VIGRE

East Asia Summer School

The NSF has an annual program entitled East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes for U.S. Graduate Students .

The Program, aimed at US citizens, gives students the opportunity to
work with researchers in countries ranging from Japan and Korea to Australia.

You would need to make some arrangements with researchers there to
have a successful application. Deadline is in early December of each year.

IBM PhD Fellowship

Availible to graduate students who have completed one year of study. Must be nominated
by a faculty member.

IBM is pleased to announce the Ph.D. Fellowship Program for the 2005-2006
academic year. We have received many outstanding and exceptional
candidates from universities all over the world in the past and encourage
your participation. IBM Ph.D. Fellowship nominations may be made by
faculty members from September 20 to November 1, 2004.

The IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Program honors exceptional Ph.D. students in the
array of disciplines fundamental to innovation and on demand business,
including: business, chemistry, computer science, electrical engineering,
materials science, mathematics, mechanical engineering, and physics, as
well as emerging technical fields, such as autonomic computing,
nanotechnology, Grid computing, and services management, operations,
research, and services science. The IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Program also
supports our long-standing commitment to workforce diversity. IBM
the workplace and encourages nominations of women, minorities and all who
contribute to that diversity.

Please feel free to post this Program Announcement in your department
area. This announcement will also be posted on the Internet
at 2004 and will be linked to the Internet nomination form. Award recipients
will be finalized in early February, 2005 followed by letters to all
participants. All supporting documents for the fellowship, such as
student's resume, and endorsement by the department head as well as the
nominator's recommendation must be included in the nomination form. We
ask that each department submit no more than two new nominations (in
addition to any existing fellowship renewals). In cases of more than one
nomination for a particular fellowship (including renewals), the
department head's endorsement must include an indication of the relative
merits of all the candidates and the department's prioritization of these
candidates. Students must be enrolled full-time in a college or
university Ph.D. program, and they should have completed at least one
year of study in their doctoral program at the time of their nomination.

IBM Ph.D. Fellowships are awarded worldwide. IBM Ph.D. Fellows are
awarded tuition, fees, and a stipend of $17,500 (US) for the nine-month
academic year 2005/2006. All IBM Ph.D. Fellows are matched with an IBM
Mentor according to their technical interests, and they are encouraged to
participate in a summer internship. Interns are awarded an IBM ThinkPad
gift during the internship.

We look forward to receiving your department's nominations.

For further information, see your IBM contact, visit the website above, or
contact phdfellow@us.ibm.com

If you wish to be removed from this announcement mailing in the future,
please send a return email indicating this.

Thank you.

Dr. Mary O. Rigali
Program Director, Ph.D. Fellowship program

Corporate University Relations

East Asia Summer Institutes, Opportunity for Grad Students

A letter from the NSF

Dear Colleague,

The Summer Institutes in Asia and Australia 2004 program is complete and it
is now time to prepare for the 2005 program. One hundred and fifty US
graduate students became internationally experienced researchers by spending
eight weeks conducting research and experiencing life in Australia, China,
Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Congratulations to all of them for taking that
first step towards a lifetime of collaboration. With your encouragement
more students will learn about and apply to this program for the next cycle.

I would like to ask for your cooperation with the broad distribution of this
information to your colleagues, peers and various institution offices
responsible for advising students and promoting international collaboration.
The deadline for applying to the 2005 program is December 10, 2004.

Top 2 websites for this program
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03608/nsf03608.htm - Program Announcement
http://www.nsftokyo.org/spmenu.html - Covers important topics including the
following:
* Handbooks on 2005 East Asia Summer Programs
* Potential Host Institutions for East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes
* How to Apply to the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes
* Hints to East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes' Applicants for
Initiating
* Contact with Prospective Hosts
* Participants for Summer Programs in Japan 2003
* NSF Advice to Participants in EAPSI in Japan
* Advice Letters from Previous Participants in Summer Programs
* Research Reports from Previous Summer Programs Participants

2004 Summer Press Release
150 U.S. Graduate Students Embark on Research Experiences in East Asia and
Australia
http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/newsroom/pr.cfm?ni=10000000000104
Best regards,

Tony Teolis
Program Specialist
Office of INT Science and Engineering
National Science Foundation
Tel: 703-292-7343
ateolis@nsf.gov
www.nsf.gov/sbe/int

Tiffany Gobles to Defend Thesis

Tiffany Gobles will defend her thesis, on the subject of automatic theorem proving, on
August 17. Her thesis director is Professor Belinfante.

