State of the School Address — transcript

Listen from 0:00 (MP3 audio)

Welcome. So, I've had my speech writers working for months on this. Just like Bush. Just like George, yes. And I feed him to the punch. Welcome to the first SINs or State of the Schools Inception. I hope this will become a regular presentation by the dean on the State of the School. I'm going to go back to 2004, which is when I became the next, February 1, 2004.

Listen from 0:35 (MP3 audio)

And I confronted a couple of sets of recommendations. One was from a student project group, the Sims Corpus Project, and one was from Outsiders We Hired, a branding firm that we hired. And they gave me a pretty long list of to-dos, including sharpen the focus and identity of the school balance and deepen the curriculum. Build community. Strengthen the online presence. And then from Peterson School, Nick, and Dodge, very similar. Develop an identity system. Brand yourself.

Listen from 1:05 (MP3 audio)

Build relationships. Nobody on campus knows who you are. Build relationships with the campus. Nobody outside the campus knows who you are. You don't know who you are. They don't know who you are on the campus. They don't know who you are on the outside. So we're starting from, you know, that point. I'm going to talk today about where we stand in 2006. I think, first of all, we have a new name, a focus. We're working on our focus and our branding. Second, I believe we've strengthened our program. We have a whole bunch of new staff and administrative processes in place.

Listen from 1:40 (MP3 audio)

Outstanding new faculty. We've continued, the faculty has continued to raise a lot of money, do great research. We've got some interesting initiatives. Our men's and PhD students are really getting great jobs. And of course, we still have some challenges and priorities ahead of us. Here's the new, the name, which was just to prove the School of Information has been through every bureaucratic level on the campus as well as in Oakland with the exception of, where's Barbara?

Listen from 2:13 (MP3 audio)

The Provost and President. Provost and President of the system. So unless they stand in our way, we will become the school of information, UC Berkeley School of Information. And we have a logo, the little I, and a tab line up there. One of the most important things that the faculty worked on early on was trying to define our scope and focus. And we broke into five areas that we are focusing our research on.

Listen from 2:44 (MP3 audio)

Starting from the top left-hand corner, you have information economics and policy, information design and architecture, information assurance, sociology of information, and human-computer interaction. Now, none of these are completely separate, which is why we put them in a Venn diagram. They're all interacting and overlapping. We hope that all of them draw on different disciplines. Our charter was to bring together information science, computer science, management science, and social science to train a new generation of professionals.

Listen from 3:17 (MP3 audio)

And those are the areas that we've been organizing our classes around and our curriculum in general. And that's the Venn diagram. We have a new website. And there's some people in here that I have to thank, especially Jennifer Hastings, but also the whole team really... It is launching on Wednesday. Yay, and it's really, these guys have worked really hard for a long time,

Listen from 3:49 (MP3 audio)

and I want to thank them just immensely for all the work that they've done on the website. I'll have more to say about that later. Our program, we've worked hard on the program. We've updated three out of the four core courses, 202 Bob valiantly restructured. 203 Coy has been working hard on. And 206 John Chuang and Doug Todd have sort of restructured and John has been teaching a new format. So we've responded to the concerns, I think we are responding to concerns about the core.

Listen from 4:23 (MP3 audio)

We have a whole bunch of new electives and new lecturers. I couldn't list them all here. Document engineering is now an established part of our curriculum. I barely call it new except if I look back in 2004. Mixing and remixing information, quality information. Clinton Hardy did a nice thing on IT and identity. We've really enriched the curriculum. One of the problems in 2004 was there weren't enough electives and they were all balanced towards the spring and there were no electives in the fall. And now we have both in the fall and in the spring about 20 courses

Listen from 4:55 (MP3 audio)

being offered each semester. So I think we've enriched the program. And I have to say, in spite of the fact that we have a team faculty, our ladder-ranked faculty seems to be diminishing rather than growing, as I was promised by when I was hired. But we'll work on that. We started a distinguished lecture series, had standing room only for Bruce Rick Hale, Mitch Kapor, Howard Reinhold, Jenny Lee Bell, a lot of really interesting people. We've got people from all over campus coming to these lectures.

Listen from 5:26 (MP3 audio)

So I think that was a real achievement. The information access seminar is now in its how many semester? 31st. 31st semester. So that continues strong. And we've implemented some new undergraduate classes. Larry Downs has been teaching one. Maury first taught a very popular course on search and search engines. So I feel like we're making a real good stab at the program. we have taken on a lot of new staff.

