Dear Badgers,

Fall has unmistakably arrived in Madison, with cooler temperatures, changing leaves, holidays peeking over the horizon, and Badger football! For me, sadly, it means no more sailing until next year. But it’s a special season for many of us.

This is my first message as department chair, having taken over from Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau on July 1. I want to pay a special tribute to Remzi for his four years of wonderful service as chair during a period of growth and development against the challenging background of Covid. Remzi was a natural chair and an inspiration to our faculty and to everyone else who interacted with him. I was always impressed by his ability to handle effectively each of the many challenges that were thrown his way. I want to thank Remzi personally for working with me for many months on a smooth leadership transition and for making himself available to advise me when I need it - hopefully less frequently now than in earlier days. Heartfelt thanks to you, Remzi! I hope that you and Andrea are enjoying your well deserved sabbaticals.

During Remzi’s final days as chair in June, I traveled with him and CDIS Director Tom Erickson to meet some of our alumni in the Bay Area. The focal event was an alumni gathering that featured a panel chaired by Remzi on the topic of large language models. Panelists included CS alum Srinivas Narayanan (VP of Engineering at OpenAI), Kangwook Lee (UW ECE Asst Professor, and an affiliate of CS), and myself. It was a timely and enjoyable event and a pleasure to meet so many enthusiastic alums enjoying success in their professional lives.

Construction on the new CDIS building is proceeding apace, with the site visible to most faculty from their office windows. We look forward keenly to the move in mid-2025. We have been hard at work on the many activities associated with the move, including environmental branding, allocating and organizing space, and of course selecting furniture.

The numbers are in on our undergraduate majors for Fall 2023. The CS major remains the biggest on campus at 2487, a 13% increase since last year. The Data Science major, run jointly between CS, Stats, and Math, has 1207 enrolled. We’ve built up our ability to handle larger enrollments by means of some excellent additions to the ranks of our dedicated teaching faculty. At the graduate level, we kicked off new Professional Masters programs in Data Engineering and Data Science, the latter jointly organized with Statistics. The number of new graduate students starting our Professional Masters programs and “traditional” graduate programs in Fall 2023 totalled over 200 - a record by far. 

Our faculty continue to gather important recognitions for their research and professional work. One special award was to Assistant Professor Sharon Li, who was named by the influential publication MIT Technology Review as their 2023 Innovator of the Year. I am so proud of Sharon and all my colleagues. 

I wish you a happy Fall season and look forward to hearing from you whenever you have a moment to drop me a line or visit. 

On, Wisconsin!

Steve Wright

Computer Sciences Department Chair

Bilge Mutlu leads grad students in integrating robotics into work

Mutlu and his students are working hard to address workplace challenges such as injuries caused by heavy lifting by "researching how to better integrate robots into the manufacturing industry and beyond." They are doing so through an interdisciplinary project called INTEGRATE, led by Mutlu, that "combines expertise in computer sciences, economics, engineering, psychology, and robotics."

Read more here.

Rahul Chatterjee and team combat cyberstalking

Chatterjee and his team were recently highlighted in the Letters & Science magazine for their creation of a tech clinic at Cornell, "a resource that victims of IPV [intimate partner violence] could access to learn more about spyware and how to safely disable or remove it without alerting their stalker." He’s recreated the model at UW-Madison. Read all about it here.

Sharon Li named MIT Innovator of the Year

"As AI models are released into the wile, Sharon Li wants to ensure they're safe." Read the MIT story - and our Q&A with Li - here. Li discusses her team, their process, next steps in her research, and how she's incorporating it in the courses she teaches: "By incorporating the latest developments and breakthroughs from our research into the course curriculum, I aim to provide a unique learning experience for students at UW-Madison. They not only gain exposure to state-of-the-art techniques but also have the opportunity to produce exciting research on their own."

ChatGPT explained . . . by two UW-Madison CS professors

Check out this short video of Jerry Zhu and Fred Sala explaining ChatGPT!