The Whistle

Campus Connection Inspires Mother and Son to Find Purpose and Passion

admin — Fri, 09 May 2025 14:00:41 +0000

Campus Connection Inspires Mother and Son to Find Purpose and Passion admin Fri, 05/09/2025 - 10:00

When Andrew Rush started at Georgia Tech last fall, he already had a sense of direction as soon as he set foot on campus. His mother, Holly Rush, is a longtime Georgia Tech staff employee, and this exposure influenced Andrew to study at the Institute.

We caught up with Holly and Andrew to learn more about what makes Georgia Tech so appealing to students and employees alike, and the unique perspective their mother-son relationship brings to campus.

How long have you worked at Georgia Tech? What do you do as a financial operations assistant director?

[Holly] I have been at Georgia Tech since 2000 and joined the College of Computing in early 2005. Ironically and very memorably, I found out I was expecting Andrew right after I started in Computing. I still recall being very nervous about telling my new boss that I was expecting, but she was happy for me and very accommodating. I went to the bookstore right after our meeting and bought Andrew his first Georgia Tech t-shirt, which I plan to pass down to him one day.

Being part of the College for this long, I have watched it grow from having divisions to schools. I began as a financial administrator and steadily grew into my current role as assistant director of financial operations for the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE). In my current role, I oversee financial operations for the School of CSE, including budgeting, forecasting, financial reporting, and ensuring compliance with Institute and sponsor guidelines. I work closely with faculty, staff, and leadership to support our financial programs and other initiatives. It is a rewarding role that allows me to contribute to the success of the college while watching it grow, just like my own journey here.

How much influence did your mom’s work at Georgia Tech have on your interest in coming here for college?

[Andrew] It definitely played a role. I grew up a fan of all things Georgia Tech, so this was always my dream school. When I got in, all the stars aligned. Tech was my dream school, my mom worked there, and I was close to home. It was perfect.

What is it about Georgia Tech that has kept you here for more than two decades?

[Holly] From the beginning, I have always felt that my work contributes to something bigger – supporting faculty who offer world-class education and innovation. I have had the opportunity to grow professionally and work alongside very talented colleagues.

How has your first year gone? What do you like best about attending Georgia Tech?

[Andrew] Overwhelming. I wasn’t sure what to expect from attending college. The college lifestyle was a big change for me, and I had to learn how to navigate it. I knew Georgia Tech would be challenging, and I thought I was ready for it, but it was still harder than I expected. However, I managed to get through my first year with great resilience and finish stronger than I started.

What do you each like best about being on campus together?

[Holly] I enjoy being nearby and getting to share this chapter of his life. There are many times that Andrew is focused on his studies or his fraternity commitments, so he doesn’t get to come home as often as I would like. But with me being on campus, we can grab a quick lunch or have a short visit. I also like knowing he is a short walk from my office if I want to drop off a homemade meal. Even when we are both too busy for a visit, sometimes I find myself looking out the window across campus. Just seeing the top of a building where he is attending class gives me comfort knowing he is there.

[Andrew] Bouncing off of what my mom said, it has been great. It is comforting that I can go to her office just to say “hey,” and not drive all the way home. It’s nice that when I’m having a rough patch with school, she drops by to offer some reassurance.

What has been the key to reaching the milestones of a fulfilling career and witnessing your children achieve their goals?

[Holly] The key to reaching these milestones has really been maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Georgia Tech has given me the space and support to grow professionally while also being present as a parent. That balance has been everything. It allowed me to build a fulfilling career that I’m proud of, while also being there to watch my children grow and pursue their dreams, including Andrew becoming a Georgia Tech student himself. Being able to do both, without having to choose one over the other, has truly been the foundation of my success and happiness.

What do you look forward to in the next few years studying computer engineering at Georgia Tech? And after graduating?

[Andrew] I am most excited for my threads and starting my career. I have learned so much that I am already applying my studies. I recently used Raspberry Pi to build a circuit that enabled a motion detector to work and set off an LED indicating motion. This was a part of my discovery class for my major, and it was the most fun I have had at Georgia Tech so far. It was very new and exciting to learn about, and it motivates me to put my skills to work.

After graduating, I want to work in cybersecurity, possibly as a hardware security engineer for the government or even my own startup. The project I mentioned opened my eyes to my threads and really motivated me to continue in this field.

