FORMER YELLOW JACKET QB WINS GEORGIA HOUSE SEAT
GEORGIA TECH ASTRONAUT TO HELP DEVELOP COMMERCIAL SPACE FLIGHT
Taylor Bennett, a former quarterback for the Yellow Jackets football team, won an Aug. 11 runoff for a seat in Georgia’s House of Representatives. Bennett will represent District 80 in the Atlanta area that includes parts of Brookhaven, Chamblee and Sandy Springs. The race was widely watched for its larger implications on Georgia’s state politics. With his victory, Bennett, a Democrat, ended a Republican super-majority in the State Legislature, providing the Democrats with enough votes to block any Republican-led efforts to make changes to the state constitution.
Eric Boe, MS EE 97, and three other astronauts have been chosen by NASA to prepare commercial space flights for the private sector. The astronauts will work with The Boeing Co. and SpaceX to develop transportation to and from the International Space Station. Boe was an Air Force pilot before NASA selected him as an astronaut in 2000. He has spent more than 28 days in space aboard two spaceflights, STS-126 in 2008 and STS-133 2011. The contracts with Boeing and SpaceX require a crewed flight test with at least one NASA astronaut on board to verify the fully integrated rocket and spacecraft system can launch, maneuver in orbit, dock to the space station and land safely.
COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE WINS DISTINGUISHED CONSERVATIONIST AWARD Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture has been selected as the winner of Georgia Conservancy’s 2015 Distinguished Conservationist Award. The award recognizes the College of Architecture’s 20-year collaboration with the Conservancy, during which students in Tech’s School of Architecture and School of City and Regional Planning developed successful and sustainable growth plans for communities around Georgia. Through this community-oriented program, Georgia Tech and the Georgia Conservancy have helped improve life for tens of thousands of people. Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture joins an elite and influential group of past Distinguished Conservationist Awardwinners, including: The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Ray Weeks, Gov. Zell Miller, Sen. Sam Nunn and Ted Turner.
COMPUTING TEAM WINS INTERNET DEFENSE PRIZE A team of researchers from Georgia Tech’s College of Computing received the Internet Defense Prize, an award from Facebook in partnership with USENIX, which provides the team with $100,000 to continue their research on Internet security. The team developed a new cyber security analysis method that discovered 11 previously unknown flaws with Internet browsers. The research of Ph.D students Byoungyoung Lee and Chengyu Song, with Professors Taesoo Kim and Wenke Lee, explores vulnerabilities in C++ programs that result from “bad casting” or “type confusion.” The work was selected for Facebook’s second ever Internet Defense Prize award, which recognizes superior quality research that combines a working prototype with significant contributions to the security of the Internet, particularly in the areas of protection and defense. GTALUMNIMAG.COM VOLU M E 91 NO.3 2015
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