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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"
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.
Once they finish rebuilding the campus with this sort of building, they'll have one.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
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
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 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...
Those odd, half-finished parts are what I was calling ugly. And it doesn't remind me at all of DCL. I have a few classes there next semester, so i'm going to have to learn to like it.
I'll have class in there every day next fall, and, honestly, I find the place spectacular. I find the architecture is modern yet not gaudy. Most of the architectural metal is muted, and the exterior blends well with the older buildings, even if it dominates the small high school across the street.
The place still has the most excellent smells of new computer/networking gear, and you can go around and sometimes see the MDF's still under construction.
Its a fun place.
--- Kicking the Cheat since late 2002
$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
Many rooms are designed to be reconfigured with movable partitions, flooring and fixtures
Isn't this how most modern office buildings are built already? Hell, even most modern shopping malls can be reconfigured easily.
Ahh, you don't need this kind of technology for oddities like that. On a few different occasions I've had a professor with a wireless mic make a trip down the hall like that while neglecting to turn it off. Fun (horrifying?) stuff.
(\(\
(^v^)
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This is the cute vorpal bunny virus, copy to your sig or runaway, runaway in fear!
Surprisingly, this is basically the same thing you get when you walk up to an information display on the wall (except the website doesn't have the information specific to the room you're standing in front of).
Everything actually looks really awesome right now. Too bad most of it isn't staying in the building after the weekend.
Anyway, to provide you with some other cool associated things:
web cam, VRML model of building. Enjoy.
PS Though I have complaints, I'm leaving those to the other trolls.
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).
I'll let you know before you read the rest of my post that I'm a current student at UIUC.
/ I took a tour of it, and the impression it gave me was, "Look at us, we're MIT! This building looks so crazy, we must be geniuses to work here!"
I got into the PhD programs at Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, and UIUC--and UIUC compares very well with the rest of these schools. The only thing UIUC lacks is the publicity to go with the quality of research that happens here. On the other hand, this is a good thing since the students here can concentrate more on research instead of just working very hard at appearing smart like some other schools promote.
At UIUC, the professors are generally fairly young, which I view as a good thing. At the 'bigger' name schools you end up with a bunch of dinosaurs who may have contributed to the field in the past but are simply living off the legacy insteading doing new research. If you actually care about this, check out the UIUC research page at: http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/research/areas.html
I have personally found the AI, Databases, and Theory groups to be very impressive and have had experience working with them.
If you want an interesting comparison, check out MIT's new building.http://web.mit.edu/buildings/statacenter
UIUC has a much more honest and less flashy style, which I find rather refreshing.
I do agree that most of the ubiquitous computing features of the building seem a little silly, but why not make your new computer science building a functional experiment in computer science itself?
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.
UIUC had the #1 paintball team in the country.
Damned Boilermakers.
paintball
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."