Events

Berry Launches Landmark Research on Science and Engineering Ethics

Last month, Public Policy Associate Professor Roberta Berry launched an ambitious three-year research initiative funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The first grant of its kind for Georgia Tech, the project focuses on ethics in science and engineering and an imperative that is fundamental to the Institute’s vision: educating scientists and engineers to understand the ethical implications of their work and help society address them.

The hypothesis Berry and her fellow researchers presented to NSF involves engaging graduate science and engineering students around an ethically fraught policy problem with fellow learners who are ethnically diverse, from different disciplines, and with different worldviews. Can they come to understand the problem from multiple perspectives and agree on policy recommendations?

“The students will be engaged in problem-solving mode,” says Berry. “We have drawn on research in contextualized ethics, cognitive science, problem-based learning, law, and policy to generate our hypothesis about the problem-solving skills future scientists and engineers will need and how they can develop them.”

The experimental courses will enroll Georgia Tech bioengineering graduate students with IAC public policy grad students, law students from Georgia State, ethics, religion, and bioscience students from Emory, and bioscience students from Morehouse School of Medicine. The assigned issues will be controversial and difficult, such as those surrounding the genetic engineering of human beings or the use of neuroimaging “lie detector” technologies in the courtroom.

Berry has found that science and engineering students want to engage the ethical issues posed by their work —they are curious about them and eager to find ways to cope with them. NSF and Berry want to ensure that today’s scientists and engineers are educated to be part of the solution, going beyond “what can we do” to “what should we do.”

Biofuels and the Economic Stimulus Package

Read about it in the latest Energy Buzz by Marilyn Brown, School of Public Policy Professor.

Interdisciplinary Studies a Priority for
ROTC Students

In a January 29th lecture, visiting Major General Douglas Stone, U.S. Marine Corps (USMC), voiced a theme that is fundamental to the vision of Georgia Tech and the Ivan Allen College - interdisciplinary study. Stone, who is expected to be confirmed by Congress as commander of U.S. Marine Reserve Forces, told Georgia Tech ROTC cadets and midshipmen that, to be effective in today’s world, they must understand other cultures and languages. They must merge the rigor of academic study in engineering with historical knowledge and cultural understanding to define their own perspective.

“Start picking your language now,” exhorted Stone. “If you don’t know the language, you don’t know the culture.”

Language and cultural studies are becoming a curricular requirement for ROTC. Ivan Allen College is spearheading course development. A $750,000 ROTC Language and Culture Grant awarded in 2008 by the Institute of International Education provides for “Advancing Critical Language Proficiency and Cultural Competence across Disciplines for ROTC students.” Phil McKnight, Chair of the School of Modern Languages, is developing the curriculum in partnership with the Air Force, Navy, and Army ROTC units.

Stone contextualized his message around his personal experiences in conflicts with Iraqis, violent Islamist behavior, and Al Qaeda terrorists. He described how these non-technical skills enrich decision-making and make possible one-to-one dialogs with opponents, allowing one to gain influence and win the hearts and minds of local populations.

Perspectives on China

HTS’ Lu Reshapes Transnational Perspectives

Originally from Shanghai, Hanchao Lu welcomes the possibilities resulting from China re-entering the world community. The new openness toward the West presents Lu, a historian and professor in the School of History, Technology, and Society, opportunity to disseminate among China scholars and the general public alternative perspectives on Chinese history and thought.

Toward that end, Lu is finalizing a new book, A Man of Two Worlds: The Life of Sir Robert Hart, 1835-1911, which will be published this year by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press. Lu presents a biography of Robert Hart, a British citizen who served as the Inspector General of China’s maritime customs for nearly half a century (1861-1908). Hart controlled China’s massive revenue generated from import/export commerce and was also responsible for establishing China’s modern postal service system, building a new pilotage system, and, in an important way, reshaping Chinese foreign policies.

