UW-Madison leadership is considering the creation of a new college focused on computing, reflecting the technology’s increasingly central role across other disciplines.
That’s according to Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, director of the university’s School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences. He spoke yesterday during a Wisconsin Technology Council luncheon in Madison, where he said the new college is “under strong consideration” and could be officially proposed to the Board of Regents this year.
Arpaci-Dusseau said the idea is to elevate CDIS into a college that focuses on AI and other computing applications. Currently, he noted no one who’s working on these areas is currently involved in leading the campus.
“Campus leadership is like the chancellor, provost, there’s a bunch of deans that get together, make decisions about the future of campus. We’re not part of that,” he said. “And it feels like at this moment, computing, AI, all of those things are too central to so many things to not be part of that discussion.”
He said becoming a college within UW-Madison would help CDIS keep up with the changing demands on education and research, as well as fundraising “because colleges with deans are good at raising money.”
To ultimately be successful, the proposed college would need to integrate AI and related disciplines into education and research across the university, Arpaci-Dusseau argued.
“Instead of just being one in a stack, what we hope to be is something that’s just much more connected to all the other disciplines on campus,” he said, adding “colleges aren’t created very often on campuses, last one was 1979 … to my knowledge, so this would be the first one of this century. And that’s a really unique opportunity that we have.”
As much of the progress in AI is being made at the industry level by some of the world’s largest tech companies, Arpaci-Dusseau said universities need to be careful not to get left behind. He argued higher education “must lead in this space” as there’s much more work to do on AI, including new areas of research as well as entrepreneurship.
“There’s going to be so many companies sprouting up — there already are — that are taking advantage of something new you can do today that five years ago sounded like science fiction,” he said.
Meanwhile, student interest in the computer sciences has only grown in recent years. After the university’s data science major was introduced about five years ago, it has since risen to the second-largest major at UW-Madison after computer science.
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