Zixia Song, PhD

Zixia Song has successfully defended her PhD dissertation,
"Extremal Functions for Contractions of Graphs."

She will take a postdoctoral position at Ohio State beginning in the Fall.

Congratulations, Zixia.

Patricia Pichardo a Sam Nunn International Security Fellow

Patricia Pichardo has been selected to participate in the
Sam Nunn International Security Fellows Program. The purpose of this program is to engage scientists at all levels of their career in security issues.

This is part of a large iniatiative, supported in part by the Macarthur Foundation, and involving several universities. Congratulations Patty.

Stephen Young gets NSA Internship

Stephen Young, a graduate student, will participate in the National Security Agency Summer Internship Program.

This is a competetive entry program, in which you not only have to be
admitted to the program, but also pass a security clearance.

Last year, one of the GT PhDs, Sean Curran, took a position at the NSA.

Comprehensive Exam Results

The statistics on the Comprehensive Exams in the Graduate Program are:

16 students took the Algebra Exam, including 9 first-year students.
There were 9 passes.

18 students took the Analysis Exam, including 8 first-year students
and two MS students. There were 7 passes.

Exam rules have just been changed, with students permitted to pass one exam
at a time. This, among other changes, was made to address issues of fairness, and
speed the students through the Comprehensive Exams. The results of
this exam indicate that the changes are working.

Three students passed the Comps on schedule:
Csaba Biro, Christina Carroll , and Jean Savinien

Three new students passed:
Alexander Grigo, David Jimenez, Hua Xu

Five students passed one part, and have time to take the other:
Sujin Ahn (1st year), Mark Bilinski(1st year),
Alessandro Pugliese, Radleigh Santos (1st year),
and Alex Yurchenko

Congratulations to all.

Kasso Okoudjou wins Sigma Xi Best Thesis Award

Kasso Okoudjou has been awarded one of the 2004 Sigma Xi Best PhD Thesis Award, one of five such awards given this year on the Tech campus. This is a campus wide award, which includes some prize money.

The winning thesis was entitled, "Characterization of function spaces and
boundedness of bilinear operators through Gabor frames,"
written under the direction of Chris Heil. Kasso defended the thesis April, 2003, and is now a post-doc at Cornell.

All recent GT Math Theses can be seen here

Grad Student Science Applications Down

It is our experience that the number of graduate students applications
from especially China are down. This is nationwide phenomena is reported in
the New York Times.

In fact, at Georgai Tech last year, of a number of Chinese students admitted to the program, only one managed to get a visa.

Three New PhDs

Congratulations are due to Bryan Rasmussen, Dima Kreslavskiy, and Enrique Figueroa-Lopez for defending their dissertations this term. Congratulations and best wishes also to the many MS students who are receiving their degrees.

Bryan Rasmussen's PhD title is: "Numerical Approximation of Flow-Invariant Tori." The advisor is Professor Dieci.

Enrique Figueroa-Lopez PhD title is: "Levy Process models for risky assests: Theory, Simulation and Calibration." His advisor is Professor Houdre.

Dima Kreslavskiy PhD advisor is Professor Bunimovich.

Grad Student Performs on GT Musical

Svetlana Bukharina, a first-year graduate student, will perform in
a perfromance by the GT Music Department, with details below.
Svetlana follows a number of undergrads who have participated in
Music and Theatre events on campus.

