A Culture of Research

Atlanta (November 11, 2009) — At the advent of the millennium, the College set ambitious goals to cultivate a distinctive and influential research identity. It aligned its research profile with the Institute, focusing on human and societal aspects of engineering, science, technology, and computing. Faculty began pursuing significant external funding to support research. By all measures, it has been a decade of extraordinary growth and success.

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Susan Cozzens, Associate Dean for Research said, "Sue Rosser [former Dean] envisioned the College as a research environment worthy of a premier research university and took steps to achieve that. She stressed pursuit of external funding and led the way in securing major grants for projects. She also put in place an administrative infrastructure to support faculty in the grant process."

Today, Ivan Allen College is home to one of the nation’s largest concentrations of researchers on the science, technology, and engineering workforce; distinguished historians and sociologists who put science and technology in context; literary scholars and artists redefining the boundaries of media and digital innovation; the only school of international affairs at a major technological institution; and one of a handful of public policy schools worldwide that focus on science and technology. Its reputation for extraordinary interdisciplinarity attracts top caliber faculty and students in these areas.

Faculty in the College explore more than 30 main areas of inquiry including Georgia Tech’s priority research areas: energy & environment, nanotechnology, health and biomedicine, and civil infrastructure. They lead nine research centers and five media laboratories. Annual publishing of original work includes nearly two dozen books and 185 book chapters and refereed articles. As leaders in their fields, faculty serve on the editorial boards of the major international academic journals and are regularly recognized for distinguished work in their fields. They are having an increased influence in Washington, D.C. through research presentations, congressional testimony and consultations in areas such as climate policy, economics, nanotechnology, and security. They are building a global profile by leading conferences involving policy makers and researchers from around the world.

Growing the Grant Portfolio

Government and foundation funding for the social sciences and humanities in the U.S. has traditionally been modest, making it remarkable that Ivan Allen College faculty have secured more than $25 million in research grants during the last five years and the total is expected to surpass $30 million in 2010. Sources of external funding are the most diverse at Georgia Tech, with significant grants from top tier entities including the European Union, National Science Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Institutes of Health, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and National Endowment for the Humanities, and support from foundations such as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation (entrepreneurship), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (culture, performing arts, environment, and public affairs), the Carnegie Foundation (peace), the MacArthur Foundation, and the Energy Foundation.

Dr. Susan Cozzens

The wide range of funders interested in work by College faculty has enabled collaborations across the Institute and work conducted around the globe from Brazil to Liberia to Finland, China, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Iran, and beyond. Major awards have provided the underpinning for the College’s graduate programs with five of the six schools now offering masters and PhD degrees.

Susan Cozzens explained, "The external funding has helped accelerate scholarly productivity, allowed the College to elevate requirements for faculty tenure, and has helped upgrade the scope and quality of programs for both undergraduates and graduates." Cozzens notes that, in 2008, grants provided $875,000 in graduate student stipends and $300,000 in tuition.

Even the College's undergraduate majors are directly involved in research; their work is consistently among the winners of the President’s Undergraduate Research Awards (PURA) and Undergraduate Research Option Program (UROP) awards.

On the Horizon

By examining science and technology through the lens of the liberal arts, Ivan Allen College has extended the boundaries of the Georgia Tech’s traditional classrooms and laboratories and is expanding its influence and effectiveness as a catalyst for change in Atlanta, the state of Georgia, the nation, and the world. Cozzens talked about what’s next on the horizon.

“It has truly been a remarkable decade in which we assembled a diverse and creative research portfolio," said Cozzens. Despite the economic downturn, we anticipate continued growth in research funding. I am working to engage even more faculty in research projects, and to create the conditions for them to lead campus-wide initiatives. Very exciting things are ahead.”

Read more in stories below about faculty research awards and a major new grant.

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Nunn Forum Set for March 29

Atlanta (November 12, 2009) — The Sam Nunn-Bank of America Policy forum will take place March 29, 2010.

Presented by Georgia Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy, and the Ivan Allen College, the 2010 forum will explore the challenges and opportunities for pursuing a path towards a world free of nuclear weapons.

The forum will be held at the held at the Global Learning Center on campus.

