Alumni Magazine - Fall 2008 - (Page 59) the same, and our expectations of the students are the same. “This is not and never was intended to be a Georgia Tech lite. … I have no desire to see anything but one quality metric assigned to the name of Georgia Tech.” Engineering on the Coast F YOU CROSS THE TECH TOWER LAWN, YOU’RE LIKELY to see a squirrel or two dart across your path. At Georgia Tech Savannah, you may spot a fox, deer or coyote. Word has it that an alligator even made its way onto campus last year. Bordered by wetlands and dotted with palm trees, Georgia Tech Savannah not only has an atmosphere that is distinctly coastal in flavor, it also has a coastal thrust to its academic and research initiatives. “Georgia Tech in Atlanta, all of its programs are both extensive and high quality, so the worst I thing we could try to do is implement identical programs, because guess who our biggest competitor would be? Ourselves,” Frost says. “As we have developed the program and continue to develop it, we look for ways to take advantage of some of these geographic or local attributes — i.e. the coast — as a way to build programs that do complement those in Atlanta.” Researchers at Georgia Tech Savannah have been investigating things like wave- and currentgenerated energy, hurricanes and tsunamis. Civil and environmental engineers at Savannah are performing research that could help save loggerhead turtles, an endangered species, from being killed or injured by boats off the coast of Georgia. An assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, Fumin Zhang’s research in control and sensing will help oceanographers gather and analyze data using autonomous underwater vehicles. Zhang has established a lab on the campus for the study of autonomous mobile observational networks and a robotics teaching and outreach lab. Chris Barnes, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, who previously worked with the Georgia Tech Research Institute in Atlanta, has received a grant from the National Geospatial-intelligence Agency to explore the use of image-driven data mining. He’s also helping design the software that will run the next-generation radars on the Navy’s next class of cruiser. Georgia Tech Savannah’s proximity to the coast also opens up more opportunities for collaborations between the Atlanta and Savannah campuses on water-related research. Francesco Fedele, a civil engineering professor at Georgia Tech Savannah, has teamed up with graduate student Guillermo Gallego and professor Anthony Yezzi, both in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Atlanta, to work on wave-statistics research that could determine the impact water motion has on nearshore buildings and off-shore towers as close as Georgia and as far away as Italy. Working with two researchers in Italy, Alvise Benetazzo of Protecno and Alessio Boscolo of Phoenix Ricerca e Tecnologie Ottiche, Fedele’s group designed new wave-analysis instrumentation that uses stereo imagery to reconstruct water surface over both space and time. Unlike the traditional methods used to analyze waves, the “We look for ways to take advantage of some of these geographic or local attributes — i.e. the coast — as a way to build programs that do complement those in Atlanta,” Frost says. Photo: Gary Meek Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Fall 2008 59
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