The Georgia Tech Music Department Presents:
"Invitation to the Dance" featuring the Georgia Tech Symphony Orchestra and Jazz Ensemble

The Orchestra will perform Copland's Appalachian Spring, Stravinsky's Berceuse and Finale from his Firebird Suite and Tschaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet.
The Georgia Tech Jazz Ensemble's offerings will include Duke Ellington's Dance of the Sugar Rum Cherry from his Nutcracker Suite, Herbie Hancock's Dolphin Dance, Bill Evans' Waltz for Debbie and Louie Prima's Sing, Sing, Sing.
Tickets are available at the Georgia Tech box office, and are $5 for the general public and free for Tech students with I.D.

When: Monday November 24th @ 8pm
Where: Robert Ferst Theatre

Sam Burer, Math/ACO Graduate wins "New Hot Paper Recognition"

Samuel Burer, a Math graduate student in the ACO program is a coauthor on a paper picked for "Hot Paper" for September 2003, on the ISI Essential Science Indicators web page.

Samuel Burer is now an Assistant Professor of Managment Science at the University of Iowa.
The paper cited is titled, "Solving a class of semidefinite programs via nonlinear programming",
and is coauthored with Professor Renato D.C. Monteiro, of ISYE at Georgia Tech, and
Professor Yin Zhang of Computational and Applied Mathematicsat Rice University.

The paper demonstrates that a class of semidefinite programs can be solved by nonlinear
programming techniques, in a manner that is simpler and more efficient than interior point methods.

Research Horizons for January

From Evans Harrell, Graduate Director

Dear faculty,

As you know, the Research Horizons seminar is a VIGRE-supported effort to
get graduate students involved in research by providing lectures at an
introductory level. We have often seen disappointingly few students
in attendance, and this situation will probably be exacerbated in January,
because a portion of the target audience will be focusing on the Comprehensive
Exams.

We are thinking of structuring the RH seminar differently in January to
revitalize it and attract some of the students studying for the
Comps. The theme of the month would be {\it Instructive Examples}. We have
in mind a selection of faculty presenting entertaining or useful examples
which either illustrate familiar theorems of the kinds learned early in
graduate school or show how those theorems are applied in practice.

We are asking for volunteers to present their favorite instructive
examples. By the way, the time allotted need not be a full hour -
different volunteers could present a few examples in the same seminar.

Mason Porter is the organizer of the RH seminar this Academic Year, so
volunteers could address themselves to mason@math.gatech.edu to get
on the schedule.

This could be a real benefit to the graduate program, and those of
us involved in it will be appreciative.

Georgia Tech's Graduate Recruiting Brochures

From Evans Harrell:

You can get it as
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~harrell/GP/brochure/flyer1.pdf
and
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~harrell/GP/brochure/flyer2.pdf

(A fuller brochure is at
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~harrell/GP/brochure/ )

I'll also prepare some copies to leave with Genola, which might be more
convenient than using your own color printer.

Kamal Jain, ACO Grad, Giving Seminar

Kamal Jain, who got his doctorate in 2000 through the Georgia Tech ACO Graduate Program, is back in town to give a Graph Theory seminar with the title"Combinatorics in Network Coding" on Thursday October 16.

Kamal Jain, who got his PhD in Computing, is now at the Theory Group at Microsoft. You can find out more about his work at his Georgia Tech home page. The ACO (Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization) is a joint program between Mathematics, Computing and Industrial Systems.

Results from the Comprehensive Exams

The first major hurdle the Graduate Students face are the comprehensive exams, one in Analysis and one in Algebra, both at the level of the first year courses in those subjects.

The exams given this past September were taken by 17 students, with three of those being students who had just started gradute school, with the remaining 13 being students who had been in the program for at least one year.

Six of those 13 passsed the exam. The six are Nate Berglund, Michael Kettner, Jean-Phillipe Lessard, Bill McClain, John Pearson, and Turkay Yolcu. These results are some what better than the results from the last couple of exams given.

Some more students passed one exam, but not both, as is currently required.

Nevertheless, grad students and faculty are concerned about the administration of the exams, and the role they are playing the PhD program. The Graduate Committee, chaired by Professor Mucha, with the graduate student Christel Hohenegger on the committee, is considering the adminstration of the exam.

The committee will likely propose some tweaks to the system. The items under discussion include (and are not limited to)
(1) permitting the passage of one exam at a time, rather than both as is currently required
(2) having the exams three times a year, Fall, Spring, and Summer
(3) placing all students on the same time limit to pass the exams, in contrast to the current system that treats those with masters differently

These changes have to make it out of the Graduate Committee, and then be voted on by the whole faculty before becoming effective.

Some students and faculty have deeper concerns about the Comprehensive Exams. Namely, the time spent on the exams is really large. And the Exams do not serve the interests of all faculty, especially those with more applied interests. But, addressing these concerns would require a significant overhaul of the current Comprehensive and Oral Exams, and will have to be addressed at some later date.

Sigma Xi Conference and Funding Opportunities

Mason Porter points out this opportunity from the national organization Sigma Xi:

GRANTS-IN-AID OF RESEARCH DEADLINE - Awarding research support to undergraduate and graduate students for 80 years. Most grants range from a few
hundred dollars to $1,000. Vision related or astronomy related research projects may be awarded up to $2,500.
Students apply online:
APPLICATION DEADLINE: October 15, 2003.

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT OPPORTUNITY - 2003 Student Research Conference to be held in Los Angeles November 14 and 15. Students present research,
attend workshops and lectures by leading scientists and network with graduate school and employment recruiters. Information and Registration:
http://www.sigmaxi.org/meetings/student/index.shtml
GRADUATE STUDENTS and DOCTORAL - Special Opportunity for participation at the Student Conference. More Info at:
http://www.sigmaxi.org/meetings/student/phd.shtml

COLLABORATE. COMMUNICATE. WITHOUT BOUNDARIES. - Sigma Xi's 2003 Forum, "Science & Engineering: Keys to International Understanding," will be
held November 12-13 in Los Angeles in conjunction with the Society's Annual Meeting and Student Research Conference. Spearheaded by Sigma Xi
President Peter Raven, this meeting will focus on scientific and engineering communication and collaboration as an enabler for international
understanding. See http://sigmaxi.org/meetings/forum/upcoming.shtml for the latest program information and online registration. Early
registration ends October 16, so register today!

How Do You Survive Grad School?

A panel of three professors, and three graduate students fielded questions from professors, graduate students, and undergraduates. The panelists were

Mason Porter, Postdoc	Evans Harrell, prof	Michael Lacey, Prof
Sam Greenberg, ACO grad	Todd Moeller, grad	Luis Hernandez, grad

It was a full hour of discussion. Your scribe gives an overview, but does not claim to be accurate to all the opinions voiced. Sam Greenberg stressed that the grad students should talk to peers, and profs about research, advisors, and everything else. This is good advice for those of you reading this.

The Advisor An early topic of conversation was the relationship to the advisor. Whatever an advisor is, the average number of advisors on all those on the panel was, I think, more than 2. While the advisor should be entered into a spreadsheet in the Graduate Advisor's computer. Such entries are easy to change.

So what is the point of the advisor? In Professor Harrell's opinion, one should ``fall in love with the problem, not the advisor." The thesis topic w ould ideally be a rich enough topic to sustain your interest for a period of time beyond your thesis. And the advisor can continue to play a helpful role to the PhD student, with postdoctoral positions, conference invitations, and the tenure track position.

There is no hard and fast rule to choosing the advisor. One indication is recent track record of the advisor in terms of students finishing, and being placed in postdoctoral positions. But, to take a local example, Professor Lubinsky has a very strong record of training students in his native South Africa, but has not yet advised a grad student at GT. Likewise, a young professor, with a hot research record, may not have any record at all, but could be an ideal choice.

Getting Research Done You are in the PhD program to do research. Sam Greenberg pushed the idea of getting into research as possible. Take a homework problem, and twist it, and generalize it, to get a new problem, and possibly a research topic. Attend seminars. Ask questions. Attend the Research Horizons talks, which are targeted at newbies.

