to the starting open position.

The team members said they entered the class knowing very little about electronics and microprocessor control, but learned more than they imagined. "The class is time consuming, since you have to put in a lot of your own time outside of the lecture portion," Gaudry said.

The robotic hand is just one interesting invention to come out of the mechatronics courses. Other notable inventions have been the self-playing guitar that actually takes requests, a machine similar to an ATM that dispenses money called the "CA$H-o-MATIC," and the automatic card dealer, a machine that deals cards and plays along with human players.

"The mechatronic engineering techniques used in this project are representative of the approach that's used today to design devices and systems that possess a degree of computer-based intelligence," said Georgia Tech Professor Charles Ume, who teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in mechatronics. "We expect to see the integration of mechanics, electronics and computing - mechatronics engineering - increase rapidly in the near future due to consumer demands for smart products and intelligent machines."

Georgia Tech's state-of-the-art Mechatronics Laboratory, which supports these classes, was built with a grant form the U.S. National Science Foundation, a matching fund from Georgia Tech, and financial and equipment support from Siemens.

Consider non-traditional programs
If it's been a while since you've been in school, consider applying for non-traditional graduate programs that let you get your degree from home or while you're still employed. Some schools offer distance learning degrees, which allow students to take courses at their leisure via video, DVD or online. At Tech, one student is even working on his master's in mechanical engineering while serving in the U.S. Air Force in Iraq.

Schools even partner with corporations to offer degree programs to a large number of employees at once. The advantage of this is employers often foot the bill for the entire degree; others will reimburse employees who make certain grades.

"Getting an advanced degree helps employees differentiate themselves. It gives them additional breadth and may qualify them for promotions," said Bill Wepfer, vice provost for Distance Learning and Professional Education. "Last year we had a big uptick in our programs. A lot of folks were very concerned about their employers and wanted to make themselves more valuable."

Apply early
Graduate schools only have so many seats, and many process applications year-round, so the later you wait, the fewer seats are available.

"We try to accept as many people as we can, but we get far more applications than we have slots," said David Hertling, associate chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "So don't wait until the last minute to send in your application."

Do your homework
Few things will ruin your chances of being accepted more than not clearly being able to explain why you are applying in the first place. And no, a tough job market isn't a good reason. "We're looking for people who have a sense of direction, people who know what they want to get out of the program and want the education, not just people who are coming because they lost or can't find a job," explained Ann Scott, director of graduate programs for the DuPree College of Management.

"You should be an informed candidate," added Beth Mynatt, an associate professor in the College of Computing who oversees admissions for the master's program in Human-Computer Interaction. "You should be able to say why this exact program is the one for you."

Brush up on your test-taking skills
Whether it's the GRE, GMAT, LSAT or some other acronym, most graduate programs require applicants to take a standardized test to be considered for admission. That can be a challenge for someone who's been in the workplace and hasn't taken tests in awhile. "People who have been out of school may underestimate how much they've lost their standardized test-taking skills," said Mynatt. So, take a prep course and hone your testing skills.

Pick your reference letter writer carefully
Applicants coming from a bachelor's program often have an edge in this area because of the simple fact that professors know what professors want to read and tend to write better letters of recommendation than employers. "You really need to find a supervisor who can write a good letter," said Mynatt, "because a good letter often can compensate for a low test score." A good reference letter should highlight technical expertise, initiative, communication and team skills and motivation for graduate studies.

Because this letter is not a job-related reference, Myantt said, comments such as "always gets things done on time" are less important than "suggested improvements in . . . ," "was the catalyst for . . . ," and "communicates novel ideas well." "Also make sure that your letter writer understands what degree you are applying to. Generic letters are worrisome," she said.

Highlight your achievements on the job
Grades are extremely important for applicants who are coming from academia, but for people who've been working for a while, job experience can help compensate for less-than-excellent grades. "We're looking for people who are going to be successful both academically and after graduation, so we want candidates who have shown a history of achievement," said Scott. "For example, has an applicant received certain promotions? Has there been a progression of responsibility in their jobs, or have they had a string of short-time jobs?"

"Workers offer a breadth of real-world experience," said Mynatt, who added that her program currently has a medical doctor enrolled. "So if somebody wants to do a project on how to design a medical interface, we have someone right here who has experience using that technology. That makes a huge difference."

"Since we'll have more trolleys than we had buses on this redesigned yellow route, the trolley will run every four minutes; plus, we'll have fewer delays because we'll have back-up units, which we've never had before," said Bob Furniss, director, Parking & Transportation. "We want this trolley to be so convenient that people will want to hop on the trolley and not bother with driving over to Technology Square."

Starting at the new turn-around circle located across the street from the new Health Services building, the trolley will drive around Ferst Drive to Fifth Street, cross the Interstate, stop mid-block before Spring Street, stop at the circle in front of the new Management building, then turn left onto West Peachtree to the Midtown MARTA station. The trolley will return to campus via Spring Street to Fifth Street to Ferst Drive. The eight new trolleys will provide service every four minutes, ensuring quick rides for the many students, faculty and staff needing to shop at the new Barnes & Nobles at Georgia Tech bookstore, attend classes at the new Management building, and shop and visit the rest of the newly opened Technology Square. In addition, the Midtown community and visitors are invited to use the trolley as well.

"Anyone can get on the trolley. We do not require an I.D., so visitors to Georgia Tech and Midtown can come to Technology Square direct from the airport. They can ride MARTA and board the trolley at the Midtown station," said Furniss. " Guests of the new Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center will find this particularly convenient."

In addition to the new, quaint trolleys, the fleet of regular buses for the Stinger service will be replaced in September with new, highly efficient diesel buses. The new fleet also will have extra back-up buses, which will reduce delays due to mechanical problems. With the new buses and trolleys, Georgia Tech surpasses the state mandate of 40 percent alternative fuel vehicles in the entire fleet.

"When we renegotiated the contract with the vendor providing transportation services for the campus, we were able to add some requirements, including monitoring and data collection, to ensure more reliable service," said Furniss. "Our vendor, Cognisa, made a serious commitment to honor those terms and provide the new, more efficient vehicles for all the routes."

The trolleys will also sport a pilot GPS (Global Positioning System) tracking system to tell riders waiting at four major bus stops when the next trolley will arrive. The four stops will have an electronic sign indicating how many minutes until the next trolley arrives. Riders will also be able to view this information online on computers or PDAs. Over the next two semesters, Parking & Transportation will assess whether to continue and expand the system to the rest of the fleet.

The Red, Blue and Green Stinger routes have few changes from last year, except for more reliable service due to the extra buses. The frequency on the Green route, which runs through Home Park to GCATT (Georgia Centers for Advanced Telecommunications Technology) on 14th Street, is much improved with the wait reduced to 15 minutes, from 30 minutes last year. The Red and Blue loops, which circle the campus, have a seven-minute wait.

Riders can view the most current routes and updated schedules for the trolley (Yellow route), and Stinger routes online in the Transportation folder on the Parking & Transportation website: http://www.parking.gatech.edu/ie_home.html

Parking at Technology Square

The new trolley is designed to minimize the need for the campus community to drive to Technology Square. However, the new Technology Square deck with 1,550 parking spaces is available. This deck is gated 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and during business hours charges an hourly fee for non-permit holders. From 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. Monday - Friday, drivers without a permit for that deck will have to pay an hourly fee. After 5 p.m. on weekdays and during weekends, anyone with a Georgia Tech parking permit and a Georgia Tech Buzz Card will be able to park for free. The only exception to free weekend parking will be Saturday football games and large special events. In addition, metered parking spaces along 5th Street and Spring Street are designed to be used by visitors to the retailers in Technology Square and will be strictly enforced.

Clough will specifically address the importance of funding for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, which provides 40 percent of federal funding for basic science research. Recently, the federal funding for research has focused on the life sciences, a development that PCAST has cautioned may result in unbalancing the federal research and development portfolio, potentially harming not only science and engineering fields, but biomedical research as well. Clough is expected to testify that biomedical research relies not just on biology, but also on chemistry, physics and various fields of engineering and declining federal support in these areas will negatively impact the life sciences.

Research from the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, of which Clough is an executive committee member, indicates that the United States needs to be a leader in every major field of research if it is to sustain the innovation that drives the country's prosperity and world leadership. One indicator that the United States is in danger of slipping in its global leadership role in science research is the decrease in the number of Ph.D.'s awarded in these fields. The number of Ph.D.s awarded in the United States in the sciences peaked in 1998. Engineering Ph.D.s peaked in 1996 and had declined by more than 15 percent by 1999. Federal funding of university research is seen by graduate students as an indicator of career opportunities. As the financial support slips away, so do the number of potential researchers in the United States. The drop in researchers is occurring, at the same time that international universities are ramping up their programs and luring many graduate students away from American universities.

In addition to funding research grants and contracts, the Office of Science also runs the country's 10 national laboratories and 14 technology centers. Providing university researchers with access to these facilities, the Office of Science offers incredible opportunities for university researchers to use research tools, such as the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Lab and the National Synchrotron Light Source at the Brookhaven National Lab. Federal support is crucial to keeping these relationships growing.

Clough was invited to testify before the committee by U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander, chairman of the subcommittee on energy. Also testifying will be Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham; Director of the Office of Science Ray Orbach; Nobel laureate and former director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, Burton Richter; and Hermann Grunder, director of Argonne National Laboratory. The hearing will take place at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room SD-366 at 9:30 a.m.

McMath received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1972, joining the faculty of Tech shortly thereafter. In 1996, McMath became Fulbright lecturer at the University of Genoa, teaching American Political History at universities in Italy, France and England. That same year, he was promoted to vice provost after serving as chair of Georgia Tech's School of History, Technology, and Society.

McMath oversees student academic services and coordinates campus-wide initiatives to improve the teaching and learning environment for undergraduates, including the design of a new undergraduate learning center for the Tech campus. As professor of history, he continues to supervise graduate students and teach undergraduate courses in American Social History, the History of the American South, and the History of Industry and Labor. He has received the Institute's George C. Griffin Award for Outstanding Teaching and the ANAK faculty service award. In 1989, he received the Governor's Award in the Humanities from the Georgia Humanities Council. He is past president of the Agricultural History Society and is the author or co-author of seven books and numerous articles on American history and the history of the South. McMath is listed in Contemporary Authors, the Dictionary of American Scholars, and Who's Who in America (46th edition). He continues to lecture on American political history at leading universities in the United States and Europe.

First Cyber Corps Students Graduate from Tech: Information Security Expertise in Demand

The first two Georgia Tech students in the National Science Foundation's Cyber Corps scholarship program graduate this semester with highly sought after information security expertise. Cyber Corps, a scholarship opportunity for students in either the Department of Defense Information Assurance Scholarship Program or the NSF Scholarship for Service Program, is designed to increase and strengthen the cadre of federal information assurance professionals who protect the government's critical information infrastructure. The program provides full scholarships for qualified students attending an approved institution of higher learning. In addition, students in the program work in paid internships with a federal agency and may be offered permanent employment upon graduation.

Christopher Messer, Master of Science in International Affairs, and Charles "Chad" Sellers, Master of Science in Computer Science with a concentration in Information Security, were selected for the NSF's Scholarship for Service program for students studying information security. Georgia Tech, as a Center of Academic Excellence for Information Assurance Education (CAE/IAE), coordinates these efforts through the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC). At Georgia Tech, the College of Computing and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts both offer graduate-level information security concentration or degrees.

"Cyber Corps is intended to cover the broad spectrum of information security from policy to technology," said Mustaque Ahamed, professor of computing and co-director of GTISC. "That the first two Cyber Corps graduates from Georgia Tech are graduating with degrees in international affairs and computer science really fits the mission of the program."

"The best part of my studies here at Georgia Tech has been exploring the cutting edge of security," says Sellers. "At Georgia Tech, I have been able to explore the technologies of tomorrow as well as analyze the technologies of today in order to improve upon them."

Messer has accepted an offer to work in the Information Assurance Directorate of the National Security Agency (NSA) and will focus on information security policies and procedures. Sellers, a self-described "technical guy," plans to work in network security with the NSA Information Assurance Directorate as well.

"The Cyber Corps program has given me the opportunity to get in on the ground level of a field of huge importance to national security," says Messer. "It has helped me to make professional and career contacts with leading scholars and practitioners across the country, and it has provided the finances necessary to do this."

These "packet-level simulations" model individual data packets as they travel through a computer network. Downloading a web page to one's home computer or sending an e-mail message typically involves transmitting several packets through the Internet. Packet-level simulations provide a detailed, accurate representation of network behavior (e.g., congestion), but are very time consuming to complete.

Engineers and scientists routinely use such simulations to design and analyze new networks and to understand phenomena such as Denial of Service attacks that have plagued the Internet in recent years. Because of the time required to complete the simulation computations, most studies today are limited to modeling a few hundred network components such as routers, servers and end-user computers.

"The end goal of research on network modeling and simulation is to create a more reliable and higher-performance Internet," says Fujimoto. "Our team has created a computer simulation that is two to three orders of magnitude faster than simulators commonly used by networking researchers today. This finding offers new capabilities for engineers and scientists to study large-scale computer networks in the laboratory to find solutions to Internet and network problems that were not possible before."

The Georgia Tech researchers have demonstrated the ability to simulate network traffic from over 1 million web browsers in near real time. This feat means that the simulators could model a minute of such large-scale network operations in only a few minutes of clock time.

Using the high-performance computers at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the Georgia Tech simulators used as many as 1,534 processors to simultaneously work on the simulation computation, enabling them to model more than 106 million packet transmissions in one second of clock time -- two to three orders of magnitude faster than simulators commonly used today. In comparison, the next closest packet-level simulations of which the research team is aware have simulated only a few million packet transmissions per second.

The research team plans to present their findings at the IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS) in October. Team members include: Mostafa Ammar, Regents professor of Computing; Kalyan Perumalla, post-doctoral/research faculty; George Riley, assistant professor in School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Fujimoto. Graduate students involved in this project include Alfred Park, Computing and Talal Jaafar, Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Major funding was provided by the Network Modeling and Simulation Program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation. The cluster computing platforms at Georgia Tech were obtained through a grant from Intel.

1.Before you even get to school, call your roommate. Find out what he or she is bringing. You don't want to be stuck in a room with two stereos, two TV's and two refrigerators (or, maybe you do). Most of all, get to know them. Find out about their like and dislikes and what you have in common. A little courtesy at the beginning can go a long way.

2.Set up some ground rules. Figure out what you can tolerate and what will drive you out of your mind. Work out what's fair to share and what's off limits before you get mad about your roomie borrowing your iPod. Talking about the rules before-hand may seem like a downer, but it'll help you avoid some of the those nasty arguments in the future.

3.Learn each other's habits and rhythms. Find out if he's a night or a morning person and develop some ground rules so you can both sleep and party when your body says it's time.

4.If a problem does arise, talk to them about it (are you sensing a theme here?) before complaining to everyone else on your hall. Often, people aren't always aware that they're being an inconsiderate jerk.

5.Devise a communication system to avoid those embarrassing walk-ins when you're with a date. A sock on the door, or an index card in the door jamb can alert your roommate that you're otherwise engaged.

6.Invest in some earplugs. Residence halls are loud places. And plugging in before bedtime is a lot easier than going upstairs for the sixth time to ask those metal heads to turn down their Ozzfest.

7.Kick the snooze alarm habit. There's nothing more annoying than living with a roommate who sets her alarm for 6 a.m. only to hit snooze every 10 minutes for an hour.

8. Throw a hall party with your neighbors. Another fast way to make friends, hall parties can be a great way to meet people from other floors. Setting up one room as a disco, another as the bar and another as a game room can turn your hall into a mini club.

9. Most of all, lighten up. College is all about new people and experiences, so if everything's not exactly the way you want it, c'est la vie. Learning to live with annoyances now will make it easier on you when you get out into the real world.

"It's a great place to walk around, and it really connects Georgia Tech with Midtown," said Sally Flocks, president and chief executive officer of PEDS.

PEDS has presented Golden Shoe Awards for the past four years to people, projects and agencies that have contributed significantly during the past year toward making metro Atlanta safer and more accessible to pedestrians.

Located along Fifth Street west of the Biltmore between West Peachtree and Williams streets in Midtown, Technology Square and Centergy combine pedestrian-focused retail with education, research, economic development, hospitality and office space.

"The architecture is very pedestrian-friendly. The first-floor retail and the glass fronts to the buildings are inviting to pedestrians. The on-street parking makes walking safer because it provides a layer of protection between pedestrians and traffic," explained Flocks.

Flocks also praised the developers efforts to widen the sidewalks along West Peachtree Street, narrowing the traffic lanes and making crossings safer for pedestrians.

