Siebel School of Computing and Data Science


The Siebel School of Computing and Data Science is a department-level school within the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

History

In 1949, the University of Illinois created the Digital Computer Laboratory following the joint funding between the university and the U.S. Army to create the ORDVAC and ILLIAC I computers under the direction of physicist Ralph Meagher. The ORDVAC and ILLIAC computers were the two earliest von-Neumann architecture machines to be constructed. Once completed in 1952, the ILLIAC I inspired machines such as the MISTIC, MUSASINO-1, SILLIAC, and CYCLONE, as well as providing the impetus for the university to continue its research in computing through the ILLIAC II project. Yet despite such advances in high-performance computing, faculty at the Digital Computer Laboratory continued to conduct research in other fields of computing as well, such as in Human-Computer Interaction through the PLATO project, the first computer music, computational numerical methods through the work of Donald B. Gillies, and James E. Robertson, the 'R' co-inventor of the SRT division algorithm, to name a few.
Given this explosion in research in computing, in 1964, the University of Illinois reorganized the Digital Computer Laboratory into the Department of Computer Science, and by 1967, the department awarded its first PhD and master's degrees in Computer Science. In 1982, UIUC physicist Larry Smarr wrote a blistering critique of America's supercomputing resources, and as a result the National Science Foundation established the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1985. NCSA was one of the first places in industry or academia to develop software for the 3 major operating systems at the time – Macintosh, PC, and UNIX. NCSA in 1986 released NCSA Telnet and in 1993 it released the Mosaic web browser. In 2004, the Department of Computer Science moved out of the Digital Computer Laboratory building into the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science following a gift from alumnus Thomas Siebel.
The Department of Computer Science was renamed the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science in 2024, following a $50 million gift from Thomas M. Siebel.

Degrees and programs

Undergraduate

The department offers 14 undergraduate degree programs, all leading to Bachelor of Science degrees, through six different colleges:
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science and Physics
  • Mathematics and Computer Science
  • Statistics and Computer Science
  • Computer Science and Chemistry
  • Computer Science and Linguistics
  • Computer Science and Anthropology
  • Computer Science and Astronomy
  • Computer Science and Economics
  • Computer Science and Geography and Geographic Information Systems
  • Computer Science and Advertising
  • Computer Science and Philosophy
  • Computer Science and Animal Sciences
The department also sponsors a minor in computer science available to all UIUC students.
The department also offers two 5-year bachelors/masters programs through the College of Engineering: Bachelor of Science/Master of Science in Computer Science and Bachelors of Science/Masters of Computer Science.

Graduate

In the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the antagonist and sentient computer HAL 9000 says it was made operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois which was meant to represent the Coordinated Science Laboratory where the ILLIAC project was conducted.

Notable faculty