Homecoming Week: Alumni Invade Campus
It’s homecoming week. In terms of alumni visits, homecoming at CMU traditionally has been in the shadow of Spring Carnival, but in recent years the number of alumni we’ve been seeing for both events has really increased a lot. So, it’s been incredibly busy but also tons of fun to see old friends back on campus. Today, for example, I had lunch with Matt Humphrey, who entered our CS program at the ripe old age of 13, gained early admission to the Tepper Business School MBA program, and now, at barely legal drinking age is already referred to as a serial entrepreneur. He’s working on an Internet startup in the Silicon Valley now, though the fact that it is still in stealth mode didn’t stop me from asking for beta access… You can check out his blog at http://zellunit.com/.
Some of the alumni are people I’ve never met before. Yesterday I had a very interesting one-hour chat with Marc Onetto, a CMU Tepper grad and now Senior VP in charge of Amazon’s worldwide operations and customer service. As we have been learning through our interactions with Jeff Bezos and Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO), Amazon is really doing some interesting things in machine learning, cloud computing, and operations research, all of which is getting the attention of quite a few of our faculty. I look forward to continuing to deepen our interactions with them.
Last night I went to a dinner for Paula Wagner, a CMU School of Drama grad who then went on to a career as a Hollywood actress and then, most recently, a talent agent for people such as Kevin Bacon, Val Kilmer, Demi Moore, Liam Neeson, Oliver Stone, and Tom Cruise. The dinner was hosted by Hilary Robinson, the Dean of the College of Fine Arts, and included a really interesting group of people, including the Heads of Computer Science (me), Art, Architecture, Drama, Music, and Human-Computer Interaction, and faculty in these departments as well as Robotics. The dinner-time discussion focused on all of the amazing array of “art+technology” activities on campus, many in studio and research lab, but also including the new Bachelor of Computer Science and the Arts (BCSA) program and the new Disney co-laboratory. The discussion was really inspiring and, well, fun. We started at 7:30pm and didn’t finish until nearly 1am!
It seems clear to me that something very, very exciting in the intersection of arts and technology is happening here. I see an analogy here with physical science; in both art and science we are reaching an inflection point. No longer is it possible to do many kinds of core science or art without the use of computational thinking. In the very near future, the amount of data and/or the medium will make computing mandatory.
Lots more happening for the rest of this week. In an hour or so, Ed Clarke will give a special “Turing Award” lecture, followed by a special ED250 reception. (”ED250″ stands for “250 reasons we couldn’t live without Ed Clarke”). Tomorrow, more meetings with some really prominent alumni, and a special evening session for the conferring of the Alumni Awards. Tomorrow also kicks off the 25th anniversary celebration of Field Robotics at CMU, plus a 60th year celebration in honor of Red Whitaker.
Whew!
Peter Lee @ October 23, 2008
[…] events has wrapped up. It was really great to see so many people coming to town for this. I posted earlier about some of them. Friday was another day of meetings with alumni, starting with CS PhD grad and the Founder and CTO […]
I used to ride my motorcycle each year for my homecoming weekend. Thanks for the post. Takes me back to some great times!