Tag: Georgia Tech
Posted inMain Slider, Stories of Atlanta
What they felt the town really needed was an evening business school
Reconstruction was the term given to the period following the Civil War during which the United States set conditions under which the rebellious Southern States would be allowed back into the Union. Coming out of Reconstruction, the City of Atlanta was experiencing growing pains but one of the more positive results of Atlanta’s emergence as […]
Posted inDavid Pendered, Latest News, Main Slider
Memorial Drive may get self-taxing CID to help pay for bike lanes, sidewalks, round-abouts, etc.
Sidewalks, bicycle lanes and round-abouts could be installed along Memorial Drive sooner rather than later if commercial property owners support a possible tax hike. A newly formed group of volunteers is to devise a plan and gauge interest.
Posted inDavid Pendered, Latest News, Main Slider
Atlanta steps up to help Georgia Tech promote pedestrian-friendly Eco Commons
A committee of the Atlanta City Council voted Tuesday to help Georgia Tech advance its plans to improve the pedestrian nature of the central campus, while ensuring vehicles can still traverse the campus, as Tech pursues plans to create an Eco Commons that is to speak to Tech’s social and environmental ambitions.
Posted inMichelle Hiskey & Ben Smith
Ryan’s Run shines for shelter, son and suicide prevention
Raised by parents who started Central Night Shelter as volunteers, Ryan Bashor met men who coped with personal darkness, such as mental illness. Some carried secrets from their families; they feared the stigma. Ryan started working at the shelter in high school because he enjoyed helping people too.
Posted inDavid Pendered, Latest News, Main Slider
In a city never too busy to demolish, Peachtree Street’s iconic buildings on display at Ga. Tech
In a city that doesn’t hesitate to tear down old buildings, Georgia Tech is providing glimpses of the iconic structures that created Atlanta’s marquee Peachtree Street corridor.
Posted inColumns, David Pendered, Latest News, Main Slider
Atlanta a Top Ten high tech market with low cost of doing business, says CBRE
Atlanta’s Top Ten ranking as a high tech market was underscored again last week when Kaiser Permanente announced plans to establish an IT hub in Midtown.
Posted inDavid Pendered, Latest News, Main Slider
Georgia Tech awards Mike Dobbins for his students’ work with Atlanta’s blighted communities
Mike Dobbins is the first non-scientist to win Georgia Tech’s Innovation and Excellence in Laboratory Instruction Award, which recognizes his work with the CityLabs program in the School of City and Regional Planning.
Dobbins is best known these days for the reports and proposals his students have produced on sweeping urban redevelopments. Recent topics include Memorial Drive; Fort McPherson; West End; and Northside Drive (which influenced the debate over Atlanta’s provision of $200 million in bonds to build the Falcons stadium).
Posted inColumns, David Pendered, Main Slider
Underground ATL: Ga Tech grad shows time right for redevelopment
As Darron Cooper completed a research paper about Underground Atlanta last year at Georgia Tech, he had no idea the city was on the brink of selling Underground to a developer.
Posted inMichelle Hiskey
The only girl in a room of coders
Atlanta is home to 13,000 technology companies, and the Metro Atlanta Chamber says the tech sector will invest $1 billion in Georgia the next five years. It’s a rosy picture for young people who are learning to code.
Unfortunately, too few are girls. Those who are trying to break into the boys’ club are facing a pioneer’s uphill, often lonely climb. They are the “rainbow unicorns,” said local mom Caroline Busse, whose sixth grader Madeline is learning to code.
Posted inDavid Pendered
Tech’s study of Memorial Drive produces a number of solutions
Memorial Drive has the potential to become a visually interesting and vibrant corridor along its section from Oakland Cemetery east to the Atlanta city limit, at Candler Road in DeKalb County.
At least, that’s the opinion of a group of Georgia Tech students who have spent their fall semester analyzing Memorial Drive. On Wednesday, they unveiled a report they and their professor think is so well developed that parts of it are ready to be implemented.
Posted inDavid Pendered
Social media fuels Tech study of Memorial Drive to super speed
Social media is enabling the Georgia Tech analysis of Memorial Drive to proceed at a startling rate of speed.
As various findings appear on a Facebook page and are shared via other social media, interested parties are providing feedback to the Tech students in almost real time. Portions of a report presented Oct. 27 are already substantially out of date, Tech professor of practice Mike Dobbins said Tuesday.
Posted inDavid Pendered
Jay-Z, Beethoven and EarSketch: Tech remixes masters to engage students in computer science
Even Beethoven and Jay-Z may be impressed by a Georgia Tech program that just won another federal grant to expand a program that teaches computer science through music.
The idea is to intrigue high school students who haven’t shown much interest in computer science by showing its application in music and the recording industry. Minorities and women are a primary focus.
