University of Washington
Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Vision Statement and Strategic Plan

Vision

If, over the past 30 years, transportation technology had made the same progress as computing technology in size, cost, speed, and energy consumption, then an automobile would be the size of an attache' case, cost $200, travel 100,000 miles per hour, and go 150,000 miles on a gallon of fuel. (And for many application domains, the gains attributable to software improvements actually dominate the gains attributable to hardware advances.) This familiar analogy illustrates the phenomenal advances achieved by computer science and engineering, and suggests the profound transformation that these advances have wrought.

Twenty years ago there were no cash machines, fax machines, cellular telephones, video games, or CAT scanners. Today we are nearing the point where there are cash machines in every store, fax machines in every office, cellular telephones in every pocket, video games in every home, and CAT scanners in every hospital. Twenty years ago the software industry barely existed. Today Microsoft is worth more than Boeing (and Nintendo of America, another Washington State computing technology firm, has greater annual revenues than even Microsoft). Twenty years ago there were two fundamental paradigms in science and engineering: physical experimentation and mathematical analysis. Today computer-based simulation/visualization is firmly established as a third.

What's almost impossible to believe, in the face of this remarkable progress, is that the real computing and communications revolution still lies ahead. The next few years will see increasingly powerful digital information services brought to homes, businesses, educational institutions, and individuals across America. The result, with visionary technical and political leadership, will be increasingly effective, ubiquitous, and equitable access to the world's knowledge, information, and entertainment resources, to health and other social services, to telecommuting, banking and shopping services, distance learning, and social interaction.

Twenty years from now, existing industries will have collapsed and new ones will have been born. Pocket-size supercomputers, connected by high-speed wireless networks, will be more common than the Walkman is today. Telecommuting over the information highway through advanced user interfaces could render the automobile analogy moot, enabling truly distributed social, business, and educational communities mediated by intelligent software agents. Interactive fiction and virtual reality will likely dwarf other forms of entertainment, and may be integrated closely with education. Computer-aided design, geometric modeling, and simulation environments will transform engineering companies; simulation and visualization coupled with distance learning technologies should similarly transform education and our ability to explore, understand, and change the world around us. Software safety, despite significant progress, will likely be the limiting factor in the design of new products.

Washington State is at the center of this "digital convergence," and stands to contribute and to benefit enormously. We have major corporate players in computing and communications technology such as Microsoft, Nintendo of America, and McCaw; smaller players that together comprise the fastest growing software industry in the nation; key consumers of this technology such as Boeing and the Pacific Northwest Laboratories; and a number of strong programs in critical fields at the University of Washington, including a Department of Computer Science & Engineering that is ranked among the top ten in the nation both for the quality of its undergraduate programs and for the quality of its graduate and research programs.

The vision of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering for this decade is to lead the way, in partnership with others, in capitalizing on these advantages, achieving a forefront position in areas of high impact that will benefit the University, the region, and the nation. An enormous opportunity exists -- one that the University of Washington cannot afford to miss.

Positioning

At the root of this positioning is 25 years of recognition within the University of Washington that whatever our department will have to offer will arise from strength at the core of our discipline: from conducting research that is of major and lasting impact, and from striving for excellence in our educational programs at all degree levels, understanding that strength in research and strength in education are inextricably linked. We feel that we have been successful: Computer Science & Engineering is a highly regarded department with significant institutional, regional, national, and international interactions and impact.

As our core strength has become solidified, we have been able to devote increasing effort to "looking outward". Examples include the following:

• Recent faculty hires have emphasized areas that will be particularly critical well into the next century:
  • We have built a first-class young group in artificial intelligence, a key technology for next-generation user interfaces and computer-aided design and manufacturing systems.
  • We have hired the world's expert in software safety, which is becoming the limiting factor in the design of many modern systems.
  • We have made an additional hire in computer graphics -- critical to visualization, computer-aided design, and indeed all advanced user interfaces -- creating a small but highly regarded group in this key area.
  (We have used other hires to solidify our strength in computer engineering: we have recruited in very large scale integrated circuit design, in software systems for advanced architectures, and in compilers for advanced languages.)

