Creation of the School of Computational Science and Engineering
March 8, 2010 at 10:01 pm 3 comments
Announcement from Georgia Tech today — related to an earlier blog post.
Dear Faculty, Staff & Students,
It’s my pleasure to announce the formal creation of the School of Computational Science & Engineering within the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. The new School will operate under the direction of Chair Richard Fujimoto and in close cooperation with the colleges of Engineering and Science here at Tech.
In addition to focusing on its core research areas—high performance computing, modeling and simulation, and massive data analysis—the School of CSE’s mission will include producing a new type of computational scholar. Indeed, by creating this School, we once again take a leadership role in defining the field of computing itself. As a university, we are stating clearly that CSE is an academic discipline in its own right, with a distinct body of knowledge that lies at the confluence of computing, math, science and engineering. Many of our School of CSE faculty will have joint appointments around campus, and they will continue to pursue the kind of interdisciplinary work that has come to define this School, this College and Georgia Tech.
Finally, let us all express our appreciation to former John P. Imlay Dean Rich DeMillo, who first conceived of CSE as a separate unit of the College. Rich’s foresight has (again) allowed us to stake an important intellectual claim before our peers, and the College will reap the benefits of his prescience for years to come.
Congratulations to all of the faculty, staff and administrators in CSE on this achievement. Great work!
Best regards,
Jim FoleyInterim Dean & Professor
Stephen Fleming Chair of Telecommunications
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: image of computing, perception of university.
Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
1.
Kurt L. | March 8, 2010 at 11:49 pm
Interesting how Prof. Foley suggests that the name of this particular school will “[state] clearly that CSE is an academic discipline in its own right, with a distinct body of knowledge…” This may be true of CSE and almost certainly is true of CS, but a notable exception is IC. There isn’t really a discipline called “interactive computing” and I don’t know of anyone arguing for one. And that’s really saying something in a field crowded with near-synonyms like “informatics,” “human-centered computing,” “human-computer interaction,” “computational media,” etc. Part of me feels like we need fewer such synonyms and that thinning out the herd could help us figure out who we are and what we do.
2.
Mark Guzdial | March 9, 2010 at 8:44 am
There is a Wikipedia entry for interactive computing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_computing. Our school chair, Aaron Bobick, has been explicitly arguing that interactive computing is a new discipline of computing, somewhat on the old Web page http://www.cc.gatech.edu/inside/units/ic and more on the new Web page which will be released soon.
3.
Alan Kay | March 9, 2010 at 9:12 am
More departments with different views and ability to follow different paths seems really healthy to me. (I’ve mentioned in the past that this is one of the processes that has kept modern Biology healthy.)
I wonder if there is some route to escape the academization of the centers of our field, which still seem to me to be mired in the mid-sixties (and have imposed many mainstream mid-sixties views on new ideas to their detriment, and even death).
Cheers,
Alan