The Noyce School of Applied Computing has received a $60 million gift from the Robert N. Noyce Trust. The gift was made in honor of Robert N. Noyce, co-founder of Intel and nicknamed “The Mayor of Silicon Valley,” whose work was revolutionary in personal computing, according to a press release.
The money will be used towards providing more scholarships for students, upgrading labs with state-of-the-art equipment, and providing faculty additional resources for teaching and applied research, according to the release.
The Noyce School of Applied Computing was created in 2022 as a new interdisciplinary school that combines three departments under one umbrella: Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Software Engineering. It allows for collaborations and other opportunities between departments towards applied computing in fields such as statistics, according to the College of Engineering’s website.
“The vision for the school is really to lean into this interdisciplinary nature and provide more interdisciplinary applied computing opportunities for our faculty to do high-level research hand-in-hand with our students and to look at additional ways to create interdisciplinary curriculum that our students can benefit from,” College of Engineering Dean Amy Fleischer said.
Computer science graduate student Edward Du said that new buildings like Warren J. Baker Center and William and Linda Frost Center were more geared towards physics, chemistry and biology. However, Du said that the money would help students with research opportunities as well as upgrading other equipment necessary for their work.
“There’s not really any new facilities for computer science, and right now there are a lot of people trying to work on research problems that require a lot of computing, and we don’t really have that,” Du said. “We have server rooms, but we don’t have any lab rooms dedicated for, for example, 3D vision, which is getting really popular.”
As for now, Fleischer envisions a bright future for the Noyce School of Applied Computing by first tackling short-term goals and then looking towards the long-term.
“I think if you look out 10 years from now, what I would really like to see is a sense of a school identity that people know what the Noyce School is,” Fleischer said. “And that people think that our interdisciplinary approach to computing is a unique way to impact the world. That’s what I would really like to see.”
For more information about the Noyce School of Applied Computing, click here.
Wanda Parisien is a computing expert who navigates the vast landscape of hardware and software. With a focus on computer technology, software development, and industry trends, Wanda delivers informative content, tutorials, and analyses to keep readers updated on the latest in the world of computing.