• A significant number of multi-disciplinary collaborations have been initiated or are under discussion within the University with departments such as Applied Mathematics, Astronomy, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Materials Science & Engineering, Mathematics, Molecular Biotechnology, Radiation Oncology, and Statistics.

• We have devoted significant effort to providing leadership within the College (e.g., the Promotion and Tenure Committee and the ECSEL coalition), within the University (e.g., the University Advisory Committee on Academic Technology), and nationally (e.g., the Computing Research Association).

• Similarly, our regional outreach efforts have increased markedly: we have undertaken a televised colloquium series that has been very well received; we have built bridges to the Washington Software Association and its member firms; we have established particularly close relationships with cutting-edge regional high technology companies such as Boeing, DECwest, Microsoft, and Tera; we have expanded our Industrial Affiliates program.

Finally, the impending construction of the EE/CSE building is critical to our positioning. We currently operate with roughly 1/3 the space of our national peer departments, and this space is of marginal quality. The EE/CSE building, when it is completed in 1997, will eliminate the quality problem and will somewhat mitigate the quantity problem, with enormous impact on all areas of our activity. Much complementary work already is underway between Electrical Engineering and Computer Science & Engineering, in areas such as very large scale integrated circuit design, embedded systems, computer-aided design, robotics, and mobile/ubiquitous computing. The new shared building will greatly further this interaction.

While we are well positioned, it is important to recognize that we are seriously resource-constrained. Our responsibilities, opportunities, and activities have increased dramatically over the past five years. Our support base has increased as well, but by a far smaller amount. Despite our positioning, without at least modest additional support we cannot effectively capitalize upon the opportunity that has been created -- achieving the vision outlined above by means of the strategic plan and specific actions described in the next two sections.

Strategic Plan

• We will re-dedicate ourselves to excellence and access in our educational programs. The University of Washington's Department of Computer Science & Engineering must continue to be the place where top students can fulfill their educational objectives, becoming prepared for life-long careers related to our rapidly changing and increasingly ubiquitous discipline.

  This re-dedication involves more active recruiting of outstanding students, work on curricular coherence and orientation, a greater emphasis on teaching quality, improved co-op and internship programs, continued incorporation of technological advances into our curriculum, and preparation of both undergraduate and graduate students for a wide variety of careers.

  We will also work to ensure that in the future a broad range of students at the University have a sound exposure to computation. Graduates in many other disciplines are going to be required to be literate in many aspects of computing and information technology. We need to look to their needs as well as to those of our majors.

  To this end, as resources allow, and consistent with providing a high quality educational experience befitting a strong department in a major research university, we will consider initiatives such as an increased size for our Computer Engineering undergraduate major program, a professional Master's program, Branch Campus programs, evening programs, a minor program, a "computer literacy" course, and increased use of distance learning technologies.

• We will continue to seek high-leverage research directions with long-term impact, and to seek integration of our research and educational efforts. New directions in research will be sought by identifying critical motivating problems from computer science and engineering and from application disciplines. Long-term impact will remain a key criterion for selection of research problems. While we must aggressively pursue high-leverage problems and technology transfer opportunities, we must resist inducements to work on short-term development, since others (specifically industrial development, advanced development, and applied research groups) cover this ground admirably and with greater resources than the University can bring to bear.

  A few examples of high-leverage research directions with long-term impact include: efforts to harness the potential of scalable parallel computing for attacking the grand challenge problems of science and engineering; user interface technology; Internet-oriented telecommunications; mobile and ubiquitous computing; intelligent agents for navigating and organizing huge information spaces; the engineering of large and safe software systems; and the innovative use of digital technology for education and distance learning.

