Strategic Plan Draft Available for Review, Application Period Open for Phase Two Working Groups

Thousands of people focused on the future of Georgia Tech by helping us complete phase one — visioning and drafting — of Georgia Tech’s strategic planning process. Now, the process moves into the goal setting phase that will include an opportunity for review and input from the Georgia Tech community. Since October 2019, more than 5,700 students,…

$2 Million “Small Bets” Seed Grant Initiative Fosters Research Collaboration

Georgia Tech has launched a new “Small Bets” Seed Grant Program that will award up to $75,000 for a year’s work aimed at addressing some of society’s most difficult challenges. The aim is to catalyze new research collaborations and fuel high-risk, high-reward approaches. Unlike traditional competitive peer-reviewed grant processes, the “Small…

Jill Watson, an AI Pioneer in Education, Turns 4

Georgia Tech’s most well-known artificially intelligent teaching assistant, Jill Watson, turns four years old this January. The brainchild of Ashok Goel, professor in Interactive Computing, and launched at the start of 2016, the virtual TA was introduced into one of the courses for the then-fledgling Online Master of Science in Computer Science (…

Armored With Plastic ‘Hair’ and Silica Shell, New Perovskite Nanocrystals Show Enhanced Durability

Perovskite nanocrystals hold promise for improving a wide variety of optoelectronic devices – from lasers to light emitting diodes (LEDs) – but problems with their durability still limit the material’s broad commercial use. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated a novel approach aimed at addressing the material’s…

National Labs, Georgia Tech, Collaborate on AI Research

The Georgia Institute of Technology, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are jointly launching a new research center to solve some of the most challenging problems in artificial intelligence (AI) today, thanks to $5.5 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE). AI enables computer systems…

Diversity May Be Key to Reducing Errors in Quantum Computing

In quantum computing, as in team building, a little diversity can help get the job done better, computer scientists have discovered. Unlike conventional computers, the processing in quantum-based machines is noisy, which produces error rates dramatically higher than those of silicon-based computers. So quantum operations are repeated thousands of…

Hackers Could Use Connected Cars to Gridlock Whole Cities

In the year 2026, at rush hour, your self-driving car abruptly shuts down right where it blocks traffic. You climb out to see gridlock down every street in view, then a news alert on your watch tells you that hackers have paralyzed all Manhattan traffic by randomly stranding internet-connected cars. Flashback to July 2019, the dawn of autonomous…

Scientists Discover the Biggest Seaweed Bloom in the World

A team of scientists from the University of South Florida, Florida Atlantic University, and Georgia Institute of Technology used NASA satellite observations to discover the largest bloom of macroalgae in the world, an event that blankets the surface of the tropical Atlantic Ocean from the west coast of Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. The belt of…

Study Ties Poor Sleep to Reduced Memory Performance in Older Adults

A new study has found that variability in night-to-night sleep time and reduced sleep quality adversely affect the ability of older adults to recall information about past events. The study also found unexpected racial differences in the type of sleep patterns tied to lower memory performance across both younger and older African American research…

Ancient Toy Inspires Tool for State-of-the-Art Science

A 5,000-year-old toy still enjoyed by kids today has inspired an inexpensive, hand-powered scientific tool that could not only impact how field biologists conduct their research but also allow high-school students and others with limited resources to realize their own state-of-the-art experiments.  The device, a portable centrifuge for…