UR recently selected Welliver, a provider of construction services based in the Finger Lakes region of New York, as the manager for preconstruction services for the new Institute for Data Science. In October 2013, UR’s Board of Trustees approved the Institute for Data Science as the signature project of the 2013-2018 University Strategic Plan.
Data science refers to the extraction of meaning or knowledge from large-scale data, and it draws from and applies to many different fields including biostatistics, brain and cognitive sciences, computer science, mathematics, physics, public health and many others.
Pamphlets for the Institute explain that data science is “one of the defining disciplines of the 21st century.”
They emphasize IBM’s estimate that humans create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day and that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in just the last two years. As the prevalence of data has grown, so have its applications—in fact, UR researchers recently developed a way to analyze the data from computer and smartphone cameras to monitor personal mental health.
The University committed $50 million in endowed funds to expanding its work in data science, with plans to hire 20 new faculty members from diverse fields with expertise in data science and $25 million of those funds supporting the construction of a state-of-the-art building which will house the Institute. Welliver is currently in the process of doing estimates and looking at constructability for the project, but their contract does not extend to working on the actual building, which will be over 50,000 square feet, located next to the Hopeman Engineering Building and is projected to be completed by December 2016 or January 2017.
Stephen Dare, the Senior Associate Vice President and Interim Chief Operating Officer of University Advancement for Academic Relations, is in charge of fundraising for the project.
“Last spring we started talking to individuals; President Seligman has been very involved,” he said. While he was unable to divulge the current numbers, he said they have made “significant progress” toward the $50 million goal and that they may be able to make some announcements in the weeks to come.
Kennedy & Violich Architecture, Ltd., an architecture firm based in Boston, won the design competition for the building this past October. University Architect Jose Fernandez explained that the competing firms were asked to focus on a couple of major things.
“We wanted a building that would fit within the context of the campus,” he said. “The other thing is, we wanted a building that would create a collaborative work environment, we wanted to encourage the faculty and the students to be able to interact as much as possible and we wanted a building that at the ground plane interacted with the Science and Engineering Quad,” which also faces a major overhaul.
There is currently a separate landscaping design competition between three architecture firms to design four and a half acres of land on the Science and Engineering Quad around the Institute, and a winner will most likely be announced in a couple of weeks once the firms present their submissions. Here, Fernandez noted, the architects face the challenge presented by the edges defining the new science quad, as they are “not straightforward and clean and linear.”
However the architects deal with that challenge, Hutchison Road and the small parking lots near it will be shut down, eliminating the potential there for conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles. Fernandez is optimistic that removing the pavement and integrating that space into the landscape will help create “something of the caliber of the Eastman Quad” while still being “its own place.”
“It will redefine that part of campus,” he added.
Lai is a member of
the class of 2018.
