Welcome!
Welcome to the new CSD Head Blog! I invite you to visit regularly and even post comments on any of the items that appear here.
I’m sure some of you are wondering about the purpose of this blog. There is an old saying that a department head should never surprise the faculty. Well, in a department as big and active as ours, this poses quite a challenge! First of all, the department head doesn’t know everything. :-) Also, in any given week, so many of you are involved in notable activities or accomplishments, and while it isn’t critically important for everyone to know about these, it seems good to share the news. It’s also the case that many things are always “brewing” — new funding initiatives, thoughts on hiring, new postdocs, interactions with other parts of campus, etc. It doesn’t seem good to use the cs-faculty mailing list to spam everyone with this sort of information, nor is it a good use of our monthly faculty meetings — the time in those meetings is just so valuable. I contemplated a newsletter, but some of the items should really give all of you an opportunity for discussion or feedback.
So, I’ve settled on a weblog. This site will contain news and updates on items of interest to the Computer Science Department. While I intend to provide information of interest to all members of the department, nothing here will be “top secret”, and in fact anyone can access the blog. Critically important or sensitive issues will still use the faculty meetings and cs-faculty mailing list, but the day-to-day sort of stuff will appear here. I hope you find this blog to be a useful way to stay up-to-date on developments in the department, and perhaps your ability to make comments will stimulate productive discussion.
Peter
Peter Lee @ September 20, 2007