Homecoming Week Wrap-up
The week (and weekend) of homecoming 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 of Juniper Networks, Pradeep Sindhu. We had a really interesting discussion about data-intensive scalable computing (aka, DISC). We will need to talk more with Pradeep (and others at Juniper) about this as we continue to grow our research and education activities in this area.
At lunch I attended a board of trustees committee meeting and then met up with two more CS PhD grads, Kevin Dowling and Mike Blackwell. They are both working at Color Kinetics, with Kevin the VP for Innovation, and Mike referred to as the company’s “Rocket Scientist”. Kevin has been making a big impact on campus lately, working with the architects for the Gates Hillman Center on the design of the Pausch Bridge. It was also great to see Mike, this being his first trip back to CMU in 10 years.
Immediately after meeting with Kevin and Mike, I joined a meeting with CS alumnus Ed Frank, his wife and School of Art alumnus Sarah Ratchye, and several other faculty members and administrator. We had a lively discussion about the emerging critical mass of people and programs on campus doing work combining fine arts with technology. There is really something very interesting brewing here — as I mentioned earlier, watch out for some new developments along these lines in the near future.
The Friday evening and Saturday events continued, too numerous to list (and I was in and out, skipping most of them anyway). The university’s campaign to dramatically increase the endowment officially kicked off, and although it seems bad timing to do so in an era of such economic uncertainty, in reality the campaign has been in its “silent phase” for quite some time and has already laid a great deal of groundwork. I have little doubt that the campaign will be successful.
Peter Lee @ October 26, 2008