Features
At the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, we are defining the new face of computing in education, research and outreach, as well as shaping computing's role in the world. Here are some stories about how we're doing it.
Computational Nanogami: Search for RNA Structure Stretches Across Georgia Tech Disciplines | |
 | Back in 2009, Josh Anderson didn’t know much about biology. But he knew that a summer undergraduate research assistantship working on something called “RNA folding” had to be better than the job his mother had lined up for him. Prashant Gaurav recalls that in 2009 he was thinking about applying to graduate school in computer science—not about the base pairings of a nasty RNA virus like Hepatitis C. Yet in 2011 both Anderson and Gaurav are hard at work on problems in computational molecular biology. Read more... |
Problem Solver: Edmond Chow Triangulates Solutions to Big Problems | |
 | For seven years (1998-2005), Edmond Chow worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing. For five years after that, he applied his skills at the D. E. Shaw Research firm. In fall 2010, Chow returned to the world of academia as an associate professor in the School of Computational Science & Engineering. Read more... |
String Music: Apostolico Uses Algorithms to Decode the Mysteries of Life | |
 | DNA is often called the “language of life.” As an example of a mathematical string, DNA is simply—and almost impenetrably—a massive string of four characters: A, C, G and T. Alberto Apostolico talks about DNA a lot. Read more... |
A More Clever Query: Hongyuan Zha Tunes Up the Search Engine | |
 | Every day, hundreds of millions of people around the world use Internet search engines. As they type, the vast majority of those people are blissfully unaware of the sophisticated mathematics deployed by their fingers. Hongyuan Zha, on the other hand, has spent a sizable part of his career on it. Read more... |
Channeling the Flood | |
 | As recently as a decade ago, the challenge in data analysis was in gathering adequate amounts of data to be analyzed. Now the challenge is in making sense of the oceans of data that are being gathered. That’s where Professor Haesun Park comes in. Read more... |
Algorithmic Health | |
 | Accoring to the World Health Organization estimates, 17 million people around the world die of cardiovascular diseases each hear. About 9 million of these are women. Everyone would like to see those numbers drop, of course. George Biros is doing something to make it happen. Read more... |
An Internet for Everyone | |
 | Helping kids get the most out of the Internet, particularly while researching for school assignments, is one goal of a project conducted by the College of Computing's Guy Lebanon. Read more... |
Understanding Genomic Evolution with Petascale Computing | |
 | Technological advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing have opened up the possibility of determining how living things are related by analyzing the ways in which their genes have been rearranged on chromosomes. However, inferring such evolutionary relationships from rearrangement events is computationally intensive on even the most advanced computing systems available today. Read more...
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Finding a Quasar in a Haystack | |
 | The datasets Alex Gray works with are truly astronomical—in every sense of the word. Analogous to Moore's Law, which holds that computer speeds double every 18 months, is the even faster growth of the sizes of data collections in all fields—from document collections and business-transaction databases, to data collected by unprecedented international science instruments—many of which are in the realm of terabytes and petabytes. Read more...
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Instant Upgrade – Autotuning Software for the Parallel World | |
 | Rich Vuduc uses a familiar routine to introduce his students to the concept of parallel programming. On the first day of class, the assistant professor hands a pile of papers to a student. That student takes one and passes the bundle to the next person, and so on. The stack moves along until everyone in the room has a paper. Read more... |
