LA JOLLA – A new school at UC San Diego will offer excellent learning opportunities in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer and data science, and help pipeline talent and the workforce of the future.
Last month, the University of California Board of Regents approved the creation of a 12th school at UC San Diego, the new School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS), which will allow for more research opportunities among -collaborative and interdisciplinary educational programs. .
The new school combines the strengths of the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) and the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI), both of which prepare students to meet the needs of the business community.
SDSC is a national leader in high-performance, data-intensive computing, while HDSI is a pioneering interdisciplinary institute advancing data science and AI education and research. (HDSI’s name comes from philanthropist and computer science and engineering student Taner Halicioğlu.)
More on HDSI and SDSC
“HDSI and SDSC share the unique challenge of building academics and transdisciplinary research,” said Rajesh Gupta, founding director of HDSI. “Bringing them together under SCIDS will include new synergies and realize tremendous new opportunities in creating talent in emerging fields, including artificial intelligence.”
Founding Director
Data Halicioğlu
Institute of Sciences
UC San Diego
Among HDSI’s industry partners are Deloitte, Dexcom, Intel, Naval Information Warfare Center, Qualcomm, San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) and San Diego Gas & Electric.
HDSI also gives employers access to a career services platform. Powered by 12Twenty, HDSI provides a hub for employers to engage with our data science talent pool. With more than 1,500 majors and 837 alumni, UC San Diego has one of the largest data science programs in the country.
Founded by the National Science Foundation in 1985 as one of the nation’s first academic supercomputing centers, SDSC’s mission has evolved and expanded since then.
SDSC seeks to empower today’s science and engineering communities and help develop the next generation of scientists, technologists and engineers, and provides professional development for teachers to help them prepare students for the future use of technology tools in their career.
“We expect this innovative use of technology to significantly reduce friction for students moving between segments, thereby benefiting the transfer of students from community colleges to CSU or UC campuses, as well as K-12 to college students and from college to Ph.D. students,” said Frank Würthwein, director of SDSC and founding faculty member of HDSI.
directory
San Diego Supercomputing Center
UC San Diego
The focus of SCIDS is to provide a deeper understanding of how data shapes society and prepare the next generation of highly skilled workers who drive advances in artificial intelligence.
The school will play a key role in advancing data science across all disciplines, as well as advancing modern computing applications. It will also serve as a catalyst for increased collaborations between schools, departments and existing academic disciplines, with the aim of creating new areas of research.
SCIDS Addressing Compelling Needs
UC San Diego expects to grow its enrollment to 8,000 students with 50 faculty members in 16 different academic disciplines.
SCIDS reaffirms UC San Diego’s commitment to addressing one of the most compelling needs of modern times – transforming data into actionable knowledge. Artificial intelligence and machine learning present new career opportunities for students interested in academic research and innovative professions in a multitude of sectors.
By translating data science from the classroom to research and the wider workplace, SCIDS will prepare students for their careers by providing them with opportunities to engage directly with industry and government partners, including first responders emergency; municipal, state and national resource management organizations; and non-profit organizations.
“The sole purpose of the school is to create that talent, but that talent pool is not created in a vacuum,” Gupta said. “It was created by faculty and researchers working in that area because the knowledge of that area is expanding as well…. The reason UC San Diego and the best universities are what they are is because the people who teach in our schools are the very people who are advancing knowledge in those fields. They are the ones who are writing the next chapters of knowledge in these fields.”
Students will learn firsthand how data science can allow organizations to better address societal problems ranging from climate change mitigation and social justice issues to technical challenges and healthcare.
Gupta said the school is about “creating talent for the future” and that now is the time “because there’s a new discipline emerging — turning data into actionable knowledge” — and that while data has been always tools for extracting knowledge, what has changed is that data actually now does things like direct control of driving cars and other automations that fall under the umbrella of AI.
“The question is: What kind of talent do we want to produce that would drive this proliferation of AI?” said Gupta. “There’s probably not a single company in San Diego or outside of San Diego, no matter what their business, that isn’t looking for an AI expert to hire.
“Not every AI expert goes to Google or Facebook or Microsoft, but they actually go to, for example, the San Diego (County) Sheriff’s Department, which has hired seven to 10 full-time employees from our program of data science and has over a dozen interns from UC San Diego in data science.”
Gupta said that organizations like SANDAG are also an important part of the pipeline and added, “There is virtually no organization that does not have a demand for such talent.”
How best to secure that talent is the challenge, he said.
“We are an international university, but we also have a large local footprint and so part of the charter was to build a local ecosystem of companies, mid-sized start-ups, which are connected to our researchers and our students, to fill those needs.”
UC San Diego
Founded: 1960
CEO: Pradeep Khosla
Headquarters: La Jolla
BUSINESS: Higher education, research, healthcare
OPERATING BUDGET: $49.5 billion (2023-24)
STUDENTS: 42,000
website: ucsd.edu
CONTACT: 858-534-2230
SOCIAL IMPACT: UC San Diego is closely affiliated with the Salk Institute, the Sanford Burnham Prebys Institute for Medical Discovery, and the Scripps Research Institute.
NOTE: UC San Diego ranks among the best public research universities in the world