Rush is one of more than 150 College of Computing staff members who support the College and its five schools. Staff members are the backbone of the College. From managing operations to providing essential services, their dedication ensures the seamless delivery of education, research, and community support, making them integral to the College's success.

Summary sentence

Holly Rush has worked at Georgia Tech since 2000. Her employment influenced her son, Andrew, to attend the Institute and study computer engineering.

Summary

We caught up with Holly and Andrew to learn more about what makes Georgia Tech so appealing to students and employees alike, and the unique perspective their mother-son relationship brings to campus.

Dateline

Thu, 05/08/2025 - 12:00

Contact

Bryant Wine, Communications Officer
bryant.wine@cc.gatech.edu

Keywords

College of Computing

college of engineering

School of Computational Science and Engineering

College of Engineering; School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Daily Digest

The Whistle

whistle

Georgia Tech News Center

Mother's Day

News room topics

Campus and Community

Researchers Look to Transform TA Training with Google Community Grant

admin — Mon, 13 May 2024 14:40:41 +0000

Researchers Look to Transform TA Training with Google Community Grant admin Mon, 05/13/2024 - 10:40

Google is helping to advance training for teaching assistants (TAs) who are essential to delivering undergraduate computing courses at Georgia Tech and Georgia State University (GSU).

The corporation has provided the universities with a Google Community Grant of more than $394,000 over three years.

Researchers will use the funding to develop, test, and implement scalable training programs that reflect responsible and inclusive teaching practices for TAs supporting computer science (CS) courses.

"Google is proud to support Georgia Institute of Technology's efforts to broaden participation in computing," said Anona Shugart Walker, Google's tech education outreach lead for Atlanta. "We're excited to sponsor this collaborative effort to help equip university computer science teaching assistants with the skills and knowledge they need to create inclusive learning environments for all learners."

Researchers led by principal investigators Georgia Tech CS Regents' Professor Ellen Zegura and GSU Assistant Professor Ben Shapiro will use the programs they develop through the Google grant to create sharable resources for each university and beyond.

"This work underscores the growing importance and impact of TAs in CS and illustrates new ways that schools of education and computer science can collaborate to broaden participation in computer science," Shapiro said.

Zegura and Shapiro have a history of working together on undergraduate ethics education and TA support. CS Professor Anu Bourgeois and lecturer William Johnson from GSU and Georgia Tech School of Computing Instruction (SCI) lecturer Rodrigo Borela Valente are also part of the core research team.

"We have research faculty and instructor faculty because we think this is the best way to get some of these ideas and pilot-type efforts into practice and our TA training," Zegura said. "The instructors are on the front lines of training TAs and using them in undergrad classes."

TAs play an essential role in delivering course content, running study sessions, tutoring, and setting course culture. And this role is growing. Georgia Tech's SCI employs about 500 TAs each semester to keep pace with the growing enrollment.

Borela Valente knows first-hand that TAs are vital to successfully managing a large class and creating a sense of community among the students. He works with several TAs supporting his undergraduate courses. He says that with so many students, it's unfeasible for the instructor to grade assignments and offer help to all students in an effective way.

"TAs play such an important role: they create a liaison between the instructor and the students, giving you more insight into what they need," Borela Valente said. "They also tutor students, helping target their challenges."

In addition to improved training for TAs supporting computing courses, the research team aims to strengthen collaboration between Georgia Tech and GSU more broadly to expand access to computing education.

"We're finding ways to work together to enrich our projects, research, and teaching by taking advantage of our geographic closeness but otherwise our institutional difference," Zegura said.

"The kinds of things we want to do we hope will contribute to broadening participation by making more people feel that they belong in the field."

With support from corporations like Google, philanthropic organizations, alumni, parents, and friends, Georgia Tech is securing the resources to help achieve the most ambitious goals in the Institute's history as part of Transforming Tomorrow: The Campaign for Georgia Tech.

Summary sentence

Georgia Tech and GSU are partnering to study and advance training for teaching assistants who support computer science courses.

Summary

Researchers from Georgia Tech and Georgia State University are embarking on a new partnering to study and advance training for teaching assistants who support computer science courses. The work is being funded through a Google Community Grant of nearly $400,000.

