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UIUC Unveils the Worlds Most Advanced Building
Eagle5596 writes "The University of Illinois at Urbana
Champaign, one of the top Computer
Science programs in the world has just officially opened their new $80
million Siebel
Center. The department head describes the building as a
single computing entity, meant to be programmed and to interact with those
in the building via RFID tags in their ID cards.
This is probably one of
the biggest and most expensive projects in ubiquitous computing ever
launched, touching on all the important issues in this field, from privacy to the ultimate question about the usefulness of such a system. Several papers are covering this including the Chicago Sun Times, and the Chicago
Business"
I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you in. Your GPA is too low this semester.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
keeping the soda machines near me full of Dew, it's a good thing.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
I'm not sure if I like the idea that anything between me and these 4 walls is now between me and some sort of ubiquitous building-computer.
Does that mean the building is wildly overpriced and requires expensive consultants in suits to do anything right?
sulli
RTFJ.
...Imagine a beowulf cluster of those
Sorry
In Soviet Russia Slashdot cliches use you
The UIUC bldg sounds extremely cool, but in 5 yrs folks will be smiling politely at the "hokey-ness" of the place.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The building looks like it was designed by a bunch of computer scientists. Ugly as hell, shiny things everywhere.
Now, when you go down the hall, the "Buildy" mascot asks things like. "You appear to be walking to the bathroom. Would you like some help?"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Clap on. Clap off. What else is there?
Apparently RFID tags (and anything that doesn't have its own power source) don't have enough power to do real crypto. So this will be great until someone builds a device to read people's tags as they walk down the hall, and then impersonate any of them to the building. At least with keys or magnetic striped cards you have to get physical access to them before you can copy them.
This proves the point that all things human go in cycles. First computers were the size of buildings, then they shrunk down to fit in the palm, now they are becoming the size of buildings again.
_____
Thank you.
I saw the nearly-completed building a few months ago when visiting the campus. My immediate reaction: this can't be healthy. With that many wires and that many radio signals (RFID, wireless network, etc), I can't help but think that it will increase your risk of developing cancer. Normal offices are bad enough, but this place has significantly more in the air.
G
If only it worked that way. No matter how I try "Clap Off" that case of gonorhhea I caught in Tijuana back around '96 stays with me.
Gotta wonder what kind of security they've got on her. If I had my face scanned everytime I entered a room, and had some stupid voice asking me questions when I just wanted to finish my assignment back when I was in school, the system would have been modified drastically during finals week.....
Not that I would condone such now, of course. Probably get you labeled a terrorist and thrown under the jail.
The real issue with privacy of course is turning off the location function when you don't want something embarressing happening. I present the following situation as evidence:
Johnny wanted to find Professor X to ask a question about his research paper, approaching the wall he intoned, "Computer, please locate Professor X."
In a booming voice the wall responded, "Professor X is currently in Stall 5 of the Bathroom on the second floor, logging in."
but do I want my boss knowing every time I take a shit? also, do you think there's 802.11 in the bathroom?
Where is a link to pictures? If there aren't pictures of gadgets, no one cares.
Nice to know that the welcoming avatar has blue hair. Because that's the future, apparently.
I bet they'd fire the receptionist of he/she dyed their hair blue, or they'd refuse to hire the same, but as soon as you need to represent the future, it has blue hair.
Just like Strong Bad has a Japanese cartoon character: http://homestarrunner.com/sbemail57.html
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
I assume the would, I mean, why not eh? =) VUINCED!
"You seem to be posting a -1 Troll. Would you like assistance with that?"
Oh... and sure, the building's nice, too.
--
"It's better to have an attention span and not need it, than to need whatever it is we were just talking about."
- Mayor {Powerpuff Girls}
All the hardware exist today to make advanced computer controlled buildings. But who wants to stand beside a lightswitch, fiddling with the remote in the dark to find the correct button to push? The problem is the interface. You have to be able to talk to the system to operate it. It's not good enough walking around with a microphone, or stand beside that lightswitch talking into a microphone. Beside, it should alos recognize you when you tell it show your email on the screen in the kitchen, either by voice or by face recognition.
That's a perfect attitude. It tells it all. Especially when you consider that compared to the rest of the computer world, Mac users are like rag-swathed flea-covered savages sitting in caves.
geek rock Friday, April 30th, Siebel Center Open House, University of Illinois, Urbana IL. Salaryman, PosterChildren's electronic alter-ego will be playing at the grand opening of the new Computer Science Center at the U of I. It will be a lunchtime performance, 11:30am - 1:30pm.
No webcams, not even any pics...seems like there would be some level of interaction over the 'net for such a "wired" building. Maybe these things are yet to come?
It should be "UIUC Unveils the World's Most Advanced Buildin," maybe?
