After more than five years of planning, design and construction, many faculty and staff of the School of Computer Science moved into their new offices in the Gates Center for Computer Science and the Hillman Center for Future-Generation Technologies, just before the fall semester began.
The new occupants are almost uniformly excited by the views, the natural light and the many possibilities for interaction that these buildings provide. With the paint still drying and the outside being transformed via an intense landscaping effort, we held a successful building dedication on Sept. 22, complete with many of our benefactors.
Around one month later, we were able to dedicate the Randy Pausch Memorial Bridge, linking the Gates Center and the Purnell Center for the Arts, thus providing a convenient connection between SCS and the rest of campus.
One of the main features of the new buildings is that our undergraduate students are in our midst for their classes, labs, projects and just hanging out. It's great to have them integrated into our environment, rather than being spread all around campus.
Even though our new two-building complex provides nearly 210,000-square-feet of space, SCS still occupies Newell-Simon Hall (the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute), Smith Hall (Robotics) and parts of our old, reliable Wean Hall (Institute for Software Research, machine rooms and various labs).
Meanwhile, the real work of the school, with its educational and research mission, continues to proceed at a rapid pace. We have formally given the Lane Center for Computational Biology departmental status, meaning that it can operate with its own faculty and its own graduate programs. This is the next step in the development of computational biology as a major thrust for Carnegie Mellon. Robert Murphy, the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology, will continue to direct this effort.
We also held a 25th reunion for participants in the Andrew Project, Carnegie Mellon's groundbreaking initiative to create a wired campus, back when we aspired to provide students access to "3M" machines--having one megabyte of RAM, a one megapixel display and a processor operating at one megahertz. Of course, that was just a black and white display. It's interesting to look back and see how far we've come in the past quarter-century.
All in all, it's been an exciting few months!
The new occupants are almost uniformly excited by the views, the natural light and the many possibilities for interaction that these buildings provide. With the paint still drying and the outside being transformed via an intense landscaping effort, we held a successful building dedication on Sept. 22, complete with many of our benefactors.
Around one month later, we were able to dedicate the Randy Pausch Memorial Bridge, linking the Gates Center and the Purnell Center for the Arts, thus providing a convenient connection between SCS and the rest of campus.
One of the main features of the new buildings is that our undergraduate students are in our midst for their classes, labs, projects and just hanging out. It's great to have them integrated into our environment, rather than being spread all around campus.
Even though our new two-building complex provides nearly 210,000-square-feet of space, SCS still occupies Newell-Simon Hall (the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute), Smith Hall (Robotics) and parts of our old, reliable Wean Hall (Institute for Software Research, machine rooms and various labs).
Meanwhile, the real work of the school, with its educational and research mission, continues to proceed at a rapid pace. We have formally given the Lane Center for Computational Biology departmental status, meaning that it can operate with its own faculty and its own graduate programs. This is the next step in the development of computational biology as a major thrust for Carnegie Mellon. Robert Murphy, the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology, will continue to direct this effort.
We also held a 25th reunion for participants in the Andrew Project, Carnegie Mellon's groundbreaking initiative to create a wired campus, back when we aspired to provide students access to "3M" machines--having one megabyte of RAM, a one megapixel display and a processor operating at one megahertz. Of course, that was just a black and white display. It's interesting to look back and see how far we've come in the past quarter-century.
All in all, it's been an exciting few months!
For More Information:
Jason Togyer | 412-268-8721 | jt3y@cs.cmu.edu