A robot named Hector provided the scissors used at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the opening of the University of Southern California’s new computer science building Tuesday morning.
Dr. The Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Human-Centered Computation Hall — USC’s first LEED platinum-certified building — will house the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science and the newly established School of Advanced Computing under the Viterbi School of Engineering.
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, also known as LEED certification, refers to a set of building guidelines established by the US Green Building Council as a framework for creating environmentally sustainable buildings. Platinum is the highest level possible.
Tim Cowell, Viterbi’s director of architecture and site planning, said “no expense was spared” in the design and construction process of the building.
“Platinum is the north star and it’s very difficult to achieve, but you have to understand from day one that that’s what your goal is,” he said. “We had to fix it.”
Cowell said the final budget for the building stands at $130 million, an increase from the original budget of $90 million set for 2019. The project was made possible in part by a donation from donors Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg, who in recent years have done. made similar contributions to the establishment of scientific research centers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg, along with USC President Carol Folt, were in attendance Tuesday, delivering keynote speeches before the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Nenad Medvidović, chair of the computer science department, said that after working at USC for nearly 26 years, the opening of the Ginsburg building felt like a “total no-brainer.”
“The original structure of CS was [Grace Ford Salvatori Hall]which is a relatively small building that was built in the 1970s and is not a very big place,” he said. “We will have to find a place for everything. ‘Let’s meet, where will we meet? At what time? How do we write?’ And so on.”
Medvidović added that he and other faculty members were involved in the building’s design project from its earliest stages.
He said: “The things that burned us that we didn’t realize about the place we had, it was somehow related to the design of the building itself.
The computer science department is comprised of approximately 6000 students across their undergraduate and graduate programs and employs 100 full-time. The new building includes several new facilities, including a cyber physical systems lab, a server room for artificial intelligence research and a two-story drone aviary for indoor drone technology testing.
Many graduate students attended Tuesday’s event, some of whom demonstrated their lab projects in action.
Nathan Dennler, a fifth-year PhD student in computer science, has developed a robot capable of responding to thumb and thumb gestures, which was originally designed to interact with children with brain disease.
Dennler said he looks forward to the building’s design being conducive to working with other students and faculty.
“We are currently in Ronald Tutor Hall. All the labs are very separate and separated by walls, which I feel is not the case here,” they said. “So it should help encourage collaboration.”
Amy O’Connell, a fourth-year PhD student in computer science, shared her work with a robot called “Blossom,” programmed to provide guided meditation exercises. He had the same opinion about the design of the new building.
“I’m excited to have a collaborative space with all the other robotics students, so we can be more in tune with what others are working on,” O’Connell said. “Because we have exciting things going on.”
Cowell noted that in addition to the expansion of the collaboration area, Viterbi students will have access to 19 “privacy pods” that can be used to study or relax. Four of these pods will be reserved for non-Viterbi students.
Cowell said: “You can keep them, and you can give yourself time to meditate. You can do whatever you need to in that place…
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