Because so many research frontiers today cross departmental and even college boundaries, J. Robert Cooke, professor of agricultural and biological engineering and dean of the university faculty, is making improved communication across disciplines a major goal.
"The campus initiatives in genomics, information science and nanobiotechnology illustrate this trend," Cooke said. "Team-building has become a crucial element in the scholarship of the physical and biological sciences and will surely become increasingly important for the social sciences and the humanities as well. I'm trying to have the Office of the University Faculty provide some help to the faculty to bridge these traditional organizational boundaries." He added, "It's always a mad scramble to try to connect up, especially for new faculty, staff and graduate students. There's just a flood of information."
Cooke has offered several proposals to encourage more informal communication across disciplines.
One is to expand the existing online calendar of events at www.cornell.edu/Calendar/ so that departments can use it to replace their traditional paper mailings of seminar schedules with an electronic equivalent. It might also provide a computer-based search capability that would create weekly, personalized listings for interested students, faculty or staff of the events that match their individual interests. Users would provide a list of topics or keywords and get a list of seminars and other events that matched their profile, no matter which departments produced the events.
Several students in an advanced database class taught by Johannes Gehrke, assistant professor of computer science, will propose a design for such a system as a class project.
According to Gehrke, the goal will be to design a completely new calendar system that would perform all the tasks of the present system along with new services. "We're going to take their system as a prototype and as a demo of what the final system should look like and see what we can do," he said.
The student projects will take up the rest of the semester or more, he said. "This is an industry-style class. Students write a project proposal, then a design document, and at the end produce a demonstration of their project," Gehrke said.
"If it works it would be wonderful," said Mark Mara, associate director of Cornell Information Technologies, who maintains the current online calendar. "These guys [in computer science] are always at the edge pushing. I think it could be a real good collaboration."
Mara has agreed to install the new calendar system if it works well. Otherwise, he'll try to work out ways to add the services recommended by Cooke.
Cooke also envisions an enhanced faculty club to provide greater opportunities for more informal, face-to-face conversations for faculty to explore cross-disciplinary interests. He is hoping to recreate the faculty club, now "a mere shadow of its former self," he said, with a new structure. "In addition to stimulating intellectual exchanges," he said, "a revitalized faculty club would also contribute to another opportunity - the creation of a greater sense of community among the faculty."
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