Computer Science Faculty Retreat
I’m writing today from Newport Beach, where I am attending a DARPA ISAT meeting. I may write about that in a future article, but for today I’d like to give a rundown on our department’s faculty retreat, which was held this past Friday and Saturday (April 11-12).
Retreats, for us, are a pretty big deal, and this one was no exception. We held the retreat at the Bedford Springs Resort, about a two-hour drive from Pittsburgh. Despite the distance, we had a fantastic turnout, with about 65 Computer Science Department faculty members, four faculty members from other departments (two from Physics, one each from ECE and Art), and three university development folks all in attendance. If nothing else, one major accomplishment of the retreat was to get one of the most complete faculty group photos in recent memory!
A full-resolution version of this photo is available here.
The retreat was a great opportunity to enjoy, in a relaxed setting, the company of good colleagues. For me, the camaraderie is priceless. We had lots of time for informal discussions, which couldn’t help but create new connections and opportunities for collaboration. We also took the time to celebrate what has been a truly amazing year for the department. And, of course, we tackled some hard issues.
A complete report would be much too long (and anyway some of the issues are of a sensitive nature). So here are just a few brief highlights.
- We cleaned up in major awards this year, starting, of course, with Ed Clarke’s Turing award, but including also two ACM Fellows, an IEEE Fellow, two Sloan Fellows, an NSF CAREER award, a EurYI award, the Bower Prize, a Microsoft New Faculty Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a TR35, RoboCup soccer championship, a Smithsonian 36, …
- It’s been a banner year in publications, major initiatives, student successes, and real-world impact. Particularly notable this year has been the hyperactive amount of national and international press attention, and the impact of several major gifts for buildings and new endowed research centers.
- I argued for the need to grow our department, in both the number of faculty (especially assistant professors) and PhD students. For a department head talking to the faculty, this is a classic “easy sell”. ;-) Still, I think the discussion of this topic was quite serious.
- Ed Clarke gave a wonderful “first-ever” preview of the Turing Award Lecture. An amazing amount of work over a 27-year period, with many people (especially Ed’s students) making significant contributions. Ed said that he “couldn’t have done it anywhere but Carnegie Mellon.” After the lecture, Ed was given a new MacBook Air as small a token of appreciation. We’re also planning a formal celebration in the fall.
- Our newest faculty member, Adrien Treuille, gave an introductory lecture. This was warmly received by everyone, and in fact both the model-reduction work and the protein-folding game generated a great deal of interest.
- We had a session on new research centers, including the NSF-funded Quality of Life Technology Center, the newly endowed Lane Center for Computational Biology, the newly endowed McWilliams Center for Cosmology, the DOE-funded Petascale Data Storage Institute, a new co-lab by Disney (including Imagineering, Animation, ESPN, etc.), and a “center without a name”, being launched by Luis von Ahn. Also present on the panel was Virgil Gligor, who has recently joined the ECE Department from Maryland, and is set to take over as the new director of the CyLab this summer.
- A big part of the retreat focused on our new buildings, the Gates Center for Computer Science and the Hillman Center for Future Generation Technologies. Guy Blelloch, the faculty lead on the project, did a great job motivating the faculty to study the building plans. He provided an impossibly difficult trivia quiz about the building, with the first prize being a pair of 32GB Apple iPod Touches! Steve Brookes and Bob Harper teamed up to win the prize. The net result of all the study and discussion was a dramatically heightened sense of anticipation, as we look forward to moving in Summer of 2009.
- One of the most interesting – and most disorganized – sessions was called “Wild / Important / New Ideas”, or “WINning Ideas.” Now, I admit that I was worried enough about this session that I worked ahead of time to “plant” 6 faculty members to offer ideas. To my surprise, however, 16 faculty stood up and pitched, for two minutes, their ideas for research or some other aspect of how the department runs. Some were “wild”, such as Todd Mowry’s concept to have robotic-actuated rooms that transform automatically into different kinds of living spaces. Others were “important”, such as Karl Crary’s pitch for a major push to build a “static” OS – that is, an operating system that actually works. And some were in the “new” category, such as Golan Levin’s idea for a “hybrid” colaboratory blending art, architecture, media, and many other exploratory disciplines with computer science.
- I started a new series of annual Department Head Awards. Frank Pfenning and Luis von Ahn won the “Barging Award for Most Unscheduled Meetings with the Department Head”. Carlos Guestrin won the “Best Sucking Up Award” for the beautiful birthday present he gave me. The “Rah Rah Award” was given to Jessica Hodgins, for the determination she showed in getting Disney to open a co-lab here. And the “Glorious Failure” award was given to Seth Goldstein, for his true commitment to science, despite the recent DARPA experiences. Each award winner was given a nice certificate and a restaurant gift card to be used to take his or her graduate students out to dinner.
- Of course, “lubricating” the faculty and creating a relaxed atmosphere is critical. To this end, we had an open-bar cocktail hour, a nice dinner (with wine!), and lots of fun discussion in the resort’s tavern.
As you can see from these highlights, the retreat was lots of fun. That’s not to say all the topics were easy ones. While we have continued to have an exceptional degree of success in winning research grants, particularly from the NSF, the feeling of uncertainty about federal funding takes its toll on the faculty. And then there was the annoying disappointment of the US News ranking. Fully informing all the faculty about these issues and taking these topics head-on were very important elements of our discussions. Another key set of issues has to do with possible evolutions of undergraduate CS education. We have been seeing the creation of new programs, such as the very recently approved Bachelor of Computer Science and the Arts Program. Another proposal currently in the “thought experiment” stage is for a program in Computational Intelligence, blending large-scale data analysis, statistics, and machine learning. While firm conclusions weren’t reached, it is clear that the time has come to consider the future of undergraduate education very seriously, and ideally to have a coherent strategy under the umbrella of Computer Science. A bit of time was also spent on improving our standing in the international programming contest.
For me, the retreat was a fantastic, energizing, and fun experience. I felt all the faculty were really engaged, showing great team attitude and, at times, humoring me when I tried to get them to do silly things (like the group photo). Also, it’s worth saying that none of this could have happened without a huge amount of work by my assistant, Diana Hyde.
I’m already looking forward to the next retreat.
Peter Lee @ April 15, 2008