UI computer science department to become Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Apr. 25—URBANA — The University of Illinois Department of Computer Science is a department no longer: It's becoming the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science thanks to a donation from its new namesake.

Alumnus Thomas Siebel has already made his mark on campus with his name on centers for design and computer science, and he's doing it again with this $50 million gift.

This new school will still be a part of the Grainger College of Engineering.

"It's both an elevation because the school is a higher level entity and it's recognizing that we do things that traditional departments don't," said department head Nancy Amato.

The department already includes 17 degrees: only one is purely computer science while the remaining 16 blend in other disciplines, usually outside of Grainger.

The switch won't be official until it's approved by the UI Board of Trustees as well as the Illinois Board of Higher Education, but Amato already has a pretty good idea of what the future will look like.

Not much will change for students since titles of individual degree programs don't include department names anyway and classes are more likely to be added than taken away.

"The extra resources, like the ability to have the new building, are going to help us attract and grow our faculty so that we can accommodate more students and we will likely have more degree programs," Amato said. "We're likely going to be developing new classes and new graduate degree programs too."

That's right: the SSCDS will have its own building, which Amato hopes to start work on this year.

The entity formerly known as the Department of Computer Science still needs to go through the process of selecting an architecture firm, so details have yet to be confirmed.

Amato knows the building will be between the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science along North Goodwin Avenue and will be connected to both of those buildings.

Rather than classrooms, the building will likely hold faculty and student office space as well as a large space for workshops, receptions and other events.

"That's one of the things we'll probably also use our resources for, to have more workshops that bring researchers from across campus and from across the world here," Amato said.

Other than the building, that's exactly what the money is intended for: funding multidisciplinary projects and being able to get research off the ground.

Amato said that often, the computer science field is moving faster than academics can apply for funding for their research.

"With the rate of change and things that are happening, if we need to start up a study or do something really quickly, we'll be able to do that," she said.

Grainger dean Rashid Bashir said that computing and data sciences have become a third "pillar" in the field of engineering alongside physical sciences and mathematical sciences, so he is excited to elevate that discipline at UI.

"Computing, data science and AI, broadly speaking, is really changing everything we do: how we educate, how we treat people from a healthcare perspective. It's changing businesses, it's affecting agriculture, it's affecting manufacturing, it's affecting all industries," he said. "We want to continue to do foundational work in computing and data science, but also collaborate and expand across the campus in partnerships."