Elizabeth Campell
Institute Communications and Public Affairs
A new, self-described “service group” is
offering its resources to Georgia Tech faculty who want
to take advantage of the latest developments in algorithm
design and modeling to further their own research.
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ARC
ThinkTank Inaugural Lectures
On
Friday, Nov. 10, the ARC ThinkTank officially
kicks off with a day of lectures in the Klaus
Building Auditorium. The campus is invited. Further
details are available at www.cc.gatech.edu/arc.
9:00 a.m. Breakfast
9:35
a.m. Opening remarks
9:45
a.m. Santosh Vempala, Georgia
Tech, “Algorithms and Randomness”
10:30 a.m. Richard Karp, University of
California at Berkeley, “Balanced
Network Decompositions for Internet Routing”
1:00 p.m. Ravi Kannan, Yale
University, “Sampling for Massive
Data Problems”
2:15 p.m. Richard Lipton, Georgia
Tech, “Algorithms That Go Bump in
the Night” |
Under the leadership of Santosh Vempala, who joined
the faculty in August from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, the College of Computing’s Algorithms
and Randomness Center and ThinkTank will focus on a
growing field of research: bringing an algorithmic perspective
to questions such as how proteins fold, how the brain
learns, or how to predict the spread of a virus.
The interdisciplinary center includes faculty members
from the College
of Computing’s Computing Science and Systems
division and the School
of Mathematics and invites interested faculty from
other related fields to participate as well.
“We see ARC ThinkTank as a service group devoted
to this new field of methods, and we are excited at
the prospect of collaborating with faculty from across
campus to tackle challenges that might benefit from
analysis from this group,” said Vempala.
In September, ARC ThinkTank members began weekly lunches
to discuss natural problems related to algorithms and
randomness: wind and wave patterns, traffic routing
in networks, medical data analysis and genetics, to
name a few. During these lunches, a researcher is invited
to briefly present their favorite research topic, then
members ask questions, brainstorm and discuss possible
approaches. The members then schedule follow-up meetings
to further discuss the issues and provide feedback to
the researcher. ARC ThinkTank invites researchers across
campus to submit their challenges for consideration.
“The use of randomness in algorithm design and
algorithmic modeling of natural phenomena is a powerful
problem-solving tool,” said Richard DeMillo, dean
of the College of Computing. “We are thrilled
that Professor Vempala — one of the leaders in
this new field — has formed a think tank to apply
this tool to the most important problems in science,
engineering and computer science. ARC ThinkTank will
strengthen Georgia Tech’s already impressive interdisciplinary
capabilities in computational science.”
“With so much data available today from the Web
and medical records, for example, and with increasing
computing power, we seek to develop new techniques and
approaches to solve a variety of computational and modeling
problems,” said Vempala. “Our goal is to
formalize problems, possibly be able to suggest solutions,
and in the process find new challenges and thereby develop
new methods, for the emerging field of algorithms.”
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