Greetings from Madison!
After an April full of heat, rain, cold, snow, more heat, and more snow - in other words, a typical Madison April - summer seems to be upon us. It is sunny and warm and the Terrace is full of students, some of them about to graduate and celebrating their last few days and nights on our beautiful campus. Some of them, not graduating, but celebrating anyhow. You know how students are!
Speaking of students, we have a lot of them! Over 2200 CS undergraduate majors are learning with us these days, and over 400 graduate students. It's an exciting time to be in CS at Wisconsin! And the Data Science major, which we run jointly with our friends in Statistics, is the fastest growing major on campus, with nearly 800 students in its second year of existence. Soon, Data Science will be one of the top ten biggest majors at UW.
In this edition of Badger Bytes, we are pleased to announce several awards won by our faculty. We also have a story from "On, Wisconsin" magazine about CS alum Matt Amodio, who recently had the second longest winning streak on the game show Jeopardy! Finally, our students have been busy with a UPL hackathon, the SACM Research Symposium, and working with industry in the prototype CS Capstone class.
I hope you enjoy hearing about some of the many great things happening on campus these days. And we have more big things happening, including a new building to house our School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences (CDIS). The building will house the entire CS department, the entire Statistics department, the entire iSchool, AI-related faculty from the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics (BMI), and the American Family Data Science Institute. It truly will be the hub of computing and data activities on campus. The construction begins this summer! See https://cdis.wisc.edu/building-future/ for details.
In any case, please do stay in touch. One of the best parts of being department chair is meeting our wonderful alums, so get in touch and say hello. I'd be more than happy to connect.
On Wisconsin!
Remzi