Dateline

Fri, 12/01/2023 - 12:00

Contact

Emily Smith, Communications Officer

School of Computing Instruction

emily.smith@cc.gatech.edu

Associated importer

Keywords

Daily Digest

The Whistle

News room topics

Campus and Community

CS Majors Win 'Best Hack for Health' with App for the Visually Impaired

dgivens8 — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 16:49:20 +0000

CS Majors Win 'Best Hack for Health' with App for the Visually Impaired dgivens8 Wed, 03/20/2024 - 12:49

A team of first-year Georgia Tech computer science (CS) majors has created an AI-powered app that empowers visually impaired people to lead more independent lives.

JARVIS –yes, the team members are big Iron Man fans– uses open-source AI tools, machine learning frameworks, and computer vision techniques to provide users with a richer, more thorough understanding of their immediate surroundings.

CS majors Arnav Chintawar, Dhruv Roongta, and Sahibpreet Singh developed JARVIS as their entry for Cal Hacks 10.0, a hackathon organized by a University of California Berkeley’s student group. The team won multiple awards, including Best Hack for Health, Best Use of Zilliz, and Best Use of GitHub during the in-person event in late October that attracted more than 2,000 participants.

The multifunctional app acts much like a personal assistant for users. It can be integrated with a smartwatch and can:

Recognize and interpret a person’s environment, offering detailed scene descriptions.
Read text and make recommendations.
Recognize friends and family.

Along with these capabilities, JARVIS can perceive, interpret, and describe non-verbal cues of an individual near the user.

A visually impaired family member inspired the team to develop JARVIS. Along with volunteering with local organizations, the team consulted advocates from the Center of the Visually Impaired to understand better the difficulties faced by the community and how the app could help.

“We set out to bridge the accessibility gap for blind and visually impaired individuals by giving them unprecedented situational awareness of their surroundings. We hope that JARVIS can improve the quality of life for this community,” said Roongta.

The team started by making JARVIS easy to use. Responding to spoken queries, JARVIS could help a user meet a friend for dinner. The app would describe the general setting and layout of the restaurant, and provide an approximate number of people present and the activities observed.

“We used a speech-to-text and text-to-speech model similar to Siri or Alexa to ensure JARVIS would be easy to access and seem familiar to users,” said Chintawar.

The user would then ask JARVIS to scan the room for friends, family, or others based on a database of images uploaded by the user. Once it recognizes someone, the app says their name and where they are in the room. The team estimates its identity classification model supporting this functionality to be about 95% accurate.

JARVIS would then analyze the friend’s facial expressions as the pair chats before ordering. It conveys the detected emotions via audio descriptions or haptic pulses through the user’s smartwatch. The pulses vary in intensity based on the level of emotion it observes.

When they are ready to review the menu, the user could ask JARVIS to list the appetizers or the vegetarian options. This capability integrates optical character recognition technology with the team’s text-to-speech model, which allows the app to make relevant recommendations.

“This project has broadened our technical knowledge and instilled in us a profound sense of empathy and a commitment to enhancing the lives of visually impaired individuals,” said Singh.

Building on its success, the team is pushing JARVIS forward with an eye toward future entrepreneurial competitions. Planned upgrades include extending compatibility to a broader range of wearable computing devices and developing more robust description capabilities.

“We look forward to participating in the 2024 Georgia Tech InVenture Prize competition with an improved version of JARVIS. This will likely include customizing the vision model and fine-tuning it on custom data,” said Roongta.

Additional details about the technologies behind JARVIS and the team’s development approach are available on its Cal Hack 10.0 hackathon development site.

Summary sentence

Three undergraduate students have won multiple awards for an app they created as part of one of the largest student hackathons in the world.

Summary

Three Georgia Tech CS majors have won multiple awards for an app they created as part of one of the largest student hackathons in the world. The teams used machine learning frameworks, and computer vision techniques to provide visually impaired users with a richer, more thorough understanding of their immediate surroundings.

Dateline

Mon, 12/11/2023 - 12:00

Contact

Ben Snedeker, Communications Mgr.

College of Computing

Keywords

Daily Digest

The Whistle

News room topics

Campus and Community

The Whistle

Campus Connection Inspires Mother and Son to Find Purpose and Passion

Related links

Keywords

News room topics

Categories

Researchers Look to Transform TA Training with Google Community Grant

Keywords

News room topics

Categories

CS Majors Win 'Best Hack for Health' with App for the Visually Impaired

Related links

Keywords

News room topics

Categories