For more information, contact Bernard Gourley via email Bernard.Gourley@inta.gatech.edu

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Carnegie Funds Academic Work in Nuclear Disarmament

Atlanta (November 12, 2009) — Academic scholars have been largely absent from the current debate over prospects for eliminating nuclear weapons. Mainstays of teaching and research in political science and international relations programs during the Cold War, the subjects of nuclear strategy and deterrence, today, are either taken for granted or simply overlooked. Now, in the midst of increased momentum for a national and global non-proliferation agenda, Adam Stulberg has launched a project to reinvigorate scholarship on the issue: the “Program on Strategic Stability Evaluation (POSSE): Re-thinking Stability Criteria along the “Road to Zero””.

Dr. Adam Stulberg

The Carnegie Corporation of New York has provided a $650,000 grant to support the program.
Stulberg, Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and Co-Director of the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy (CISTP), cites unprecedented interest and opportunity for advancing nuclear disarmament as the impetus for POSSE. In a speech in Prague April 5th, President Obama announced America’s commitment to nuclear disarmament and a global agenda for pursuing that long-term vision. Obama noted that, despite the demise of the Cold War, “in a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.”

Stulberg says that the influence of advocates of a U.S. security policy centered on nuclear weapons is in decline. U.S. leaders including former Senator Sam Nunn, former Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry Kissinger, and former Defense Secretary William Perry have helped spearhead efforts toward nuclear disarmament by policymakers across the globe. Stulberg also points to research that says that over seventy percent of former leaders of the national security establishment now openly acknowledge the anachronisms of what has been the U.S. strategic force posture and the importance of debating the fundamental value of nuclear weapons.

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“Policy makers in the U.S. and other nuclear weapons possessors states (NWPS) now enjoy an unprecedented opportunity to transcend the “abolition paradox” as high-level political support now jibes with mounting concerns about nuclear proliferation, catastrophic terrorism and energy security,” says Stulberg.

With co-Principal investigator William C. Potter, Director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, Stulberg plans for POSSE to forge a global network of intergenerational and interdisciplinary scholars including those from the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, and to bring them together with national security policy makers from the eight key nuclear weapons possessing states (NWPS). POSSE seeks to spur pursuit of new analytic frameworks and methodologies for examining future strategic needs attendant to deep cuts in nuclear weapons and risk reduction:

“We’ll flesh out requirements for ‘minimum deterrence’ among the existing NWPS and then explore criteria for strategic stability. That means looking at how far we can reduce nuclear weapons and maintain stability; incentives to discourage use of residual nuclear weapons; challenges for managing virtual or latent nuclear weapons capabilities; and the prospects and modalities for eliminating nuclear weapons amid a changing global landscape. We intend to fill knowledge gaps related to conditions and processes for managing conflict among multiple nuclear powers, all of which possess very different force postures/strategies. Our hope is to encourage development of the intellectual moorings for the difficult policy choices and strategic conditions need to advance both the visions and steps towards a stable future free from practical concerns about the use nuclear weapons.”

The program will kick off with an academic workshop following the 2010 Nunn Forum and continue with successive policy workshops in Washington, D.C and on the Georgia Tech campus through the end of 2011. Applications to participate in the newly formed Program on Strategic Stability Evaluation (POSSE) are being accepted. Please access the link below for more information.

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Dalle Vacche's "Diva" Wins Prestigious Choice Award

Atlanta (November 6, 2009) — Angela Dalle Vacche, Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture and an internationally renowned film scholar has been honored with the prestigious Choice award for her book, Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema (University of Texas Press, 2008). Choice is the official publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries in the United States and bestows the award annually in recognition of an exceptional scholarly work.

Dr. Angela Dalle Vacche

The culmination of 15 years of research and work at premier film archives in Bologna and Amsterdam, Diva offers the first authoritative study of an important pre-WWI (1913-1918) film genre. Dalle Vacche analyzed some seventy films and developed a seminal iconography. “Animated by a luminous goddess at its center, the diva film provided a forum for denouncing social evils and exploring new models of behavior among the sexes. These melodramas of themes including courtship, seduction, marriage, betrayal, abandonment, child custody, and public reputation offered women a vision of—if not always a realistic hope for—emancipation and self-discovery” at the dawn of the mechanistic age.

Dalle Vacche examined the work of actresses such as Francesca Bertini, Lyda Borelli, and Pina Menichelli to establish what the diva film contributed to the modernist development of the "new woman." Contrasting the Italian diva with the Hollywood vamp Theda Bara and the famous Danish star Asta Nielsen, Dalle Vacche shows how the diva oscillates between articulating Henri Bergson's vibrant life-force (élan vital) and representing the suffering figure of the Catholic mater dolorosa.

