It would take a new University of Michigan built every week to meet the mounting global demand for higher education, professor Dan Atkins said May 9 at the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) division’s 50th anniversary symposium.
“That’s obviously not a scalable solution,” said Atkins, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, as well as in the School of Information.
Virtual universities and “collaboratories” that utilize the power of the Internet could help fill the void, he says, as the number of people around the world qualified for college but without a place available grows to 100 million.
Atkins, currently serving as director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation, addressed 200 alumni, students and faculty. He is one of dozens of renowned CSE affiliates that spoke at the symposium.
He outlined the movement toward virtual organizations in education. Virtual organizations are, in essence, online schools, portals and programs that allow scientists and students to work together in ways that go beyond being in the same physical space.
“The proposition is that virtual organizations can enable collaborations like that between Crick and Watson that led to the discovery of the double helix at greater scales and with more sophisticated tools than can brick and mortar institutions,” Atkins said. “To date, these claims remain largely untested.”
He called on computer scientists and engineers to lead the way in this effort. The online social networking revolution of Web 2.0 has been slower to reach research and learning than industry, he said.
Universities need new tools that are user-friendly but appropriate for what he calls high-performance collaboration. Researchers need ways to exploit the openness, flexibility and agility of Web 2.0 while maintaining security and intellectual property rights.
“Many Internet services aren’t inappropriate to the audiences we serve,” Atkins said. “Facebook works well for certain groups and purposes, but it may not be professionally useful to scientists who interact in very different ways than teenagers and rock bands.”
Farnam Jahanian, interim chair for Computer Science and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, says the infusion of computation into science and engineering has already revolutionized how science is carried out and applied.
“Once used by only a handful of elite researchers on select problems, advanced cyber-infrastructure has now become essential to future discovery and exploration,” Jahanian said. “The ability to collaborate in cyberspace is enabling transformative inter-disciplinary research opportunities.”
Computer science and engineering, Jahanian said, will continue to be at the center of an ongoing societal transformation for decades to come.
“The future of CSE has never been brighter,” he said, “both within the discipline and in fields that computer technology will increase influence.”
