College of Computing Official Site News

“Twitter is a tool so basic that it doesn’t suggest how you should use it,” says Amy Bruckman (IC). “I guarantee that in a few years we will look back at how we used Twitter and laugh.” Source: MarketingByRaj.com

A new study by Beki Grinter (IC) found that people respond emotionally to their robots, even non-humanoid machines like Roombas. Source: The Independent

The Mariposa botnet criminals, arrested this week in Spain with the help of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center, used a kit to build their botnet and would not need to be skilled hackers. Source: CIO Today.com

The Mariposa botnet had become one of the biggest weapons in cybercrime, infecting as many as 12.7 million PCs. With Georgia Tech's help, the Spanish government has arrested the ringleaders. Source: Associated Press

Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) researchers helped Spanish authorities detect and dismantle a massive botnet network, called Mariposa, that infected computers linked to 13 million unique IP addresses. Source: ComputerWorld

ATLANTA – March 1, 2010 – Georgia Tech has created the Institute for Data & High Performance Computing to advance and coordinate institute research and education activities in this area. Source: Office of Communications

The research behind Glitch Game Testers, by Ph.D. student Betsy DiSalvo, offers interesting results on the intersection of race, gender, video gaming and interest in computer science. Source: Racialicious

Ibis, a middleware that allows the augmented reality game Photoshoot to run on two Android phones with no server, isn't the only way to pair two devices, says Blair MacIntyre (IC). Source: TechnologyReview.com

Glitch Game Testers prompted its young African American participants to "break [video] games open" and learn about computer science, says Ph.D. student Amy DiSalvo. Source: BlackDigerati.com

Even in a down economy, CS graduates are finding their job placement rates--and starting salaries--to be higher than those of their fellow graduates, says Assistant Dean Cedric Stallworth. Source: NetworkWorld

Smartphones keep users connected but also pose new security and privacy risks. Patrick Traynor and Jonathon Giffin (CS) will use a $450K NSF grant to try to mitigate those risks. Source: CommunicationsDirectNews.com

As national militaries invest billions in robotic weapons, no fundamental barriers prevent building machines that "can outperform human soldiers in the battlefield from an ethical perspective," says Ronald Arkin (IC). Source: Christian Science Monitor

Chatroulette.com is toppling some of social networking's privacy walls while raising others. "Right now it's kind of like an online 'Lord of the Flies,'" says Ph.D. candidate Sarita Yardi. Source: The New York Times

Can community support delivered via mobile phone messages help people avoid junk food? That's the question Ph.D. candidate Andrea Grimes tries to answer with EatWell. Source: UPI.com

Ph.D. candidate Andrea Grimes' EatWell system uses mobile phones to enable users to record and share stories about healthy living, creating a sort of virtual support group. Source: ScienceBlog.com

Valerie Summet, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, has been awarded a Christine Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Graduate Fellowship by the National Academies in Washington, D.C. Run out of the National Academies' Policy and Global Affairs Division, the program is designed to engage its fellows in the analytical process that informs U.S. science and technology policy. Source: Office of Communications

P.K. Yeung, adjunct professor in Computational Science & Engineering, is principal investigator of a project that's received 20 million processor hours on the Cray XT supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The project, "A Petascale Study of Turbulent Mixing in Stratified and Non-Stratified Flows," is one of 69 proposals awarded a record total of 1.6 billion processor hours by the Department of Energy's Office of Science. Source: HPCwire.com

Second-year CS major Joy Buolamwini is a seriously focused undergraduate. A Stamp President's Scholar (the most prestigious academic scholarship Georgia Tech awards), she turned down several Ivy League schools to come to Tech. She was also part of a team that made the finals of Google's Android Developer's Challenge last year. Source: TechDrawl.com

Thirty-one years ago the first recorded instance of a robot killing a human being happened at a Ford assembly plant in Flint, Mich. That death was ruled an industrial accident, but ethical questions surrounding human-robot interaction continue to this day and are likely to become more urgent, says Ron Arkin, Regents' Professor and director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory in Interactive Computing. Source: Wired.com

"Anti-computation" is hard to explain; there is no exact analogy (matter and anti-matter may come the closest). But the concept shows enough promise that it earned Kalyan Perumalla, researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and adjunct faculty member in Computational Science and Engineering, an early-career award from the Department of Energy with a chunk of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act cash. Source: Atomic City Underground