UIUC still has some of the greatest minds in computer science, including Michael Heath, probably one of the most brilliant computer scientists of our time. They continue to attract some of the highest calibre students in the world, both nationally and internationally, and have a staff with more citations and awards than most schools can even dream of. They are the site of one NCSA facility, soon to be another one, and one of the DoE's advanced research centers. Most recently they have discovered new fabrication processes for IC's, light emitting transistors, and they continue to push the bounds of excellence in computer science.
This building isn't an effort to revive a program (currently ranked #3 in Engineering, #3 in ECE, and #5 in CS), it's a natural step taking to increase the facilities available to accomidate recent advances by the University, and a continuously growing program which time and time again excells in all areas.
Yes, but you get some nice parting gifts.
Tina, tell this fat smelly loser what he's won.
I can't believe on the eve of the night when my school's unveiling the most technologically advanced building in the world, the campus mail is down >=( Prioritize, much?
is it more advanced than Bill Gates' mansion?
MY SECRET DIARIES
How much their next upgrade is gonna cost??
once more into the breach
The web site for the opening lists one of the events as a BFG Competition. Apparently, they will be broadcasting the thing around the world. Also, they will record the competition for future viewings. Hmmm . . . only in computer science could they be proud.
Anyone able to find a neat photo gallery on the site? I looked, but could only find some movies of the grand opening. The itty bitty pictures make the place look nice, but I'd love to see more details. Wonder what their sever room(s) look like...
I hear they also planned for intelligent waste management. All waste is funneled down via chutes to a fully automated trash compactor level.
(-1, lame reference. sorry, couldn't think of any way to make this sad joke funny)
2 hours later the building was declared obsolete by new technologies...
I'm going to have to agree with the first AC on this one. I know some folks who applied to the top 20 grad programs and a few backup schools and got into only UIUC and their backups. Either UIUC is finding diamonds in the rough on a regular basis or it has lowered its standards.
And I don't know about this Michael Heath guy, but I think most places that claim to be top departments have a few Turing award winners running around their halls.
Do they have any lighcycles in there?
They can float the bill for this but they cannot give us grad students decent health care.
I am waiting for the first time they blow the breakers on the circuit that handles their security computer.
What happens? Does the system fail to "everything is locked"?
This sounds like a RISKS article waiting to happen.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Sheesh... I just lost all kinds of respect for the place... everyone knows that computers run on AC, DC and VitaminC(affeine), damnit.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
"In a booming voice the wall responded:
"Professor X is currently fighting Magneto at the Statue of Liberty."
As an aside I heard that Tom Siebel drives a bullet proof custom mercedes of some sort, anyone know what kind?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
When it crashes does it become the BBOD (Blue Building of Death)?
I can't wait for next year's Mechmania. The building they had before was larger than anything at NDSU (with a lot more wasted space). Now I have all-new nooks and hallways to explore!
Co-founder of GerbilMechs
Now all you need to get back at a professor you don't like is hack into the building's computer, and turn off the air conditioning in whatever room he goes into.
Sweet revenge!
-S
Big Freakin Deal. I think these guys watch too much reality television. Its sounds like an exercise in self-absorption.
$80000000/$100000=800. Hmm...
800 faculty years of almost anyone in the world, or one building. Good going UIUC.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
It doesn't look all THAT special. No really.
It's pretty. But it's not this "magical wonderworld" or some shit, and the keycard readers are fucked up too.
Shouldn't that be 'logging out'?
You know what?
Error: Chilly & cheeze don't mix.
Want rectum reformated? [OK] [Cancel]
...when caught from a bar near by:
"Nooo. Can't go to school, they're running critical updates on our building today!"
Moderators! The link in the parent goes to a pic of an outhouse. Who the hell (two people actually) modded parent Informative?
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
s/Chavez/Bush
There will be war between computers and all of humanity until Keanu Reeves shows up in the building to negotiate terms!
I bet you were aching to use that picture for *something*. : )
I know that people usually don't RTFA, but if you are modding comments, please at least CTFL (Click The Fscking Link).
God gets angry, tosses lighting bolts, and causes all the people inside to speak diffrent languages. Film at 11.
I always thought it would make a great Quake level, so I'm kinda pushing for them to turn it into a paintball arena...think any of the administration would go for this?
"The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, one of the top Computer Science programs in the world "
Who? Can't say that I've ever heard of them. Where do they appear on the list of other top western universities like MIT, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, etc? Is this some kind of in-place advertizing thing?
Though the university itself can only carry coca cola products, at the ACM office in Siebel they've got a "robotic" soda machine called Caffeine that will give you Mountain Dew or whatever else it is currently stocked with, and just bill a few cents to your account. There is even a website I think where you can view soda statistics (yes, mountain dew wins).