Tech announced Thursday it had won a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to further the work of EarSketch. The award extends a $2 million grant NSF awarded EarSketch in 2011.
Posted inDavid Pendered
Atlanta funds innovative dormitory that’s to help entrepreneurs succeed
A dormitory that’s designed to give a leg up to budding entrepreneurs is to be built at Technology Square, in Midtown, with financial aid from Atlanta’s development arm.
Invest Atlanta has agreed to fund up to $70 million in construction costs of a 230-unit building dubbed, “Tech Square Tower (the Entrepreneur Dorm)”. Only three similar dorms exist in the nation, according to Invest Atlanta – at Stanford, Columbia, and New York universities, with one more to open in 2015 at University of Florida.
The concept is to provide turn-key housing for students who hope to develop some sort of innovative idea, as well as for entrepreneurs who have an office at Tech Square. Residents are to mingle and brainstorm and have access to an on-site mentor, according to the presentation to the board of Invest Atlanta.
Posted inDavid Pendered
Black employment gains a sign of continuing economic recovery, Ga. Tech professor says
Georgia Tech Professor Thomas “Danny” Boston said the jobs report issued Thursday by the U.S. Labor Department contains several signs the economy continues to improve.
The jobs report indicates the nation’s unemployment rate should dip into the 5 percent range when the July report is released, Boston wrote in a column posted on Georgia Tech’s website. That report is to be released Aug. 1.
The unemployment rate among blacks continues to decline, which Boston wrote is a particularly positive indicator because unemployment among blacks is, “particularly intractable.”
Posted inDavid Pendered
Metro Atlanta on cutting edge of electric vehicles, commute options
Metro Atlanta’s traffic congestion may be a mess, but the region is at the forefront of changing the vehicles in which people travel.
Atlanta ranks No. 2 in the nation for electric car sales. Georgia Tech engineers are devising self-driving cars. Uber – the rides-on-demand service that fended off the state Legislature this year – on Friday announced it has raised $1.2 billion from investors who now value the four-year-old company at $18.2 billion.
Taken together, these developments point to a vastly different future in terms of how people metro Atlantans may commute in the future. Although the vehicles won’t be flying cars like in the Jetsons cartoon, the trajectory seems toward a very different mix of vehicles and drivers on roadways.
Posted inDavid Pendered
German aviation engineers visit Tech, Gulfstream, Airbus on trade mission
A group of German aerospace engineers are to tour the booming aviation industry in Georgia and Alabama after attending a science seminar Monday at Georgia Tech.
The scientists are traveling in a group of about 50 individuals, all of whom are part of a broader trade mission that seeks to foster relations among German engineers and manufacturers and their U.S. counterparts. The trip’s being coordinated by the German American Chamber of Commerce in the Southern U.S.
These conversations underscore the tremendous advancement in the aerospace industry since aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh flew his first solo flight in Georgia, in 1923 from Souther Field, in Americus. Four years later, Lindbergh entered the annals of history with his transatlantic flight from New York to Paris.
Posted inDavid Pendered
Atlanta’s tech sector to prospect for capital, attention, in Silicon Valley
There’s just something about a $19 billion price tag on a business acquisition that catches the eye.
This figure has to be in the back of Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s mind as he prepares to lead a trade delegation to Silicon Valley. The group has meetings with 12 venture capital companies and social media platforms to invite them to invest in Atlanta tech companies.
The $19 billion is the sum Facebook has agreed to pay to purchase WhatsApp, a messaging giant. WhatsApp has more than 450 million monthly active users, and more than 70 percent of them are active each day, according to techcrunch.com.
Posted inDavid Pendered
Award-winning architecture from around world vastly different from Atlanta’s iconic structures
Georgia Tech has opened an exhibit that offers an alternative perspective to the spectacular architecture that’s so popular among metro Atlanta’s civic leaders.
The structures shown in the exhibit whisper, “less is more.” In Atlanta, it sometimes seems that “’more’ is not enough,” as the word “iconic” is attached to future projects ranging from retrofitted bridges over the Downtown Connector to the Falcons stadium.
The concepts on display in the Aga Khan Award for Architecture Exhibit include sustainable design and vernacular architecture, which are honored in the Muslim culture. One previous winner is Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel laureate who hopes to start a bank in Atlanta to provide micro-loans to help poor people open businesses.
Posted inDavid Pendered
Georgia Tech’s research, economic development wing clipped by Great Recession, credit agency suggests
The harsh economy hasn’t spared a nonprofit entity created to support Georgia Tech’s efforts to promote high-tech research and economic development.
Georgia Advanced Technology Ventures, Inc., which oversees projects including the acclaimed Technology Square and Technology Enterprise Park, is scraping by on a bare-bones budget, according to a rating action from Moody’s Investors Services.
Stephen Fleming, a Tech vice president who serves as GATV’s CEO, said Monday that GATV will continue to work on its core mission.
