Tuesday, the University of Wisconsin will break ground on a new building for the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences.
CDIS is a school within the College of Letters and Sciences which aims to expand research and education around technology at the intersection of society, founding director of CDIS Tom Erickson said.
CDIS was founded in 2019 and brings together the departments of Computer Sciences, Statistics and the Information School, according to their website.
All three departments are ranked highly across the country in terms of research, according to Erickson.
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“That is very unusual to be so powerful,” Erickson said. “There isn’t another university in the country that can say the same.”
Erickson said the schools have three primary goals — excellence in research, ensuring students across campus have access to their classes and increasing the amount of learning in the school of CDIS.
Along with these three departments, the new CDIS building will also host the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, the American Family Insurance Data Science Institute, the Center for High Throughput Computing and the N+1 Institute, Erickson said.
The university is hopeful that having all of these departments and institutions under the same roof will help with collaboration and intellectual collisions, Erickson said. The departments will be dispersed throughout the different floors of the building to allow for more movement within the building and increased communication between faculty and students and among the different departments.
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The building will house over 50% of classes within their departments so students in the school won’t have to walk all over campus to get to class, Erickson said. Currently, computer science students only have about 20% of their classes inside of the Computer Science building.
In terms of sustainability, the building will have solar panels on the roof and will use rainwater to flush the toilets. The offices are all built the same, which allows for flexibility of use in the future, Erickson said.
The building will also have lactation and wellness rooms to allow for privacy or a space to take a break. It will have two terraces, a courtyard and green roofs.
“We want everybody on campus to want to come there, but we also want a place where those people majoring can collide with each other and share experiences,” Erickson said.
According to Erickson, CDIS is the fastest-growing school on campus, with two of its departments being the top two fastest growing majors at UW. Additionally, CDIS has hired more than 25 new faculty in the past three years and expects to continue growing.
The $260 million building project is funded fully through private donations, including $50 million from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and $125 million from Tashia and John Morgridge. It is expected to be completed in 2025.
