New U.K. relationship may boost state's economy: Deal announces UK Trade & Investment to establish base in Georgia

Gov. Nathan Deal and Lord Stephen Green, Minister of State for Trade and Investment, announced today (May 18) from London that UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) will establish an office in Georgia to promote trade and foreign direct investment opportunities between the United Kingdom and the state.

“The United Kingdom is and will remain a strong business partner for the state of Georgia. The ties that bind us grow stronger each year, benefiting both economies,” said Gov. Deal. “In this mission to the United Kingdom, I hope to build on our firm foundation of friendship and trust to further opportunities that will create jobs and profitable investment opportunities.”

UKTI, part of the British Government, helps U.K.-based companies succeed in international markets and overseas companies bring high-quality investment to the country. The UKTI will be co-located with the British Consulate-General in downtown Atlanta. An officer is in place temporarily for the months of May and June to undertake preparation for the launch of the full-time trade office opening in early July with a team of two full-time trade officers. UKTI has been operating in Georgia through regular visits of trade officers from its Miami location.

“Trade and investment is at the heart of the UK’s growth strategy and we see great prospects for further growth of British business links with Georgia and across the Southeast,” said Lord Green. “That is why we are pleased to announce today an expansion of our UK Trade and Investment team in Atlanta to further develop these opportunities to the benefit of jobs in both our countries.”

Deal and Lord Green made the announcement during the governor’s first international mission since taking office. His visits to Liverpool and London are helping develop strategic partnerships with the United Kingdom to support job growth in both countries.

“The British government is delighted to be hosting Gov. Deal on this visit. The governor’s visit will help to advance additional opportunities to expand this successful economic partnership to the benefit of both our countries,” said Her Majesty’s Consul General, Annabelle Malins, who is accompanying the visit.

“We do a lot of business in and with the U.K. and establishing the new trade and investment office is a natural outgrowth of that relationship,” said Chris Cummiskey, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development, who is traveling with Deal on the mission.

The United Kingdom ranks as the sixth-largest export market and eighth-largest import market for Georgia. The state exported nearly $990 million there in 2010, with top exports including electrical machinery, wood pulp, aircraft or spacecraft, paper and machinery. Imports from the U.K. totaled close to $2.3 billion and consisted primarily of pharmaceutical products, nonrailway vehicles, electrical machinery, machinery, and aircraft or spacecraft.

More than 100 Georgia companies have operations in the U.K. and around 565 British facilities operate in Georgia, including 110 manufacturing locations. These U.K.-affiliated companies employ close to 35,000 Georgians. Through the Department of Economic Development, Georgia maintains both a business office and a tourism office in the U.K.

This program follows a series of high-level visits: Mayor Kasim Reed of Atlanta visited London in November, U.K. Minister Alistair Burt visited Georgia in December and a Liverpool delegation led by the University of Liverpool visited Georgia in January. Daily flights between Atlanta and London operate out of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

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Gov. Perdue Announces 2009 DNR Forestry for Wildlife Partners

Gov. Sonny Perdue recognized two corporate forest landowners in Georgia for their stewardship in land management and practices benefiting the state’s wildlife.

Plum Creek and Georgia Power were honored Wednesday, Feb. 3, for participating in the 2009 Forestry for Wildlife Partnership, a program administered by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources’ Wildlife Resources Division. The Forestry for Wildlife Partnership is a voluntary annual program that promotes blending wildlife conservation into corporate forestry practices and offers choices from which landowners can build a program compatible with their forest management objectives.

“Stewardship of Georgia's natural resources is vitally important to our state's future,” Perdue said. “Georgia Power and Plum Creek serve as model corporate citizens with their participation in the Forestry for Wildlife Partnership.”

