LA JOLLA – A new school at UC San Diego will offer great learning opportunities in the fields of artificial intelligence, computers and data sciences, and help the talent pipeline and workforce of the future.
Last month, the University of California Board of Regents approved the creation of the 12th school at UC San Diego, the new School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS), which will allow for more cross-collaborative research opportunities and interdisciplinary educational programs.
The new school combines the strengths of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI), both of which prepare learners for filling needs of the business community.
SDSC is a national leader in high-performance and 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 alumnus Taner Halicioğlu.)
More on HDSI and SDSC
“HDSI and SDSC share the unique challenge of building transdisciplinary academics and research,” said Rajesh Gupta, founding director of HDSI. “Their coming together under SCIDS will involve new synergies and realize tremendous new possibilities in creating talent in emerging areas, including artificial intelligence.”
Founding Director
Halicioğlu Data
Science Institute
UC San Diego
Among HDSI’s industry partners are Deloitte, Dexcom, Intel, the Naval Information Warfare Center, Qualcomm, the 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 offers 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 supercomputer centers, SDSC’s mission has since evolved and expanded.
SDSC seeks to empower today’s science and engineering communities and help develop the next generation of scientists, technologists and engineers, and offers professional development for teachers to help them prepare students for future use of technology tools in their careers.
“We expect this innovative use of technology to significantly decrease the friction for students moving between segments, thus benefitting transfer students from community colleges to CSU or UC campuses, as well as K-12 to college students, and college to Ph.D. students,” said Frank Würthwein, director of SDSC and founding faculty member of HDSI.
Director
San Diego Supercomputer Center
UC San Diego
SCIDS’s focus is to provide deeper understanding of how data shapes society and prepare the next generation of highly skilled workers driving artificial intelligence advancements.
The school will play a key role in advancing data science across all disciplines, as well as advancing state-of-the-art computing applications. It will also serve as a catalyst for increasing collaborations across existing schools, academic departments and disciplines, with the goal of establishing new fields of inquiry.
SCIDS Addressing Compelling Needs
UC San Diego expects to grow its enrollment to 8,000 students with 50 faculty members across 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 across myriad sectors.
By translating data science from the classroom to research and the broader workplace, SCIDS will prepare students for their careers by providing opportunities for them to engage directly with industry and government partners, including emergency responders; municipal, state and national resource management organizations; and nonprofits.
“The sole purpose of the school is to create that talent, but that talent pool is not created in a vacuum,” Gupta said. “It is created by the faculty and the researchers who work in that area, because the knowledge of that area is also expanding….The reason UC San Diego and top universities are what they are is because the people who are teaching in our schools are also the very people who are advancing knowledge in those areas. They are the ones who are writing the next chapters of knowledge in these domains.”
Students will learn first-hand 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 that the school is about “creating talent for the future,” and that it’s time is now “because there’s a new discipline that is emerging – converting data into actionable knowledge” – and that while data has always been the means of extracting knowledge, what has changed is that the data actually now does things like directly controls cars driving and other automations that fall under the AI umbrella.
“The question is, ‘What kind of talent do we want to produce that would drive this this proliferation of AI forward?’” Gupta said. “There is probably no company in San Diego or outside of San Diego, it doesn’t matter what their business is, that is not 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 data science program and has over a dozen interns from UC San Diego in data science.”
Gupta said 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 to best provide 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, start-ups to medium in size, who are connected with 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 Medical Discovery Institute and the Scripps Research Institute.
NOTABLE: UC San Diego is ranked among the world’s top public research universities