Written in Chinese for the China audience, Lu challenges existing views –“the Chinese nationalist view of Hart as an agent of imperialism and exploitation, and the condescending Euro-centered view that sees Hart as the forefather of China’s modernization.”

Lu asserts that there is no doubt that Hart placed British national interests on the top of his agenda, but as a longtime high-ranking Chinese official, Hart administered the most successful government operation in China, played significant roles to propel China into the modern world, and achieved a delicate balancing act for Chinese interests in the global arena.

Through Hart, Lu asks readers to re-examine the meaning of imperialism, transnationalism, and the complicity of modernity in the non-western world, and offers contemporary implications for the significance of the West in today’s China.

Ho Explores Bank Competition in China

Originally from Hong Kong, “the world’s freest economy,” Chun-Yu Ho, joined the School of Economics last semester after finishing his doctoral studies in economics at Boston University.

Ho’s research centers on empirical industrial organization, economic development, and applied econometrics. His dissertation examined how banking reform in China impacted the market power of the country’s four main banks and whether or not the reform enhanced consumer welfare.

“I’m trying to identify where there is competition in the banking industry, if it can be improved, and the effects of competition on the market and the consumer.” Specifically, Ho has focused on competition in the consumer deposit market where higher deposit rates, lower service fees, better service by employees, and branching can improve the average consumer experience.

“If I can demonstrate that Chinese banks are not competitive and that they, and the Chinese people, would benefit from a shift in practices, perhaps it would inform their banking and competition polices.” Ho has presented papers to research institutes in Finland and Hong Kong, whose economies and trade are heavily intertwined with that of China. The research is relevant to other industries within China and can be applied to other countries as well.

This month, Ho heads to Tokyo to present an interdisciplinary paper on economic history—the impact of the 1930’s Sino-Japanese conflicts on Chinese government bonds and the resulting constraints on financing for public works. Currently, he is analyzing the effect of the Great Depression in the U.S. on China by looking into the reactions of Chinese banks in 1930s. “Research in this period,” says Ho, “informs today’s economics in China and can demonstrate how the financial market evolves over a long horizon.”

New Books

Boulard‘s Completes Unique Retrospective

Modern Languages Professor Stephanie Boulard’s new book, Visions Visitations Passions: En Compagnie De Claude Louis-Combet (Corlevour, France) is significant not only for its content, but for Boulard’s singular approach to its publication. A three year project, published in December 2008, Boulard directed every aspect of the book’s development. She engaged luminary French writers, academics, philosophers, poets, and artists, wrote an introductory analysis and a full length article, self-edited, and developed the book’s organization and presentation.

Written in French, Visions is a retrospective on the prolific and multi-dimensional writings of Claude Louis-Combet —poet, novelist, biographer, historian, philosopher, and a translator of spiritual texts. In gathering together diverse analysis, commentary, and artistic evocations of Louis-Combet’s work, Boulard inherently illuminates its extraordinary scope. Louis-Combet contributed four texts written especially for the book, a postscript to Boulard’s twenty year correspondence with him.

Boulard undertook the project for conceptual and aesthetic reasons. “I wanted a book that would be literary, but that would also escape the division between disciplines; a book that would not be strictly academic but would offer another kind of reading, which would be a form of wandering, as in a garden – with poems and visual art.”

Available in France and Belgium, Visions has not yet been translated to English.

Nitsche Takes Readers on Fantastic Journey

Three-dimensional graphics represent a dramatic artistic and technical development that suggests an overall transformation of games as media. The experience of space has become a key element of how we understand games and how we play them. In Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (MIT Press), Literature, Communication, and Culture Assistant Professor Michael Nitsche investigates what this shift means for video game design and analysis. How do game spaces evoke fictional worlds? What are their key qualities? How can we improve them?

Drawing on concepts from literary studies, architecture, theater, and cinema, Nitsche argues that game spaces can evoke narratives because the computer has to tell them to a player who is interpreting them in order to act in them. Virtual spaces stage the player in a dramatic relationship to a new digital world; they invite us to reclaim the story space and inhabit it. Consequently, Nitsche approaches game spaces not as pure visual spectacles but as meaningful virtual locations. His argument investigates what structures are at work in these locations, proceeds to an in-depth analysis of the audiovisual presentation of game worlds, and ultimately explores how we use and comprehend their functionality.

Nitsche introduces five analytical layers to better specify the connections between a computer's rule-based basis for a three dimensional world, its visual presentation, and social dynamics. He uses them in the analyses of research projects and commercial games that range from early classics to recent titles as he revisits current topics in game research from this new perspective.

Video Game Spaces is being received with enthusiasm by academic gaming experts. Katie Salen, author of several books on gaming describes it as a “fantastic journey that resonates with what we love best about games—their double identity as places to both ponder and play."

New Faculty Profile – Mikulas Fabry,
International Affairs

How are new countries recognized and accepted into the international community? How do the norms of state recognition contribute to their being integrated into the system, or sow the seeds of conflict? Born and reared in Slovakia, Mikulas Fabry explains that the grisly wars accompanying the recognition of several Balkan states in the early 1990s prompted his interest in those questions and, more broadly, the moral and legal dimensions of international politics, especially those pertaining to sovereignty, self-determination, security, and democracy.

Fabry joined the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs in fall 2008, teaching international ethics, human rights, and international law. Previously he was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Smith College. He earned his BA in international relations at the University of Toronto and his MA and PhD in political science at the University of British Columbia.

Fabry has studied how and why leading countries recognize or reject particular claimants of statehood. He examines whether or not today’s norms make sense and are viable and sustainable. Conferences and symposia have afforded him first-hand interaction with those affected by recent or lingering recognition-related conflicts such as Kosovo, the Russo-Georgian war over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and the confrontation between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

“Issues of recognition are very complex and highly charged,” says Fabry. “Often many involved parties have legitimate interests and rights. Given that, the international community has to give more thought to finding a right balance between them.”

He discusses these issues in his forthcoming book, Recognizing States: International Society and the Establishment of New States Since 1776 (Oxford University Press). “There are no easy answers, but I was struck by how much we can learn from the ideas and practices of America’s founding fathers and early 19th-century British leaders. I was quite humbled when I realized that contemporary recognition ideas and practices on the whole do not measure up to those from 200 years ago.”

Computational Media Students Launch Xbox Community Game

Holden Link, Cory Johnson, and Ian Guthridge

Many students like to play video games, but Literature, Communication, and Culture sophomores Holden Link and Cory Johnson, and College of Computing sophomore Ian Guthridge are selling their own game. Audiball was launched for sale during the first week of Xbox Community Games in November.

Link and Johnson are studying Computational Media, a joint degree program between Literature, Communication, and Culture and the College of Computing. Guthridge is studying computer science. Their idea for Audiball came last February when the Georgia Tech’s Honors Program Student Challenge Fund enabled them to attend the Game Developers Conference.

“We realized that some four million people have an Xbox 360 and a guitar controller, but there was only one type of game that can be played using that,” explains Link. “So what we did was to require the guitar controller to be used in a completely different scheme.”

While developing their game, Microsoft announced the launch of a community games section to allow designers to create for the New Xbox Experience. This encouraged the students to push their boundaries. “We knew the theory of creating the game. We knew the algorithms, we knew how to code, we knew about object-oriented design. We knew all these things from books and projects we’d done before, but it’s very different when you implement a project to this scale,” said Johnson.

Audiball launched on New Xbox Experience under the company name Indiecisive Games, an homage to the difficulty the three had in selecting a name as well as their love of the indie spirit. They are in the early stages of developing a new game to be bigger in scope than Audiball. Audiball can be purchased in the Xbox Community Games site on Xbox Live for 200 Microsoft points ($2.50).