The companies have helped improve a total of 937,700 acres for wildlife. The Wildlife Resources Division recognized the two as Forestry for Wildlife Partners for integrating wildlife conservation practices into their forest management programs. Some of the practices included:

Preparing wildlife conservation plans that detail natural resources inventories and outline management strategies that combine forest and wildlife aspects.
Providing internal training opportunities for employees on how to blend forestland management with wildlife-friendly practices for multiple natural resource benefits.
Incorporating wildlife management techniques into current land-use planning and timber management practices.
Providing valuable data for Wildlife Resources research projects.
Providing public recreational opportunities on corporate forestlands.
Participating in partnerships with conservation organizations through programs such as Partners in Flight, the Longleaf Alliance, the state Breeding Bird Atlas, and the Georgia Amphibians and Reptiles Atlas.
Managing riparian forests for wildlife use and water quality protection.

Habitat is the key to wildlife abundance. Georgia has more than 24 million acres of forestland. Of that land base, 93 percent is privately owned. Corporate forest landowners manage 18 percent.

Georgia Power helped develop the Forestry for Wildlife Partnership in the 1990s and Plum Creek joined in 2004. Wildlife Resources Division Director Dan Forster said the program has proved “a catalyst that served to engage the wildlife community with the forestry industry in Georgia,” registering positive impacts on varied initiatives such as Georgia’s Wildlife Action plan and the annual nongame fundraiser Weekend for Wildlife.

“It’s especially rewarding to see these two pioneering partners still engaged in this flagship partnership,” Forster said of Plum Creek and Georgia Power.

Conservation efforts benefit from Forestry for Wildlife through management of endangered red-cockaded woodpecker habitats, managing and monitoring bald eagle and swallow-tailed kite nesting, managing isolated wetlands critical to protected reptiles and amphibians like the gopher frog, managing rare remnant Coosa Valley Prairie and Black Belt Prairie habitats containing endangered plants, and providing numerous public hunting opportunities.

All of the conservation enhancement components and reporting procedures are compatible with the American Forest and Paper Association’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative, a voluntary approach within the forest industry to maintain high environmental standards on lands managed by corporate landowners.

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New Emory Partnership Announced to Educate and Improve Access to Care for Atlanta-area Minorities with Diabetes

AADE, Emory University and Johnson & Johnson Diabetes Institute Partner to Educate and Improve Access to Care for Atlanta-area Minorities with Diabetes


/PRNewswire/ -- The American Association of Diabetes Educators (AADE) today announced the launch of an Atlanta-based program aimed at improving self-management of diabetes among minority populations. In partnership with Emory University's Latino Diabetes Education Program and the Johnson & Johnson Diabetes Institute, the program aims to advance diabetes education in Hispanic and African American populations and to improve clinical and behavioral outcomes. The announcement was made at the Association's annual meeting.

The program will be offered in the Chamblee neighborhood, which is served by the North DeKalb Health Clinic. The clinic is part of the satellite neighborhood network of clinics of Grady Health System in the Metro Atlanta area. Emory's Latino Diabetes Education Program is already serving the Latino community in this area, and will partner with Grady and AADE to implement this minority-specific model.

The "Increasing Access to Diabetes Self-Management Education as a Means of Decreasing Health Disparities in Minority Populations" project aims to:

-- Ensure high quality and culturally appropriate services for people
with diabetes by involving different members of the disease management
team including: physicians, educators, health promoters/community
health workers and other health care professionals.
-- Teach the basics of diabetes self management to populations often
lacking in education and community-focused support.
-- Build upon local program capacity to achieve desired clinical and
behavioral outcomes.

Individuals from minority communities that participate in this program will receive support and tools that will empower them to:

-- Improve their health and clinical outcomes.
-- Change behaviors, set goals and gain problem solving and healthy
coping skills.
-- Learn how to navigate the health care system to increase adherence to
evidence-based guidelines and reduce high-cost emergency department
utilization.

"This program is unique in that it promotes a team approach to diabetes care. Each member of the team -- physician, diabetes educator and community health worker -- supports and builds upon one another's work," said AADE President Marcia Draheim, RN, CDE. "Success will be measured by many factors including clinical improvements, behavioral outcomes, participation and patient satisfaction with the program."

Emory University School of Medicine and Grady Health System have been serving Latinos with diabetes through the Emory Latino Diabetes Education Program. "The program started over three years ago and has reached more than 750 Latinos with diabetes and their families," said Amparo Gonzalez, RN, CDE, director of the program. "This grant offers the opportunity to apply the successes and experiences that the Emory Latino Diabetes Education has had had with Latino community to the African American community."

The program is sponsored through a grant from the Johnson & Johnson Diabetes Institute.

Facts about Diabetes in Minority Populations

Diabetes disproportionately affects minority individuals, who comprise a significant segment of the U.S. population. For example, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Latinos represent the United States' largest minority group making up 14.8% of the population or 43 million people.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
-- Non-Hispanic whites: 14.9 million, or 9.8% of all non-Hispanic whites
aged 20 years or older, have diabetes.
-- Non-Hispanic blacks: 3.7 million, or 14.7% of all non-Hispanic blacks
aged 20 years or older, have diabetes.

Moreover, health disparities are increasing in the U.S. Individuals in African American and Hispanic neighborhoods, in particular, face many barriers to achieving successful self-management of their diabetes. These barriers are attributable to structural factors (e.g., lack of sidewalks or access to food stores with affordable produce) as well as the cultural, socio-economic, and literacy characteristics of the people living there.

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Korean Government and Georgia Tech Form Partnership

/PRNewswire/ -- Imagine watching your favorite TV show and talking about it with one friend on the phone, while at the same time trading messages with others on Twitter and e-mail. Sound like an impossible juggling act? A team of faculty from the Georgia Institute of Technology has formed a historic partnership with the Korean government, industry, and universities to develop a single platform where these and even more multimedia functions can take place, even anticipating what show you might like to watch or what music you might want to listen to.

Awarded a $9 million contract through the 2008 KORUS Tech Program, an initiative of the Korean Industrial Technology Foundation, Georgia Tech was chosen out of 109 universities to lead the development and design of the next generation of digital convergence devices that will let users establish and participate in digitally connected communities. This award marks the first time that the Korean government has chosen a U.S. university to lead one of its research and development programs.

Project investigators will develop immersive technologies on a hybrid graphics processing unit (GPU)-central processing unit (CPU) platform, which will be created at the newly established KORUS Research Center for Informersive Systems (CIS). The center will be headed by Jongman Kim, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the lead investigator for this project and consortium.

An enabling technology for personalized, interactive media convergence, the platform will consist of a custom-designed massively parallel architecture with a hybrid GPU accelerated many-core and heterogeneous multicore fusion system for new machine learning and multimedia algorithms and techniques. To balance resources and computationally demanding applications for high performance, Kim and his team are developing new mechanisms -- dynamically decomposed computing and hardware-based load balancing techniques. He will introduce a new holistic design analysis model -- the Performance, Energy, and Fault-Tolerance Metric.

"The interdependence among speed/throughput, energy, and fault-tolerance shows the importance of having this new metric that can identify the best tradeoffs among these three competing traits and desired design goals," said Kim, who leads the computer architecture part of this project.

Plans call for the system to be a smart, updated engine that understands user behavior; it will feature a tailored software interface that is based on intelligence and immersion with advanced three-dimensional graphics support. Ghassan AlRegib, a Georgia Tech ECE associate professor and editor-in-chief of the ICST Journal on Immersive Telecommunications, leads the multimedia processing and immersive communications portion of project, where data about home environments, modes of entertainment, and viewing and listening preferences are captured, processed, and interpreted by using motion, temperature, and light sensors; microphones; and multiple cameras that are placed in a user's home.

"Our challenge is to intelligently process this data and digitally understand the user," said AlRegib, who serves as area editor for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. "We are trying to create smart agents within media centers that understand users and adapt media accordingly."

