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Seattle Times on UW CSE Industry Affiliates meeting and new building plans

Picture 177The Seattle Times reports on UW’s plans for an expanded facility for CSE, discussed at last week’s UW CSE Industry Affiliates meeting:

“Ten years after it opened, the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering still has that new-building smell.

“It’s a glorious home for the University of Washington’s esteemed computer science program, with polished wood and metal interiors that look more like Microsoft headquarters than a public school …

“More important, graduates have found jobs at pretty much all the world’s leading tech companies. The school is also an important center for research into emerging fields such as ‘big data’ analytics, machine learning and computer vision.

jl-scaffold“The program is so successful and important that lawmakers shuffled the state’s scant education funding over the past two years to increase enrollment …

“There’s just one problem. The building is now full, and the program keeps growing.

“‘We have no more space – that’s going to be an issue for us in the future,’ Hank Levy, the department’s chairman, said last week during an annual meeting with tech companies that support the program and recruit its graduates.

“Levy then disclosed plans to build an entirely new computer science building across the street …

“The new center would house multidisciplinary programs, which are proliferating as computer science becomes integral to other fields of research.

“It could also accommodate surging demand for programming courses that’s coming from students across the university. During the past school year, 2,500 took the introductory course.

money“‘More and more students are realizing they’ve got to be really well-versed in computational thinking, no matter what they’ll be doing,’ said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering.”

Read more here.  Learn more about our recent Industry Affiliates meeting here.  Learn about our home, the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering, here; learn about the Allen Center’s collection of art by UW-affiliated artists here.  Most importantly, learn about the crowd-sourced exponential funding effort for Levytown – our new building – here.  (This is a well-traveled path; see here.)