Todd Moeller encouraged students to take advantage of range of summer programs for grad students. Todd specifically praised he North Carolina State program in applied math. There is also the IMA program, which was held at Georgia Tech this summer, and the the MSRI has another program. Georgia Tech is a member of the IMA and the MSRI, making participation in these programs especially easy. Participation in these kinds of conferences can help you learn quite a bit about a field, it's questions and future.

[Note: The National Science Foundation's programs are not exclusively targeted at US citizens. Any grad student support that comes through an individual grant, CAREER grants, or Focused Research grants, among many other examples, carry no citizenship restrictions. A prof doesn't even have to be a US citizen to get an individual grant from the NSF. Other programs, such as the VIGRE and REU programs do carry citizenship restrictions. These programs were formulated in part to respond to national interests, and congressional will. ]

One stumbling block to getting research done is the difficulty in reading a research paper, say one that your research advisor gave you. Some strategies are:

• The paper might be cutting edge material, that is written at a very specialized audience. You may not yet be part of that audience.
• Flip to the back, and find the key original references. These are more likely to explain the context and importance of the problem at hand. You can also look for recent survey articles, and textbooks and research mongraphs that address that topic.
• Find out what the key motivating examples are. And study those. The advisor probably knows what these examples are.

The fact is that reading research papers is hard. You can also try to identify the unorigonal bits, the parts that are standard aspects of the subject, and the orginal arguments that represent the contribution to knowledge.

But what about the Comps? Sure, you can't just leap into research. You do need to learn more--Real Analysis, Algebra, and the like. And you need to pass the Comps.

This is a conflicting goal with doing research. There isn't a good answer to this one. Not everyone should pass the Comps, since to do well on a thesis, you will need to be a good problem solver, among other things of course. And we all have a range of conflicting demands on our time. Try balance them out as best you can.

There is a specific timetable for passing the Comps. At the same time, there is no expectation that one rule will be fair to all cases.

(Student Run) Graph Theory Seminar

The Graph Theory seminar is about to resume its regular meetings.                                                                                
If you are interested in attending, please e-mail Paul Wollan                                                                                    
 the times when you have other committments.                                                                             
                                                                                                                                                 
As in the past, the speakers (mostly students) will present recent                                                                               
results of interest to current students working in Graph Theory.                                                                                 
 

Editors Comment: Paul Wollan is a 3rd year Grad student.

Pass Rates on Qualifying Exams

The qualifying exams are coming up in a little over three weeks.
A very large number of students will be taking the exams on 12, 15 September. These exams cover Analysis and Algebra, at the level of an introductory graduate course.

Over the years 1990-2001, the Qualifying exams have been taken
by about 140 students, and have had a success rate of about 60%.
And in recent years, the exams have been more focused in their subject matter than they have in the past.

In the period of Fall 1997, to Fall 2001, these students have passed the exam:

Kelome, D. Armel		Sep-97
Khlabystova, Milena	Sep-97
Morales, Victor		Sep-97
Renom, Jose Miguel	Sep-97
Sheppardson, Laura	Sep-97
Viveros, Jorge			Sep-97
Hernandez, Luis		Sep-97
Maroofi, Hamed		Sep-97
Day, Sarah			Sep-98
Figueroa, Enrique		Sep-98
Jiang, Jiahui			Sep-98
Li, Xiantao			Sep-98
Moeller, Todd			Sep-98
Okoudjou, Kasso		Sep-98
Wang, Di				Sep-98
Chen, Jian			Aug-99
Lin, Jing				Aug-99
Komandarczyk, Rafal	Sep-99
Hohenegger, Christel	Sep-01
Timar, Adam			Sep-01

This is data for only the Qualifying Exam for the Math PhD. It does not include data for the
Algorithms, Computation and Optimization program.

This selective program has its own set of Qualifying Exams that are at least broader, if not also harder than the Qualifying Exam. Recent math grad students to pass that exam include Rajnessh Hegde, Paul Wollan, and Sam Greenberg.

New International Grad Students

  back row: Guido Kempel, David Jimenez, Cathy Jacobson, Adem Cakmak, Hua Xu,                                                                                                            
front row: Selin Caliskan, Eliana Traldi, Sujin Ahn, Sang-Ho Shim. 
Not pictured:  Xiaozhou Zhou.     
  

International Graduate students are vital to the Graduate program in Math, as they are to most Math departments. This year, the new international grad students went through an extensive introduction to Math, Georgia Tech and life in Atlanta. The students, whose names and faces are above, come from Korea, China, Turkey, Columbia and Argentina, among other places.

These students will also receive extensive training in English and teaching duties by Cathy Jacobson, a specialist in teaching english as a forgein language. Cathy is n the center of the picture.

She, with Rena Brakebill, and Klara Grodinsky, lead the TA Development Seminar, required of all first time Math TAs. This program is at the forefront of TA training at Georgia Tech.

IMA Combinatorics Pics

The IMA program in Combinatorics program, held at Georgia Tech, concluded last friday. Over a three week period, five projfessors gave courses on reserach topics in combinatorics to graduate students from all over the US. The principal lecturers were

• Graham Brightwell
• András Gyárfás
• Prasad Tetali
• Robin Thomas
• William T. Trotter

  There are some fun pics of the program up at different sites

  
  
  

  A tagged version of the Group Photo above has been put together by Frank Fiedler of University of Deleware. He also has plenty of captioned photos of the Workshop, participants, and some of the sites of Atlanta. And yet more photos here.

  Posted by lacey at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)

Orientation for Incoming Grad Students

Orientation for incoming grad students is taking place from July 29 to August 8, with the longer period due to new regulations governing international Graduate students.

Several GT faculty have voluntered to give overviews of research interests. These faculty include Bunivomich, Harrell, Hill, Lacey, Landsberg, and Loss. These talks are open to all interested parties, but especially the current graduate students.

Talks are at 4pm, Skiles 255, July 29---August 8

Kevin Khan Memorial Service

Kevin Khan, a GT graduate student, and native of Trinidad has
died, suddenly and unexpectedly.
A Memorial Service will be held Monday July 27, at 7:30pm, at
Morehouse Catholic Center

The Comprehensive Exam Committee for Fall, 2003

The Comprehensive Exam Committee for Fall, 2003, will consist of Profs. Andrew, Basu, and Carlen. Dates: 12, 15 September.

These exams cover Analysis and Algebra, at the level of an introductory graduate course. We expect that a large number of current students, 12 to 15 students, plus some new students, will sit for the exams.

These exams are to be passed by the second year of graduate study.

Congratulations to Summer PhDs

The summerwill see several new PhDs defend or graduate. They are
availible at
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~harrell/GP/Dissert/

Read on for the list of all seven PhDs.

1. Xuelei Wang, 8 November, 2002,
Level Set Model of Microstructure Evolution in the Chemical Vapor
Infiltration Process (abstract)
Advisor: Shi Jin.

2. Erik Boczko, 13 November, 2002,
Polygonal approximation for flows
Advisor: Konstantin Mischaikow.

Eric is an assistant professor of biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University.

3. Milena Khlabystova, 3 April, 2003,
Dynamical and Statistical Properties of Lorentz Lattice Gases,
Advisor, Leonid Bunimovich

4. Kasso Okoudjou , 22 April, 2003,
Characterization of function spaces and boundedness of bilinear
operators through Gabor frames (abstract)
Advisor, Christopher Heil.
Kasso will be taking a postdoctoral position at Cornell University.

5. Laura Sheppardson , 27 June 2002
Grah Theory
Advisor, Xingxing Yu

Laura will be taking a tenure track position at Ole Miss.

6. Sean Curran
Graph Theory
Advisor, Xingxing Yu

Sean will take a position with the National Security Agency.

7. Sarah Day
Dyanmics
Advisor: Konstantin Mischaikow

Sarah will take a one year postdoc at Leiden, Netherlands, and then
a postdoc at Cornell University.