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A fascinating tour that includes the Ballets Russes, orientalism, art nouveau, Futurism, fashion, prostitution, stunt women in the circus, aviation, anti-Semitism, colonialism, and censorship, Diva sheds light on the eccentric implantation of modernity in Italy, as well as on how, before World War I, the filmic image was associated with the powers of the occult (rather than Freudian unconscious, as had been previously argued).

Perhaps a highlight of the book for technology-focused readers is the chapter on aviation, Wings of Desire. “The invention of the airplane marked the twinning of modern technology with visual vertigo,” writes Dalle Vacche. “The airplane’s ability to move between ground and sky matched the diva’s oscillation between historical change and personal ruin.”

The book is accompanied by a DVD of archival film clips Diva Dolorosa.

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Clark Honored for "Remaking Regional Economies"

Atlanta (November 3, 2009) — Jennifer Clark, Assistant Professor in the Ivan Allen College School of Public Policy, and co-author Susan Christopherson (City and Regional Planning, Cornell) have won the 2009 Regional Studies Association Best Book Award for their work Remaking Regional Economies: Power, Labor, and Firm Strategies in the Knowledge Economy(Routledge, 2008).

Dr. Jennifer Clark

Clark and Christopherson's book explores a field widely studied in Europe and Canada, but rarely in the U.S. The book has drawn an unusual amount of attention: it has been positively reviewed in five academic journals spanning both US and UK-based publications and several social science disciplines including the Journal of Economic Geography, Regional Studies, Growth and Change, Economic Geography, and the British Journal of Industrial Relations.

The Regional Studies Association which bestowed the award is an international forum for regional development and policy research based in the United Kingdom. Clark and Christopherson will be recognized at an awards luncheon in the House of Lords in London.

About the Book

Since the early 1980s, the region has been central to thinking about the emerging character of the global economy. In fields as diverse as business management, industrial relations, economic geography, sociology, and planning, the regional scale has emerged as an organizing concept for interpretations of economic change.

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The book is both a critique of the "new regionalism" and a return to the "regional question," including all of its concerns with equity and uneven development. It will challenge researchers and students to consider the region as a central scale of action in the global economy, and at the core of the book are case studies of two industries that rely on skilled, innovative, and flexible workers - the optics and imaging industry and the film and television industry. Combined with this is a discussion of the regions that constitute their production centers. The authors’ intensive research on photonics and entertainment media firms, both large and small, leads them to question some basic assumptions behind the new regionalism and to develop an alternative framework for understanding regional economic development policy. Finally, there is a re-examination of what the regional question means for the concept of the learning region.

This book draws on the rich contemporary literature on the region but also addresses theoretical questions that preceded "the new regionalism." It will contribute to teaching and research in a range of social science disciplines and this new paperback edition will also make the book more accessible to students and researchers in those disciplines, those individuals who will influence the re-structuring economies of the 21st century.

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Harrell receives NSF CAREER Award

Atlanta (November 6, 2009) — Fox Harrell, Assistant Professor, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his project "Computing for Advanced Identity Representation (AIR)." The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty. Harrell's award is accompanied by a five year $535,000 grant.

Dr. Fox Harrell

Harrell directs the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab (ICE Lab). His AIR Project represents a new transdisciplinary approach to designing computational identity technologies. Computer users already have the ability to represent themselves in digital media (e.g., virtual characters, avatars, and social networking profiles). The AIR Project will result in new technology and theory to allow users to create highly imaginative self representations and to reveal how stereotypes, prejudice, bias, and other ills are built into current technologies.

Harrell is developing an identity modeling "toolkit" for constructing identities across interactive narratives/games and social networking applications. Grounded in computing, cognitive science, and digital media arts, the technology will enable representations that more fully mirror how humans express our identities in nuanced ways such as adapting to social context, changing over time, varying body language, discourse, and more. They also model how we classify ourselves and each other, and how our identities relate to our social groups. As an example application, the technology will enable more dynamic player characters in games and allow computer characters to respond more creatively to players' identities.

Image from "Loss, Undersea"

The AIR Toolkit will also allow Harrell to conduct empirical evaluation of his new user representations and compare them to those available in current systems with a goal of better understand how users adapt their self-presentations in response to expected behaviors and appearances, as well as to social categories and stigmas.

Harrell noted, "The AIR Project represents developing technology with a humanistic ethos that extends through education in the classroom, curriculum, mentoring, and outreach. Most importantly, the AIR Project serves society-at-large by developing technology to enable real-world empowerment, critical awareness, and diversity."

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