Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Congratulations go to Klara Grodzinsky, Enid Steinhart, and Lutz Warnke, who are all winners of the 2018 Class of 1940 Course Survey Effectiveness Award. These awards recognize faculty members with exceptional scores and response rates in CIOS.   Further details about the award are below. Congratulations!

About the Awards

A few years ago, funds were identified to further recognize excellence in teaching at Georgia Tech. Some of these funds are used to reward faculty members with exceptional scores and response rates on the Course-Instructor Opinion Survey (CIOS). A maximum of 40 awards are given out each year. The proportion of “small” classes and “large” classes that qualify are based on the proportion of those classes in the GT catalog for the past three years. 

Courses under consideration for this award were taught during Fall 2017and Spring 2018. The criteria for selection for the award included a CIOS response rate of 85% and above for Fall and/or Spring semesters and: The top 12 rankings (ties broken by response rate) of a class size of at least 40 students with a CIOS score for the question which reads “Overall, this instructor is an effective teacher” of at least 4.9; and The top 28 rankings (ties broken by response rate) of a class size of at least 15 students and a CIOS score for the same question of at least 4.9, or a 5 (or greater) credit course with a size of at least 10 and a CIOS score for the same question of at least 4.9. 

In the Fall of 2003 — not long after retiring from her 28-year career as a mathematics professor at Kennesaw State University — Elaine M. Hubbard, MATH 1972, MS MATH 1974, Ph.D. MATH 1980, felt compelled to take action that would have a lasting impact on her alma mater.

That September, Hubbard signed an endowment agreement whose income would one day establish the Elaine M. Hubbard Endowed Chair in the School of Mathematics — the School’s first endowed faculty chair. 

By establishing an endowment fund through her Will, Hubbard knew she would never meet any of the distinguished academics who would ultimately hold the Hubbard Chair. She did know, however, that her estate gift would one day play a vital role in developing and strengthening Georgia Tech’s mathematics faculty, which had long ago helped lay the foundation for her own success as a scholar and teacher. 

Following the Board of Regents’ approval of the Hubbard Chair earlier this year, the School of Mathematics is now embarking on an international search to fill this pivotal position of academic leadership. 

Continue here for the full story from the Office of Development

The 2019 AMS Short Course on “Sum of Squares: Theory and Applications” will take place January 14-15 at the Hilton Baltimore in Baltimore, MD, just prior to the Joint Mathematics Meetings. Please see the link below for more information.

http://www.ams.org/meetings/short-courses/short-course-general

A 2006 result of SoM Professor Matt Baker was mentioned in a recent online news article.

See the full article here:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/tinkertoy-models-produce-new-geometric-insights-20180905/

Data, data, and more data.

The rapid growth of data seems wild and limitless. But various Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) institutes have been making theoretical sense of it.

TRIPODS institutes receive funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Among them is Georgia Tech’s TRIAD – the Transdisciplinary Research Institute for Advancing Data Science. TRIAD researchers are poised to share data science insights with the Atlanta higher education community.

Meanwhile, NSF aims to expand the scope of TRIPODS institutes. Today the agency awarded 19 collaborative projects at 23 universities. The awards are called TRIPODS+X grants. X is the scope-expanding activity; it could be research, visioning, or education.

Among the award recipients is Georgia Tech’s project: TRIPODS+X:EDU Collaborative Education: Data-driven Discovery and Alliance, led by Prasad Tetali, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Georgia Tech.

The award to Georgia Tech and its alliance partners – Agnes Scott, Morehouse, and Spelman Colleges – aims to train a diverse workforce for the inevitable data-driven future. The project will also engage faculty at the minority-serving institutions to help them teach data science and develop related curricula.

"TRIPODS+X is exciting not only for its near-term impact addressing some of society's most important scientific challenges, but [also] because of its potential for developing tools for future applications," says Anne Kinney, NSF assistant director Mathematical and Physical Sciences. 

With the $200,000 TRIPODS+X:EDU grant, the alliance partners will develop undergraduate data-science-focused courses. Through boot camps, workshops, and other joint activities, they will prepare data science modules to integrate into science curricula at the partner institutions. The goal is to prepare students who can address the emerging challenges in data science.

“The NSF-supported educational alliance is exciting in many ways,” says Prasad Tetali.

“It gives an opportunity to infuse the foundational data science curriculum with real-world applications from the physical and life sciences,” Tetali says. “It will also likely catalyze collaborative research in data science and related fields between Georgia Tech and Atlanta area colleges.”  

Following are the individuals involved in the TRIPODS+X: EDU project:

Principal Investigators

• Chris DePree, Agnes Scott College
• Alan Koch, Agnes Scott College
• Wenjing Liao, Georgia Tech School of Mathematics
• Brandeis Marshall, Spelman College       
• Chuang Peng, Morehouse College
• David Sherrill, Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
• Prasad Tetali, Georgia Tech School of Mathematics and School of Computer Science
• Joshua Weitz, Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences

Senior Personnel

• Thinh Doan, Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Flavio Fenton, Georgia Tech School of Physics
• Xiaoming Huo, Georgia Tech School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
• Renata Rawlings-Goss, Georgia Tech Institute for Data Engineering and Science
• Justin Romberg, Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Photo Caption

From left to right, top row: Joshua Weitz, Justin Romberg, and David Sherrill; middle row: Alan Koch, Brandeis Marshall, Chris DePree, and Wenjing Liao; bottom row: Thinh Doan, Prasad Tetali, and Chuang Peng