CMU CS Department to Move to Gates and Hillman Centers on August 3

Personal

I’ve been feeling pretty guilty about being off the blog for the past month. I do have some excuses, though. Of course, there were the usual paper and proposal deadlines, two distinguished lectures, and a busy season for recruiting faculty and grad students. My PhD students also kept me busier than usual, with one going through a thesis defense and three others working on papers. But there were a few other issues to handle that really put me over the edge, forcing me to put the blog (and other things) aside for a little while.

For one thing, I had to work pretty hard on our budget planning for the upcoming year. (More about that, perhaps, in a future post.) I have also been neck-deep in the NSF/CISE-funded Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Project, working as its PI. (I’ll write more about this later, too.) But while these tasks were certainly time-consuming, one endeavor was particularly daunting in the amount of individualized attention it required from me. The task: finalizing the office and space assignments for our department’s move, starting August 3rd, to the fabulous Gates and Hillman Centers. Wow, what a remarkable work of modern architecture. I’m hoping to post a video tour soon.

For the office/lab assignments, I took most of our faculty, one by one, through the building for “hardhat tours,” in part to get them excited but also to convince each one to be happy with their new offices and labs. (At least one faculty member accused me of acting like a real-estate salesman. ;-) The whole process has been tons of fun but also time-consuming. I must say, also, that it would have been totally impossible without the advice and hard work of Sharon Burks, who graciously came out of retirement to work on this with me.

As we come close to the end of our time in the not-quite-revered Wean Hall, it becomes time to reflect on what we might be leaving behind. In this vein, Paul Heckbert took a great Gigapan image of Mark Stehlik’s office. Check it out! Just click on the image to see the Gigapan. And make sure to take a good snapshot!

Paul asks if there are other Wean Hall spaces that need to be Gigapan’d before we move…

Peter Lee @ June 17, 2009