• We will continue to strengthen our partnership with the region's computing industry. This industry is one of the most vital in the nation. Benefits of closer ties include better educated and more employable students, as well as the identification of high-leverage research directions and a clear path for technology transfer.

  Part of what is needed is more intensive dialog, so that each partner better understands the needs and capabilities of the other; this will increase the likelihood of fruitful joint initiatives. Another part is strategic partnerships with firms with which we have strongly complementary needs and capabilities.

  More specific items include a renewed educational effort through improved co-op and internship programs, a more active Industrial Affiliates program, increased ties with the Washington Software Association, deployment of high-bandwidth digital communications technology, and the formation (in collaboration with Electrical Engineering, Boeing, and others) of an Engineering Research Center focused on large-scale computer-aided design.

• We will forge increasingly strong relationships with computationally-oriented individuals and departments throughout the University, and embark on interdisciplinary activities with them. Collaboration with strong faculty in other disciplines is an important way for us to identify the high leverage directions mentioned above, and to see that our solutions have impact on practice. Collaborations may take many forms, including research projects, service-oriented interdisciplinary courses, or formal or informal centers.

• We will develop a computing environment that provides cutting- edge hardware and software for faculty, students, and staff. Such an environment is essential for experimental research, for understanding the implications of research, and for education.

  The construction of the new EE/CSE building provides an unparalleled opportunity to investigate future office technology. It gives us the opportunity to invest in ubiquitous computing, electronic white boards, networked supercomputer workstations with high performance graphics, and user interface technology.

Specific Actions

• Re-orient our introductory/service curriculum to better meet the needs of a broad spectrum of students. We are pursuing two thrusts, each in close consultation with "client" departments:
  • We are re-focusing our existing introductory course, currently taken by roughly 1,500 students per year, so that its laboratory component emphasizes facility in producing modest-sized programs using advanced programming tools.
  • We are considering various alternatives for a complementary course in which the laboratory component does not involve "traditional programming". One model is a course that teaches the fundamental concepts of computation using advanced interfaces such as S, MATLAB, and Mathematica to solve engineering and scientific problems. We would expect a course such as this to have the potential to attract 1,000 students per year. (Such a course would require additional faculty and particularly teaching assistant support if it were to be expanded to this scale.)

• Remain engaged in a continual process of curricular modernization, making intellectually sound changes in our undergraduate curriculum that will better prepare our students for their careers. There are three major thrusts to this initiative:
  • Complement the concepts taught in our undergraduate curriculum with a clearly defined mixture of practical skills and specific abilities. Our curriculum, like others across the country, has focused primarily on concepts. A major thrust for the current year is to identify various complementary skills and abilities that we expect our students to acquire, and to identify the sources from which we expect these to be acquired. We expect this seemingly small change to result in a significant increase in the effectiveness of our curriculum. We also plan to increase the number of design-oriented courses that provide students with hands- on experience.
  • In selective cases where appropriate, re-orient the curriculum to more closely reflect practice. Here is one example that we are actively pursuing. Advances in computer graphics hardware and algorithms, the hiring of an additional faculty member in computer graphics by our department, and the burgeoning use of advanced computer graphics in the Puget Sound region and elsewhere, create a unique opportunity to introduce an innovative graphics curriculum emphasizing 3-D graphics and animation instead of the traditional "graphics pipeline" around which the nation's curricula are built today. This innovative approach can be expected to be highly influential, and not incidentally to produce students who are better-prepared to enter the workforce as designers and implementors of advanced graphical interfaces for entertainment, visualization, and other virtual reality environments. (If our efforts are successful, space and some staff support will be required.)
  • Expand participation in co-op and internship programs, and increase the integration of these programs with the students' classroom experience. This task is already underway. Faculty, staff, students, and employers all are being mobilized. Well- integrated co-op and internship programs can be key contributors to the educational process for computer scientists and engineers.