"Georgia Tech is honored to receive the Golden Shoe Award," said Bob Thompson, senior vice president for administration and finance at Georgia Tech. "Our Master Plan emphasizes pedestrian-friendly development and encourages pedestrian activities. As an extension of our campus into Midtown, it's vital that Technology Square be an inviting place for students, faculty, businesses and the local community to meet and interact. Moreover, Georgia Tech needs a robust retail and activity center convenient to the campus community."

Key to this plan is the DuPree College of Management. Featuring a large, glass-fronted courtyard that is open to the public, the building design provides pedestrians with a view inside the college. From inside, views of the surrounding streets connect students and faculty with the outside world. Because the building's entrance is set back from West Peachtree, the streetscape is open to natural light, preventing the street from feeling like an alley. Similar features that emphasize pedestrian activities are incorporated in the Georgia Tech Hotel, Global Learning Center and Centergy. A planned park across the Interstate 75/85 Connector, incorporating the Fifth Street Bridge, also emphasizes pedestrian quality spaces.

This month, Georgia Tech unveiled a new trolley service connecting Technology Square and Centergy with the Midtown MARTA station and the Tech campus. The rubber-tired trolleys are fueled by compressed natural gas and feature a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking system to tell riders waiting at the four stops when the next trolley will arrive. Riders also will be able to view this information online on computers or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).

Technology Square was developed by a Georgia Tech team including Jones Lang LaSalle as project manager, architects Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback & Associates and the Holder-Hardin Construction Team. Centergy was developed by a partnership of Kim King and Associates, The University Financing Foundation, Smallwood Reynolds, Stewart and Stewart and the Hardin Construction Company.

Georgia Tech alumnus Ryan Gravel also garnered a Golden Shoe for his research on the Belt Line Transit Project, which he began as a Tech graduate student. His idea is to use existing railroad tracks to provide mass transit throughout 40 central Atlanta neighborhoods.

About Technology Square and Centergy:
Designed to be the nexus of a thriving high-tech corridor in Atlanta, Technology Square and Centergy connect the intellectual capital of Georgia Tech, one of the nation's premier technological research universities, to the burgeoning business and residential community in Midtown Atlanta. Within walking distance from the Midtown and North Avenue MARTA transit stations and with easy access to Interstate 75/85, Technology Square and Centergy are easy to reach whether traveling by foot, transit, or car.

Major components of Technology Square include:

* DuPree College of Management, with 189,000 square feet of classrooms, offices and learning resource space, including Executive Education and Interdisciplinary Centers.
* The 252-room Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center, including an Executive Conference Center with 21,000 square feet of meeting space.
* Global Learning Center, including 113,000 square feet dedicated to classrooms, computing labs, offices and distance learning.
* Economic Development Institute, devoted to furthering business development and economic growth throughout the state of Georgia.
* Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, a research center to study metro Atlanta as a living laboratory for mixed-use development and related issues.

Centergy includes:

* Centergy One, a 486,993-square-foot office building featuring Georgia Tech's Advanced Technology Development Center, dedicated to incubating high-tech business start-ups.
* Technology Square Research Building, a 210,000-square-foot Georgia Tech building containing Tech's Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center, dedicated to becoming one of the world's premier centers for research, design and commercialization of broadband communications technology.

Retail outlets of Technology Square and Centergy include (to date):

* Barnes and Noble at Georgia Tech
* Starbucks
* LA Fitness
* Fifth St. Ribs and Blues
* Tin Drum Asian Café
* Moe's Southwest Grill
* St. Charles Deli
* Great Wraps
* Marble Slab Creamery
* Posh Day Spa
* T-Mobile
* Parcel Plus/Copy Club
* Modern Care Cleaners and Newstand
* Great Clips
*Ray's Pizza/Cedars Mediterranean
*Volcano Smoothie and Tea Room
*Celoe

Golden Shoe Award Winners

Technology Square and Centergy: Pedestrian-friendly Development for providing a vibrant, mixed use community that connects Midtown and Georgia Tech;

Decatur Downtown Development Authority: Pedestrian-friendly Traffic Operations for installing in-street crosswalk signs that cause crosswalk law compliance to skyrocket;

Jonesboro Road Beautification Project: Pedestrian-friendly Streetscape for installing sidewalks, landscaping, lighting, and bus shelters;

City of Atlanta: Pedestrian-friendly Legislation for legislation increasing fines for parking on sidewalks;

Atlanta Regional Commission: Pedestrian-friendly Education for Walkable Community Workshops focusing on the value of pedestrian-friendly street design;

Georgia State University Police: Pedestrian-friendly Enforcement for intense,
year- round enforcement of crosswalk laws;

Flora Tommie: Pedestrian-friendly Activism for persistent advocacy and organizing efforts on behalf of pedestrians with disabilities;

Colin Campbell: Pedestrian-friendly Media for persistent attention to aggressive panhandling, speeding buses, and other problems facing pedestrians in Atlanta, balanced by columns on the joy of walking in other cities.

Ryan Gravel: Pedestrian-friendly Research for the Belt-Line Transit Project, which creates opportunities for pedestrian-friendly transit and development in Atlanta.

The Awards Jury was composed of
* Richard Dagenhart, Professor of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology
* Jim Durrett, Executive Director, Urban Land Institute, Atlanta District Council
* Sally Flocks, President & CEO, Pedestrians Educating Drivers on Safety
* Ronni French, Director of Development, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University
* Karen Huebner, Director, City of Atlanta Urban Design Commission

PEDS is a member-based organization dedicated to making metro Atlanta safe and accessible for all pedestrians.

Throughout August 2003, the Red Planet has appeared bigger and brighter in the night sky as its orbit brings it closer to Earth. But at 5:51 a.m. Aug. 27, Mars will be closer to Earth than it has been at any time in the past 59,000 years, said Jim Sowell, an astronomer and physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

"Normally it's one of the brightest objects in the heavens, but Mars will double in brightness during this period," Sowell said. "It is almost already as big as it is going to appear, and it will stay this large through September."

Through a telescope, Mars should appear as an orange disk with possibly a white ice cap, he said. But there are other ways for the public to catch a glimpse of the planet, too.

Today, NASA announced it will allow sky watchers an unprecedented opportunity to suggest places on Mars that should be photographed from a spacecraft orbiting the planet. Camera operators for NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are ready to take suggestions online for new places for images from the Mars Orbiter Camera.

The spacecraft, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has been orbiting Mars since 1997, having conducted more than 20,000 orbits so far. The Mars Orbiter Camera onboard has taken more than 120,000 pictures in that time.

Many of the camera's images have sharp enough resolution to show features as small as a school bus. The images have revealed relatively recent gully erosion, ancient sedimentary rocks and many other spectacular scientific surprises.

An online gallery of pictures taken by the camera is available at the link below.

"We've only covered about three percent of the surface area of Mars with the high-resolution camera. We want to be sure we're not missing some place that could be important, so we're casting a wide net for new suggestions," said Dr. Ken Edgett, staff scientist at Malin Space Science Systems, the San Diego firm that supplied and operates the camera for NASA.

"We're looking for excellent suggestions of areas on Mars that we have not already imaged," Edgett said. "We'll look at every request that comes in."

Information about how to submit requests is posted online at the link below.

Requesters should describe the purpose for the suggested image. Suggestions for target sites already imaged by the camera will be disqualified unless there is a convincing reason for repeating the target.

"Some of the best requests may be places nowhere near any site the Mars Orbiter Camera has imaged before," Edgett said. As with pictures desired by Mars scientists working with the camera every day, new suggestions will need to wait until the Mars Global Surveyor flies directly over the selected target, which could be several months or longer.

The first images from this public suggestion program will probably be released this fall.

Wang is ranked number 20 with nearly 2,350 citations to 121 nanotechnology papers published during the last decade. Wang also was a principal author of one of the most cited nano papers last year in the area of chemistry. The paper, "Nanobelts of semiconducting oxides," reports a remarkable way of making ribbon-like, metal oxide fibers, which the authors refer to as "nanobelts" because they have a rectangular cross-section.

Science Watch, which is published by Philadelphia-based Institute of Scientific Information, also ranks the top 25 institutions worldwide according to the number of citations received to papers published on nano topics in the last decade. Georgia Tech ranks number 12 with a total of 6,150 citations.

In an interview with Wang that appears in the bulletin, Science Watch writes that Wang's research "is clearly going places as his output of research papers shows." Some of his papers have been singled out for special mention, including his paper in Microscopy and Microanalysis on the structures of oxide nanobelts and nanowires, which the journal selected as the best paper it had published in 2002.

Wang's nanobelts have widths of 30 to 300 nanometers, can grown up to a millimeter or more in length, and can be synthesized with a large degree of control over their structure. According to Wang, their belt-like morphology appears to be a common structural characteristic for this family of semiconducting oxides.

Speaking to Science Watch, Wang outlined his plans for the future: "My research will focus on two aspects: the application and integration of nanobelt materials with other microsystems; and applications of nanobelts in biomedical science." Ultimately he predicts that his nanobelts will play a part in cancer treatment.

"One day, we may use these materials for in-situ, real-time, non-destructive and remote monitoring within the human body, using them to detect cancer cells-and this might even be possible by sending a single such cell," he said. "Meanwhile we are concerning on developing nanobelt structures from improving the performance of mico- and nan-electromechanical systems."

The respected trade publication follows trends in construction, design and planning of facilities at schools, junior colleges and universities throughout the United States. This month's issue honors the J.S. Coon Building renovation as one of 16 outstanding buildings in the Renovation/Modernization category of the 2003 American School & University Architectural Portfolio, compiled annually since 1983.

"We're very proud of the new facility, and I think everybody at Georgia Tech can be proud of it," said Randy Engle, chair of the School of Psychology.

The renovation, designed by the Atlanta architecture firm of Jova Daniels Busby, transformed the early 20th century building on Cherry Street and behind Tech Tower into a 21st century home for the students, faculty and staff of Georgia Tech's School of Psychology.

The Coon Building was erected in 1912 and was first called the New Shop building. It later was renamed in honor of John Sayler Coon (1854-1938), one of the Institute's original faculty members. "Uncle Si," as students knew him, was a professor of mechanical engineering who retired in 1922.

The Coon Building's original architect, Francis Palmer Smith, also was head of Georgia Tech's first Achitecture Department, formed in 1908.

"We are particularly pleased that efforts have been made to preserve this important historic building designed by one of our own," Georgia Tech architecture Professor Robert Craig said.

Between October 2001 and September 2003, Uncle Si's campus namesake was transformed through an interior demolition and total renovation that included various changes to the building's exterior plus construction of an 11,000-square-foot addition and a 4,200-square-foot mezzanine. Architects and designers went to great lengths to maintain or incorporate some of the building's original architectural features into its new floor plans, Engle said.

"The Coon Building is one of the most historic buildings on campus, and since we have so few like it, keeping the historic qualities of the building was something we wanted to do from the beginning," he said. "When we first started looking for a new home, the Coon building didn't seem like a real good match. But we worked with several architects and designs, and eventually we found ways to make the building work for the School of Psychology."

Gary Petherick in the Office of Facilities was project manager for the Coon renovation, and he said he couldn't be more proud of the final result.

"I have been fortunate to have been involved with four other major renovations of historic buildings during my career at Tech, and I can tell you it is always a good feeling to see our older buildings brought back to life," Petherick said. "In my opinion, one of the things that makes [the Coon renovation] stand out is the way the interior was made new while allowing the character of the original building to be retained."

He said a good example of this is how the building addition allowed the old shop wing to be renovated, making full use of the story-and-a-half space and bringing part of the building exterior inside.

"It created a very interesting, atrium-like space," Petherick said. He and Engle said that many unique challenges cropped up through the project. For example, making some rooms in the former mechanical shop quiet enough for researchers to conduct sensitive research requiring concentration and few distractions for test subjects was a major hurdle.

"With the Whistle right across the street, well, noise was a problem for us," Engle said. But designers tackled it by adding extra insulation to labs and testing spaces while keeping many of the interior, exposed-brick walls visible to occupants, he said.

And, again, because of the building's location in the Georgia Tech Historic District, it was important that Coon's exterior appearance be altered as little as possible, Petherick said. It was no easy task.

"The original building was made up of three wings, and the not all of the existing floor levels matched," he said. "One of the challenges faced by the designers was to make the building accessible [to the disabled], and this was accomplished by a combination of interior ramps and an elevator. In addition to the problems posed by the historic nature of the building … many unforeseen conditions in the old building challenged the contractor and the designers during construction. But these were overcome by maintaining a team-work focus between Georgia Tech, Jova Daniels Busby and Juneau Construction."

The report will appear in the Nov. 15 edition of Analytical Chemistry, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

"Our technology provides a hand-held sensing device capable of real-time detection, reducing the time between drug seizure and laboratory analysis," says Desmond Stubbs, a doctoral candidate in chemistry working under the direction of William Hunt, Ph.D., a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The sensor, which performed well in the lab and in a field test with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, is "an elegant fusion of biotechnology and microelectronics," according to Hunt. This combination of disciplines makes the sensor superior to previous "electronic noses." The U.S. government will spend more than $19 billion this year in the war on drugs, according to the Office of National Drug Policy. Police dogs are important tools in this battle; their highly developed olfactory systems can detect small molecules in the part-per-billion range.

But using dogs has its drawbacks. They require expensive handlers to train and care for them, and the seized drugs must still be sent to the lab for further analysis - adding trained technicians and costly lab equipment to the tab.

Plus, scientists still don't know exactly what chemicals the dogs are sensing, allowing for significant variations from one dog to the next. Dogs also have trouble detecting specific drug targets in the presence of other odors, such as coffee grounds.

"Unfortunately, the illicit drug traffickers are aware of this and invariably mask their product with different chemicals to evade authorities," Stubbs says.

The new device addresses all of these issues. Two key features of any vapor-sensing tool are sensitivity and specificity. Sensitivity is the ability to detect very small amounts of a chemical. Specificity is the ability to differentiate a certain chemical from a group of many similar ones (e.g., cocaine from coffee grounds).

The dog-on-a-chip can sense cocaine at a few trillionths of a gram. This sensitivity is achieved through surface acoustic wave (SAW) electronics, a method of detecting a chemical by measuring the disturbance it causes in sound waves across a tiny quartz crystal. This is a fairly common analytical method, and it has been used in other electronic noses, but by itself it does not address the problem of specificity.

The new chip goes a step further by incorporating monoclonal antibodies - cloned copies of proteins called antibodies that the immune system produces to fight foreign invaders. The researchers used anti-benzoylecgonine (anti-BZE) in the device because it differs only slightly in structure from cocaine, allowing it to bind preferentially to that molecule.

The SAW sensor is coated with a thin layer of anti-BZE. When a vapor sample passes through, cocaine molecules attach to anti-BZE molecules, causing a disturbance in the sound waves on the quartz crystal that is detected as an electrical signal.

"We are the first group to use specific antibodies to differentiate similar sized molecules in a complex vapor sample," Hunt says. This gives the dog-on-a-chip an advantage over its canine competitors and other electronic devices. It will also be significantly cheaper and less time-consuming by removing many of the steps from the current detection protocol.

The new device was carefully calibrated in a laboratory setting, and then it was put to the test in the field. "In field tests conducted at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, we were able to detect cocaine obtained during an actual drug seizure," Stubbs says. "By simply drawing the vapor through our prototype device, we got a positive detection in a matter of seconds."

The ability to detect and identify small, non-volatile molecules like cocaine based on their electronic vapor signature could also be used in airports and other locations to detect explosives and chemical warfare agents, according to the researchers.

The U.S. Customs Service and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) provided funding for this research.

A pdf file of the Nov. 15 report to appear in Analytical Chemistry is available by emailing Larry Bowie at larry.bowie@icpa.gatech.edu

"The medals we confer today are a way of expressing our own gratitude to some of the most gifted and visionary men and women in America," Bush said in handing out the 2002 National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology at a White House ceremony. "They have freely accepted the toil of overcoming challenges. They have put their considerable gifts to good purpose. Their fellow Americans are grateful to them, all humanity is in your debt."

Dupuis, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and two colleagues were among those who received the 2002 National Medal of Technology. The team was selected for their work to develop and commercialize light emitting diodes, commonly called LEDs - a technology that forms the numbers on digital clocks, transmits information from remote controls and lights up watches.

Also during the White House ceremony, Georgia Tech physics alumnus, W. Jason Morgan, now on faculty at Princeton University, received the 2002 National Medal of Science for his theories that describe how land masses move, how volcanoes are formed and how many features of the land and sea take shape. The award recognizes Morgan for his work in pioneering two fundamental ideas - plate tectonics and mantle plumes.

Before Bush placed the medals, hung on red, white and blue ribbons, around each honoree's neck in an East Room ceremony, the winners met with students from a local high school to help develop their interest in science, according to the Associated Press. "Thank you for not only being scholars and pioneers, but teachers, as well," Bush told the award recipients.