Beat this http://www.duffield.cornell.edu
Biggest cleanroom with most verstile range of nanotechnology equipments any university dreamt so far.
Cost : 65 million dollars for the entire thing
Class 10 clean room with TWO state of the art E-beam machines.
Why stop at the professor? The hacker could have a building full of hostages.
Plus, all the "computers and PDAs, closed-circuit TV cameras, telephones and infrastructure (heating/cooling/lighting/door locks)" would be under the control of that person...
Just lock all the doors and crank up the heating to start a nice Korean BBQ. Mmmmm
n.t.
Nice building.
Shame they didn't get a spell-checker with it. I believe the reference to "Accomodations" on the main page of their website should read "Accommodations".
Ho hum. Am I being too picky?
Yeah... except for THIS soda machine (which just so happens to be in the seibel center) The link points at the web server running inside the pop machine itself. The only photo I can find of the thing is here, with one of the guys who worked on it sitting in front of it. And a BeBox perched on top.
It can't do anything right. It only appears to be doing something between hourly reboots.
Damn this story makes my Luddite skin itch.
15 years ago I had to work on my CS225 labs on the second floor of the old Woodshop. 1st floor, planing sanders! 2nd floor, AT&T 3b2s!
Amazing what a few bubbles can do to the campus.
CITES (runs the majority of computing services for the campus) has already started its takeover of DCL.
They failed to mention whether caffeine was gratis or not.
If it's free, I'm going to college.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
where the fuck are you? Give this man his prizes.
In fact, if I recall, the contractors are still working on the building right now. If you look at the progress that has been made just in the past few days, I'm sure they will eventually achieve a large number of the goals they have set for this project.
Just give them some time to "debug" the building.
Its always amusing to type in CS and UIC into google and have it ask me if I mean UIUC.
So now I know why they bought and knocked down my old apartment building!
Surprisingly enough, I just happened to visit this building this past Monday. I was taking a visit to UIUC (thinking about transferring there) for the first time, and was referred to this building, since I'm a CS major.
When I was in there Monday, all kinds of work was being done on the building--I would have never thought it'd be done so soon. I absolutely loved the architecture though, very very cool. And I can't count how many "50 inch plasma screens on wheels" I saw in the various rooms.
And just think, all that above deeply impressed me, and I didn't even have a clue that the building was going to be a giant computer/the first of its kind.
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
who cares about computers?
will we have Milla Jovovich fighting zombies on this one?
I for one, welcome our new hot grits... PROFIT!
1. CEO makes a lot of money building a business at the right time, not a bad business, not a particularly great business.
... Siebel opens an engineering office in India - but the engineers in the US office know nothing. Senior management types that I keep in touch with have informed me that since engineers were leaving anyways it doesn't matter anymore.
2. CEO gives away a lot of money to get press.
3. Econony tanks along with company because they grew too fast, too soon. Did I mention that they bought an auction company for $500 million in stock?
4. During company meeting in 2003, says that no jobs will be offshored.
5. 3 months later, 400-500 QA engineers (most of whom worked about 60-70 hours a week to get the Siebel 7.0 release out the door) from the USA are laid off - I was one of those engineers that was laid off.
6. Raises and bonuses are given to Directors and above 1 month later.
7. early 2004, Engineers in the USA start to leave due to shit management and shit projects and shit product managers that like buzzwords such as ERM and ISS.
8. 2004
8. Be happy that the $$$ given to UIUC didn't go into his bank account - lying bastard. Tom Siebel - Larry Ellison Wannabee. RIP bastard
Pop, Mountain Dew, Cold.
paintball
I've found that using my cell phone to receive calls from my girlfriend has severe consequences on my mental health.
paintball
So just how does "lots of computer-related toys" translate to "most advanced?"
Seriously, where's the discussion about environmental controls? HVAC improvements? Energy efficiency? Chemical and electronic emissions?
Don't get me wrong--this isn't a bad idea, nor is it a bad building. It's cool but relatively straightforward to create a building with endless technological integration, on the level they're talking.
But HVAC is a very big, expensive, INCREDIBLY important, and not yet solved problem, which probably has more long-term relevance than anything they spent $80M on in this project.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Faculty members, on salary and benefits alone, cost a lot more than $100,000 per year. Now, don't forget to add a place for them to work, money for them to do research, tuition assistence for their research assistants, people to take out the professors' garbage, electricity for the professors' lamp, etc.
Or look at it another way - it's only 10,000 undergratuate tuition years (assuming UIUC tuition is still $8k.)
paintball
i took some; they're .
UIUC had the #1 paintball team in the country.
Damned Boilermakers.
paintball
Wow... This is an entirely different article!
But how often do *you* actually do your bit!
No. You can't look at my Sig; it's mine, and I'm not showing you.