Listen from 5:57 (MP3 audio)

And I want to say a few words about our staff. Our staff is such an important part of our community. And they have, of all of us, have undergone the most change over the past two years. They've had to absorb a lot of new people, a lot of new tasks. I just want to really thank both the existing staff, some of them who have been here far longer than I have, but also the new staff who've hired since I came. Barbara Brok, my assistant dean. Gary Lum, our new system administrator.

Listen from 6:28 (MP3 audio)

I want you to raise your hand so people know who you are. People know who you are. Barbara. Gary. Cynthia Robinson, business operations. Cynthia. Eve Borden, my executive assistant. If you ever need to see me, Eve is the one to call. Okay. Andrea Bell, the new assistant director of external operations. Andrea comes to us from Chabot State Center and Experience at Fifth Davidson. and she's really a great addition to our staff. And then finally, Jenny Cornett, Assistant Director of Student Services. Jenny is back there.

Listen from 6:59 (MP3 audio)

And many of the Mids students know Jenny already for the good work she's been doing on resumes and recruiting. So I'm very excited about the staff that we've put in place now. And in line with that, the staff has been working very hard in improving many of the administrative processes in this school. First, rationalizing staff responsibilities. which we're not that clear of a club design. The staff has contributed. Kevin isn't here, but Kevin and Christy get special credit for the web redesign process.

Listen from 7:32 (MP3 audio)

They've spent more hours than I can care to admit on the web redesign process. Barbara has started looking with staff across different units on many of the processes that we have to do within the school that aren't being done as efficiently, maybe as we came for in as collegial a way as we might like. The first task they've taken on is the non-center appointments, but they're going to go on and take on.

Listen from 8:02 (MP3 audio)

This really includes almost all of this staff. Purchasing, course scheduling, a lot of the processes that are really right now for rationalization. Finally, we're working hard on planning for space in South Hall since as we know this building as beautiful as it is it's already starting to sort of bulge around the edges and we need to think about how to fit more people we want to grow we need to think about how to fit more faculty more staff more students into this beautiful old building

Listen from 8:39 (MP3 audio)

outstanding new faculty we hired some great faculty first Larry Downs raise your hand there in case nobody knows who you are. Larry is also great to see my associate dean. Roy Tetscher, Roy, raise your hand. And then Paul Doogood and Jeff Nunn for record you guys up together. Paul and Jeff. Raise your hand. Thank you. As well as many lecturers who I can find all your pictures

Listen from 9:09 (MP3 audio)

and put you all up there, but we're very, um, thanks. So we're building the faculty. Um, faculty research is in great shape. We have raised, collectively, over $6 million since 2004 from places that diverged in the MacArthur Foundation, um, uh, National Science Foundation. MacArthur was Peter's brand on digital tips. National Science Foundation is involved in a, the, uh, clean slate redesign of the internet. the U.S. Postal Service, Doug is really our USPS guy, Microsoft Research British Telecom.

Listen from 9:45 (MP3 audio)

We've also published, among us, five books in the last two years, and I counted 40 articles. I'm sure I didn't get them all. So we've got Bob's book on document engineering, one of Doug's two books, his book on computer security, Hal published a book on the economics of information technology, and you can't see my book down in the right-hand corner, but it's coming out in a couple of weeks. Research and Service Awards. I mean, an impressive faculty. I'm going to just read to you awards.

Listen from 10:15 (MP3 audio)

Pam Samuelson, Anita Thorpe Women, a vision award for social impact. Mark Davis, Best Demonstration Video at ACN Multimedia 2005. Ray Larson, Best Paper Award, European Conference on Digital Libraries. Where's Ray? Yes, Ray. Michael Buckland, Watson Davis Award, the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Coy Tessier, the Dornfish Award for Contributions to Social Psychology in 2005. And Hal Barian is now here on an honorary PhD at the University of Carlsons.

Listen from 10:46 (MP3 audio)

So I just think we have a really distinguished faculty and we ought to be proud of that and look forward to continuing that. New initiatives. Okay, here are the things that we're working on now that we would love more ideas and more energy from all of you. While the new initiative that does already well is the Yahoo Research Lab, which was set up last fall and many students are working at already. I think one of my goals is to build a closer tie to the research lab.

Listen from 11:19 (MP3 audio)

We established a partnership with the California Digital Library, which allows for internships of students at CDL. We are working hard under Bob Blushko's leadership to build a curriculum for its service of sciences, management, and engineering. Really, this is a collaborative effort on campus that involves engineering, the business school, and SIMS, but we believe that SIMS is really at the core of SSME, so we're working hard on establishing courses and rationalizing that curriculum.

