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Discussion about Strategic Directions for the CS Department

Discussion about Strategic Directions for the CS Department. Vic Lesser and Prashant Shenoy. Outline. Short Review of McCallum and Smaragdakis retreat talk (Nov 08) about where “CS is Going” What Has Happened since Last Year Possible Future Scenarios. Summary – “Where CS is Going”.

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Discussion about Strategic Directions for the CS Department

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  1. Discussion about Strategic Directions for the CS Department Vic Lesser and Prashant Shenoy

  2. Outline • Short Review of McCallum and Smaragdakis retreat talk (Nov 08) about where “CS is Going” • What Has Happened since Last Year • Possible Future Scenarios

  3. Summary – “Where CS is Going” • Machines that can act & understand in our natural world • Massive data sensing, collecting, understanding, deciding • Massive Parallelism (and Quantum and Biological Computing?) • Computational Thinking -- “biology as an information science”, “modeling, simulating and analyzing human, biological and physical systems as computational systems”

  4. Summary – “Our Stance on Campus” • Avoid becoming like “Statistics” • spread across the departments, little core influence • Configure ourselves to • reach out, connect with all other relevant dept’s • have a central identity • Exploit Popularity of “IT” and “Informatics” • Now is a moment of uncertainty. Take advantage of fluidity! Setting our Own Agenda!

  5. Do We Still Feel Comfortable with these Observations • Discussion • “Where is CS Going” • “Our Stance on Campus” • How do we see interdisciplinary activities affecting our core CS discipline?

  6. What Has Happened Since Last Year -1 • Now part of Larger College • Oriented more towards life sciences than NSM • New Dean • Confronting Possibility of Being Moved to Engineering • Questionable whether we will grow in future or even maintain the size of the faculty as of September 2008 • Whether we will get to replace 3 faculty that we recently lost • Whether we will be able to replace a number of senior faculty that will be retiring in the next few years

  7. What Has Happened Since Last Year - 2 • Shown strong connection with other parts of campus via Faculty RFP Proposals • Possibility of further campus restructuring • continuing serious state budget problems for foreseeable future • Chancellor/ Provost Emphasis on Return on Investment • Monetizing our activities

  8. Possible Future Scenarios • Stay in CNS • Move to Engineering • Establish New Model for CS Activities on Campus What is the appropriate Organizational Structure for us to be at the forefront of these new directions in CS activities and What is possible on this campus?

  9. Questions • How important is for us to be more directly in control of our staffing decisions • How much of the dean’s RTF is coming back to this department? • Are we willing to put in the non-trivial effort to create a new organization form for CS on this campus? • Do we want to control the IT educational programs on Campus? • Are there other informatics programs that we’d want to offer (jointly or by ourselves)? • Do we see CS becoming a multi-department activity?

  10. Discussion • How do we grow into new areas, foster cross-campus research connections, and take a broader educational role within the university? • What organizational structure will best serve our needs and enable us set our agenda?

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