Message from the CS Chair,
Charles Van Loan
At Cornell and other research universities,
departments and research areas were once much more closely
aligned. Physics was handled by faculty in the Department
of Physics, anthropology was the purview of faculty in the
Department of Anthropology, and so on. In those “Wild West” days, the department chair’s job was like herding researchers on the open range! With widely spaced academic homesteads, the primary responsibility was to guarantee “good grazing” up to and including the horizon. Chairs in fledgling subjects such as computer science had the additional problem of defining the horizon. My predecessors did an excellent job in that regard.
Fast-forward
to the age of
multidisciplinary
research, where
it is impossible to say where one scholarly area ends
and the next begins. As everyone knows, broad research
agendas tend not to align with the university’s grid of
academic departments. Well-known administrative
solutions that address this problem include the joint
faculty appointment, the cross-listed course, and the
on-campus multidisciplinary research center. At Cornell,
we are fortunate to have a fourth device that can also be
used to track critical research trends—the graduate-field
system. In this system we define the set of allowable
thesis advisors for a given student by field rather than
by department, a distinction that makes our approach
to multidisciplinary research friendly and effective.
The system’s inventors made Cornell a stronger research
university because they challenged a department-centric
view of graduate education. Thanks to their vision, our
Ph.D. students see only the open prairie, even though it
has long since been partitioned into a patchwork of
administrative territories.
Multidisciplinary research is also forcing us to rethink
how we deliver undergraduate education, because on this
campus we insist upon the tight coupling of research and
the undergraduate mission. Narrow definitions of “college”
discourage the creation of new undergraduate programs
and the flourishing of others when the subject matter
fails to align with the university’s subdivision into
colleges. The Faculty of CIS addresses this issue in part
by overseeing CS n a way that does not diminish the
colleges of Engineering or Arts and Sciences, where our
undergraduate majors reside. It is an administrative
innovation that generalizes the concept of college
so that membership issues are driven by intellectual
considerations, just as they are in the graduate-field
system. If all goes according to plan, Cornell
undergraduates in computing and information science
will likewise see just the open prairie.
New structures like the Faculty of CIS make departments
all the more important. Departments are the critical
social unit within academia. The loftiest university-level
strategic plan depends upon how well the participating
departments hire, mentor, and promote their faculty and how outward-looking they are in terms of curriculum. Life
on the prairie is defined by life on the homestead and the
department is the homestead.
In looking over our particular academic domicile, I am
happy to report that we are stronger and more secure in
our campus mission than ever before. Compared to last
year, our research expenditures are up about 30 percent
and the number of outside units that have representation
in the field of computer science has doubled. (Psychology, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Science
and Technology Studies join Electrical and Computer
Engineering, Operations Research and Industrial
Engineering, and Mathematics.) The number of
departments that cross-list courses with CS has increased
from a handful to about a dozen. This track record reflects
our commitment to the university’s strategic plan for
computing and information science and confirms that
the CIS structure has been a success.
Thinking about faculty, we have two new professors. Paul
Francis (networks) and Uri Keich (bioinformatics) bring
new strength to our systems and computational biology
groups. We have a Sloan Fellowship award winner
(Johannes Gehrke). We have a record number of assistant
professors (fourteen). It’s youth and creativity up and
down the hallways of Upson!
Joe Halpern became a fellow of the ACM, Bart Selman
and Don Greenberg became fellows of the AAAS, and Fred
Schneider received an honorary doctorate from the
University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England.
Congratulations to these senior faculty members!
David Gries has returned to the faculty and will be serving
as the associate dean for undergraduate education in
the College of Engineering. We have joint appointments
with the JGSM (Dan Huttenlocher) and the Weill Medical
College (Ramin Zabih). There is outreach to other
universities through the tri-institutional program for
computational biology (Ron Elber) and an ITR grant
concerned with high-performance code generation for
scientific and engineering
applications (Keshav Pingali,
Steve Vavasis, Paul Chew). We
have CS leadership in the CTC
(Tom Coleman), the FISC (Tom
Coleman), the IISI (Carla Gomes),
the IAI (Fred Schneider), the PCG
(Don Greenberg), and the NSDL
(Bill Arms). These multidisciplinary
adventures are supported by the
department’s commitment to
collegiality and core CS research.
Saddle up. It’s Big Sky Country!