Listen from 11:55 (MP3 audio)

I've been working on information technology in developing countries, co-teaching a class, and we're now sponsoring in May here in this building. Well, partly in this building. Unfortunately, we can't fit everybody in this building for the main event, but the first annual conference, peer-reviewed conference, a scholarly conference. There are a lot of meetings about IT and development that are run by governments and non-profits, but this is the first scholarly conference in that area and I invite you to join us for that.

Listen from 12:26 (MP3 audio)

We're involved in recruiting for the Center of New Media as well as I should say for a faculty member for students and I want to again say that we will be having faculty candidates coming through the building throughout February and everybody is welcome to those events. Students will also have opportunities to meet with the faculty candidates either as part of the ministry for a PhD group, but the talks are wonderful and well worth attending. The Center for the Media Recruitment, I put that up there because

Listen from 12:58 (MP3 audio)

we're a likely home for a candidate that comes into the Center for the Media. This job is described as theory and practice of interactive media. I don't know what we're going to get. I mean, it's one of those interesting things that the ad is out there. We'll see what kind of applications we get. And finally, we're working again with Professor Glushko on the information systems clinic, which would be modeled after the law school clinic, bringing in projects.

Listen from 13:30 (MP3 audio)

Initially from campus, we have a lot of cooperation with the new CIO on campus, Shell Wagner and the Berkeley Initiative, and this would bring in projects that are manageable by students. And then over time, I think the goal is to also bring in projects from the outside and develop a real capability for students getting involved in doing these projects in information systems. Lots of new issues. Okay, now I'm going to talk about our students in Long Island.

Listen from 14:02 (MP3 audio)

The men's students are working at all sorts of great places. Virtually all of the students who are want jobs are getting placed often in HDI positions also, sometimes in project management jobs, in digital library kind of positions, document engineering, what? Integration consultants. Integration, lots of consultants. And I met, you know, I bumped into a bunch of our alums. A lot of them are a startup.

Listen from 14:33 (MP3 audio)

A lot of them are a startup in their own companies. And we're looking forward to watching how they progress. Our PhD students, so far our PhD students are doing extremely well. We have post-docs at the Harvard Center for Internet and Society, Hebrew University Computer Science Department. One is in a faculty position at Carnegie Mellon in the Heinz School of Policy. One is working at PARC. Two of our students, one actually a MIM student and one a PhD student,

Listen from 15:04 (MP3 audio)

have received Fulbright awards. and we have a Microsoft Research Fellow. There's an L at the end of his name. I guess that's a fellowship they've covered in my home, right? So I think we can be really proud of what both our Masters and our PhD students are doing. Okay, what are our next steps? I think for me, the most important priority is revising and enhancing the PhD program. We spent a lot of time over the last two years looking at the MIM curriculum,

Listen from 15:35 (MP3 audio)

in looking at the program and thinking about the requirements, we need to do a similar process with the PhD program. It's been, you know, the school was started about 10 years ago and it hasn't really been revamped since then. So there's some important work to do then on that front. We're also going to spend some time first among the faculty evaluating the viability of building a real undergraduate program. We'll continue to offer classes, one-off classes but the question is do we want to offer a minor for

Listen from 16:06 (MP3 audio)

undergraduates one of the things that this campus made very makes very clear to me repeatedly is if we want resources if we want to grow we need to get more bums on chairs more undergraduate seats they measure us by the number of undergraduates that we bring through and we are now ranked very very low on that measure so it's a big commitment it would be a big commitment for the school to actually start an undergraduate program. So that's something we'll be actively thinking about over the next couple of years.

Listen from 16:38 (MP3 audio)

One of the advantages already apparently is that you start to build recognition on campus and also start to get some of the good undergraduates into our classes. There's a recruiting mechanism in part. And the website which is launching on Wednesday really will benefit from continuous improvement. And this, I'm really looking to everybody, staff, students, faculty. We need content. The way that a website stays alive is with fresh content, and we can't provide it ourselves. So we will welcome advanced news accomplishments of students, faculty, staff.

Listen from 17:14 (MP3 audio)

I would really invite, I've tried with the PhD students, and I obviously tried the wrong way, but I would invite groups to take on things like the 10 Qs or ITalk, which are sections in the website where we discuss current issues and information or interview, the 10Q is interview of a prominent person. If you notice, we had John Mattel up there because he was our graduation speaker last year. So I welcome volunteers in all of these areas. I think we should be the first website that has extensive podcasts.

Listen from 17:45 (MP3 audio)

And again, content has to come from you. We'll post it, but we need people to do what Joe is doing now and recording talks and video and things and providing content. That's what will keep our website alive. Obviously, we also want feedback on anything, the usability, the graphics. People have worked really hard on it, but it will continue to evolve and improve over time. Webmaster it since, if you have comments, ideas.