The medals are the nation's highest honor for work in science and technology and are bestowed to America's leading innovators. The medals are given annually to individuals, teams, or companies.

Dupuis' team was selected for "contributions to the development and commercialization of light-emitting diode technology, with applications to digital displays, consumer electronics, automotive lighting, traffic signals and general illumination."

"I'm happy to be a part of the history of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and this Medal is a wonderful recognition of that contibution," says Dupuis. "It has been interesting to teach graduate students about this technology that I perfected in the 1970s, then have them go out and discover and learn new applications and new ways to improve these important materials."

In August, Dupuis moved his Advanced Materials and Devices Group from the University of Texas at Austin to Georgia Tech where they continue to focus on developing new semiconductor materials, primarily to make light emitters more efficient so that every watt of electrical energy going into the semiconductor becomes light at 100 percent efficiency.

LEDs, small electronic devices made from semiconductor materials, are the world's most efficient light source being mass-produced today. They are seen more and more in automotive taillights and traffic signals. The energy savings of replacing traditional traffic signals with LED versions pays off in about twelve months or less, according to Dupuis.

His work resulted in the first demonstration of low-threshold, room-temperature operation of single-and multiple-quantum-well lasers grown by any materials technology, thus firmly establishing the MOCVD process as a materials technology for the growth of the next generation of compound semiconductor devices. Most of the lasers today, as seen in grocery store scanners and in CD and DVD players, are made using the MOCVD process, which Dupuis perfected.

The National Medal of Science winners were: James E. Darnell Jr., Rockefeller University, New York, N.Y.; Evelyn M. Witkin, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.; John I. Brauman, Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.; Leo L. Beranek, BBN Technologies, Cambridge, Mass.; James G. Glimm, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, N.Y.; Richard L. Garwin, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, N.Y.; W. Jason Morgan, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.; and Edward Witten, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J.
The National Medal of Technology winners were: Calvin H. Carter Jr., Cree Inc., Durham, N.C.; Haren S. Gandhi, Ford Motor Company, Dearborn, Mich.; Carver A. Mead, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.; John J. Mooney and Carl D. Keith of the Engelhard Corporation, Iselin, N.J.; Nicholas Holonyak Jr., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign, Ill.; M. George Craford, LumiLeds Lighting, San Jose, Calif.; Russell Dupuis, Georgia Tech.; and DuPont Co., Wilmington, Del.

Drivers who volunteered to take part in the study allowed researchers to install a small, electronic box in their vehicles, developed by Georgia Tech researchers, called the "GT Trip Data Collector." About the size of a car CD player, the device uses global positioning systems to record the movement of vehicles and various engine data, as well as where, when and under what conditions people drive in the Atlanta area.

The research team, led by Randall Guensler, a transportation professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, says the data could be used to help city planners decide such matters as what streets are in need of stoplights, which are prone to bottleneck traffic, and which have become heavily-used shortcuts.

"We can use this information about how people travel in Atlanta to better plan the future of our regional transportation system," Guensler said. "The data will provide a wealth of information for possible use in congestion mitigation, signal timing improvement and roadway design improvement."

Called "Commute Atlanta," the project is sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration, the Georgia Department of Transportation and Georgia Tech. The research team recruited 275 households to participate in the study. So far they have already collected data from more than 100,000 trips.

In the study, data such as speed, position and acceleration are tracked as drivers go about their daily routines. The data are so accurate that if a participant's vehicle was stolen, researchers could locate the vehicle using the equipment.

The information is uploaded, via a cell phone connection, to a main computer at Georgia Tech, where researchers monitor the travel patterns. The data identifies locations of recurrent traffic congestion on highways and arterial roads, and gives precise details on such information as what time it occurs, what days are the heaviest and how long it tends to last.

For example, on one stretch of Interstate 75 in the Atlanta area, "… if you arrive between 7:05 and 8:20 a.m., it's going to take you a significantly longer amount of time to get through that section," Guensler said.

Although Guensler and his group gain important data from the data trip collector, position data doesn't tell the whole story. So the team supplied each driver with a travel diary to better understand the types of trips each was making at various times of the day.

Looking at the commuting data of one of the drivers during the course of one week, Guensler pinpoints the driver's trips to the grocery store, daycare, home, school, healthcare, a drop-off at MARTA and two work locations. The trip data collector assesses traffic flow patterns from location to location - information drivers could use to choose better routes to take from point A to point B in order to cut their commuting times.

Nationwide congestions surveys typically rank Atlanta among the top cities for traffic congestions, with the average rush-hour driver wasting about 55 hours per year in traffic, according to an annual report released this month by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. The report notes that congestion extends to more times of the day and more roads, creating more extra travel time than in the past.

Guensler says the information his group is collecting could be useful to planners to help them prioritize improvements to the regional transportation system in order to obtain the biggest congestion reductions, at the least cost, and as quickly as possible.

Although Commute Atlanta is designed to provide critical transportation planning data for the Atlanta region, Guensler said it is also designed to serve as the starting point for a planned research effort that would evaluate the potential effects of cent-per-mile automobile insurance pricing. The Commute Atlanta project would establish baseline travel patterns for all of the 275 participating households, who would be invited to participate in a pay-as-you-drive insurance research study.

It is to be the first of two expeditions to the South Pole region that will provide data for the four-year, $1.8 million Antarctic Tropospheric Chemistry Investigation (ANTCI), a grant funded by the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs.

Ten other institutions are involved in the project, including major involvement by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado plus contributions from researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, among others. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research under primary sponsorship by the National Science Foundation.

This first ANTCI expedition runs Nov. 15 through Jan. 4, 2004. A second expedition is planned for 2005 or 2006. The 2003 expedition includes the participation of Jill Beach, a teacher from Rockdale County High School in Conyers, Ga., who will communicate what she does at the South Pole with her students via an interactive Web site.

"Antarctica is a land of mystery. But with these expeditions, we're going to be probing some fundamental questions posed by science about the region," said Professor Emeritus Doug Davis, ANTCI's mission scientist and the project's co-principal investigator along with Principal Research Scientist Fred Eisele, both from Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

"In fact, we're rewriting the book on atmospheric chemistry in Antarctica," Davis said. "The data we're collecting down there is changing our whole view of what's happening in the atmosphere, and why."

The broad goal of ANTCI is to gain a better understanding of the air above Antarctica. This includes measuring two major chemical families in the atmosphere and in the local environment - sulfur and nitrogen -- and the oxidizing agents that affect their levels. Scientists also plan to measure the levels of several other trace gases that affect atmospheric chemistry.

Sulfur is of interest because it is a major component of the atmosphere above Antarctica, and it can be transferred from the air to the snow, where it eventually ends up in the ice. When it appears in ice-core samples going back thousands of years, it can be used to indicate major geophysical events from the past, such as volcanic eruptions, El Ninos and major climate changes.

But what has been puzzling about this data is that it shows much higher levels of sulfur in the atmosphere over the polar plateau than scientists have been able to explain, Davis said.

Similarly, both recent and earlier studies of the air, snow pack, and ice cores show large fluctuations in levels of reactive nitrogen at the South Pole. Atmospheric nitric oxide - normally considered a pollutant in most regions of the world - appears to have a natural source at the South Pole and its levels are higher by nearly a factor of 10 than they are at all other polar sites.

This finding continues to be one of the most baffling made by the earlier studies conducted by Georgia Tech researchers, Davis said, and the unexpected findings are what led scientists to propose the ANTCI project.

Back to the South Pole for Answers

There are several reasons why they need to better understand the processes at work affecting these levels of sulfur and nitrogen in the atmosphere, Davis said.

Chief among them is that a better understanding of these two families of gases affects how scientists interpret ice-core samples, which in turn affects global understanding of past atmospheres and, hence, climate and what might affect it today.

"Analysis of ice cores from the Antarctic glaciers are among the most important pieces of information we have for understanding past climates," said Professor Judy Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Chemistry. "Georgia Tech's major role in ANTCI reflects the strengths and unique capabilities of our atmospheric chemistry program."

Using specially outfitted aircraft this year and in 2005, ANTCI scientists will take air samples from a variety of locations above the polar region to gain a bigger and more detailed picture of what's happening to sulfur and nitrogen levels. Investigators also will make measurements at the South Pole's Atmospheric Research Observatory as well as take a variety of samples from the Antarctic snow pack.

"The chemistry of the atmosphere is what interests us," said Associate Professor Dave Tan, another member of the scientific expedition going to Antarctica this fall. "Ultimately, atmospheric chemistry relates to climate, which affects us all. Previously, we thought that the Antarctic atmosphere was inert, but it turns out, it's not."

In fact, the region's atmosphere is quite active. In 1998, NASA satellite data showed that the Antarctic ozone hole was the largest on record, covering 27 million square kilometers -- bigger than Antarctica's entire 14 million square kilometers of surface area.

Researchers in 1997 also found that increased ultraviolet light coming through the hole damages the DNA of ice fish, an Antarctic fish lacking hemoglobin, according to the CIA's World Factbook. It also reports that ozone depletion has been shown to harm one-celled Antarctic marine plants. And in 2002, significant areas of ice shelves disintegrated in response to regional warming.

This warming climate appears to be melting glaciers across the planet, Davis said, raising concern that the planet's sea levels may begin to rise in the coming decades, inundating coastlines from Florida to Indonesia. Scientists - not to mention policy makers and the general public - need to understand what might be happening in the atmosphere as a whole so as to understand that phenomenon, he said.

"The question is no longer whether there is a global climate change," Davis said. "The only question is why is it happening?"

Because ANTCI is a regional experiment, the data collected during this project also will be added to and compared with samples taken from other parts of the planet by various teams of researchers - including those at Georgia Tech - to gain a better idea of what the global atmosphere is like today, Tan said.

"We need to understand this," he said. "We've got to know what we're doing to the atmosphere, how quickly we're doing it and how critical is it?"

Sparking Interest in Science Among Students

An outreach component of the ANTCI project also involves the participation of Jill Beach, a teacher from Rockdale County High School in Conyers, Ga., who will communicate what she does at the South Pole with her students via e-mail and a daily journal posted on a Web site.

"Everybody at the school is really excited about my trip, and so am I," Beach said.

Rockdale is the site of a magnet program founded in 2000 that is devoted to intensive science study, and Georgia Tech faculty work actively with the school in a variety of projects. Beach teaches 59 students how to conduct research - from generating a research idea, to conducting experiments and reporting their results.

"The hope is that with this trip to Antarctica, we will be able to generate some interest among the students in what I'll be studying, which is atmospheric research that looks at sulfur and nitrogen compounds in the air," Beach said.

Beach will arrive in Antarctica around Nov. 19 and stay until about Dec. 5. Once there, she will assist ANTCI researchers in setting up experiments and compiling the data they collect.

During two ANTCI expeditions to the South Pole, researchers will use balloons and aircraft specially outfitted with spectrometers and other equipment that will test and sample the air in a variety of locations. This fall, they will use a deHavilland Twin Otter turboprop airplane to take two, four-hour missions a day between Nov. 21 and Dec. 7.

Instruments and sampling techniques designed by Georgia Tech researchers to measure levels of nitrogen and sulfur in the atmosphere will be aboard. Beach will be there to help.

"We've been studying this organic sulfur chemistry for some time at Georgia Tech, and we've developed new instruments that help us to understand the sulfur breakdown that's occurring in Antarctica and the many other chemical species that are facilitating this," Davis said.

"We don't know that what we see at the surface at South Pole extends out over the entire plateau - how far does it extend upwards and outwards? A kilometer? Ten kilometers? A hundred kilometers? How general is this phenomenon?" Davis said. "Once you see something that is totally unique, you want to know how big is it? How extensive is it? We don't know whether this phenomenon covers the plateau region of Antarctica. And we don't know how deep it is. How high is it? How important is it to the regional atmosphere, and what effect does it have on the rest of the atmosphere?"

"We need many new measurements," Davis said. "We have to have a very reliable measurements of many different species to understand the atmospheric chemistry there."

When the plane lands each day, downloading and compiling this important data will be one of Beach's tasks.

"Jill is going to be a part of that data processing after the flights, and she also will assist with preparing instruments for each trip," Davis said.

"The goal in a lot of these field exercises is to involve high-school teachers, to share some of the excitement that this land of mystery has to offer," he said. "We're trying to get that excitement into the high schools themselves, and what better way is there to do that than by getting teachers involved in the actual science?"

If teachers can become excited about current scientific questions, then they're going to take that excitement back with them to young people and, hopefully, spark an interest in science that will produce future investigators with more questions.

"Jill's experience there is likely to spawn some projects that she can share and involve students with here," Davis said. "Once she's in Antarctica, then she'll be exposed to a broad cross section of other people working in the sciences. I'm sure she'll walk away with ideas of projects she can do with her students."

Tricky? Absolutely. But it helped him defend his point at the time, which was that it didn't take an omniscient and enigmatic God to create man -- only time and evolution.

Now an undergraduate researcher in Georgia Tech's School of Mathematics - and his two faculty advisers - say that a team of monkeys tossing coins and picking their favorite football teams could come up with the same championship teams as the almost-omniscient and definitely enigmatic NCAA Division I-A Bowl Championship Series (BCS) ranking system.

And they've developed calculations that demonstrate it.

Georgia Tech junior Thomas Callaghan, working alongside Assistant Professor Peter Mucha and Visiting Assistant Professor Mason Porter, scratched his head while pouring over the befuddling BCS rankings this past summer and wondered: Could a bunch of monkeys rank the top Division I-A football teams at least as well as the expert coaches, professional sportswriters and complicated statistical ranking algorithms in the BCS system?

It turns out that they can, at least in theory. Callaghan tested the hypothesis using simulated monkeys - the actual, mathematical term is "random walkers" - and a list of the 117 teams playing in Division I-A.

"Each of our virtual monkeys got a single vote to cast for the best team in the nation, making their decision based on only one, simple guideline - they periodically look up the win-loss outcome of a single game played by their favorite team, and they flip a weighted coin to determine whether to change their allegiance to the other team when making their vote," Callaghan said.

The "weighted coin" is the key, Callaghan said. In this hypothesis, the monkey's coin toss is meant to imitate what happens in the real world, when there's a better-than-50-percent chance that the winning team -- say, "heads"-- is the better team. But the weighted coin toss also allows the losing team -- or "tails," with a less-than-50-percent chance of winning - to still be considered the better team by voters, thus regarding the game as an upset. The monkey simply casts its vote according to the outcome of the coin toss, Callaghan said.

This system, of course, is far less complex than the labyrinthine BCS system, which looks at much more than a team's win-loss record. [See details below.]That system takes into account such things as the strength of an opposing team, when a game is played in a season, a team's poll averages and the sometimes-secretive computer rankings given to Division I-A teams by several formulas.

Callaghan's Monkey Ranking System, however, looks only at wins and losses. A monkey starts voting for a randomly chosen team in Division I-A. Then, the monkey meanders around a "network" of the other teams, randomly changing his vote for his favorite team each time a game is played. Again, the monkey bases his vote decision on a weighted coin toss.

"We let the monkeys change their minds over and over again, but the total number of votes cast for each football team quickly stabilizes," Mucha said. "We thereby obtain rankings each week of the season and, at the end of the season, by looking at the fraction of monkeys that have voted for each team."

Under this system, winning a game is directly rewarded and the strength of a team's schedule is automatically incorporated into the rankings, because games played against highly ranked opponents lead to more monkeys inquiring about a team and making vote decisions based on the outcomes of those games.

The mathematicians took their system and compared the monkey rankings with the real rankings from the past 33 seasons of Division I-A football.

It turns out the monkeys do almost as well as the BCS system in picking the two teams that face off in the national championship. For example, at the end of the 2002 season, the monkeys picked Miami and Ohio State as the top two teams. In 2001, they picked Miami as the top team and, in 2000, they picked Oklahoma.

"Although an individual monkey never settles on an individual team, the collective behavior of all the monkeys after they all vote appears to give you a meaningful ranking of teams," Mucha said.

"We're not statisticians. We don't know anything about statistics," he said. "I mean, there are just some real freakish football fans out there that really get into this, and we're just doing this as a fun research topic. But I think we've proved our point."

And that is?

"One of the main things that comes up in this is its simplicity," Mucha said. "All our system does is take into account who beats who. Only by that, we come up with a ranking system that, in the end, is almost comparable to all the other systems used to rank teams today. All these other systems have all these arbitrary points of information. At the end of the day, if you take all that away, the monkeys often come up with the same championship competition."

The researchers are quick to point out, however, that they haven't come up with the best way to rank Division I-A football teams.

"Saying our system is better than the others - you're not going to win that argument," Mucha said. "This was about trying to make decisions in an environment where you have very little data. It has applications to many settings, especially in helping a student understand how to attack a problem with little data when you're forced to make a decision."

Callaghan is more succinct.

"I believe there should be a playoff system," he said.

This summer research experience was funded by the National Science Foundation through the three-year, $1.5 million VIGRE program, which aims to increase the number of Americans who pursue careers in the mathematical sciences. Porter's postdoctoral position at the Institute is another component of Georgia Tech's VIGRE award, which encourages research interactions with undergraduates like Callaghan.

"The projects are intended to involve students in the creative aspects of mathematics in a non-classroom setting, and they're also expected to enhance the development of student communication skills," Porter said, adding that Callaghan's project did all those things while examining a topic of real interest to scientists and football fans.

"All of this monkey ranking actually comes from who plays who. The idea is that we spent time looking at this football network. But there are networks all over the place," Porter said. "You can look at networks in Congress, or when looking at the power grid and, of course, when you're talking about the Internet. Each of those represents a network of some kind. This is a timely topic and it's not going away. That's what makes it beautiful for Thomas to pursue as a research project."

Gary Schuster, dean of Georgia Tech's College of Sciences, said the VIGRE grant opportunities in the School of Mathematics are among the many undergraduate research options available to students throughout the Institute.

"This is one of the features that distinguishes Georgia Tech from many other universities," Schuster said. "Our faculty members are dedicated to advancement of knowledge in their fields, and students at Georgia Tech have the opportunity to work with a wide variety of the world's leading scientists on projects that lead to exciting and meaningful discovery."

Callaghan said he'd heard about this research opportunity last year through Porter and Mucha, and it immediately caught his interest.

"[Mucha] told me about this idea and I said, 'Sign me up!' I just jumped on the project and started doing research on college ranking systems," he said. "There are statistical methodologies that are out there among sports enthusiasts and serious scientists, and there are all kinds of ranking systems employed."

Looking at the Division I-A system, Callaghan said he quickly realized that it might fit into a mathematical study of networks and systems.

"There's information in that system. Given that - and the controversy over the rankings - we thought this would make a great exercise," he said. "As a result, I get a lot out of this by being able to look at real-world problems and elegant ways to address them using mathematics. For example, I got to learn how to use mathematical computer programs out of it, and I'd had no experience with them before. I got very comfortable using them after this. I also had a chance to gain a better understanding of networks, discrete mathematics, applied mathematics - a whole range of topics."

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.

Results of the 8th annual report on third-party logistics (3PL) trends and issues were released at the Council of Logistics Management's annual conference in Chicago. According to the study, more than three-quarters of North American and Western European respondents (78 percent and 79 percent respectively) indicate they use 3PL services. More than half of the respondents of Asia-Pacific (58 percent) also practice logistics outsourcing.

In addition, operating performance, cost management and service delivery are the three biggest ongoing concerns to 3PL customers in each of the key regions studied. The study involved 400 logistics and supply chain executives from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, China, Japan and South Africa.

"This year's study suggests that the 3PL industry is in transition as both buyers and sellers of 3PL services gain experience in their respective roles," said C. John Langley Jr., professor of supply chain management and 3PL study leader at Georgia Tech. "Market trends, 3PL user characteristics, 3PL service offerings and capabilities, management and relationship issues, customer value and strategic directions for the future were all examined in depth to provide a better understanding for the marketplace for 3PL services around the world."

The 2003 study had a number of interesting key indicators and metrics, including:

-- Western European respondents spend a larger portion of their logistics dollar or euro (65 percent) on 3PL services than do those in North America (49 percent) and Asia-Pacific (50 percent)

-- Globally, the four most frequently outsourced activities to 3PL providers are warehousing, outbound transportation, customs brokerage and inbound transportation

-- In North America and Asia-Pacific, the four biggest reasons why non-users did not use 3PL services were logistics is a core competency (44 percent), logistics is too important to outsource (40 percent), costs would not be reduced (32 percent) and control would diminish (32 percent)

-- In terms of the top 3 IT-based services currently provided by 3PLs for each region, North American respondents said warehouse management (70 percent), event management (66 percent) and freight forwarding (66 percent); Western European respondents answered warehouse management (75 percent), freight forwarding (71 percent) and transportation management (68 percent), while Asia-Pacific respondents replied that transportation management (71 percent), freight forwarding (47 percent) and warehouse management (33 percent) were offered by 3PLs

-- In terms of primary sources of IT solutions, 32 percent of Asia-Pacific respondents use 3PLs (compared to 29 percent of Western Europeans and only 16 percent of North Americans), 35 percent of North American participants use technology provider (compared to only 15 percent in Asia-Pacific and 6 percent in Western Europe) and 59 percent of Western European respondents use internal sources (compared to 56 percent in Asia-Pacific and 46 percent in North America)

-- In North America, the use of the Internet and independent electronic markets is up significantly from previous studies. The 2003 study shows that 26 percent currently use industry vertical procurement markets and 40 percent plan to use them in the future. This is a drastic shift from the 2001 findings of 11 percent and 17 percent respectively. In addition, 28 percent currently use transportation/logistics electronic markets and 63 percent plan to use them in the future, compared to the 2001 findings of 13 percent and 37 percent respectively

-- While more than 70 percent of all respondents view their 3PL as a "resource provider," only 24 percent of Western European respondents view them as a "resource manager," compared to 43 percent in North America

-- When comparing quantifiable measures of 3PL success between North America and Western European respondents respectively, logistics cost reduction (9 percent vs. 7 percent); fixed logistics asset reduction (16 percent vs. 5 percent); average order-cycle length change (from 9.8 to 7.9 days vs. from 4.7 to 2.0 days) overall inventory reduction (8 percent vs. 13 percent) and cash-to-cash cycle reduction from 25.6 to 18.3 days for North American respondents only.

Additionally, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young launched a facilitated learning and research group through its Accelerated Solutions Environment (ASE) center in Atlanta, Georgia in July, which consisted of 30 key executives from various industries and geographies for the first time to analyze and clarify the research findings from this year's study. The key message derived from that session was that proper definition of the scope of work with enough flexibility built into the contracting process with 3PLs is the key to maintaining a long-term healthy relationship.

"Companies in all industries must see the 3PL option as one that can provide value creation for the user firm, its customers and suppliers and the supply chain in general," said Mark Colombo, Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Corporate Strategy and 3PL study leader for FedEx Corporate Services. "The study showed that 3PL providers will increasingly be at the focal points of strategy formulation, operational excellence and information technology to make the maximum contribution in value creation for their customers."

Respondents by region included 221 from North America, 53 from Western Europe, 118 from Asia-Pacific and eight from South Africa. More than two-thirds of respondents globally came from the manufacturing sector, with the following vertical industries represented: aerospace; government; automotive; industrial management; chemical; life sciences; computers and peripherals; medical consumer products; retail; electronics; and telecommunications.

"At a time when customer expectations are increasing at exponential rates, product lifecycles shortening and new enabling technologies driving change, this study produces relevant data on how the 3PL industry is addressing these challenges," said Paul Matthews, Americas supply chain leader for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. "These learnings are invaluable in understand how companies view the 3PL industry and gaining insights on how companies can utilize 3PL services to facilitate a shift towards an adaptive supply chain."

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 tasking 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 -- 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.

The new system was developed by Atlanta-based, Connexxia LLC in conjunction with Georgia Tech's Enrollment Services office.

"We developed this system based on feedback we received that said most students go to the web first to get information about their prospective colleges," said Deborah Smith, vice provost of Enrollment Services at Georgia Tech.

But Smith decided to take the idea a step beyond the traditional bulletin board approach of most university web sites and use the site to encourage interaction between prospective students and admissions staff, current students, faculty and alumni. Smith contacted Connexxia, which customized its interactive AdmissionsGenie product to meet Tech's needs.

"Rather than using the Internet to simply automate the admissions process, we're taking advantage of the web's ability to allow students to choose what type of information they'd like to receive. This helps us get to know the students better and respond to their needs more quickly and on a more personal basis," explained Smith.

When a student logs into the system, their information is automatically sent to Banner, Tech's student database. An admissions officer will contact the student if requested, or the student can simply choose to browse.

While browsing, a prospective student can create his or her own college brochure filled with information about specific academic programs and campus activities that match their individual preferences. They can also read news and feature stories about what's happening on campus and in the city or check out profiles of Tech students and faculty. Students may also receive invitations to campus events so they can get a first-hand look at life at Georgia Tech.

Third year student Livia Carneiro said she used the web extensively when she was shopping for schools. "All of the schools seemed to have a lot of information about their majors, but not so much for the campus lifestyle," said Carneiro.

Which is why she's decided to participate in the site's upcoming chat sessions with prospective students. "I think the information you get from students is much more helpful than what you get from the admissions counselors, because the students will tell you what's bad and good about the school," she added.

For the fifth year in a row, U.S. News & World Report ranked Georgia Tech as one of the top ten public universities in the nation. The school was ranked 9th among the nation's top public universities and 37th overall, up one slot from last year. Moreover, its peer assessment rating (a school's perceived quality rating among other universities) was high enough to be ranked among the top 20 overall. Smith hopes to use the new recruiting program to boost Georgia Tech's reputation even higher in the future, in part by "attracting even more well-rounded students, more arts and sciences students, more women, and more minority students" to the school, which is located in Atlanta's vibrant Midtown neighborhood, home of the city's arts community, numerous restaurants and hotels, and a host of upscale office and residential buildings.

Connexxia Co-Presidents Peter Flur and Shawn Coyne appreciated Georgia Tech's selection of their company to help support its new initiative. "For an institution with the technology reputation and resources of Georgia Tech to choose our AdmissionsGenie service, when they had so many other options available, means a lot to us," said Flur. "We look forward to doing all we can to help Georgia Tech this year," added Coyne, "and to seeing them achieve the same kind of results that our other clients have experienced over the past three years."

AdmissionsGenie is a fully integrated service that helps colleges and universities use the Internet to create and manage a coordinated program of high-impact, personalized, two-way communications with prospective and incoming students. Over the past three years, it has helped produce significant increases in applications, yield rate, student quality, student diversity and admissions office efficiency at more than 20 large and small colleges and universities across the nation including Duke University, the University of North Carolina Charlotte, Ball State University, Oglethorpe University, LaGrange College, the Sage Colleges, and many others.

Michael Arad, who graduated from Georgia Tech in 1999 with a master's degree in architecture, has submitted Reflecting Absence: A Memorial at the World Trade Center Site as a design for the international World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition, launched this past April.

In what has become the largest design competition in history, 5,201 submissions were received from 63 nations and 49 states, according to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC). Each proposal was evaluated by a 13-member memorial jury, which is comprised of individuals representing various points of view.

Among its members are world-renowned artists and architects, a family member of a person killed on Sept. 11, a Lower Manhattan resident and business owner, representatives of New York's governor and New York City's mayor, as well as other prominent arts and cultural professionals.

"When the LMDC was founded two years ago, one of our key objectives was the creation of a beautiful and fitting memorial to those who were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the 1993 bombing [of the World Trade Center]," said John C. Whitehead, Chairman of the LMDC.

"Since then, many organizations have joined the efforts to rebuild Lower Manhattan and honor the victims, but no single group has toiled harder or longer than this dedicated jury," Whitehead said. "Through their tireless efforts, they have identified the best work of highly creative individuals and teams from around the globe. Generations to come will see the final design as a time when America was attacked but not bowed and heroes were lost but not forgotten."

The eight finalist designs required certain elements, including delineation of the World Trade Center (WTC) tower footprints, recognition of every individual killed in terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 and on Feb. 26, 1993, and a final resting place for unidentified remains.

Arad's Reflecting Absence design includes reflective pools set into the ground to cover the WTC footprints. Each pool is fed by a waterfall around its edges, and names are engraved in the stone around them. The pools also are surrounded by pine trees and stone paths.

In accordance with competition rules, finalists and jury members are not to speak publicly about their designs or the competition until a winner has been announced. But, Associate Dean Doug Allen in Georgia Tech's College of Architecture said he remembers Arad and his work at the Institute very well.

"He was really bright, and worked hard at his design skills," Allen said. "Obviously, he learned a lot."

For his master's thesis project at Georgia Tech, Arad examined a portion of the campus master plan - in particular, the southwestern edge of campus towards Marietta Street. His master's project, Insurgent Landscapes, was a design for an exhibition landscape that featured a series of mounds, hillocks and caves that would be open to Georgia Tech students and the immediate community.

"The formal language of his master's project came out of a study of the marginal and accidental spaces around freeways, plus his experimentation with digital software programs," College of Architecture Associate Dean Sabir Khan said. "Both were very new to Michael. The social programming came out of his readings on, and experiences with, contested landscapes."

Khan said that, of the nine master's projects submitted the same quarter as Arad's, his was the only one where the studio inquiry took on both formal and social issues, with each informing and pushing forward the other.

"Perhaps the form-making and the social programming was not to everyone's taste, but his project -- the propositions and the exploration -- had tremendous integrity," Khan said. "What is intriguing is the degree to which the issues he took on in his master's project -- of power, voice, and identity in a polycultural setting -- resonate with his competition submission."

Arad grew up in Israel, the United States and Mexico. He has been living in this country since finishing his military service in the Israeli Defense Force in 1991. He received a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College before beginning his graduate studies at Georgia Tech.

Upon graduation here, Arad moved to New York City in 1999 and worked as an architect at Kohn Pedersen Fox for three years. He recently joined the Design Department of the New York City Housing Authority and has been working on the design of two NYC police stations.

Arad lives in the East Village in New York City with his wife, Melanie Arad Fitzpatrick, who studied City and Regional Planning here. They have a newborn son, Nathaniel.

"It is critical that we have more minority representation in academia in order to better prepare minority students in the fields of engineering and science," said Graham, who joined Georgia Tech's School of Mechanical Engineering as an assistant professor this fall, following four years at Sandia National Laboratories.

Graham (ME '99) is one of three Georgia Tech graduates who each recently received a $20,000 grant to help newly minted Ph.D. graduates jumpstart their academic careers. The grants were awarded by FACES, a Georgia Tech program supported by the National Science Foundation that is designed to groom minority students for careers in academia. The grants are earmarked as seed money to help minority scholars build their research programs during the first academic appointment of their careers in a tenure-track faculty position.

Graham is well aware that he's bucking a national trend. According to a recent report from the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), only two percent of tenured and tenure-track engineering faculty are African American. The figure for Hispanic faculty is only slightly better; they account for 3.1 percent.

The numbers aren't surprising when you consider the numbers in graduate education. Although African Americans are well represented in the professional fields of law and medicine, they along with Hispanics/Latinos and American Indians are not well represented in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines when it comes to graduate degrees, according to a recent Black Issues in Higher Education survey. African Americans were awarded 7.7 percent of all master's degrees and 5.1 percent of all doctoral degrees during the 2001-2002 academic year.

"As a result, faculty of color are underrepresented in the STEM disciplines," said Hilary Hurd Anyaso, editor of Black Issues.

Increasing those numbers-particularly the students who will then enter the professoriate-is one of the objectives of the grant that Graham received.

The other two Tech students who received the career grant this year are: William Robinson, who completed his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering in May and recently joined the faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Vanderbilt University; and Chekesha Liddell, who completed her Ph.D. in materials science and engineering this summer. She is considering faculty positions at Cornell University and at Georgia Tech. Nine students have received the grant since 1999, the first year it was offered.

"When someone is starting out as a new faculty member, it is difficult to get a research program started," said Reginald DesRoches, an assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, who coordinates the faculty career initiative grants for FACES. "This really helps to leverage one's resources."

The ultimate goal of the FACES program, which stands for Facilitating Academic Careers in Engineering and Science, is to increase the number of minorities pursuing advanced degrees in engineering and science, particularly the number of underrepresented students pursuing careers in academia. One facet of the program is the FACES Career Initiation Grant.

FACES is one of several university-based initiatives funded by the National Science Foundation under its Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program. AGEP works to increase the number of AfricanAmerican, Hispanic and Native American students receiving doctoral degrees in science and engineering.

In addition, the FACES program offers a series of future faculty development workshops to prepare students for the challenges of academia. The program is a collaborative effort of the College of Engineering and the College of Science, OMED (Georgia Tech's Office of Minority Educational Development), Morehouse College and Spelman College.

Joining Dr. Clough at the meeting will be Anderson Smith, Georgia Tech's Associate Dean of Sciences, and Associate Professor Jung Choi from Georgia Tech's School of Biology.

Each will discuss the value, importance and growth in master's education in science and mathematics throughout the United States, particularly the growth and interest in professional science master's degrees.

Georgia Tech has four successful professional master's degrees in the sciences, each implemented under the leadership of Dr. Clough and Gary Schuster, dean of Georgia Tech's College of Sciences. Dr. Smith has responsibility for developing these degrees in that college, and Dr. Choi is the faculty coordinator for Georgia Tech's professional master's degree in bioinformatics, a popular program within the School of Biology.

Dr. Clough said the Institute began to offer professional science master's degrees because a significant number of bright students here expressed interest in science and math, but did not want to pursue careers in higher education. Many also were not convinced that they would get what they needed by beginning a Ph.D. program but finishing with a conventional master's degree.

"As technology became more ubiquitous in virtually every sphere of life, we also saw a need for a stronger knowledge base of science and math in the corporate and policy-making arenas," Dr. Clough said. "Corporate demand was increasing for employees with higher-level science and math skills, but not conventional Ph.Ds. Instead of a Ph.D. researcher who discovers new knowledge, employers were looking for someone with the skills to make competent use of those new discoveries. Others wanted someone with a specialized mix of skills, rather than a vast amount of knowledge in one narrow specialty."

To date, Georgia Tech has created professional science master's degrees in human-computer interaction, bioinformatics, quantitative computational finance, and prosthetics and orthotics. Each program -- generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation -- has produced successful graduates who work for the nation's leading companies and research facilities, including Los Alamos National Labs, GlaxoSmithKline, Toronto Children's Hospital and Vanderbilt Genome Center.

"These four degree programs are working very well, and we are playing around with some ideas for additional programs," Dr. Clough said.

The Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology is charged with collecting, analyzing and disseminating reliable information about the human resources of the United States in the fields of science and technology; promotion of the best possible programs of education and training for potential scientists, engineers, and technicians; and the development of policies for the utilization of scientific and technological human resources by educational institutions, industry and government for the optimum benefit to the nation.

The CPST was founded in 1953 and is a participating organization of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The non-profit corporation's membership includes leading professional societies, corporations, institutions and individuals concerned with advancing public understanding of professionals in science and technology, their roles, education and employment.

Georgia Tech's library was one of 308 to participate in the LibQUAL+ study, which used a survey tool to gauge user perceptions of services and to measure their satisfaction with services and resources so that libraries throughout the country can identify areas for improvement.

In all, 2,100 Georgia Tech students and faculty were invited to participate in the survey. Of those, 463 completed the survey -- a 22 percent response rate. The survey was completely anonymous and, as an incentive, respondents could enter their e-mail addresses into a drawing for one of several prizes.

"We truly appreciate the thoughtful feedback and insight provided by LibQUAL+ Survey participants," Assistant to the Dean of Libraries Kathy Tomajko said.

"In fact, in response to the survey results, the library already has taken steps to address user comments," Dean of Libraries Rich Meyer said.

Among the changes that are planned or have taken place:

* The library's hours were expanded in August. Both East and West buildings are open continuously from noon Sunday until 6 p.m. Fridays nd Saturdays between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. With the East building open all evening, students have uninterrupted access to collections, study areas and circulation and reserve services.

* Also this past August, the Library and Information Center introduced a new Web interface to facilitate student and faculty use and to improve access to resources and services. A significant change is the implementation of SFX, a utility on the Web site that provides seamless access to full-text resources and dynamic links to fully integrate information resources. Also, a new library catalog interface provides easier access, navigation and increased functionality to the site.

* Eight digital photocopy machines were purchased. They now are located near service points so that staff assistance is readily available.

* By the end of fall, library officials anticipate converting to the BuzzCard debit system for all services.

* Many survey respondents indicated they believe the library is in critical need of renovation. At present, officials estimate the cost of comprehensive remodeling, infrastructure modernization and furniture replacement is about $25 million. For now, incremental improvements are in the works. For example, in the coming year, officials expect to receive funds for restroom refurbishment and expansion of the Library West Commons.

* Survey responses also indicated that the majority of students who come to the Library to study expect all spaces to be free of ringing cell phones and the conversations they carry. Again, in August, the library established a cell phone-free zone throughout both buildings as a response.

* The library plans to double the allocation for popular reading or fiction in the coming budget year.

* Officials consider the transition to electronic full-text of journal and conference literature to be a critical priority. Specific titles and publishers mentioned in the LibQUAL+ comments have been reviewed and are being targeted for electronic access, Tomajko said. In addition, officials are adding electronic access for print journals when available.

And, this past week, the work earned his research team the most prestigious research prize given by the European Union.

Bredas, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, is one of a group of researchers - some based in Europe, others here in Atlanta - that has earned the 2003 Descartes Prize, an award for outstanding scientific and technological achievements resulting from collaborative research conducted in Europe.

Named in honor of René Descartes, the aim of the prize is to raise awareness of the scientific achievements of European scientists, highlighting the benefits of working together and the importance of the results achieved. The award ceremony for the 2003 prize took place Nov. 20 in Rome, and Bredas' research collaborators took first prize.

"It's a project for which Richard Friend at Cambridge was the spokesperson and that gathered research teams from Cambridge University's Departments of Physics and Chemistry, the University of Linköping in Sweden, my group at the University of Mons-Hainaut in Belgium and here at the Georgia Institute of Technology, plus industrial groups at CDT, Philips and Covion," Bredas said.

The award nomination is based upon these various research groups and their investigation of the revolutionary potential of PLEDDs for light and image display screens. Their eventual goal is to replace ubiquitous liquid crystal displays, or LCDs, with flexible PLED displays. This would allow for less costly processing and, because of the flexibility of the material, a new range of innovative applications.

"I am tremendously pleased by this recognition of Professor Bredas and his colleagues," Gary Schuster, dean of Georgia Tech's College of Sciences said. "The Descartes Prize is an indication of important contributions to science by Professor Bredas at the highest international level."

"The recognition of their work on advancing understanding of the fundamental chemistry and physics of organic, light-emitting diodes marks a new level of trans-Atlantic achievement for Georgia Tech that helps us fulfill our goal of becoming a worldwide leader in science, engineering and technology," Schuster said.

Bredas, a native of Belgium, joined Georgia Tech's faculty this fall, along with three other prominent researchers from the University of Arizona - Professors Seth Marder and Joseph Perry, also in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Professor Bernard Kippelen in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The four are widely considered pioneers in the fields of chemistry and optics, with a specialized interest in photonics - the technology of generating and harnessing light.

In addition to his appointment to Georgia Tech, Bredas also maintains an affiliation with his original research group located at the Universite de Mons-Hainaut in Belgium. The Belgian and Georgia Tech groups work in close collaboration. Members of both groups travel between the two locations as one way to strengthen research ties, Bredas said.

Significant progress already has been made in the application of PLEDDs - for example, Philips has incorporated the technology into their high-end Spectra shaver, marketed by Norelco. And, the technology appears to have great promise for video and other high-performance displays.

The program includes "Festival Overture on the 'The Star Spangled Banner'" by Dudley Buck; "Walking Tune" by Percy Grainger; "Pavanne from Symphonette No. 2" by Morton Gould; "Suite Francaise" by Darius Milhaud; "First Suite in Eb" by Gustav Holst; and "Rolling Thunder" by Henry Fillmore.

The Georgia Tech Symphonic Band consists of 55 musicians this fall, including graduate and undergraduate students from programs throughout the Institute.

"Many of these talented students have been involved in band since the sixth grade and have numerous accolades and awards to their credit," said Assistant Professor Andrea Strauss, director of bands at Georgia Tech and conductor of the Symphonic Band.

"Most of these accomplished musicians attended All-State and District Honor Bands in high school and are from nationally acclaimed high-school band programs, including Lassiter High School in Marietta, Ga., and Westlake High School in Austin, Texas," Strauss said.

The fall selections by the Symphonic Band include classic British, French and American wind band literature. For example, "Suite Francaise" -- composed in 1945 by Darius Milhaud -- represents five French provences, the very ones in which American and Allied forces fought together with the French underground for the liberation of France during World War II.

Strauss said Milhaud used folksongs from these provences so that Americans could hear the popular melodies of those parts of France where their grandfathers, fathers, uncles and brothers fought, on behalf of the peaceful people from these regions.

"The repertoire that we will be performing represents some of the best literature ever written for wind band," she said. "The compositional expertise of these renowned composers coupled with a quality musical performance will make for a very enjoyable evening."

The new campus, located near the Savannah International Airport in the city's new Technology and Engineering Campus (TEC) development, is the anchor tenant and cornerstone of the largest technology corridor project in Southeast Georgia's history.

Georgia Tech-Savannah is a partnership that makes economic sense: The world-renowned academic, research and business development resources that Tech has to offer will not only attract and bolster economic development in Savannah's burgeoning high tech community, but also will help meet the escalating demand for engineers in an increasingly technological part of the state.

To make an even bigger impact on the region, operations on the Georgia Tech-Savannah campus include two economic development programs, with core facilities in Atlanta, that help Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build successful companies: The Georgia Tech Economic Development Institute and the Advanced Technology Development Center.

Georgia Tech - Savannah

Academics
·GTREP - The Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program, known as GTREP, offers students who live in Southeast Georgia an opportunity to earn Georgia Tech degrees in civil engineering, computer engineering, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering through distance learning connections and on-site classes. Students take their core classes at one of the partner schools-Armstrong Atlantic State University, Georgia Southern University or Savannah State University-before transferring to Georgia Tech at the beginning of their junior year.

·Graduate Degrees - Georgia Tech graduate degrees are offered in the areas of civil and environmental engineering, electrical and computer engineering and mechanical engineering.

Campus Facts
·Georgia Tech - Savannah is the anchor tenant in the city's new 170-acre Technology and Engineering Campus development.

·Tech occupies approximately 50 acres and includes three buildings within the development: The Program Administration and Resource Building (PARB), the Economic Development and Research Building (EDRB), and the Engineering Laboratory and Analysis Building (ELAB).

·Georgia Tech facilities include 25 laboratories, six classrooms, 12 telecollaboration studios, a library and faculty and administrative offices.

·GTREP enrollment for fall 2003 is approximately 525 students. Of that number, 425 students are freshmen or sophomores at one of the three GTREP partner institutions, and 100 are juniors or seniors enrolled through Georgia Tech. Currently, there are more than 30 students pursuing graduate degrees under the advisement of Savannah-based faculty. GT-Savannah has 18 faculty members. Graduate and undergraduate courses are taught through a combination of on-site instruction and distributed education technologies.

Research at Georgia Tech - Savannah
·Diagnosis support technology - Researchers are using digital mammograms to search large archives of patient health records in order to help doctors better understand tumor images they find in new mammograms and make screenings more effective.

·High-performance materials studies - Researchers are evaluating the sustainability of composites used to reinforce hydraulic structures such as bridges and dams to find the most durable and economical options.

·Alternative energy technology - Faculty are working with public and private sectors to promote economic development and foster acceptance of alternative clean energy technologies through legislation, job training, technology transfer and promotion of Savannah as an "Alternative Energy City."

·Coastal engineering - Students are investigating the best methods to stop beach erosion and rebuild the shoreline using such solutions as structures like jetties, breakwaters, groins or seawalls, or softer structures,like beach nourishment.

Partnerships at Georgia Tech - Savannah
Academic Collaborators
·Armstrong Atlantic State University, Georgia Southern University, and Savannah State University are Georgia Tech's partner institutions for delivering undergraduate engineering education. These institutions also collaborate with Georgia Tech faculty in Atlanta and Savannah on educational and technological research initiatives.

·Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) -faculty work together with ATDC-Savannah and Georgia Tech faculty to attract animation companies to Savannah.

·Skidaway Institute of Oceanography collaborates with Georgia Tech-Savannah in coastal science and engineering programs.

·Savannah Technical College partners with Georgia Tech-Savannah in a range of educational and economic development initiatives, including alternative energy.

Industry Collaborators
·The Business, Education and Technology Alliance (BETA) helps grow the GTREP Scholarship Program that supports junior- and senior-level GTREP students.

·Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation -works in conjunction withGeorgia Tech-Savannah to deliver courses in aviation electronics and related topics that assist Gulfstream with the recruitment/education of engineers.

·Savannah Economic Development Authority (SEDA) is the catalyst for the development of the Technology and Engineering Campus. Georgia Tech-Savannah and SEDA work together to attract significant new manufacturing and assembly plant operations to the Savannah area.

·The U.S. Army Core of Engineers, Savannah District, is the top recruiter in Georgia Tech's Cooperative Program, that gives students an opportunity to gain paid employment experience in their field while still enrolled in college.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the scholarship program. The British Government established the scholarship for American students in 1953 in appreciation for assistance received after World War II under the Marshall Plan. The scholarship encourages potential leaders to become ambassadors for the United States and establish personal ties between the two countries. The award covers tuition, books, travel and living expenses for two or three years. Prominent former Marshall scholars include U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer; former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt; New York Times foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman; and the scientist/inventor Ray Dolby. Xu is one of 40 winners of this year's Marshall Scholarship. He was selected by the Marshall Committee Atlanta Region.

Xu will use his scholarship to pursue a master's in international relations at the London School of Economics and a master's in aerospace engineering at Imperial College. Afterwards, Xu said, he plans to pursue a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering followed by a career in the defense industry as both an engineer and an analyst.

"He has a great awareness of the world at large and is well placed to integrate his technical training with perspectives in international relations," said P.K. Yeung, associate professor of aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech.

Xu's love of aerospace began shortly after he moved to the United States from Zhengzhoun, China with his family. He was only 11 years old when his dad took him to an air show at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. "Seeing those aircraft was amazing," he said. But rather than wanting to fly them, he said, he wanted to design them.

He is returning to the Naval Surface Warfare Center in West Bethesda, Maryland over the winter break, where he will continue his work designing and testing the new Littoral Combat Ships (LCS).

"The old design methods are no longer working," said Xu. Designing hundreds of ships at once on the computer allows the Navy to test how ships perform with different weapons systems, hull types and engines, uncovering the best design for specific applications, he said.

Both the new ships and their design method represent a transformation in the Navy's combat and planning philosophy.

"The Navy is undergoing a dramatic shift in operations," said Xu. "They're focusing on shore fights, developing smaller, more agile ships that can fight in shallow waters."

The LCSs would run 50-60 knots and weigh about 3,000 tons. By comparison a typical destroyer weighs 9,000 tons, while an aircraft carrier displaces 80,000 tons. Both ships run closer to 30 knots.

The new ships would deploy in large groups in front of a group of more traditional ships. Able to run in shallow waters, the LCSs would be very fast and able to hit multiple targets at once. Launching unmanned submarines to clear mines and drone helicopters for surveillance, an LCS group would operate much like a swarm of insects.

"The idea behind these ships is that many smaller ships are harder to destroy than a few larger ships," said Xu.

Back at Tech, Xu has been engaged in more fundamental research on how air, fuel and temperature affect aeronautics systems. He has also spent time researching air-flow at the University of Maryland's wind tunnel.

Using his Marshall Scholarship to supplement his aerospace training with a degree in international relations will give him the perfect training for a career as a defense analyst, said Xu. "Because Britain is the bridge between the United States and Europe, if I want to understand the gap between American and European policy, the London School of Economics is a good place to be," he said.

In a recent speech to the fellows, former Senator Sam Nunn said, "Bridges must be built between the world of science and the world of human relations. Bridges, which can give shape and purpose to our science, can breathe heart and soul into our new technologies. Together scientists and policy makers must help our citizens reap the benefits of our exploding scientific knowledge and together we must protect this generation and future generations from the dark side of this explosion."

Norris, a nuclear engineering Ph.D. student, currently researches radiation and biological particle dispersion in buildings, as might be seen in a terrorist event using a radiological dispersion device (RDD) explosion or a bioterrorist event inside a building. Norris says she gravitated towards analyzing the policy side of this topic, such as needing to revisit first responder instructions for this type of terrorist event in order to reduce risks to the public. When she heard about the Nunn Security program, she jumped at the opportunity to add a solid security policy dimension to her doctoral research.

"Ultimately, the goal is to study how these deadly particles travel inside buildings to help better protect the public from subsequent inhalation doses," says Norris. "I personally benefit from this Nunn Security Program because it gives me the opportunity to couple science with policy that could potentially be used to save lives in the future."

The Nunn Program fellows participate in a weekly 3-hour seminar - requiring intensive readings to prepare for the robust class discussions and debate. Topics range from regional national security threats to cybersecurity and border security. Some weeks international affairs faculty introduce a topic followed by discussion by the entire class. Other weeks the seminar features guest lecturers such as Nunn, representatives from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council to name a few.

"The structure of the seminar is surprising to me. Class participation is plentiful and aggressive, while still remaining civilized. The diversity of the class introduces a range of viewpoints, some of them strongly against my fundamental beliefs. Most surprisingly, in contrast to mathematical, scientific, or engineering classes, the topics in this seminar are highly subjective in nature and require much different tactics to understand problems," said physics Ph.D. student Sauer.

Computer science Ph.D. student Iachello's research has shifted from his previous work in information technology security toward ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), a new way to look at computing systems, where computing is embedded in every-day artifacts, architecture and infrastructure, such as seen in experimental smart houses. In ubicomp, objects operate actively and invisibly to the benefit of their users, such as safety systems in automobiles, automatic tracking to find lost objects in homes, or automatic conference recording. As computers become more pervasive, these concerns will continue to grow.