• Increase opportunities for "cooperative education" in our undergraduate programs. Education is not a passive activity -- students must participate actively if they are to receive maximum benefit. Many opportunities for active participation already have been crafted into our curriculum; the team design projects in many of our senior-level courses are an excellent example. Other opportunities are being expanded, such as co-op and internship participation, and NSF REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) awards. We must seek additional opportunities for cooperative education. Allowing undergraduates to participate as teaching assistants and tutors is one that many of us find attractive; both the students who participate and those they assist benefit, and diversity efforts are particularly well served.

• Introduce a small number of graduate service courses in computation. There has been widespread interest in such a course on the part of our colleagues in disciplines applying computing technology. We have had a number of discussions, and are prototyping a first course this year. It is important to reiterate in this context that all of our faculty are teaching full loads. No curricular initiatives at the graduate or undergraduate level can be undertaken on a permanent basis without additional support.

• Enhance curricular and research ties with Electrical Engineering. Progress is continually being made. We firmly believe that the EE/CSE Initiative has paid off handsomely for the two departments, for the College, and for the University.

• Revitalize our Industrial Affiliates program. This task is already underway. Our principal goal is to increase participation by regional companies (the program has had a national focus until now), by integrating the program more closely with co-op, internship, and recruiting opportunities. Ultimately a staff member will be required to support this expanded program, but it should be self-supporting.

• Seek the ability to make a small number of additional strategic hires. There are three specific types of hires that we feel are critical:
  • We have worked hard to achieve diversity among our faculty (as well as among our student body). We have three female faculty members. In the past ten years we have hired two other first class women who left because of two-body problems that we were unable to resolve. We have no under-represented ethnic minority on our faculty. We must continue to have the opportunity to recruit first class under-represented people to our faculty.
  • One thing that clearly separates us from the other top departments is the lack of a "Turing-caliber" individual -- a person who has received, or is likely to receive in the near future, the Turing Award, the top technical prize in computer science and engineering. Our competitiveness would be greatly enhanced by hiring a Turing-caliber senior person in any area of strategic importance.
  • Because of the dynamic nature of computer science and engineering, and because of its extraordinary role in the University and in the region, situations will arise that offer high leverage in critical areas by building upon existing departmental, institutional, and regional strengths. As one example, highly sophisticated user interfaces are the key to making computer power more accessible, achieving the promise of "digital convergence". An individual in the user interface area would offer unique synergy by building a bridge between our existing strengths in AI and graphics, the Human Interface Technology Laboratory in the WTC, and work at regional leadership companies such as Microsoft. The Department of Computer Science & Engineering is the right place to recruit such a person. Several similar opportunities exist today, and others can be expected to arise in the future.

• Given adequate support, increase access at the undergraduate and graduate levels:
  • At the undergraduate level, our assistance has been requested in establishing a "software systems" degree program at the Bothell campus.
  • At the graduate level, the time may have come to introduce a professional Masters program, possibly involving distance learning and/or evening instruction. The University of Washington must be the place where top students can fulfill their educational objectives. Up to this point, sufficient demand has not existed. We sense that this demand may be growing now. (It must be emphasized that no departmental decision has yet been made, and that we would not be able to undertake such an initiative entirely with our existing faculty.)
  • If the College were willing and resources were available, we feel that we could significantly increase the size of our ABET- accredited Computer Engineering undergraduate major program. The quality of these students is extraordinarily high. (We must emphasize our continuing firm commitment to our Arts & Sciences programs: our Computer Science major program, our junior/senior "minor" curriculum developed in collaboration with the mathematical science departments, our introductory sequence which is taken by students throughout the University, and our research, educational, and personal ties to a large number of outstanding colleagues.)

• Create a prototype distributed research center involving UW, the Boeing Research and Technology organization, and Microsoft Research, using early digital collaboration technology. This effort will serve two purposes: to cement relationships among these organizations, and to explore collaboration technology before it becomes widely available.

Summary