Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

UIUC Unveils the Worlds Most Advanced Building

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the soon-to-be-an-ocp-offering dept.

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"

8 of 319 comments (clear)

  1. security issues? by eisenbud · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Dangerous? by glpierce · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  3. Am I the only one... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
    .. who expects that the brutal hacks done to Gaia are going to be much better 'learning experiences' for everyone than the official software itself?

    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.

  4. Re:"Modern" buildings tend to not age well by cfoster611 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  5. Salary by GrEp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    $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
    1. Re:Salary by tsangc · · Score: 3, Interesting
      800 faculty years of almost anyone in the world, or one building. Good going UIUC


      I can't see how this comment was modded interesting.


      First, faculty and students need buildings to work and learn in. You can hire all the people in the world, but if they don't have a place to run their labs, teach classes etc in, what's the point?


      Second, having the best facilities in the world is a draw for leading researchers and students. You can't expect to attract the best with some beat up old building from 1970, can you? This is an investment in the staff and students as much as hiring more TA's or buying new lab equipment.

      Third, do you know much UIUC spends overall on their budget for professors salaries? We don't know if this is a fraction of their budget or half of it.


      Finally, $80 million is not a lot of money for a university building. It's about average.

  6. Re:UIUC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'll let you know before you read the rest of my post that I'm a current student at UIUC.

    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/ 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!"

    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?

  7. Only mountain dew on this campus... by Benley · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.