A Note from the Chair - AU21
What an incredible year this has been! The pandemic notwithstanding, CSE entered a period of growth that is unprecedented in our 50+year history. Our research program received major national recognitions. These include the awards of three NSF Institutes in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. You’ll learn more in this newsletter about these remarkable initiatives, which are funded at a level of $55M over the next five years, and the new opportunities they will enable for our students and partners.
I am super excited to share with you that we are substantially ramping up the growth of our educational program. We now plan to more than double the number of students in our undergraduate and graduate programs over the next five years. This ambitious target is aligned with the JobsOhio program in our state, which recognizes the critical needs of workforce development in Ohio in Computing and allied interdisciplinary fields.
Innovation and brand development of our educational programs will accompany this growth so that we can properly meet the evolving aspirations of students who are increasingly being attracted to Computing. As I had outlined in the Spring newsletter, we’ve created new certificate and degree programs in cybersecurity and data analysis, and new program pathways are currently under development—in person as well as online and with options in CS+X, AI+X among others.
Our faculty in CSE will grow in a large way to help support our enhanced mission. This past Spring we were delighted to have Andrew Perrault from Harvard and Xeuru Zhang from UMichigan join our tenure-track faculty, and Diego Zaccai, Greg Ryslik, and Matt Boggus join our clinical-track faculty. This fall we are running on all cylinders (or, should I say, on all cores:) to recruit 20 new tenure-track and 2 new clinical-track faculty members. This is the first step of a multi-year faculty expansion, one that is expected to better serve our growing student body by substantially improving the student to faculty ratio towards OSU’s target of 24. Hiring at this scale is a great privilege and an awesome responsibility.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our College of Engineering and the University for being staunch supporters of our new strategic initiatives. But no less, I want to recognize the wonderful support and encouragement we are receiving from you. Having been in my role for a year now, I’ve been deeply impressed by the level of interest and generosity that many of you have shown. In response to your caring and willingness to put skin-in-the-game, I can assure you that we fully intend to engage you in our community. I personally welcome your help in charting this new phase in our department’s story. Please feel free to reach out to me (arora.9@osu.edu) and any share suggestions you might have. And, oh, please help us spread the word with potential candidates!
Go Bucks!