My personal experience has been that
when an organization builds a fantastic,
expensive new building, the organization
itself is on the verge of failure, and you
can expect it to be out of business in
a very short time.
UIUC always ranked better in EE and CompE than in CS.
paintball
We were there for the Microsoft Imagine Cup contest a couple weeks ago. The building is totally sweet, and looks amazing. The bathroom has solid chrome hand-dryers. (I know that's not THAT much - but considering at MY school the paper towel dispensers don't always work. . . ) The only complaint I have is their network connection. You connect, it asks you to logon. I choose guest authentication, enter my info/purpose (We are there for legitimate CS business) - and it lets me on. Sometimes it lasts for an hour, sometimes it asks you to log on when you click a link from the authentication success screen. I checked cookies, so that wasn't it, and we were ALL having that problem. Seems like the worlds most advanced building needs an upgrade already :P
It still makes me happy and I want to go there. . . too bad I'm not rich :(
I can feel my knee jerking already!
First came the building for the IC designers. This has its very own wafer fab. Unfortunately, it's a 1980s wafer fab. Wafer fabs are too expensive to keep up to date unless they're heavily used. So it's obsolete. If you want something fabbed, you send it out.
Then came the Gates Computer Science building. This is where AI went to die. Visit the second floor "Knowledge Systems Lab", and see all the empty cubicles with obsolete computers. The layout is wierd; the basement and first floor are difficult to get to from each other, and are connected only via a seminar room. The corridors are devoted to a museum of old computer equipment, of mixed historical importance. ("Wow, an '80s DEC Ethernet hub! There's a Gandalf port selector box!")
Then there was the Lane Medical Library. Built with built-in stacks just as medical data was going online, it's used as office space. The immovable stacks remain, dividing up the space into long narrow office aisles.
Then came the New Engineering Quad. Finished at the height of the dot-com boom, it looks great. But it has all the wrong built-in stuff, like in-wall VCRs. More museum area. ("Wow, an original HP audio oscillator!") Good expresso bar, though.
The latest building is the Clarke Center for Biotech Engineering Stuff. Jim Clarke put up the money just before Netscape tanked. SGI contributed an obsolete supercomputer. Nobody seems quite sure what's going on there. The building has the overdesigned look of the free-spending dot-com era. There's steel and glass and balconies and atriums.
I actually have the pleasure of having a class at Siebel next semester (my Compilers class) as well as having used it for my video editing needs this semester. -- It's a beautiful building. Balconies, courtyards, art-deco frosted glass tables, windowed offices .. it's gorgeous. Not to mention all of its RFID capabilities, certainly .. it's definitively the nicest building on campus.
- http://pakman.sytes.net/
I watched Prof. Jeff Erickson swipe three times before the reader finally recognized him. The elevators fried for a few hours the other night too. It'll all be nice and pretty in a few months.
~LD "My destiny was to be a karma whore. Then, I forgot my user name."
Well DUH -- anyone who's seen Die Hard knows that :-)
After years of hearing all those poor analogies about how software development should be more like building an edifice, we get to see it in practice. Let's just hope they don't need to do too many patches. ;)
-- Solaris Central - http://w
We really have to setup structures to match the colloseum, tajmahal, etc.
Let us leave something for the humans 1000yrs later, when they visit back the planet for research see that we had really grown.
No matter whatever you want to put in the buildings, if it looks confusing and mystical, put it! Scientists would be making really really strange assumptions later...
:)
"one of the top Computer Science programs in the world" - I've heard this claim from almost every University with a CS department. I thought the University of Waterloo was "one" of the bes...blah, blah...
Esta es una firma en Espanol.
When I saw the headline "Worlds Most Advanced Building", the first thing I thought of was the old Tom and Jerry cartoons where Tom chases Jerry into the "House of the Future."
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Maybe someone should've told UIUC that neither the U.S. Gov nor U.S. Corporations really care about remaining at the forefront of technological innovation. They just spent 80mil on training the next generation of white-collar unemployed.
They would've done better to build larger facilities for the study of 'human manipulation', 'bullshit', or 'creative profit reporting'.
Sorry, my extreme cynisism coming through but what is this here? The AC button!
I watched Prof. Jeff Erickson swipe three times before the reader finally recognized him.
The card reader thought I was Pedro. --Jeff
Well at least it's not just me, then. :-)
The fools. Haven't they watched Gremlins 2?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Well, I'm in the ECE department, and I'll tend to agree with you with regards to their grad admission - not as hard as their peers to get in. But they have a good filtration system when it comes to the qualifying exams for the PhD.
Beetle B.
Electronic locks can be either "fail-safe" or "fail-secure". Fail-safe means they unlock when the power fails and, you guessed it, fail-secure means they lock when losing power and won't unlock until power is restored.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent