Library Public Programming

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Library Public Programming

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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8

Music, Science, and Technology

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-03-03) Hunt, William D. ; Valk, Henry

Music and its performance have been part of our inheritance since primitive times. But what is music? How do we produce and hear it? How are popular instruments that we use to perform it, such as the guitar and piano, evolving? These and related questions will be discussed from the standpoint of current science and technology.
Making Computer Science 101: Fun with Robots

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-11-06) Balch, Tucker

We're trying an experiment here at Georgia Tech: We're teaching freshman Computer Science 101 (CS 1301 to be exact) with personal robots. Every student has her own robot to take home and work with. All the fundamentals of CS are taught in the context of programming a mobile robot with sensors, motors, a camera and a speaker. During this talk I will report on our success with this approach.
Self-organizing logistics systems

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-09-04) Bartholdi, John J., III

The social insects, such as bees or ants, operate complex logistics systems that are efficient even though no agent is in charge. Instead of a centralized control, each agent follows a simple local rule and an efficient global organization emerges spontaneously. This idea has been successfully adapted to coordinate order-pickers in a warehouse. Under a protocol called "bucket brigades", each worker follows a simple rule; and without conscious intention or even awareness of the workers, the flow of work is smoothed and bottlenecks are removed. Furthermore, this happens without the advice on engineers, consultants, or management. The bucket brigade protocol has increased pick rates by 20-50% at some major distribution centers. (This is joint work with Don Eisenstein of the University of Chicago.)
Visionary or Autocrat: Pat Crecine and Georgia Tech Reorganization, 1988-1990

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006-02-28) Giebelhaus, August W.

The adminstration of Georgia Tech's ninth president, John Patrick "Pat" Crecine, was the most controversial in the school's history. The period from 1987 to 1994 would become marked by much change and significant accomplishment, but also be accompanied by a high level of conflict. In the minds of many, the idea put forth by the former Senior Vice President from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh represented the vision needed to propel the Institute into the 21st century; others interpreted Crecine's perceived "my way or the highway" approach as too high a price to pay, and weighed his leadership as being more destructive than constructive. As with most historical judgements, truth rarely resides on either extreme. This talk will focus on the major reorganization of the campus in the period 1988-1990 as a case study for evaluating Pat Crecine's presidency. It will explain how the current organizational structure of the campus developed historically, and attempt to highlight the nature and extent of the conflict that surrounded the process.
The Energy Challenge and Fuel Cells

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005-11-29) Fuller, Tom

Our society's power and energy demand is met largely through the combustion of fossil fuels. We rely on a limited resource, and what's more global energy use is expected to double in the coming decades. At the same time concerns about the effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and criteria pollutants as well as concerns about energy security continue to mount. Meeting our energy needs in a sustainable manner is a historic challenge that will cause us to diverge from the pattern of the last couple of centuries. To this end, several U.S. reserach universtities, Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project, Georgia Institute of Technology, and MIT to name a few, have recentely launched major intitiatives to intesify their efforts in energy research. Clean, efficient and secure energy is cleary a critical national priority. The U.S. Department of energy has also introducde a broad hydrogen-fuel initiative and shown renewed interest in nuclear power, for example. One specific technology, fuel cells, will be discussed in detail. What are the potential applications for fuel cells, what are the research challeges, and how is Georgia Tech contributing to their development?
Sports Scheduling

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005-10-25) Nemhauser, George L.

College and professional sports, including basketball, baseball, football and hockey, is a multi-billion dollar industry with a substantial part of the revenue derived from television. To maximize revenue, it is crucial to have important games televised on the right days and times. These requirements frequently conflict with more traditional requirements of a "fair" schedule that balances strength of schedule, home and away games, and travel. Sports scheduling can be thought of as the engineering of the sports entertainment supply chain. A typical model for a sports scheduling problem is a combinatorial design with nasty side constraints and multi-objectives. In this talk we discuss our experience with the Sports Scheduling Group in scheduling ACC basketball and football, and major league baseball.
Not Lost in Space: Science and Technology as Women's Work in Postwar Science Fiction

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005-09-27) Yaszek, Lisa

The new technologies that proliferated after World War II — including everything from atomic bombs and communication satellites to deep freezers and automatic coffee makers — radically transformed American thinking about science, society, and gender. In the first study of its kind, Professor Lisa Yaszek explains how women writing for the postwar science fiction community created the earliest body of literature to systematically explore these transformations. Yaszek begins by reviewing how cold war domestic industrialization fostered new notions of women’s work as the technoscientific management of home and family. At the same time, she contends, anxiety about early Soviet successes in the space race led to a growing conviction that American women should leave their homes and serve their country as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. Yaszek then demonstrates how Judith Merril, Kay Rogers, and Marion Zimmer Bradley merged these seemingly contradictory ideas in stories that celebrated women's domestic lives as inspiration for scientific and technological discovery. Thus these authors figured women's work in both the home and the laboratory as essential to the ongoing development of technoscientific society in particular and human progress as a whole.
Aware Home: Sensing, Interpretation, and Recognition of Everday Activities

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005-03-29) Essa, Irfan

The Aware Home project is a unique living laboratory for exploration of ubiquitous computing in a domestic setting. Dr Essa's Talk will present ongoing research in the area of developing technologies within a residential setting that will affect our everyday living - specifically concentrating on the sensing and perception technologies that can enable a home environment to be aware of the whereabouts and activities of its occupants. The discussion will include the use of computer vision, audition work and other efforts in computational perception to track and monitor the residents, as well as methods being developed to recognize the residents' activities over short and extended periods. The technological, design and engineering research challenges inherent in this problem domain, and the focus on awareness to help maintain independence and quality of life for an aging population will also be explored. The project is located in the Georgia Tech Broadband Institute's Residential Laboratory.