As the hub for home-networked entertainment, this platform will have wireless connectivity to other devices and will be operated with hand gestures, body movements, and facial expressions. AlRegib also noted that the platform would further advance the use of social networks by the broadcast industry to broaden its viewer base.

"This system will allow users to have a personalized media experience; content providers and Internet-based or TV broadcasters will be able to adjust their delivered media according to individuals' needs and interests rather than regional needs," AlRegib said. "We have witnessed the impact of social networking media on our daily lives, so merging them with TV seems to be a natural next step toward complete digital convergence."

Helping Kim and AlRegib -- both faculty members at the Georgia Tech Savannah campus -- tackle these technical challenges are ECE faculty members specializing in digital signal processing, telecommunications, computer architecture, and human-computer interaction: Monson H. Hayes, III, professor and associate director at Georgia Tech Savannah; Biing-Hwang "Fred" Juang, Motorola Foundation Chair Professor and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar; and Associate Professor Sung Kyu Lim. Kim and AlRegib will create undergraduate and graduate courses related to this project, while students at the Atlanta and Savannah campuses will assist with developing technologies and testing prototypes.

Four Korea-based partners will work with Georgia Tech to make this platform into a reality. Celrun, an Internet protocol television company, will handle graphic engine, media processing, and display layout issues. C&S Microwave, a wireless communications company, has conducted a feasibility study on Femtocell (a small cellular base station for residential or small business environments) and mobility between handheld devices and the proposed system. Sungkyunkwan University will work on embedded software, semiconductor technology, operating system, virtual ware, migration, and load balancing. The Korean Electronics Technology Institute will focus on personalized service solutions for various multimedia, data fusion, and digital communities, especially in social network modeling.

Kim said that interested parties from Georgia Tech and other organizations are welcome to join CIS in creating technologies for this platform. The center will also continue working with Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute, which has provided crucial marketing research and commercialization plan assistance. "Growth in this area and industry interest is only expected to increase," said Kim, who has held R&D positions at both LG Electronics and Neopoint. "We believe that digital convergence will happen and that our work will be pivotal in its realization."

Institute officials enthusiastically support this new international partnership. "Georgia Tech and ECE have long been world leaders in digital media and its supporting technologies," said Gary S. May, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair for ECE. "The Korean government's decision to ask Georgia Tech to lead this effort further solidifies our international reputation in this arena."

The establishment of CIS and its future success could also lead to collaborations in areas like the automotive industry, according to Georgia Tech Vice Provost for International Initiatives Steven W. McLaughlin. "Georgia Tech has many longstanding collaborations in Korea and a very healthy representation here in Atlanta. The KORUS Tech program is emblematic of the partnerships we have, the kind of impact we continue to develop in the region, and the benefits those relationships have in Georgia," McLaughlin said. "Korea is a gateway to Asia for Georgia Tech, and we expect to have increasing interactions with Korean companies, institutes, universities, and ministries in the coming years."

According to the Georgia Tech study conducted for this project, Korea ranks among the world's top seven countries with the most households subscribing to broadband and is projected to move into the top five in the near future. Per capita, Korea ranks among the top four broadband subscribers, according to a June 2007 study conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and had more total subscribers than the other top eight countries combined. The United States ranked 15th per capita, but had the largest number of total subscribers.

Korean officials cited Georgia Tech's stellar reputation in research, education, and translation of technology into useful products and successful companies as the primary reasons for choosing the institute for this project. "The Georgia Tech team's innovative ideas were backed by technological rigor and complemented by detailed analysis of state-of-the-art technologies and competing initiatives," said Sungjin (Bryan) Baik, senior researcher and project manager of the KORUS Tech Program from the Korea Institute of Advancement of Technology. "Atlanta's stature in the telecommunications and information media industries was also key in deciding that Georgia Tech was the proper home for this center." The majority of CIS operations will be based at the Atlanta campus of Georgia Tech and will receive additional support from facilities and personnel at Georgia Tech Savannah.

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