[IP] Carnegie Mellon Receives $20 Million from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation To Build a New Home for the Study of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon Receives $20 Million from Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation
To Build a New Home for the Study of Computer Science
PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University has received a $20 million gift
from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help fund construction of a
new building dedicated to expanding the horizons of computer science.
The new facility, to be named the Gates Center for Computer Science,
will enable the university to broaden its leadership in this crucial
field by providing more space to nurture important ongoing and new
endeavors.
The Gates Center is envisioned as a prominently located,
150,000-square-foot building that will bring a range of computer
science activities together under one roof and foster more of the
interdisciplinary teaching and research breakthroughs for which the
university is famous, particularly in the areas like trustworthy
computing and artificial intelligence, which are crucial to the future
of computer science.
The estimated cost of the new building is $50 million, with the
foundation gift providing inspiration for additional fundraising. Plans
call for moving the project forward as quickly as possible so that the
facility is completed within three years from the time ground is
broken.
An artist’s conception of the new building shows three entrances with
one facing Forbes Avenue, the major Pittsburgh thoroughfare on which
the campus is located. Preliminary plans call for the new facility to
provide laboratory and office space for more than 80 faculty, as well
as several computer clusters, two 100-seat lecture halls, four 50-seat
classrooms and a 250-seat auditorium.
“We thank Bill and Melinda Gates for the generous gift that will
further outstanding work by this university,” said Carnegie Mellon
President Jared L. Cohon. “The Gates Center will be the new home for
students, faculty and research laboratories that embrace our
collaborative, problem-solving tradition in computer science. With its
state-of-the-art facilities and resources, the new Gates Center will
help us to continue to transform computer science with outstanding
research and thinking, while visibly and remarkably transforming our
campus with a bright new space for learning.”
Bill Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said,
“Our goal is for this new building to be a catalyst for computer
science breakthroughs. Carnegie Mellon is one of the top schools for
computer science in the nation, and we hope the foundation’s gift will
help the school continue to excel and push the envelope of human
understanding and innovation.”
The gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reaffirms the
significance of the contributions that Carnegie Mellon has made to the
field of computer science over more than four decades. Since 1956 when
computer science pioneers Herbert Simon and Allen Newell fathered the
field of artificial intelligence by demonstrating that computations
could be performed with symbols as well as numbers, Carnegie Mellon
computer scientists have pushed the frontiers of the field, producing
an astonishing array of breakthroughs in time sharing, speech
recognition, multiprocessors, expert systems, robotics, computer chess
machines and communication networks. Much of their work has been aimed
at developing and building practical, knowledge-based artificial
intelligence and programming systems. As a result Carnegie Mellon is
recognized as one of the few universities to build real systems in the
academic environment that have made their way into the commercial world
and into the research agendas of government agencies.
“This gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation represents a
substantial investment in the future health of the field of computer
science,” said School of Computer Science Dean Randal E. Bryant. “By
offering the very best facilities in which to learn and do research, we
can engage the most promising students and faculty. These innovators
and creative thinkers will transform the field of computer science,
producing fundamental scientific breakthroughs, while also making
computer technology even more beneficial to society.”
# # #
Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon
The School of Computer Science (SCS) was established as a doctoral
degree-granting department in 1965; it became a college in 1988 and
founded its highly regarded undergraduate program in 1990. The school
includes six divisions – the Center for Automated Learning and
Discovery, Computer Science Department, Human-Computer Interaction
Institute, Language Technologies Institute, Institute for Software
Research International and the Robotics Institute. SCS researchers are
known for making breakthroughs that have real-world application in
operating systems, programming languages, software engineering,
wearable computers, ubiquitous computing, networks, educational
computing systems and robotics. SCS researchers and faculty collaborate
with colleagues across the campus, from science and engineering to fine
arts and humanities to business and policy, enriching and being
enriched by the cross flow of ideas and information. For more
information about SCS, see www.cs.cmu.edu.
About the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to promote greater equity in
four areas: global health, education, public libraries and support for
at-risk families in Washington state and Oregon. The Seattle-based
foundation joins local, national and international partners to ensure
that advances in these areas reach those who need them most. The
foundation is led by Bill Gates’ father, William H. Gates, Sr., and
Patty Stonesifer.
Contact:Teresa S. Thomas or Anne Watzman Embargoed
until:
412-268-3580 or
-3830 10 a.m. Sept. 14, 2004
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