"These technologies carry with them a host of policy issues, ranging from privacy protection to the responsibility associated to automatically functioning systems, on which I am currently concentrating my efforts," says Iachello.

The Nunn Security Program is designed to build bridges between policy, technology and the scientific community. Funded by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, over the next three years the Nunn Security Program will select young to mid-career scientists and technology experts for intensive year-long training in research approaches and policy methods for addressing national and international security issues. This first class of fellows began this fall.

"I've been very pleased by the pre-doctoral students in our program, and they come from a good spectrum of disciplines," said Dr. John Endicott, co-principal investigator of the Nunn Security Program and professor of international affairs. "Also, we have a few foreign-born participants in the program who bring different perspectives to the discussion on current events."

"The Nunn Security Program has allowed us to broaden our scope and bring together a critical mass of people and resources on international security and policy issues, including our international affairs faculty, our CIA Officer-in-residence, former Ambassador John Kelly who is affiliated with our Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy, and even engineering and computing faculty," said Dr. Seymour Goodman, co-principal investigator of the Nunn Security Program and professor, in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the College of Computing.

The grant also enabled the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs to add a new professor, Dr. Allison Macfarlane, with expertise in the science and policy of controlling nuclear waste, non-proliferation issues, and nuclear energy. A geologist by training who has done field work in such exotic places as Ecuador and Nepal, Macfarlane wanted to do more applied research and decided to apply her geological expertise to the critical issues of nuclear waste disposal and nuclear waste management. Macfarlane also has a joint appointment with Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

"My goal is to uphold what the MacArthur Foundation wants - apply more science and technology analysis to policy issues. I do this through teaching and working with the fellows, of which several have nuclear engineering backgrounds," said Macfarlane.

During this first semester the Nunn Security Program is focusing on introducing the fellows to the policy and security issues to put everyone on an equal footing on these new concepts. In the spring, the program will be more active as the fellows travel on a number of research trips to regional security facilities including the Savannah River Site and to Washington D.C. to visit with high-level officials at the Pentagon and other non-governmental organizations. In addition, the fellows will concentrate on their required research papers to be presented during the semester. Not satisfied with just allowing his name to be on the program, Senator Nunn has expressed interest in seeing the fellows present their final papers. The next annual Sam Nunn Policy Forum will be held at Georgia Tech on March 23, 2004 and will focus on issues related to domestic preparedness for bioterrorism.

McArthur, who earned a Master of Science degree in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech in 1983, and Russian Cosmonaut Valery Tokarev, have been named as the Expedition 9 crew, set to blast toward the Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in April 2004.

McArthur and Tokarev, both highly honored military test pilots, will relieve Expedition 8 crew, Michael Foale and Alexander Kaleri, who took up residence in October. Both McArthur and Tokarev have been to the Station before, but neither has "lived" there. They will spend several months residing and working on the Station.

Once on board, they'll begin scientific studies in Earth sciences, life sciences, fundamental biology, and microgravity.

McArthur flew on Discovery's STS-92 mission in October 2000, performing more than 13 hours of spacewalks to help attach the Z1 Truss and Pressurized Mating Adapter 3 to the Station. This expansion of the ISS opened the door for future assembly missions and prepared the station for its first crew.

Tokarev also visited the station on Discovery, delivering four tons of logistics and supplies on STS-96 in June of 1999.

In addition to STS-92, McArthur flew on two other shuttle missions, including a 1995 rendezvous and docking with the Russian Space Station Mir.

European Space Agency (ESA) Astronaut Andre Kuipers joins McArthur and Tokarev on their Soyuz flight. He'll spend eight days on the Station conducting experiments under a commercial agreement between ESA and the Russian space agency. Kuipers will return to Earth with Foale and Kaleri.

McArthur is among ten astronauts who have earned degrees from Georgia Tech. Three other graduates have been selected as candidates for future missions. Another astronaut is a former Tech faculty member.

Raised in Wakulla, N.C., McArthur earned a Bachelor of Science degree in applied science and engineering from the U.S. Military Academy in West Point in 1973 and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army.

Following a tour with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., he entered the U.S. Army Aviation School in 1975. He was the top graduate of his flight class and was designated an army aviator in June 1976. He subsequently served as an aeroscout team leader and brigade aviation section commander with the 2nd Infantry Division in the Republic of Korea.

In 1978, he was assigned to the 24th Combat Aviation Battalion in Savannah, where he served as a company commander, platoon leader, and operations officer. After completing studies at Georgia Tech, he was assigned to the Department of Mechanics at West Point as an assistant professor. In June 1987, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School and was designated an experimental test pilot. Other military schools completed include the Army Parachutist Course, the Jumpmaster Course, and the Command and General Staff Officers' Course. McArthur retired from the Army in 2001.

McArthur was assigned to NASA at the Johnson Space Center in August 1987 as a Space Shuttle vehicle integration test engineer. NASA selected him as an astronaut candidate in January 1990. McArthur became an astronaut in July of the following year. A veteran of three space flights, McArthur has logged 35 days, two hours, 25 minutes and 10 seconds in space, including 13 hours and 16 minutes of EVA time in two space walks.

International Space Station Marks Five Years in Orbit
On November 20, the International Space Station reached the historic milestone of five years in space. The unique orbiting laboratory complex has grown from a lone, uninhabited module into a permanently staffed, house-sized research facility.

The Station remains the largest and most complex international space research project in history. The Station will eventually triple scientific capacity with components awaiting the Space Shuttle's return to flight.

The first Space Station element, the Russian Zarya control module, was launched from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, Nov. 20, 1998. Two weeks later, the Space Shuttle Endeavour delivered the second element, the U.S. connecting module called Unity. The challenges, triumphs and tragedy shared by the international partnership since then have solidified cooperation on the Station among the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and Europe.

"Together with our international partners, we have learned how to build, operate and maintain a very complex spacecraft, through the good times and the bad," said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA Space Station Program Manager. "With this experience to guide us, we look forward to the future, with a vast expansion of the Station on the horizon."

At five years old, the Station is still growing. More than 80 tons of equipment and hardware are in the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Fla. being prepared for launch.

The Space Station has orbited the Earth more than 29,000 times. It is visible in the night sky as it flies more than 210 miles overhead. The living and working area inside the Station has a volume of about 15,000 cubic feet, larger than a three-bedroom house.

The orbiting complex has been inhabited since Nov. 2, 2000. Eight successive crews, 22 people, have staffed the Station. Residents have conducted research in bioastronautics, physical sciences, fundamental space biology, space product development and space flight disciplines. In the U.S. Destiny Lab alone, astronauts have worked on more than 70 different science experiments.

Hundreds of people on Earth support Station operations from the Station Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Round-the-clock science operations are handled by the Payload Operations Center team at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Hundreds of other scientists and engineers perform important jobs, such as training Station crews and building new hardware that will become part of the orbiting laboratory.

Additional research facilities are being readied for launch on future Shuttle missions. They will enhance Destiny's capabilities in the areas of fundamental space biology; glass and porous ceramics materials processing research; human physiology research; combustion research; research on the behavior of fluids; Earth observations; and experiment refrigerator/freezer conditioned sample storage.

Also awaiting launch at KSC are solar arrays and support structures that will triple the sunlight-gathering, solar cell area, thereby increasing the power dedicated to research by 84 percent.

The Node 2 module that will serve as a connector between the U.S., European and Japanese research labs is at KSC undergoing pre-launch processing. The Kibo Japanese Experiment Module, including a pressurized lab already at KSC, will also be added to the Station. The European Columbus Laboratory, under construction in Bremen, Germany, will expand the Station's volume to almost that of a five-bedroom house.

"I think it's important to give back," said Tech alumnus Mike Mattias. "We're so blessed with what we have. It's nice to step back and help people who didn't have the same opportunities we did."

Mattias has been volunteering with TEAM Buzz for the past five years. Even though he graduated from Tech in 2001, he still comes back every year to do a house painting project. This year, he'll be working with a group of volunteers at Charis Community Housing to paint the exterior of a house.

Coming on the heels of Hands On Atlanta Day, TEAM Buzz gives participants a chance to extend the generosity many of them practiced in one of Hands On Atlanta's 200 community projects earlier this month.

Not content to just help out Atlantans, alumni of Georgia Tech are heading up volunteer service projects in cities like Washington, D.C., Houston, San Francisco and Dallas.

This year marks the seventh year TEAM Buzz has sprung into action. The project was started by then-student Tony Chan, who gathered 1,200 volunteers for 30 projects in the first year.

Among the projects this year are volunteering at elementary school carnivals, painting and gardening projects at several Boys' and Girls' Clubs, repairing bikes to donate to kids and preparing meals for the elderly and people with medical disabilities.

For many students, TEAM Buzz marks the first time they've done community service. Their experience at this event often leads them to make volunteering a regular activity, said Katie Twist, steering committee chair of TEAM Buzz.

"I'd never really done community service before I came to college. It's really great to know you're helping someone and it's great to be around people who value the same thing,"

Since participating in her first volunteer event at TEAM Buzz four years ago, Twist has participated in a number of community service activities, including Hands on Atlanta Day. Twist hopes this year's projects spur others to do the same.

Many students who try to sell their textbooks back to the college bookstore at the end of the semester find that the store either won't buy it back because it's not being used in class anymore, or they get very little money back for them. Putting the Books for Africa bins at all campus buy back places gives students a chance to put the books to good use rather than throwing them in the trash, said Jennifer Wu, student organizer of the book drive at Georgia Tech.

During fiscal year 2003, Books for Africa sent $17 million worth of books to the continent. Since the organization's founding in 1988, Books for Africa has distributed more than nine million books.

Georgia State University, University of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Mercer, Spellman and Berry College are also participating in the Books for Africa drive, which was organized by Campus Community Outreach for Books for Africa. Emory University will hold its drive in January.

Georgia Tech will have five drop-off locations including the Barnes and Noble at Georgia Tech in Midtown and the Student Center.

For more information about Georgia Tech's Books for Africa drive, contact David Terraso, Institute Communications and Public Affairs, at 404-385-2966.

For more information about Books for Africa or other participating schools, contact Mary Murphy, Campus Community Outreach, at 770-664-6178.

Young received his bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering in 1952. Since then, he has dedicated his entire professional life to the pursuit of perfecting spaceflight as a tool for the advancement of humankind.

Associate director (technical) of NASA's Johnson Space Center since 1996, Young is responsible for technical, operational and safety oversight of all NASA programs and activities assigned to the center. As an active astronaut, he remains eligible to command future shuttle astronaut crews.

Young's NASA career began in 1962 when he was selected as an astronaut. His first flight was with Astronaut Gus Grissom aboard Gemini 3 in 1965. He subsequently served as commander of Gemini 10 in 1966 and as command module pilot of Apollo 10 in 1969.

In 1972, Young served as spacecraft commander for Apollo 16, a lunar exploration mission. Young made aeronautical history in 1981 as spacecraft commander of the first flight of the space shuttle, the orbiter Columbia. Columbia was also the first winged re-entry vehicle to return from space to a runway landing.

Two years after the Columbia flight, Young served as spacecraft commander of the first Spacelab mission, whose six-man crew performed more than 70 experiments. The mission returned more scientific and technical data than all the previous Apollo and Skylab missions combined.

Altogether, Young has logged more than 14,000 hours of flying time in props, jets, helicopters, rocket jets and spacecraft, including 835 hours in six space flights. Administrative appointments with NASA include chief of the Space Shuttle Branch of the Astronaut Office, chief of the Astronaut Office, and special assistant to the director of Johnson Space Center for Engineering, Operations and Safety.

Prior to joining NASA, Young was a test pilot in the U.S. Navy. His test projects included evaluations of the Crusader and Phantom fighter weapons systems. In 1962, he set world time-to-climb records to 3,000-meter and 25,000-meter altitudes in the Phantom. Young retired from the Navy as a captain in 1976, concluding 25 years of active military service.

Young has received numerous honors. These include the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, three NASA Distinguished Service Medals, NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal and Outstanding Achievement Medal, NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal, two Navy Distinguished Service Medals and three Navy Distinguished Flying Crosses. Young has also received the Georgia Tech Distinguished Young Alumni Award, Distinguished Alumni Service Award and the Exceptional Engineering Achievement Award.

Six Years and Seven Organ Transplants Later, Student Graduates with High Honors

When Kathryn Smith enrolled at Georgia Tech in the fall of 1997, she knew the road to graduation wouldn't be easy, but she had no idea she would have to struggle for her life. After just her first week at Tech, complications from a liver disease forced her to spend two weeks in intensive care. After her first year, she underwent a liver transplant. The next month she had another transplant and lapsed into a coma. Eight months later she endured a rare five-organ transplant involving her small intestine, liver, pancreas, kidney and stomach. Her doctors didn't expect her to live, but Smith fought for her life. On Saturday, she's not only graduating with a bachelor's degree in psychology, she's doing so with highest honors.

"I didn't think I would get through it," said Smith. "You hope you just get out of the hospital first and then you just hope you can walk. It helped me more than anything to come back here [to Tech], because it forces you to do things, rather than sitting around," she said.

Now Smith is applying to medical school. "I've always wanted to be a doctor, but this experience has strengthened my desire," she said. "I think I can bring something unique because I've been on the other side of it."

Smith's ordeal began when she was still in high school. In 1996, she was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis, a disease that causes the immune system to destroy the liver. With her liver functioning at 50 percent of capacity, she enrolled at Georgia Tech in the fall of 1997. The day after she got her bid from her sorority, she passed out and spent the next two weeks in intensive care at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where she was placed on a transplant list. She finished up her first year at college and was beginning the next one when she got the call that a liver had become available.

After the surgery, she thought she was in the clear. "I remember waking up and thinking that was easy. It was almost too easy," she said. Within a week of the operation, the liver failed, weakened by a blocked artery.

In December 1998, a month later, Smith had a second transplant, which was plagued by complications. Her intestines began to shut down. When the doctors told her parents she had just 24 hours to live, they gathered their friends and family for a prayer vigil at the hospital. Whether it was the hospital, prayer or the love of her family and friends; she doesn't know. She spent the next month unconscious but alive.

Smith's ordeal wasn't over. The next few months would be filled with infections that not only made another transplant impossible but also threatened her life. Again, her doctors predicted she wouldn't make it.

"The doctors said there was nothing more they could do. Then my Mom asked about an intestinal transplant," Smith said.

She not only needed a new liver but also a small intestine, kidney, pancreas and stomach. In January 1999, she was taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami for an operation that had only been performed 11 times before.

It took until August for the infections to clear up enough to allow her to undergo the five-organ transplant. She was so weak that the doctors only gave her a 50 percent chance of surviving the 21-hour surgery. Again, she beat the odds, but things would get much worse before they got better. She spent the next nine months in the hospital battling infection after infection. Drugged and exhausted, Kathryn began to experience hallucinations and depression.

"I woke up and had no idea where I was. I couldn't walk. I couldn't sit up. You take all that stuff for granted," she said.

She finally went home in October 2000 and spent a year recuperating. Her parents' support, Smith said, was critical to her recovery. "My mom made me keep little goal cards that said 'sit up for three hours, walk to the end of the bed.'"

Smith took a few classes at Augusta State before returning to Tech in August 2001. Now that she's graduating, medical school is her next challenge. It won't be easy. She still has to take medication to suppress her immune system to keep her body from rejecting the organs. That's not going to stop her. "If I always stopped when people said I couldn't do it, I wouldn't be here," Smith said.

Kathryn Smith is active in the Georgia Transplant Foundation and LifeLink, a nonprofit organ and tissue recovery organization. She returns to Miami every three months for medical checkups and to visit other transplant patients.

Occupying one-and-a-half million square feet on 13.3 acres along Fifth Street in Midtown, Georgia Tech's Technology Square is the new home of the DuPree College of Management, the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center, the Economic Development Building and the Global Learning Center, a professional education and technology communications center. Also included is 17,676 square feet of ground-level retail, plus a 55,000 square feet Barnes and Noble at Georgia Tech. The construction of the complex was overseen by development manager Jones Lang LaSalle, which provided initial market feasibility studies, highest and best-use analyses, design consultation, budgets and schedules for the entire Technology Square project.

The privately owned Centergy at Technology Square occupies the north side of Fifth Street. Developed in coordination with Georgia Tech's buildings, Centergy is host to Georgia Tech's Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) along with three other Georgia Tech research centers and a host of retail and office tenants. With two upscale apartment and condominium complexes only a block away, Technology Square provides residents in the neighborhood with a wide range of entertainment and retail options.