Listen from 18:15 (MP3 audio)

My priorities. Recruit superior faculty, continue to raise the calendar of our faculty. Do you want to come in, Lindsay? She's standing out there. You don't need to stand out in a cold. Raise money. This is a really important goal and something I haven't been able to focus on in the first two years, but unfortunately, it's more and more what deans do, especially on this campus. We're going into a campus-wide

Listen from 18:46 (MP3 audio)

capital campaign. Over the next seven years, it's actually in the quiet phase right now. I'm in the process, and will be in the process of working with faculty to think about what are our priorities. Obviously, we care a lot about fellowship funding for graduate students. What are our next priorities? Are there research priorities? redoing the building. What are the priorities for the capital campaign? Christy is going to faint because I said that our goal is to raise $100 million over five years.

Listen from 19:18 (MP3 audio)

We might as well be ambitious, especially if we need to redo South Hall, which I think we need to do. And then, actually, my third priority is really initiate the redesign of the building. Upcoming events. This is just some highlights of what's coming up. the launch on Wednesday, February 1st. Don Norman will be our first distinguished lecturer this spring. Don Norman is a leader in, you know, design for usability, design for human beings. He's a really experienced guy and should be a wonderful inaugural lecturer.

Listen from 19:55 (MP3 audio)

March 20th we'll be having an open house for newly admitted students, MIMS and PhD I hope as well and I hope that some of the students and faculty will get involved in that just to you know the more energy we show up front the more likely students will come to SINC and we want to get the best students. We may not have as much money as our competitors but we have great energy and great ideas. Quentin Hardy is on for the second of the students in the next year. here on March 22nd.

Listen from 20:26 (MP3 audio)

On April 26th, Christy and I are working on it. Presenting the iSchool, which is going to be a big event for all of the people who contributed to our branding effort and our reviews over the past two years. The people we interviewed both on campus and off campus to show them the fruits of what we've done so far. It will be something that I hope students, again, will contribute to get involved and it will be a big splashy event i hope um in south hall uh commencement speaker

Listen from 20:57 (MP3 audio)

for this year which is on may 13th by the way is tim o'reilly if you don't know who tim o'reilly is he's the founder and president of o'reilly media which is probably the largest computer publisher computer computing book publisher in the world he's certainly well known for his web 2.0 vision at conferences. He should be a very interesting speaker now to what you think about Web 2.0. And then finally, I urge you to try to make this the second

Listen from 21:29 (MP3 audio)

iSchool conference. This is a conference, the deans of the information schools in the U.S., which includes myself, the dean of the school in Michigan, the school in Toronto, the University of Washington, and about a dozen information school community got together a couple years ago and said we need to start building our community start building visibility and information schools around the country and one of the initiatives was an i-school conference the first one was held last year in remote place

Listen from 22:04 (MP3 audio)

state park pennsylvania thank you i was spacing it out it took us so long to get back State College. State College, yeah. They have a gorgeous new building at Penn State. And it was a fun conference, but we really, I think, especially graduate students, PhD students, this is a great opportunity to start building the community and networking and learning about this field, which is evolving as we speak. So that's at Michigan this year, October 15th to 17th.

Listen from 22:37 (MP3 audio)

should be a really interesting and exciting event. Thank you.

Listen from 22:53 (MP3 audio)

And I know you're all dying for cookies and coffee, but if you have a few questions, I'm happy to answer them. Bob, never tell. I saw the Queen de Sassin comes to Webmaster at Synth, and I'm confused why we're not re-branding our domain name for Benigni. We will change that. He's haven't gotten around to it. Are we going to use the master of our domain name? Is that what he decided? I don't know that we've actually... Kevin, you've been in negotiations. We've been negotiating several. We've always been in place.

Listen from 23:25 (MP3 audio)

I think iSchool at Berkeley. Yes. Are we still... Are we still, are we calling it a SIMS, right? Or should we be like Hick? We should be iSchool. So SIMS is dead out of tomorrow. Yeah, the problem is it's hard to break the habit. You're going to find the SIMS. It's a great activity. Tell me what is this? It is.

Listen from 23:56 (MP3 audio)

The MIMS program is sort of a MIMS program. So it's a little bit rocky, but yes, we're trying to see the answer so that the iSchool. Yeah. Other questions? You guys are being shy. We could be just eye-opper. Eye-opper, yeah, you do. No questions, comments, leave back. All right, go have to keep him out of coffee. Thank you.