"Technology Square reintegrates Georgia Tech into the physical and intellectual life of the city, making it a place where students, business people and faculty all meet on the streets. We're familiar with the saying that innovation occurs at the water cooler. This is a model where innovation occurs at the sidewalk," said Ellen Dunham-Jones, director of the architecture program at Tech's College of Architecture.

There was a time when blurring the line between campus and city would have been unheard of. Fueled by fears of crime and urban decay during the 1960s and 1970s, new universities were choosing to locate in the suburbs, while urban universities like Georgia Tech, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania actively sought to insulate their campuses from the city. But now, as downtowns across America are experiencing a rebirth, universities like Tech are opening themselves up to become an active part of the communities they once feared.

In the 1980s, universities started to get more involved in controlling their environments, said Dunham-Jones. Princeton bought the adjacent Palmer Square and made it into an even more upscale retail area. Stanford created Silicon Valley as a business incubator in an office park setting. And, in the late 1990s, Penn turned a barren and crime-ridden section in the center of campus into a lively street with retail. Now, Georgia Tech is blending those approaches by creating a brand new neighborhood, moving its research centers and incubators from the office parks and weaving them into the community with ground-level retail, restaurants and academic space.

"Every single university started looking at what Stanford did with incubators in Silicon Valley. Now, more people want to be in the city. Start-up businesses that want to attract the new knowledge workers have to be in the city to attract young employees like new Georgia Tech grads," said Dunham-Jones.

The benefits Tech Square brings to the university are many, said Clough. "First, it reclaims an area adjacent to our campus that was deteriorating in such a way to pose a threat to us. It links us to Midtown and bridges the gap created by the construction of the freeway. It provides much-needed new facilities for our academic programs and visitors to our campus. The retail outlets represent an important step in creating a 'college-town' feel to our campus. And, finally, it creates a highly visible signature development stating that the heart of the technology community is here," he said.

Tech's move into Midtown gives the DuPree College of Management neighbors that include BellSouth, Bank of America, the Federal Reserve and a host of businesses in the renovated Biltmore Hotel. The school hopes to use its geographical connection to boost relationships with those companies through educational partnerships and internships. Employees at area businesses will be able to use the resources at Tech Square, from the executive education classes at the College of Management and the guest suites and meeting space at the hotel to the distance learning technology at the Global Learning Center.

"We're delighted that Technology Square is in place. Georgia Tech's integration into Midtown will provide the impetus for growth and development that leads to jobs and new economic development initiatives that will benefit not just the city, but the region and the state," said Kim King, president of Kim King Associates, developer of Centergy at Technology Square.

A Public Space
In 1997, Midtown Atlanta was undergoing tremendous change. Once a busy business district, the neighborhood fell on hard times in the 1960s. Fueled by the efforts of the Midtown Alliance and the Midtown Improvement District, parts of Midtown were experiencing a resurgence, but the section that was to become Tech Square was on the fringes of this redevelopment. A collection of parking lots and warehouses with a few isolated businesses here and there, the area was ripe for improvement. "Live, work and play" was becoming the mantra of developers intent on increasing their projects' profitability by creating pedestrian-friendly mixed-use developments that combined residential space with office and retail. Clough and the Georgia Tech Foundation realized the university could meet its demand for new space while taking advantage of this new environmental trend in order to reunite Georgia Tech with its neighbors.

"We pride ourselves on having one of the world's most advanced curricula and research programs in sustainable technology. It is only right that we walk the walk as well as talk the talk," explained Clough.

At the same time, private developers like Jim Borders and Kim King, both Tech alumni, were eyeing space in Midtown. The relatively inexpensive land and a commitment from a major university to develop the south side of Fifth Street made their decisions easier.

"Georgia Tech's decision to cross the interstate definitely had an influence on my decision to buy the Biltmore," said Borders. "What it has done for us is that the Biltmore is no longer on the fringe. It's now in the middle of all that is happening in Midtown."

"The vision that a number of us had was to utilize a significant portion of land to try to create a new environment that could tap into the energy that exists in Midtown. It was really Wayne Clough's vision to jump the divide of the Interstate," said King.

King agreed to develop the north side of Fifth Street, while Tech developed the south side. Coordinating the architecture and streetscape design of both projects would go a long way toward achieving the neighborhood feel both wanted. Wide, tree-lined sidewalks with benches and bike racks along with bike lanes, ground-level retail and proximity to MARTA would make the area a draw for the public. A new alternative-fueled trolley would help ferry students from the main campus and provide free transportation to the public to the Midtown MARTA station.

"The attention to streetscapes, walkable tree-lined streets, all of that is extremely important to the value of the neighborhood, especially in a city like Atlanta, where that is rare," said the College of Architecture's Dunham-Jones. "It conveys a very important sense of this development as a community. This is a model that's about getting people out into the public space."

Providing the opportunity for students, business executives, researchers and the public to mingle is part of what made the partnership so attractive, said King. "In the modern era, human contact is very limited. People go from the car to their house, and they don't see their neighbors. This was an opportunity to allow people to do something they enjoy, which is to interact with others. It was crucial for us to capture that," he said.

Key to this plan is the DuPree College of Management building, which features a large, glass-fronted courtyard that is open to the public. The building design provides pedestrians a view inside the college. From the interior, views of the surrounding streets connect students and faculty with the outside world. Because the building's entrance is set back from West Peachtree, the streetscape is open to natural light, preventing the street from feeling like an alley. Similar features that emphasize pedestrian activities are incorporated into the other buildings in the development. A planned park on top of the Interstate will help complete the area's transformation from urban blight to bustling and attractive mixed-use neighborhood.

Borders predicts Technology Square will help spur development up and down the Spring and West Peachtree corridor for years to come. "Georgia Tech has shown this is a great corridor," he said. "Instead of walking east when you leave the Biltmore, now you want to walk west. In my mind, it's the best view in Midtown Atlanta," he said.

The burst in construction is part of the Institute's strategic plan for education, research and campus facilities that will lead Tech to define the technological university of the twenty-first century.

"Our building program speaks to our intent to take our place among the great educational institutions of the world," explained President G. Wayne Clough. "When you arrive on our campus, we want you to feel the value we place on institutional traditions when you see restored historical buildings. At the same time, you should sense our commitment to innovation in the way our new buildings and laboratories look and the way we bring them together into academic neighborhoods. You should see open spaces that appeal to our aesthetic side, and classrooms that enhance a dynamic learning environment."

Among the more than 20 new or renovated buildings, the most visible is the $256 million Technology Square project that turned a once dilapidated part of the city into a mixed-use and transit-oriented neighborhood that combines street-level retail, academic, research and office space in the heart of Atlanta's Midtown business district. But, for all its innovative features, Technology Square is only half of the picture. Rounding out Georgia Tech's new facilities are projects that illustrate the school's rising prominence among the world's top-ranked universities.

Innovation through interdisciplinary research

New facilities dedicated to interdisciplinary research are realizing Clough's visions for the Georgia Tech campus. The evolving Life Sciences and Technology Complex added the $23 million U.A. Whitaker Building and the $58 million Ford Environmental Science and Technology Building. Whitaker is the new home of Georgia Tech and Emory University's joint program, the Coulter School of Biomedical Engineering, the only public-private joint academic department in the country. The Ford ES&T Building, now the largest academic building on campus, houses faculty and students from five different schools focusing on environmental issues. Tech expects to complete the complex with a building dedicated to molecular science and engineering.

"The most interesting questions in research are at the boundaries of disciplines," said Narl Davidson, associate dean in the College of Engineering. The complex was designed to foster interaction among peers from various departments. Rather than the traditional design of devoting sections of a building to each discipline, researchers from chemical, electrical, mechanical and biomedical engineers share office and lab space with their colleagues from areas such as biology and chemistry. This arrangement is already leading to developments in fields like molecular imaging, which requires experts with knowledge of molecular biology, quantum mechanics and electrical and computer engineering, said Davidson. "What's really powerful is having access to expertise in all those areas and being able to share it," he said.

Georgia Tech also added a new campus in Savannah to its portfolio, which already includes activities in France and Singapore. The three new buildings at Georgia Tech-Savannah house the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program, which expands the school's engineering program to the southern portion of the state. This fall the new campus hosts 440 students.

"A few years ago, it became clear more engineers would be needed to meet the needs of the industrial- and technology-based growth in southeast Georgia and Savannah," said Jean-Lou Chameau, provost and vice president for academic affairs. "Individuals in southeast Georgia who want a premier engineering education close to home were an untapped pool of talent. The increase in engineering talent made possible with Georgia Tech-Savannah is helping the state secure its standing as one of the nation's leaders in technology development."

To make an even bigger impact on the region, the Georgia Tech-Savannah campus includes satellite locations of two Atlanta-based economic development programs that help Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build successful companies: The Georgia Tech Economic Development Institute and the Advanced Technology Development Center.

Energizing campus life

Along with Clough's vision of supporting Tech's academic mission with new facilities, boosting the quality of campus life is at the top of the agenda. Technology Square's public spaces are already providing much-needed relief from the rigors of the school's academics. On the other side of campus, the first phase of reconstruction of the Olympic Aquatic Center--built for the 1996 games--is transforming the open-air natatorium into a full-fledged Campus Recreation Center (CRC). After enclosing the pool and diving well, Tech built a full-service gym over the pool, a modern engineering marvel of construction. Complete with six basketball courts, weight and aerobics rooms and an elevated jogging track that provides views of Midtown Atlanta, the new CRC gives students and faculty an athletic facility that surpasses the offerings of many privately owned workout chains. When the second phase of construction is completed next fall, the CRC will add a leisure pool, racquetball courts, squash courts, auxiliary gym, lounge and parking deck.

Next to the CRC, the new Whitehead Building, which houses the Stamps Health Services Center, offers students medical and dental services. In the Home Park neighborhood adjacent to campus, the R. Kirk Landon Learning Center offers Tech and its neighbors first-rate child care. The reconstruction of Bobby Dodd Stadium and the addition of 9,000 seats restores the nation's oldest Division I-A on-campus stadium to first-class condition.

Georgia Tech's $500 million infusion into campus facilities over the past year represents a giant investment in the Institute's future. Investments such as the rebirth of the Library West Commons into a digital information hub are the model for future projects like the Innovative Learning Resource Center. The Klaus Advanced Computing Building, to be built next to the Life Sciences and Technology Complex, will complete a neighborhood devoted to information and biotechnology. Each future project will build on the innovations of the past year to fulfill Tech's goal of defining the technological university of the twenty-first century.

"Our building program of today attempts to not only serve near-term educational and research goals, but also to create a campus that, one hundred years from now, will demonstrate that our generation understood its obligation to the Georgia Tech of the next century," said Clough. "We are building a Georgia Tech that will stand among the world's best universities long into the future."

Campus Construction at a Glance

Opened:
Technology Square
Management Building
Global Learning Center
Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center
Economic Development Building
Barnes & Noble @ Georgia Tech
Parking Garage
Technology Square Research Building
ATDC Building
Retail Outlets
Ford Environmental Science and
Technology Building
U. A. Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Building
John S. Coon Building (renovation)
West Commons, Price Gilbert Library (renovation)
Campus Recreation Center (Phase I)
Whitehead Building (Stamps Health Services)
Bobby Dodd Stadium (expansion/renovation)
Research Administration Building
(expansion/renovation)
R. Kirk Landon Learning Center (child care)
Business Services Building
Georgia Tech-Savannah campus (three buildings)

Under way:
Klaus Advanced Computing Building
Student Center renovation
Campus Recreation Center (Phase II)
Food Processing Technology Building
Family apartments

On the drawing board:
Innovative Learning Resource Center
Advanced Clean Room Building
Materials and Molecular Science and
Engineering Building

The school also boasts 55 new, first-year students this fall - its largest incoming class to date - and seven new research groups, each of which is producing more research opportunities for faculty and students than ever before at Georgia Tech.

"The recruitment within the school has been strong and successful for the past several years," Professor Thom Orlando, chair of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry said. "Several peer schools have experienced a slight increase in enrollment, too, but not at the level that our school has."

Orlando said that the large increase in graduate and undergraduate enrollment indicates several things, including the rising prominence of the school in academic research circles. Much of that is due to the acquisition of new, senior faculty members in recent years.

"The students are the most important reason why the school exists, and their presence and efforts are what fuels the science we are all engaged in," Orlando said. " The number of students and their quality and success are the real indicators of our school's strength."

What's more is that the overall research portfolio of the school also is the strongest it has ever been, he said. It has grown into a broad and interdisciplinary research enterprise, with strengths in essentially all areas of chemistry plus rising disciplines such as materials science, nanoscience, biophysics and chemical physics.

"We therefore have a lot more to offer to prospective graduate students," Orlando said. "The size and friendliness of our school also is an attribute, since our success in terms of recruiting is rather high for students who come to the Institute for a visit prior to their final decision on which college to attend."

When they tour programs and meet faculty, prospective students have several new people to meet at the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry for 2003 and 2004. Among the new researchers and programs this year are:

* Professor Uwe Bunz, previously at the University of South Carolina, who studies synthetic organic chemistry plus polymer and materials science;

* Professor Joseph Perry, formerly at the University of Arizona, who is a physical chemist studying three-dimensional, nanoengineered assemblies plus organic electronic and photonic materials;

* Professor Seth Marder, who also was at the University of Arizona before coming to Atlanta. Marder is an organic chemist who studies the synthesis of novel organic materials for use in non-linear optics and photonics;

* Professor Jean-Luc Bredas, another former faculty member of the University of Arizona and a physical chemist. He and his research group -- winners of the 2003 Descartes Prize in Europe -- study the theory of carrier transport in polymer systems, plus the theoretical description of organic photonic and electronic devices;

* Professor Bridgette Barry, previously at the University of Minnesota, who is a biophysicist studying mechanisms of photosynthesis and charge transfer in biological media;

* Associate Professor Art Ragauskas, formerly a faculty member in the Institute of Paper Science and Technology at Georgia Tech, who works in the area of carbohydrate chemistry as it relates to the paper industry. He is also active in biofuels and bioenzyme catalysis;

* And Assistant Professor Facundo Fernandez, an analytical chemist who examines the develops novel mass spectrometry methods that can be used for disease detection.

Initial funding for the Nanotechnology Research Center will be provided by a $36 million contribution from an anonymous donor, Gov. Perdue said, and that amount will be followed by up to $45 million in state support over the next several years.

The governor said he plans to include state matching funds for this project as part of his economic development budget recommendations to the 2004 Georgia General Assembly.

"If Georgia is to emerge as a leader in nanotechnology, we need to take advantage of the opportunity to build one of the nation's premier centers for this cutting-edge technology and research," Perdue said. "Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor who recognizes the tremendous economic potential of this opportunity, the state will be able to share the cost of building this new facility."

Once constructed, the center will be the most advanced nanotechnology research facility in the southeast, the first of its kind in the region, and among the most sophisticated in the country. The 160,000-square-foot facility will be built at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Ferst Drive with 30,000 square feet of its space dedicated to "clean rooms," or rooms specially designed to reduce the number of dust particles in the air.

Clean rooms are critical to nanotech research, and the new center will almost quadruple the square footage of clean-room space available to researchers at Georgia Tech. This will allow researchers at the Institute and throughout Georgia's higher education community to compete with other areas of the country where similar facilities are planned or under construction - places such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell University in the northeast; Purdue University and the University of Illinois in the midwest; and Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley in the west.

"This puts Georgia Tech on the national map for nanotechnology," Georgia Tech President Wayne Clough said. "Through a unique public-private partnership, we will serve as a center for innovation in the southeast and throughout the world. I'm deeply appreciative for this incredible display of private philanthropy, and to the state for making this type of investment in a critical research area."

"I know that the talent we have at Tech -- and the research partnerships we will forge as a result of this -- will pay big dividends for our economy," Clough said.

Nanotechnology, sometimes referred to as the "science of the small," allows scientists to manipulate individual atoms and molecules, making it possible to build machines on the scale of human cells or build structures or materials that assume dramatically different properties by virtue of their size.

The prefix "nano" comes from the Greek word nanos, and it represents one-billionth of a unit. Scientists working in the field of nanotechnology work at the nanoscale, dealing with materials measured in a billionth of a meter, or about 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Currently, Georgia Tech researchers are working to develop structures at the micrometer level. With this new facility and the purchase of an electron beam nanolithography system, researchers will be able to fabricate structures with features as small as 10 to 50 nanometers.

Many experts hail nanotechnology as the next great scientific and technological breakthrough. To date nanotechnology research has led to such advances as the development of the flat screen television, but it potentially could be used for much more advanced purposes. For example, nanoscience might one day lead to microscopic machines that could investigate and repair damage to the human body at the cellular level.

The primary purpose of the new center is to dramatically expand clean-room capacity at the Institute. The facilities are expensive to build due to the extensive air-filtering requirements necessary for nanotechnology research. This new building will be designed with Class X clean rooms, meaning that there will be a maximum of 10, 0.5 micrometer particles per cubic foot of air. A typical office environment contains more than a million particles per cubic foot.

Innovative nanotechnology research already is under way at Georgia Tech, and many of the field's leading investigators are based at the Institute. For example, Regents Professor Uzi Landman -- the Fuller E. Callaway Chair in Computational Materials Science at Georgia Tech -- is the 2003 recipient of the Feynman Prize, named in honor of the father of nanotechnology, Robert Feynman.

In addition, Materials Science Professor Z.L. Wang is ranked fifth in the world by the Institute of Scientific Information for the number of nanotechnology research papers he has published to date. And according to Science Watch -- a bulletin that reports on trends in basic research - Wang also is among the world's most cited authors in nanotechnology research.

In other areas of campus, Professor Jim Meindl -- the Joseph M. Petit Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering -- directs the National Science Foundation-funded Microelectronics Research Center at Georgia Tech. He also is a world-renowned expert in semi-conductor and integrated circuit technology, both fields which stand to gain from nanotechnology advances.

And Professor Ralph Merkle, director of Georgia Tech's Information Security Center, is a national expert in nanotechnology research and policy. He was co-recipient of the 1998 Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology for Theory and he was executive editor of the journal Nanotechnology for several years.

"Dr. Rohatgi has for more than a quarter century focused his immense technical talents on developing low cost and high efficiency solar cells," said NREL Director Richard Truly. "So many of the significant advances that have been achieved in this important field can be credited to his tireless efforts."

Dr. Rohatgi additionally has played a significant role in education, having supervised 25 Ph.D. students in photovoltaic sciences, and currently serving as Regents Professor and Georgia Power Distinguished Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has published more than 275 papers in his field and holds 10 U.S. patents.

NREL initiated the Paul Rappaport Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Award last year in celebration of the laboratory's 25th anniversary. It is named for the laboratory's pioneering first director and honors outstanding efforts to advance renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. Waverly Power and Light, an Iowa utility that has made great strides in wind power development, was the first recipient of the national award.

This year's Rappaport Award was presented to Dr. Rohatgi by NREL Director Truly at an NREL event Tuesday in Denver. Also honored was Dr. Morton Price of the Bell Labs, a pioneer in the development of early solar cells.

"I am truly honored to receive this award since this recognition comes from my peers and colleagues and it is named after a true champion of renewable energy and a pioneer in the field of photovoltaics-Paul Rappaport," Dr. Rohatgi said. "Personally, I am very thankful to NREL and DOE for their continuous financial and technical support throughout my career. Additionally, this award is a tribute to my Georgia Tech faculty and staff colleagues, my past and present students, the Georgia Tech administration, and my industrial and governmental collaborators. They have played a major role in the research leading to this award, and I am very grateful to them."

Dr. Rohatgi began his research into photovoltaic devices in 1977 as an engineer at the Westinghouse Research and Development Center in Pittsburgh, Pa., and received the Westinghouse Engineering Achievement Award in 1984 for his work on high efficiency silicon solar cells. A year later, Dr. Rohatgi joined Georgia Institute of Technology as an associate professor of electrical engineering.

In 1985, Dr. Rohatgi produced a cell with record efficiency on thin silicon ribbon. Eleven years later, he achieved record efficiency with cast multicrystalline silicon. That work led to more widespread research into the material, and today multicrystalline silicon accounts for 48 percent of all newly manufactured PV cells. Recently, he has produced record high-efficiency cells of 18.2 percent on silicon ribbon using photolithography, as well as 16% using screen-printed contacts.

Over the years, Dr. Rohatgi has helped the Georgia Institute of Technology develop one of the most respected cell characterization and fabrication labs in the world. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in 1992 made Georgia Institute of Technology the first University Center of Excellence in Photovoltaics Research and Education in the United States. Dr. Rohatgi currently serves as the center's director. Rohatgi is also the recipient of the 1996 Georgia Tech Distinguished Professor Award and the 2003 William R. Cherry Award, which was presented at the Third World Conference on Photovoltaics held last May.

One lasting contribution came as part of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Dr. Rohatgi and his group designed and installed the world's largest grid-connected, roof-top PV system at the Georgia Tech Aquatic Center.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers made Dr. Rohatgi an IEEE Fellow in 1991 for his contributions to photovoltaics.

"The new format of Georgia Tech's Executive Education Program is designed for the busy executive, and our new courses and certificate programs are driven by the needs of the business community," says Dan Stotz, director of Executive Education in the DuPree College.

Many of the multi-day courses offered in the past have been broken into individual modules so that employees can pick and choose the specific modules or classes that best fits their needs. Starting in January 2004 there will be four new executive certificate programs in the line up:

The General Management Certificate is designed for managers who need broader business knowledge for career advancement and can be completed in 15 days within three-years. The certificate includes 12 required topics and three days of electives.

The Advanced Technical Management Certificate expands technical managers understanding of the larger enterprise and the role of technology within the company. The certificate can be completed in 10 days within three-years.

The Six Sigma Green Belt Certificate is for professionals with an interest in the Six Sigma approach and methodologies or who wish to achieve Green Belt certification. This program is offered in two five-day modules spaced a month apart.

The Information Technology Management Certificate is designed to help IT professionals enhance their ability to think, plan and act strategically. The certificate can be completed in 12 days within three years and includes eight required classes and four elective classes.

The College also continues the popular Finance and Accounting for Non-Financial Managers and the Institute for Program Management offerings.

In addition to the open-enrollment courses and certificate programs, the Huang Executive Education Center offers customized programs for companies seeking a training program tailored specifically to their needs. More information about the DuPree College's Executive Education Program, including a course catalog, can be found online at http://www.execinfo.org.

"While being exposed to the campus atmosphere, these high school students can learn just how their hard work in school can pay off with well-earned success in the real world," said Christopher Olinde, Georgia Tech sophomore.

The four research institutions comprise the Atlanta Outreach Consortium (AOC) -- an effort to pool the universities' community outreach resources in metropolitan Atlanta area. Last year was the first year for the "A Day in the Life Program" and involved about 230 students from eight high schools. This year AOC anticipates 320 students from nine high schools will visit the university campuses. Also new this year, the host universities will follow-up with the participating high school students and track their progress, graduation rates and whether they go to college.

"When students can see themselves on a college campus, in a college classroom, and enjoying college life, they reach for higher goals. The Atlanta Outreach Consortium is helping Atlanta Public Schools' students dream bigger and work harder for a college career after high school," said Dr. Beverly Hall, superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools.

The sophomore high school students, who would not otherwise get a glimpse of college life, will shadow volunteer college students on each campus on Friday, November 7. Clark Atlanta will host 10th graders from Douglass and Washington High schools; Emory will partner with Druid Hills and Clarkston High schools; Georgia State will sponsor Carver, Crim and Southside High schools; and Georgia Tech has adopted Grady, Mays and Southside High schools.

"I found the experience useful, especially going to a college class and lab. I got to meet cool college students and to walk the campus like I was one of them," said a Southside High student who participated in the 2002 program.

Each school plans to have a keynote speaker for the students. At Georgia Tech, radio personality Porsche Foxx of V103 radio will provide the highlight of the day when she speaks to the students at 12:15 p.m. Emory plans to have the Rev. Bridgette Young, associate dean of the Chapel and Religious Life speak to the students.

"'A Day in the Life' is an important experience for high school students as well as our students from CAU. This program gives going to college a 'face' and is designed to make it both personal and possible," said Dr. Collette Hopkins, associate director for partnerships at the Research Center for Science and Technology at Clark Atlanta University.

The AOC, formed in 2000, is composed of outreach professionals, public policy faculty and the presidents of each university. This year's program is sponsored in part by Publix, Johnson Controls, Krispy Kreme, and Arby's.

For specific information about the AOC or "A Day in the Life" events, please contact:

Clark Atlanta University
Darius Jones
(404) 880-8357

Emory University
Jacquelyn Anthony
(404) 727-5166

Georgia Institute of Technology
Andrea Ashmore
(404) 894-5189

Georgia State University
Linda Calloway
(404) 651-3545

Already boasting the highest number of women engineering students in the country, Georgia Tech is trying to boost enrollment of women in other disciplines. The Women's Leadership Conference is designed to both increase awareness of what Tech has to offer women students as well as provide leadership training and support to current students, alumni and faculty. The conference is open to high school students as well as associates from metro-Atlanta universities.

"In our culture, there are still limited places where women can gather to support each other," said Yvette Upton, assistant dean of students and director of Georgia Tech's Women's Resource Center. "We're providing a place for college women across Atlanta to gather and learn about the issues that will face them once they leave college and begin their careers," she said.

On Friday evening, Georgia Tech will hand out the Women of Distinction Awards to outstanding students, faculty, staff and alumnae. Saturday will feature leadership and training workshops on topics such as balancing work and family, managing stress and mapping out a career path.

The keynote address this year will be delivered by retired army Lieutenant Colonel Consuelo Castillo Kickbusch, who was the highest ranking Hispanic woman in the army's combat support field. Kickbusch was born and raised in a barrio in Laredo, Texas. While in high school, a counselor advised Kickbusch that a child from the barrio could never aspire to a college education. Informing her father of this, he gave her then, and what is today, the best advice she has received. He told her to always ask, "Porque No-Why not?" whenever someone tries to deny her opportunities. Following that advice, Kickbusch went on to become the first woman commissioned as a Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) officer in Texas and eventually earned both the Legion of Merit and Army Commendation Medal.

Tech alumna Gena Abraham will deliver Friday evening's address. Abraham is the executive secretary and director of the Construction Division of the Georgia State Financing and Investment Commission (GSFIC). GSFIC is charged with the proper application and execution of bond funds for the state of Georgia and is responsible for a $600 million statewide construction program. Abraham is currently taking a leave of absence from her duties as an assistant professor of civil engineering at Georgia Tech.

Mariette Edwards of Star Maker Enterprises, Inc. will address the Saturday breakfast. Edwards is a business and career coach and publisher of Star Maker News, a monthly on-line newsletter focusing on professional success.

A schedule of the conference is listed below. For a listing of the workshops or more information about the speakers, go to http://cyberbuzz.gatech.edu/wlc/home.html

Friday, November 7, 2003
Student Center Ballroom

Reception
5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.

Speaker Gena Abraham
and Women of Distinction Awards
6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.

Saturday, November 8, 2003
Student Center

Breakfast
8:00 a.m. - 9:00 a.m.

Speaker Mariette Edwards
9:00 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.

Morning Workshops
9:40 a.m. - 11:20 a.m.

Speaker Consuelo Castillo Kickbusch/Lunch
11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Afternoon Workshops
1:10 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

In an effort to achieve that goal, the Atlanta Fire Department approached Georgia Tech about developing a fire command training simulator to better prepare their officers to react in emergencies. Collaborating with the Atlanta Fire Department, Georgia Tech researchers are refining a training application using virtual environment technology -- immersive computer-generated experiences -- to better train fire commanders directing teams of firefighters.

"The key here is the safety of the firefighters," says Captain W.G. May, special projects coordinator, Atlanta Fire Department. "By reducing the dangers involved in training, we can greatly lower the chance of a firefighter injury."

This application simulates the progress of a fire in a single-family home and responds to the orders made by the fire commander on the scene. The virtual environment allows the user to navigate around the fire scene and view a house on fire from any angle; to direct firefighters and watch them execute commands; and see realistic fire and smoke behavior reacting to changes in the environment such as the opening of windows.

"The world that firefighters work in is incredibly complex. Every fire and every situation is different, so a virtual environment, which can be changed fairly easily, is a good fit for this type of training," says Dr. Chris D. Shaw, senior research scientist in Georgia Tech's College of Computing and faculty member of the Graphics, Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center, who leads the project.

The Firefighter Command Training Virtual Environment is designed as a training tool to be used by the fire company officer, who usually commands a four- to eight-person company of firefighters who respond to fire emergencies. The officer usually has a number of years of experience as a firefighter and has trained to be an officer in the classroom and by practicing command procedure at the fire department's training ground.

However, these training methods are limited. First, not all fire companies see all types of emergencies in equal amounts; some companies may see many more fires than others. The overall number of fires has declined over the years -- only about 3 percent of calls to the Atlanta Fire Department are for fires. Second, practice training always takes place at the training ground in exactly the same fireproof building, so realism and the element of surprise are limited. The virtual environment, on the other hand, can provide a variety of scenarios in a more realistic way and with less risk and expense than training with real fires.

"When I came to Georgia Tech for graduate school, I was interested in working in computer graphics and with virtual reality, so this project was a good fit," said Tazama St. Julien, third year computer science Ph.D. student. "The visit to the actual fire training ground and seeing fires up close and personal was pretty interesting and fun."

In the prototype application, Shaw and his team of students created a virtual environment with a furnished one-story house with a garage, a fire truck, firefighters, tools, and fire hydrant. The user, the fire company officer, sees the house on fire on a computer screen or a head-mounted display and gives verbal commands as he would in a real fire. The system operator types the officer's commands into the computer system via code. The project team decided to handle the command input in this fashion rather than incorporating a voice recognition system to translate the voice commands due to their unreliability for multiple users. Also, having an operator input the commands rather than the user allows the user to concentrate on evaluating the situation and making decisions. This arrangement also allows the operator to set up mistakes or traps for the user, again creating a more realistic experience. The officer then sees animated firefighters reacting to his commands, such as laying hoses or climbing onto the roof to cut a hole over the fire. Also, every 15 seconds the visuals of the smoke and fire change in reaction to the officer's commands.

"Due to the number of factors involved, the project has proven technically challenging. The Atlanta Fire Department told us that accuracy is important. If the fire in our virtual environment doesn't respond like a real fire would to a door opening, for example, then it's not very useful as a training tool. So we've concentrated on accuracy in the amount of smoke and fire produced, for example, which is a huge amount of data to calculate," said Shaw.

Significant improvements have been made since the original prototype was created. Originally, the animated firefighters moved like robots; now the application includes motion scripts to make the firefighters' movements more realistic.

"It has been amazing to see this project develop. The early stages were simply cylinders representing firefighters that hopped through a house with little candle flames sprouting from the floor. Now, we have firefighters that can walk, climb ladders, ventilate a roof, spray water, etc. The fire is very realistic, not only in the way it looks but in its behavior as well. For example, if the house has a limited oxygen supply, the fire will smolder and burn slower," says May.

Due to the complexity of calculating the amount of smoke and fire produced, the team turned to the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), which studies why firefighters die and compiles extensive data on this problem. The Georgia Tech team is using NIST's Fire Dynamic Simulator to compute realistic physical fire and smoke behavior. Due to the lengthy time to accurately compute the volume of fire and smoke, the team pre-computed the data for the entire house at one-second increments, and the system uses the pre-computed data to visualize and animate the fire and smoke in the virtual environment. On a current PC, the Fire Dynamic Simulator takes about eight hours to compute one minute of data, making it impossible to calculate the smoke and fire in real time.

"The majority of my work has been on the volume renderer," said St. Julien. "I worked with the Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) to simulate the fire and smoke data, then render or draw a visualization of that data in the virtual environment. This took learning the input and output file format for FDS, learning how to use FDS, and learning how to efficiently render the data. My other main contributions are path finding, the hose animation, control of the firemen, and the fire simulation."

Other challenges for this project include the need to develop compression techniques to make the huge data files manageable. The exponential growth of choices and conditions -- such as opening doors, spraying water -- result in an exponential increase in data. Also, the team had to create realistic-looking 3-D visuals of fire and smoke to accurately indicate to the officer the amount of soot, heat and smoke. At the scene of a real fire, officers look for these factors to determine the cause and type of fire to guide their decisions.

"The firefighter project had a compelling blend of the technical challenges I'm interested in: graphics and artificial intelligence, as well as concrete, real-world applicability," said Dan Cunning, senior in computer science. "I am currently working on creating a more realistic looking fire simulation, exploring the possibilities of using different textures and transparency for different parts of the fire, and possibly using fragment and vertex shaders, a fairly cutting-edge technology. Most undergrads have no clue how easy it is to start working with one of the research groups on campus."

The Firefighter Command project has provided hands-on experience to a number of computer science seniors and graduate students. Typically, a student is assigned to work on a specific component of this complex project. The team continues to refine the technical aspects of the application including developing a more complex path selection of the various choices a commander might make.

Housed in the new Technology Square Research Building, the Graphics, Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center, an interdisciplinary research center at Georgia Tech, fosters collaborations in computing and information technology research among Georgia Tech faculty and students. With more than 40 faculty and 150 affiliated students from the disciplines of Computing; Psychology; Architecture; Literature, Communication and Culture; and Electrical and Computer Engineering, GVU has gained international recognition in the research areas of graphics, animation, virtual reality, human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, wearable computing, 3-D compression, robotics, perception, collaborative web spaces and online communities.